The Aboudaram Family

The first Abudarham that history holds firmly is a master of liturgy. David ben Joseph Abudarham lived in Seville, in the Castile of the mid-fourteenth century, and completed there in 1340 his commentary on blessings and prayers. The date is not deduced: the author himself inscribed in the closing of his work that he had brought it to completion in Seville, in the year 5100 of Creation [Jewish Encyclopedia]. His formation tied him to the highest school of his time: he was the disciple of Jacob ben Asher, the famous Baal ha-Tourim, whose halakhic work then dominated the religious life of Spanish Jewry [Oxford Reference ; Jewish Encyclopedia].

David Abudarham's undertaking answered a need that he himself states. In his preface, he observes that the faithful recite prayers without understanding their meaning or origin, and he sets himself the task of making liturgy intelligible to them [Jewish Encyclopedia]. To do this, he gathers immense material: he draws from the Babylonian Talmud and from the Jerusalem Talmud, from the literature of the Geonim and from all the commentators who preceded him, in order to explain each portion of the prayer book [Jewish Encyclopedia]. Where other communities — Spanish, Provençal, French, German — diverged in their usages, he strove to account for these customary variations rather than settle them authoritatively.

This choice reveals a virtue that runs through all of Jewish tradition: respect for minhag, local custom, held to be a legitimate form of fidelity. In explaining without leveling, David Abudarham performed the work of transmission as much as erudition. His book, written in an "age of decline" according to the words of historians of Spanish Judaism, aimed to save a knowledge by making it accessible to the greatest number [Jewish Encyclopedia]. A certain religious warmth, an edifying rather than strictly legal intention, pervades the whole and gives it its unity [Jewish Encyclopedia]. It is in this that the work bears, more than any discourse, the value of taught piety: the conviction that prayer must be understood in order to be truly prayed.

A medieval work is judged not only by its composition, but by its posterity. That of the Sefer Abudarham was considerable. The text was printed for the first time in Lisbon in 1489, in the workshop of Eliezer ben Judah Toledano, at a date which the colophon fixes to the 1st Tevet 5250 [Sotheby's ; Corpus Zakhor id:332d985d]. This Portuguese edition, one of the earliest Hebrew printings of the Iberian peninsula, precedes by only three years the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492: the book thus crossed, in printed form, the threshold of the catastrophe that would scatter its readers.

What follows testifies to distribution throughout the entire diaspora. After Lisbon, the commentary was reissued in Constantinople in 1513, in Venice in 1546 and then in 1566, in Amsterdam in 1726, in Prague in 1784 and 1817, in Lemberg in 1857, in Warsaw afterwards — that is nine successive editions which suffice to measure the need it answered [Jewish Encyclopedia]. From an Ottoman empire where Sephardic exiles flowed in to the Ashkenazi communities of Central Europe, the name of Abudarham became synonymous with liturgical authority.

This is a remarkable fact: through this book, a family driven from Spain remained present, in printed form, in the synagogues of the entire world, long after its last members had left Seville. The Sefer Abudarham is not merely the title of a work; it became, for generations, the very name of the commentary on Sephardic prayer. The lineage survives here in the printed object, that transmissible companion which crosses centuries and languages without being lost.

The surname itself deserves examination, for it preserves, like an ancient coin, the imprint of a trade. Aboudaram comes from the Arabic abū ad-dirham, "the father of the dirham," that is to say the man of the dirham: the moneyer, the money changer, he whose activity concerned the silver coin [Laredo, Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc]. The dirham, this currency derived from the Greek drachma and long in use in the Maghreb, circulated widely in Morocco, which explains the vitality of the name in these lands [Notice de la lignée]. Sephardic onomastics often preserved thus, within a surname, the trace of an economic charge — banker, money changer, treasurer — that the family once exercised.

It is here that tradition and the archive respond to one another in striking fashion. The name speaks to a relationship with money and commerce; now, when we encounter the lineage at Gibraltar at the turn of the nineteenth century, its members are precisely prosperous merchants, engaged in maritime trade with Tétouan [The People of Gibraltar]. The surname was therefore not a simple frozen label: it designated a vocation that the family continued to embody five centuries after leaving Spain.

The multiplicity of spellings — Aboudraham, Abudarham, Aboudirham, Aboudarhem, Abuderham and many others — is not disorder, but the very memory of dispersion itself. Each shore, each language, each colonial office transcribed the name in its own way. It was Maurice Eisenbeth, Grand Rabbi of Algiers, who methodically noted these variants in his onomastic dictionary of 1936, the first systematic study of Jewish surnames in North Africa founded on censuses, community registers and the examination of names [Eisenbeth, Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord; Corpus Zakhor id:8a9bb129]. Behind the apparent orthographic confusion, the scholar recognized the unity of a single root.

Between the Seville of David Abudarham and the Maghrebi communities where the name reappears extends the great turning point of Sephardic history. Christian Reconquest, then the persecutions of 1391, finally the expulsion of 1492, scattered the Jews of Spain toward Portugal, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and Italy [O'Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain]. The Aboudarams followed this common path, the one that led, from Andalusia, toward the nearby shores of the Maghreb, across the narrow passage of the Strait of Gibraltar.

From this crossing, documents specific to the family are rare: this is the realm of Memory rather than the archive, and it must be said honestly. We know only that the lineage, dispersed at the end of the Middle Ages, spread across North Africa, where it is attested in the communities of Oran and Morocco [Lineage Notice; Eisenbeth, Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord]. Tétouan, a city in northern Morocco deeply marked by the influx of exiles from Spain, became one of the family's centers — to the point that it was from there that the branch departed, in the 18th century, which would reach Gibraltar [Solomon Abudarham, notice].

This displacement of the Sevillan scholar toward the merchant-rabbi of Tétouan traces the very trajectory of Western Sephardic Judaism: a culture born in the cities of Al-Andalus, transplanted to the African shore, and which there reconstituted its schools, its synagogues and its commercial networks. The Aboudaram lineage illustrates this stubborn continuity — the faculty of reconstructing elsewhere what had been lost, while keeping alive the link with the land of origin and its liturgy.

In the eighteenth century, the lineage entered anew, and fully, into documented history. Solomon Abudarham — Chlomo Abudarham, also known as Shelomo Abudarham II — came from Tétouan; he emigrated in 1790 and became Grand Rabbi of Gibraltar [Lineage Record]. Grandson of Shelomo Abudarham I of Tétouan, he belonged to a family several of whose members had come to the British Rock, where they had established themselves as merchants maintaining close commercial and maritime ties with their city of origin in Morocco [Solomon Abudarham ; The People of Gibraltar].

Rabbi Solomon distinguished his name through teaching as much as through office. He founded a school of religious study on Parliament Lane and laid the first stone of the Flemish synagogue, on Line Wall Road [Solomon Abudarham]. His career was, however, brief and tragic: he died of yellow fever in December 1804, shortly after his appointment, and was buried in the Jews' Gate cemetery, on Windmill Hill, where the former grand rabbis of the island rested [Solomon Abudarham ; jguideeurope.org]. His predecessor in office had been Rabbi Yehouda ben Yitshak Halevi [Solomon Abudarham].

The name, however, did not die with him. In 1820, the academy he had founded was converted into a place of worship and took the name of Abudarham Synagogue, which it still bears [Solomon Abudarham ; jguideeurope.org]. Thus the memory of a man who died at the threshold of his office became fixed in the stone of a communal building. This gesture — transforming a school of Torah into a house of prayer — speaks to the lineage's attachment to study and to collective life: the rabbinic office was not there an honour but a service rendered to the community, a way of embodying commitment to the life of Israel.

Around Rabbi Salomon gravitated an entire merchant kinship, whose history illuminates in concrete terms the significance of the name "father of the dirham." Several family members followed the path of commerce and became, according to a well-established tradition, prosperous merchants engaged in trade with Tétouan [The People of Gibraltar]. One of them, Samuel Abudarham, rose to the rank of the third most important landowner in Gibraltar, possessing seven large properties and a share in an eighth — a rank which, in the small society of the Rock, was second only to Isaac Aboab and a few others [The People of Gibraltar].

This material success was not separate from religious commitment: the same family counted merchants and a rabbi, the ease of one making possible the study of the other. Tradition moreover reports that the brother of the merchant, Salomon, showed himself less inclined toward the goods of this world and chose the rabbinic path [The People of Gibraltar]. One touches here upon a balance dear to Sephardic life: the alliance of commerce and Torah, of the counting-house and the synagogue, where economic prosperity placed itself at the service of communal institution.

This place of the Aboudaram in nineteenth-century Gibraltar — a Sephardic community born itself from proximity with Morocco — confirms the depth of family roots in the commerce of the Strait. The patronym inherited from the Andalusian treasurer thus found, on the Rock, a renewed truth: that of a family which knew how to make the dirham flourish without forgetting the book of prayers whose ancestor, five centuries earlier, had made the ornament of his name.

David ben Joseph Abudarham (active in Seville around 1340; birth and death dates unknown) [דוד אבודרהם] — Commentator on synagogal liturgy, disciple of Jacob ben Asher, he composed and completed in Seville in 1340 the Sefer Abudarham, a systematic commentary on Jewish blessings and prayers. Drawing on both Talmuds, the literature of the Geonim and earlier collections of customs, he sought to make prayer intelligible to the faithful and to explain the divergent practices of communities. Printed as early as Lisbon in 1489, his book went through nine editions and remains a reference work for Sephardic rite.

Salomon Abudarham (Chlomo Abudarham, Shelomo Abudarham II) (birth date unknown – † December 1804) [שלמה אבודרהם] — From Tétouan, grandson of Shelomo Abudarham I, he emigrated in 1790 and became Chief Rabbi of Gibraltar [Lineage File; Solomon Abudarham]. He founded a school of religious study on Parliament Lane and laid the foundation stone of the Flemish synagogue. Taken by yellow fever shortly after his appointment, he was buried in the Jews' Gate cemetery. In 1820, his academy became the Abudarham synagogue, which perpetuates his name on the Rock.

David Aboudirham (mentioned in the kingdom of Castile, around 1400; precise dates unknown) [דוד אבודרהם] — Spanish rabbi attached to the Castilian lineage, he attests to the persistence of the name in medieval Spanish Jewry at the turning point between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, at the threshold of the great persecutions [Lineage File]. Documentation concerning him remains sparse, and one cannot, in all honesty, attribute any assured work to him; his mention nonetheless testifies to the continuity of the family in its Iberian homeland before the exile.

Samuel Abudarham (dates unknown, active in Gibraltar in the early nineteenth century) — Merchant of the Rock, member of the commercial branch of the family, he was among the most important landowners in Gibraltar, holding seven large properties [The People of Gibraltar]. His success illustrates the Aboudaram family's anchoring in maritime trade with Tétouan and the way family prosperity sustained Sephardic communal life on the island, even to the point of giving its name to one of the local synagogues.

From a scholar of Seville to a rabbi of the Strait, from a prayer book to a synagogue, the Abudarham lineage composes a history of singular coherence. What this family will have, among all virtues, best expressed is taught piety: the conviction, carried by David Abudarham from 1340 onward, that prayer must be understood to be faithfully recited, and that liturgical knowledge is transmitted by being made accessible. This vocation of teaching prayer, the Jewish tradition has carried it from century to century; the Aboudaram inscribed their name in a lasting way, to the point that this name still designates today an entire rite commentary.

To this first virtue is added a second, never separated from it: involvement in collective life. Rabbi Solomon of Gibraltar founded a school and a synagogue before being taken away scarcely appointed; his merchant parents put their prosperity at the service of the community of the Rock [Solomon Abudarham ; The People of Gibraltar]. The name itself — "the father of the dirham" — recalls that this family knew how, without contradiction, to hold together the trading post and the book, economic action and sacred study.

Thus the Abudarham lineage connects the destiny of a family to the collective Memory of Israel: that of a people who, driven from Seville, knew how to carry with them, printed and transmissible, the commentary of their own prayers, and to reestablish it on other shores. In this, the history of the Aboudaram is not only theirs: it is a fragment of Sephardic History entire, from medieval Andalusia to the Strait of Gibraltar.