The Alhyayni Family

The starting point is an established fact, documented by the reference catalogue of Moroccan Jewish onomastics. Laredo classifies Alhyayni among surnames of geographical origin, formed on a toponym or ethnonym, and gives as its source the confederation of the Hyayna [Laredo, Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, 1978]. This category is one of the most productive in Judeo-Moroccan onomastics: a considerable portion of Moroccan Jewish family names derive from the names of cities, villages or tribes, testifying to a population deeply rooted in local geography [Toledano, Une histoire de familles, 1999].

The mechanism is simple and universal throughout the Islamic world: when a Jewish family left its region of origin to settle in a city, it carried with it, as a sign of identity, the name of the place left behind. In Fès, Meknès or Sefrou, the newcomer was naturally designated by the place from which he came; the man from the Hyayna became al-Hyayni, and this qualifier eventually became fixed as a hereditary surname. This process, found throughout North African Judaism, explains why so many Jewish names are in fact maps of migration: they inscribe in the civil record the memory of a displacement [Toledano, Les Noms de famille des Juifs d'Afrique du Nord, 2003].

What Alhyayni reveals, then, is a rural and tribal origin — a trait that distinguishes these families from lineages of Iberian origin settled after 1492. There is, here in embryo, a discreet virtue that Jewish tradition has always honored: fidelity to one's roots, the refusal to erase where one comes from. By keeping in its name the memory of the Hyayna, the family perpetuated a memory of place, this zakhor — the commandment to remember — that structures all Jewish consciousness. The name thus becomes the smallest and most tenacious of monuments: a fragment of earth carried from one generation to another.

To understand the Alhyayni, one must picture Jewish life in the land of Hyayna and, more broadly, in the rural areas of northern Morocco before the colonial period. These rural communities, often reduced to a few families, lived in the shadow of the tribes within which they had settled, bound to them by ties of customary protection. The rural Jew was frequently a goldsmith, blacksmith, shoemaker, tanner, peddler, or small moneylender — professions that tribal society readily delegated to the Jewish minority and which made their presence indispensable to trade [Toledano, A History of Families, 1999].

This status had its fragility. The Jew of the countryside depended on a word given, on the protection of a local chief, and paid the price of his minority condition in a world where his safety was never entirely guaranteed. But he also had his dignity: through his craft, the Jewish artisan served the entire community, and through his commerce, he connected the markets of the lowlands to those of the city. Here we touch on a cardinal value of Judaism, that of honest work and social utility — the idea that earning one's bread by the work of one's hands is a form of fulfillment, and that the artisan contributes, in his modest place, to the balance of the world.

The transmission of the Law in these communities was carried out by itinerant scholars or by the schoolmaster who taught the children to read the Torah. Rural piety was less learned than that of the great academies of Fès, but no less fervent: attachment to the festivals, to the rest of the Sabbath, to rites of passage, the veneration of local saints — these tsaddiqim whose tombs dotted Morocco — formed the fabric of an intense popular religiosity. The pilgrimage to the tombs of the righteous, the hiloula, expressed this intertwining of the singular and the collective: each family came to entrust their sorrows there, and thereby communed in the memory of all Israel.

The movement that fixed the name Alhyayni is that of the city. Fès, spiritual heart of Moroccan Judaism, exerted a constant attraction on the Jews of the surrounding countryside. Since the Hyayna were established in the immediate vicinity of the capital, it is likely that the Jewish families of this region gravitated, for a long time, toward the mellah of Fès — that Jewish quarter created in the fifteenth century, one of the oldest in Morocco, where synagogues, rabbinical courts and talmudic schools were concentrated.

Fès was, for centuries, an intellectual capital of the Jewish world. It housed renowned rabbinical academies, decisors whose responsa held authority far beyond Morocco, and a halakhic tradition of great rigor. The arrival, after 1492, of exiles from Spain — the megorashim — had added to it a learned, prestigious stratum, sometimes in tension with the toshavim, the native Berber- and Arabic-speakers established long ago [Kriegel, La prise d'une décision : l'expulsion des Juifs d'Espagne en 1492, 1978]. The Alhyayni, by their very name, belong according to all likelihood to this second group, that of Jews rooted in Morocco before the Iberian exile — the toshavim, guardians of a millennial presence.

This distinction is not incidental. It speaks to the dual richness of Moroccan Judaism: on one side the Sephardic contribution, its jurists and poets; on the other, the indigenous depth represented by families like the Alhyayni, heirs to an earlier, indigenous Judaism that stretched back well before the arrival of Islam in the Maghreb. By joining the great community of Fès, these rural families brought their know-how, their piety and their memory of the bled, contributing to that involvement in collective life which is one of the most constant virtues of Judaism: no one is Jewish alone, the community — the kehila — is the very place of shared salvation.

The nineteenth century in Morocco was, for Jews, a time of tensions and transformations. The legal status of the Jewish minority, governed by the dhimma statute, oscillated between protection and vulnerability, depending on the sultan's authority and the safety of the roads. Periods of turmoil — droughts, tribal revolts, famines — struck rural communities hard, more exposed than the walled cities. Historiography has well documented these ordeals, while also recording the remarkable capacity for resistance and solidarity of Moroccan Jewish communities [Kenbib, Jews and Muslims in Morocco, 1859-1948, 1994].

It is in this context that, from the 1860s onward, European presence increased and Western Jewish organizations took action, concerned with the fate of their coreligionists. The opening of modern schools, the attention paid by international Jewish diplomacy and philanthropy to the situation of Morocco's Jews, slowly transformed the communities' horizons [Assaraf, A Certain History of Morocco's Jews, 1860-1999, 2005]. In the North, the Tétouan community, at the junction of the Hispanic and Moroccan worlds, experienced at the same time a dense communal life, made up of mutual aid, charitable confraternities and constant concern for the poor, widows and orphans [Leibovici, Chronicle of the Jews of Tétouan (1860-1896), 1984].

Here emerges the virtue of tsedaqa — charity, understood in Hebrew not as optional almsgiving but as justice, as duty. Moroccan Jewish communities maintained mutual aid funds, endowed girls without resources, ransomed captives, fed travelers. A family of modest means like the Alhyayni participated in this network of solidarity where each gave according to their means. The fact that these institutions survived famines and crises testifies to a deep conviction: that care for the weakest is the beating heart of the Law, and that a community's dignity is measured by how it treats its destitute.

The establishment of the French protectorate in 1912 transformed the landscape of Jewish life in Morocco. Jews from the countryside, among whom the Alhyayni are descended, left the bled en masse for the cities — Fès, Meknès, Casablanca above all, which became the great metropolis of modern Moroccan Judaism. School, the city, the French language opened to the new generations unprecedented professional horizons, while the traditional rural world, that of tribes and weekly markets, gradually faded away [Assaraf, A Certain History of the Jews of Morocco, 1860-1999, 2005].

Then came the darkest years. Under the Vichy regime, the Jews of Morocco were struck by antisemitic legislation, excluded from professions, threatened in their rights. History has recorded that Sultan Mohammed V demonstrated, in this period, an attitude of protection toward his Jewish subjects, refusing the most infamous measures and affirming that all his subjects deserved his solicitude [Assaraf, Mohammed V and the Jews of Morocco in the Vichy Era, 1997]. This episode, in which the relationship to the foreign and the relationship to power were bound together in a mutual loyalty, remains a point of honor in Judeo-Moroccan memory.

European Judaism, at the same time, was suffering annihilation. It must be recalled, for the Memory of the Jews of Morocco is inscribed within the larger Memory of all Israel in the twentieth century: the Memorial of the Deportation of the Jews of France preserves, name after name, the trace of those who were exterminated [Klarsfeld, Memorial of the Deportation of the Jews of France, 1978]. The Moroccan community, largely spared from deportation, carried this consciousness of the disaster as a part of its own destiny. After the war, History accelerated: the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, then the independence of Morocco in 1956, led to the departure of nearly all Moroccan Jews, toward Israel, France, Canada. The Alhyayni, like so many others, scattered into this new diaspora, carrying their name — and with it, the memory of the Hyayna — toward other lands.

At the end of this journey, what remains of the Alhyayni? A name, first and foremost — a name which, according to Laredo, speaks of belonging to the land of Hyayna [Laredo, The Names of the Jews of Morocco, 1978]. And behind that name, an entire world: that of the rural Jews of northern Morocco, their rise toward Fès, their integration into the great community, their trials and their final dispersion. For lack of sustained family archives, we have reconstructed the milieu rather than the lineage; but it is within this milieu that the truth of the family is revealed.

If one were to name, among all others, the virtue that this lineage will have expressed best, it would be faithfulness — faithfulness to its roots and to its memory. For everything in the Alhyayni speaks of Memory: the name that preserves the place left behind, the attachment of rural Jews to their land of origin, the persistence of a toshavim presence prior to the Spanish exile, the tenacious transmission of the Law and rites in the remotest countryside. In keeping within their family name the remembrance of Hyayna, these families accomplished, without knowing it, the founding commandment of Judaism: zakhor, remember. They made of their name an act of Memory, binding their singular destiny to the long chain of Israel, which since exile has not ceased to carry, from land to land, the remembrance of lost places and the hope of recovered faithfulness.