The Allal Family

The name Allal and its variants emerge in a precise geography: eastern Algeria and neighboring Tunisia, that communal corridor stretching from Souk Ahras to Constantine, from Bône to Tunis, along the valleys and caravan routes that have always made this region a zone of transit and exchange. This is not a background geography: it is the very soil of the lineage, the soil that shaped its crafts, its alliances and its ways of being.

The Constantinois — the region of ancient Cirta — was home to one of the densest and oldest Jewish populations in Algeria. The city of Constantine itself, perched on its limestone gorges above the Rhummel, was a center of Talmudic erudition and popular piety where great rabbinical families held school and tribunal for centuries. But the Allal lineage does not come from learned Constantine: it comes from smaller, more rural, more Berber towns, from the arc stretching from Souk Ahras to Aïn Beïda, passing through Annaba. It is in this fabric of towns and markets that the family lived, worked, married off its children, buried its dead.

The family genealogy, as it can be reconstructed from available sources, traces back to a great-grandfather named Jacob, husband of Baïa, born Brami. Their eldest son, Mouchi, born around 1850 and died in 1918, married Zeïra Taïeb and settled in Aïn Beïda, a town in eastern Algeria nestled between the high plateaus and the Aurès. One of the descendants of this branch, Fraji, married Chalbïa Bakis and established himself in Annaba and then in Souk Ahras. This couple had seven sons and three daughters. One of the sons was named Simon — Simon Halali, who would become Salim Halali.

The city of Souk Ahras bears in Arabic a name that evokes the forest and the frontier. It is located about a hundred kilometers from the Tunisian border, in a march zone between two regencies, two cultures, two administrative languages — but a single living communal reality. The Jewish families of this region moved freely between Souk Ahras, Aïn Beïda, Bône and Le Kef, in a space where ties of kinship and commerce mattered more than the political borders drawn by colonial powers. Bône itself — ancient Hippo Regius, the city of St. Augustine — was a port city open to the Mediterranean, a crossroads of wool, cork and leather.

In this fabric of cities and markets, Jews practiced the crafts of artisanal work, small commerce and local finance. Simon Halali's father was a baker — a humble but central profession in the moral economy of the neighborhood. It is at the Jewish baker's in the Maghreb that the dafina of Shabbat was cooked, that dish of meat and vegetables that simmered slowly in the communal oven from Friday dawn to Saturday noon. Behind the humility of the condition lies a concrete contribution to the observance of the Law: a halakha lived not in books, but in the warmth of the oven and the smell of leavened bread. The father's profession inscribes the family in this logic of communal involvement through daily work — a form of modest but real tikkun.

Simon was one of ten children of this family which, by his own admission in his memoirs, was not financially well-off. He defined himself as Chaouï — a Berber from eastern Algeria, heir to the language and culture of the Aurès. This Berber identity gives the lineage an additional depth: the Chaouï Jews of eastern Algeria are among the most anciently rooted in North Africa, some historians tracing their presence to the pre-Islamic era, even to antiquity. They are the oldest substratum of Maghrebi Judaism, even before the great waves of medieval immigration from Spain and the East.

The documentary foundation that renders the anchorage of the surname Allal in Constantine and Tunisia legible rests upon a scholarly gesture of considerable scope: the onomastic enterprise of Maurice Eisenbeth. His work, The Jews of North Africa: Demography and Onomastics, published in Algiers in 1936, is not a simple dictionary of names. It was born of a concern — that of seeing the memory of a group that colonial administration had ceased to count separately disappear.

The work is divided into two major parts. The first, demographic, establishes the numbers, geographic distribution, and structure by communities of North African Jews at the turn of the 1930s, drawing on French, Spanish, and Italian statistical data crossed with local rabbinical archives. The second part, onomastic, constitutes a reasoned inventory of surnames and their graphic variants, with indication of their geographic anchorage and, where possible, their etymology. It is in this second part that the name Allal appears, recorded with four orthographic variants — Allaly, Benallal, Halali, Hallali — and linked to the communities of Constantine and neighboring Tunisia.

The method employed by Eisenbeth is particularly rigorous. It combines the complete examination of nominative lists of inhabitants of all municipalities in Algeria — a reading that allowed him to determine the almost certainly exact number of Israelites residing in Algeria on March 8, 1931 — the primary account of surnames, masculine and feminine given names and professions, and, for doubtful cases, supplementary inquiries. This approach, at once statistical, onomastic, and ethnographic, was made necessary by a paradoxical administrative anomaly: official censuses had ceased to distinguish Israelites from other French citizens.

Eisenbeth himself reproduces the explanations of the competent Services of the Governor General of Algeria: it was materially impossible to discriminate these demographic elements, because in fact the greater part of those concerned had not responded to the question concerning their status as Israelites naturalized French by the decree of 1870, preferring to answer simply that they were French by origin. For the Constantine agglomeration alone, despite being one of the largest Israelite communities in Algeria, only 653 units had answered "Israelite" — a figure manifestly below reality. It was against this statistical erasure that the Chief Rabbi of Algiers drew up his inventory — a gesture of safeguarding that belongs to that ethic of Memory that the Jewish tradition formulates in the word zakhor: "remember."

Eisenbeth's gesture also carries an implicit political significance. In reconstituting the demographic fabric of North African Jewish communities from their own traces — the names, the professions, the places of birth — he asserts the existence of a collective identity irreducible to faith alone, a group whose History merited being documented with the same instruments as those applied to any other human group. The work was honored with a grant from the Governor General of Algeria, which testifies to the recognition, at least partial, of its scientific and administrative utility.

For Constantine specifically, Eisenbeth notes that the examination of individual bulletins collected by the municipalities could only be as sincere as possible, but that the casusal endings of surnames, even the resonance of given names, the place of birth, residence, or even profession did not constitute indices sufficiently reliable for automatic discrimination. The conclusion was that each doubtful case necessitated a supplementary inquiry — a painstaking work that the Chief Rabbi carried out with a patience that one might describe, without exaggeration, as talmudic: the same scrupulous attention to detail, the same refusal of hasty generalization, that the Talmud commentator brings to each line of the sacred text.

Eisenbeth was continuing the line of his own previous works: his essay North African Judaism, published in Constantine in 1931 and bearing on the Israelites of the Constantine department alone, had prefigured the approach extended to the whole of North Africa in the 1936 work. This first essay, rooted in Constantine itself, gives to the geographic anchorage of the name Allal additional documentary depth. Robert Attal's bibliography on the Jews of North Africa, like André Chouraqui's comprehensive history, make it possible to place Eisenbeth's work within the broader framework of a century of scholarly reflection on North African communities.

Few Maghrebi surnames offer an etymology as debated as Allal. Two main hypotheses share the scholarly field, and their coexistence is itself instructive of the condition of North African Jewry, caught between two linguistic universes that daily life reconciled where theory opposed them.

The first hypothesis traces Allal to a Hebrew root, seeing in it a form derived from Obadiah — "servant of God" — whose exact Arabic equivalent is precisely Abdallah, "servant of Allah". This double reading is wholly coherent: the passage from Hebrew to Arabic through semantic calque is a constant in Jewish onomastics in Muslim lands, where the theophoric name changes language without changing meaning. The piety contained in such a name — the acknowledgment of a voluntary servitude toward the divine — discreetly links this lineage to one of the cardinal virtues of Judaism: humility before God, the awareness that man is great only insofar as he knows himself to be a servant.

The second hypothesis, defended by Joseph Toledano, moves away from the theophoric sphere. He recognizes in it a name of Arabic origin, indicative of a character trait — that of the "great drinker" — a masculine given name very widespread among Muslims of the Maghreb, especially in Morocco, but unknown in the Orient, and which existed among Jews only in patronymic form, with the variant Ben Allal. This reading inscribes the name within the everyday fabric of the Maghreb, where nicknames and character traits became frozen as family names over generations, according to a practice common to both communities.

The work of Paul Sebag on the names of Tunisian Jews and that of Abraham Laredo on those of Morocco confirm, each within its region, this constant porosity between the common Semitic base and local contributions. The journey of a name from one community to another, from one spelling to another, also illustrates the plasticity peculiar to Judeo-Maghrebi surnames in contact with colonial civil administration. When the French scribe's pen fixed names in the registers at the end of the 19th century, the same syllable heard could become Allal, Halali or Hallali according to the official's ear and the declarant's accent. The decree of October 24, 1870, in declaring indigenous Israelites of the Algerian departments French citizens, had incorporated them ex officio into the nation — not without creating this perverse effect that their separate classification could only have appeared as bearing an exclusively confessional or historical character. Thus names dispersed and fragmented under official spellings, while oral memory maintained, within families, the continuity of an identity that official papers obscured.

Whether one retains the pious etymology or the secular etymology, the essential lies elsewhere: the name Allal is the very place where Hebrew and Arabic respond to each other. It embodies that capacity for double belonging which characterized the Jews of the Maghreb for centuries — speaking dialectal Arabic, praying in Hebrew, and bearing names where the two languages met without contradicting each other. It is in this identity bilingualism that one of the most authentic forms of tolerance resides: not the abstract tolerance of an ideology, but that, lived daily, of a people who inhabited two cultures at once without betraying one or the other.

It was around 1937 that Simon Halali left eastern Algeria for Paris. He was seventeen years old, with a voice, and nothing else. The French capital of the interwar years was, for a cultured young Maghrebi, both the center of the colonial universe and a stage where the musics of the world clashed and mingled with unprecedented freedom. It was in Parisian flamenco clubs that Simon began to make a name for himself — this choice of flamenco was not arbitrary: an Iberian genre born itself from the encounter of Hebrew, Arabic, and Romani in medieval Andalusia, it constituted for an Algerian Judeo-Berber a kind of familiar space beneath exotic exteriors.

The decisive encounter was with Mohamed el Kamel, an Algerian artist who wrote his first songs and opened the doors of the Arabo-Andalusian repertoire to him. Mohand Iguerbouchène would later compose some fifty pieces for him, constituting a repertoire that blended flamenco, Andalusian muwashshah, and Algerian popular song. At this time, Simon took the stage name Salim — the Arabic form of Simon, but also a word meaning "safe and sound," "preserved": a prophecy in deeds that he could not yet measure.

Before the war, Salim Halali performed at the Moorish café of the Great Mosque of Paris, alongside renowned artists such as Ali Sriti and Ibrahim Salah. Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and first rector of the Mosque, an intellectual and music lover — himself an oudist and violinist — befriended Salim Halali. This friendship, born in the Moorish café on the rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, would prove to be capital a few years later.

Salim Halali's music quickly achieved considerable success throughout North Africa, where he held record sales. Among his most popular titles were Al ain zarga (Blue Eyes), Mahenni zine (Beauty Has Troubled Me), Habibti samra (My Brown-Skinned Beloved), and Allala illali, this last title bearing in its very title a musicalized deformation of the lineage's name — as if the singer were re-inscribing, note by note, his own patronym in collective memory. This music, blending flamenco, Andalusian song, and Eastern repertoire, embodied in deeds what the Jewish tradition calls derekh erets — the manner of being in the world of men, the respectful and enriching relationship to the other's culture.

The entry of Nazi Germany into Paris in June 1940 fractures the world in which Salim Halali had built his life. He is Jewish, he is known, his name is on display. The machine of death is not abstract: it passes through the streets, the registers, the denunciations. Mohamed el Kamel, his first lyricist, had meanwhile gone to work at Radio Berlin — a separation that leaves Salim alone in an occupied city.

It is then that the friendship forged at the Moorish café of the Great Mosque takes on its full dimension. If Kaddour Benghabrit managed to conceal his Jewish origins by providing him with a false certificate of Muslim status and by having the name of his deceased father engraved on an anonymous tomb in a Muslim cemetery in Bobigny. This gesture — inscribing a Jewish name on a Muslim tomb to save a life — is one of the most striking of this period: it inverts the logic of death of the Nazis, who sought to erase Jewish names from the registers of the living, by making the register of the dead the very place of protection.

During the Occupation, Mohammed Aïssaoui documented at least two people saved by the Great Mosque through Benghabrit's personal intervention, and historians estimate that the Mosque aided several hundred people in total. The case of Salim Halali is the most documented, the most public, and it carries a particular symbolic significance: that of an artist whose voice had succeeded in crossing cultural boundaries, saved precisely by one of those with whom he had shared this crossing.

Jewish tradition knows this commandment in the form of the lo ta'amod al dam re'akha — "you shall not stand indifferent before the blood of your fellow." If the saving gesture came here from a Muslim, it illuminates in return the Judeo-Muslim solidarity that the Maghrebi world had long known — and which European barbarism attempted to break. It also reminds us that the fate of the Jews of the Maghreb was not decided only in chancelleries and extermination camps, but also in these human, discreet and decisive gestures, by which individuals refused to be complicit with the worst.

But the Allal-Halali family nonetheless paid a terrible price. Salim's sister, Berthe-Beya, arrested and deported, born on December 16, 1926 in Bône, died on September 7, 1943 in Auschwitz, while her son Claude André Valaix, born on February 21, 1943 in Paris, perished there on September 30, 1943, less than three weeks later. Berthe-Beya was sixteen years old when she was arrested. Her son Claude André lived less than eight months. These dates and these places — Bône, Paris, Auschwitz — draw a tragic triangle that condenses the entire history of the Jews of the Maghreb in the European upheaval: born on the edge of the inland sea, bearers of a double culture, they were overtaken by a barbarism that recognized in them only the single category of their death.

The name Allal-Halali is thus inscribed in the martyrology of Israel. This inscription is not a metaphor: it is literal, engraved in the archives of the Holocaust Memorial and in the registers of Auschwitz. It is the tragic counterpoint to all the beauty that Salim had brought to the stage, and it prevents this lineage forever from being merely a beautiful story of music and Mediterranean fraternity.

After the Liberation, Salim Halali rebuilt a career with an energy that witnesses of the time describe as dizzying. In 1947, he created an oriental cabaret — the Folies Ismaïlia — in a Parisian hotel on Avenue Montaigne that had belonged to Ferdinand de Lesseps, in one of the capital's most upscale neighborhoods. In 1948, he created a second establishment, Le Sérail, on Rue du Colisée. These two Parisian addresses trace a meteoric social ascent: the baker's son from Souk Ahras was now the host of oriental nights on Avenue Montaigne.

In 1949, he settled in Morocco, bought an old café in the cosmopolitan Maârif neighborhood in Casablanca, and transformed it into a prestigious cabaret: Le Coq d'Or. This choice of Casablanca was no accident. In the nineteen-fifties, Morocco under protectorate still offered Judeo-Arab artists a space where Andalusian music and oriental repertoire could flourish in a context of relative coexistence. At the Coq d'Or performed Line Monty, Samy El Maghribi, Warda el Djazaïra, and Tunisian singer Chafia Rochdi, known as Nana, grande dame of Sfaxian song. The venue also hosted lavish evenings for King Farouk of Egypt and his court, in the presence of stars like Mohammed Abdel Wahab. Oum Kalthoum herself — the voice of the Nile, the greatest Arab singer of the twentieth century — showed Salim Halali a public admiration that testifies to the recognition of his peers in the Arab musical sphere.

The Coq d'Or was ultimately destroyed in a fire, and Salim then returned to France, to Cannes, in the early nineteen-sixties. This brutal end of the Casablanca venture coincided with the period of independence movements and upheavals that emptied the Jewish communities of North Africa. Families bearing the name Allal and its variants found themselves, like hundreds of thousands of their brothers, scattered between France, Israel, and other lands of refuge.

But it is in the margins of this life of splendor that the deepest moral dimension of the figure reveals itself. Testimonies agree: he had a good heart and donated his fees for various causes in complete discretion, giving even his clothes and jewelry, and offered a truck of sheep to the poor of the old medina at each Aïd el-Kébir feast. This anonymous charity, offered to Muslim poor during their own feast, extends into the twentieth century the old Maghrebi virtue of discreet tsedaka — and opens it to the other in a gesture of fraternity that Jewish tradition names gemilout hassadim, acting kindness without any condition of reciprocity.

That a child of Souk Ahras, who became a star of the Casablanca cabaret, offered each year a truck of sheep to the poor of the medina for the Aïd says something that neither sociology nor politics can quite grasp: the persistence, in a singular being, of a memory of neighborhood, of a quarter's fraternity that did not let the fractures of history take precedence over kindness. It is the same impulse that had once driven Si Kaddour Benghabrit to carve a name on a tomb to save a friend: the refusal to let the category — religious, ethnic, national — prevail over the human.

Solitary by choice in his final years — he had forbidden anyone to visit him, except for a few close friends — Salim Halali died on June 25, 2005 in Antibes. According to his last wishes, his ashes were scattered in Nice, in the garden of remembrance. This ending, between the Côte d'Azur and the sea, had something of a closing of the loop: born facing the Mediterranean in Annaba, he returned to the Mediterranean in Antibes, with between them a life that had crossed all its shores.

Salim Halali's legacy was recognized late, but with growing intensity. His recordings enjoyed renewed success with the revival of interest in Judeo-Arabic musical repertoire from the last years of the twentieth century — a movement that accompanied a broader rehabilitation of Judeo-Maghrebi culture in French and international collective consciousness. Researchers, musicologists, and documentarians gradually became interested in his trajectory, seeing in it an irreplaceable testimony to the disappeared Judeo-Arab world, to Andalusian music as shared heritage, and to the complexity of relations between Jews and Muslims in colonial North Africa.

The European Institute of Jewish Music devoted a detailed entry to him, and the Music and the Holocaust website of World ORT documented the circumstances of his survival under the Occupation as a textbook case of relations between Jewish artists and the Muslim world in the interwar period. This retrospective gaze constitutes in itself a form of zakhor — of active memory — toward a lineage and a culture that the convulsions of the twentieth century had nearly engulfed.

The dispersal of the bearers of the name Allal and its variants after 1962 did not signify the end of memory. Algerian independence, then successive waves of emigration that emptied the Jewish communities of Algeria and Tunisia, scattered this lineage across France, Israel, and other lands of refuge. But dispersal is also, in the Jewish tradition, a mode of survival: what a concentrated community may lose all at once, a dispersed community preserves in fragments within multiple memories.

Maxime Karoutchi, one of the last Judeo-Moroccan singers, said of Salim Halali that "speaking of him is exactly like speaking of Oum Kalthoum" — not that they were comparable in terms of posterity, but because both belonged to that Arab musical world where the boundary between sacred and profane, between Jewish and Muslim, between East and West, was crossed at every measure. This phrase from a Judeo-Moroccan singer about a Judeo-Algerian singer says, in one formula, what the Allal lineage's contribution to Israel's collective memory has been: a voice carried beyond itself, open to the other, recognizable even in exile.

The work of Claire Rubinstein-Cohen on the Jewish community of Sousse, like the comprehensive saga traced by André Goldenberg on the Jews of North Africa, allow us to measure how much these communities upheld the ideal of collective solidarity that defines a kehila, a community of Israel. Under the name Allal, as under hundreds of other names in the Judeo-Maghrebi onomastic tradition, lived men and women who practiced the ethics of kindness without making it a banner — and it is perhaps that, precisely, which deserves to be remembered.

Salim Halali (born Simon Halali, 30 July 1920 – 25 June 2005), in Arabic سليم الهلالي — Born in Annaba (Bône), in a Jewish family of Chaouïa origin from Souk Ahras, Salim Halali was one of the major figures of Arab-Andalusian and Judeo-Maghrebi song. After his début in Parisian flamenco clubs from 1937, he performed at the Moorish café of the Great Mosque of Paris alongside Ali Sriti and Ibrahim Salah. Protected during the Occupation by rector Si Kaddour Benghabrit through a false Muslim attestation, he survived while his sister Berthe-Beya and his nephew Claude André perished at Auschwitz. Founder of the Folies Ismaïlia on avenue Montaigne, then of the Le Coq d'Or cabaret in Casablanca, he was admired by Oum Kalthoum. His ashes rest in Nice.

Berthe-Beya Halali (16 December 1926 – 7 September 1943) — Younger sister of Salim Halali, born in Bône in the same family from Souk Ahras. Arrested during the Occupation and deported, she died at Auschwitz at sixteen years old. Her son, Claude André Valaix, born in Paris on 21 February 1943, perished in the same camp on 30 September 1943, at the age of seven months and nine days. Their names are inscribed in the archives of the Mémorial de la Shoah and in the registers of Auschwitz. The figure of Berthe-Beya and her son, two direct victims of deportation, anchor the Allal-Halali lineage in the martyrology of Israel with a documentary precision that the historian must state without equivocation.

Maurice Eisenbeth (1886 – 1957) — Chief Rabbi of Algiers, onomastician and demographer of Jewish communities in North Africa. Author of Le Judaïsme Nord-Africain (Constantine, 1931) and Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord : démographie et onomastique (Algiers, 1936), he was the first to systematically census the surnames of Jewish communities in the Maghreb — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya —, by cross-referencing colonial statistical data, rabbinical registers and field surveys. His inventory, honored with a subsidy from the General Government of Algeria, is the documentary foundation without which the name Allal and its variants would remain invisible in the archives.

Si Kaddour Benghabrit (c. 1868 – 1954) — Founder and first rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, inaugurated in 1926. Diplomat, intellectual and music lover — oud player and violinist —, he formed a friendship with Salim Halali during concerts at the Mosque's Moorish café. During the German Occupation, he provided Halali with a false Muslim attestation and had his father's name engraved on a grave in a Muslim cemetery in Bobigny to conceal his Jewish origins. Although his action benefited at least several hundred people according to historians, it is not formally recognized as Righteous Among the Nations due to the complexity of the case.

The Allal lineage does not confine itself to a single history. Under its multiple spellings — Allal, Halali, Benallal, Allaly, Hallali — it perhaps unites distinct branches, all born from the same Tunisian-Constantinois soil, all marked by the double belonging that defines Maghrebi Judaism. Its very name, oscillating between the Hebrew Obadiah and the Arabic Abdallah, speaks to this in-between condition where one served the same God in two languages, where one brought bread to the community of the quarter before singing for it in the evening.

Eisenbeth's undertaking made it possible to read this lineage clearly. By deciphering the nominal lists commune by commune, by cross-referencing surnames, given names, professions and birthplaces, by resisting the temptation to simplify where data were incomplete, he accomplished a gesture that Jewish tradition recognizes as foundational: to name, to count, not to let fade away. His refusal to proceed by mere assertions where criteria are lacking is itself a model of intellectual honesty — a form of justice rendered to the living and the dead.

From this lineage, history has not retained great decision-makers of the halakha nor dynasties of illustrious rabbis — and it would be dishonest to invent any. What it has best expressed, among all the virtues of Judaism, is the virtue of passage: that singular capacity to circulate beauty, goodness and memory across borders and communities, without ever denying the identity that is its source. In the documented figure of Salim Halali, this vocation crystallizes with rare clarity. A Chaoui child from Souk Ahras, son of a baker who baked the dafina on Friday, becomes a carrier of a shared Judeo-Arab culture among all the shores of the Mediterranean. He is saved by a rector of a mosque when Europe wants his death. He renders to the poor of the medina, at their own feast, a part of what he received from the world. And he carries in his repertoire, under the title Allala illali, a musicalization of the very name of his lineage — as if each note were a way of not forgetting where one comes from.

Discreet charity, faithfulness to a music of brotherhood, and the martyrdom of Berthe-Beya and Claude André at Auschwitz bind the singular destiny of the Allal to the double memory of Israel: that of solidarity and goodness offered to the stranger, and that of faithfulness maintained even unto annihilation. Between the oven of the baker of Souk Ahras and the stage of the Coq d'Or in Casablanca, between the onomastic registers of Eisenbeth and the archives of the Shoah Memorial, one same line runs: that of a name which never ceased to cross borders without ever denying what it carried. This is, ultimately, the highest contribution of this lineage to the collective memory of Israel: to have embodied, in the humility of humble origins, the virtue of openness — between Hebrew and Arabic, between Jew and Muslim, between song and prayer, between life and the memory of those whom one could not save.