The Annabi Family

The name Annabi is inseparable from the destiny of its mother city. Annaba is one of the oldest cities in North Africa, and over the centuries it has borne a succession of names that summarize the history of eastern Maghreb. Annaba has been called in turn Hippo, Hippo-Regius and Bone before receiving its present name.

Founded by the Phoenicians, the city was a Punic trading post before becoming a major Roman city under the name of Hippo Regius — "Hippo the Royal" — so named because it was the residence of Numidian kings. It reached its peak as a great port and intellectual metropolis of Roman Africa. It was there that Saint Augustine was bishop from 395 to 430, making Hippo one of the major centers of ancient Christian thought, until his death during the Vandal siege of the city. But from that distant epoch onward, Jewish presence was deeply inscribed there: the city had many Jewish inhabitants from the first centuries of the Christian era, as attested by several epitaphs found in the surrounding areas. Under Roman rule, the Jews of Bone enjoyed considerable freedom, even making many proselytes among the Kabyls, their neighbors. This early openness to the other — the Berber neighbor, the Phoenician merchant, the Roman settler — immediately forged a communal identity founded on contact and exchange, rather than on withdrawal.

After the Vandal and then Byzantine periods, the Arab conquest transformed the city. The medieval name of Bûna (or Bone in its European form) took hold, while the new city moved somewhat from the ancient site of Hippo. As for the modern name, Annaba, it derives according to tradition from the Arabic 'unnâb, the jujube tree, a fruit tree once abundant in the region; the city was nicknamed the "city of jujubes." The fruit of the jujube tree from which the city takes its name has today practically disappeared from the region. It is precisely from this form — 'Anâba — that the nisba Annabi proceeds.

During the Ottoman period, Bone was an active port of central Maghreb, integrated into the domain of the Regency of Algiers and oriented toward Mediterranean commerce, notably in coral and cereals. In 1152, Roger of Sicily seized Annaba, and during this period, Jewish merchants established commercial relations with merchants of Pisa, who subsequently created a trading post. This role as commercial intermediary — ensuring the liaison between the shores of the Mediterranean, between East and West — constitutes one of the guiding threads of Jewish presence in Bone, and it illustrates what Jewish tradition sometimes calls economic action: not the accumulation for its own sake, but the bringing into relationship of men and wealth through networks of trust.

Taken by France in 1832, two years after the landing at Algiers, Bone became one of the great ports of colonial Algeria, endowed with a cosmopolitan population in which Muslim Algerians, indigenous Jews, and European migrants — French, Italians, Maltese — rubbed shoulders. It was in this urban crucible that the name Annabi circulated, marking those whose lineage had been formed in the city.

To understand the surname Annabi, one must grasp the logic of Maghrebi names. A significant portion of family names among North African Jews derives from place names. This "toponymic" category groups names formed from cities, regions or countries of origin, and it constitutes one of the most identifiable strata of Maghrebi Jewish onomastics.

The mechanism is simple and universal: when a family leaves its city of origin to settle elsewhere, the host community identifies it by its provenance. L'Annabi — "the one from Annaba" — thus becomes a transmissible family name. The procedure follows the grammar of the Arabic nisba, where the suffix -î (feminine -iyya) expresses belonging or origin. The same formation is found in countless North African surnames: Constantini (Constantine), Mostaganémi (Mostaganem), Tlemçani (Tlemcen), Djerbi (Djerba), Sfaxi (Sfax), Tunsi (Tunis). Annabi belongs fully to this series.

However, an essential fact must be emphasized: a toponymic surname is not the exclusive preserve of a single religious community. A name like Annabi could be borne by both Jewish families and Muslim families, all originating from the same city. The surname Annabi is attested as a patronym whose origin and meaning are documented in genealogical registers. The religious affiliation of a given Annabi lineage cannot therefore be deduced from the name alone: it must be established through civil registries, community records or family memory. This shared character is precious: it reminds us that in pre-modern Maghreb, Jews and Muslims from the same city shared a language, material culture and, often, the same onomastic repertoire. In this shared space, tolerance was not an abstract principle but a concrete, daily practice, inscribed even in the way men named one another.

The Ghriba was venerated by both the Muslim and Jewish populations of Annaba because of a legendary shrine that drew pilgrims from both faiths. This fact — the shared sanctuary, common prayer to the same relic — illustrates better than any discourse the reality of a living-together that the convulsions of the twentieth century would break, but which the name Annabi continues to carry within itself.

The transmission of these names was codified late. In Algeria, it was the Crémieux Decree of 1870, granting French citizenship to indigenous Jews, and more broadly the establishment of colonial civil registration, that froze surnames in their official spelling. Before that, names circulated in variable forms, and the same individual could be designated by their nisba of origin, by their trade or by their father's name.

The name Annabi, when it designates a Jewish lineage, inscribes itself within one of the oldest diasporic presences in the Mediterranean. Annaba possesses one of the oldest Jewish communities in Algeria, whose origins trace back to the 1st century of our era. The region of Hippone was crossed by commercial routes that connected the Orient, Italy, and Iberia.

Over the centuries, Maghrebi Judaism constituted itself through successive strata: a very ancient autochthonous foundation, sometimes called "Berber" or "toshavim"; eastern contributions from the Near East; then, after 1492, the massive arrival of exiles from the Iberian peninsula, the megorashim, driven out by the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. These waves mixed in the cities of eastern Algeria — Constantine, Bône, Guelma — producing communities that were at once rooted locally and connected to the great Sephardic networks of the Mediterranean. It is also possible that certain families migrated from Livorno, in Italy, due to the coral trade that the two cities maintained. This hypothesis of the Livornese route testifies to the insertion of the Bône community into the commercial and intellectual circuits of the central Mediterranean — a network through which circulate not only goods but also books, rabbinic responsa, and currents of thought.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Annaba was part of the Ottoman Empire, Jewish economic influence grew thanks to the powerful Bensamon and Bacri families. These great families of Mediterranean commerce, specialized in the coral and grain trade, embody in their own way a cardinal virtue of the Maghrebi Jewish tradition: that of parnassah — the care devoted to the subsistence of the community through economic activity, while maintaining bonds of trust and credit between partners dispersed on both sides of the sea. Economic action, here, is not separable from ethics: keeping one's word in a commercial contract is also fulfilling a moral obligation.

By 1830, the majority of Annaba's Jewish population worked as artisans specialized in the manufacture of jewelry, fabrics, and bespoke clothing. These artisanal crafts, transmitted from father to son, form another face of Bône's community life: that of a Judaism of craft and detail, which finds in the mastery of manual expertise a form of dignity and belonging. These goods were sold in the Jewish souks inside and around the Jewish quarter. The mellah of Bône — designated locally by the names Sidi Abra or Houma la Yaoud — was thus a space of production and exchange, integrated into the city while maintaining its own institutions.

Between 1832 and 1842, Annaba's Jewish population experienced significant growth due to the arrival of migrants from Tunisia, who numbered in the "several hundreds." These migrations internal to the Maghreb confirm what the history of North African Jewish communities teaches: the relationship to the foreigner is not there synonymous with hostility, but with reception. The newcomers from Tunisia were integrated into the Bône community, and this movement continued throughout the nineteenth century, giving the community its composite and Mediterranean character.

Under French administration, the Jewish community of Bône experienced, like all Algerian Jewry, a profound transformation: Francization through schooling, modernization of religious institutions, increased social and geographic mobility. It is in this context that families named Annabi — those who had left the city for Constantine, Algiers, Tunis, or France — still carried in their name the memory of the city of jujubes, even as they no longer resided there.

Bone was home to a structured Jewish community, equipped with its religious institutions. The most famous sanctuary in the city was the Ghriba of Bone, a pilgrimage site that echoed the famous Ghriba of Djerba in Tunisia. The Ghriba was a venerated sanctuary of the city's Jewish community. The name Ghriba — "the stranger," "the wondrous one" — designates throughout North Africa these synagogues surrounded by legends and associated with pilgrimage practices.

The origin of the Ghriba of Bone is wrapped in a legend transmitted from generation to generation, whose symbolic significance deserves to be reported faithfully. According to an old legend, a Moor from Annaba embarked on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and to return home, he boarded a ship at Alexandria. On this ship, he met a Jewish passenger from Annaba who was returning from Jerusalem with a bible in a casket. As they sailed, a storm struck and the ship sank, the Moor being the sole survivor. The Turks then recalled the Moor's account of the shipwreck. The caid summoned some Israelites and ordered them to seize the casket; scarcely had they approached it when the casket advanced rapidly toward them; from it they removed a Séfer Torah made watertight by miraculous packing. This miracle made such an impression that the community erected a synagogue around this relic.

The legend deserves careful reading, beyond its wondrous character. It stages an encounter between a Muslim pilgrim and a Jewish traveler on the same ship, sharing the same risks at sea, as if they belonged to the same fragile humanity. It gives the Séfer Torah — the Torah scroll — the value of a relic that transcends communal boundaries: the Ghriba was venerated by both Muslim and Jewish populations of Annaba because of this legendary bible that attracted pilgrims from both faiths. This detail is not insignificant: it says that piety as it was expressed in Bone was not closed in upon itself. It radiated beyond the community, touched the neighbor on the other shore, and made the sanctuary a space of shared faith rather than exclusion. The miraculous Séfer Torah became, in the city's imagination, a common good of the entire city, kept by Jews but revered by all.

Some accounts report that this very ancient text came from Jerusalem and dated from the time of the Temple's destruction. From this miracle onward, the city inherited the nickname "Bone the Miraculous." This symbolic link between Bone and Jerusalem — between the city of the jujube tree and the Holy City — is not a narrative coincidence. It inscribes the Bone community in the long chain of Israel's memory: the Jews of this city were the keepers of a fragment of the ancient light, rescued from destruction and preserved across the seas. This relationship to the collective memory of Israel — the awareness of being heirs to a tradition that goes back to the Temple — is precisely what tradition calls zakhor, "remember": the obligation of memory as an act of piety and fidelity.

Attached to the Ghriba synagogue was a rabbinical body that ensured the religious and intellectual life of the community. An office of the Synagogue in 1957 shows, at the teba, the rabbi Chouchana, future director of the Rabbinical School of France, and behind him rabbi Rahamim Naouri. These rabbinical figures — of whom the chief rabbi Naouri will be the last keeper of the miraculous Séfer Torah — embody a tradition of religious authority rooted in halakha and transmitted from master to disciple. The fact that rabbi Chouchana, trained in Bone, later became director of the Rabbinical School of France illustrates how the Talmudic learning of the Bonois community nourished French Judaism in the postwar period, prolonging in the metropolis a spiritual tradition forged on the shores of Algeria.

The toponynic patronym is, by essence, the product of displacement. As long as a family remained in Annaba, it would be redundant to call them "the Annabi"; the name only made sense elsewhere, where Bônese origin distinguished its bearers. The very diffusion of the name Annabi outside the city is thus evidence of ancient mobility, predating its administrative fixation.

Here, the archive and tradition answer each other. The documented history of the Jews of North Africa confirms constant circulation among the cities of the Maghreb: the communities of eastern Algeria and those of Tunisia — Tunis, Le Kef, Sfax — maintained dense ties through commerce, matrimonial alliances, and rabbinic exchanges. The Jewish communities of North Africa were linked by networks that crossed regional boundaries. An Annabi settled in Tunisia would be recognized there precisely by his Algerian provenance, and vice versa.

Family tradition, where it subsists, tends to preserve the memory of a "city of origin" and sometimes of a sanctuary of reference. When an Annabi lineage transmits the memory of Bône and its Ghriba, it confirms through narrative what onomastics had suggested. But one must remain cautious: not all families bearing this name necessarily descend from the same common ancestor. Several stems may have independently adopted the same nisba, simply because they shared the same city of origin. The unity of the name therefore does not guarantee the unity of blood — this is a nuance that the archive imposes upon memory.

This dual reading — the name as an attested marker of origin, and oral tradition as the transmission of that origin — makes the Annabi patronym an object of "intersection," where documentary data and transmitted narrative confirm each other without merging. This care in transmission, this vigilance of memory, stems from a virtue that Judaism has named and cultivated since the Exodus: the obligation to tell children, generation after generation, the story of departure and return, of dispersion and faithfulness. It is in this sense that family memory is not merely an act of nostalgia: it is a religious act, a form of kiddoush, a sanctification of the past by the present.

The fate of the Annabi families, like that of Algerian Jewry as a whole, was overturned by the convulsions of the twentieth century. The history of Algerian Jews is marked by successive ruptures. The Vichy period temporarily abolished French citizenship granted by the Crémieux Decree; the Second World War struck hard at communities that for a moment believed themselves to face an existential threat.

On the eve of the Second World War, the Jewish population of Annaba had reached 3,000 people. This community, which had been strengthened throughout the nineteenth century by the influx of Tunisian migrants, by economic growth linked to the port, and by educational francization, suddenly found itself threatened in its very existence. Vichy's antisemitic laws, applied in Algeria with full effect, excluded Jews from the liberal professions, from teaching, from regulated commerce. For Annabi families who had traversed two millennia of vicissitudes — late Roman persecutions, medieval domination, Ottoman resistance — the shock of republican betrayal was of a particular nature: it was France itself, the promised homeland of the Crémieux Decree, that turned against them.

But this dark chapter reveals, in the negative, a virtue that the sources do not allow us to illustrate through a precise individual fact for the Annabi lineage specifically, and which must therefore be named with caution: the resistance through continuity. Maintaining communal life, the school, the synagogue, the transmission of name and rites, in a context of legal exclusion — this is a form of collective implication that the Jewish tradition fully recognizes, even where no individual hero emerges from the narrative.

Then came the decisive turning point of Algerian independence, in 1962. Almost the entire Jewish population of Algeria left the country, in a movement of exodus that ended a multisecular presence. The Jews of Bône, numbering around 4,000 in 1962, like their coreligionists in Algeria, opted for France. This exodus scattered the Annabi families across France — Marseille, Paris, the South — where they rebuilt a communal life while preserving the memory of their city of origin.

With them departed the last living thread connecting the Ghriba to its guardians. In 1962, during the exodus of Algerian Jews, the Chief Rabbi of Bône, Rahamim Naouri, took with him the miraculous Séfer Torah and deposited it in a synagogue in Paris. This gesture — to save the sacred book before saving one's own possessions, to transport the community's relic into exile rather than leave it — is an act of piety and of care for the other in the deepest sense of the term. Chief Rabbi Naouri was not saving merely an object: he was saving the collective memory of thousands of Bône Jews, their link with Jerusalem, their founding legend. He was accomplishing, in his own way, the gesture of those rabbis who, at the destruction of the Temple, had carried away the Torah scrolls so that the light would not go out.

Today, there are no Jews living in Annaba; the remaining Jewish population left the city between 1964 and 1965, migrating to Israel and France. The Ghriba no longer functions as a synagogue: it was converted into a mosque in 1963. The material heritage of this presence — synagogues, cemeteries, the Ghriba itself — remains in Algeria as a stone witness, while the living bear its memory in their patronymic.

From the moment the 1962 exodus dispersed Algeria's Jewish communities, the name Annabi changed function. It was no longer merely the mark of a living geographical origin, but the repository of a Memory: that of a vanished world, the Jewish communities of eastern Algeria. In the French cities where the Annabi families rebuilt themselves, the name became the discreet sign of a double belonging: to adoptive France, and to the Bône of Memory.

This duality is not without recalling the classical condition of the Sephardic Jew in diaspora: anchored in his host country by language, culture and law, yet holding within him the recollection of another, older belonging, which generations transmit not as an open wound but as a quiet faithfulness. The name Annabi, borne in France, in Israel, in America, thus accomplishes a remarkable inversion: forged to signal departure from a city, it has become, generations later, the last thread connecting descendants to the city of jujubes.

The presence of bearers of the patronym in Sephardic genealogical registers — which major databases such as encaoua.org and north African diaspora directories allow us to glimpse — confirms this diffusion from eastern Algeria toward Tunisia, then toward Europe and Israel. The name circulates in the matrimonial registers of consistories, the civil status lists of colonial Algeria, the directories of Sephardic communities in France. Each occurrence is a point on a map of the Bônian diaspora.

It is fitting to mention here, with the caution that honesty of narrative requires, that the contemporary notability of the name Annabi has been brought into the public domain by renowned personalities — notably in the arts — who bear this patronym and whose family origin is rooted in North Algeria. Without confusing individual celebrity with the History of a lineage, one may note that the public visibility of this name, in early twenty-first-century France, has contributed to its recognition beyond the circles of communal Memory. This visibility is itself a fact of transmission: the name Annabi, once confined to the registers of Algerian civil status and family memories, has acquired resonance in the common cultural space.

The Ghriba of Bône is today part of the documented and preserved heritage of North African Judaism. Institutions such as the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme (mahJ) in Paris keep its material and photographic trace, ensuring the preservation of the Memory of this venerated sanctuary of Bône's Jewish community. This institutional conservation extends, in the museum and archival space, the gesture of Grand Rabbi Naouri carrying away his Séfer Torah: a community's Memory dies only if no one consents to keep it.

The patronymic Annabi condenses into a few letters a long Mediterranean history. Its primary meaning is clear and documented: it designates Annaban origin, "he who comes from Annaba," through the operation of the Arabic nisba appended to the name of the city of a thousand names — Hippo, Hippo Regius, Bûna, Bône, Annaba. This city was in turn a Phoenician trading post, a Roman metropolis, the episcopal seat of Saint Augustine, an Ottoman port, and then a major city of colonial Algeria.

When it designates a Jewish lineage, this name links its bearers to the long Jewish presence of eastern Algeria, spanning millennia, composed of indigenous strata and Sephardic and Livornese contributions, structured around institutions such as the Ghriba of Bône and animated by a rabbinic body, some of whose members would nourish French Judaism in the postwar period. But the name, by its toponymic nature, was also shared with Muslim families of the same origin, and cannot, by itself, fix the confessional belonging of a lineage: only the archival record can do so.

At the end of this journey through the centuries, a question imposes itself: among all the great values that the Jewish tradition has carried, which one will the Annabi lineage — as it can be known through documented facts and transmitted Memory — have best expressed?

The answer that the sources authorize is this: fidelity through Memory, that is, what Judaism names zakhor. This lineage lived two millennia in a city that changed masters, languages, and names without ever quite changing its soul. It maintained, through the Phoenician, Roman, Vandal, Arab, Ottoman, French, and finally Algerian strata, a continuous presence and an ability to adapt its forms of life without renouncing its identity. It kept its Séfer Torah through literal and metaphorical tempests. It transmitted its name — even when that name no longer had a territory — as an act of fidelity to a city, to a community, to a history.

This fidelity was also expressed in the relationship to the stranger: the community of Bône welcomed Tunisian migrants of the nineteenth century, shared its sanctuary with its Muslim neighbors, established commercial relations with merchants from Pisa and Livorno, produced rabbis who became directors of the Rabbinical School of France. In each of these gestures, the Annabi lineage participated in a virtue that the Jewish tradition has carried across centuries and continents: the conviction that the other, though a stranger, is also a bearer of dignity that deserves to be recognized and welcomed.

What remains is essential: a name of migration become a name of Memory. Born of departure, it signals today a fidelity. Through the ruptures of the twentieth century and the dispersal of Algerian communities, Annabi continues to say, to those who know how to hear it, the fidelity of a lineage to the city that saw it born. This is, perhaps, the deep vocation of every toponymic patronym: to transform distance into connection, and exile into transmission.