The Arfi Family

The name Arfi first approaches itself through the science of names. In the reference work that is The Names of the Jews of Morocco by Abraham Laredo, Judeo-Moroccan onomastics reveals itself to be stratified: names of Hebrew origin, Arabic names, Hispanic names inherited from the expulsion of 1492, and toponymic names attached to a place of origin [The Names of the Jews of Morocco]. The patronym Arfi, short and vocalized in an open manner, belongs to the most frequent type in the Maghreb: that of names in which a Semitic root has adapted itself to local phonetics.

The series of attested variants — Arfi, Arffi, Arphi, Harfi, Larfi, ARFARAS — illuminates several well-documented phenomena of Maghrebi Jewish naming. The passage from Harfi to Arfi illustrates the instability of initial hé and het, often elided or restored depending on whether the scribe wrote in Hebrew, Arabic, or Latin characters. The form Larfi reveals the agglutination of the Arabic article al-, common when a name enters into Arabophone usage (al-Arfi becoming Larfi). Finally, the ancient form ARFARAS suggests a Hispanicized or Latinized ending, a possible trace of a passage through the Iberian sphere or through colonial registers that Frenchified and lengthened names. These shifts are not errors: they are the very signature of a mobile lineage, constrained to inscribe its identity in successive languages while never renouncing its profound unity.

This plasticity of the name already speaks a virtue: that of humility before the powers that name you, joined to the obstinacy of remaining oneself. Maghrebi Judaism made this capacity for adaptation without renunciation one of its arts of survival; the Arfi family, through its changing spellings, offers a tiny and faithful testimony to it.

Where does the meaning of the name come from? Here, caution is warranted, and it is better to advance through reasoned hypotheses rather than certainties. Several leads, all plausible, present themselves to the historian attentive to Judeo-Maghrebi onomastics [The Names of the Jews of Morocco].

A first hypothesis links Arfi to an Arabic root. The Arabic verb ʿarafa — "to know, to understand, to recognize" — has given rise to a family of words linked to knowledge and recognition; a bearer named al-ʿArfi could thus be "the man of knowledge" or "he who recognizes." This appealing reading would align with a cardinal value of Judaism, that of knowledge and study, but it remains conjectural.

A second lead, equally plausible, is toponymic. The Maghreb contains several places whose root evokes a height, a crest, or a ridge; a name of the Arfi type could designate the geographical origin of a family from such a place, according to the well-attested mechanism of names of provenance [The Names of the Jews of Morocco]. A third hypothesis, rarer, would seek a Hebrew root, but no source consulted allows it to be privileged.

We must therefore state clearly: the exact meaning of the name Arfi is not established. What is established, by contrast, is the framework within which it inscribes itself — that of a Maghrebi Judaism where the name expressed now a craft, now a knowledge, now a land, and always a belonging. Honesty demands that we not decide where the sources are silent.

If onomastics first attaches Arfi to the Moroccan area [The Names of the Jews of Morocco], it is in the history of Moroccan Jewry that one must seek the vital environment of the lineage. The Jewish communities of Morocco rank among the oldest in the Western diaspora, present well before Islam, strengthened by successive waves of exiles from al-Andalus after 1391 and then 1492. From this encounter between toshavim — the indigenous — and megorashim — the expelled from Spain — was born a culture of extraordinary richness, where liturgy, sacred poetry and juridical learning held an eminent place.

It is precisely in this liturgical and poetic tradition that Maghrebi Judaism deployed one of its most beautiful contributions to the thought of Israel. The piyyutim, these liturgical poems sung at services and major occasions of life, constituted in the Maghreb a considerable spiritual heritage, transmitted orally and from manuscript to manuscript [Zafrani, 1970]. A family like the Arfi, embedded in a Moroccan community, will have lived to the rhythm of these songs: birth greeted with a piyyut, marriage enhanced by ancient strophes, mourning bordered by laments. It is likely, though not documented by name, that members of the lineage were among those faithful who preserved liturgical memory by singing it.

In this culture, piety was not separated from beauty, nor beauty from fidelity to the Law. The care taken in transmitting sacred song stems from a discrete but essential virtue: that of keeping alive the received word. In participating, even anonymously, in this preservation, the Arfi lineage will have taken part in the collective work by which Maghrebi Judaism maintained its soul intact through trials.

The agglutinated variants of the name, singularly Larfi, also direct attention toward the Algerian region, where the Arabic article al- frequently fused with Jewish surnames. There, one city stands out above all for those following the trace of learned families: Tlemcen, the "Jerusalem of the Maghreb."

Norbert Bel-Ange, in his reference study on the Jews of this city, demonstrated how Tlemcen was, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, a major intellectual center, where Talmudic study, rabbinical jurisprudence, and mysticism flourished in contact with currents from Spain and central Maghreb [Bel-Ange, 1998]. The community there cultivated both knowledge of the Law and concern for collective life: charitable institutions, rabbinical courts, study academies formed the fabric of a closely-knit society [Bel-Ange, 1998].

The belonging of an Arfi or Larfi branch to this Tlemceni world remains a probability grounded in onomastic evidence, not archival certainty: this is where tradition and document answer one another without fully overlapping. But the hypothesis has the merit of situating the lineage within a precise ideal, that wherein Algerian Judaism most fully expressed two complementary virtues: Talmudic knowledge, held to be the highest of offices, and involvement in collective life, by which no member of the community was left to their solitude alone. In a city like Tlemcen, knowing the Law made sense only on the condition of placing it in the service of one's own; study and charity there walked in step together [Bel-Ange, 1998].

The destiny of North African Jewish families was upended by the advent of colonial modernity. In Algeria, the Crémieux Decree of 1870 collectively granted French citizenship to indigenous Jews, wrenching them from their former status and inserting them into the orbit of the Republic—not without provoking, among their neighbors, resentments that would culminate in anti-Jewish violence at the end of the nineteenth century. In Morocco, under the protectorate established in 1912, Jewish communities experienced slower modernization and a different insertion, between schools of the Alliance israélite universelle and loyalty to traditional structures.

For a lineage such as the Arfi, whose Frenchified spellings—such as the earlier form ARFARAS—betray passage through the registers of colonial civil registration, this period was one of double belonging: to France by right, to tradition by Memory. The decades of the mid-twentieth century, marked by the Second World War, the temporary repeal of the Crémieux Decree under Vichy, then the independence of Morocco (1956) and Algeria (1962), precipitated the great departure. Nearly all the Jews of the Maghreb left their native land for France, Israel, and the New World.

In this uprooting is revealed another virtue, that of the relation to exile which runs through all the History of Israel. To leave the land of ancestors without losing the name, to remake community elsewhere, to transmit to children the language of prayers and the taste of feasts: this was the trial and the honor of an entire generation. The bearers of the name Arfi, dispersed among these migrants, thus joined the long cohort of those who made of exile not an end, but a displaced fidelity.

What remains, at the end of this journey, of a lineage whose own archive remains scattered? There remains the name itself, borne today in France, Israel and elsewhere, each occurrence of which is a living proof of continuity. There remains the memory of the communities — Moroccan, Tlemcenian — within which this name has lived, prayed, studied, traded, loved and buried its dead.

Jewish tradition teaches that the memory of the righteous is a blessing, and that no one is truly forgotten so long as their name is spoken. By gathering what the sources allow us to say honestly about the Arfi lineage — the onomastics established [The Names of the Jews of Morocco], the liturgical milieu [Zafrani, 1970], the learned horizon of Tlemcen [Bel-Ange, 1998] — this book does not fill the silences: it inhabits them with respect. Where History lacks documents, Memory takes over, not to invent, but to transmit what, from generation to generation, has never ceased to be true: belonging to a people who made Memory a commandment.

From the lineage Arfi, the historian cannot establish either a continuous family tree or a gallery of illustrious figures — the archival items gathered under this name do not permit it, and it would have been dishonest to feign it. What this Great Book was able to do, however, is to situate with precision the name within the geography and culture of Maghrebi Judaism: a Moroccan lineage by its onomastics [The Names of the Jews of Morocco], probably linked through certain of its branches to the interior Algerian world, and entirely traversed by the great movements of the diaspora, from the liturgical splendor of ancient communities [Zafrani, 1970] to the ordeal of twentieth-century exile.

Among all the virtues that this history allows us to glimpse, one seemed to me, more than the others, to have been the particular achievement of the Arfi lineage: fidelity in adaptation — that capacity, readable even in the metamorphosis of its name from one language to another, to remain oneself beneath successive faces. Where others would have lost themselves in shifts of spelling, migrations and changes of status, this family knew how to remain, through Harfi, Larfi, Arffi and ARFARAS, a single and same lineage. In this, it embodies in its own measure what Maghrebi Judaism, and the people of Israel as a whole, has known best how to do throughout the centuries: to traverse the worlds without ever dissolving into them, and to make remembrance the most tenacious of dwellings.