The Attali Family

The surname Attali belongs to the broader ensemble of Jewish surnames from North Africa, whose study falls within a demanding discipline where linguistics, the history of communities, and family memory converge. The standard reference works, beginning with the monumental work devoted to the names of the Jews of Morocco, show how deeply these surnames preserve the trace of a millennial history, shaped by migrations, settlements, and transmissions [Abraham I. Laredo, Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, 1978].

Tradition links the name Attali — like the closely related forms Attal and Atallah — to a Semitic root in which the idea of favor or gift resonates; other readings see in it an onomastic derivative connected to localities or trades, following the customary mechanisms of formation of Maghrebi Jewish surnames. These hypotheses coexist without any medieval archive making it possible to settle the matter definitively: they should therefore be presented as probable readings rather than certainties. It is precisely this prudence that honors truth: where the document is absent, the lineage contents itself with transmitting, without fabricating.

In this reserve toward what one does not know, one can already discern a virtue that the Jewish tradition holds in high esteem: humility before knowledge, the rigorous distinction between what is received and what is established. Rabbinic Judaism has made this intellectual honesty a cardinal value — the one that commands one to say "I do not know" rather than to assert what is false. The Attali lineage, whose most illustrious member will make thought his vocation, unknowingly aligns itself with this exigency from the very enigma of its own name.

To understand where the Attali lineage comes from, one must picture the world that shaped it: that of Algerian Judaism under French administration. The Jewish community of Algeria, one of the oldest in the Mediterranean basin, experienced a decisive upheaval with the French conquest of 1830, and then with the granting of French citizenship through the Crémieux decree of 1870, which profoundly transformed its legal status, its culture, and its aspirations [Richard Ayoun & Bernard Cohen, The Jewish Communities of Algeria under French Rule, 1830-1962, 1991].

This Frenchification was not without tensions. The Jews of Algeria had to navigate a dual belonging — rooted in a Sephardic and Maghrebi practice and Memory, they simultaneously embraced the language, the schools, and the institutions of the Republic [Richard Ayoun & Bernard Cohen, 1991]. The most painful rupture came under the Vichy regime, which abrogated the Crémieux decree and brutally stripped the Jews of Algeria of their French citizenship, casting them out of the national community with which they had identified for three generations. This episode, which is part of the broader anti-Jewish policy of the French State, illuminates the fragility of emancipation and the weight of History in the consciousness of Algerian Jewish families [Robert O. Paxton, La France de Vichy, 1940-1944, 1972].

It was in this milieu — French-speaking, attached at once to tradition and to the promise of integration — that the twins Jacques and Bernard Attali were born in Alger on November 1, 1943, in the full turmoil of the Second World War. The coincidence of this birth with the years when Algerian Judaism wavered between degradation and hope is not insignificant: it inscribes the lineage from the outset within the collective Memory of Israel, that of a people who learns to hold together fidelity to itself and belonging to the world. The community into which they were born embodied this engagement in collective life, this balance between transmitted piety and civic commitment, which Mediterranean Judaism has long carried as a virtue of its own.

The Attali family left Alger for France in 1956, at a time when the Algerian War was beginning to shatter the existence of the country's Jewish communities. This departure preceded the mass exodus of 1962, when Algerian independence brought about the uprooting of almost all Algerian Jews, who were forced to rebuild their lives in metropolitan France [Richard Ayoun & Bernard Cohen, 1991]. The Attali lineage thus belongs to that pivotal generation which chose France before many others did.

This exile is part of a major demographic transformation of French Judaism: the arrival of Jews from North Africa profoundly altered the composition, sensibility, and vitality of the Jewish community in France, long dominated by an Ashkenaze and native French Judaism [Doris Bensimon & Sergio Della Pergola, La Population juive de France, 1984]. The Séfarade families brought with them a practice, a communal warmth, and a Memory that breathed new life into a French Judaism wounded by the Shoah [Doris Bensimon & Sergio Della Pergola, 1984].

The family narrative of this crossing belongs in part to transmitted memory — the intimate circumstances of the departure, the belongings left behind, the settling in Paris — yet it meets the established History of an entire people in motion. It is here that the Attali lineage illustrates one of the great virtues of Judaism in exile: the capacity to rebuild, to transform uprooting into a new beginning, to make of displacement the fertile ground of a new vitality. The relationship to the foreign — being oneself a stranger and having to carve out a place anew — becomes, in this experience, a source of openness rather than withdrawal.

From the Attali lineage, the most considerable figure is that of Jacques Attali, born in Alger in 1943 [Corpus Zakhor : Jacques Attali, notice]. Trained in the grandes écoles of the Republic — a graduate of both the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale d'Administration — he became, from 1981 onward, the special adviser to President François Mitterrand, a position he held until 1991, at the very heart of French executive power. He then went on, in 1991, to found and serve as the first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), an institution created to support the transition of Eastern European countries following the fall of communism.

Yet it is perhaps less through the exercise of power than through his written work that Jacques Attali takes his place among the great figures of Jewish thought. A remarkably prolific essayist, he has devoted several of his books to the history, Memory, and thought of Israel. His essay 1492 revisits the pivotal year in which the expulsion of the Jews from Spain coincided with the discovery of the New World — a turning point at which the history of the West and of the Jewish people was forever altered. One hears in this work the echo of the Sephardic tragedy — the very same from which the Jews of Algeria descend, through their Maghrebi ancestry — and the memory of the great figures of the Iberian exile, such as Isaac Abravanel, counselor to princes condemned to wandering [Roland Goetschel, Isaac Abravanel, conseiller des princes et philosophe, 1996].

In his Histoire économique du peuple juif, Jacques Attali undertook to trace, over the long term, the role of Jews in the development of trade, credit, and economic life — a delicate subject he sought to address with a commitment to truth against caricature. Through this work, he illuminated one of the most misunderstood dimensions of Jewish history — economic activity as a constraint of survival no less than as a contribution to civilization. Finally, his Dictionnaire amoureux du judaïsme bears witness to an intimate, learned, and affectionate relationship with tradition, in which one discerns a desire for transmission that extends, in a modern and secular form, the ancient Jewish duty to teach.

In this man converge several of the great virtues that Jewish tradition has carried across the centuries: knowledge placed in the service of the collective, fidelity to a threatened Memory, and that conviction, so profoundly Jewish, that thought is a form of action. His reflection on utopia and the future is not without echoes of the fertile tension, described by Gershom Scholem, between faithfulness to the past and the messianic hope directed toward a world in need of repair [Gershom Scholem, Fidélité et Utopie, 1978]. In this, Jacques Attali participates fully in the collective Memory of Israel: that of a people for whom writing, transmitting, and thinking toward the future are inseparable from survival itself.

To Jacques Attali's twin brother, Bernard, falls an equally remarkable trajectory, though one placed under the sign of economic service and public responsibility. A senior civil servant and executive, Bernard Attali presided over the national carrier Air France, one of France's great industrial flagships, at a time when the company was facing profound difficulties. To lead such an institution is to take charge of a common good, with all the trials, social conflicts, and painful decisions that this entails.

There is, in this gemellity of destinies — one situated closest to thought and political counsel, the other at the helm of a great national enterprise — something like a double illustration of engagement in civic life. The Jewish tradition has never set the life of the mind against action in the world; on the contrary, it has taught that study and the management of human affairs spring from the same demand for justice and rectitude [Shmuel Trigano, Philosophie de la Loi, 1991]. The two Attali brothers, each in his own way, embody this involvement in collective life — that of a lineage of exiles who, a generation after having left everything behind in Alger, find themselves in the service of the State and the economy of their adopted country.

Yet this success cannot be told as a hagiography. The responsibilities exercised by the two brothers exposed them to the criticisms, controversies, and setbacks inherent in any public life. Honesty in the telling demands that these shadows not be erased: they are part of the condition of those who accept acting in the world rather than contemplating it from a distance. And it is precisely in this acceptance of risk, contestation, and exposure that the full measure of their commitment is revealed.

Beyond individual trajectories, the Attali lineage bears witness to a singular relationship with Jewish Memory. Rooted in Algerian Judaism and marked by the experience of exile, it has made historical consciousness an essential part of its identity. The written work of Jacques Attali, entirely traversed by the question of the destiny of the Jewish people, is its most visible expression: it transforms a family memory into universal reflection.

This consciousness is grounded in the great ordeals of contemporary Judaism. The Jews of Algeria, even before the exile of 1962, had known the betrayal of Vichy and the abrogation of their citizenship; they carried within them, as did all of French Judaism, the Memory of the Shoah and the role of the State in persecution [Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz, 1983] [Denis Peschanski, La France des camps, 2002]. Yet that same generation had also known, in the Resistance, proof that dignity could be defended arms in hand, and that French Judaism had been able, in its darkest hours, to oppose courage to despair [Lucien Lazare, La Résistance juive en France, 1987].

It is in the light of this tragic History and its resurgences that the attachment of the Attali lineage to transmission becomes comprehensible. To think Judaism, to write its economic history, to compose a dictionary of love for it, is to refuse oblivion and to honor the duty of Memory — zakhor, "remember," which has commanded Jewish consciousness since the desert [Armand Abécassis, La pensée juive. Du désert au désir, 1987]. In this faithfulness to Memory, the lineage joins the long chain of the transmitters of Israel, those for whom the survival of the people depends on the spoken word transmitted no less than on the men who carry it [Léon Askénazi, La parole et l'écrit, 1999]. And in its manner of assuming the dual condition of heir to an engulfed world and citizen fully engaged in his own time, it illustrates that fertile tension of modern Jewish identity which Isaiah Berlin described — to belong without self-betrayal, to integrate without self-erasure [Isaiah Berlin, Trois essais sur la condition juive, 1973].

From the casbah of Algiers to the palaces of the Republic, in a single generation, the Attali lineage will have traced one of the most significant itineraries in contemporary Judaism. Born within an Algerian community poised between Séfarade tradition and the promise of integration, marked by the exile of 1956 that preceded the great uprooting of 1962, it reconstituted itself in France, giving rise to two men devoted to the service of the public sphere: one through thought and counsel, the other through the stewardship of a great national institution.

Of all the virtues this lineage expressed, none was perhaps more fully realized than the duty of Memory allied to the transmission of knowledge. By making Jewish History an object of thought, of narrative, and of teaching — from the year 1492 to the economic history of the people of Israel, to the dictionnaire amoureux du judaïsme — the Attali lineage converted the experience of exile into active fidelity. It demonstrated that one could integrate fully into a new nation without ever renouncing the Memory of one's own, and that the highest form of fidelity may consist in transmitting.

In this, the singular destiny of the Attali family joins the collective Memory of Israel. For from the desert to the capitals of Europe, the Jewish people has perpetuated itself not through the permanence of places — always threatened — but through the constancy of the transmitted word. The Attali lineage, exiled and then renewed, learned and committed, will have carried in its own way that ancient commandment which traverses the centuries and the continents: zakhor — remember, and transmit.