The Benblila Family

For the Benbilas, everything begins with the name, for it is almost the only archive we possess. Onomasticians of North African Judaism have established a typology of patronyms: biblical names, occupational names, geographical names, and this singular category of nicknames describing a physical or moral trait. Benblila belongs to this latter family. Toledano explicitly classifies it among names "indicative of a character trait," designating a man afflicted with a mania [Toledano, A History of Families, 1999].

What is to be understood by this "quirk"? Nothing disreputable. In the sociability of the Moroccan mellahs, these nicknames arose from daily observation, affectionate or mocking: the stubborn man, the dreamer, the man of immutable habits, the one who repeated endlessly the same gesture or the same prayer. The North African Jewish tradition, where people were willingly named after their particularity, transformed these epithets into house names. Laredo shows that the Arabic foundation of Moroccan Jewish patronyms is considerable, a sign that these families lived fully immersed in the vernacular language of their country, dialectal Arabic and sometimes Berber [Laredo, The Names of the Jews of Morocco, 1978].

Here surfaces a first value, discreet but real: humility. To bear a name that points to a defect, to assume it generation after generation without disguising it as an honorific title, is to accept holding oneself in one's proper place. Jewish tradition makes anava, humility, the virtue of Moses himself, "the humblest of men." That the Benbilas preserved, without denying it, a patronym born of neighborhood mockery, says something of this fidelity to oneself that Moroccan Judaism cultivated in the dignified poverty of the mellahs [Chouraqui, History of the Jews in North Africa, 1985].

If the name Benblila was borne only in Morocco, it is because the destiny of this lineage is bound up with that of the oldest Judaism in the Muslim West. The Jewish presence in Morocco predates Islam itself; according to historians, it goes back to Antiquity, strengthened by successive waves — Jews of the Roman exile, indigenous communities sometimes Judaized, then the megorashim, the expellees from Spain and Portugal who arrived after 1492 [Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, 1981]. Chouraqui emphasizes that this Judaism was one of the oldest and most rooted in the entire diaspora, present in Maghrebi lands long before the Arab conquest [Chouraqui, Histoire des Juifs en Afrique du Nord, 1985].

The Arabic character of the name Benblila, without any perceptible Hispano-Jewish stratum, points toward the hypothesis of a family of toshavim — that is, stemming from the old indigenous, Arabic-speaking foundation, rather than from the Iberian Jewish-Spanish exiles. This distinction durably structured Moroccan communities: the megorashim brought their customs, their takkanot (ordinances) and their prestige, while the toshavim perpetuated an ancient rite and a secular intimacy with the language and land of the country [Barnavi (dir.), Histoire universelle des Juifs, 1992].

Dispersed among the great imperial cities — Fès, Meknès, Marrakech — and the towns of the South and Atlas, Moroccan Jews lived under the status of dhimmi: protected and subordinate, bound to the jizya tax, but endowed with real communal autonomy under the authority of their rabbinic courts. It was within this framework — precarious yet structured — that a family with as humble a name as Benblila was able to transmit itself, from father to son, through the centuries [Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, 1981].

For lack of nominative records preserved for the Benblila, it is through the collective life of their community that we approach their daily existence. The mellah — this Jewish quarter whose first, in Fès, was established in the fifteenth century — was at once refuge and enclosure: a place of protection against violence, but also of relegation and confinement [Assaraf, A Certain History of the Jews of Morocco, 2005]. There one led an existence rhythmed by the synagogue, study, the trades of craftsmanship and small commerce.

In this universe, halakha — Jewish Law — was not an abstraction but the skeleton of the day. Moroccan Judaism produced a remarkable juridical and liturgical tradition, illustrated by masters whose rabbinic decisions (responsa) regulated the life of families. The great takkanot of the expellees from Castile, adopted in Fès from the sixteenth century onward, framed inheritance, marriage, dowry — protecting notably widows and orphans [Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, 1981]. A family like the Benblila lived under this horizon of ordered justice, where concern for the weakest was not optional charity but a legal obligation.

It is there that a second virtue is woven, that of tsedaka — a word which, in Hebrew, means at once justice and charity. In Moroccan communities, mutual aid was institutional: benevolent confraternities (hevrot), dowering of poor girls, care of the sick, burial of the destitute dead. No source allows us to name a Benblila benefactor in particular; but belonging to this communal fabric supposes participation in these shared duties, where each household, however humble, contributed according to its means [Goldenberg, The Saga of the Jews of North Africa, 2014]. The lineage thus participates, anonymously, in the collective memory of a people who made solidarity a law.

The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries upended this world. The establishment of the Alliance israélite universelle, which opened its first schools in Morocco from 1862 onwards and then expanded widely, offered thousands of Jewish children—and obscure families such as the Benblila might have been—access to French, to modern knowledge, to an intellectual emancipation without precedent [Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1994]. Laskier demonstrates how the Alliance profoundly transformed North African Jewish society, introducing it to modernity while giving rise to tensions with traditional culture [Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1994].

The French protectorate, established in 1912, reshuffled the cards. Moroccan Jews, unlike the Jews of Algeria who became French through the Crémieux decree of 1870, remained largely subjects of the sultan [Assaraf, Une certaine histoire des Juifs du Maroc, 2005]. This intermediate position—between tradition and modernity, between indigenous status and aspiration to emancipation—was that of an entire people, and thus, in its measure, that of the Benblila.

Then came the Second World War and the shadow of Vichy. The regime imposed anti-Jewish laws on Morocco; but collective memory has retained the attitude of Sultan Mohammed V, whose symbolic resistance to the implementation of exclusionary measures remained a point of shared pride [Assaraf, Une certaine histoire des Juifs du Maroc, 2005]. Here lies a value that Judaism places foremost: the relationship to the stranger and to one who welcomes you. The long Moroccan Judeo-Muslim cohabitation, marked by inequalities but also by loyalties, illustrates this capacity of the Jewish people to live as a loyal guest of a land that was not its sovereignty, without ever renouncing its Law [Chouraqui, Histoire des Juifs en Afrique du Nord, 1985].

The mid-twentieth century was, for Moroccan Judaism, a time of exodus. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Morocco's independence in 1956, uncertainty about the future, and the call of the ancestral land prompted the departure of nearly an entire community that had numbered, at its peak, several hundred thousand souls [Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1994]. In a few decades, this thousand-year-old Judaism emptied almost entirely, its faithful making their way to Israel, France, and Canada.

It was most probably in this great movement that the Benblila, like so many Moroccan families, left their land. A name so rare — carried "only in Morocco" according to Toledano [Toledano, Une histoire de familles, 1999] — found itself thus projected across five continents, merged into the new Sephardic diasporas of Jerusalem, Marseille, Paris, and Montreal. The rarity of the patronym, once a sign of modest local roots, became the mark of a precise and cherished origin: to say "Benblila," henceforth, is to say "Morocco."

In this uprooting manifests a virtue that Jewish tradition calls fidelity to memory — zakhor, "remember." Sephardic families carried into exile their melodies, their recipes, their names of local saints, their pilgrimages (hiloulot) [Goldberg, Penser l'histoire juive, 2000]. The transmission of a name as improbable as Benblila, which nothing obliged one to preserve, bears witness to this stubborn attachment to continuity, this refusal of forgetting that is perhaps the very heart of Jewish identity.

The honesty of this book demands that we name its silences. To our knowledge, the Benblila have left no chief rabbi cited in collections of responsa, no merchant whose house appears in consular correspondence, no author listed in manuscript catalogues. Onomastic repertoires mention them briefly; the great histories of Moroccan Judaism do not name them individually [Toledano, Une histoire de familles, 1999] [Laredo, Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, 1978].

This silence is not a void: it is the condition of the vast majority of Jewish families, whose history is written only in the margins of collective history. It would be dishonest to fill this blank with invented figures. It is more just — and more faithful to historical truth — to acknowledge that the Benblila belong to that people of the humble who bore the Law, filled the synagogues, paid the tax, married their children according to halakha and buried their dead with dignity, without ever entering the annals.

Contemporary Sephardic genealogical research, carried forward by institutions and enthusiasts, is precisely engaged in rendering visible these erased lineages, drawing from the civil registries of the protectorate, from rabbinic archives and community lists [Goldenberg, La Saga des Juifs d'Afrique du Nord, 2014]. It is work in progress, and this chapter is also an invitation: let the descendants of the Benblila contribute their memories, their marriage certificates, their photographs to the record. For in Judaism, every name saved from oblivion is a part of the world repaired.

At the end of this inquiry, the Benblila lineage remains what it was in the first chapter: a rare name, of Arabic origin, born from a nickname, borne only in Morocco, and scattered by the great winds of the twentieth century. We could attribute to it neither particular glory nor infamy; we refused invention. This refusal is, in itself, a tribute.

For of all the values that Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries, the one that this lineage will have expressed best is perhaps faithful humility — this anava that accepts a modest name, almost mocking, and transmits it intact; this obscure fidelity to the Law, to the community, to Moroccan land and then to the memory of that land. The Benblila embody the people of the nameless in history, those who left neither treatise nor fortune, but who kept Judaism alive at the level of daily life, in shared tsedaka, in the mutual aid of the mellah and in the memory carried into exile. In this, their singular history joins the collective memory of Israel: that of a people who survived less through its princes than through its humble, less through its palaces than through the perseverance of obscure families faithful to their name and their God. May this Great Book be, for them, the recognition that the annals refused them.