The Enbito Family

The first established fact lies in the structure of the name itself. The honorific particle en — and its feminine form na — is a well-known feature of medieval Catalan, used before the given names of people of quality in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon, in Barcelona as in Majorca and Valencia. Its presence in a Jewish surname signals, without any possible ambiguity, an origin in the Catalan linguistic area and not the Castilian one. This is a precious clue: it ties the Enbito lineage, not to the Castilian Sefarad of Toledo or Seville, but to Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, centers of a distinct Sephardic Jewry, oriented toward the western Mediterranean [Laredo, 1978].

The second element, Bito, opens onto an even older history. The translation of the Hebrew given name Hayyim by the Latin Vita is a phenomenon attested from Late Antiquity onward, at the time when Jewish communities of the Roman Empire adopted double names, Hebrew and Latin, bearing the same meaning. Hayyim, "Life," becomes Vita; Shalom, "Peace," becomes Pax; Tsemah, "Sprout," becomes Vivo or Vives. This practice of onomastic translation, where a Jew bore simultaneously the name of the synagogue and that of the city, is a marker of the long coexistence between Judaism and the Latin world [Laredo, 1978]. It is found again, subsequently, throughout the Sephardic world, where the names Vidal, Vives, Vita and their variants all derive from this same root, Hayyim [Toledano, 2003].

This chapter carries, implicitly, a first Jewish value: that of knowledge and faithfulness to language. To translate Hayyim into Vita without losing its meaning is to refuse oblivion; it is to maintain, under the garb of another language, the continuity of a blessing. The Enbito lineage is, by its very name, a guardian of this linguistic memory, custodian of a learned equivalence that modern onomasticians have been able to decipher [Laredo, 1978] [Sebag, 2002].

Situating the origins of Enbito in the Catalan region is to inscribe it within one of the most brilliant Jewish cultures of the Middle Ages. Catalonia, Aragon, neighboring Provence and the Balearic Islands formed a space of thought where halakha, philosophy and mysticism met. It was from this world that there sprang forth, in the eleventh century, the work of the poet and philosopher Salomon ibn Gabirol, whose great Neoplatonic treatise bears precisely the title of Mekor Hayyim — "The Source of Life" — translated into Latin under the name of Fons Vitae [Ibn Gabirol, 1070].

The coincidence is not inconsequential, even if it remains in the realm of resonance rather than lineage. A name that means "Mr. Life" and a Sephardic thought that makes the "Source of Life" the name of the Absolute respond to one another across the centuries. There is an intersection between the memory of a family and the intellectual memory of Israel: the same image, the same root Hayyim, runs from the philosopher of Málaga and Saragossa to the surname of an obscure lineage. We claim no blood tie; we note a community of culture, that of Sephardic Iberia, where Life was at once a name, a prayer and a metaphysical concept [Ibn Gabirol, 1070] [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000].

From this culture, the Enbito lineage inherits an essential virtue: the contribution to Jewish thought, the esteem for philosophical and Talmudic knowledge. The Catalan and Aragonese communities numbered among the most learned of the Diaspora, and a name borne in this milieu was necessarily inscribed in a fabric of synagogues, schools and rabbinical courts where the Law was transmitted with rigor [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000].

What History establishes beyond dispute is the rupture. The persecutions of 1391, which devastated the aljamas of Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Majorca, then the edict of 1492 that banished Jews from the Spanish kingdoms, ended centuries of presence in the Catalan region. The Jews of the Balearic Islands and the Mediterranean coast, including those who bore the name Enbito, were forced into conversion or exile. The history of Judeo-Spanish-speaking Jews of the Mediterranean basin is read entirely under the sign of this dispersion [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000].

The routes of Catalan and Balearic exile naturally led toward the Maghreb, a few days' sail away. Thus many names from the Crown of Aragon are found in the Jewish onomastics of North Africa, carried by the megorashim, the "exiles," who settled in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The presence of the name Enbito in the Judeo-Moroccan corpus noted by Laredo testifies to this trajectory: a name born in the Catalan orbit, washed ashore on the southern shore of the Mediterranean [Laredo, 1978] [Toledano, 1999].

Exile here is more than a demographic fact: it is the ordeal of a faithfulness. To choose departure rather than baptism, the uncertainty of the crossing rather than the denial of faith, is to embody the most tenacious virtue of Israel's Memory — the kiddoush ha-Shem, the sanctification of the Name, which prefers the loss of all to the denial of faith. That the name Enbito survived this catastrophe, and that it continued to signify "Life," speaks volumes about the force of this refusal to disappear [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000].

In Morocco, the Sephardic expellees joined native Jewish communities, the toshavim, whose presence dated back to antiquity. The encounter was not always easy: differences in rite, language, and custom long opposed megorashim and toshavim, before a fusion gradually took place over generations. Moroccan Jews lived grouped together in the mellah, this reserved quarter that was at once a refuge and an enclosure, a place of relative protection and extreme vulnerability in the face of the vagaries of power and food shortages [Deshen, 1991].

It is within this framework that we must imagine the bearers of the name Enbito in the classical centuries: artisans, merchants, men of the Law, embedded in the dense fabric of a society where the community — the kehilla — itself ensured the school, the tribunal, assistance to the poor, and the redemption of captives. Life in the mellah, despite its precariousness, rested on a cardinal principle of Jewish tradition: kol Israël arevim ze la-ze, "all Israel is united." The institutions of charity, organized tsedaka, care for widows, orphans, and travelers, formed the moral foundation of a community that had only itself to protect [Deshen, 1991] [Lévy, 2001].

From this long period, during which the lineage remains largely anonymous, we therefore retain collective rather than individual virtue: involvement in community life, charity as an institution, fidelity to halakha as the framework of daily life. A family named "Life" at the heart of a world where to survive was a daily miracle: the name stated the program [Deshen, 1991].

The nineteenth century opened for the Jews of Morocco a period of profound transformations. From 1860 onwards, the intervention of European powers, the action of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the opening of its schools profoundly disrupted the condition of Jews: access to modern instruction, progressive emancipation, but also new tensions in a country subject to colonial pressure [Assaraf, 2005] [Kenbib, 1994]. The Jews of Morocco, whose Sephardic families of origin such as that suggested by the name Enbito, found themselves at the heart of these mutations, torn between fidelity to tradition and attraction to modernity.

The gravest trial came in the twentieth century. Under the Vichy regime, anti-Jewish laws threatened the Moroccan community; it was in this context that the sultan Mohammed V demonstrated a protective attitude towards his Jewish subjects, refusing to hand them over and asserting their belonging to the nation. This episode, documented by historiography, illustrates a singular intersection between Muslim power and the protection of the Jewish minority [Assaraf, 1997] [Kenbib, 1994]. The Jewish families of Morocco, of which the Enbito may have been part, crossed these years as a community both threatened and defended.

The virtue that runs through this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, the thirst for knowledge, this hunger for instruction which, from the Torah to the modern school, has never ceased to be a constant of Jewish life; on the other hand, the relationship to the stranger and to the host, where the lineage was at times protected, at times exposed, but always engaged in the difficult dialogue with the nations among which it lived [Assaraf, 2005] [Kenbib, 1994].

From the 1950s and 1960s onwards, the great dispersal of Moroccan Jews — to Israel, France, Canada and Latin America — redistributed Sephardic lineages across the world once again. The name Enbito, like so many other Judeo-Moroccan surnames, followed these new routes, passing from household to household, sometimes spelled differently, but always carrying its original meaning [Toledano, 2003] [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000].

Here, family memory and scholarly archive converge in a remarkable way. What descendants transmit orally — the family's « Spanish » or « Northern » origin, the recollection of an ancestor from the Mediterranean — finds its confirmation in onomastic decryption: the Catalan particle en indeed attests to an origin in the Crown of Aragon, corroborating tradition through philology [Laredo, 1978]. It is rare that family memory finds thus, in a scholarly catalogue, proof of its own veracity.

The virtue of this last movement is one of humility and perseverance. An obscure lineage, without celebrated chief rabbi or resounding fortune — at least what the archive has preserved for us — has nevertheless accomplished the essential: to transmit a name, and with it a blessing. To bear the name Enbito through expulsion, the mellah, the trials of the century and dispersal, is to have kept the promise contained in its Hebrew syllable: Hayyim, to continue living [Laredo, 1978] [Toledano, 1999].

At the conclusion of this inquiry, we must reiterate what the name Enbito teaches. Born from the crossing of Catalan courtesy and a Hebrew root, it means "Mister Life" — the Sephardic and Latin translation of the name Hayyim [Laredo, 1978]. From the Sepharad of crowns, where the Mekor Hayyim of ibn Gabirol already resounded [Ibn Gabirol, 1070], to the mellahs of Morocco [Deshen, 1991] and to contemporary diasporas [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000], the lineage followed the Sephardic destiny in all its hardship and all its dignity.

If one were to name, among all, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed, it would be that very one which its name bears: attachment to Life as a sacred value, the le'hayyim made patronym. Where Jewish history was so often a history of mourning and dispersion, a family crossed the centuries by calling itself "Life," refusing erasure through its sole persistence in being. This silent obstinacy — to live, to transmit, to bless — joins the cardinal virtue that the tradition of Israel places at the summit: the choice of life, ou-vaharta ba-hayyim, "and you shall choose life." In this, the modest lineage Enbito partakes of the great collective Memory of a people who, generation after generation, has made survival a fidelity and life a commandment.