The Eturqui Family

The first certainty, the only one that the archive fully guarantees, is that of meaning. Laredo classifies Eturqui among surnames of geographical origin and translates it unambiguously: "The Turk," designating someone from Turkey [Laredo, The Names of the Jews of Morocco, 1978]. This reading is coherent with the morphology of Moroccan dialectal Arabic, where the ethnonym turkî is prefixed with the definite article, pronounced e- or et- depending on the region.

A name of this type emerges when an individual distinguishes himself within his community by a foreign origin. One does not call oneself "the Turk" in Istanbul: one becomes so in Tétouan, Tangier, or Fès, in the eyes of neighbors for whom this Ottoman origin is remarkable. The surname is therefore, by nature, the fruit of a collective gaze cast upon a newcomer. Paul Sebag, studying the names of the Jews of Tunisia, emphasizes that gentilics designating a distant origin are almost always fixed in the generation following settlement, when the memory of migration remains vivid but integration is already underway [Sebag, The Names of the Jews of Tunisia, 2002].

In this first fact — a man identified by his origin and welcomed under this very name — there is already readable a cardinal value of Judaism: the relationship to the stranger. The Torah commands, thirty-six times according to the Talmudic count, to love the ger, the stranger, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." That a Moroccan community integrated an Ottoman to the point of making his alterity a transmissible family name, rather than a mark of exclusion, says something about the Sephardi capacity to make the exile one of their own. The name Eturqui, far from being a stigma, became an inheritance.

Understanding the ancestor Eturqui means understanding the two worlds he connected. After the expulsion of 1492, the Ottoman Empire became the great refuge of Iberian Jews. Maurice Kriegel analyzed the mechanics of this expulsion decision and the immense dispersion it caused toward the eastern Mediterranean [Kriegel, La prise d'une décision, 1978]. Salonika, Istanbul, Izmir became Sephardic centers of exceptional vitality, where the Castilian of the exiles — Judeo-Spanish — was maintained for centuries. Abraham Galante devoted to this flourishing his Histoire des Juifs de Turquie, showing the extent of Sephardic contribution to the Empire, in commerce, medicine, printing and rabbinical scholarship [Galante, Histoire des Juifs de Turquie, 1985].

Northern Morocco, for its part, had received its own wave of Iberian exiles: the megorashim who made Tétouan, Tangier, Fès and Salé into Sephardic cities speaking haketía, this Judeo-Spanish of the Strait. Between these two poles — the Ottoman and the Moroccan — circulated merchants, rabbis, emissaries from the Holy Land (shadarim) and entire families. A man from Istanbul or Salonika who came to settle in Tangier was therefore not an exile lost in foreign lands: he found a kindred language, a related liturgy, the same heritage of Sepharad. The migration of the ancestor Eturqui, very likely linked to these commercial and communal networks connecting Ottoman Orient to Moroccan ports, fits within this trans-Mediterranean Sephardic continuity.

Here a second value is expressed: the solidarity of the diaspora, the feeling that the Jew of Salonika and the Jew of Tétouan belong to the same dispersed body. That one could settle with the other and found an illustrious lineage there concretely expresses this arevout, this mutual responsibility which, according to the Talmudic adage, binds all of Israel. The name Eturqui thus becomes the witness of a bridge thrown between two shores of the same people.

If precise acts are lacking for the Eturqui family itself, the documented context of Jews in northern Morocco makes it possible to sketch, with caution, the probable activity of a lineage that came from the Ottoman East. The port cities of the Strait — Tangier especially — lived off maritime commerce and intermediation between Europe, Morocco, and the Levant. Mohammed Kenbib has shown how much Jews played a role as interface there, as brokers, dragomans, and merchants, precisely because they mastered several languages and had correspondents in the major Mediterranean trading posts [Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 1994].

A man who came from Turkey possessed in his own right a rare capital: knowledge of Turkish and the Ottoman world, familiarity with Izmir or Istanbul, and often kinship and trust ties in those ports. Such assets made him a natural intermediary of the great Levantine trade. Robert Assaraf has described, for the modern period, how Moroccan Jewish families wove transnational economic networks that were also networks of solidarity and mutual aid [Assaraf, Une certaine histoire des Juifs du Maroc, 2005].

This is where tradition and History answer one another. Sephardic Memory long valorized the figure of the honest merchant, whose word was bond — a direct echo of the Talmudic requirement concerning just weights and honest commerce (Baba Batra). Economic action, in Jewish thought, is not an end in itself: it is legitimate when it nourishes the community, finances its institutions, and practices rectitude in exchange. Without overloading with praise a lineage whose account books have not come down to us, one can reasonably inscribe the Eturqui in this economy of passage where trust was the first of capitals — and where mercantile honesty was, also, a matter of religious duty.

The great virtue of the Sephardic communities of Morocco, the one that runs through their history, was fidelity to halakha and visceral attachment to communal structure. Sarah Leibovici, in her chronicle of Tétouan, describes a society profoundly organized around the synagogue, the rabbinical court (bet din), charitable confraternities and study [Leibovici, Chronicle of the Jews of Tétouan, 1984]. Every family integrated into this fabric, including those who came from elsewhere, found itself immediately engaged in this network of obligations and mutual aid.

It must be said with honesty: we have neither a responsum nor a register attesting by name to a decision by a rabbi Eturqui, nor a specific act of charity carried out by the family. This reserve is necessary, and the silence of the archive is part of the narrative. But the tradition transmitted by the communities of the Strait teaches that no lasting family maintained itself there outside of tsedaka — that charity which, in Hebrew, is inseparable from justice — nor outside the hevrot, those confraternities ensuring aid to the sick, the poor, the bereaved. Norman Stillman reminds us that these mutual aid institutions formed the very backbone of Jewish life in Islamic lands [Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, 1979].

A family bearing a name of Ottoman origin brought with it its own heritage: the rites, melodies (maqamat) and usages of the great Sephardic centers of the East. The encounter between the Ottoman liturgical tradition and that of northern Morocco could enrich local patrimony — for piety, in Judaism, is not fixed: it is transmitted and enriched from one community to another. In this way, the Eturqui, if they were faithful to the Law like their neighbors, participated in this contribution to collective life which is one of the most concrete forms of Sephardic piety.

No Jewish lineage in the Mediterranean basin crossed the twentieth century without bearing its wounds. In Morocco, the Vichy period was a trial. Robert Assaraf has established how, between 1940 and 1942, the antisemitic legislation of the Vichy regime was promulgated in the protectorate, and how Sultan Mohammed V demonstrated toward his Jewish subjects an attitude that protected them, symbolically and sometimes concretely, from the worst [Assaraf, Mohammed V et les Juifs du Maroc à l'époque de Vichy, 1997]. Moroccan Jewish families, whatever their name, suffered exceptional status and discriminatory censuses.

For the branches of the Sephardic diaspora established in or passing through France, the ordeal was even more terrible. Serge Klarsfeld's Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France preserves the nominal trace of victims of the Shoah deported from French soil [Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France, 1978]. This type of source demands rigor: one affirms the deportation of an individual bearing a given name only if his name actually appears in the Mémorial, and we make no claim here to any identification that the archival record would not confirm. The duty of memory commands this precision.

What remains certain is the context: the Eturqui lineage, like the whole Moroccan and Mediterranean Jewish world, was caught in the upheaval of racial laws and war. In the face of this, the tradition of Israel has always opposed a paradoxical virtue — survival as fidelity. To continue transmitting the name, the language, prayer, when History strives to erase, is in itself an act of spiritual resistance. That the name Eturqui crossed this century testifies to this obstinacy to endure.

From the 1950s and 1960s onwards, the Moroccan Jewish world experienced its great departure. Robert Assaraf traced this massive exodus to Israel, France, Canada and Spain, which emptied millennia-old communities in a single generation [Assaraf, A Certain History of the Jews of Morocco, 2005]. Families from the north — Tangier, Tétouan — settled notably in France and Israel, carrying with them the haketía, recipes, melodies and surnames.

A name like Eturqui, already bearing a double origin — Ottoman and Moroccan — then acquired a third, then a fourth stratum of belonging: Israeli, French. The very spelling could vary according to civil registers, becoming Latinized or Hebraized. Joseph Toledano emphasizes that these orthographic mutations, far from dissolving identity, are the normal signature of a living name that accompanies the migrations of its bearers [Toledano, The Surnames of the Jews of North Africa, 2003].

In this dispersion is expressed a final value, perhaps the most profound: transmission. Against erasure, a Sephardic family transmits a name that is in itself an abridged history. To pronounce "Eturqui" today, in Ashdod, Paris or Montreal, is to invoke unknowingly an ancestor who came from the Ottoman East, welcomed in a Moroccan port, integrated into a community that made of his origin a patrimony. This continuity of memory, borne by the name, is exactly what Jewish tradition calls zakhor — "remember".

The Eturqui lineage has not left, to our knowledge, any great decision-maker whose a responsum would carry authority, nor any commercial fortune attested by registers, nor any name carved that the archive would allow us to celebrate without reservation. Its history is first and foremost that of a name — "The Turk" — and that name, by itself, says what matters most [Laredo, The Names of the Jews of Morocco, 1978].

For among all the values of the tradition of Israel, the one that this lineage will have best expressed is the relationship to the stranger — and its inseparable reverse side, the welcome of the migrant within Israel. The patronym Eturqui is the silent monument of a double hospitality: that of the Ottoman Empire which took in the exiles of Sepharad, and that of the Moroccan communities which, in turn, integrated a son of that East to the point of making his origin a family heritage. By embodying this figure of the bridge-builder — the man who connects two shores of the same dispersed people —, the Eturqui family participates in a virtue that the collective Memory of Israel has carried since Egypt: to make of the stranger not an outsider, but a brother, because one was oneself a stranger.

This Great Book endeavored to distinguish with honesty what the archive establishes, what context renders probable, and what tradition transmits. Where facts are lacking, it remained silent; where they speak, it listened. And what the name Eturqui bequeaths to us, more than any genealogy, is the living proof that a dispersed people knows how to make of each of its displacements a Memory, and of each Memory a name to transmit.