The Eznagui Family

The most solid starting point, because it is documentary, is the Laredo entry itself. In Les noms des Juifs du Maroc, published by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid, the author classifies Eznagui among ethnic patronyms — that is, those derived from the name of a people or tribe — and links it to the Znaga of the Tafilalet, drawing in turn on the ethnographer Ouedenfeldt [Laredo, 1978]. This scholarly lineage — Laredo citing an earlier source — is in itself valuable: it guards us against the fanciful etymologies that proliferate around family names.

The Znaga are one of the branches of the great Saharan Berber confederations that medieval Arabic sources call Sanhaja. The word "Znaga" is simply a regional form of "Sanhaja," and the same root recurs in the name of the Sénégal river and in that of the "zenaga" language still spoken in Mauritania. That Jewish families bore this name points to a fundamental anthropological reality: in the Maghreb, Jewishness and Berber identity are not mutually exclusive. According to Joseph Toledano, the very existence of Jewish patronyms drawn from Berber tribal names attests to the antiquity and depth of Jewish settlement within the Amazigh world, long before the waves of Iberian arrivals of 1492 [Toledano, 2003].

At the level of values, this opening chapter already tells us something essential about the Jewish way of inhabiting the world: the relationship with the stranger and the art of cohabitation. To bear the name of a Berber tribe is to have forged, across generations, a bond of neighborliness, commerce, and protection with the Amazigh populations of the South. This capacity to inscribe oneself within a local fabric without dissolving into it — to speak the language of the other while keeping one's Law — belongs to the distinctive genius of diasporic Judaism: that virtue which the tradition of Israel has exercised since the Babylonian exile, remaining oneself in the midst of the nations. As the studies on Tunisian onomastics by Paul Sebag remind us, a patronym is never a mere label: it is a miniature archive of the encounters that made a family [Sebag, 2002].

The cradle assigned to the name, the Tafilalet, is no ordinary periphery: it is one of the oldest and most prestigious regions of Moroccan Judaism. Around ancient Sijilmassa, the caravan capital founded in the 8th century and long a golden gateway for salt and gold between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, there developed a Jewish presence whose vitality — commercial and intellectual — is attested by medieval sources, most notably the letters of the Cairo Guenizah. The Jewish merchants of Sijilmassa maintained correspondences with Fès, Kairouan, Egypt, and Spain, participating in the great network of Saharan gold trade.

It is within this context that a Berber Judaized family, or Judeo-Berber family, could have been designated — by their neighbors and by themselves — as "the Znaga." Talmudic learning and piety were no less alive in these distant oases than elsewhere: the Tafilalet gave Moroccan Judaism renowned rabbinical dynasties and a tradition of tsaddiqim — those venerated saints whose tombs, scattered across the South, were the objects of pilgrimage. Here is expressed the piety and the care devoted to the dead and to memory, a cardinal value of Judaism: in a world of isolated oases, the Jewish community of the Tafilalet upheld the study of the Law, its rabbinical courts, and its teaching, against the remoteness and harshness of the desert.

The Saharan rootedness also reflects a particular economic agency. The Jews of the Tafilalet were metalworkers, goldsmiths, tanners, and above all intermediaries in the caravan trade — activities often reserved for or entrusted to minorities, yet which made them an indispensable link in the regional economy. This expertise, transmitted from father to son, belongs to a quiet virtue: labor as dignity and as service rendered to the community, the melakha that sustains without dishonoring. According to historians of Moroccan Judaism, this economic symbiosis between Jews and Berbers constituted, over the course of centuries, a model of coexistence whose solidity stood in contrast to the juridical fragility of the dhimmi status [Kenbib, 1994].

Living Jewish in pre-colonial Morocco meant living under the regime of the dhimma, that pact of protection which guaranteed life and worship in exchange for the payment of a tribute and the acceptance of a legal inferiority. Mohammed Kenbib demonstrated the complexity of this status, oscillating between real protection and vulnerability to political upheavals and periods of scarcity or unrest [Kenbib, 1994]. A family such as the Eznagui, rooted in a region that was borderland and sometimes resistant to central power, likely experienced this alternation of security and precariousness that characterizes the history of the communities of the South.

It is through this ordeal that one of the deepest virtues of the Jewish lineage of the Tafilalet reveals itself: fidelity to the Law and humility in adversity. The observance of halakha, of circumcision, of Shabbat and of kashrut under often harsh material conditions does not belong to the realm of spectacular heroism but of an obscure, daily constancy. The Jewish tradition names this virtue hasidut — the piety that perseveres. The narrative transmitted by Filali families — that of ancestor peddlers traveling through the ksour, hosted by Amazigh tribes and protected by pacts of alliance — is partly corroborated by what the archive documents of Judeo-Berber relations; it is for this reason that this chapter falls at the intersection of Memory and History.

Involvement in collective life found here its communal form: tsedaka, organized charity, ensured the survival of widows, orphans, and travelers. In the small Saharan communities, where everyone knew everyone, mutual aid was not a moral option but a condition of survival. This solidarity, which Judaism establishes as an obligation — kol Israël arevim ze la-ze, "all Israel is guarantor for one another" — was the cement that allowed families scattered across the oases to remain a community.

Morocco's entry into the colonial orbit, sealed by the 1912 protectorate, profoundly transformed the condition of Jewish life. Robert Assaraf traced this long mutation, from the country's gradual opening to European influences to the great recompositions of the 20th century [Assaraf, 2005]. For the families of the Tafilalet, this period was one of internal exodus: the pull of major cities — Fès, Meknès, Casablanca — and the rise of schooling, notably that of the Alliance israélite universelle, gradually drew younger generations away from the world of the oases.

This migration embodies an eminent Jewish value: the thirst for knowledge. Access to modern education, without renouncing traditional Talmudic learning, allowed the children of peddlers and artisans to become teachers, literate merchants, employees, and later, professionals in major metropolises. Judaism, which makes study a commandment — talmud torah ke-neged kulam, "study is equivalent to all the commandments" — found in this scholastic eagerness an unexpected continuity: the ancient veneration of the Law extended into the conquest of secular knowledge.

This era also had its shadows. The Vichy period, in particular, put to the test the protection owed to Moroccan Jews. Robert Assaraf documented the manner in which Sultan Mohammed V refused to apply to Moroccan Jews the most infamous exclusionary measures sought by the Vichy regime, preserving their status as full subjects [Assaraf, 1997]. That the sovereign manifested this solidarity partakes of a virtue that Jewish tradition places at the summit: justice and the protection of the stranger and the weak. For the Jewish families of the South, including those who, like the Eznagui, carried their Berber identity in their very name, this gesture confirmed an ancient pact of coexistence.

The mid-twentieth century was, for Moroccan Judaism, a time of uprooting. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Morocco's independence in 1956, and the successive political crises that followed precipitated the departure of nearly an entire community rooted in the land for several millennia. Robert Assaraf has analyzed this demographic hemorrhage which, within a single generation, emptied the mellahs and oases of their Jewish inhabitants [Assaraf, 2005]. The families of the Tafilalet were among the first affected, their peripheral situation rendering their future all the more precarious.

The dispersal of the Eznagui followed the major axes of this diaspora: Israel, where many settled, and France, where North African emigration reconstituted vibrant communities. This uprooting, though painful, carried within it a singular virtue: the capacity for renewal — that faculty possessed by the Jewish people, since the biblical exiles, to rebuild elsewhere a complete communal life — synagogue, school, mutual aid. The memory of the Tafilalet was not abandoned: it was transmitted through particular liturgies, melodies, recipes, the names of venerated saints, and even through the patronym itself, which became the bearer of a lost homeland.

One must here measure the collective significance of this singular experience. In leaving southern Morocco for Israel or France, the Eznagui lineage repeated, at its own scale, the founding gesture of the people of Israel: to depart without renouncing, to carry the Law as a portable homeland. This fidelity to transmission — keeping alive, in new lands, the memory of one's ancestors — is perhaps the highest of diasporic virtues, the one which, from Babylon to Sepharad and from Sepharad to the Sahara, has allowed a people to survive all its dispersions.

What remains, at the end of this journey, is the name itself: Eznagui, carried today in Israel, in France and elsewhere by the descendants of a family whose precise genealogy and individual figures remain unknown, for lack of continuous archives. This documentary silence is not a failure: it is the ordinary condition of most Jewish families of southern Morocco, whose history was written orally, in the memory of the living rather than in registers.

What the name preserves is a rare and fertile double belonging: that of being Jewish and Berber, of having kept the Law of Moses at the heart of the Saharan Amazigh world. This composite identity, far from being a contradiction, illustrates the virtue that Judaism names anavah, humility — not self-effacement, but the rightful place: accepting to be marked by the land that welcomed you, to the point of bearing its name, without ceasing to belong to Israel. Tradition transmits, within these families, the idea that the name is a sacred deposit, a fragment of history that must be passed on intact to the next generation. It is in this that this chapter belongs to transmitted Memory more than to the archive.

At the close of this Great Book, the Eznagui lineage reveals itself less through a succession of dates and figures — which the archive does not provide — than through the coherence of a destiny inscribed within a name. From the Berber tribe of the Znaga of the Tafilalet, whose name Laredo established as the source of the patronym [Laredo, 1978], to the communities of Israel and France that emerged from the great departure of the twentieth century [Assaraf, 2005], this family will have crossed the worlds of Saharan, colonial, and diasporic Judaism.

Among all the virtues that its history allows us to glimpse, one seems to me the most clearly expressed: the art of coexistence and of a just relationship with the stranger. To bear, as one's very name, that of a Berber tribe is to bear witness to a rootedness in otherness — a capacity to live among other peoples without losing oneself, to speak their languages and share their roads while keeping the Law of Israel intact. This virtue, the Eznagui lineage will have embodied through its very Berber identity. It thus joins the longest experience of the Jewish people: that of a people who, from Babylon to the Sahara, made of exile not a dissolution but a faithfulness, and of neighborliness with the nations a school of humility. In this sense, the modest name of a family from the Tafilalet carries, in its own way, the entire collective Memory of Israel.