The Khabbaz Family

Among the Jews of the Arab world, the formation of family names long obeyed a concrete logic: place of origin (Halabi, the Aleppine; Shami, the Damascene), religious function (Cohen, Levi), a physical characteristic, or — very frequently — the trade exercised by an ancestor. The surname Khabbaz unambiguously belongs to this latter family: it fixes in the name the profession of baker, just as other Levantine lineages bear names drawn from work in leather, cloth, or goldsmithing. The name thus reads as a minuscule archival item: it preserves the trace of an ancestor whose oven fed a street, an alley, a quarter of Ottoman Damascus or Mount Lebanon Beirut.

This naming by trade is not anecdotal for the historian of language. Works devoted to the Hebrew component and the stratification of Judeo-Arabic show how much the Jewish vernaculars of the Arab world integrated, alongside liturgical and scholarly Hebrew, a dense vernacular Arabic lexicon, where names of trades occupied a central place [Moshe Bar-Asher, La composante hébraïque du judéo-arabe, 1992; ref:1]. The baker, the craftsman of bread, belonged to this fabric of exchanges where the Jew and his Muslim or Christian neighbor shared the same everyday vocabulary. In this sense, a name like Khabbaz testifies to a deep insertion into the Arab city: it is not the name of an exile in passing, but that of a rooted worker, known to all by his work.

Yet we must guard against too smooth a reconstruction. We do not have — to this day — a notarial deed or community register that would date the appearance of the surname in such a synagogue or such a precise quarter. The filiation between the trade of baker and the lineage Khabbaz pertains, literally, to transmitted memory and linguistic plausibility, not to documentary proof. We shall say therefore, with becoming caution: according to the onomastic tradition of the Jews of the Levant, the family would draw its name from an ancestor baker, without the identity of this first "Khabbaz" having been able to be recovered.

To understand the matrix from which the lineage proceeds, one must turn to Damascus, one of the oldest uninterrupted Jewish communities in the world. Established in Antiquity, mentioned in biblical and talmudic texts, the Damascene Jewry traversed the Byzantine, Umayyad, Mamluk and then Ottoman eras while preserving its vitality. It experienced a marked renewal after 1492, when the expulsion from Spain cast waves of Sephardim onto the roads of the eastern Mediterranean, who came to mingle with the indigenous Jews, the Arabicized Musta'ribûn. This encounter between Iberian exiles and Oriental Jews shaped the scholarly and religious character of many communities in the Levant; the history of maritime empires and Sephardic diasporas has shown how profoundly these networks of exile were also networks of commerce and culture [Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora, 2002; ref:7].

In the Jewish quarter of Damascus — the Harat al-Yahud — there lived in the nineteenth century a dense population of craftsmen, merchants, money-changers and men of letters, organized around its synagogues and its rabbinical authority. It was in such a milieu that an artisan surname like Khabbaz naturally found its place: between the stalls of the souk and the interior courtyards of houses, the community lived by trades passed down from father to son, of which bakery was one. The making of bread indeed bore a properly religious dimension: the laws of purity, the setting aside of the hallah, the requirement of specific breads for Shabbat and the festivals made the Jewish baker a link in collective observance as much as a supplier. To nourish the community was also to serve it in its faithfulness to the Law.

Yet a shadow hovers over this history: that of the Damascus affair of 1840, this accusation of ritual murder that struck the Jewish notables of the city and upended the community, revealing its fragility within a society where coexistence could at any moment collapse. Although no source directly connects the Khabbaz family to this episode, it forms part of the collective horizon with which it is in solidarity: the Memory of Israel in Damascus is also that of a vulnerability endured with dignity.

The notice that grounds this book associates the lineage with two cities: Damascus and Beirut. This dual belonging is nothing exceptional; it reflects a well-attested historical movement. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even more so under the French Mandate, many Jewish families from inland Syria — from Damascus as from Aleppo — made their way to Beirut, a port open to the Mediterranean, a city in full commercial and cosmopolitan expansion. The Jewish community of Beirut concentrated there in the Wadi Abu Jamil neighborhood, long called the "Jewish Quarter," with its great synagogue Maghen Abraham, its schools, its charitable institutions.

The passage from Damascus to Beirut fits into a logic where commerce, and singularly food commerce, played a driving role — precisely the domain that the notice associates with the Khabbaz lineage. From an ancestor baker to descendants engaged in the trade of foodstuffs, then in hospitality, a trajectory emerges characteristic of Levantine Jewish families: the mastery of a nourishing know-how is converted, over generations, into commercial activity of greater scope. This economic mobility, the history of Mediterranean Jewish communities has documented it as a constant spring of their adaptation, from the artisanal shop to the modern enterprise [Claire Rubinstein-Cohen, Portrait of the Jewish Community of Sousse, 2011; ref:6].

The Beiruti of the 1940s and 1950s was, paradoxically, a refuge: the Jewish community of Lebanon experienced growth against the current, welcoming Jews leaving Syria and Iraq after 1948. There is found a virtue that the Jewish tradition places very high: the welcome of the exile, hakhnasat orḥim extended to the scale of a city, where the already established made room for newcomers. If one cannot prove that such a Khabbaz branch participated nominally in this hospitality, the position of the family — rooted in Beirut, active in food commerce and hospitality, two sectors which, literally, nourish and lodge — situates it at the heart of this economy of welcome.

Here, the tradition of the name and the documented economic trajectory respond to each other with remarkable coherence. The name speaks of bread; the history of the lineage speaks of food commerce and hospitality. There is a continuity of meaning that deserves to be underscored without being over-interpreted. The baker nourishes; the hotelier nourishes and shelters. From one generation to the next, it would be the same fundamental gesture — to receive, to serve, to restore the other — that would have unfolded under successive economic forms.

Hospitality, in particular, engages a virtue that Judaism has erected into a pillar: the welcome of the stranger. The Torah returns ceaselessly to the fate of the stranger who resides among you, and the memory of slavery in Egypt is summoned to ground the duty of hospitality. A family whose patrimony is built around the fact of receiving and nourishing travelers embodies, in its secular and commercial manner, this ancient moral requirement. One measures how much the economic life of the Jews of the Levant was inseparable from their universe of values: the trade, far from being neutral, prolonged an ethic of care extended to the other.

It is nonetheless necessary to name the limits of this reading. No document consulted details the precise establishments held by the Khabbaz family, nor their names, nor their dates. The convergence between the sense of the name and the nature of the activities is striking, but it pertains to the probable intersection between Memory and History, not to a dossier of archives constituted. The reader will retain the coherence of the motif — bread, table, roof — as a plausible guiding thread, and not as a chain of facts established one by one.

The twentieth century was, for Jews in Arab lands, the century of exodus. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the ensuing tensions, rising nationalisms, and growing insecurity precipitated the departure of communities sometimes millennia old. The Jewish community of Damascus, long confined to a restricted quarter and then subjected to severe restrictions by Syrian authorities, gradually emptied; that of Beirut, at first spared, declined in turn from the 1960s onward and was devastated by the Lebanese Civil War. From this vast movement, the Khabbaz lineage bears the mark: the notice indicates it present, in the twentieth century, in Brazil and in Israel.

These two destinations outline the two classical poles of the modern Sephardic and Mizrahi diaspora. Brazil — and São Paulo above all — welcomed substantial immigration of Syrian-Lebanese Jews, often arriving via already-established merchant networks, who reconstituted across the Atlantic their synagogues, their rites, and their mutual solidarities. Israel, for its part, absorbed the mass of Jews coming from Arab lands, whose integration was not without friction: the history of the Mizrahim in the young State was also that of a struggle for equality and recognition, an "era of rebellion" and civic demands long overshadowed by the national narrative [Bryan K. Roby, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion, 2015 ; ref:5]. A family like the Khabbaz, in moving from Damascus or Beirut to Ramat Gan or to São Paulo, thus embraces the dual fate of the Mizrahim: the loss of an old world and the reconstruction, through trial, of a new existence.

What this dispersion reveals is a tenacious form of fidelity. Carrying with them their rites, their cuisine, their Judeo-Arabic, their memory of the streets of Damascus and the Wadi Abu Jamil, the families of the Syrian-Lebanese diaspora kept alive a heritage that geography was tearing from them. The very fact of continuing to call themselves "from Damascus" or "from Beirut" thousands of kilometers away, of transmitting the name and its meaning, participates in this virtue of memory — zakhor, "remember" — which structures Jewish identity as a whole.

A lineage without attested illustrious figure, without manuscript to its name, without documented hero, poses to the historian a fruitful question: what is the value of the Memory of ordinary families? Jewish tradition brings here a strong answer. Contemporary Jewish thought recalled that transmission — of the Law, of narrative, of name — constitutes the beating heart of a people that defined itself less by a stable territory than by a continuity of Memory and study [Gershom Scholem, Fidelity and Utopia, 1978 ; ref:11]. The singularity of Judaism, it was further noted, lies in this unbreakable bond between a people and its Law, which holds generations together across dispersions [Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Israel and Judaism, 1993 ; ref:9].

By this measure, a family of bakers turned merchants and hoteliers, scattered between the Levant, Brazil and Israel, is no less a bearer of the collective Memory of Israel than a rabbinical dynasty. It embodies a discreet but essential facet thereof: that of the people who works, nourishes, welcomes, and transmits a name charged with meaning. Reflection on the writing of Jewish History in the twentieth century precisely insisted on the necessity of doing justice to these ordinary existences, long neglected by a History turned toward elites alone [Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Thinking Jewish History at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, 2000 ; ref:8].

This chapter is, more than the others, conjectural: it proposes a reading of the meaning of a lineage whose precise facts largely escape us. It assumes this share of editorial hypothesis. But it does so in the name of a principle of honesty: it is better to say clearly what one interprets than to attribute invented exploits to the Khabbaz family. The dignity of this lineage has no need of ornaments; it lies in the constancy of a name which, from Damascus to São Paulo, has continued to speak the bread shared.

At the end of this journey, the Khabbaz lineage appears as an exemplary figure of the Jewish diaspora in the Levant in the modern and contemporary era. Born in the Jewish quarters of Damascus and Beirut, bearing in its name the memory of a baker ancestor, it distinguished itself in the food trade and hospitality before scattering, like so many others, between Brazil and Israel under the effect of twentieth-century upheavals. Lacking fully documented individual figures, its history is read through that, solidly established, of the communities from which it springs.

Among all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried through the centuries, it is hospitality — the welcome and care offered to the other — that this lineage will have, above all, best expressed. The bread that its name suggests, the food trade that sustained it, the hospitality industry that shelters and restores the traveler: everything in its material trajectory converges toward this fundamental gesture of receiving and nourishing others, which the Torah establishes as a sacred duty in the name of the memory of exile. In embodying, on the modest scale of a family of workers, this ethic of welcome and shared table, the Khabbaz participated, in their way, in the great Memory of a people who, having themselves known wandering and otherness, made hospitality one of its highest virtues. May their name, which speaks of bread, endure as the discreet sign of this fidelity.