The Lanquar Family

The event that commands the first reading of this name is a date: 1492. The decree of the Alhambra, promulgated in March by the Catholic Monarchs, offered the Jews of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon the choice between conversion and exile. Tens of thousands of them left the peninsula in the months that followed. As Béatrice Leroy demonstrated, this rupture marked the passage from a prosperous peninsular Jewish civilization to a multiform diaspora whose ramifications extended from the Ottoman Empire to North Africa, from Italy to the United Provinces, and even to the edges of the New World [Leroy, 1986]. The lineage file inscribes the name Lanquar precisely in this horizon: a claimed Iberian Sephardic origin, an anteriority to the supposed but undocumented expulsion, a dispersal from the Iberian space at the end of the 15th century.

Jonathan Ray described with precision the manner in which this exodus did not immediately create a unified Sephardic community, but rather a collection of dispersed refugees who, over several generations, had to reconstruct institutions, solidarities, and a common identity [Ray, 2013]. The itineraries were multiple. A significant portion of the exiles went to neighboring Portugal, where they experienced a new forced conversion in 1497, giving rise to the vast population of Lusitanian "new Christians." Joseph R. Hacker analyzed the resettlement patterns that followed, demonstrating that the Sephardic diaspora organized itself around successive poles — the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Italy, and then Atlantic Europe [Hacker, 2001]. Guilherme d'Oliveira Martins, for his part, emphasized the specificity of the Ibero-Portuguese trajectory, which led many converted families, generations later, to take the path of an open return to Judaism in more tolerant lands of refuge [Oliveira Martins, 2015].

It is in this logic that the ancestor bearing the surname Lanquar can be inscribed. If the family is connected both to the Iberian area and to France, it may have followed one of the major axes of dispersal: either a passage toward southwestern France, or a long detour through Portugal and the new Christian merchant networks. Henry Méchoulan emphasized how much the Hispanic diaspora constituted a fabric of circulations rather than a simple flight, each family weaving its path according to commercial opportunities and the protections offered [Méchoulan, 1992]. In this inaugural trial is already at play a virtue that the tradition of Israel carried through the centuries: fidelity maintained in uprooting, the refusal to dissolve the covenant when everything pushes toward abjuring it. Those who took the path of exile rather than that of the altar chose, at the price of their goods and their security, to remain themselves.

One of the major drivers of Sephardic survival and prosperity was long-distance commerce. Francesca Trivellato demonstrated, using the example of the Tuscan port of Livorno, how Sephardic merchants established networks of exchange founded on trust, kinship, and a remarkable ability to trade across religious and political boundaries [Trivellato, 2009]. These networks connected the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and even to the Indian Ocean, making sometimes modest families the links in a globalized economy ahead of its time.

For a lineage connected to southwestern France, the hypothesis of insertion into these merchant circuits is more than plausible. The ports and commercial hubs of the French Atlantic coast — Bordeaux, Bayonne, and their hinterlands — constituted privileged anchoring points for merchants of Iberian origin. The familiarity, described by Trivellato, among actors from distinct horizons, offered these families a space for economic integration precisely where their religious status remained long ambiguous or clandestine [Trivellato, 2009]. Here we read a discrete yet decisive value: economic contribution as a form of engagement with the world. Sephardic commerce was not merely a means of subsistence; it was, for communities deprived of land and stable rights, a way of enduring, of forging solidarities across borders, and of sustaining collective charity from the fruits of labor.

It is nonetheless necessary to remain cautious: in the absence of commercial documents explicitly naming the family, this insertion remains a plausible reconstruction, supported by the general sociology of the diaspora rather than by direct proof. The file itself underscores this, by qualifying the area of Portuguese merchants as "plausible but unverified due to lack of access to sources." It is precisely this articulation between the structural and the particular that recent research recommends, in order to avoid the pitfall of romanticized genealogies [García-Arenal, 2014].

The south-west of France occupies a central place in the file dedicated to this lineage: it was there, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the notice locates the settlement of branches, within the sphere of Portuguese merchants in Bordeaux and Bayonne. This region was indeed, from the sixteenth century onward, a land of welcome for communities known as "Portuguese," composed of new Christians from the Iberian peninsula. Officially Catholic, these "Portuguese merchants" gradually returned, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to an open practice of Judaism — around Bordeaux, Bayonne and Saint-Esprit-lès-Bayonne — as royal tolerance toward them became more relaxed.

Esther Benbassa analyzed the way these communities reconstituted, on French soil, a distinct Sephardic identity, articulated around the memory of lost Spain and Portugal [Benbassa, 1993]. The chronology aligns remarkably: it is precisely at the time when the file locates the settlement of the Lanquar branches that families of Iberian origin in the Bordeaux and Bayonne regions moved from the status of new Christians to that of recognized Jews. Transmitted tradition and collective archive answer one another here, without an individual act naming the lineage yet being able to be produced — hence the status of probable intersection, not established fact, of this settlement. Emanuela Trevisan Semi has moreover shown how vivid the memory of these origins remained, reactivating itself through to the contemporary period as a component of a specific French Sephardic identity [Trevisan Semi, 2011].

These communities embodied a virtue that Jewish tradition holds as central: implication in collective life and care for the other. The Portuguese nations organized themselves as confraternities of charity, as institutions of relief and mutual aid, taking charge of the sick, the indigent and the deceased. Where civil law scarcely recognized them as existing, these families held a community together by the sole force of internal solidarity. The supposed anchoring of the lineage in the south-west would thus be not merely a geographical fact, but an inscription within a community with structured memory, whose rituals, cemeteries and synagogal registers constitute today the principal documentary deposits for anyone wishing to find the precise trace of a named ancestor. It is toward these collections — registers of the Portuguese nations of Bordeaux and Bayonne, notarial acts, consistorial archives — that any research aiming to link the name to dated individuals should turn.

Beside the Iberian trail stands a second origin, independent, which the form of the name renders highly plausible and which must be set forth for its own sake, without artificially linking it to the first. According to the reference onomastics of North African Jews, a form like Lancar can derive from the Arabic al-naqqâr (النقّار), "the engraver," "the chiseler," he who engraves on stone, metal or wood [Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, Laredo, 1978]. The Semitic root n-q-r (نقر / נקר) designates the act of digging, piercing, incising; the naqqâr is the craftsman who engraves jewelry, incises seals, ornaments stamps and sometimes monetary matrices. The agglutination of the definite article al- to the occupational name produces al-naqqâr, from which proceeds, through Latin transcription—French or Spanish—the form of the patronym. This phenomenon of article agglutination is commonplace in North African onomastics, as in Lasry or Elmaleh [Les noms de famille des Juifs d'Afrique du Nord et leur origine — Dafina].

This formation belongs to the most stable and best-documented class of Maghrebi Jewish patronyms: that of occupational names, alongside Sabban (the soap maker), Nadjar (the carpenter), Dahan (the painter), Attar (the perfumer) or Haddad (the blacksmith). Modern onomastics considers these names as the oldest and most reliable as to their meaning, for they describe a tangible economic reality: an ancestor actually practiced the profession, and the name became fixed through community usage before being codified by colonial civil registration [Les noms de famille des Juifs d'Afrique du Nord et leur origine — Dafina]. The profession is not incidental: in pre-colonial Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, work with gold and silver was very largely, sometimes exclusively, in the hands of Jewish artisans, Muslim guilds having often reserved or abandoned this sector to them [Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, Laredo, 1978]. The engraver, the naqqâr, chiseled jewelry, engraved merchants' seals and ornamented objects of worship. Documents from the Judeo-Arabic world, of which the Cairo Geniza offers the richest testimony, attest to the importance of goldsmiths and metalworkers in networks of Mediterranean exchange, where technical expertise was coupled with insertion into large-scale commerce [Goitein, 1967-1993].

Here two conjoined values emerge. The first is the dignity of manual labor: rabbinic Judaism has always honored the craft, the melakha, this work of the hands that tradition places at the heart of the human covenant with Creation, and the sages themselves bore occupational names. To bear the name of the engraver was to inscribe in one's very identity the sanctification of labor. The second is the artisan's contribution to ritual and Law: the engraver does not work for himself alone; he engraves the covenant of the married couple, the seal that authenticates a contract, the rimon that crowns the Torah scroll. In chiseling the pointers for reading, the plaques and silver crowns of synagogues, the artisan participated materially in hiddour mitzva, the adornment of the commandment, this way of glorifying the sacred through the beauty of human gesture.

The distribution area of the Judeo-Maghrebi form of the name and its variants — Naar, Nakkar, Naqqar without the article — covers the western and central Judeo-Maghrebi space: the entire Moroccan region, where Abraham Laredo documents Jewish surnames and their Arabic and Hebrew roots, as well as western Algeria, with attestations in the communities of Tunisia and the Levant [Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, Laredo, 1978]. These communities, heirs to both indigenous Berber and Arabic-speaking Judaism — the toshavim — and the Spanish exiles of 1492 — the megorashim — formed a dense Jewish civilization, structured around the synagogue, the rabbinical court and artisanal trades. The distinction is legible in the onomastics themselves: an Arabic trade name more often belongs to the ancient, Arabic-speaking substrate, whereas Hispanic names such as Toledano or Perez signal Iberian descent [Les noms de famille des Juifs d'Afrique du Nord et leur origine — Dafina]. A patronym forged from al-naqqâr would thus testify, with high probability, to deep roots in Arabic-speaking Maghrebi society.

Such a lineage of artisans lived, prayed and negotiated in Judeo-Arabic, the language proper to Jewish communities in Islamic lands. Far from being a mere dialect, it constituted a linguistic system in its own right, structured by a profound Hebrew component that surfaced in the vocabulary of the sacred, of law, of commerce and of family life [Bar-Asher, 1992]. Judeo-Arabic even rose to the rank of literary language, supporting a rich scholarly production from the Middle Ages to the modern period [Ben-Shammai, 2004]. From Tlemcen to Fès, from Constantine to Tunis, it carried biblical commentaries, liturgical poetry, chronicles and Torah translations called sharh [Chetrit, 2007]. The features of the speech of Tlemcen, the great Jewish city of Oran, were the subject of fine linguistic analyses showing the persistence of Hebrew elements at the heart of spoken Arabic [Hebrew Elements in Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic: The Tlemcen Dialect, Bar-Asher, 1992; Blau, 1999].

It is here that a major virtue of the Jewish diaspora in North Africa comes into full relief: lived tolerance. The name of the engraver, Arabic in its form, Hebrew in the fidelity it embodies, incarnates a double belonging: perfectly integrated into Arab language and society, the Jewish artisan nonetheless remained faithful to the Law, to the festivals, to the Hebrew calendar. To live fully in two worlds without denying oneself, to honor the stranger and his language while keeping the covenant intact: this faculty of weaving the common without dissolving the singular joins the commandment to love the stranger, so often repeated in the Torah. In these communities, the engraver artisan occupied a place at once modest and essential, and his virtue was measured less by splendor than by constancy: the transmission of the craft from father to son, fidelity to a neighborhood, to a synagogue, to a confraternity of charity, the hevra. Community solidarity, tsedaka — this justice made charity — structured these societies where confraternities ensured dowries for orphan girls, care for the sick and burial for the indigent, and where no artisan was left alone in misfortune.

What Memory Retains of the Engraver, Beyond the Archive

What memory retains of the engraver, beyond the archive, lies in the very nature of his art: to inscribe, in a durable material, that which must endure. The Jewish engraver inscribes letters—and in a civilization of the Letter, this act is never neutral. To engrave a verse upon an amulet, to engrave the covenant upon a ring, to engrave the inscription of a tombstone: so many gestures that touch the heart of Jewish transmission. The link between engraving, calligraphy, and the copying of sacred texts is structural in the Judeo-Arab world, where the production and preservation of manuscripts mobilized the same cult of the exact letter [Chetrit, 2007]. The engraver, like the scribe—the sofer—and the copyist, belongs to this chain of faithful servants of the text for whom the accuracy of a stroke engages both meaning and holiness. The rigor of the artisanal gesture thus joins that of halakha: both demand precision, patience, and humility before a received norm.

For such is perhaps the most intimate virtue of this lineage of the engraver: the humility of one who serves matter and meaning without advancing his own person. The engraved object survives its author; the name of the craftsman fades behind the work. This voluntary effacement, this anavah—the humility that tradition places at the summit of virtues, that very humility of Moses "the humblest of men"—is the hallmark of all the anonymous artisans who beautified the synagogues and Jewish homes of the Maghreb without leaving a signature. The memory of their name is, often, the only monument they have left.

This dimension also illuminates, in turn, the difficulty that runs through the entire work. What is to be done with a rare patronym whose exact origin escapes direct documentation? The history of Sephardic names as well as that of Maghrebi names teaches the same caution. Many families adopted, under the constraint of conversion, patronyms which they then retained; others bore toponymic or occupational names; still others saw their names deformed according to the transcriptions in notarial, parochial, synagogal, and then civil registers. The attested variants—Lancar, Lancart, Languar, Lankar, Lanquar—are the spellings of one and the same word pronounced, reshaped by successive scribes and by the passage from one alphabet to another. One must here honor the silences of the archive rather than fill them through invention. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin calls the poetic and transformative dimension of the diaspora this manner in which memory is transmitted precisely through the alterations and recompositions of the name [Raz-Krakotzkin, 1993], while David A. Wacks reminds us that Sephardic culture constituted itself in a constant relation to loss and remembrance, making absence itself a material of identity [Wacks, 2015].

The two histories that this name encompasses lead, each in its own way, to the same modern ordeal: dispersal. For the Maghrebi branch, the twentieth century upended the world that had borne this name. French colonization, then decolonization and the creation of the State of Israel, brought about the near-disappearance of Jewish communities in North Africa between 1948 and the early 1960s. The bearers of the name, like the vast majority of Maghrebi Jews, dispersed — toward France, Israel, Canada, America — carrying with them Judeo-Arabic language, liturgical melodies and surnames that sum up centuries of history [The surnames of the Jews of North Africa and their origin — Dafina]. For the Western Sephardic branch, the file contains an attestation of the surname in France from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, without the precise localities having been confirmed: here too, the name travels faster than the archive.

In this dispersal, the name becomes a portable relic, the ultimate trace of an engulfed world. It is precisely for this reason that the work of onomastics — that of Laredo, that of Toledano — carries a memorial significance: in establishing the origin and meaning of names, these scholars preserved part of the soul of vanished communities [The Names of the Jews of Morocco, Laredo, 1978 ; The surnames of the Jews of North Africa and their origin — Dafina]. Similarly, the linguistic preservation of Judeo-Arabic and its literature preserves the voice of those generations [Chetrit, 2007].

Here is revealed an essential virtue above all in Judaism: zakhor, the duty of memory. "Remember" is one of the most repeated commandments of the Torah. In transmitting the name, in deciphering it, in writing its history, the descendants of the engraver like those of the exile from Sefarad accomplish, perhaps without knowing it, a truly religious act: to snatch from oblivion what was, to honor the generations departed, and to link the present to the long chain of Israel. The engraver, who inscribed so that it would endure, finds in this effort of memory his most fitting continuation; and the exile, who bore his name from one continent to another, finds in it the proof that nothing of what was faithfully transmitted is entirely lost.

The verified dossier of this lineage has, to this day, preserved no individual figure named and dated: neither rabbi, nor merchant, nor craftsman whose direct archival record retained the given name, dates, and work. This is one of the truths of this book, and it would be dishonest to mask it with invented characters. The only attested bearers are collective — the families attached to the Iberian space before 1492, the Portuguese nations of southwestern France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Judeo-Maghrebi area of the engraver al-naqqâr — and the only figures that can be named with certainty are the scholars whose work made it possible to reconstruct the horizon of this name. It is to them, lacking identified ancestors, that this gallery belongs.

Abraham I. Laredo (1895–1969) — Historian and onomastician of Moroccan Judaism. Established in Morocco and then in Israel, he devoted a major part of his work to the inventory of Jewish families of the Moroccan kingdom. His work The Names of the Jews of Morocco, published posthumously by the CSIC in Madrid in 1978, remains the reference for understanding the Arabic and Hebrew roots of Maghrebi surnames, including those formed, like the one studied here, on a craft name. He thus preserved the onomastic memory of communities now dispersed.

Joseph Toledano (born in 1938) — Writer and historian of Moroccan origin, born in Meknes. Journalist and memoirist of the Jews of Morocco, he is the author of A History of Families, a vast repertory of Jewish family names in North Africa and their origins, widely distributed and reproduced online. His work, cited throughout this book, connects Arabic craft names — including the form al-naqqâr — to the ancient, Arabic-speaking heritage of Maghrebi Judaism, and sheds light on the Maghrebi path of the surname.

Béatrice Leroy (1937–2020) — French medieval historian, specialist in the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula and Navarre. Her work The Sephardic Adventure (1986) offered the French-speaking public a synthesis on Peninsular Jewish civilization and its dispersal after 1492, an essential framework for situating the Sephardic path of this lineage. She showed how a prosperous civilization transformed into a diaspora with worldwide ramifications.

Francesca Trivellato (born in 1970) — Italian historian of the economy of the early modern period. In The Familiarity of Strangers (2009), she analyzed, from Livorno, the Sephardic merchant networks founded on trust and kinship across religious boundaries. Her work illuminates the hypothesis of an insertion of the Iberian branches of southwestern France into the great Mediterranean and Atlantic trade.

Esther Benbassa (born in 1950) — Historian of Judaism, specialist in the Sephardim. Her work on the diaspora after the expulsion, notably The Sephardic Diaspora After the Expulsion (1993), shed light on the reconstruction of a distinct Sephardic identity in French land, around the memory of lost Spain and Portugal — the framework in which the supposed establishment of the lineage in the Bordeaux and Bayonne regions is situated.

Moshe Bar-Asher (born in 1939) — Israeli linguist born in Morocco, eminent specialist in Judeo-Arabic and Jewish linguistic traditions. His studies on the Hebrew component of Algerian Judeo-Arabic and on the dialect of Tlemcen (1992) established the depth of the Hebrew element at the heart of the spoken Arabic of communities — the very language in which the engraver's name was borne and pronounced for centuries.

At the end of this journey, the Lanquar lineage does not allow itself to be confined to a single chronicle. Two distinct and legitimate paths open from its name. The first, Sephardic and Iberian, inscribes it in the great movement of the expulsion of 1492, which Jonathan Ray has shown shaped Sephardic Jewry recomposed over several generations [Ray, 2013], from the peninsula to the Portuguese nations of southwestern France, passing through the merchant networks described by Francesca Trivellato [Trivellato, 2009]. The second, Judeo-Maghrebi, reads in the spellings Lancar, Lankar or El Nakkar the trace of the Arabic al-naqqâr, "the engraver," a profession name deeply rooted in the Arabic-speaking society of the Maghreb [Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, Laredo, 1978]. Nothing in the verified record authorizes merging these two origins into a single branch, nor preferring one with authority: the same name can be born twice, in two worlds, and saying so honestly is the truth of this book.

Epistemological honesty imposes a double affirmation. On the one hand, the contexts are established: the bearers of this name, on one side as on the other, could and must have participated in the dynamics that Sephardic and Judeo-Maghrebi historiography has long analyzed. On the other hand, the particular lineage remains to be documented: only systematic exploration of archives — registers of Bordeaux and Bayonne, colonial civil status documents of North Africa — would make it possible to transform the probable into the certain. As Esther Benbassa invites us to do, the history of these families unfolds at the intersection of transmitted memory and patient archives [Benbassa, 1993].

There remains, beyond the two paths, what this lineage will have best expressed. If one holds both threads together, a virtue binds them: faithful humility in service of what must endure. The exile from Sefarad who preferred uprootedness to abjuration, the craftsman engraver who inscribed the letter without affixing his own, the descendant who today deciphers a name to snatch it from oblivion — all accomplish the same discreet gesture: to serve, to transmit, to efface oneself before the work and before the covenant. It is here that the Lanquar lineage, under all its spellings, joins the collective Memory of Israel, that People of the Book for whom engraving is already remembering, and remembering is remaining faithful. The Great Book of the Lanquars thus remains an open work, whose most precise pages remain to be written.