The Obadia Family

Sefrou was, at the turn of the twentieth century, a singular city in the landscape of Moroccan Judaism. Nestled at the foot of the first foothills of the Middle Atlas, it sheltered a Jewish community of remarkable internal diversity: Tamazight-speaking Berbers from the Tafilalet, Arabic-speaking Jews of Fessian origin, and descendants of those exiled from Spain in 1492, all united in a mellah whose religious and intellectual vitality contrasted with the narrowness of the town. It was in this setting that David Obadia made his first steps as a rabbinical judge — dayan — and then rose to the presidency of the local rabbinical court, the bet din, a central institution of Jewish communal life that settled civil and family disputes according to the rules of halakha.

The function of dayan was not merely legal. It required profound knowledge of the Talmud and medieval rabbinical codes — Maimonides, Joseph Karo — a keen sense of equity in conflicts where written law and local usage sometimes intersected with difficulty, and moral authority recognized by the entire community. That David Obadia presided over the bet din of Sefrou testifies to advanced training and an established reputation from his youth. This value of justice — tsedek — placed by the Hebrew tradition at the foundation of all collective life, was concretely embodied in the deliberations of this court where inheritances, marriages, divorces, and commercial contracts were decided.

His recognized authority in Sefrou earned him a call to exercise the same functions in two of Morocco's greatest communities: Fès, imperial city and crossroads of Moroccan rabbinical learning since the Middle Ages; then Marrakech, capital of the South and home to a community whose distinctive liturgical traditions testified to particularly deep roots. This double passage — from Sefrou to Fès, from Fès to Marrakech — traces the itinerary of a man whose rabbinical competence was recognized beyond his native city, called to where the community needed a first-rank decision-maker ;.

After Morocco's independence in 1956, David Obadia took an active part in the political transition. He was designated as a Jewish delegate to the Moroccan Parliament, representing a community seeking to find its place in the new State. Simultaneously, he served as inspector of Hebrew education in schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, ensuring that Jewish children in Morocco continued to receive education in Hebrew and Jewish culture as departures accelerated. This double involvement — political and educational — illustrates the conception of communal service that characterizes his entire life: to be present where the community had need, whether in the rabbinical court, on the parliamentary tribune, or in the classroom.

The written work of David Obadia is the other face, monumental, of this vocation. In five volumes devoted to the history of the Jewish community of Sefrou and in two volumes on the community of Fès and its rabbis, he accomplished what no one before him had done at this scale for these two communities: to gather documentation scattered in rabbinical archives, manuscript colophons, bet din registers, and oral traditions, and to draw from them a coherent and sourced history ;. This memorial gesture, accomplished from Jerusalem where he had settled after his aliya, extended and amplified the vocation of zakhor — of Memory — that lies at the heart of the Jewish tradition.

Among David Obadia's works, the edition of Rabbi Raphaël Elbaz's Kissé Melakhim ("The Throne of Kings") holds a particular place, for it says something essential about the relationship that the Obadia lineage maintains with knowledge and transmission. Raphaël Moshé Elbaz — known by the acronym Harama — was born in Sefrou in 1823 and died there in 1896; he was the chief rabbi of the city during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the most striking intellectual figure that the Sefrou community produced in that era. Son of a family claiming Spanish origin, he embodied the characteristic synthesis of Moroccan Judaism between Sephardic heritage and local rootedness.

The work of Rabbi Raphaël Elbaz was multifaceted: liturgical poet, legal decisioner, he notably wrote the Kissé Melakhim, a vast fresco devoted to the history of Israel and humanity from Creation to his own time, constructed to demonstrate the ineluctable character of final Redemption. This text, long known to specialists but remaining in manuscript form, had awaited for decades an editor capable of ensuring its formatting and dissemination. It was David Obadia who took on this role, publishing the Kissé Melakhim in 1988 in Jerusalem, as part of his series devoted to the Sefrou community. In editing this text of his predecessor and master, he accomplished a double act of faithfulness: to the memory of Rabbi Raphaël Elbaz, whose work risked remaining inaccessible, and to the Sefrou community whose intellectual legacy he thus extended beyond geographic and temporal boundaries.

This act deserves to be read in light of the value that Jewish tradition places in the transmission of knowledge. Limoud — study — is not merely an individual obligation; it is also a collective duty of preservation and dissemination. Publishing a forgotten manuscript is to rescue a voice from oblivion, to restore to the chain of tradition a link that risked being lost. David Obadia's decision to include this edition in his memorial project on Sefrou reveals a conception of Talmudic and rabbinic knowledge as a common good for which each generation is accountable to those that follow. The value of humility before the masters of the past — kivud rav, respect for the master — is expressed here in concrete fashion: the editor effaces himself before the author, the contemporary rabbi honors the rabbi of old by giving him a new voice.

Sefrou, the city of Rabbi Raphaël Elbaz and David Obadia, was itself a microcosm of Moroccan Judaism in all its diversity. Its community gathered, according to available sources, families of very different origins — indigenous Berber speakers, Arabic-speaking Jews from Fès, descendants of Iberian exiles — who had eventually constituted a distinct entity with its own liturgical traditions, its own saints (tsaddikim), its own festivals and its own ties with surrounding rural communities. The fact that two major figures of this community — Rabbi Elbaz in the nineteenth century, David Obadia in the twentieth — were both producers of learned works testifies to a durable local intellectual tradition, which the Obadia lineage helped to maintain and transmit.

David Obadia's decision to devote two volumes to the history of the Fès community and its rabbis — published under the title Fas vehachémeha (Fès and Its Rabbis) in 1980 — was far from arbitrary. Fès occupied, in the intellectual geography of Moroccan Judaism, a position analogous to that which Babylon or Mainz had held in other contexts: that of an irradiating center whose rabbinic authority transcended the boundaries of the city to extend across the entire country, and even to communities on the other side of the Mediterranean.

The Jewish presence in Fès dated back to remote antiquity, reinforced by the massive influx of Iberian refugees after 1391 and 1492. The megorashim (expellees) brought with them their Sephardic rite, their Judeo-Spanish language, and a learned culture inherited from the Golden Age of al-Andalus. They settled initially in tension with the toshavim communities already in place, maintaining their own synagogues and distinct minhagim (liturgical usages). But over the generations, the two populations gradually merged, in a process of mutual acculturation that gave rise to a particularly rich Fassi Judaism, combining the halakhic depth of Eastern traditions with the literary refinement of Iberian heritage. It was in Fès that some of the most important rabbinic decisions for Moroccan Judaism were rendered — those of the Ranabim, Haras, and other great decisors whose work David Obadia would go on to recount.

That David Obadia was called to exercise the functions of rabbinic judge in this prestigious city, after his years in Sefrou, was a testament to his intellectual and moral stature. Fès did not accept just any rabbi: the community was conscious of its heritage and demanded of its leaders a first-rate rabbinic mastery. In accepting this charge, David Obadia inscribed himself within a long lineage of decisors who had made Fès a radiating center of rabbinic law. In publishing their collective biography — seven centuries of Fassi rabbis gathered in two volumes — he rendered them the homage that Jewish tradition reserves for masters: to preserve their place in collective memory, to refuse that their names be carried away by oblivion.

The work on Fès and Its Rabbis inscribed itself within a particularly fertile tradition of Moroccan Jewish historiography: the sefer ha-zikkhronot, the book of communal memories, in which the rabbis and notables of each generation set down the momentous events of their community, the decisions of tribunals, the biographies of scholars, the miracles attributed to the tsaddikim. David Obadia was not inventing this gesture — he was perpetuating it under new conditions, those of an exile in Jerusalem that made the reconstitution all the more urgent as living witnesses aged and archives remaining in Morocco became inaccessible. He thus exercised, in contemporary diaspora, the same function as the communal chroniclers of old: to be the guardian of collective memory.

The distribution of the surname Obadia draws a revealing geography that far exceeds the single community of Sefrou or Fès. Attested throughout French North Africa — Algeria and its major historical regions, Morocco and Tunisia — the name spans the complete area of Maghrebi Judaism [Eisenbeth, 1936]. This pan-Maghrebi presence argues for ancient diffusion from multiple centers rather than a diaspora stemming from a single point of origin.

In Algeria, the surname is documented in the Constantinois, to the east — a major community of eastern Algeria rich in a particularly vibrant liturgical and musical tradition — and in Oran, to the west, a zone of intense exchanges with neighboring Morocco where the border between the two cultural spheres was permeable. Algiers itself, capital and crossroads, had welcomed families of diverse origins since the great medieval migrations, and the great Algerian rabbinical families — the Duran, who had found refuge there after the expulsion of 1391 — had durably marked the Jewish intellectual landscape. The surname Obadia fit into this rich onomastic fabric, among hundreds of other theophoric Hebrew names or those of Iberian origin [Chouraqui, 1985].

The mention of the Saharan borderlands is particularly significant. The communities of southern Algeria — those of the oases, the ksour and the caravan routes — represent one of the oldest and most autochthonous strata of Maghrebi Judaism, often less marked by Sephardic influence than the coastal cities. The presence of Obadia in these zones may refer as much to an immemorial rootedness as to internal migrations along the commercial axes that connected the Sahara to Mediterranean ports [Goldenberg, 2014]. These Saharan communities played a considerable economic role in trans-Saharan exchanges — trade in gold, salt, ostrich feathers and spices — and Jewish merchants often held a position of intermediaries between the Berber, Arab and sub-Saharan worlds. The discreet yet structuring economic action of these families helped weave ties between communities separated by geography.

The question of Megorashim and Toshavim poses itself for the Obadia lineage as for all Moroccan Jewish families. Iberian refugees arrived en masse after 1391 — the first Spanish pogroms — and especially after the expulsion of 1492. In Fès, Sefrou, Oran, Tlemcen and other Maghrebi cities, they settled at first in tension with already-established local communities, the two groups preserving their own rites for several generations. Family memory transmitted in certain Obadia branches evokes an ancestor who is said to have opposed a religious figure advocating the conversion of Spanish Jews before the legal obligation of 1492 — a narrative of resistance and faithfulness whose symbolic reach is clear, even if its documentary value cannot be established with certainty. If this tradition is accurate, it would date the presence of at least one Obadia branch in the Iberian Peninsula before the expulsion, making certain bearers of the name Megorashim in the proper sense. The surname is in any case compatible with both origins — Toshavim and Megorashim — being attested in the Iberian Peninsula before 1492 and in the Maghreb prior to Sephardic presence [Laredo, 1978].

In Tunisia, where community structure had long opposed the Twansa foundation to the Grana of Livornese origin, the surname likewise fits into the local onomastic fabric. This Maghrebi ubiquity, rather than designating a single family, attests to the vitality of a devotional name adopted and transmitted in multiple contexts, from the great coastal cities to the solitudes of the Saharan oases [Sebag, 2002].

Bearing a Name Meaning "Servant of God" Was Not Neutral in Maghrebi Jewish Societies

Formed from the Hebrew root ʿaved (to serve, to worship) and the abbreviated theonym Yah, ʿOvadyah (עֹבַדְיָה) belongs to the great family of theophoric anthroponyms — those that inscribe the divine into the very identity of the bearer. Like Yirmeyah (Jeremiah, "Yah raises"), Yeshaʿyah (Isaiah, "Yah saves") or Zekharyah (Zechariah, "Yah remembers"), this name combines a verb and the divine name to form a declaration of piety [Laredo, 1978]. The major onomastic repertoires agree on this transparent etymology, which Dafina confirms for specifically Moroccan usage.

The biblical figure that gives the name its highest symbolic charge is the prophet Obadiah — ʿOvadyah in Hebrew — whose book, the shortest in the Hebrew Bible with its twenty-one verses, condemns Edom for its joy at the fall of Jerusalem and announces the restoration of Israel. The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 39b) identifies Obadiah as a convert of Edomite origin — which would make him the model of the stranger become faithful servant of the God of Israel, a motif that the Sephardic tradition particularly valorized in its exchanges with the anousim (forced converts) returned to Judaism.

According to the reference onomastic dictionary established by Maurice Eisenbeth, Grand Rabbi of Algiers, the patronym is present throughout the regions of French North Africa, with no fewer than six graphical variants recorded [Eisenbeth, 1936]. This multiplicity testifies to the historical conditions of writing North African Jewish names. Until colonization, names were transmitted essentially orally and in communal registers in Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic characters. Transcription in Latin characters, imposed by French administrations from the nineteenth century onwards — massively in Algeria after the Crémieux Decree of 1870 — took place without unified norm. A single Hebrew name could thus give rise to competing spellings: Obadia, Abadia, Ovadia, Abbadi and neighboring forms, depending on the rendering of the initial vowel, the Hebrew b/v in spirant position, and the ending [Laredo, 1978].

The initial ʿayin of ʿOvadyah, a pharyngeal consonant unknown to French, was sometimes ignored (giving Obadia), sometimes rendered by aspiration, sometimes assimilated to an open a. This complication makes the identification of lineages difficult and invites genealogical caution: two branches bearing distinct spellings may trace back to a single ancestor, while perfect homonyms may be unrelated to one another. Eisenbeth's approach, in grouping variants under a single entry, offers precisely the critical tool allowing one not to confuse graphical accident with family reality [Eisenbeth, 1936]. Descendants of Obadia seeking their forebears in French and Algerian archives must systematically broaden their search to encompass all variants: neglecting one of them may cause an ancestor to be missed whose identity was transcribed differently according to the civil registry office or the date of the document.

In the Judeo-North African onomastic tradition, theophoric names maintained themselves with remarkable continuity, transmitted from generation to generation as a liturgical given name before becoming fixed, in the modern era, as a hereditary family name. This persistence is explained also by the symbolic charge of the name: the oved, the servant, is not the constrained slave but one who accomplishes his service through freely consented fidelity — an ideal that tradition designates by the term ʿavodah, which means at once labor, divine service, and prayer [Toledano, 2003].

To understand what we know of the Obadia lineage in its Algerian ramifications, we must first understand the instrument that tells us about it: Maurice Eisenbeth's work, The Jews of North Africa: Demography and Onomastics, published in Algiers in 1936. This book represents a rare intellectual and moral gesture: that of a man who, from the position of Grand Rabbi of Algiers, decided to save from oblivion, in his own words, everything that could interest the ethnic group constituted by the Israelites in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.

Eisenbeth's method was rigorous. For Algeria, he conducted a complete examination of the "nominal lists" of inhabitants of all communes, cross-referencing surnames, masculine and feminine given names, professions and places of birth to identify with precision the Israelites whom official censuses no longer wished, since the decree of October 24, 1870 on naturalization, to keep separate records of [Eisenbeth, 1936]. This work was explained by an administrative paradox: Algerian Jews, who had become full French citizens, answered "yes" to the question "Are you French by origin?" and were statistically merged into the mass of Europeans, making their separate enumeration impossible by ordinary means. In Constantine, one of the most important communities in Algeria, only 653 individuals had declared themselves Israelites in the census — a figure that field observation clearly showed to be below reality [Eisenbeth, 1936].

This scientific gesture was also a memorial gesture imbued with profound historical consciousness. Eisenbeth knew that he was documenting a reality in rapid transformation. His approach was part of the great Jewish tradition that places the preservation of knowledge — limoud, study — among the highest obligations, and which considers the forgetting of the past as a form of infidelity to those who lived it. By recording surnames, he was accomplishing an act that participates in the commandment of memory — zakhor — which the tradition places upon each generation. The fact that the work was honored with a subsidy from the Government General of Algeria also testifies to the recognition, by the colonial administration, of the scientific value of the enterprise — even if this recognition was tinged with a certain political ambiguity.

For the surname Obadia, Eisenbeth records six graphic variants and establishes its presence throughout all the regions of French North Africa — Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia — as well as in areas as diverse as the Constantinois, Oran and the Sahara. This mapping remains, ninety years after its publication, the indispensable foundation for all that can be said of the Algerian lineage with certainty. David Obadia's monumental work on Sefrou and Fès offers a Moroccan counterpart to this Algerian work: two men, two cities, two generations, two research traditions — but the same fundamental gesture of zakhor, of memory refusing oblivion.

The fate of the Obadia lineage, like that of North African Judaism as a whole, shifted in the twentieth century according to a sequence whose stages are now well documented, even though their application to specific individuals of a given family remains dependent on dispersed archives.

The first rupture is that of Vichy. In Algeria, on October 7, 1940, the Pétain regime abrogated the Crémieux decree, stripping Algerian Jews of French citizenship that they had held for seventy years with a single stroke of the pen. This decision had not waited for German pressure: it was an initiative of the French government itself, revealing that state antisemitism was not a Nazi import but a temptation rooted [Abitbol, 1983]. The exclusion measures that followed — numerus clausus in the liberal professions, teaching and public service, "Aryanization" of property — struck the Obadia families of Algeria head-on, whether they were in Algiers, Constantine, Oran or in smaller localities.

In Morocco, the context was different but no less trying. Mohammed V — whose protective role David Obadia himself noted upon his death on February 26, 1962 — had refused to apply the racial laws with the same rigor as the French protectorate administration, interposing himself symbolically between his Jewish subjects and the most brutal Vichy measures. This royal posture of protection, real in its effects even though its political contours remain debated by historians, imprinted on the memory of Moroccan Jewish communities a sense of gratitude that durably influenced their relationship with the new independent Morocco.

In Tunisia, occupation by Axis forces between November 1942 and May 1943 was of direct brutality: requisitions, forced labor, deportations and spoliation of property. Hundreds of Tunisian Jews perished during this period; thousands were subjected to compulsory labor. The families of the Obadia surname present in Tunisia traversed this period like all their coreligionists.

Liberation and the postwar period seemed to reopen a perspective for the future. But the decolonization movements irrevocably altered the equation. In Morocco and Tunisia, the independences of 1956 created a situation of uncertainty for Jewish communities. David Obadia himself, after attempting to inscribe himself in the new Moroccan state by accepting a mandate as a delegate to Parliament and continuing to inspect Alliance teaching, eventually made his aliya to Israel in the 1960s — a decision shared by the great majority of his Moroccan coreligionists in the same decade. In Algeria, the war of independence (1954-1962) and the proclamation of independence in July 1962 provoked the quasi-simultaneous departure of almost the entire Jewish community, approximately one hundred twenty thousand people, within a few weeks [Goldenberg, 2014].

This dispersal paradoxically stimulated genealogical and memorial research. Cut off from their places of origin — the mellah in Morocco, the hara in Tunisia, the Jewish quarters in Algerian cities, the synagogues, the cemeteries, the schools — families became attached to reconstituting and preserving their history. It is precisely in this context that the work of David Obadia, produced from Jerusalem where he was vice-president of the Religious Council, took on its full value: history of Sefrou in five volumes, history of Fès in two volumes, edition of the Kissé Melakhim — so many archives snatched from oblivion from the diaspora, for communities now dispersed between Israel, France, Canada and other host countries.

The composition of a Great Book of the Obadia lineage is part of a broader movement, characteristic of second and third-generation Sephardic Jewish communities after the North African exodus: a return to origins as a response to the threat of forgetting. This return takes multiple forms — memorial associations, digitization of archives, construction of genealogical websites, organization of trips to places of origin — and corresponds to what historians have called the "memorial boom" of Sephardic Judaisms since the 1980s.

The figure of David Obadia illuminates this movement in his own singular way. He did not wait for this "boom": he began collecting and publishing in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when the reconstruction of Moroccan communities in Israel and France was still recent and living witnesses were numerous. This precedence allowed him to access sources — oral testimonies, family documents, manuscripts held by families — that might have disappeared without him. In this sense, his work constitutes not only a history of the communities of Sefrou and Fès, but also an archive of primary sources that subsequent generations could not have reconstituted.

The central tool of this memory remains the surname itself. The name Obadia, passing through generations and continents, accomplished exactly what theophoric names were meant to accomplish: to keep alive a bond with the divine and with the community of origin, even beyond the most drastic geographic and cultural ruptures. A grandson of Obadia born in Paris or Montreal, bearing this surname without necessarily knowing its etymology, continues nonetheless to express what his ancestors expressed in transmitting this name: belonging to a tradition that places the service of God at the foundation of identity.

Digital resources — online Algerian civil status databases, archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, registries of the Consistoire israélite de France, corpora such as those of the Zakhor platform — today multiply research possibilities. Each birth certificate, each marriage contract (ketoubbah), each school enrollment found in Alliance archives is liable to bring a specific Obadia into the light of history. The collective dimension that these researches reveal is as important as individual data: it shows how a family was inserted into the social fabric of its community, what trades it practiced, what matrimonial alliances it formed, in what synagogue it prayed.

The value of piety that the name Obadia carries within itself — the service of God — perhaps expresses itself today in an unexpected way: no longer only in prayer or study, but in this act of memory that constitutes the reconstitution of the lineage. For in the Jewish tradition, the commandment of memory — zakhor — is itself a form of service. To write this Great Book is to accomplish, on the scale of a family, the gesture that the Jewish people accomplish collectively each year at Passover in telling the story of the Exodus: to name those who have been, so that their descendants know where they come from and who they are.

David Obadia (20th century, exact dates unknown) — in Hebrew דוד עובדיה — is the best-documented figure in the lineage. Born in Sefrou (Morocco), he served there as a dayan (rabbinical judge) and then as president of the rabbinical court, before being called to Fès and Marrakech. After Morocco's independence, he served as a Jewish delegate to the Moroccan Parliament and held the position of inspector of Hebrew education in the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Settled in Jerusalem, he became vice-president of the Religious Council. His written work is monumental: a five-volume history of the Jewish community of Sefrou, a two-volume history of Fès and its rabbis (Fas vehachémeha, 1980), and the edition of the Kissé Melakhim of Rabbi Raphaël Elbaz (Jerusalem, 1988). He represents, within the lineage, the most accomplished synthesis of rabbinical engagement, communal involvement, and memorial vocation ; ;.

Rabbi Raphaël Moshé Elbaz (1823–1896) — in Hebrew רפאל משה אלבז, known by the acronym Harama — is linked to the Obadia lineage through David Obadia's editorial act. Born and died in Sefrou, he was the chief rabbi of this community during the second half of the nineteenth century, and its dominant intellectual figure. From a family claiming Sephardic origins, he embodied the synthesis between Sephardic heritage and Moroccan rootedness. A liturgical poet and halakhic decisioner, he authored the Kissé Melakhim, a vast historical and eschatological fresco, as well as a collection of liturgical poems (Chir Hadash, printed in Jerusalem in 1935). His Kissé Melakhim, which long remained in manuscript form, was published for the first time in 1988 by David Obadia, an act of loyalty to the master and of restitution to the community of a treasure threatened with oblivion.

Maurice Eisenbeth (1886–1957) is linked to the Obadia lineage as he is to North African Jewry as a whole: he is its great onomastic cartographer. Chief Rabbi of Algiers, he published in 1936 Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord : démographie et onomastique, a work honored with a subsidy from the General Government of Algeria. For the surname Obadia, he records six graphical variants and establishes its presence throughout all regions of French North Africa — Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia — from the Constantinois to the Sahara. His exhaustive work of examining communal nominal lists constitutes the first systematic study of Jewish populations in North Africa, and remains, ninety years after its publication, an irreplaceable practical tool for genealogists and historians.

At the end of this journey, the Obadia lineage reveals a two-tiered architecture. At the first level, a figure documented by name: David Obadia, rabbi, judge, historian and editor, whose seven-volume work constitutes a monument of Moroccan Jewish memory. At the second level, a pan-Maghrebi patronym — ʿOvadyah, "servant of God" — whose diffusion across Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and the Sahara testifies to the vitality of a devotional name transmitted in multiple contexts and superimposed settlement strata, from biblical Antiquity to the upheavals of the twentieth century.

Established history provides us with precise geography — Sefrou, Fès, Marrakech for documented Morocco; Algiers, Constantine, Oran, the Saharan borderlands and Tunis for the broader Maghreb — and a solid onomastic fact: six graphic variants recorded by Maurice Eisenbeth [Eisenbeth, 1936]. It provides us above all with a major figure: David Obadia, who was able to embody at once justice (tsedek), transmitted and amplified talmudic learning, involvement in collective life up to the parliamentary forums of independent Morocco, and the commandment of memory — zakhor — through a literary and editorial work without equivalent in its field.

In editing the Kissé Melakhim of Rabbi Raphaël Elbaz, David Obadia also illustrates the value of kivud rav — respect and fidelity toward the masters of the past. In presiding over the rabbinical courts of Sefrou, Fès and Marrakech, he testifies to a concrete commitment to justice as a lived value, not as abstraction. In accepting parliamentary mandate in independent Morocco, he expresses a conception of involvement in collective life that transcends the boundaries of the Jewish community to embrace the city as a whole.

Among all the values that the Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries, the Obadia lineage expressed best the one that its name designates: fidelity to service — ʿavodah. Not spectacular grandeur, but the constancy of the servant who accomplishes his task over time, who transmits his name and his memory from generation to generation, who survives expulsions, colonial ruptures and independences without denying what he is. The prophet Obadiah, stranger become faithful servant; Eisenbeth, Chief Rabbi who sifted through nominal lists to save from oblivion the names of his coreligionists; David Obadia, who from Jerusalem reconstitutes the history of scattered communities — all say, each in his own way, the same thing: that the service of God is also accomplished in fidelity to one's own, in the transmission of memory, in the refusal to leave a life lived without trace.

The Great Book of the Obadias remains open. Each recovered document, each deciphered colophon, each ketoubbah photographed, each family testimony gathered is capable of enriching this picture. What can be affirmed without reservation is that this name, borne through the centuries and across the seas, continues to say what it has always said: the attachment of a family to the service of the divine, and the will not to let this service fall into oblivion.