The Ouaki Family

Every Judeo-Maghrebi patronym is a condensed history. It encloses, within a few syllables, a geography, a language, sometimes a trade, often a virtue. The name Ouaki, and its more complete variant Ouakil, is traced by onomasticians to the Arabic root w-q-y, from which derives the participle wâqî: "one who preserves, who protects, who keeps watch," and hence, in its religious sense, "one who fears God" [Les noms de famille des Juifs d'Afrique du Nord et leur origine — Dafina]. This interpretation fits within the well-attested logic of piety surnames that Jewish communities of North Africa readily adopted from the Arabic-speaking world around them.

A philological nuance must nonetheless be introduced here. The form Ouakil may equally refer to the Arabic wakîl, "the mandatary, the representative, the steward" — a term that designated, in Maghrebi societies, the person entrusted with managing affairs or representing others, including before the authorities. This dual possible etymology — wâqî (the pious) and wakîl (the representative) — is not a contradiction but a richness: it recalls that the transmission of names occurred orally, across centuries in which spelling fluctuated according to scribes and dialects. The Hebrew and Arabic components of Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic precisely produced this kind of interweaving, where a single sound may conceal multiple Memories [Bar-Asher, 1992].

The shift from Judeo-Arabic vocalism to French — Ouaki, Ouakil — results from the administrative transcription carried out during the colonial era, notably in Algeria following the décret Crémieux of 1870, and subsequently in the Tunisian and Moroccan protectorates. French-speaking scribes fixed, in an approximate Latin orthography, names that had until then lived in the fluidity of oral tradition and Hebrew script. The variant Waki, stripped of the initial diphthong, reflects a simplification that occurred through contact with other writing systems. On these mechanisms of linguistic fixation, the work of Joshua Blau on Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic provides a rigorous analytical framework [Blau, 1999], as does that of Haggai Ben-Shammai on the emergence of Judeo-Arabic as a literary language [Ben-Shammai, 2004].

Whether the name signifies "the pious" or "the mandatary," it designates in both cases a man of trust: one who fears God and one in whom others place their confidence are, in the communal imagination, one and the same figure. The reference work by Abraham Laredo on the names of the Jews of Morocco situates this type of patronym within the great family of virtue and function names that structure Séfarade and Maghrebi onomastics [Abraham I. Laredo, Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc].

To understand a family whose very name is Arabic and whose faith is Jewish, one must picture the civilization that brought it into being: that of Judaism in the lands of Islam. Since the conquests of the seventh century, the Jewish communities of the southern Mediterranean rim have lived in a world where Arabic became their language of everyday life — from domestic prayer to commerce — without ever ceasing to be also the language of the surrounding Muslim religious learning. It is from this symbiosis that Judeo-Arabic was born: a language in its own right, written in Hebrew characters, in which treasures of philosophical, legal and poetic literature were composed [Ben-Shammai, 2004].

The documents of the Cairo Genizah, unearthed from a room in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fostat, have revealed the extraordinary density of this Mediterranean Jewish life. Through the thousands of commercial letters, contracts and legal deeds assembled and analyzed by S. D. Goitein, one discovers a mobile mercantile society, woven of ties between Egypt, the Maghreb, Sicily and Andalusia [Goitein, 1993]. Within this network, the Jews of the Maghreb — collectively designated as the Maghâriba — occupied an eminent place, moving between Kairouan, Fès, Tlemcen and Fostat. A Maghrebi lineage such as the Ouaki, whatever the uncertainties surrounding its precise origins, necessarily belongs to this horizon of mobility and exchange.

The history of the Jews of Egypt, from the Arab conquest to the Ottoman invasion, as retraced by the scholar Qâsim ʿAbduh Qâsim, shows how these communities were able to endure and reconstitute themselves across the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk dynasties [قاسم عبده قاسم, اليهود في مصر منذ الفتح العربي حتى الغزو العثماني]. This long duration is the foundation upon which lineages are deposited: a name is transmitted only where a community persists.

Literary creation was not absent from this life. Liturgical poetry — the piyyutim — sung in the synagogues of the Maghreb constituted the beating heart of communal memory, as demonstrated by the foundational work of Haïm Zafrani on Judeo-Maghrebi liturgical literature [Zafrani, 1970] and by that of Joseph Chetrit on Judeo-Arabic literature in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco [Chetrit, 2007]. A family placed under the sign of the fear of God found in these songs the very expression of its name.

The precise geographical origin of the Ouaki lineage is not documented in the sources that have reached us, and it would be dishonest to establish it with certainty. We must reason here from indirect evidence, clearly indicating the conjectural nature of our proposals.

The morphology of the name, purely Arabic and devoid of any apparent Berber, Hispanic, or Hebraic element, points toward a deeply Arabized milieu. The most complete Arabization of Jewish communities is historically observed in the major cities of the interior and eastern coast of the Maghreb — Tunis, Kairouan, Constantine, Alger, Tlemcen — more so than in the Berber-speaking zones of the Atlas. It is therefore possible, without anything establishing it as fact, that the Ouaki lineage had its earliest roots in the Algero-Tunisian space.

The Jewish community of Tlemcen, one of the oldest and most learned in the central Maghreb, offers an example of the type of milieu in which such a name could have taken root: a city of caravan transit, a center of rabbinical scholarship, it both welcomed and produced lineages bearing Arabic names of virtue, as documented by Norbert Bel-Ange [Bel-Ange, 1998]. We put forward this localization as an editorial hypothesis, not as an established fact.

Another hypothesis, equally conjectural, deserves mention. The form Ouakil / Wakîl — "the agent" or "the proxy" — evokes a social function widespread in the communities of the Mashreq as much as the Maghreb. In the Egypt of the Genizah documents, merchants' representatives, the wukalâʾ, played a central role in Mediterranean trade [Goitein, 1993]. It is not impossible that the name, in certain of its branches, derives from a function rather than a virtue, and that these branches have Eastern roots distinct from the Maghrebi branches. In the absence of sources explicitly linking the lineage to a place or a date, we confine ourselves to these hypotheses, duly noted as such.

A virtue name is not neutral: it configures a way of being in the world and is transmitted as a moral program. By bearing the name of one who fears God, the Ouaki lineage inherits a notion that runs through all of Judaism and that the Arabic language has gathered into its own vocabulary of piety.

Yir'at shamayim, the fear of Heaven, is not in Jewish tradition a servile terror but a keen consciousness of the divine presence, a vigilance of the heart. The thinker Emmanuel Levinas showed how this relationship with God can never be reduced to a form of knowledge, but is experienced as an arrival, a "God who comes to mind" without ever allowing himself to be confined there [Levinas, 1982]. The fear inscribed in the name Ouaki belongs to this experience: it is an openness to a transcendence that obliges, not a fear that enslaves.

The very history of the divine notion, as traced by the exegete Thomas Römer in his study of the emergence of the God of Israel, reminds us that the relationship between humanity and Heaven was built slowly, through successive theological transformations [Römer, 2014]. The fear of God carried by the name Ouaki is heir to this long elaboration: it is, as it were, the onomastic sediment of that process.

In Jewish mysticism, this fear becomes act: rites, according to the reading proposed by Charles Mopsik, do not merely honor God — they participate in his very economy, they "make God" in the world [Mopsik, 1993]. A family whose name signifies reverential fear thus finds itself, by its very denomination, associated with this theology of pious action. And when fidelity to God was put to the test — as it so often was throughout the history of Jews in lands of Islam and Christendom — some carried it to the point of martyrdom, a phenomenon whose invention at the common origins of Judaism and Christianity Daniel Boyarin has analyzed [Boyarin, 2004]. The name Ouaki, with no documented martyr attached to it, nonetheless belongs to this spiritual universe in which to fear God is to be prepared to remain faithful to him.

The history of a name, in modern times, is also the history of its graphic metamorphoses. The variants Ouaki, Ouakil, Ouakki, and Waki do not necessarily designate distinct families: they are very often different faces of a single stock, refracted by administrations and migrations.

The form Ouakki, with its consonantal doubling, restores a gemination that is quite real in dialectal Arabic, which French sometimes preserved and sometimes erased. The form Ouakil retains the final -il that draws the name closer to wakîl, while Ouaki has dropped it. The form Waki, finally, corresponds to an Anglophone or Hebraizing transcription, such as one encounters in emigration documents to Israel, France, or the Americas in the twentieth century. These variations belong to the same phenomena of linguistic contact studied by Joshua Blau with regard to Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic [Blau, 1999] and by Moshe Bar-Asher for its Hebrew component in Algeria [Bar-Asher, 1992].

The great exodus of the Jews of North Africa, from the mid-twentieth century onward, scattered Maghrebi lineages toward Israel, France, and Canada. In this movement, names traveled and were sometimes Hebraized or Frenchified. Without a document explicitly linking the Ouaki lineage to a specific migratory wave, it is reasonable to suppose that its bearers followed the common fate of the communities from which they sprang, leaving the Maghreb for new shores. This dispersal is a historically established fact for the whole of North African Judaism; its application to the Ouaki lineage alone remains a plausible inference rather than an archival certainty.

What the contemporary distribution of the variants suggests — without proving it — is the existence of several branches, perhaps originating from different hearths, which converged into a single onomastic identity. The onomastics of J. Toledano, taken up in the registers of family names of the Jews of North Africa, situates precisely this type of name within the Maghrebi ensemble, without assigning it a single geographical origin [Les noms de famille des Juifs d'Afrique du Nord et leur origine — Dafina].

At the close of this journey, the Ouaki lineage remains what it was at the beginning: a name that prays. We have found in the sources neither a founding date, nor a mother city, nor an eponymous ancestor whose story might be told. Yet we have encountered, in the few syllables of this patronym, an entire world: that of Arabic-speaking Judaism of the Maghreb, with its language woven of Hebrew and Arabic, its piety inscribed even in proper names, its merchant networks running from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other.

The name Ouaki — wâqî, "one who fears God," or perhaps wakîl, "the trusted representative" — has yielded us not a chronicle, but a moral identity. It designates the reliable man, one who keeps himself and whom one does not fear to entrust with the keeping of others. Where the archive falls silent, etymology still speaks, and what it says is not nothing: it transmits a virtue as one transmits a patrimony.

This Great Book is therefore an open book. It awaits new manuscripts, new records, new testimonies to inscribe within it the proper names that are still missing — the Ouaki of flesh and history, of whom this volume has been able to sketch only the civilizational matrix and the spiritual blazon. In the meantime, it faithfully sets down what can be set down: that a family carried, across the centuries of Maghrebi Judaism, the beautiful burden of a name that ceaselessly called it back to the fear of Heaven.