The Salmon Family

Jewish presence in Constantine did not begin with French colonization, nor even with the Ottoman conquest. Epitaphs bearing two Latin names with the mention Judeus dating from the first centuries of the common era are attested, witnesses to a Jewish settlement under the Roman period that gives this rootedness a depth that few communities in Europe can claim.

The city, capital of ancient Numidia, became in the Middle Ages one of the great cities of central Maghreb. Jewish communities lived alongside Muslim populations, participating in commerce and craftsmanship, subject to the variable condition of the dhimmi but rarely reduced to insignificance. The Almohad persecutions profoundly disrupted the community; the Hafsid sovereigns eventually occupied Constantine and the condition of the Jews improved there; they lived alongside Muslims and engaged in commerce, in that fragile but real balance that the medieval centuries knew intermittently.

The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 profoundly altered the sociology of North African communities. The megorashim — the "expelled" in Hebrew — brought with them their rituals, their rabbinical learning, their culture and their Judeo-Spanish language. In Constantine as elsewhere, they encountered the toshavim, the indigenous Jews whose tradition was Berber and Arab. The meeting of these two worlds was not always without tension, but it enriched the religious and intellectual life of Maghreb communities with a considerable Iberian contribution. The dynamics of this mixing shaped Constantinois Judaism as it would exist until the twentieth century.

Constantine, at the moment of French conquest in 1837, was a city of modest dimensions but of intense communal life. Its Jewish population occupied a specific quarter and practiced the trades of commerce, textiles, goldsmithing and, for the more educated, medicine and rabbinical law. The synagogue and the heder — the elementary school for Torah instruction — structured the time and space of collective life. It is in this fabric that the Salmon lineage took root, among the families whose surname testified to the veneration of the great royal figures of the Bible.

The permanence of this presence, from the Roman period to colonial modernity, says something essential about the virtue of emouna — the stubborn fidelity to a place, to a community, to a tradition. The Jews of Constantine did not choose the ease of dispersion: they rebuilt their presence, century after century, on the same rock. This constancy in rootedness is, in itself, a form of testimony.

In the fabric of Constantinopoian Jewish life, the name that generations transmit to one another is not an administrative detail: it is a memorial burden, a perpetual wish, an act of piety toward ancestors and toward God. The name Salmon belongs to the vast family of North African Jewish surnames derived from a Hebrew given name of biblical tradition. The process is ancient and well known to onomasticians: a prestigious first name, borne from generation to generation, eventually becomes fixed as a family name, often preceded by the filial particle ben ("son of"), hence the variant Bensalmon. The form Salmon itself is a contraction of Solomon, thus designating "the descendant of Solomon"—a linguistic phenomenon attested in several regions and documented in North African onomastic repertories.

Tradition reports that King Solomon was famous for his sense of justice and the construction of the first Temple in Jerusalem, and that his very name—Shlomo, formed on the root shalom, "peace"—sums up the tone of his reign. In the memory of Israel, Solomon embodies governing wisdom and discerning justice—that of the famous judgment where two women disputed over a child—but also the peace that gave its name to his reign. By perpetuating this name, the Salmon families of the Maghreb inscribed themselves, perhaps unknowingly, in a spiritual genealogy of justice and peace, two of the cardinal pillars of Jewish ethics that the Pirqé Avot place at the foundation of the world's duration.

The patronym unfolds into several graphic forms whose learned memory has preserved the trace. Salmon in its canonical form, Bensalmon with the filial particle, and Cohen-Salmon—the latter associating with the name of Solomon the sacerdotal dignity of the Cohanim, descendants of Aaron. Three forms for one same nucleus: so many branches of a tree whose Hebrew root means peace. Eisenbeth's onomastics took into account principally patronyms, masculine and feminine given names, and professions, which allowed him to distinguish the branches of a same lineage where a superficial reading would have seen only distinct patronyms.

Choosing, transmitting, and preserving the name of Solomon was not a trivial gesture in Maghrebi Jewish society. At a time when Hebrew given names of consequence—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon—constituted the most frequent vocabulary of masculine naming, naming a child Solomon was to place him under the patronage of the wisest king, the builder of the Temple, he to whom God had granted a listening heart (lev shomea) to judge his people. This desire for wisdom and discernment transmitted through the name is itself a value: it speaks to the vocation that parents wish for their children, the quality of soul they hope to see embodied.

The documented existence of the Salmon lineage in North Africa rests first on a monument of Jewish erudition: the onomastic dictionary of Maurice Eisenbeth. Born in 1886 and died in 1957, Eisenbeth was Grand Rabbi of Algiers, and his work The Jews of North Africa: Demography and Onomastics, published in Algiers in 1936, constitutes the first systematic study of Jewish populations in North Africa — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya — founded jointly on colonial censuses, community registers and a methodical examination of surnames [Zakhor Corpus id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. It remains the reference instrument for establishing the existence and settlement of a Maghrebi Jewish family.

The 1936 study follows a first essay by Eisenbeth, North African Judaism. Demographic Studies on the Israelites of the Department of Constantine, published in Constantine in 1931 [Zakhor Corpus id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. This foundational text dealt precisely with the Constantinois — the very region where the Salmon lineage is attested — and it constituted the laboratory from which Eisenbeth subsequently extended his research to all of French North Africa. The 1936 version, honored with a subsidy from the General Government of Algeria, amplifies and consolidates this first work; it is dedicated to Arthur Weisweiller, to whom Eisenbeth offers a "grateful tribute." The undertaking bears the marks of gratitude as much as scientific rigor.

The method used by Eisenbeth for Algeria comprises the complete examination of the nominal lists of inhabitants of all communes in Algeria, which allowed him to determine the most probably exact figure of Israelites residing in Algeria on March 8, 1931 [Zakhor Corpus id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. For doubtful cases, he resorted to supplementary inquiries. One can measure here the scope of the task: to go through commune by commune, list by list, the registers of a vast territory, to extract from them the Jewish names that the colonial administration had ceased to distinguish.

For this is the paradox that Eisenbeth's foreword reveals with remarkable lucidity. The General Government itself acknowledged that it was materially impossible for it to discriminate these demographic elements, because in fact the vast majority of those concerned had not answered the question about Israelites naturalized as French by the decree of 1870, but had answered "yes" to the question "Are you French by origin?" [Zakhor Corpus id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. This fact, apparently administrative, is in reality a fact of civilization: Algerian Jews of the third post-Crémieux generation thought of themselves and lived as fully French.

For the Constantinois in particular, Eisenbeth notes that in the entire Constantina agglomeration, where one of the most numerous Israelite communities in Algeria nonetheless resided, only 653 units answered "Israelite" during the census [Zakhor Corpus id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. This figure, manifestly lower than reality, illustrates how far assimilation had progressed, and how much the reconstitution of Constantine's Jewish presence — of which the Salmon family is part — required a work of nominal archaeology that only a man of Eisenbeth's stature could accomplish.

It is in this corpus that the name Salmon is recorded, with its orthographic variants, and linked to the Jewish communities of Algeria, singularly of the Constantinois. Scholarly posterity has confirmed and extended this work: modern directories of the surnames of Jews in North Africa, notably those of Joseph Toledano, take up and enrich Eisenbeth's nomenclature. Even today, genealogical databases explicitly cite the work The Jews of North Africa (1936) as the source for attesting the surname Salmon.

This chapter sheds light on a discreet but essential virtue: care for knowledge and nominal memory. That a Grand Rabbi should have devoted years to recording, classifying and etymologizing the names of his people is an act of piety as much as erudition — for naming, in the Jewish tradition, is to recognize; and preserving the memory of a name is to preserve the existence of those who bore it. The Salmon lineage owes its historical existence to this rigor.

It must be emphasized the condition in which this work has reached us. The volume belonged to the library of Jean-Luc Monneret, who had it scanned to make it available, before Alain Spenatto prepared it and put it online on the site algerie-ancienne.com [Zakhor Corpus id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. From there, it joined the Zakhor corpus. This chain of transmission makes clear enough that the preservation of a Maghrebi Jewish memory owes nothing to institution and everything to the individual will of a few men concerned to save from oblivion all that can interest the ethnic group constituted by Israelites in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco [Zakhor Corpus id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. In this, Eisenbeth himself embodies zikaron — active remembrance, the act of memory — one of the virtues most deeply rooted in the tradition of Israel.

The year 1870 marks a decisive rupture in the history of all Jews of Algeria, and therefore of the Salmon lineage. In 1870, the Crémieux Decree conferred French citizenship en bloc on the indigenous Jews of the Algerian departments. This transformation in a single stroke of status — from Ottoman or indigenous subject to French citizen — had consequences whose magnitude is only measured with the hindsight of decades.

Francization opened to Constantinois families the doors of the republican school, the liberal professions, the administration and the army. A lineage like that of the Salmons was thus able, in one or two generations, to pass from the shop of the traditional merchant to the benches of the lycée, to the study of law or medicine. This ascent through secular knowledge prolonged, in a new form, the ancient Jewish veneration for study — Torah yielding in part to republican knowledge, without the thread of religious transmission in the home being broken.

The Eisenbeth corpus illuminates this phenomenon in a new and paradoxical light. In the decades following the Decree, Algerian Jews assimilated their French citizenship so profoundly that they ceased, in official censuses, to declare themselves as Jews. The decree of 24 October 1870, in declaring indigenous Israelites of the Algerian departments French citizens, incorporated them ex officio into the nation, from both ethnic and civil points of view, rendering any separate classification affected by an exclusively confessional or historical character. In other words, it was emancipation itself that threatened to dissolve the collective memory of the community into French national memory — and which made Eisenbeth's enterprise all the more necessary.

This francization had its reverse side. It made the Jews of Algeria the privileged target of virulent colonial antisemitism that culminated in the years 1890-1900. Constantine had remained in the years after the First World War an administrative capital and a commercial center, essentially a cloth market and a grain market. Despite a strong demographic surge — Constantine had grown from 65,000 inhabitants in 1911 to 99,600 in 1931 — the city, little modernized, little industrialized, remained very traditionalist, composed of juxtaposed communities but unequally protected. The Salmons of the Constantine region, like their coreligionists, had to learn to combine a sincere French belonging with the persistence of ancient hostility — a lesson in endurance which, in the memory of Israel, resonates with the millennial experience of the stranger forever half-welcomed.

Community life nonetheless continued to organize itself around the synagogue and the institutions of mutual charity. Tsedaka — just charity — was there not a voluntary alms but a duty structuring the social bond. In Jewish tradition, tsedaka does not stem from spontaneous generosity: it is a right that the poor holds over the rich, an obligation of distributive justice. It is this conception of charity not as personal virtue but as a pillar of social order that distinguishes the practice of Judeo-Maghrebi communities from simple almsgiving and makes each participating family, as the Salmons must have been, a link in this community solidarity.

On August 5, 1934, while the director and collaborators of the daily newspaper L'Éclair algérien had for some time been waging an aggressive and hateful campaign against the Jews of Algeria, "responsible for all the country's ills and the sufferings of its Muslim population," the Croix-de-Feu had solid footholds in the city. The persecutions against Jews committed in Germany by Nazi authorities also influenced the rising hatred against the Jewish community. Rumors of massive immigration of German Jews and layoffs of Muslim workers in their favor indeed fueled the antisemitic press. This campaign culminated in anti-Jewish riots that left about ten dead, mostly Jews. Every Jewish family in the city, whatever their name, bore the mourning or terror from it.

Before 1934, violence against the Constantinian Jewish community was increasing even as authorities attempted to minimize the phenomenon. Clashes between far-right activists and Jews had already occurred, foreshadowing the brutality of August. The Jewish community of Constantine, one of the most numerous in Algeria, emerged from those days deeply traumatized. Families who had lived street after street with their Muslim neighbors for generations discovered that French citizenship, acquired sixty-four years earlier, did not guarantee physical safety. The colonial authorities, too slow to intervene, did not emerge with their reputation intact from the episode.

It is significant that these riots occurred precisely at the moment when Eisenbeth was finalizing his great work — a work whose "Statistique de la Population Algérienne" of September 1934 is still cited in the foreword. There is a meaningful coincidence here: the scientific enterprise of Memory unfolds at the very hour when the community whose names it records is struck by violence. The decision to save from oblivion the Jewish surnames of North Africa takes on, in this context, additional significance: to assert, against those who hold hatred, the documented, rooted, irrefutable existence of a secular Jewish presence — the very one that riots would seek to erase.

For the Salmon lineage, as for each Jewish family of Constantine, 1934 represents a fissure in the confidence that six decades of emancipation had built. The collective Memory of Israel knows such fractures: they do not destroy hope but make it harder to hold. One of the most profoundly tested virtues in these moments is precisely the shalom that the name of Salmon carries within it — peace not as naïveté but as obstinate refusal of hatred, as conviction that peaceful neighborliness is possible and that History is wrong when it opposes it.

The Second World War strikes the Jews of Algeria in a specific and particularly cruel manner: it is their own legal country, France, that persecutes them. The Vichy regime abrogates in October 1940 the Crémieux decree, precipitating the Jews of Algeria out of citizenship, excluding them from schools, professions and public life. Become indigenous once more by administrative decision, stripped in a single day of seventy years of belonging, they know humiliation and exclusion before Liberation restores their rights in March 1943.

In this trial, the community of Constantine demonstrates this virtue that tradition names emouna — obstinate fidelity, the capacity to endure in adversity without renouncing either one's identity or one's hope. The private Jewish schools, quickly opened to receive children excluded from public school, become spaces of cultural resistance. The transmission of the Torah and secular knowledge continues under degraded but determined conditions. We do not know precisely which members of the Salmon lineage lived these years in Constantine or whether some had already migrated to Algiers or the metropole — the archival record does not tell us — but every Jewish family of the Constantine region carries in its memory the recollection of this humiliation.

It is notable that the work of Eisenbeth itself — published in 1936 with the blessing of the General Government — takes on under Vichy an ambiguous dimension: to census the Jews, even in order to pay them scientific tribute, meant in another context to supply lists. The history of Memory is also the history of its uses, and the names that the Grand Rabbi had wished to save from oblivion were precisely those that others wished to subject to persecution. This is why the preservation of this rare work — until its digitization and online publication a half-century later — represents a gesture of cultural resistance, modest but real.

History ended, for Algerian Jewry, with independence in 1962. The Algerian War, from 1954 to 1962, had gradually placed the Jews in an untenable position: too profoundly French to remain in an independent Algeria, too profoundly Algerian to sever without tearing the thread of a bi-millennial presence. Nearly all the Jews — several hundreds of thousands of people — left the country in a few months, most for metropolitan France, some for Israel. The Salmon followed this great exodus that closed, in a single generation, more than two millennia of Jewish presence on Algerian soil. The name, dispersed, continued to live in the new diaspora — carried toward other shores like a seed swept along by the wind of History.

This massive and precipitous exodus inscribes itself in the long series of expulsions and uprootings that mark the history of Israel, from the Exodus from Egypt to the expulsion from Spain, from the destruction of the Temple to the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Judaism has elaborated, through these trials, a theology of mourning and hope that does not exclude suffering but refuses resignation. In transmitting their name of peace into exile, the Salmon participated in this long fidelity.

The Cohen-Salmon form captures the attention of the historian of lineages. By joining to the name of Salmon the title of Cohen, it signals that one of the branches of the family claimed membership in the priestly caste, that of the descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses, to whom the Torah entrusted the service of the Temple and the prerogatives of worship. This hypothesis remains conjectural for lack of attested genealogy linking by name a Cohen-Salmon to a specific priestly lineage; but the logic of North African nomenclature, where compound names associating Cohen with a second patronym are frequent and documented, renders it plausible.

The dignity of the Cohanim conferred upon those who bore it a particular ritual role: the priestly blessing (birkat kohanim) pronounced over the assembly, precedence in the reading of the Torah, observance of purity rules specific to them. These prerogatives were not merely honorific: they entailed a responsibility of service toward the community, a life placed under the sign of holiness and availability to the sacred. The virtue at issue here is that of service: the Cohen existing not for himself but for the blessing of the people. This priestly function, inherited from Aaron and transmitted according to the law of male descent, constitutes one of the pillars of the ritual continuity of Israel since the destruction of the Temple — the Cohen no longer sacrifices, but he blesses, and this blessing is equivalent to an act of communal service.

The form Cohen-Salmon also says something about the internal stratification of Maghrebi Jewish families. Nominal identity was constructed in layers: the Cohen marked priestly belonging, the Salmon marked Solomonic descent — wisdom, justice, peace. That these two components united in a single name suggests a family conscious of its titles, concerned with transmitting not only a patronym but a rank and a mission within the community. Genealogical memory, in the Jewish tradition, is not vanity: it is responsibility. To know where one comes from is to know what one owes.

It is significant, in this regard, that Eisenbeth himself was a man of the Church in the fullest sense of the term: Grand Rabbi, that is to say at once spiritual leader, arbiter of questions of halakha and guardian of communal bonds. His onomastic undertaking was also a pastoral act: to enumerate the names was to restore to each family its rank in the memory of Israel, to recall that each patronym was the bearer of its own dignity. In naming the Salmon and the Cohen-Salmon, Eisenbeth restored them to their history.

Thus the Salmon lineage, in the diversity of its branches, may perhaps have conjugated within itself the Solomonic royalty inscribed in its name and the Aaronic priesthood of its Cohen branch: the two great figures of authority and mediation that the tradition of Israel placed at the summit of its spiritual order. Whether this link is historically demonstrated or only suggested by the name, it speaks to the depth of the religious soil from which this family springs.

The preservation and transmission of the memory of North African Jews constitutes one of the most complex undertakings in contemporary historiography. Algerian archives have largely disappeared or become inaccessible after 1962; communal registers were often lost in the haste of departures; family libraries were abandoned on the docks of Algiers port. In this context, each saved document represents a victory against oblivion.

The history of Eisenbeth's book illustrates perfectly this fragility and this resilience. Published in 1936 at the Lycée Printing House in Algiers, distributed to a restricted learned audience, honored by the General Government but quickly out of print, the work disappeared from ordinary distribution channels to survive only in a few private collections. It was Jean-Luc Monneret, author of works on the Gospel and the Qur'an, who preserved a copy in his personal library and made the decision to have it digitized to make it accessible again. Alain Spenatto, from Aurillac, took charge of preparing the digital document and putting it online on the site algerie-ancienne.com. From there, the text joined the Zakhor corpus, where it is now available for genealogical and historical research.

This chain of transmission — from the Chief Rabbi to the bibliophile, from the bibliophile to the passionate student of Algeria, from the passionate student to the memory platform — is in itself a lesson on how the memory of a dispersed community is preserved. None of these actors was a professional archivist in the institutional sense of the term; all were driven by the conviction that allowing this document to disappear would be an irreparable loss. This conviction is, in its principle, a secularized form of the commandment of memory that runs from Torah to Talmud: Zakhor — remember.

For the Salmon lineage, the stakes are direct. Without Eisenbeth's work — without his patient method, without his exhaustive examination of nominal lists, without his decision to survey surnames one after another — the name Salmon would not appear in any identified source. The family would be among the countless Maghrebi lineages that history has erased, not by their non-existence but by the absence of someone to record them. The Chief Rabbi made this gesture: he recorded. And in doing so, he fulfilled one of the deepest virtues of Judaism, the one that tradition designates by the word hesed — kindness, grace, attention to the other — for to take an interest in the name of the other is already to show them that they matter.

The memory of the Salmon lineage is thus doubly constructed: by the name it received and transmitted, and by the learned and benevolent gaze that gathered it. The name speaks to vocation — peace, justice; the gaze speaks to method — rigor, patience, care. Together they form the foundation of this Great Book.

It is fitting, in conclusion of this chapter, to emphasize what this collective effort of preservation says about the collective memory of Israel. Throughout the centuries, the Jewish people developed a culture of memory that is not merely nostalgic but prescriptive: to remember is not a luxury, it is a commandment. Zakhor — remember — is repeated dozens of times in the Torah, concerning Egypt, the Sabbath, Amalek, the Law. This obsession with memory is not pathology: it is an architecture of identity. In gathering the names of Salmon, Eisenbeth, Monneret, Spenatto and the Zakhor teams have all, each in their own way, satisfied this millennial injunction.

Maurice Eisenbeth (1886–1957) — Chief Rabbi of Algiers, born in Tlemcen. Author of Le Judaïsme Nord-Africain. Études démographiques sur les israélites du département de Constantine (Constantine, 1931), then of Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord : démographie et onomastique (Algiers, 1936), the first systematic census of Jewish surnames in the Maghreb based on exhaustive examination of the nominative lists of all municipalities in Algeria. It is in this corpus that the name Salmon is attested and connected to the Jewishness of the Constantine region. Eisenbeth embodies the union of rabbinical learning, scientific rigor, and the duty of zikaron. His work, long confidential, has been digitized and added to the Zakhor corpus.

Jean-Luc Monneret (dates unknown) — French bibliophile and author, whose work focuses on the relations between the Gospel and the Qur'an. He kept in his personal library one of the rare surviving copies of Eisenbeth's onomastic dictionary (1936) and decided to have it digitized to make it accessible to research once again. This gesture of disinterested transmission is part of the long tradition of hesed — attention to the memory of the other — and represents an indispensable link in the chain of transmission that connects Eisenbeth to the Zakhor corpus.

Alain Spenatto (dates unknown) — Passionate about the history of Algeria, settled in Aurillac, founder and manager of the algerie-ancienne.com website. He undertook the digital preparation and online publication of Eisenbeth's work after its digitization by Jean-Luc Monneret. His volunteer work in making rare sources available constitutes an act of collective memory for the benefit of all Jewish lineages in Algeria whose documented existence depends on this corpus. Without him, the path between the printed work of 1936 and the Zakhor corpus would not have been traced.

Note on the bearers of the name Salmon : No individual figure of the Salmon lineage has emerged to date from the sources consulted — nominative registers, civil status records, community archives. The attestation of the Salmon surname in the Constantine region rests on Eisenbeth's work, which lists the name Salmon among the Jewish surnames of the region, without naming specific individuals. The lineage belongs to the vast majority of Maghrebi Jewish families whose collective memory is documented by the name but not by individual biographies — which in no way diminishes the reality of their presence and their life on this land.

At the end of this journey, the Salmon lineage appears to us less through the prominence of individual figures — which the archival record has not preserved — than through the power of a name, the loyalty of a rootedness, and the solidity of a collective destiny. Rooted in the Constantinian region since times that Roman tombstones attest for the community of which it was part, recorded by the patient scholarship of a Grand Rabbi who had already devoted his first essay to this same region, tested by the riots of 1934, humiliated by Vichy, torn from its land by the exodus of 1962, it crossed the centuries as a branch among the branches of the great tree of Israel in North African soil.

This enriched Great Book made it possible to measure with greater precision the debt this lineage owes to Maurice Eisenbeth. It was he who, at the end of an exhaustive examination of all the nominal lists of the communes of Algeria, restored the Salmon to memory. The method — consulting "mainly the surnames, the masculine and feminine given names, the professions" — was at once scientific and human: behind each identified surname, there were generations of families, the dead buried far from Jerusalem, children circumcised in ancient rites, shops opened onto the medinas, prayers whispered at sunset. Eisenbeth perhaps did not know it, but in saving the name, he saved all of this.

The integration into this volume of data relating to the Constantine riots — their political context (the antisemitic press, the Croix-de-Feu, the global crisis and the rise of Nazism), their outbreak in August 1934, their victims mostly Jewish — made it possible to clarify the nature of the ordeal that the Salmon lineage underwent, just as the entire Constantine community did. These events are not an epiphenomenon: they are a demonstration that legal emancipation in 1870 was not enough to guarantee physical safety, and that the trust that sixty years of French belonging had built could be shattered in a few days of violence.

Of all the virtues that Jewish tradition has carried across continents and centuries, it is peace — shalom — that this lineage will have, above all others, best expressed. Not through this or that brilliant deed, but through its very name. For in transmitting from generation to generation the name of Solomon, king of peace and justice, the Salmon made of their surname a perpetual wish: that peace may reign, that justice may be accomplished. In a world where their destiny was so often made of violence suffered — riots, Vichy, exodus — and exile, preserving this name was an act of stubborn hope, the affirmation, against History, that peace remains the vocation of Israel and the promise of its ultimate end.

To this primary virtue is added, in light of all that this book has brought to light, a twin virtue: zikaron, active remembrance, the imperative of memory. For if the Salmon lineage still exists for us, it is because men — Eisenbeth, Monneret, Spenatto, the teams of Zakhor — refused oblivion. This refusal to let a name die, this attention paid to the existence of the other even in the driest administrative lists, is an accomplished form of hesed, that benevolent kindness that Jewish tradition places at the heart of the covenant between people. The Salmon lineage thus joins the collective memory of a people who, from Solomon to our days, has never ceased to pronounce shalom as greeting, as prayer and as horizon — and who has known how, in the darkest hours, to entrust its name to those who would have the patience to read it.