The Sebaoun Family

The first named and documented figure of the Sebaoun lineage is neither an anonymous merchant nor craftsman: he is a rabbi, an editor and a merchant established in Salé, a trading port on Morocco's Atlantic coast, in the second third of the seventeenth century. His name is Aharon Sabaoni, and his patronym belongs to the Siboni family — al-Sabʿuni in Arabic — of rabbis settled in Salé, several of whose members would ensure the rabbinical continuity of this city until the end of the century.

The act that renders him visible to history is precise: he is the editor of the Hekhal ha-Kodesh ("The Palace of the Holy") by Rabbi Moshe bar Maimon Elbaz, a work of kabbalistic prayers written in southern Morocco, published in Amsterdam in 1653, to which he adds his own notes. This role as editor-annotator is no minor gesture. In the seventeenth century, editing a kabbalistic book and ensuring its transmission to the Amsterdam presses presupposed both an intellectual mastery of the text, a network of correspondences spanning the Mediterranean, and a conception of knowledge as a common good to be transmitted. Sabaoni belongs to the generation of those Moroccan rabbis who, from Morocco's Atlantic seaboard, wove intellectual bonds with the great Sephardic communities of Amsterdam, Livorno and Constantinople.

To understand what the text he edits represents, one must recall who Moshe Elbaz was. This kabbalist from the region of Taroudant and Akka, in the deep southern Morocco, was a contemporary of Isaac Louria — the Arizal — and his work is part of the movement of mystical renewal that, in the sixteenth century, transformed Jewish spiritual life from Safed to the synagogues of the Maghreb. The Hekhal ha-Kodesh, written in that Moroccan south and carried to the Amsterdam presses, embodies in itself the mobility of Jewish ideas across the Mediterranean: a work born in the mountains of the Souss, published in the Netherlands, annotated by a rabbi of the Moroccan Atlantic coast.

This mobility is not merely geographical. It is also intellectual, and Aharon Sabaoni is one of its agents. In annotating Elbaz's text, he does exactly what the tradition of commentary — at the heart of Jewish practice since the Tannaïm — expects of a learned man: not to let received speech close upon itself, but to enrich it, clarify it, pose to it the questions that the new generation addresses to the one that preceded it. Moroccan kabbalah had developed, with a vigor of its own and distinct from the Safedian school though nourished by it, this practice of practical commentary and piyout, of the liturgical poem sung. Sabaoni inscribes himself fully within it.

It should be noted that his sons Joshua and David also served as rabbis in Salé in the second half of the seventeenth century and left manuscripts of homilies. The Siboni lineage of Salé was thus a rabbinical lineage in the strong sense: a family whose transmission of knowledge and religious authority occurred from father to son, from generation to generation, within the city itself.

A few years after the publication of Hekhal ha-Kodesh, Aharon Sabaoni confronts the most destabilizing crisis that Judaism has known in centuries: the messianic movement of Shabbetaï Tsvi (1626–1676), which between 1665 and 1666 raises intense hopes and massive adherence in nearly all Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world and beyond.

Sabaoni's position is unambiguous: he is one of the resolute opponents of the movement, and he takes as partner in this resistance Yaakov Sasportas himself, born in Oran, then established in Amsterdam, who will become the most vigorous voice of the anti-Shabbatean struggle in Sephardic Judaism. Their correspondence, whose trace subsists in the rabbinic sources of the period, testifies to an active network of rabbis around the Mediterranean who, from Salé to Amsterdam, stood together against the drift that the false messiah's movement represented.

What this stance expresses says something essential about the way Sabaoni conceives of Jewish Law. The appeal of Sabbateanism rested in part on a promise of liberation from the Law—some disciples of Shabbetaï Tsvi would even go so far as to sacralize transgression. For Sabaoni, defender of Hekhal ha-Kodesh, a text of Kabbalistic prayers rigorously inscribed within the framework of halakha, such a perspective was theologically and morally unacceptable. His resistance to Sabbateanism is thus also a defense of the Jewish conception of the Law: Kabbalah is not an exit from halakha but its mystical deepening.

This virtue—fidelity to the Law even when the promise of liberating transgression seduces the masses—is one of the most demanding that the Jewish tradition requires of its authorities. Sabaoni exercised it at a moment when adherence to Sabbateanism was, in many communities, the majority position, and when opposing it demanded a certain form of intellectual courage and moral authority. In this, he stands in the line of great decisors who knew how to say no to what seemed to them to distort transmission.

The city of Salé itself is no neutral setting for this debate. In the seventeenth century, this port city harbors an ancient Jewish community, embedded in Atlantic commercial networks, in connection with the ports of Northern Europe. The rabbis of Salé correspond with those of Amsterdam, Livorno, Hamburg. They are conduits of ideas as much as of goods. That the Siboni-Sabaoni family stands at the heart of this Atlantic rabbinic community says much about the intellectual and spiritual milieu from which the Sebaoun lineage springs.

What strikes one when following the name through registers and centuries is its extraordinary morphological and territorial dispersion. The root al-Sabʿuni — arabicization of the Hebrew root Sibʿon — unfolds into a constellation of forms, each anchored in a precise region of colonial and pre-colonial Maghreb, or in the communities of the Sephardic diaspora.

Onomastic science, a discipline that reconstructs history in the absence of written genealogies, agrees in seeing in all these forms the branches of a single root. Sibony, just as Siboni, is most often a name borne by Jews originating from North Africa; it is a derivative of Sebaoun, a name of uncertain meaning. This very uncertainty is fruitful: it opens the narrative onto several worlds. The Aramaic of the talmudic academies proposes seba — satisfied, replete. Liturgical Hebrew offers Siv'ôn — pigment, color —, from which Siv'ônî — variegated, multicolored. The Moroccan tradition also reads it as an ethnonym: "the native of Lisbon" [Dafina, The Names of the Jews of Morocco]. These readings do not exclude one another: they bear witness to the depth of bilingualism, indeed trilingualism, in which the Jewish culture of the Maghreb was steeped, where the Hebrew of the synagogue, the Aramaic of study, and the Arabic of daily life constantly answered one another [Toledano, The Family Names of the Jews of North Africa, 2003].

The "Lisbonite" hypothesis merits particular attention. It would make the Sebaoun descendants of exiles from the Iberian peninsula, driven from Portugal after the forced conversions of 1497, who came to rebuild their communities in the Maghreb. This memory of Iberian exile, were it to be confirmed, would link the lineage to the vast Sephardic diaspora and to its proper virtue: the stubborn fidelity to the Law of Moses maintained through wandering. One must nonetheless remain cautious, for the reference work on Judeo-Moroccan onomastics precisely ranks these names among those whose etymology remains debated [Laredo, The Names of the Jews of Morocco, 1978].

The onomastic repertories record the Algerian forms of the name in the three great colonial regions: SEBAOUN in the departments of Algiers, Constantine, and Oran; SABOUN and SEBAON in the department of Constantine; SEBAONE and SEBAOUNE in Constantine and Algiers respectively; SEBBOUN and SEBOEN in Oran; SIBON in Constantine; SIBOUN in Oran. This geography draws a major Algerian center in the northeast of the country, around Constantine, with other branches in Oran and the Algiers region. In the west, the Moroccan variants Sibony and Siboni are particularly present in Marrakech, in Salé, and in the great communities of the South [Forebears, Sebaoune / Sibony]. The so-called ethnic form — ending in -i or -î, Arab and Hebrew marker of belonging or origin — appears under the spellings Sebaoni, Seboni, Siboni, and Sibony. This ending reinforces the hypothesis of a name of provenance: "he who comes from such a place." The mobility among all these forms is in itself a figure of the diasporic condition: a single root, several branches, a single tree.

The method that Eisenbeth applied in his 1936 work — exhaustive examination of the nominal lists of all Algerian communes, cross-referencing of surnames with given names, professions, and rabbinical registers — made it possible to map with unprecedented precision the distribution of these families. This undertaking was itself an act of resistance to erasure: the official French statistics of 1931 grossly underestimated the Algerian Israelite populations, with part of the families having answered "Frenchman of origin" without specifying their religious affiliation — a direct consequence of naturalization by the Crémieux decree of 1870. Eisenbeth noted that the endings of patronymic names, the sound of given names, the place of birth, residence, and profession itself could not constitute sufficiently reliable indices to automatically identify Israelite families without risk of error. This methodological caution illustrates a tension inherent to the history of Maghrebi Jewry under colonization: the will to count oneself, to know oneself, to preserve communal memory — and simultaneously, for many families, the aspiration to be distinguished only by their French citizenship.

Since the Algerian home of the name is located mainly in the north-east and west of the country, the history of the Sebaoun of Algeria is intertwined with that of the great Jewish communities of these regions, among the oldest in the Mediterranean basin.

The Jewish presence in Constantine dates back to Roman times, proven by tombstones bearing the inscription Judeus from the first centuries of the common era. A family bearing the name Sebaoun in this city thus inscribes itself in a continuity of nearly two millennia, made up of Berber, Roman, Arab-Muslim and, from 1837, French layers. It was precisely in Constantine that Eisenbeth conducted his first demographic studies, published in 1931 under the title Le Judaïsme Nord-Africain, before expanding his inquiry to all of North Africa. The 1936 work, honored with a subsidy from the Government-General of Algeria, extended this method to the entire French Maghreb.

In doing so, Eisenbeth drew a picture that illuminates the precise milieu in which the Sebaoun families of Constantine evolved: a numerous, close-knit community, yet traversed by deep social inequalities. According to his survey, in 1936, the Chief Rabbi of Algiers estimated that the great majority of families lived in poverty, often several people cramped into a single room. A significant part of economic life was concentrated in a confined neighborhood, whose main artery was the commercial heart. In this context of material narrowness, community solidarity — the confraternities of charity, the mutual aid funds, the care given to the most destitute — was not a luxury but a condition of survival. It embodied tsedaqa, that justice-charity which Jewish tradition places at the summit of its duties, and which the communities of Constantine and Oran exercised with constancy through the generations.

It is not possible, given the state of documentation attached to this lineage, to attribute to a Sebaoun specifically identified such a precise act of charity or such a community function in Constantine or Oran. But it is established that the families of their milieu — artisans, small merchants, cantors, members of relief societies — carried this collective virtue. The Sebaoun of Constantine and Oran were, in all likelihood, of that discreet people who keep a community alive through a thousand anonymous gestures [Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 1994].

The manner in which Eisenbeth himself, Chief Rabbi and scholar, carried the memory of these communities is one of remarkable collective commitment. Issuing from the same North African world he describes, he put his rabbinical authority at the service of rigorous scientific inquiry, devoting years to sifting through nominative lists commune by commune. This gesture — to preserve the number, to preserve the name — expresses the same fundamental value that animates this Great Book: that none be forgotten, that each family have its trace, even anonymous, in the collective archive of Israel.

In Istanbul, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Sebaoun lineage took on an unexpected face: that of a Sephardic rabbi born in the Kuzguncuk quarter, trained at the Rabbinical Academy of Istanbul, who would become the first official Chief Rabbi of the Turkish Republic. His name is Rafael Saban — Saban being the Ottoman and Turkish form of the same root sabʿon —, and his path illustrates brilliantly how a lineage rooted in the Judeo-Mediterranean world was able to traverse the most radical political revolutions without losing either its fidelity to the Law or its capacity for dialogue with the surrounding world.

Rafael David Saban was born in Istanbul in 1877. His father Nesim was a merchant. Trained at the Rabbinical Academy of Istanbul, he climbed the ranks of communal hierarchy with a slowness and rigor that characterize great rabbinical careers. For twenty-three years — roughly from 1930 to 1953 — he presided over the rabbinical court of Turkey, keeping Hebrew law alive through the most troubled years of the twentieth century: the end of the Ottoman Empire, the founding of the Kemalist Republic in 1923, the forced secularization of Turkish institutions. A member of the Istanbul Municipal Council from 1908 to 1925, he was one of the few rabbis to exercise simultaneously a civic function in Ottoman public space and full religious authority within the Jewish community.

In 1953, he was elected Chief Rabbi of Turkey — the first official holder of this office in the Turkish Republic as the Constitution of 1923 had redrawn it. He exercised this office until his death on July 14, 1960, in Istanbul. He was eighty-three years old.

His halakhic approach is revealing of a virtue that the Jewish tradition calls the pesak illuminated: the capacity to respond to new situations through the Law, without renouncing the Law. Faced with the rise of mixed marriages in the Jewish community of Turkey — destabilized by Kemalist modernization, emigration to Israel, and assimilationist pressure —, Saban chose neither rigid condemnation nor abandonment of halakha. He consulted Rav Benzion Uziel, Chief Rabbi of Israel, on the possibility of conversions facilitating the integration of non-Jewish spouses, in order to preserve Jewish households and children raised in the tradition. This correspondence, included in the collection Mishpete Uziel, testifies to a conception of the Law that is both firm in its principles and concerned with its concrete human effects.

He also left a manuscript testimony of his thought: the Midrash Lepirushim, a collection of commentaries and personal reflections on Rashi's commentaries bearing on the Nevi'im and the Kethuvim — the Prophets and the Writings. This precious manuscript, preserved and then transmitted by his grandson the lawyer Rifat Saban to the Museum of the Jews of Turkey in Istanbul, was published in Judeo-Spanish transliteration (Ladino) in Jerusalem in 2015–2016 by the institution Malhe Rabanan. Through this gesture of commentary on commentary — to gloss Rashi, that is, the greatest of the medieval commentators of the Bible and the Talmud —, Saban inscribes himself in the same intellectual posture as Aharon Sabaoni annotating the Hekhal ha-Kodesh three centuries earlier: to receive tradition, not to leave it silent, to address it with the questions of one's own time.

This thread between Salé in the seventeenth century and Istanbul in the twentieth century — one commenting on a book of Atlantic kabbalah, the other glossing the commentaries of Rashi in Ladino — is not a documented filiation. But it reveals a constancy of intellectual and spiritual posture that the name Sebaoun/Saban seems to have carried through the centuries and geographies.

To the west, under the spelling Sibony, the lineage sinks its roots into the communities of Morocco, notably in the medina of Marrakech and the regions of the South, lands of ancient mellahs where Hebrew, Moroccan Arabic dialect, and later French were layered upon one another.

One of the most notable contemporary bearers of this form of the name allows us to glimpse concretely this universe. Daniel Sibony, born on August 22, 1942 in Marrakech, is a French mathematician, philosopher, and psychoanalyst. Born into a Jewish family of the Marrakech medina whose mother tongue was Moroccan Arabic dialect and whose cultural language was biblical Hebrew, he learned French from the age of five. His family emigrated to Paris when he was thirteen. There he defended a doctorate in mathematics in 1967, subsequently became an assistant at the university, then a psychoanalyst from the age of thirty-two. In 1985, he also obtained a doctorate in philosophy. This portrait illuminates the texture of a Moroccan Sibony family: deeply rooted in the Arab city, nourished by the Hebrew text, then open to French modernity and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Among the works of Daniel Sibony is an essay entitled Lectures bibliques, which constitutes one of the most explicit threads connecting this thinker to the tradition from which he springs. In this essay, Sibony approaches the foundational texts of the Hebrew Bible not as a theologian but as a reader inhabited by psychoanalysis and the philosophy of language, seeking in each narrative the deep structures of human experience — violence, desire, identity, the relation to the Other. This movement — to read the Bible with the tools of modernity, and to read modernity in the light of the Bible — is a very Jewish way of bringing times into dialogue, of refusing that the ancient and the new exclude one another.

It is striking to note that this gesture of Daniel Sibony in the twentieth century resembles, at a distance of three centuries, that of Aharon Sabaoni in seventeenth-century Morocco: each poses new questions to an ancient text, one with the categories of Moroccan Kabbalah, the other with those of Lacanian psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. And each does so from the space of Judeo-Moroccan civilization, this civilization of the in-between where Hebrew and Arabic have never truly separated. Between them, the posture of Rafael Saban in Istanbul — glossing Rachi in Ladino from republican Turkey — forms a third point of this triangle of thinker-commentators that the Sebaoun/Saban/Sibony lineage produced across the centuries.

The musical and liturgical heritage constitutes another avenue of transmission of this same lineage. The tradition of piyoutim, these liturgical poems sung, and of zemirot of Shabbat, transmitted from father to son in North African synagogues, belongs to the heart of the identity of these communities. This attachment to sacred song, received from childhood in the synagogue beside the elders, embodies the virtue of transmission — massoret — without which no memory survives exile.

The destiny of the Sebaoun, Saban and Sibony families mirrors that of all Mediterranean Jewry in the twentieth century: that of millennial communities caught in the upheavals of colonization, war and decolonization, then scattered to the four corners of the world.

In Algeria, the Crémieux Decree of 1870 had made the Jews of the Algerian departments French citizens, overturning their status, their language and their horizons. This collective naturalization, unique in Islamic lands, tore families — the Sebaoun of Algiers, Constantine and Oran among them — from their former status as dhimmi to thrust them into republican citizenship, with its promises and its fragilities. Since naturalization, Algerian Jews were no longer counted separately in official statistics, because the decree of October 24, 1870 having incorporated them into the French nation, "any separate classification of these elements could only have appeared, henceforth, as bearing an exclusively confessional or historical character". It was against this statistical erasure — benevolent but blinding — that Eisenbeth worked, so that communities might know their own numbers and their own needs.

The Vichy period brutally revealed the fragility of this integration: the abrogation of the Crémieux Decree in 1940 temporarily plunged these families back into legal exclusion, returning them to the status they had left seventy years earlier. This brutality was not overcome without wounds.

In Morocco, the trajectory was different: the relative protection accorded by Sultan Mohammed V to his Jewish subjects during the Vichy years remains a striking episode, where Jewish memory and Moroccan history converge [Assaraf, Mohammed V et les Juifs du Maroc à l'époque de Vichy, 1997]. Then came the great departures: to France, to Israel, to Canada, beginning in the 1950s and especially after the independences.

In Turkey, the twentieth century was for the Jewish community a trial of another kind: not colonization and decolonization, but Kemalist secularization, which required each religious community — Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Armenian — to redefine its place in public space. It was during this period of transformation that Rafael Saban conducted the essential part of his career, maintaining for twenty-three years the continuity of rabbinical law in a state that no longer recognized its civil authority, and weaving through his municipal functions (1908–1925) a thread of civic presence in the life of the city. This double commitment — rabbinical and civic — is a form of involvement in collective life that Jewish tradition honors: tikkun olam, the participation in the repair of the world through action in the city of men.

The Sibony of Morocco, the Sebaoun of Algeria and the Saban of Turkey then took, each in their own time, the path of exile or aliyah, carrying their names, their multiple spellings and their liturgical traditions. Daniel Sibony himself embodies this itinerary: born in Marrakech in 1942, established in Paris from the age of thirteen, he made this passage between two worlds the very material of his thought, notably in his writings on identity, cultural in-betweenness and Judeo-Arab relations. These departures were not merely ruptures; they were also acts of fidelity. To carry the name, to maintain the synagogue, to transmit the chant and the Law in a new country, is to refuse that exile have the final word [Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, 1979].

Aharon Sabaoni (active towards the second third of the seventeenth century, exact dates unknown) — His name, Aharon ha-Sibʿoni (אהרן הסבעוני) in Hebrew, is the Hebraicized adjectival form of the stem al-Sabʿuni, meaning "he of the Sibʿon lineage". Rabbi, editor and merchant established in Salé (Morocco), he belongs to the rabbinical family Siboni of that city. He is the editor of Hekhal ha-Kodesh by Moshe Elbaz, published in Amsterdam in 1653, to which he adds his own annotations. Partner of Yaakov Sasportas in the struggle against the Sabbatean movement, he constitutes the first named and documented figure of the Sebaoun lineage in Jewish intellectual history. His sons Joshua and David succeed him as rabbis in Salé, leaving behind manuscripts of homilies.

Moshe bar Maimon Elbaz (active sixteenth century, † towards the beginning of the seventeenth century) — Kabbalist from the region of Taroudant and Akka in southern Morocco, contemporary of Isaac Louria (the Arizal). Author of Hekhal ha-Kodesh ("The Palace of the Holy"), written in southern Morocco and published in Amsterdam in 1653 through the editorial work of Aharon Sabaoni, with a theological introduction by Yaakov Sasportas on the doctrine of the Sefirot. This foundational text of Moroccan Kabbalah is the basis upon which the documented intellectual trace of the Sebaoun lineage was established. His work connects southern Morocco to the most vital currents of sixteenth-century Mediterranean Jewish thought.

Yaakov Sasportas (c. 1610–1698) — Rabbi and kabbalist born in Oran (Algeria), major figure of seventeenth-century Sephardic Judaism. He is the theological introducer of the Amsterdam edition of Hekhal ha-Kodesh in 1653, and the active correspondent of Aharon Sabaoni in the anti-Sabbatean struggle. Although he does not bear the Sebaoun name, his presence is indispensable to this account: it is through his editorial work and his correspondence with Sabaoni that the documented link between Moroccan Kabbalah and the Sebaoun lineage could be established. Born in Oran — one of the cities where the Sebaoun stem is precisely attested in Algerian records — he embodies the same Judeo-Atlantic civilization from which the Siboni family of Salé originated.

Rafael David Saban (1877–1960) — Born in Istanbul (Kuzguncuk district), whose name Saban is the Ottoman and Turkish form of the stem Sabʿon. Trained at the Rabbinical Academy of Istanbul, he presides over the rabbinical court of Turkey for twenty-three years before being elected, in 1953, first official Chief Rabbi of the Turkish Republic. Member of Istanbul's Municipal Council from 1908 to 1925, he is the author of Midrash Lepirushim, a manuscript of commentaries on the commentaries of Rashi concerning the Prophets and the Writings, written partly in Ladino, published in Jerusalem in 2015–2016. His consultation with Rav Benzion Uziel on mixed marriages testifies to a halakha mindful of human realities. He dies in Istanbul on July 14, 1960.

Daniel Sibony (born August 22, 1942 in Marrakech) — Mathematician, philosopher and French psychoanalyst. Born into a Jewish family of the medina of Marrakech whose mother tongue was Moroccan dialectal Arabic and whose cultural language was Biblical Hebrew, he learns French at five years old, goes to Paris at thirteen, defends a doctorate in mathematics there in 1967, then a doctorate in philosophy in 1985, and becomes a psychoanalyst at thirty-two. Author of some thirty works combining psychoanalysis, philosophy of language and readings of Hebrew texts, including Biblical Readings, Racism, an Identity Hatred and Perversion. Contemporary bearer of the Sibony spelling, he represents the Moroccan branch of the Sebaoun stem and illustrates the continuity between the Hebrew of the medina and the philosophical thought of the French university.

Maurice Eisenbeth (1886–1957) — Chief Rabbi of Algiers, author of The Jews of North Africa: Demography and Onomastics (Algiers, 1936), the first systematic study of North African Jewish populations founded on exhaustive examination of nominal lists from all Algerian communes and rabbinical registers. He had previously published North African Judaism (Constantine, 1931), a pioneering study of the community of the Constantine department. His work constitutes the principal documentary source enabling the mapping of the presence and distribution of Sebaoun families across colonial Maghreb. His approach — combining rabbinical authority with statistical rigor — is in itself an expression of the Jewish relationship to knowledge as an act of Memory.

Of all the virtues that Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries, the one that the Sebaoun lineage will have, above all, expressed most fully is now nameable with precision, because the sources document it at three distinct epochs and in three distant places: it is the fidelity of commentary, that virtue which consists in receiving a text, a tradition, a word — and not letting it close upon itself, but reopening it, glossing it, extending it toward territories that the previous generation had not yet explored.

This virtue manifests itself at three documented extremities of the lineage. In Salé, in the mid-seventeenth century, Aharon Sabaoni edits the Hekhal ha-Kodesh, adds his annotations to it, and resists Sabbateanism alongside Sasportas — defending not only the Law but the very conception of what a sacred text demands of its readers: fidelity, not messianic enthusiasm. In Istanbul, in the twentieth century, Rafael Saban glosses Rachi in Ladino from the capital of a secular Republic, keeps alive the rabbinical court for twenty-three years, and consults Rav Uziel so that halakha may respond to the challenges of a world that has changed without the Law needing to capitulate. In Paris, heir to the medina of Marrakech, Daniel Sibony reads the Torah with the tools of psychoanalysis and philosophy, offering in his Biblical Readings a rereading of the founding text that says something that previous centuries had not yet said in this way.

Between them, the Sebaoun of Constantine, Oran and Algiers whom Eisenbeth's registers have silently counted, these families of artisans and small merchants who nonetheless maintained the synagogue, the chant, tsedaqa and the transmission of the text. Their humility — this absence of an isolated brilliant figure — is itself a virtue, so much does it remind us that the essence of the Memory of Israel is borne by ordinary households more than by scholars alone.

This name that hesitates between Aramaic, the Hebrew of colors and the Arabic of Lisbon or satisfaction, which is said Sabaoni in Salé, Sebaoun in Constantine, Saban in Istanbul and Sibony in Marrakech, is in itself a lesson: the unity of a people rests not on the uniformity of its spelling but on the constancy of its Memory. In maintaining, from the medina to the mellah, from the ghetto of Constantine to Parisian or Israeli exile, the transmission of text, song and Law, the bearers of this name have accomplished, without making history of it, the most exacting commandment: zakhor, remember. And if the Sebaoun lineage were to be summed up in a single virtue, it would be this one: commentary as fidelity, the capacity never to leave the received text without the living question of the generation that reads it.