The Tordjman Family

The city of Colomb-Béchar, on the margins of the Oran Sahara, was not an ordinary city at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both a military post and a caravan relay station, a crossroads between the Arab world, the Berber world, and the great desert routes, it offered those who lived there a daily experience of plurality. The Jewish, Arab, and Berber communities coexisted there in a proximity that fostered exchange and cross-learning — a fertile promiscuity that Jules Tordjman was to carry throughout his life as one of his most profound marks of origin.

It was there that Jules Tordjman was born in 1907, in a family of wealthy Jewish merchants whose commerce articulated the circuits of the southern Sahara with the markets of the Oran province. This family establishment in an advanced post of Saharan commerce was not fortuitous: it retraced, in the full twentieth century, the exact geography of the intermediaries that the family name had designated for centuries. The Tordjman of Colomb-Béchar were men of passage — of the passage of goods first, but also, as would become clear, of the passage of languages and cultures.

Jules received a double education in Colomb-Béchar: that of the family synagogue, where liturgical Hebrew marked the passage of time, and that of the French school, where the language of the Republic opened another horizon for him. But it was a third apprenticeship that best reveals his nature. At eighteen, he decided to learn Arabic — a deliberate gesture that went beyond his family's commercial pragmatism to reflect a fraternal curiosity toward the other. He learned the language from his friend Mohammed Ould-Cheikh, whose family was established in the same city, and taught him French in return. This friendship of mutual learning, between a Jew and an Arab in a Saharo-Oran oasis, is one of the best-attested facts of Jules Tordjman's biography. It would bear fruit: in 1936, Ould-Cheikh published Meriem dans les palmes, one of the first Algerian novels in French — a novel that Jules had, in a sense, made possible by giving him access to the language in which he wrote it.

In 1918, the family left Colomb-Béchar for Oran, where Jules became a student at the French Lycée and discovered poetry. He was eleven years old. Oran, a cosmopolitan Mediterranean city, offered him an intellectual milieu that the Saharan post could not have given him. But something of Béchar remained in him: the memory of a border landscape, the sonority of Arabic heard before French, the feeling that languages are windows open onto different and equally precious worlds. Three languages, three registers of beauty, three memories — and one man alone to make them resound together.

This relationship with the foreign — not endured but chosen, cultivated with care unto the sharing of languages — is perhaps the most concrete manifestation of the virtue that the family name had borne for centuries. Judaism has always founded in the memory of Egyptian exile a duty of hospitality and understanding toward the stranger: "For you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Jules Tordjman, in learning Arabic out of friendship at the age of eighteen, lived this injunction in his most ordinary daily life, long before becoming a recognized poet.

The Beginnings: Publishing at the Desert's Edge

While contributing to the family business enterprise, Jules Tordjman devoted his free hours to poetry. In 1928, he published at his own expense his first collection, Larmes et sourires. Publishing poetry in 1928, at twenty-one years old, in a provincial Algerian town, was an act of quiet faith in the power of the written word. Self-publishing concealed nothing behind the prestige of an established publisher: it exposed the name and voice directly to the judgment of his contemporaries. The title itself expressed the tonality of his poetry—neither pure lament nor pure celebration, but the oscillation between the two, that in-between which is precisely the posture of the mediator.

In 1930, he took a further step by publishing Au rythme de mon cœur with the Parisian publishing house La Jeune Académie. This entry into national publishing meant that the voice of the poet from Béchar had crossed the Mediterranean and found, in Parisian literary circles, sufficient reception to justify publication. In those same years, Jules Tordjman held a politico-social column in "Oran matin," under various pseudonyms, and collaborated with journals that brought together writers of all faiths and origins: "Les Annales africaines," "Aguedal," "Simoun," "Mithra." This presence in multiple spaces at once—the Oran newspaper and journals open to broader influences—testified to a refusal of communal isolation and genuine involvement in the collective life of Algerian letters.

Jardins en pente (1938) and the Corymbe Prize

It was in 1938 that Jules Tordjman published Jardins en pente, the collection that earned him the Corymbe Prize and favorable reviews. The title is of evocative sobriety: sloping gardens, that is, spaces of cultivated beauty that are not flat, that demand effort, that from their slope offer a particular view of the world. In a sloping garden, one does not stand as in a plain; one adapts, one seeks one's footing, one learns to valorize the oblique. Whether intentional or not, the image says something about the condition of the Jewish Algerian poet in those years.

The Corymbe Prize was a literary distinction awarded in the French-language literary circles of Algeria between the wars. The recognition it represented was not inconsequential in the context of 1938: at a moment when clouds were gathering over Europe and the status of Algerian Jews was beginning to be questioned by local antisemitic movements, the fact that a Jewish poet from Colomb-Béchar received a literary distinction in the cultural capital of his province represented an assertion of full right to speech, to beauty, to literary knowledge—that capacity which Judaism has always considered a dimension of human honor. There is in this act a humility that is not resignation: that of a man who continues to tend his garden—in slope—when history begins to threaten.

Mobilized, Demobilized, Authorized Representative

In 1939, Jules Tordjman was drafted into the African Light Horse regiment in Mascara, his in-laws' town. The proximity of horses marked him; this military experience, brief but real, was one of the rare instances where he had to occupy a position defined by institution rather than by choice. At demobilization, the situation had been transformed: "Oran matin" had been declared bankrupt, ending the journalistic career he had built over the years.

Thanks to the fact that Vichy's anti-Jewish laws were very little applied in Oran compared to other Algerian cities, Jules Tordjman was able to become the authorized representative of Jacques Sadok, a friend of his father, who ran one of the city's largest colonial product enterprises. This trajectory — from poet to merchant, from journalist to authorized representative — is not a rupture but a continuity of another kind: Jules Tordjman remains, in all these forms, a man of exchanges. The weak application of Vichy's laws in Oran constitutes an important historical nuance; oppression was real but unevenly distributed by location. The Jews of Oran lived through these years in less catastrophic conditions than their coreligionists in Algiers or Constantine, without however being sheltered from legal stigma and institutional humiliation. The Vichy decree abrogated the Crémieux decree in October 1940, depriving Algerian Jews of French citizenship that their families had held since 1870. That some were able to maintain economic activity in Oran cannot erase this legal and moral wound.

Casablanca, 1946: Moroccan Literary Life

In 1946, Jules Tordjman settled in Morocco with his family and opened a branch of their enterprise with Jacques Sadok in Casablanca. This move, initially commercial, would prove a decisive stage in his existence as a poet. In Casablanca, he frequented Émile Amoyal's bookstore, founder of the "Literary and Poetic Friendships," and discovered an environment of unexpected richness: poets and artists of all origins and confessions, Amédée Matougui, Slobodan, Pierre Duret, Hamid Kiran, Armand Rojo Leon. Jules Tordjman actively engaged in the defense of this nascent Moroccan poetry, as Emmanuel Roblès would later note in a 1973 article. He published in journals of an entirely different scale than the Oran organs of his youth: "Cahiers du Sud," "Points et contrepoints," "Marginales," "Mercure de France." He also wrote critical essays on the poetry of Philippe Chabaneix, Alain Bosquet, Marc Alyn, Max-Pol Fouchet.

This active presence in Casablanca, in a plural and cosmopolitan literary milieu, says something essential about the way Jules Tordjman lived his identity. Far from withdrawing into a community defined by confession or origin, he cultivated friendships and debates with writers from all backgrounds, extending in Casablanca what he had begun in Béchar with Ould-Cheikh. It is precisely this openness — not self-erasure, but sustained curiosity toward the other — that care for the other designates in its most concrete formulation.

Living Memory (1954) and the Prizes of the French Academy

In 1954, Jules Tordjman publishes Living Memory, a collection that receives simultaneously the Flammes vives prize and the Juliette de Wils prize from the French Academy. This double academic distinction, awarded to a North African Jewish poet living in Casablanca, constitutes a remarkable event: it signifies that the voice of this child of Béchar had not only crossed the Mediterranean but reached the highest French literary institution. The title — Living Memory — takes on a particular resonance for one who knows Jules Tordjman's path: it is memory that remains awake, that has not been extinguished by exile nor by the Vichy years, a memory that continues to observe the world and transform it into poetic language. There is in this fidelity to the act of writing, maintained through wars and displacements, an echo of the Jewish virtue of zakhor: to remember not out of nostalgia but from conviction that the past has significance for the present.

Space is a Mirror and the Tributes of the Great

In 1961, inspired by Max Jacob whose work had profoundly transformed his own practice, Jules Tordjman publishes Space is a Mirror. The collection elicits laudatory reviews from René Char and Gaston Bachelard — two of the most demanding and respected voices in twentieth-century French poetic thought. That Bachelard, philosopher of material imagination and reverie, should have praised this collection is hardly surprising: Space is a Mirror bears in its very title an interrogation of the relationship between sight and the world, between the subject who perceives and the space that reflects it. For a man born at the edge of the Sahara, space is not a philosophical abstraction; it is the physical and primary reality of existence, that immensity of light and sand which teaches the eye to measure distances otherwise than in Europe.

Space is a Mirror receives the Voronca Prize, a distinction awarded in tribute to Ilarie Voronca, Romanian poet writing in French who died in 1946, whose work combined Surrealism with meditation on exile and the Jewish condition. That Jules Tordjman's collection should have received a prize bearing the name of a European Jewish poet of exile is a biographical coincidence worth noting: two men, two different exiles, the same faith in the power of French to express the intimate.

The Production of the Years 1962–1975

The following years see the succession of two new collections: If I Put Out the Day (Brussels, CELF Editions, 1962) and Between Fire and Word (Paris, Caractères Editions, 1970). This latter title perhaps summarizes better than any other the constitutive tension in Jules Tordjman's poetry: between the violence of the world — fire — and the attempt to answer it through language. For a man whose adult life had passed through the Second World War, Vichy, Algerian independence and settlement in several successive countries, the relation to fire was not metaphorical but lived. Poetic speech, in this context, is not ornament; it is response to urgency.

Jules Tordjman also continued to write critical essays on his contemporaries, contributing to making known poets he admired. This critical dimension of his work testifies to a generous and non-competitive conception of the literary milieu: the act of writing about another poet to defend him and make him known participates in the same ethic as the act of learning Arabic to enter the world of a friend. He published again Plumb Line (Paris, Caractères Editions, 1975), bearing witness to a poetic vitality maintained into advanced age. The title evokes the instrument of measurement and balance, as if poetry were for him a way of constantly verifying the verticality of his own existence, of ensuring that the line stretched between earth and sky remained straight despite everything. He died in Béchar in 1990, in the city that had seen him born, closing a geographical and human journey of rare amplitude.

Morocco: First Attestation of the Surname

Before Jules Tordjman and his Oran generation, the presence of the surname in Morocco constitutes the oldest documented stage of the lineage. The name appears there in the nomenclatures of the great communities under its forms Tourjeman and Tordjman, recorded in the Dafina, the inventory of the names of the Jews of Morocco established by researchers specializing in Sephardic onomastics. The Moroccan settlement is part of the long Jewish presence in this country, which goes back at least to late Antiquity and experienced several successive waves: native Berber-speaking populations, refugees from the Near East, and finally megorashim — the expellees from Spain after 1492.

It is this last wave that Joseph Toledano examines in his reference work on Jewish family names of North Africa. He advances the hypothesis that certain families bearing the surname Tordjman were concentrated in the cities that welcomed the Iberian megorashim, suggesting that the name perhaps traveled with these exiles or was adopted within this Sephardic milieu where mastery of several languages was a daily reality. The argument merits attention without being able to be held as proven: the absence of continuous documents linking a twentieth-century bearer to a medieval dragoman imposes caution. What can be said without risk is that the surname Tordjman is part of the geography of the Sephardic communities of the Maghreb, whether it is of Iberian origin or whether it crystallized there independently from the occupational name.

Algeria and Eisenbeth's Seven Variants

In Algeria, the surname is attested across the entire territory, from eastern Constantia to western Oran and as far as the Saharan communities of the South. It was these data that Maurice Eisenbeth recorded in the onomastic part of his 1936 work, identifying seven graphic variants — Tordjman, Torjman, Tourdjman, Tourdjeman and their phonetic derivatives — whose diversity reflects the regional differences in transcription of the same Arabo-Hebrew original into the Latin spellings of the colonial civil status.

Eisenbeth's approach had a particular virtue: by proceeding to the nominal investigation of all communes in Algeria, he restored a presence that the 1870 naturalization had rendered statistically invisible. The Tordjman families of Sétif, Oran or Béchar no longer appeared as such in State statistics: they were there lost in the general category of the French. It was to this invisibility that Eisenbeth refused to resign himself — in the name of a conviction that the inquirer can read in every line of his method: the memory of a people does not dissolve in a decree, and the care taken in its preservation is in itself a duty.

The Saharan Oases: Dragomans at the End of Caravans

The presence of the surname in the Saharan communities of southern Algeria is not fortuitous. In the oases of this region — Colomb-Béchar, Adrar, Timimoun, Ghardaïa — the Jews served as intermediaries between trans-Saharan caravan commerce and the markets of Mediterranean cities. Their simultaneous knowledge of Arabic, Berber and European commercial languages made them indispensable mediators on routes that brought into contact worlds without a common language. This function went far beyond the simple translation of words: the Saharan dragoman was a trusted broker, an expert in exchange circuits, sometimes a guarantor of good faith between parties who did not know each other. He exercised an economic action in the fullest sense: articulating exchange circuits between worlds which, without these mediators, would have ignored or confronted each other.

The Tordjman family of Colomb-Béchar, in which Jules was born in 1907, was inscribed exactly within this geography. That Jewish merchants bearing this surname had established themselves in a Saharan commercial crossroads rather than in a great Mediterranean city says something about the economic vitality and spirit of commercial adventure that the name carried in its consonants. This is not a coincidence: it is the coherence of a long history.

The Tablets of Kanesh and the Oldest Memory of the Craft

The name Tordjman possesses the rare property of plunging its roots into the most ancient strata of documented Semitic languages. Its root, trgm, is attested in the Akkadian cuneiform tablets of Kültepe-Kanesh (Kayseri, Central Anatolia), at the beginning of the 2nd millennium before the Common Era: the term targummanu designates the interpreter, the mediator of speech between speakers of different languages. This attestation, among the oldest known of the interpreter's profession, situates the function that would give rise to the patronymic within the long duration of Near Eastern civilizations.

The same Semitic root trgm gave rise to the learned term Targum, which designates the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible. The Targum of Onkelos for the Torah and the Targum of Jonathan for the Prophets are monuments of Jewish literature, used today as sources in critical editions of the Hebrew Bible, where the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia refers to them by the abbreviation 𝔗. This etymological kinship is no mere lexical accident: it says that the act of translation is, in Jewish tradition, a sacred act. The meturgeman of the ancient synagogue, who rendered in Aramaic the Hebrew reading of the Torah so that the assembly might understand, exercised a function of dignity recognized by the Talmudic masters themselves. To make divine speech pass from one language to another was an act of tsedek — of distributive justice — that gave each person access to what had hitherto been inaccessible to them.

From the Medieval Dragoman to Molière's Truchement

The journey of the word through European languages is itself revealing. The Arabic turjumân gave the French « truchement » — a term used with this meaning in Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme — and the word « dragoman » designating the interpreter attached to embassies and consulates. For centuries, the figure of the dragoman was central to Mediterranean and Levantine diplomacy. In the Middle Ages, in the Arabophone world as in the great cities of the Islam-Christian interface, most of these translators — tourdjoumân or turǧumān — were Jews, their polyglottism — liturgical Hebrew, vernacular Arabic, Romance languages of merchants — making them natural and sought-after intermediaries.

It should be noted, for the sake of accuracy, that the patronymic is not the exclusive preserve of the Jewish community: it is frequently borne by persons of Jewish faith, but also by Muslims and Christians. It is in its North African Jewish sense that it is most widely documented in onomastic sources.

The condition of dhimmi and spaces of mediation

To understand the social place of Tordjman in long history, one must restore the framework of pre-colonial Maghrebi society, governed by the status of dhimmi, which defined the legal condition of non-Muslims under Islamic domination. This status implied codified subordination, a series of symbolic and practical prohibitions. Charles de Foucauld, in 1883, disguised as a Jew to cross Morocco, experienced it directly.

But this subordination left interstices. The function of interpreter was precisely one of these niches that the status itself made possible, because it required the position of in-betweenness. The dragoman was not a mere translator of words: he was a trusted broker, a negotiator, sometimes an adviser. In the commercial scales and before European consulates, the Jewish dragoman wielded languages but also cultural codes, diplomatic usages, merchant networks. To be the interpreter was to accept inhabiting the frontier, to understand the other without dissolving into him, to serve passage without betraying one's own roots. Jewish tradition, in its insistence on the memory of exile, grounds precisely this duty of understanding toward the stranger; the Tordjman, through their very trade, lived this injunction in the daily business of their affairs.

The Crémieux decree, Vichy and the stigma

The Crémieux decree of October 24, 1870 had declared French citizens the native Israelites of the departments of Algeria. Civic emancipation was real and irrevocable — and its practical effects on identity memory were ambiguous, since they erased Jews from statistics by absorbing them into the mass of the French. It was this invisibility that Eisenbeth refused, by stripping commune by commune the nominal lists of Algeria. Colonial authorities had themselves recognized that it was "materially impossible to discriminate these demographic elements" ; Eisenbeth did the work that official statisticians had renounced doing.

The Vichy regime abrogated this decree in October 1940, depriving Algerian Jews of their French citizenship. The Tordjman families, like all Jewish families in Algeria, were subjected to anti-Jewish laws: exclusion from public office, liberal professions, educational establishments, limitation of economic rights. The fact that Jules Tordjman crossed this period in Oran, where the laws were applied with less rigor than elsewhere, constitutes a real historical nuance without erasing the juridical and moral wound. It would be hagiographic to claim that all Tordjman families crossed these years as heroes: the history of Jews in Algeria under Vichy is a history of survival, of ordinary resistance and imposed compromises.

The exodus of 1962 and contemporary diaspora

The independences of Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, then that of Algeria in 1962, provoked a massive exodus toward France, Israel, Canada and other countries. Families rooted for centuries in Constantinois, Oranie or the Sahara reconstituted their homes in diaspora metropolises, carrying with them their name and its memory. For the Tordjman of Algeria, the departure of 1962 was often the final act of a presence spanning millennia on soil that colonial law had made French and that the national movement would render foreign. This migration was not merely a geographical displacement: it was also a cultural translation, a new mediation between a Maghrebi world and a European or Israeli modernity. The capacity to cross frontiers without losing oneself, which the name had designated for centuries, was, in the difficult years of exile and reconstruction, a real resource.

It is today in France that the patronym enjoys its strongest European visibility. The seven variants recorded by Eisenbeth tended to crystallize around the forms Tordjman and Tourdjman, now transmitted in stable fashion. The Israeli diaspora also bears the name, in its Hebraicized forms or preserved as such. In Israel, where the word turgeman still designates the interpreter in everyday language, the Tordjman from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia find themselves etymologically at home in their own patronym — perhaps for the first time in centuries.

Jules Tordjman (1907–1990) — Born in Béchar (province of Oran, Algeria) in a family of wealthy Jewish merchants, died in Béchar in 1990 after a literary life that took him from Oran to Casablanca, from Paris to Rodez. Sole bearer of the name whose work is documented in sources. He published Larmes et sourires (1928), Au rythme de mon cœur (La Jeune Académie, Paris, 1930), Jardins en pente (Corymbe, 1938, Corymbe Prize), Mémoire vive (1954, Flammes vives Prize and Juliette de Wils Prize of the Académie française), L'Espace est un miroir (1961, Voronca Prize, with critiques by René Char and Gaston Bachelard), Si j'éteignais le jour (1962), Entre feu et parole (1970) and Fil à plomb (1975). Journalist at "Oran matin", contributor to "Cahiers du Sud" and "Mercure de France", advocate of emerging Moroccan poetry in Casablanca, he embodies in the lineage the vocation of mediator between languages, cultures and continents.

Maurice Eisenbeth (1886–1957) — Chief Rabbi of Algiers and historian of Jewish communities in North Africa. Author of Le Judaïsme Nord-Africain. Études démographiques sur les israélites du département de Constantine (Constantine, 1931) and Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord : Démographie et Onomastique (Algiers, 1936), a work honored with a subsidy from the General Government of Algeria and constitutive of the first systematic study of North African Jewish populations. His exhaustive examination of the nominal lists of all Algerian communes enabled him to identify seven graphic variants of the surname Tordjman. Although he was not a bearer of the name, his work constitutes the principal primary source for documentation on the Tordjman families of Algeria in the twentieth century.

Mohammed Ould-Cheikh (dates unknown) — Algerian writer in French, childhood and youth friend of Jules Tordjman in Colomb-Béchar. It was from him that Jules Tordjman learned Arabic; in return, Ould-Cheikh learned French. This friendship of mutual learning, between a Jew and an Arab in a Saharan-Oranais oasis, resulted in 1936 in Meriem dans les palmes, one of the first Algerian novels in French. Although Ould-Cheikh was not a bearer of the name Tordjman, his friendship with Jules is one of the best-attested facts of the poet's biography and illustrates, in the concrete of a personal relationship, the intercultural vocation that the family name had carried for centuries.

Joseph Toledano (dates not established with precision) — Genealogist and historian of the Jews of North Africa, author of Les noms de famille juifs d'Afrique du Nord, des origines à nos jours, a reference work that explores the Iberian track of certain Maghrebi surnames and proposes, for the surname Tordjman, the hypothesis of a link with communities stemming from the expulsion of 1492. His inquiry draws on ancient sources, including the so-called Tolédano list, which records common names in Morocco from the sixteenth century onward. His approach, which starts from migratory flows to descend toward individuals, is complementary to that of Eisenbeth, which is statistical, and together with it constitutes the bibliographic foundation of any inquiry into the Tordjman lineage.

The name Tordjman traverses the millennia like a thread connecting the cuneiform tablets of ancient Anatolia to the community registers of colonial Maghreb, and from there to the families of the contemporary diaspora. Its clear meaning — the translator, the interpreter, the intermediary — makes it one of the most eloquent surnames in North African Jewish onomastics. It speaks to a function, and through it a condition: that of a people settled between languages, natural mediator of words and exchanges.

The inquiry has shown how important it is to distinguish what the archive establishes from what tradition transmits. The etymology is solidly attested, tracing back to the Akkadian tablets of Kanesh and the meturgemanim of ancient synagogues. The geographic dispersion and graphic variants are documented by Eisenbeth in his 1936 work. The Spanish lead, advanced by Toledano, remains probable without being proven for each lineage. As for the individual link between a given contemporary bearer and a given medieval dragoman, it most often belongs to memory rather than continuous proof.

The most precious contribution of this revision — enriched by the biographical note on Humazur — is the complete figure of Jules Tordjman, poet of Colomb-Béchar whose collections from 1928 to 1975 comprise one of the richest and most overlooked poetic works in French literature of North Africa. Larmes et sourires (1928) and Jardins en pente (1938, Corymbe Prize) constitute the first documented milestones; Mémoire vive (1954) with its two academic prizes, L'Espace est un miroir (1961) praised by René Char and Gaston Bachelard, Entre feu et parole (1970) and Fil à plomb (1975) extend this voice across nearly half a century. In learning Arabic out of love for his friend Mohammed Ould-Cheikh, in publishing French poetry on the edge of the Sahara, in defending nascent Moroccan poetry in Casablanca in pluriconfessional circles, Jules Tordjman did not merely carry his name: he lived it, embodied it, poeticized it.

The shadows in this history — the condition of dhimmi, the Vichy years, the trauma of exile — are part of the honesty of the narrative; they do not fade behind the prestige of the name.

Among all the values that Judaism has carried through the centuries, the one that the Tordjman lineage best embodied is the value of passage — that capacity, forged in centuries of life between languages and peoples, to serve as a bridge between worlds that without this bridge would ignore or confront one another. In its most human formulation, this value is not conceived in abstract terms; it is lived in the gesture of Jules Tordjman learning Arabic at eighteen, in Eisenbeth's decision to sift through municipality by municipality the nominative lists of Algeria so that no one would be forgotten, in the poems offered to the French language by a child of the Oran desert who received the praise of Bachelard and René Char, in the friendship between a Jew of Béchar and an Arab of Béchar who exchanged their languages before exchanging their works. Judaism has always known that the frontier between peoples can be a place of violence or a place of encounter; it has valued, in its textual tradition as in its daily practices, those who make the frontier a place of dialogue. The meturgeman of the ancient synagogue, the dragoman of Mediterranean consulates, the Saharan merchant, the poet who writes in French on the edge of the desert, the emigrant who reconstitutes his home in a new language: all embody, in their own way, this same fundamental virtue — the care taken in the passage of speech, the conviction that understanding the other is an act both ethical and sacred.

Perhaps this is the ultimate lesson of the name Tordjman: that translation, in the broadest sense, is a form of justice — tsedek — because it gives everyone access to what was foreign to them, and builds, in the modesty of daily work, the conditions for peace among men.