The Zabali Family

The most solid foundation concerning the Zabali lineage lies in the analysis of its name. Abraham Isaac Laredo, in his magisterial work devoted to the onomastics of the Jews of Morocco, classifies Zabali and its related forms among the patronyms of toponymic origin derived from the Arabic jebli, "highlander" [Laredo, Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, 1978]. The Semitic root j-b-l — found in the Hebrew gebul (border, boundary) and in the Arabic jebel (mountain) — immediately inscribes this name within the register of relief and territorial limits.

The variation between Jebli, Djebali, Zabali, and Zebali reflects the multiple transcriptions to which these names were subjected. The shift from the Arabic consonant jîm to a "z" or "dj" in Latin spellings results from the habits of Spanish, French, and Portuguese scribes who recorded these patronyms according to their own ear, without any fixed standard. According to Joseph Toledano, the spelling of North African Jewish names was never stabilized before colonial civil registration, so that a single family stock could appear under several graphic forms depending on the city, the period, and the author of the document [Toledano, Une histoire de familles, 1999].

The onomastic process itself is perfectly documented across the Maghreb as a whole. Paul Sebag, studying the names of the Jews of Tunisia, demonstrated how patronyms constructed on an adjective of origin — the relational "X-i," derived from a place name — constituted a major category of Judeo-Maghrebi names, designating the individual by their real or supposed provenance [Sebag, Les noms des Juifs de Tunisie, 2002]. The name Zabali belongs without ambiguity to this family of formations: it is not a trade name, nor a name of devotion, nor a physical nickname, but indeed a geographical identity marker, that of the highlander.

It must be emphasized that this meaning is by no means incidental. In traditional Morocco, the distinction between people of the plains (Ahl el-Wta) and people of the mountains (Ahl el-Jebel) structured social representations, alliances, and patterns of movement. To bear the name of the highlander was to be perceived, within the urban mellah, as the heir to a rural world — harsh and pious, at once close to and distinct from Sephardic urban culture. This duality runs through the entire History of the lineage.

To understand the Zabali lineage, one must restore the world that gave rise to its name: that of the Jewish communities of Morocco's mountainous regions. Contrary to a persistent image that would reduce Moroccan Judaism to the great imperial cities, a significant portion of the Jewish population lived scattered across the mountain ranges — whether in the Jbala country to the north, between Tétouan and Chefchaouen, or in the valleys of the High and Anti-Atlas to the south.

According to Shlomo Deshen, pre-colonial Moroccan Jewish society was deeply shaped by this territorial diffusion, with multiple small communities living in direct contact with Berber and Arabic-speaking tribes, often under ties of protection (sekhkha or local dhimma) forged with Muslim chiefs and notables of the mountains [Deshen, Les Gens du Mellah, 1991]. These mountain Jews practiced trades indispensable to the rural economy: blacksmiths, goldsmiths, peddlers, tanners, itinerant merchants linking the weekly souks. Their mobility was the condition of their survival and the very origin of surnames such as Zabali.

The history of relations between Jews and Muslims in these regions was shaped by daily proximity as much as by vulnerability. Mohammed Kenbib has analyzed how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these peripheral communities were particularly exposed to upheaval, exactions, and the insecurities of the periods of anarchy preceding the protectorate, while benefiting, in ordinary times, from longstanding local solidarities [Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 1859-1948, 1994]. A family such as the Zabali, if their name speaks true, will have known this mountain existence: devout, mobile, on the threshold of the tribal world and the Jewish communal world.

The connection between these highland Jews and popular sanctity deserves to be noted. Jewish Morocco is the land of hiloulot, those pilgrimages to the tombs of saints (tsaddiqim) scattered even into the most remote valleys of the Atlas. According to scholarship devoted to Moroccan pilgrimages, many of these venerated sanctuaries are found precisely in mountainous or rural sites, bearing witness to the antiquity and vitality of Jewish life in the countryside and mountain ranges [MoroccanJews.org, Pèlerinages au Maroc, 2024]. The mountain was therefore not merely a place of economic constraint: it was also a sacred space, woven through with religious Memory.

The patronym Zabali, as the name of the "mountain-dweller," takes on its full meaning only in the movement that leads its bearers out of the mountain. A name of geographical origin becomes fixed, in fact, only at the moment the family leaves the place that named it: as long as one remains in the mountains, one is not "the mountain-dweller." It is in the plain, in the city, that one becomes el-jebli, the one who comes from above.

This dynamic of descent toward urban centers is well attested throughout Moroccan Judaism. Robert Assaraf described the long movement of concentration of Jews toward the great cities — Fès, Meknès, Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech — over the course of the 19th and especially the 20th century, driven by economic transformations, rural insecurity, and the pull of urban opportunities [Assaraf, Une certaine histoire des Juifs du Maroc, 2005]. It is likely that bearers of the name Zabali participated in this internal exodus, bringing into the urban mellahs the mark of their mountain origins inscribed in their very patronym.

In the north, the region of Tétouan constitutes a natural pole of attraction for Jews who came down from the mountains of the Jbala country. Sarah Leibovici, in her chronicle of the Jews of Tétouan, documented the richness of this northern Sephardic community, its institutions, its families, and its connections with the mountainous hinterland and with the other shores of the Mediterranean [Leibovici, Chronique des Juifs de Tétouan, 1984]. A family that descended from the heights toward Tétouan would there have encountered the culture of hakitía, that Judeo-Spanish of northern Morocco, and would have gradually merged into urban Sephardic society, while preserving, through its name, the trace of its provenance.

This hypothesis of an ascendant trajectory — from the mountain to the city, from the rural world to the world of letters — remains, for the Zabali lineage specifically, in the realm of the probable rather than the documented. We put it forward as a plausible reconstruction, grounded in the patterns that research has established for Moroccan Judaism as a whole, and not as a fact attested by any particular document.

A lineage is transmitted less through blood than through language, rites, and stories. The Zabali, as mountaineers turned city-dwellers, would have stood at the crossroads of two cultural worlds within Moroccan Judaism: the Arabic-speaking world of the interior communities, and the Spanish-speaking world of the Sephardim of the north.

Moroccan Judaism produced a remarkably rich Judeo-Arabic literature — poetry, songs (qsidas), commentaries, translations of the sacred corpus. Joseph Chetrit has shown how profoundly this creation, often oral and popular, expressed the lived experience of the communities, including those of the rural and mountainous regions, weaving together liturgical Hebrew and the dialectal Arabic of everyday life [Chetrit, Judeo-Arabic Literature, 2007]. A family of mountain origin would have been a bearer of this Judeo-Arabic culture, made of devotion, proverbs, and melodies passed down from generation to generation.

It is here that family memory and the archive speak to each other — or seek each other out. The oral tradition of Moroccan families readily preserves the memory of an origin, a trade, a patron saint, or a village from which one is said to descend. For a name like Zabali, transmitted memory and scholarly etymology converge: both point to the mountain as the cradle. This convergence belongs to the realm of intersection, where the family narrative ("we come from the mountains") and onomastic analysis (Zabali = jebli = mountaineer) confirm each other, without either being strictly reducible to the other.

One must nevertheless maintain due caution: a name of origin may, over the centuries, become detached from its meaning. According to Toledano, it sometimes happens that a toponymic patronym survives long after the family has lost any concrete link to the place of origin, becoming a pure identity inheritance whose original meaning is sometimes no longer known [Toledano, Une histoire de familles, 1999]. The name Zabali, today, is thus at once a memory of the mountain and a sign of fidelity to a lineage, independent of any actual residence in the highlands.

The twentieth century upended, and then largely dismantled, the world that had produced and carried the name Zabali. The French protectorate (1912), the Second World War, the creation of the State of Israel (1948), and Moroccan independence (1956) transformed, within a few decades, an ancient and rooted community into a diaspora scattered across Israel, France, Canada, Spain, and Latin America.

The Vichy episode was in this regard a decisive and paradoxical ordeal. Robert Assaraf has shown how, under the Vichy regime, the Jews of Morocco were struck by antisemitic exclusionary legislation, while benefiting, to a certain extent, from Sultan Mohammed V's restraint toward the most infamous measures targeting his Jewish subjects [Assaraf, Mohammed V et les Juifs du Maroc à l'époque de Vichy, 1997]. Moroccan Jewish families, wherever they were established — in major cities or in mountain villages — experienced the fragility of their condition at that time.

The postwar period was one of great departure. According to Robert Assaraf, the mass emigration of Morocco's Jews, beginning in the late 1940s and especially through the 1950s and 1960s, gradually emptied the mellahs — urban and rural alike — reducing a community of several hundred thousand souls to a few thousand individuals by the turn of the century [Assaraf, Une certaine histoire des Juifs du Maroc, 2005]. Mountain communities, the most isolated and the most vulnerable, were often among the first to disperse, carrying with them names like Zabali toward new horizons.

In this dispersion, the family name changed status one final time. From a concrete geographical indication of origin, it became a memory-name: carried in Jerusalem, Paris, or Montreal, Zabali no longer pointed to an inhabited mountain, but to an inherited identity, to a bond with a lost Morocco, and to the long History of the Jews of the massifs. Norman Stillman has emphasized how profoundly, for the Jews of the lands of Islam, the exile of the twentieth century transformed surnames of origin into identity relics — precious precisely because they preserved the Memory of an engulfed world [Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, 1979].

The Zabali lineage offers, through its very name, a condensed history of the Jews of Morocco. What the archive establishes with certainty is the meaning of the surname: Zabali, from the Arabic jebli, designates the mountain-dweller, the man of the heights [Laredo, Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, 1978]. Around this solid core, research allows us to reconstruct, with a reasonable degree of plausibility, a probable trajectory: an origin in the Jewish communities of the Moroccan mountains, a descent toward cities and urban mellahs, an integration into Judeo-Arabic and Sephardic cultures, and then the diasporic dispersal of the twentieth century.

It should be recalled, with all the honesty of a historian, that documents directly linked to this particular lineage are absent from the corpus consulted: the history retraced here proceeds from established onomastics and the broad documented patterns of Moroccan Jewish history, applied with care to the Zabali case. The convergence between the meaning of the name and what is known of mountain Judaism authorizes a probable reconstruction, not a certainty regarding individuals.

What remains is the essential: a name that, from generation to generation, has carried the Memory of a Moroccan mountain. Whether they live today in Israel, in France, or elsewhere, the bearers of the name Zabali are the heirs of these Jews of the heights — devout, mobile, rooted in the relief of a land they shaped as much as it named them. The mountain-dweller, wherever he may go, carries the mountain in his name.