The Zermati Family

Every genealogy has its certainties and its shadows. For the Zermati family, the established record distinguishes three strata of anchorage, corresponding to three different regimes of documentation: claimed tradition, the stage attested by collective history, and the toponymic cradle documented by scholarship.

The first stratum is Toledan. Rabbinical family tradition traces the lineage to the ancestry of Rabbi Ephraïm Enkaoua — known in Hebrew sources under the name Ibn al-Nakawa — a major figure in Iberian Judaism, born in Toledo around 1359 and died in Tlemcen in 1442. Enkaoua is the author of the Menorat ha-Maor, one of the greatest ethical and homiletical works of the Hebrew Middle Ages, compiled at the confluence of Andalusian philosophy and the mussar movement. He was forced to leave Spain after the 1391 pogroms that decimated the Jewish communities of the Iberian peninsula, and found refuge in Tlemcen, then a flourishing capital of central Maghreb under the Zianides. He died there and was buried there; his tomb, at the heart of Tlemcen's Jewish cemetery, became one of the pilgrimage sites of North African Judaism. Rigor demands that we say it: the direct genealogical link between Enkaoua and the surname Zermati is not documented in available sources. This connection belongs to transmitted memory, not to a notarial deed. But transmitted memory has its own status: it says something of the identity that the family wished to give itself, and that something deserves to be reported as such.

The second stratum is Tlemceni. After the waves of expulsion in 1391, then the definitive deportation of 1492, thousands of Sephardic Jews left the Iberian peninsula for the Maghreb. Tlemcen welcomed a substantial portion of them, adding to an ancient Jewish community that the city had harbored at least since the Berber era. The great Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldoun, contemporary of the first Sephardic migrations, had described Tlemcen as a first-rank intellectual and commercial crossroads, where communities mingled, where knowledge circulated among Arab, Berber, and Jewish scholars. This Tlemceni context — blending an autochthonous Jewish population of Berber substratum and Iberian refugees bearing a dense learned culture — is precisely the one in which the Zermati lineage takes root in the Maghreb. Tradition claims Tlemcen as a stage; the city's history renders this stage plausible and inscribes it in a documented collective movement.

The third stratum, the best documented, is Berber and toponymic. Maurice Eisenbeth, Grand Rabbi of Algiers, established in his 1936 work that Zermati is an ethnic term referring to the Berber tribe of the Zelamta, whose singular is precisely Zelmati, and which left its imprint on an Algerian locality. This is the toponymic cradle of the surname: not a specific city one could point to, but a tribal territory whose name became fixed on Jewish families who lived there or originated from there. This third stratum articulates the first two: the Jews of the Zelamta region could be at once of ancient Judaized Berber stock and bearers of Iberian memory acquired during the migratory waves post-1391 or post-1492. The name Zermati is, in this sense, a synthesis: it speaks the Berber place, but it may have been borne by families whose frame of reference extended as far as Toledo.

In the fifteenth century, in Xativa in the kingdom of Valencia, rabbinical sources attest to a certain Rabbi Salomon Zelmati. Whether this is a nominal coincidence or the trace of an Iberian branch of the same name remains undecidable in the present state of sources. But this mention isolates, at the western extremity of the Sephardic world, a bearer of the surname at the very hour when Jewish Spain was dying.

Tlemcen is not a simple point on the map of Sephardic exile. It is, for North African Judaism, a place of memory in the strongest sense: the tomb of Ephraïm Enkaoua made it, for centuries, a pole of pilgrimage that scattered communities from Algeria to Morocco came to honor each year. The hillula of Enkaoua — the luminous feast of remembrance, held on the anniversary date of his death — brought together the faithful from across the region and perpetuated the memory of a scholar whose work had crossed borders.

The work in question, the Menorat ha-Maor — "The Candlestick of Light" — is a collection of ethical and homiletic teachings composed in the manner of the Andalusian school: reason and faith dialogue there, talmudic commentary draws nourishment from philosophy, and moral concern is central. Enkaoua develops there, among other things, a profound meditation on man's obligations toward his neighbor — tsedaka, honesty in business dealings, respect owed to the stranger. These values are not abstract: they correspond to the concrete demands of a community of merchants and scholars who had survived the Iberian pogroms through flight, and who had to, on the African shore, rebuild a social life according to the prescriptions of halakha.

If the family tradition of the Zermati connects to this Enkaouan horizon, it thus claims descent from a lineage of thought as much as from a lineage of blood. It says: we come from a world where the rabbi was also a philosopher, where the Law was articulated with concern for the other, where exile was not a degradation but an opportunity to demonstrate that Judaism could rebuild itself wherever there were men of good will and books. This affiliation — even transmitted, even undocumented in its strict genealogical dimension — has its own significance: it expresses an aspiration, a model that the family chose to give itself. And these models shape descendants as much as genes do.

Tlemcen also plays a role in the formation of one of the great figures of the contemporary lineage. The family of Zécharia Zermati, born in Algiers in 1964, was established in Tlemcen from the epoch that Ibn Khaldoun described — which places the Tlemcenian anchoring of this branch several centuries back, before the family moved to Algiers and then, after the Algerian War of Independence, to France and finally to Jerusalem. This displacement in three stages — Tlemcen, Algiers, Jerusalem — is itself a metaphor for the destiny of North African Judaism: the Berber city, the colonial capital, the holy city.

From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the Tunisian branch of the lineage became firmly established in Tunis. The hara — the Jewish quarter nestled in the heart of the medina — was the setting for this life. Understanding the Zermati of Tunis meant first understanding this space.

The Tunisian Jewish community under Ottoman and then Beylic rule was organized according to a system of internal autonomy that was remarkably stable. The dayyanim — the rabbinic judges — resolved civil disputes according to halakha, the moadim punctuated the calendar, charitable confraternities endowed orphan girls and ransomed captives. Two major internal divisions structured the community: the Twansa, native Jews of old stock, often of Berber or Judaized Arab descent, and the Grana, arrivals from Italy — especially from Livorno — carriers of commercial, legal, and cultural capital linked to the Mediterranean West. The very physiognomy of the name Zermati — Berber consonantal root, the suffix -i of belonging, absence of Italian markers — strongly points toward the world of the Twansa, those Jews "from time immemorial" whose presence in North Africa far predates Iberian and Livornese migrations.

In this society, the dual vocation of "rabbis and merchants" was not a contradiction but an ideal. Tunisian Judaism maintained alive the model of the scholar who earns his bread honestly rather than "making Torah a spade to dig with," in the words of the Talmudic masters. The dayan of the hara was often also a merchant or the husband of a woman who kept a shop; the merchant of the souks could be, on Friday evening, the most attentive of the faithful at the reading of the weekly sidra. This porosity between the sacred and the profane, between study and action, is a profound characteristic of Sephardic and Maghrebi Judaism.

What the archive allows us to assert about the Zermati of Tunis amounts to a few lines: the family is identified there as rabbinic and mercantile, it lived there for several centuries, and its name appears in the category of Tunisian names documented by Eisenbeth and his repertory. What tradition adds — the memory of rabbis who taught, of merchants who kept their word, of families who participated in communal institutions — remains within the province of transmitted Memory. We hold it as such, without in any way diminishing its dignity.

Life in the hara also had its tensions. The Twansa-Grana division was a source of ritual conflicts, economic rivalries, and debates over rabbinic authority. These tensions were productive: they forced each group to clarify its practices, to document its customs in order to defend them, to produce responsa that circulated from synagogue to synagogue. Tunisian Judaism owes part of its intellectual richness to these internal debates. Djerba, the island of synagogues, remained until the twentieth century one of the great conservatories of Talmudic study in the lands of Islam; its masters influenced the rabbis of Tunis, who themselves corresponded with the authorities of Jerusalem, Safed, and Livorno. A Tunisian rabbinic family, even a modest one, was bathed in this network of letter and Law.

The Fundamental Pact of 1857, and then the Constitution of 1861, altered the status of Jews in Tunisia by abolishing in principle the discriminations afflicting non-Muslims. The establishment of the French protectorate in 1881 opened a new era: the Alliance israélite universelle multiplied its schools, Frenchification spread among the middle classes, a Tunisian Jewish bourgeoisie emerged in the trade of textiles, metals, colonial goods, and soon in the liberal professions. The Zermati doubtless traversed this transformation in the manner of so many families of the hara: maintenance of a business handed down from father to son, progressive schooling of children, learning of French without abandonment of the Judeo-Arab dialect or Hebrew prayers.

It is fitting to pause on the undertaking of Maurice Eisenbeth, whose 1936 work constitutes a fundamental primary source for the history of the Zermati. Grand Rabbi of Algiers, born in 1886 and died in 1957, he had already published in 1931 a demographic study on the Jews of the Constantine department, entitled Le Judaïsme Nord-Africain. Driven by the wish of several "personalities and scholars" to extend the inquiry to all of French North Africa, he composed Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord : démographie et onomastique, honored with a subsidy from the General Government of Algeria.

The first part of the work, demographic in nature, illustrates a revealing methodological difficulty. The official censuses had ceased to distinguish Israelites from other French citizens, either because those concerned had answered "French of origin" to the questionnaires — refusing the confessional discrimination that the Crémieux decree of 1870 conferred upon them —, or because municipal offices had not applied the criteria for distinction with rigor. To remedy this gap, Eisenbeth proceeded to a complete examination of the "nominative lists" of the inhabitants of all the communes of Algeria, cross-referencing surnames, given names, professions and places of birth. In doubtful cases, he conducted further inquiries, and subsequently extended the method to Tunisia, Morocco and Libya. This positivist rigor — that of a Grand Rabbi who does the work of the archivist and the statistician — gives his repertory a lasting value.

The second part of the work, devoted to onomastics, is where the name Zermati finds its place. Eisenbeth lists there hundreds of surnames, classifies them by etymological families — toponymic, ethnic, professional, descriptive — and links them to their geographical areas of diffusion. It is there that he identifies Zermati as an ethnic term referring to the Zelamta tribe, whose singular is Zelmati. The form Zermati results from a metathesis common in Maghrebi speech, where the l and the r readily permute. Eisenbeth further notes multiple graphic variants — ZERMTTI, ZELMATI, ZERMATY — according to regions and scribes, attesting to a broad diffusion across French North Africa.

As to the original meaning of the radical, several readings coexist. One invokes the Berber azelmad, which designates the left hand — the non-dominant hand — with all that this term could signify symbolically in the cultures of the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Another reading proposes that the name originally meant "of noble birth," before acquiring according to places and times more ambivalent, even pejorative senses — this semantic shift itself being revelatory of the social tensions that surrounded minority communities. This ambivalence of meaning is not rare in the onomastics of minorities: names imposed or fixed by colonial usage sometimes bear the trace of an external gaze as much as of an identity proper.

This documentation inscribes the Zermati in the oldest stratum of Jewish settlement in North Africa, that which precedes the Iberian and Livornese migrations, that which bears witness to a continuous presence since the first centuries of the common era, indeed since Berber antiquity. The fact that a name like Zermati carries within it the memory of an entire Berber tribe is, in itself, a testimony of rootedness: these Jews were not foreigners in their country. They spoke its names, they inhabited its lands, they bore its imprints. Abraham Laredo, in his inventory of Jewish names in Morocco, formulates the same intuition: the Sephardic surname is a "portable archaeology," preserving the trace of a place, a trade or an origin that exile has not effaced. Joseph Toledano, in his own repertory published in 2003, insists on the same idea: the name accompanies the exile better than any title of property could do.

Eisenbeth's undertaking illustrates, in mirror, a virtue proper to Jewish learning: the care brought to collective Memory by the work of archive. To census, to classify, to examine the registers so that no community disappears into statistical anonymity — this is an act of zakhor, of commanded Memory. That it is a Grand Rabbi who takes charge of it is no accident: he accomplishes there, with the tools of modern science, what his predecessors had accomplished with the registers of the ketubbah and the responsa of the beit din.

Tunisia was, between November 1942 and May 1943, the only territory in North Africa directly occupied by the German army. For six months, the Jewish community suffered requisitions of property, collective fines, taking of hostages, and forced labor: thousands of men were sent to labor camps, notables were interned, families were despoiled. It was, at the scale of the Maghreb, the direct irruption of Nazi persecution—briefer than in Europe but very real in its effects. Every Jewish family in Tunis was affected by it, and the Zermati could not escape it: it was the common fate of a community that, in those months, experienced in its flesh what Europe had been enduring for much longer.

One must broaden one's perspective here, for the Judaism of which the Zermati were part is the same as that which, in Paris and throughout occupied Europe, was engulfed by the Shoah. The survivors have testified that survival is explained neither by merit nor by fault, but by chance and by an obscure solidarity among the deported. Primo Levi showed that the concentration camp universe blurred even the boundary between good and evil. Charlotte Delbo made heard, in stripped prose, that from this return no one came back entirely unscathed. The historiography of the Vel d'Hiv roundup, notably the work of Laurent Joly, has recalled the proper responsibility of the French administration in the persecution.

A Tunisian family like the Zermati, part of which would later take root in France, inherits this Memory doubly: through the occupation suffered in Tunis in 1942–1943, and through belonging to the People of the Book struck everywhere in Europe. The virtue revealed in it is that of testimony—the refusal to forget, the zakhor that commands Israel to remember so that the catastrophe does not repeat itself. This Memory of catastrophe is not a paralysis: it is, in the Jewish tradition, an obligation of vigilance and action, the foundation of commitment to universal justice.

The Algerian War, which shook in parallel the Algerian branch of the lineage, had direct consequences for the family of Zécharia Zermati. The Jewish community of Algeria—and in particular that of Tlemcen, where the Algerian Zermati had their anchorage—caught between an Algerian nationalism that asked it to choose its side and a France that offered it departure, left the country en masse between 1961 and 1962. The family of Zécharia Zermati was part of this wave: it moved to France, thus continuing the history of a lineage inhabited by forced departures since the Iberian pogroms of the fourteenth century.

Tunisia's independence, proclaimed in 1956, closes a history of two millennia. The progressive dismantling of communal institutions, the Arabization of administration and education, the insecurity born of Middle Eastern conflicts, and then the Bizerte crisis in 1961, accelerated departures. The Tunisian Jewish community, numbering around one hundred thousand souls in the mid-century, shrank within a generation to just a few thousand people. The great movement was directed toward France — Marseille first, the natural Mediterranean gateway, then Paris and its region — and toward Israel.

This is precisely the trajectory recorded in the Zermati file: "active branches in Tunis, Marseille and Paris after independence." Marseille, with its port and its Sephardic community in full expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, welcomed the first arrivals. Paris offered trades in commerce, textiles, crafts and, for the next generation, access to higher education and the professions. This exile was not merely a loss: the Jews of Tunisia profoundly revitalized French Judaism, bringing with them their own liturgy, melodies, cuisine, attachment to the neighborhood synagogue and to the extended family.

In reconstructing elsewhere places of prayer and study, in maintaining the bonds between the scattered branches of a single family tree, families such as the Zermati exercised one of Israel's most discreet and most tenacious virtues: involvement in collective life, a refusal to let the community die with the lost homeland. This involvement also manifested itself in tensions: Tunisian Jews arriving in a France partly Ashkenazi or marked by the imprint of Algerian Jews had to negotiate their singularity, defend their rites, obtain synagogues where one could pray according to the Tunisian rite. These struggles for recognition were themselves acts of loyalty — not to a frozen pastism, but to the conviction that the diversity of traditions within Israel is a richness that Memory commands us to preserve.

The welcome of the stranger — the ger, the guest, the newcomer — whom the Torah commands us to respect because "you were yourself a stranger in Egypt" finds here an unexpected echo: Tunisian Jews, becoming in turn strangers in France, experienced in their own flesh what it means to arrive in a country whose language of implicit customs one does not yet speak, and to have to remake a community there. Some responded to this by withdrawal; others, and this is doubtless the case for families such as the Zermati whose entry mentions sustained activity, responded through commitment: in communal associations, in the trades of commerce that weave bonds between communities, in religious education that transmits to French children an identity come from beyond the sea.

Born in Algiers in 1964, Zécharia Zermati embodies the most recent and best-documented synthesis of the lineage. His family had been established in Tlemcen for several centuries — "since the time of Ibn Khaldoun," the file specifies, which places the Tlemceni anchorage no earlier than the fourteenth century — before moving to Algiers and then, after the Algerian War of Independence, to France. Zécharia subsequently chose Jerusalem, where he settled and established himself as a recognized figure in the Sephardic rabbinic renewal.

His stature is twofold: he is a morei horaah — an authorized decisioner — for the Chief Rabbinate of Jerusalem, and he is an active figure in the renewal of North African Sephardic Judaism in the diaspora as well as in Israel. This title of morei horaah is not honorific: it designates a rabbi who has passed rigorous examinations in practical halakha and who is authorized to decide questions of religious law in the domains of the Choulhan Aroukh — the laws of Shabbat, kosher food, personal status, mourning and festivals. It is the direct continuation of the function of the Tunisian dayan that this book evoked in preceding chapters: the service of the Law as a form of engagement in collective life.

The fact that Zécharia Zermati is specifically identified as a figure "of the renewal of North African Sephardic Judaism" is significant. This renewal, which takes shape in Israel and in the diaspora from the 1980s onward and especially from the 1990s, is a reaction to a dual phenomenon: on one hand, the tendency toward halakhic uniformization imposed by a dominant Ashkenazi rabbinic apparatus in Israel; on the other, the temptation of assimilation in Western diasporas. The Sephardic renewal asserts that the traditions specific to communities of the Maghreb, the Near East, and the Iberian peninsula have their own legitimacy, a corpus of responsa and customs that is not inferior to that of the masters of Central Europe, and that deserves to be studied, transmitted, and defended.

In this context, Zécharia Zermati plays a bridging role: between Algeria and Jerusalem, between the Tlemceni tradition and the demands of modern Israel, between the faithful of the diaspora who grew up far from the synagogues of their parents and the classical sources of Sephardic Judaism. The virtue that is expressed here is that of talmud torah — study as service — but also the master's humility: the morei horaah knows that his function is not to impose but to guide, not to decide lightly but to weigh carefully the texts and situations. That the Zermati lineage, after centuries of Tunisian and then Algerian rabbinic tradition, produces in the twenty-first century a decisioner of Jerusalem, is proof that transmission is not an illusion.

This continuity is rooted in a place: Jerusalem, Israel's city of memory, where the scattered threads of all the diaspora communities converge. That the Zermati lineage — having departed from Toledo in the fourteenth century, passed through Tlemcen, Algiers, Tunisia, and France — arrives today in Jerusalem is a trajectory that resembles that of the people of Israel as a whole: long, winding, painful at times, but oriented.

Rabbi Ephraïm Enkaoua, known as Ibn al-Nakawa (Toledo, circa 1359 — Tlemcen, 1442) — Major figure of medieval Iberian Judaism, author of the Menorat ha-Maor ("The Lamp of Light"), a vast ethical and homiletic compilation that synthesizes the Andalusian tradition and the mussar current. Forced to leave Spain after the pogroms of 1391, he found refuge in Tlemcen where he died and was buried; his tomb became one of the great pilgrimage sites of North African Judaism. The rabbinical family tradition of the Zermati claims him as an ancestor; this connection is transmitted not documented by genealogical archive, but it expresses a horizon of reference: the lineage situates itself in the orbit of a thought that unites the rigor of the Law with ethical concern for the other.

Rabbi Salomon Zelmati (15th century — dates of birth and death unknown) — Rabbi attested in Xativa, in the kingdom of Valencia, in the 15th century, whose name constitutes the earliest documented mention of a bearer of the surname Zelmati/Zermati in rabbinical sources. His presence in Xativa, a city in the kingdom of Valencia that sheltered an active Jewish community before the expulsion of 1492, potentially situates this surname in the Sephardic Hispanic world. The direct genealogical link with the Tunisian or Algerian Zermati is not established by available sources, but the onomastic coincidence remains the oldest trace of a name that later crossed the Mediterranean and took lasting root in North Africa.

Maurice Eisenbeth (1886–1957) — Grand Rabbi of Algiers, author in 1936 of The Jews of North Africa: Demography and Onomastics, published in Algiers with the support of the Government General of Algeria. He had already published in 1931 North African Judaism, a demographic study on the Jews of the Constantine department. His work constitutes the first systematic and scientific study of Jewish populations in French North Africa, based on a methodical examination of nominative lists of communes cross-referenced with rabbinical archives. It is in this work that he identifies and documents the surname Zermati as an ethnic term referring to the Berber tribe of the Zelamta, noting its graphic variants across colonial archives throughout the region.

Zécharia Zermati (born in Algiers in 1964) — Rabbi from a family whose anchorage in Tlemcen dates back to the medieval period and who emigrated to France after the Algerian War of Independence. Trained in the rabbinate, he settled in Jerusalem where he obtained the title of morei horaah (authorized decisioner) for the Grand Rabbinate of Jerusalem. Recognized figure in the diaspora and in Israel of the renewal of North African Sephardic Judaism, he embodies the continuity of the rabbinical vocation of the lineage through geographical displacement: from Tlemcen to Jerusalem, passing through Algiers and France, the tradition of the Law has been maintained and renewed.

Abraham Laredo (dates unknown) — Sephardic scholar, author of The Names of the Jews of Morocco, a reference work for Judeo-Maghrebi onomastics. His approach shows that the Sephardic surname functions as a "portable archaeology," preserving the trace of a place, a trade, or an ethnic origin that exile has not erased. His work complements and illuminates that of Eisenbeth, with whom it forms the foundational corpus for the study of Jewish surnames in North Africa.

Joseph Toledano (dates unknown) — Historian and genealogist, author of an inventory of family names of the Jews of North Africa published in 2003. He emphasizes the function of portable memory of the Sephardic surname and situates his work in the continuity of Eisenbeth and Laredo. His repertory constitutes an essential tool for any research on Judeo-Maghrebi lineages, and confirms the North African anchorage of the surname Zermati in its multiple graphic variants.

At the end of this journey, the Zermati lineage emerges as an exemplary witness to a long and branching history. A name of Berber origin, borne by Jewish families rooted in the Zelamta region, linked by tradition to the Sephardic horizon of Toledo and Tlemcen, documented for the first time in Hispano-Rabbinic sources of the 15th century in the form Zelmati, it has traversed the ages of Jewish life in the Maghreb: the subjection of dhimmis and the autonomy of Law under the Regency of Tunis, the commercial flourishing of the protectorate, the brutal interruption of German occupation in 1942–1943, the rupture of Algerian independence for the Tlemcen branch, and the great exodus of 1956 toward Marseille and Paris. At each stage, the family embraced the destiny of its community without ever, according to what tradition tells of it, detaching itself from it.

The trajectory of Zécharia Zermati, born in Algiers, formed in the Sephardic rabbinic tradition and established today in Jerusalem as a decisor of the Chief Rabbinate, gives this history an additional dimension: it confirms that the rabbinic vocation of the lineage is not a nostalgic memory but a living reality. From Tlemcen to Jerusalem by way of Algiers and France, the thread of Law has not been severed.

If one had to name, among all others, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed, it would be founding fidelity — this ne'emanout that unites in a single movement Law and commerce, study and action, memory of the past and commitment to the present. Fidelity to study, transmitted through the memory of a rabbinate that made the humble service of dayan and master an honor from generation to generation; fidelity to the justice of exchange, exercised by merchants bound to just weight and given word; fidelity to the community itself, rebuilt stone by stone in each new country of welcome — in Tlemcen after Spain, in Tunis after Algerian Maghreb, in Marseille and Paris after Tunisia, in Jerusalem finally as point of culmination and new beginning. This fidelity also bears an onomastic face: the name Zermati, traversing centuries of migrations, expulsions and recompositions, is itself an act of memory.

This fidelity is nothing of a withdrawal into itself. It is the condition of transmission, and transmission is the condition of duration. In embodying this virtue, the Zermati participate in the most ancient vocation of Israel: to remember in order to endure, to endure in order to transmit. The lineage that runs from Rabbi Solomon Zelmati of Xativa to Zécharia Zermati of Jerusalem, by way of the rabbis and merchants of the Tunisian hara and the families of Tlemcen who gazed upon the tomb of Enkaoua, says something essential about what it means, in the end, to be Jewish across the centuries: not a fixity, but a fidelity in motion.

The present book, where nominative archives are lacking, has scrupulously distinguished what is established from what is transmitted. This honesty is itself a tribute: for a lineage is better respected through measured truth than through complacent legend.