Tlemcen

Tlemcen, a city in the far west of Algeria nestled against the foothills of the mountains that bear its name, holds a singular place in the Jewish memory of the Maghreb. Capital of the Zianid kingdom in the Middle Ages, a crossroads of caravan routes linking the Sahara to the Mediterranean, it served, for the Israelite communities of North Africa, as both a center of rabbinical study and a sanctuary. Until the twentieth century, Tlemcen was known as "the Jerusalem of the West," an appellation derived from the vitality of the city's Jewish community — in both its size and its piety.

The Jewish destiny of Tlemcen is inseparable from a single figure: Rabbi Ephraïm Enkaoua, known as "le Rab," a refugee from the Iberian Peninsula whose arrival at the end of the fourteenth century refounded the community and made his tomb one of the great pilgrimage sites of North African Judaism. Around this Memory there has been woven a History that intertwines the Zianid archive, the responsa of the great exiled Séfarade masters, and the hagiographic narrative passed down from generation to generation. The present work seeks to disentangle — without conflating them — that which belongs to the established and that which belongs to the transmitted.

The Jewish presence in Tlemcen is part of a broader history of Maghreb communities, predating the great Iberian migrations. Historical records mention the presence of Jewish and Christian communities in Tlemcen in the thirteenth century, during the time of the Almohads; while the Christian community did not survive the persecutions carried out by the latter, the Jewish community reappeared notably following subsequent arrivals.

These indigenous Jews, deeply rooted in the Maghrebi world, were clearly distinguished, both culturally and in their customs, from the Sephardic newcomers who would later arrive in large numbers. The distinction became proverbial in the sources: the older Algerian Jews were known as the "turban wearers," the newcomers as the "beret wearers." This sartorial opposition concealed a genuine social and ritual divide, which left a lasting mark on the communities of the central Maghreb, and on Tlemcen above all.

A city of learning and commerce, Tlemcen derived its prosperity from its position as a crossroads. The Jews flourished particularly in the fifteenth century in Tlemcen, capital of the Zianid kingdom, where trade and rabbinical studies developed. The trans-Saharan and Mediterranean trade offered Jewish families a role as intermediaries and financiers, while the growth of Talmudic academies attracted masters and disciples alike.

The year 1391 marks a major turning point in the history of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula and, by extension, in that of Tlemcen. The massacres and forced conversions of 1391 provoked a massive wave of emigration, primarily toward Tlemcen, Alger, the coastal cities of Tunisia, and, to a lesser extent, Morocco, which was then in a period of dynastic instability.

This influx profoundly transformed the character of the communities of the central Maghreb. Greatly superior to the African Jew in culture and in intellectual and commercial activity, the Spanish Jew soon gained the upper hand, and from the very first years of the fifteenth century, rabbis who had emigrated from Spain found themselves at the head of nearly all the Jewish communities of Algeria. The great master Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet, the Ribash, settled in Alger, while other Séfarade authorities spread throughout the neighboring cities.

In Tlemcen, this movement took shape around one man. The history of Jewish Tlemcen would be transformed by the arrival of a refugee from Spain, the illustrious Ephraïm Enkaoua. The rabbinic sources confirm this without ambiguity: R. Ephraïm Ankawa restored the community of Tlemcen, while the eminent Talmudic authorities R. Isaac b. Sheshet Perfet (Ribash) and R. Simeon b. Ẓemaḥ Duran (Rashbaẓ) were principally responsible for the rise of Alger as a religious and intellectual center.

The figure of Rabbi Ephraïm ben Israël Enkaoua — whose name also appears as al-Naqawa, Alnaqua or Encaoua — dominates the entire Jewish history of the city. Rabbi Ephraïm ben Israël Alnaqua was a physician, rabbi, author of theological works, and founder of the Jewish community of Tlemcen, in Algeria, where he died in 1442.

His journey connects him directly to the Iberian tragedy. An emblematic figure of the Jewish community of Tlemcen, he is known to many Algerian Jews simply as the Rab ("the Master"); born in 1359 in Tolède, he fled Spain in 1391 following the persecutions. Even his death was invested with symbolic weight by tradition: a figure held in the highest veneration by the Jews of Tlemcen, he died in 1442, in the year Rab (ר"ב) of the Hebrew calendar. The coincidence between his epithet and the numerical value of the Hebrew year of his death belongs to a mode of reading that is as much Memory as chronology.

His primary work was institutional and religious. Alnaqua's first concern was to establish a great synagogue: it still existed and bore his name. This edifice, the "synagogue of the Rab," became the heart of Tlemcen's communal life for the centuries that followed. Beyond this founding act, the man enjoyed a reputation as a miracle-worker that contributed to his enduring fame: the rabbi, who died in 1442, was renowned for his miracles and is regarded as the founder of the Jewish community of Tlemcen.

If the founding of the community belongs to established History, the cult that developed around the tomb of the Rab belongs to the register of Memory and popular devotion. Tradition holds that the rabbi was buried outside the city walls: he lived in Tlemcen until his death in 1442 and was interred beyond the city, in a small cemetery.

Around this burial place gathered accounts of miracles and rituals. Tlemcen tradition associates the tomb with a spring whose waters, at the height of summer, were considered miraculous, and to which pilgrims came to make their vows — a narrative transmitted through the family memory of the city's Jews rather than established by the archive. The tomb rapidly acquired a regional renown: it became one of the most frequented pilgrimage sites among the Jews of North Africa on the occasion of the hiloula of Lag Ba'omer.

The scale of this pilgrimage in the modern era is attested by the figures reported. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more than ten thousand pilgrims would converge each spring upon the Algerian city of Tlemcen, nearly doubling its population, the Jewish cemetery then situated on the outskirts of the city being the focus of their pilgrimage. This springtime gathering, structured around the festival of Lag Ba'omer, made Tlemcen a devotional center comparable, in the North African imagination, to the great sanctuaries of Galilee.

The Jewish history of Tlemcen entered a new age with the French conquest. Following the conquest of Algeria from 1830 onward, Algerian Jews, like Muslims, were classified as indigenous people under a particular legal status that denied them French citizenship.

The major legal upheaval came forty years later. The Crémieux decree of October 24, 1870 granted French citizenship to all Jews born in the colony of Algeria; they had held the status of French subjects since the conquest of 1830. This text radically transformed the condition of the Israelites of Tlemcen as well as those of Algeria as a whole, but it also opened a lasting political divide. The decree automatically made indigenous Algerian Jews French citizens, while their Arab and Berber Muslim neighbors were excluded and remained under the second-class indigenous status defined by the Code de l'Indigénat.

The gradual Frenchification of the community, its integration into schools and administration, its adoption of the French language and customs, marked the final century of continuous Jewish presence in Tlemcen. The Jews remained there until Algerian independence, having built the synagogue of the Rab.

The Jewish history of Tlemcen unfolds in successive strata: an ancient indigenous presence, attested from the Almohad era; a Sephardic refoundation in the wake of the persecutions of 1391, embodied by Rabbi Ephraïm Enkaoua; a flourishing as a city of scholars and merchants under the Zianides; and finally a long colonial twilight sealed by the décret Crémieux and closed by Algerian independence.

At the heart of this trajectory stands the figure of the Rab, whose Memory bridges the established and the transmitted. The founding of the synagogue and the restoration of the community belong to the archive and the responsa; the veneration of the tomb, its miracles, and the great hiloula of Lag Ba'omer belong to devotion as it was handed down. It is precisely in this tension — between the documented city of learning and the venerated sanctuary — that Tlemcen earned its name of "Jerusalem of the West," which remained, long after the departure of its Jews, as the echo of a millennial presence.