The surname Annabi (sometimes transcribed El-Annabi, Bonel in its Frenchified equivalent, or Bône in colonial registers) belongs to the great family of Jewish and Maghrebi names of toponymic formation. Its reference entry establishes it clearly: it designates "one who originates from Annaba ('Anâba), in eastern Algeria." The structure of the name follows the Arabic nisba, that suffix of belonging in -î which, attached to a place name, designates the geographical origin of an individual or a lineage — exactly as Fâsî refers to Fez, Tlemçânî to Tlemcen, or Constantinî to Constantine. <cite index="3-0">The surnames of North African Jews have diverse origins, and a significant proportion of them derive from place names.</cite>
This practice of naming by place of origin is one of the oldest and most widespread in the Mediterranean basin. It bears witness to a memory of migration: one bears the name of a city only when one has left it, and when the host community identifies the newcomer by their provenance. The name Annabi is therefore, in itself, a trace of exile and displacement — that of a family from the city of Annaba, subsequently dispersed toward other cities of eastern Algeria and Tunisia, then, in the twentieth century, toward France and beyond.
This Great Book sets out to retrace the historical horizon in which this name takes on meaning: the long history of the city of Annaba, ancient Hippo; the Jewish presence in eastern Algeria and its place within the Mediterranean diasporas; the mechanics of toponymic surnames; and finally the contemporary fate of the families who bear this name. Where the archive speaks, we shall speak of History; where only tradition remains, we shall say so plainly.
The name Annabi is inseparable from the destiny of its mother-city. Annaba is one of the oldest cities in North Africa, and over the centuries it has borne a succession of names that summarize the history of the eastern Maghreb. <cite index="2-0">Annaba was successively called Hippone, Hippo-Régius and Bône before receiving its current name.</cite>
Founded by the Phoenicians, the city was a Punic trading post before becoming a prominent Roman city under the name Hippo Regius — "royal Hippo" — so named because it was the residence of the Numidian kings. It reached its zenith as a great port and intellectual metropolis of Roman Africa. It was there that Saint Augustine was bishop from 395 to 430, making Hippo one of the major centers of ancient Christian thought, until his death during the Vandal siege of the city.
After the Vandal and then Byzantine eras, the Arab conquest transformed the city. The medieval name of Bûna (or Bône in its European form) took hold, while the new town shifted somewhat from the ancient site of Hippo. As for the modern name, Annaba, it derives according to tradition from the Arabic 'unnâb, the jujube tree, a fruit tree once abundant in the region; the city was nicknamed the "city of jujube trees." <cite index="4-0">The fruit of the jujube tree from which the city takes its name has today practically disappeared from the region.</cite> It is precisely from this form — 'Anâba — that the nisba Annabi proceeds.
During the Ottoman period, Bône was an active port of the central Maghreb, integrated into the domain of the Regency of Algiers and oriented toward Mediterranean trade, notably in coral and grain. Taken by France in 1832, two years after the landing at Algiers, it became one of the great ports of colonial Algeria, endowed with a cosmopolitan population in which Muslim Algerians, native Jews, and European migrants — French, Italian, Maltese — lived side by side. It was in this urban crucible that the name
To understand the surname Annabi, one must grasp the logic of Maghrebi names. <cite index="3-0">A significant portion of the surnames of North African Jews derives from place names.</cite> This "toponymic" category brings together names formed from cities, regions, or countries of origin, and it constitutes one of the most identifiable strata of Maghrebi Jewish onomastics.
The mechanism is simple and universal: when a family leaves its city of origin to settle elsewhere, the host community identifies it by its provenance. L'Annabi — "the one from Annaba" — thus becomes a transmissible surname. The process follows the grammar of the Arabic nisba, where the suffix -î (feminine -iyya) expresses belonging or origin. The same formation is found in countless North African surnames: Constantini (Constantine), Mostaganémi (Mostaganem), Tlemçani (Tlemcen), Djerbi (Djerba), Sfaxi (Sfax), Tunsi (Tunis). Annabi belongs squarely to this series.
It must nonetheless be emphasized that one essential fact: a toponymic surname is not the preserve of a single religious community. A name such as Annabi could be borne both by Jewish families and by Muslim families, all originating from the same city. <cite index="0-0">The surname Annabi is attested as a patronymic whose origin and meaning are documented in genealogical repertories.</cite> The religious affiliation of a particular Annabi lineage therefore cannot be deduced from the name alone: it must be established through civil registers, community records, or family memory. This shared character is precious: it reminds us that, in the premodern Maghreb, Jews and Muslims of the same city shared a language, a material culture, and, often, a common onomastic repertoire.
The transmission of these names was codified late. In Algeria, it was the
The name Annabi, when it designates a Jewish lineage, belongs to one of the oldest diasporic presences in the Mediterranean. <cite index="1-0">The history of the Jews in Algeria dates back to Antiquity and spans more than two millennia.</cite> Jewish presence in North Africa is attested from the Roman era onward, and the region of Hippo — Annaba — was no exception, situated as it was along the trade routes that connected the East, Italy, and Spain.
Over the centuries, Maghrebi Judaism was formed in successive strata: a very ancient indigenous base, sometimes called "Berber" or "Toshavim"; Eastern contributions from the Near East; then, after 1492, the massive arrival of the exiles from the Iberian Peninsula, the Megorashim, driven out by the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. These waves intermingled in the cities of eastern Algeria — Constantine, Bône, Guelma — producing communities that were at once locally rooted and connected to the great Sephardic networks of the Mediterranean.
Bône was home to a structured Jewish community, endowed with its religious institutions. The city's most famous sanctuary was the Ghriba of Bône, a place of pilgrimage that echoed the renowned Ghriba of Djerba in Tunisia. <cite index="5-0">The Ghriba of Bône was a venerated sanctuary of the city's Jewish community.</cite> The name Ghriba — "the foreigner," "the marvelous one" — designates, throughout North Africa, these synagogues surrounded by legends and associated with pilgrimage practices. <cite index="5-0">The Ghriba synagogue of Bône belonged to the religious heritage of the Jews of this Algerian city in the twentieth century.</cite>
Under French administration, the Jewish community of Bône underwent, like Algerian Judaism as a whole, a profound transformation: Frenchification through schooling, modernization of religious institutions, increased social and geographical mobility. It is in this context that Annabi families — those who had left the city for Constantine, Algiers, Tunis, or France — still carried, in their name, the memory of the city of jujube trees, even though they no longer resided there.
The toponymic surname is, in essence, the product of a displacement. As long as a family remains in Annaba, it would be redundant to call them "the Annabi"; the name only acquires meaning elsewhere, where the Bône origin distinguishes those who bear it. The very spread of the name Annabi beyond the city is therefore the sign of an ancient mobility, predating its administrative fixation.
Here, the archive and tradition echo one another. The documented history of the Jews of North Africa confirms a constant circulation between the cities of the Maghreb: the communities of eastern Algeria and those of Tunisia — Tunis, El Kef, Sfax — maintained dense ties through trade, marriage alliances and rabbinic exchanges. <cite index="1-0">The Jewish communities of North Africa were connected by networks that crossed regional borders.</cite> An Annabi settled in Tunisia would be recognised there precisely by his Algerian provenance, and vice versa.
Family tradition, where it survives, tends to preserve the memory of a "town of origin" and sometimes of a reference sanctuary. When an Annabi lineage transmits the memory of Bône and its Ghriba, it confirms through narrative what onomastics already suggested. But caution remains necessary: not all families bearing this name necessarily descend from a single common ancestor. Several lines may have adopted the same nisba independently, simply because they shared the same town of origin. The unity of the name therefore does not guarantee the unity of blood — this is a nuance the archive imposes upon memory.
This dual reading — the name as an attested marker of origin, and oral tradition as the transmission of that origin — makes the surname Annabi an object of "intersection," where the documentary record and the transmitted narrative confirm one another without merging.
The fate of the Annabi families, like that of Algerian Jewry as a whole, was overturned by the upheavals of the twentieth century. <cite index="1-0">The history of the Jews of Algeria is marked by successive ruptures over the course of the twentieth century.</cite> The Vichy period temporarily abolished the French citizenship granted by the Crémieux Decree; the Second World War struck hard at communities that, for a time, believed they were facing an existential threat.
Then came the decisive turning point of Algerian independence, in 1962. Almost the entire Jewish population of Algeria left the country, in a movement of exodus that brought an end to a centuries-old presence. The Jews of Bône, like those of Algiers, Oran, or Constantine, settled mainly in metropolitan France, and in part in Israel. This exodus scattered the Annabi families across France — Marseille, Paris, the South — where they rebuilt a communal life while preserving the memory of their city of origin.
From then on, the name Annabi took on a different function. It was no longer merely the mark of a living geographical origin, but the vessel of a memory: that of a vanished world, the Jewish communities of eastern Algeria. The material heritage of this presence — synagogues, cemeteries, the sanctuary of the Ghriba — remains in Algeria as a witness of stone, while the living carry its remembrance in their family name. <cite index="5-0">The Ghriba of Bône is today part of the preserved and documented heritage of North African Jewry.</cite>
Thus, through the successive exiles, the name Annabi underwent a remarkable inversion: forged to signal departure from a city, it became, generations later, the last thread linking its descendants to the city of jujube trees.
The surname Annabi condenses a long Mediterranean history into a few letters. Its primary meaning is clear and documented: it designates Bônois origin, "one who comes from Annaba," through the play of the Arabic nisba attached to the name of the city of a thousand names — Hippone, Hippo Regius, Bûna, Bône, Annaba. This city was in turn a Phoenician trading post, a Roman metropolis, the episcopal seat of Saint Augustine, an Ottoman port, then a great city of colonial Algeria.
When it designates a Jewish lineage, this name links its bearers to the long Jewish presence of eastern Algeria, several millennia old, made up of indigenous strata and Sephardic contributions, and structured around institutions such as the Ghriba of Bône. But the name, by its toponymic nature, was also shared with Muslim families of the same origin, and cannot, on its own, fix the confessional belonging of a lineage: only the archive can do that.
What remains is the essential: a name of migration become a name of memory. Born of departure, it signals today a fidelity. Through the ruptures of the twentieth century and the dispersion of Algerian communities, Annabi continues to tell, to those who know how to hear it, the fidelity of a lineage to the city that saw its birth. Therein lies, perhaps, the deep vocation of every toponymic surname: to transform distance into bond, and exile into transmission.
