The name Charbit belongs to a particular category of North African Jewish surnames: that of names of pure Hebrew origin, as opposed to names of Arabic, Berber, Spanish, or toponymic origin that make up the greater part of the Maghrebi Sephardic corpus. As a Hebrew name meaning "sceptre," Charbit evokes the themes of authority, leadership, and identity, reflecting the roles and responsibilities of those who bear this name.
The term *sharvît* (שרביט) designates, in the biblical language, the staff of command, the royal insignia, and by extension the rod of power. It is encountered notably in the Book of Esther, where Ahasuerus extends his golden sceptre to the queen to signify the favourable reception of her request (Esther 5:2 and 8:4). This scriptural resonance lends the name an almost heraldic dimension: to bear the name Charbit is to bear a sign of dignity, even of priestly office. CHARBIT or CHERBIT: name of Hebrew origin meaning sceptre ('sharvît).
On the philological level, the rendering of the Hebrew name into Latin script underwent several variants. The initial consonant, in Hebrew a *shin* (ש), was sometimes rendered by "Ch" (the predominant Frenchifying transcription in French Algeria), sometimes by "Sh" or "S" (in Anglo-Saxon or Hispanicizing contexts). The medial consonant *vav* (ו) pronounced [v] explains the forms Charvit or Cherbit. As for the final, the *tet* (ט) is invariably rendered by a voiceless "t." These variations explain that Variant: Cherbit appears on birth and marriage certificates of colonial Algeria sometimes for brothers born of the same sibling group, according to the fancy of the civil registry officer charged with the transcription.
The reliability of the classification of the name Charbit among the surnames of Hebrew origin rests precisely on the method adopted by Eisenbeth, whose 1936 work proceeds from a methodical examination of surnames cross-referenced with community registers and colonial censuses [Corpus Zakhor id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. Unlike earlier compilations, often impressionistic, this study establishes the origin of names by confronting administrative attestations with the internal rabbinic sources of the communities. The placement of Charbit in the category of pure Hebrew names — and not in the much vaster category of Arabic or toponymic names — is therefore not an isolated philological intuition, but the fruit of a reasoned classification supported by the documentation available at the turn of the 1930s.
It is, however, appropriate to draw a cautious distinction with the surnames Sriki, Sreki, and their cognates. According to the repertories of Sephardic onomastics, these names belong to a distinct family, Sreki · Shriki · Shriqui · Sriki · Serique · Sriqui · Asharqui · Ashriqui · Axarqui · Esharqui · Exarquino · Eshriqui · Cheriqui is documented as a Jewish family name in Morocco in the first half of the 16th century. In the Iberian Peninsula they are linked to Sharquia, the eastern part of Spain — that is to say, from the Arabic root *sharq* (the east) and not from the Hebrew root *sharvît*. The occasional association of these forms with the Charbit file likely arises from a paronymic confusion, given the phonetic proximity between the two roots with their sibilant initials. It is nevertheless possible that, in certain localities, branches may have become administratively confused owing to an approximate transcription; but the present state of the sources does not permit the establishment of a common filiation.
It is in the Oran region, and more particularly in Tlemcen, that the Charbit lineage knew its most ancient and most continuous presence. Tlemcen, a crossroads city on the Moroccan border, harboured from the Middle Ages one of the most prestigious Jewish communities of the Maghreb, illustrated notably by the tutelary figure of Rab Ephraïm Enkaoua (1359-1442), founder of the medieval community and miracle-worker whose memory still imbues Tlemcenian consciousness today.
The Charbit family is fully inscribed within this tradition. The rabbinic sources consulted mention several notable figures. A certain MOCHE: The annals of the community of Tlemcen cited by rabbi Yossef Messas report his election to the head of the community in 1792. This mention, transmitted by the authority of the chief rabbi Yossef Messas (1892-1974), a major figure of Moroccan Judaism who ended his days as chief rabbi of Haifa, constitutes the oldest documented landmark of the Charbit presence in Tlemcen. It suggests a deep and ancient integration of the family into the governing bodies of the Tlemcenian *kehilla*, in the last decades of the Ottoman regency.
A century later, the family's religious authority is embodied in another figure: MESSOD: Famous rabbi in Tlemcen in the middle of the last century. This indication, dated most likely to the 19th century, attests to a stable rabbinic transmission within the lineage, over several generations.
The expansion toward the other cities of Oranie logically follows the demographic shifts linked to French penetration and the urban growth of the nineteenth century. SAADIA: A rabbi born in Tlemcen, he was rabbi of Relizane and Mostaganem between 1930 and 1955. This trajectory, from the spiritual metropolis of Tlemcen toward the more modest communities of western Algeria, illustrates a classic function: the export, by the great mother-communities, of religious cadres intended to oversee the small satellite *kehillot*. His presence in Mostaganem is confirmed by the community's chroniclers: The last ones before the exodus were Saadia Charbit and Marciano (the latter officiated at the Synagogue on rue Breteuil in Marseille after the exodus). The phrase "the last ones before the exodus" refers to the massive departure of the Jews of Algeria in 1962, in the wake of independence, and confers upon Rabbi Saadia Charbit the melancholy stature of a witness to the end of a world.
The geographical distribution of the family across Oranie finds valuable illumination in the demographic part of Eisenbeth's work. He devotes his first section to establishing the numbers, geographical distribution, and community structure of North African Jews at the turn of the 1930s, drawing on the French, Spanish, and Italian statistical data available at the time, cross-referenced with local rabbinical archives [Corpus Zakhor id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. It is by relying on this description, conducted commune by commune, that one can situate the Tlemcen community within the larger Oranian whole, and understand the web of small *kehillot* — Relizane, Mostaganem, Sidi Bel-Abbès — toward which, precisely, the religious cadres from Tlemcen, like Saadia Charbit, were called to serve. The communal cartography drawn up by Eisenbeth thus offers the objective statistical framework within which the lineage's movements within Oranie are inscribed.
In Sidi Bel-Abbès, another stronghold of Oranian Judaism, the family likewise provided a community leader of the first rank: GEORGES: President of the Consistory of Sidi Bel-Abbès in the 1950s. The designation "Consistory" refers to the centralized organization of Jewish worship established in Algeria under the auspices of the Crémieux decree and the law of 1905, to which Algeria was subjected by derogation from local principles. The presidents of local consistories were elected notables, generally drawn from the merchant bourgeoisie or the liberal professions; the office thus testifies to notable social success and civic visibility.
At the heart of family and communal memory reigns the figure of Rabbi Jacob (Yaacov) Charbit, whose centenarian existence — he lived nearly a hundred years — embodies in itself the apogee and the epilogue of Tlemcen Judaism. To take a personal example, as a native of Tlemcen myself, I preserve intact the memory of those omnipresent rabbis who, in this community, were Rabbi Yaacov Charbit (1885-1982) and Rabbi Haim Touati. The testimony is precious: it comes from a former member of the community himself, and attests to the centrality, the "omnipresence," of Rabbi Jacob Charbit in the religious and social life of Tlemcen for nearly three quarters of a century.
Born in 1885, Jacob Charbit lived through the golden age of colonial Algeria, the First World War, the antisemitic ostracism of the Vichy regime (which suspended the Crémieux decree between 1940 and 1943), the Second World War, Algerian independence in 1962, the exodus, and ended his days in exile without severing his bond with the dispersed community. The father of André, Jacob Charbit, Chief Rabbi of Tlemcen who died in 1982, was the religious head of the Union Nord-Africaine des Tlemcéniens (UNAT), a communal structure founded in France to perpetuate the distinctive rite of Tlemcen after the exodus.
It is significant that Jacob Charbit's rabbinate unfolded precisely during the period documented by Eisenbeth. When the Chief Rabbi of Algiers published his demographic and onomastic survey in 1936, Jacob Charbit, then around fifty years of age, had already long been exercising his functions at the heart of the Tlemcen community [Corpus Zakhor id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. The work thus offers a statistical snapshot of the community at the apogee of its rabbinical influence, at a moment when the Charbit lineage simultaneously held the religious scepter in Tlemcen and dispatched cadres toward the satellite communities. The rigor of the survey — grounded in colonial censuses and communal registers — lends documentary footing to the portrait of a Tlemcen *kehilla* still living and structured, of which Jacob Charbit was one of the cardinal figures.
The perpetuation of the Tlemcen *minhag* — the body of liturgical usages, melodies, and customs particular to the community — constitutes one of the major legacies of this family. The services according to the Tlemcen rite have been celebrated there without interruption ever since, the memorialist testifies, emphasizing that around the figure of Chief Rabbi Jacob Charbit a genuine enterprise of cultural preservation crystallized. His son André, and his other son Joseph, took up the relay in this task of transmission: UNAT had been managed by a collegial leadership of three members: Roger Bansard, Robert Djian, and Joseph Carbit, André's brother; and then by himself around 1980. The spelling "Carbit" appearing in the source illustrates, even in contemporary documentation, the orthographic malleability of the surname.
The rabbinate of Jacob Charbit unfolds at a pivotal moment. According to historians of Algerian Judaism, Like many of his peers, he had to fight tooth and nail to preserve the prerogatives of his office in the face of the new rabbis, freshly graduated from the Rabbinical Seminary of France and dispatched to Algeria to "civilize" their "native" brethren — a phrase fraught with meaning that describes the tension, characteristic of the first half of the 20th century, between rabbis of local tradition, custodians of age-old customs, and the rabbis trained in Paris, bearers of an assimilationist consistorial model. Rabbi Jacob Charbit belongs to the former category, that of the sages rooted in the Andalusian-Maghrebi soil, faithful to the legacy of Rab Enkaoua and his successors.
Although the main and best-documented branch of the Charbit lineage is Algerian, the family also had a Moroccan presence. The entry devoted to the surname in Joseph Toledano's *Noms de famille juifs d'Afrique du Nord* states accordingly: CHARBIT Surname of Hebrew origin meaning "the scepter," classing the name among the surnames attested both in Morocco and in Algeria. In Morocco, it is chiefly in the rabbinical circles of Fès that the trace is most visible: MESSOD: Founder of one of the first Hebrew printing presses in Fès. This mention is of great historical import. Moroccan Hebrew printing, long nonexistent owing to the prohibition imposed on Jews under the reign of several sultans, truly developed only from the 19th century onward. The founding of a Hebrew press in Fès — a holy city of Moroccan Judaism where the yeshivot of the Toledano, the Ibn Danan, and the Serero flourished — represents a major contribution to the dissemination of rabbinical knowledge: the printing of prayers, *piyutim*, responsa, and pedagogical tracts.
The simultaneous attestation of the name Charbit in Morocco and Algeria is itself corroborated by the pan-Maghrebi perspective of Eisenbeth's survey. His work, indeed, is not confined to Algeria but encompasses all the Jewish populations of North Africa — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya [Corpus Zakhor id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. This transregional framework makes it possible to understand how one and the same Hebrew surname, from the root *sharvît*, could be encountered on both sides of the Algerian-Moroccan border, in areas of Jewish settlement linked by ancient circulations — commercial, matrimonial, and rabbinical. The Charbit presence in Fès and its Tlemcen roots are thus in no way contradictory: they belong to one and the same Sephardic Maghrebi space, of which Eisenbeth was the first to draw the overall demographic and onomastic map.
As for the Saharan penetration, it belongs to a geography specific to Algerian Judaism: that of the communities of the M'zab, of Ghardaïa, of Touggourt, and of Laghouat, as well as those, straddling Algeria and Morocco, of the Touat and the Gourara. According to Eisenbeth, several lineages of the Oranie spread out toward these southern oases between the 18th and the 19th centuries, whether through commercial activity (trans-Saharan caravans) or through religious mission [Corpus Zakhor id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. It is possible that Charbit branches followed these routes, though it is not easy today to reconstruct their precise itineraries.
In the Constantinois, the settlement appears more diffuse and later, presumably linked to the intra-Algerian migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the administrative and commercial rise of Constantine, Bône (Annaba), and Philippeville (Skikda) drew families from Oran and Tlemcen in search of opportunities.
To understand the trajectory of the Charbit family in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is important to situate it within the broader framework of Algerian Judaism. When the French army landed near Algiers in July 1830, the Jews numbered between 15 and 16,000 (out of 2 million Muslims6), settled chiefly in 4 cities: Algiers, Oran, Constantine, Tlemcen, constituted into autonomous Jewish Nations relative to one another. The organization into "Jewish Nations" — each endowed with its rabbinical court, its parnasim, its cheikh al-yahoud — explains the persistence, in Tlemcen as elsewhere, of a structured and largely autonomous communal life until the French conquest.
The distinctiveness of Tlemcen lies in its antiquity and in the memory of the great medieval rabbis who exercised their office there. in Algiers: Isaac ben Chechet known as ... the leadership of the Jewish community of Algiers; in Constantine: Maimun ben Saadia Najar and Joseph ben Menir; in Tlemcen: Abraham ben Hakin and Ephraim Encaoua, a rabbi born in Toledo. The Charbit family, by establishing itself durably within the Tlemcen rabbinate, thus inherited a chain of transmission unbroken since the 14th century.
It is upon this ancient demographic foundation that Eisenbeth's inquiry casts a particular light. As Grand Rabbi of Algiers himself — Maurice Eisenbeth (1886-1957) held this office at the time of publication —, the author had privileged access to communal registers and local rabbinical archives, which he cross-referenced with the colonial censuses [Corpus Zakhor id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. His 1936 work thus offers, for the first time, a scientific measure of this population which, from an estimated figure of some sixteen thousand souls in 1830, had grown and redistributed considerably over the course of a century of French rule. For the Charbit lineage, whose Tlemcen roots go back at least to 1792, this inquiry provides the indispensable numerical context: it makes it possible to situate the community of Tlemcen, one of the four great historic settlements, within the general dynamics of Algerian Judaism in the first third of the twentieth century.
The Crémieux Decree of 24 October 1870, collectively granting French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria, transformed the legal condition and way of life of the communities. It opened the French school to entire generations, rapidly Frenchified customs and surnames, and entered families into the European civil status registers. It was within this framework that the spellings Charbit, Charbite, Charvit, Cherbit became fixed, sometimes arbitrarily. But the decree also divided: the new secular elites, educated at the French lycée and university, gradually distanced themselves from the traditional rabbinical authorities. The rabbinate of Jacob Charbit, as we have seen, unfolds precisely at the intersection of these two worlds, striving to maintain the dignity of the Tlemcen *minhag* in the face of the double pressure of French modernization and, from the 1930s onward, the rise of hostilities (the antisemitic riots in Constantine in 1934, the Vichy statute of the Jews in 1940).
The year 1962 marks for nearly all the Jews of Algeria — the Charbit family included — the rupture of a multi-millennial attachment to the Maghrebi land. Within a few months, the overwhelming majority of the community made its way to metropolitan France, to which it was legally bound by the citizenship of 1870, while minorities chose Israel, Canada, or Latin America.
In Mostaganem, in Sidi Bel-Abbès, in Tlemcen itself, the synagogues closed, the cemeteries were entrusted to the precarious care of local keepers, and the rites died out. It is in this context that the founding, by the Charbits and their kin, of the Union Nord-Africaine des Tlemcéniens (UNAT) in France takes on its full meaning, an organization of which Jacob Charbit was the religious leader until his death in 1982 and where his son André took over around 1980. The perpetuation of the Tlemcen rite in a diaspora synagogue, with its particular melodies and its own liturgical calendar, bears witness to a will for continuity in the face of erasure.
Measured against the figures established by Eisenbeth for the 1930s, this dispersion takes on its full gravity. The community that the 1936 inquiry had described and enumerated, commune by commune, from the censuses and the rabbinical registers, found itself, less than three decades later, almost entirely displaced from Algerian soil [Corpus Zakhor id:8a9bb129-e473-4f98-82aa-e2563b90f8ff]. The work of the Grand Rabbi of Algiers thereby acquires a paradoxical value as a monument: conceived as a scientific instrument for describing a living present, it became, after 1962, one of the last systematic testimonies of an Algerian Jewish world now vanished in place. The Charbit lineage, in perpetuating the *minhag* of Tlemcen in the diaspora, strives to keep alive a part of this reality that Eisenbeth's inquiry had fixed only in the form of tables and statistics.
The episode reported by the Israeli press illustrates this symbolic permanence: thus when the World Center of North African Judaism asked him whether he wished to give a name to his synagogue, Mr. Charbit immediately thought of Rav Ephraïm Enkaoua. And it was only natural that the famous Sefer Torah should one day come to this place, in the capital of the Jewish State. The transfer of a 180-year-old Tlemcen Sefer Torah from Algeria, through the efforts of a member of the Charbit family, to Jerusalem, condenses into a single gesture the whole movement of the lineage: from Tlemcen, medieval heir of Toledo, toward the Holy City, by way of the long detour of contemporary France. I decided to bring the Sefer Torah; Rabbi Isaac Chouraqui gave it to experts. They dated it.
Today, the Charbits form a scattered diaspora, predominantly present in the Paris region, in the Mediterranean South (Marseille, Nice, Aix-en-Provence), and in Israel. The genealogical statistics of Geneanet nonetheless confirm the relative numerical discreetness of the name: this surname is uncommon. The bearers of this patronymic may descend from a common ancestor. This hypothesis of a *common ancestor*, to be received with due caution, suggests that all present-day bearers might descend from a single stock, in all likelihood from Tlemcen — a hypothesis consistent with the historical concentration of the family in that city and with the rabbinical function transmitted across several attested generations.
