The surname Schelli — also encountered under the spellings Chelli, Chéli, or Shelli depending on the transcription conventions adopted by colonial, rabbinical, and French administrations — belongs to the vast family of Jewish names from North Africa of Arabic origin. Its study falls within a now well-mapped scholarly field: the onomastics of Maghrebi Jewries, whose great repertories catalogue and classify names according to their root, linguistic register, and area of diffusion. The reference compilations remind us that in North Africa, the family names of Jews have diverse origins, some being of Hebrew origin, others Arabic, Berber, Spanish, or Italian [DAFINA, Les noms de famille des Juifs d'Afrique du nord et leur origine].
The genealogical notice transmitted connects Schelli to the Arabic consonantal root sh.l.l (ش-ل-ل), carrying the idea of "immobilizing," "paralyzing," or "rendering inert," and designating here, by semantic extension, a left-handed man — that is, one whose right side appeared "hindered" in favor of the left. The terminal suffix -i, common in Arabic onomastics, marks belonging or relation: it attaches the individual to a clan, a place, or a characteristic. This double articulation — a descriptive root and a suffix of belonging — makes Schelli a nickname-name, the most widespread class in the Maghrebi patronymic corpus.
This book sets out to retrace, with the caution that all genealogy demands, the outlines of a lineage whose very name is a trace: the trace of a language shared with the Arabic-speaking environment, the trace of a singular body become hereditary mark, and finally the trace of a community whose History unfolds between the medieval dhimma and contemporary emancipations.
The etymology of Schelli stems from a perfectly documented onomastic mechanism. In the Arabic-speaking world, and particularly in the Maghreb, a considerable proportion of Jewish family names derives from individual nicknames that became hereditary. Scholarly repertories note that many surnames originate from nicknames linked to a trade, a physical trait, a distinctive character, or a place of origin [DAFINA].
The triconsonantal root sh-l-l is, in classical Arabic, one of the most stable in the lexicon of the body and of movement. It generates the verb shalla (شَلَّ), "to be paralyzed, to lose the use of a limb," and the noun shalal (شَلَل), "paralysis." From this matrix arises, through metaphorical shift, the designation of the left-handed person: in a culture where the right hand is the hand of honor, of oaths, and of sharing food, the one who favors the left appears as having the right hand "immobilized." The nickname is therefore not neutral; it records a bodily particularity noticed by the community and fixed by usage. This type of designation aligns with other Maghrebi names formed from physical traits — great height, red hair, blindness, limping — which constitute an ancient and popular stratum of the onomastic heritage.
The suffix -i — the Arabic nisba — transforms the adjective or nickname into a marker of belonging. Chelli thus means "he who pertains to / who is connected with [the trait of] the left-handed one," and by extension "member of the household, the clan, the lineage of He-who-was-called-the-left-handed-one." This passage from individual nickname to clanic nisba is precisely the moment at which a hereditary surname is born. One should note, out of methodological caution, that a homographic root may sometimes encompass neighboring meanings; it is therefore appropriate to present this etymological filiation as the most probable, rather than the only possible one, in keeping with the rigor of onomasticians.
The very fact that Schelli derives from an Arabic root places the lineage at the heart of Arabic-speaking Maghrebi Jewish identity, by opposition — or in complement — to the contributions of Spanish-speaking, Italian-speaking, and Judeo-Berber Sephardic communities. The great repertories recall the stratification of the corpus: one distinguishes names of Hebrew origin, those of Arabic origin, those of Berber origin, as well as names imported by Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal [DAFINA]. A name like Chelli, transparent to an Arabic speaker, belongs to the most anciently rooted stratum in the North African soil, that of communities established well before the waves of Iberian expulsions of 1391 and 1492.
This linguistic affiliation has profound cultural implications. The bearers of such a name moved within a universe where dialectal Arabic — Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic — was the language of daily life, commerce, and often of commented prayer, while Hebrew remained the sacred language of ritual and study. Judeo-Arabic, written in Hebrew characters, conveyed a considerable literature: commented translations of the Bible (sharh), hagiographic narratives, liturgical poetry, and communal chronicles. A patronym derived from Arabic bears witness to this multicentury linguistic symbiosis, in which the Jews of the Maghreb shared with their Muslim neighbors a common lexical matrix, while reinvesting it according to their own usages.
It is important here not to over-interpret: the Arabic origin of a name says nothing of a supposed conversion, nor of a non-Jewish ethnic origin. It says only that the community, at the time when the name became fixed, lived in an Arabic-speaking environment and drew naturally from it its designative resources.
The localization of the Schelli / Chelli families must be approached with caution, given that, in the current state of this inquiry, no systematic examination of civil registry records has been conducted. The reference onomastic repertoires mainly inventory the communities of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and it is within this space that the cradle of the lineage most likely lies [DAFINA ; Origine des noms des Juifs d'Afrique-du-nord, tunisie-genealogie.com].
The form Chelli and its variants are found across several areas of the Arabic-speaking Maghreb. Its morphology — a pure Arabic root combined with a nisba — points the hypothesis toward a Tunisian or Algerian origin, regions where this pattern of patronymic formation is particularly productive, without excluding eastern Morocco. Family tradition, where it exists, often designates a founding city or a local patron saint around which Memory has crystallized; the archive, for its part, only yields these anchors at the cost of painstaking work on notarial records, community registers (pinqas), and colonial censuses. Where oral memory and the document converge — hence the register of intersection — they tend to confirm one another, yet the status remains probable as long as precise archival sources have not been produced.
The spelling Schelli, with its German-style initial sch or its doubled l, also betrays a passage through a European administration — French, Italian, or German-speaking — which crystallized in writing a pronunciation until then transmitted orally. Each graphic variant is thus the fossil of an administrative encounter, and the diversity of forms (Chelli, Chéli, Shelli, Schelli) reflects less a diversity of origin than a diversity of scribes.
The hereditary transmission of Jewish family names, as we know it today, became widespread only gradually and, in many cases, under the effect of modern legislation. In France and its possessions, the legal framework governing the naming of Jews was established notably by the imperial measures of the early nineteenth century, which imposed the adoption of fixed surnames and first names [Décret sur les noms des Juifs, francearchives.gouv.fr]. In Algeria, the Crémieux decree of 1870, conferring French citizenship upon indigenous Jews, was accompanied by a reorganization of civil registration that helped stabilize and transcribe family names according to French norms.
For a lineage such as Schelli, this administrative moment is decisive: it is the one that transforms a communal nickname — until then flexible and susceptible to variants — into a legally transmissible name, orthographically fixed. Before this codification, the same individual might be designated in rabbinical documents by his given name followed by his father's name, and in everyday life by the clan sobriquet Chelli. Administrative codification fused these two usages, turning the nickname into the official name.
This history is not unique to the family under study: it is the history of the vast majority of Maghrebi Jewish family names, whose modern form results from a negotiation between communal Memory and bureaucratic writing. To understand the name Schelli is therefore to understand this tipping point where an oral tradition meets the State, and where the flexibility of the sobriquet gives way to the rigidity of the register.
The 20th century profoundly reshaped the Jewish communities of North Africa. The upheavals of the Second World War, followed by the independence of Morocco and Tunisia in 1956 and of Algeria in 1962, led to the departure of nearly all Maghrebi Jews toward France, Israel, Canada, and Latin America. Families bearing a name such as Schelli took part in this great migratory movement, carrying their patronym with them as an identity viaticum.
In the diaspora, the name has followed varied paths: preserved unchanged for many, sometimes lightly adapted to the phonetics of the host country, and more rarely Hebraized in Israel, where certain immigrants chose to translate or replace their Arabic name. The coexistence of the spellings Chelli and Schelli in contemporary directories illustrates this dispersal: a single common stock, scattered across several civil registers, gives rise to branches that are orthographically distinct yet genealogically united. In the absence of exhaustive records, the precise mapping of these branches remains an inquiry yet to be undertaken; accordingly, the status of this chapter remains probable. What is certain, however, is that the name has survived the ruptures of exile, bearing witness to the remarkable continuity of Memory among Maghrebi Jewish families, for whom the patronym remains one of the last threads stretched toward the lost homeland.
At the end of this journey, the name Schelli reveals itself as a condensed history. Its Arabic root sh.l.l inscribes it within the long duration of an Arabophone Maghrebi Jewishness, intimately bound to its linguistic environment. Its meaning — the left-handed one, he whose right hand appears immobilized — places it among bodily sobriquets, that ancient and popular stratum of onomastics where the singular body becomes a hereditary sign. Its suffix -i, finally, constitutes it as a clan name, marking the passage from the individual to the lineage.
Three lessons emerge. First, Schelli is a transparent name, whose probable etymology is solidly supported by the known mechanisms of Maghrebi patronymic formation. Next, its geography and graphic variants (Chelli, Shelli, Schelli) tell a story of successive transcriptions, in which each administration has left its mark. Finally, its survival through the exiles of the twentieth century bears witness to the fidelity of North African Jewish families to their name as to their Memory. Where precise archival evidence is still lacking, honesty demands speaking of probability rather than certainty; yet the general framework is solidly established by the reference repertories. The Great Book of the Schelli thus remains an open endeavor, where each newly discovered record will, in time, transform the probable into the established.
