Among the great rabbinic families of the Muslim West, few bear a name so singular and so enduringly bound to a single city as that of Serero, inseparable from Fès. At the crossroads of Iberian exile and Moroccan rootedness, this lineage embodies the destiny of the megorashim — the expelled of Sefarad — who, in the aftermath of 1492, carried to North Africa not only their persons but also their learning, their books and their juridical tradition. The Serero form a family of Spanish scholars who settled in Fès after the Expulsion, bringing with them their considerable library.
To reconstitute the history of such a lineage entails a twofold exercise: following the documentary trace it left in the takkanot (communal ordinances), the chronicles and the collections of responsa, and restoring the transmitted memory that surrounds it. The present work attempts this synthesis by honestly distinguishing, at each stage, what belongs to the established archive, what remains probable, and what tradition alone preserves. While the family's earliest origin in Morocco still eludes documentation — there exists no available information on the first generation of the Serero family in Morocco — the rest of its course is, by contrast, exceptionally well attested, to the point of making the Serero one of the best-known rabbinic dynasties of Fès.
The Serero family belongs to the great Sephardic migration prompted by the decree expelling the Jews from Spain in 1492. Saul ben David Serero was born in Fès, where his family had settled after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. This fact firmly anchors the lineage in the Castilian world of the pre-exile era, among that lettered elite who chose the crossing to the Maghreb rather than conversion or wandering toward the Ottoman Empire.
One of the most remarkable traits of this family lies in what it carried with it: not only a scholarly memory, but a rare material and intellectual treasure. Saul Serero stood at the head of a yeshiva, where he possessed numerous manuscripts of the rabbis of Spain, which he had inherited. This inherited library forms a guiding thread of the family identity: it materially links the Serero of Fès to medieval Spain, and partly explains the intellectual authority that the lineage long wielded.
The surname "Serero" is attested very early in Morocco. According to Maurice Eisenbeth, historian of the Jews of North Africa, the surname Serero is attested in Morocco from the first half of the 16th century. As for the etymology, it remains uncertain and must be treated with caution: the registers of surnames do not yield any assured origin, and the neighbouring forms (Serrero, Severo, Sereno) invite circumspection rather than assertion. It is therefore more honest to present the Iberian origin of the name as probable — confirmed by the context of the exile and by the early attestation in Morocco — without settling on a meaning whose key the archive does not preserve.
The figure who lends the lineage its luster is unquestionably Rabbi Saül ben David Serero. The sources concur on his preeminent role: Saul ben David Serero (1575–1655) was the most eminent ḥakham of Fès of his time. Biographical notices place his birth between 1566 and 1575 and his death in 1655, attributing to him an exceptional longevity for the period, devoted to the service of the community for nearly sixty years.
His public career is marked by precisely documented stages. In 1602, he was appointed a member of the ma'amad of Fès, and in 1621 he succeeded Samuel Abendanan at the head of the local bet din. These two offices — a seat on the communal council (ma'amad) followed by the presidency of the rabbinical court (bet din) — sum up the rise of a man who passed from lay representation to the city's supreme spiritual magistracy. To this was added his pedagogical role: he was also at the head of a yeshiva.
Saül Serero was likewise an actor in the community's internal legislative life. He was a signatory of the takkanot of 1602. These Castilian takkanot, ordinances governing marriage, dowry, inheritance, and the civil life of the exiles and their descendants, constitute one of the monuments of Sephardi communal law in Morocco; to affix one's signature to them was to take part directly in the legal governance of Fès.
Finally, Saül Serero stands out for a dimension rare among the rabbis of his time: a taste for history. His interest in history found expression in a chronology of events. This documentary inclination makes him not only a judge and a master, but also a witness and a memorialist of his city — a stance that, across the centuries, renders the historian of today indebted to his labor.
Far from being limited to a single brilliant generation, the house of Serero endures across time as a lineage of judges and decisors. The motif of the signature at the foot of communal acts recurs through the generations, attesting to an authority recognized and handed down. Thus, among the rabbis of Fez who, in 1698, signed a protest concerning the use of the dowry, we find Menahem Serero. Nearly a century apart from Saul, another Serero therefore continues to exercise the function of guarantor of communal law.
At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the family appears at the heart of the rabbinical college that brought glory to Fez. Ḥayyim David Serero sat among the rabbis of Fez alongside Abraham ibn Danan, Samuel ibn Zimrah, Meïr Ẓaba', Jacob ibn Ẓur, and others. This mention is precious: it places the Serero within the very circle of Rabbi Yaakov ibn Tsour (Yaabetz), one of the greatest halakhic authorities of Morocco, and confirms that the family belonged to the rabbinical aristocracy of the city, the one that issued the most binding rulings.
The repetition of the given names — David, Saul, Menahem, Ḥayyim David, Mattityahu — from one generation to the next outlines a strategy of transmission characteristic of Sephardic rabbinical dynasties: the name of the illustrious ancestor returns, each time reviving the memory of the founder and the authority attached to it. This phenomenon, frequent in the lineages of Fez, makes the nomenclature itself an instrument of institutional continuity. The Serero were not merely a family in which one studied: they were a family in which office was perpetuated, almost hereditarily, within the bet din and the ma'amad.
If there is one heritage that sets the Serero apart among the families of Fès, it is their relationship to the book. Tradition holds that they were the guardians of an Iberian library passed down from father to son, and the archive here confirms the memory. Upon settling in Fès, the family brought with it its considerable library. This collection was no mere ornament: Saul Serero possessed numerous manuscripts of the rabbis of Spain, which he had inherited.
The preservation of Sephardic manuscripts by a family of Fès carries considerable historical significance. In a world where the Hebrew printed word remained rare in the Maghreb, to possess the writings of the masters of Castile and Aragon conferred an intellectual power: that of judging according to the sources, of citing the ancients, of ruling with the authority of the decisors of the pre-exilic age. The yeshiva of Saül Serero, backed by this treasure, thus became a hearth where the Spanish tradition was transmitted without rupture.
The lineage's historiographical inclination extends this culture of the document. The chronicle kept by Saül Serero — a record of events that occurred in Fès — proceeds as much from the work of an archivist as from that of a scholar. Here, family memory and documented history converge: what the family chose to preserve of its past is precisely what the modern historian draws upon to reconstitute it. This convergence justifies placing the present chapter at the intersection of tradition and archive, each illuminating the other, though one cannot always, for want of complete inventories of the manuscripts now dispersed, measure its full extent with certainty.
A remarkable trait: the Serero family did not scatter according to the political vicissitudes of Morocco; generation after generation, it remained attached to Fès, its founding city. This rare permanence holds true into the twentieth century. Genealogical registers thus attest to Rabbi Ḥaïm David Serero, born in 1883 or 1884 in Fès, son of Mattityahu Serero, designated as chief rabbi, and of Rebecca née Botbol.
This early-twentieth-century record confirms that the rabbinical office remained, three centuries after Saül, a family affair: a Mattityahu Serero described as chief rabbi, a son named Ḥaïm David — reviving the name of the Fès rabbi from the turn of the eighteenth century —, a matrimonial alliance with another great house of the community, the Botbol. The network of alliances revealed by genealogical sources, which connects the Serero to the Botbol, Shitrit, Bensimon, and Assaraf families, illustrates the central place of the lineage within the Jewish social fabric of Fès.
The continuity of settlement in a single city, from the exile of 1492 to the threshold of the contemporary era, makes the Serero a textbook case for the history of the Jews of Morocco. Where so many families experienced wandering between Fès, Meknès, Salé, Tétouan, or Marrakech, the Serero present the image of an almost uninterrupted rootedness, tied to their very function: guardians of the court, of the library, and of the memory of a community that recognized them as one of its pillars. In the twentieth century, with the decline of Moroccan Jewry and the great migrations toward France, Israel, and Canada, the name Serero accompanied the Moroccan diaspora in its new dispersal, carrying afar the memory of Fès.
The history of the Serero lineage condenses, within a single family, several centuries of Jewish history: the exile from Sefarad, the rooting in the Maghreb, fidelity to the book, and the transmission of the rabbinic charge. From the arrival in Fès after 1492, with their library as their sole intellectual viaticum, to the great rabbis of the twentieth century, the house of Serero illustrates the way a Sephardic elite knew how to convert a heritage threatened by expulsion into a lasting, almost dynastic, authority.
The figure of Saül Serero — ḥakham, judge, master of the yeshiva, signatory of the takkanot, and chronicler of his city — remains the embodiment of this success. Around it gravitate the Menahem, Ḥayyim David, and Mattityahu who, from signature to signature and from generation to generation, maintained the name at the summit of the communal hierarchy. While the very first Moroccan generation still eludes documentation, the entire trajectory rests upon a framework of solid archives and catalogues. The Great Book of the Serero thus closes on the image of a lineage faithful to a city, to a book, and to a vocation — that of declaring the law and preserving memory.
