The patronym Zenati belongs to the great family of North African Jewish names whose etymology refers directly to the Berber substrate of the Maghreb. It derives from the name of the Zenata (in Arabic Zanāta, in French the Zénètes), one of the three great Berber tribal confederations of the medieval Maghreb, alongside the Sanhadja and the Masmuda. The term Zenati thus means, in the literal sense, "one who belongs to the Zenata" or "originating from the Zénète lands," and more broadly designates one who speaks zenatiya, the Berber dialectal ensemble proper to these tribes. According to the Dafina portal, in its directory "Les noms des Juifs du Maroc," the patronym is connected to the Berber tribe of the Zenata, whose historical area extends from southwestern Algeria to eastern Morocco [Dafina, "Les noms des Juifs du Maroc"].
This name illustrates a central onomastic phenomenon in the history of the Jews of the Maghreb: the inscription, within the patronym itself, of a Berber tribal or geographical origin. Unlike names of Hebrew origin (Cohen, Lévy), Spanish origin (Tolédano, Cordova), or Arabic origin (Abergel, Abitbol), names of the Zenati type bear witness to the antiquity and depth of Jewish rootedness in the Berber world, predating the Arab conquest and the waves of Sephardic immigration. The Chief Rabbi Maurice Eisenbeth, in his reference work Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord. Démographie et onomastique (Algiers, 1936), records this patronym among the names attested in the communities of Algeria and notes several graphic variants — the family notice enumerates eight [Eisenbeth, Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord, 1936].
The present volume proposes to reconstruct, insofar as the sources permit, the historical, geographical, and onomastic horizon of the Zenati lineage: its anchorage in the Zénète world, its attested presence in western Algeria and the Oranie, its graphic forms, and the place it occupies in the collective Memory of the Jews of North Africa. Where the archive is lacking, we will honestly distinguish the documented from the probable, and transmitted tradition from the established.
To understand the name Zenati, one must first understand the Zenata. The Zénètes constituted, alongside the Sanhadja and the Masmuda, one of the three great Berber population groups of the Maghreb. Medieval Arab historians, foremost among them Ibn Khaldoun in his Kitāb al-ʿIbar (Histoire des Berbères, 14th century), describe them as a people of nomads and horsemen, long established in the steppes and high plains of North Africa before playing a leading political role [Ibn Khaldoun, Histoire des Berbères]. According to the Encyclopédie Larousse, the Zénètes formed a group of Berber tribes to which several medieval dynasties of the Maghreb trace their origins [Larousse, « Zénètes »].
The political influence of the Zenata was considerable during the Middle Ages. Several major dynasties emerged from this group: the Mérinides of Fès, the Abdalwadides (or Zianides) of Tlemcen, and the Wattassides. Their sphere of expansion covers precisely the area designated by Jewish onomastic tradition: southwestern Algeria and eastern Morocco, that is, the Tlemcen and Oran region that would later become one of the heartlands of Maghrebi Judaism. The language of these tribes, the zenatiya (or Zenatic dialects), remains to this day one of the recognized major branches of Berber, comprising notably the dialects of the Rif, the oases, and certain regions of the Aurès and the Mzab.
The Jewish presence in the Berber world is attested from ancient times. The works of onomastics and linguistics brought together in the Encyclopédie berbère emphasize that many North African Jewish surnames preserve traces of a Berber origin, bearing witness to an ancient coexistence between Jewish communities and the indigenous populations of the Maghreb [Encyclopédie berbère, « Juifs du Maghreb : onomastique et langue »]. The name Zenati belongs precisely to this category: it fixes, within the family name, the memory of a Zenatic belonging or origin. Whether this origin refers to a Judaization of Zenatic Berbers, to the settlement of Jews in Zenatic lands, or simply to a surname designating an individual who came from that territory, the root remains the same and points toward the Berber heart of the western Maghreb.
The analysis of the name Zenati confirms a transparent onomastic formation. The base is the ethnonymic root Zanāta / Zenata, to which the Arabic attributive suffix -ī (the nisba) is added, producing Zanātī → Zenati, "the Zenete," "he of the Zenata." This construction by nisba is extremely common in Maghrebi onomastics, where names ending in -i frequently denote a tribal, geographical, or ethnic origin: it recurs in patronyms of the same structure referring to places or groups.
The connection of the name to the Zenete confederation and to the zenatiya language is explicitly formulated by North African Jewish onomastic repertories. Dafina, in "Les noms des Juifs du Maroc," links the patronym to the Berber tribe of the Zenata, locating its cradle in south-western Algeria and eastern Morocco, and associating these populations with the zenatiya dialect [Dafina, "Les noms des Juifs du Maroc"]. This double information — tribal origin and linguistic origin — is valuable: it indicates that the name does not designate a single, precise location, but a vast Berber-speaking cultural area.
Contemporary genealogical databases confirm the persistence and diffusion of the name. According to online onomastic repertories (Geneanet, Forebears), Zenati is today a well-attested patronym, whose bearers are found principally in North Africa and in countries of Maghrebi emigration, with notable concentrations [Forebears, "Zenati"; Geneanet, "Zenati"]. One should note the formal proximity with the variant Zenatti, whose doubled spelling appears chiefly in Italianate or Tunisian contexts, illustrating the graphical plasticity of a single etymological stock [Forebears, "Zenatti"]. It is nonetheless advisable to distinguish carefully between Jewish and Muslim bearers of the same name: since the Zenete ethonym is shared, the patronym Zenati exists in both confessions, and only communal or archival inquiry makes it possible to link a specific bearer to the Jewish lineage.
Jewish onomastic sources place the principal settlement of the Zenati lineage in Algeria, and more specifically in Oranie, that is, western Algeria oriented toward eastern Morocco. This localization is consistent with the historical geography of the Zenata, whose tribes dominated precisely the region of Tlemcen and the Oran hinterland. The heartland of the name and the historical heartland of the confederation thus coincide, which reinforces the plausibility of ancient rootedness.
Oranie constituted, from the Middle Ages through the colonial era, a major crossroads of North African Judaism. Tlemcen, capital of the Abdalwadid kingdom, harbored an important Jewish community and became a rabbinical center of the first order — it was notably there that, in the fifteenth century, the celebrated saint and Talmudist Rabbi Ephraïm Enkaoua (Rab) lived, whose tomb remains a place of pilgrimage. Oran and Mostaganem, Aïn Témouchent, Nedroma, and all the towns of the region counted Jewish families, many of whom bore names of Berber or local toponymic origin. The attestation of the patronym Zenati within this territory thus inscribes itself within a dense and ancient communal fabric.
One must nonetheless remain measured: while the area of settlement is well established by onomastic repertories, the detail of families, precise places of residence, and individual trajectories often belongs to the domain of reconstruction. The Crémieux Decree of 1870, which granted French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria, brought about an administrative fixing of patronyms in civil registry records, and it is in these archives — birth, marriage, and death certificates from the communes of Oranie — that the Zenati lineage can be traced with the greatest certainty. In the absence of a systematic survey of these holdings within the framework of the present volume, we present the Oran settlement as solidly probable rather than exhaustively documented, drawing on the convergence between the repertory of Eisenbeth and the Zénète geography [Eisenbeth, Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord, 1936; Dafina, « Les noms des Juifs du Maroc »].
One of the most remarkable features noted in the family record is the existence of eight orthographic variants of the surname, catalogued in the onomastic dictionary of Maurice Eisenbeth (1936) [Eisenbeth, Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord, 1936]. This graphic plurality is not an anomaly: it is the rule in Maghrebi Jewish onomastics, and it results from the encounter between several writing systems and several phonetic realities.
Several factors account for this diversity. First, the transition from Hebrew and Arabic — the languages of internal and religious use within communities — to the Latin transcription imposed by the French administration. The same name as pronounced locally could be recorded in divergent ways by civil registry officers according to their ear and their habits. Then, the variability of the initial vowel (Ze- / Zé- / Zen-), the possible doubling of the consonant (-t- / -tt-), the ending (-i / -y / -ti) and the possible agglutination of an article or particle produce a range of forms. Contemporary directories confirm this breadth by placing side by side, for instance, the forms Zenati and Zenatti [Forebears, « Zenati »; Forebears, « Zenatti »].
It is here that tradition and archive speak to one another — hence the intersection register. Family memory often preserves a pronunciation and a « true » form of the name, transmitted orally, while administrative records fix variants that are sometimes far removed from it. Eisenbeth's work consists precisely in gathering under a single entry these dispersed forms, reconstituting the unity of a surname behind the diversity of its spellings. The figure of eight variants, attested by the reference catalogue, makes Zenati an exemplary case of this graphic fragmentation: it is a reminder that a North African surname is never a fixed object, but a plural reality, and that serious genealogical research must explore all possible spellings so as not to lose track of a branch.
Beyond the archive and etymology, a lineage also lives through the memory that its members transmit. The family notice specifies that, when known, rabbinical or communal figures are associated with the name Zenati. In the tradition of the communities of Oranie, the transmission of the name is often accompanied by the memory of a founding ancestor, a man of learning, a notable, or a respected craftsman, whose memory structures family identity.
This dimension belongs to the register of Memory and testimony as transmitted, rather than to established History: family narratives, oral genealogies, attachments to a local saint or a particular synagogue constitute an intangible heritage that does not always lend itself to documentary verification. It is therefore fitting to gather these with respect while presenting them for what they are: a received tradition. For the Zenati lineage, editorial prudence requires that no specific figures be attributed without a named source; we note only that the notice opens the possibility of identifying such personalities when communal documentation makes it possible.
The great memorial rupture, for this lineage as for the whole of Algerian Jewry, was the exile of 1962. At the moment of Algerian independence, virtually all the Jews of Oranie left the country, principally for France and, to a lesser extent, for Israel. This uprooting profoundly transformed the relationship to the name: severed from its Zénète homeland, the surname Zenati became, in diaspora, a sign of fidelity to an origin and a thread connecting generations to a lost land. It is in this context that associations and memory platforms — such as those dedicated to North African Judaism — are today undertaking the collection of narratives, photographs, and genealogical trees, so that oral transmission, fragile by its very nature, may not be lost. The Great Book is part of this work of preservation, offering the Zenati lineage a framework in which established History and transmitted Memory may coexist without being conflated.
At the end of this journey, the Zenati lineage emerges as a privileged witness to the Berber depth of Maghrebi Judaism. Its name, formed from the ethnonym of the Zenata and associated with the zenatiya dialect, roots it in the great Zenete confederation that dominated the medieval western Maghreb, from Tlemcen to eastern Morocco [Dafina, « Les noms des Juifs du Maroc »; Larousse, « Zénètes »]. Its settlement in Algeria and particularly in Oranie remarkably coincides with the historical territory of these tribes, which lends the hypothesis of ancient rootedness a strong degree of plausibility [Eisenbeth, Les Juifs de l'Afrique du Nord, 1936].
The study of the eight graphic variants recorded by Eisenbeth is a reminder that this surname, like so many others in North Africa, has never ceased to be plural, shaped by the encounter between Hebrew, Arabic, Berber, and French [Eisenbeth, 1936]. This plasticity is not a weakness, but the very signature of a history of crossroads, circulation, and coexistence.
What the archive establishes — the etymology, the area of settlement, the graphic variability — Memory extends through the stories, the attachments, and the figures that each family preserves. The present volume has sought to distinguish honestly between these two orders, marking section by section what belongs to documented History, to probable inference, or to transmitted tradition. May it serve as a foundation for further research, grounded in the examination of civil records from Oranie and in the gathering of testimonies, so that the Zenati lineage — dispersed but not erased — may continue to know itself and to pass itself on.
