David Encaoua · April 2025 · Tribune Juive
Judaism is a religion of memory. Zakhor — remember — is one of the most widespread commandments in the Torah. But what is the difference between history and memory in the Jewish tradition?
History is the scholarly reconstruction of the past from documents, sources, and evidence. It aspires to objectivity, even if it never fully attains it. It is the domain of the historian.
Memory is something else. It is transmission, it is identity, it is urgency. The Jewish memory of the Shoah, of the expulsion from Spain, of the destruction of the Temple, is not first of all a historical reconstruction. It is an act of identification: “we were slaves in Egypt.” The past is made present.
For the Encaoua lineage, these two registers coexist. There is history — rigorous, verifiable, founded on the documents of the Bodleian Library, the archives of the ANOM, the responsa of the Rivash. And there is memory — the accounts transmitted orally from generation to generation, the hilloula of Rabbi Raphaël in Salé, the legendary journey of Samuel Sultan to Oxford in 1897.
These two registers are not opposed to one another. They complement each other, as Yerushalmi says in his admirable Zakhor (1982): modern Jewish historiography must become a new vehicle of collective memory.
This is the ambition of this work: to make the history of the Encaoua family, rigorously documented, become living memory for future generations.