At the close of this journey through seven centuries of history, from Tolède to Tlemcen, from Séville to Jerusalem, from Salé to Paris, one truth stands out: the Encaoua lineage is not merely one lineage among others in the vast tree of Sephardic Judaism. It is one of its most vigorous, most fruitful, and most faithful branches in the ideal of transmission that founds Jewish identity.
From Rav Israël Al-Naqua, burned alive in Écija on 6 June 1391 while holding a Sefer Torah in his hands, to David Encaoua, emeritus professor at the Sorbonne publishing with L'Harmattan his reflections on the contemporary issues of Judaism — the chain has never been broken. Each generation produced its “bearers of thought”: men who knew how to combine traditional erudition with the knowledge of their age, fidelity to the sacred texts with openness to philosophy, medicine, poetry, and law. Israël Al-Naqua's Menorat ha-Maor sought to make the Torah accessible to all; Ephraïm Al-Naqua's Sha'ar Kevod Hashem demonstrated the compatibility of reason and faith; Abraham Ankawa's Keren Hemer codified rabbinic jurisprudence; Raphaël Encaoua's Karné Rem unified the law of the High Rabbinical Court of Morocco. Each of these works, in its time and in its way, answered the same imperative: to transmit by adapting, to preserve by renewing.
The history of the Encaoua is also a history of resistance. Resistance to persecution in 1391, when Rav Yaakov Encaoua of Séville chose martyrdom rather than forced conversion. Resistance to exile in 1492, when entire branches of the family chose to leave rather than renounce their faith. Resistance to assimilation in the Maghreb, when for five centuries the Encaoua kept the rabbinic tradition alive in the synagogues of Tlemcen, Oran, and Salé. Resistance to the antisemitic laws of Vichy in 1940, which struck the Jews of Algeria harshly. Resistance to oblivion, finally, when after the exodus of 1962, the Encaoua diaspora set out to preserve, against all odds, the memory of an engulfed world. This resistance is not mere stubbornness: it proceeds from a deep conviction, rooted in the Torah, that memory is a sacred duty and that forgetting is a form of spiritual death.
The Encaoua lineage is today scattered across four continents. In France, where the majority of the descendants of the Jews of Algeria and Morocco settled after 1962, the Encaoua are present in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Nice, and many other cities. In Israël, branches of the family live in Jerusalem, Netanya, Dimona, and other localities — a synagogue dedicated to Rab Ephraïm Al-Naqua perpetuates his memory in Jerusalem. In Canada, notably in Montreal, and in the United States, other branches of the family have taken root. In Morocco itself, a few descendants continue to live, guardians of a centuries-old presence. This geographic dispersion, far from diluting the family identity, has on the contrary enriched it: today's Encaoua carry within them a multiplicity of belongings — Sephardic and Ashkenazi, French-speaking and Hebrew-speaking, traditional and modern — that makes this family a microcosm of the contemporary Jewish people.
The spiritual heritage of the Encaoua is not reducible to the manuscripts preserved in libraries. It is alive in the melodies of the piyutim sung at the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in the synagogues of the Oran and Tlemcen rites. It is alive in the hillula of Rab Ephraïm, celebrated each 5 Iyar by hundreds of the faithful in Tlemcen, Paris, and Netanya. It is alive in the work of David Encaoua, who in the 21st century extends the tradition of the “bearers of thought” by applying the interpretive framework of Judaism to the contemporary issues of Israeli society. It is alive in Bernard Bensaïd's genealogical tree, which with its 28,666 individuals listed constitutes one of the largest undertakings of genealogical memory in Sephardic Judaism. It is alive, finally, in Didier Nebot's Manuscrit Sacré, which has restored flesh and voice to figures that oblivion threatened to engulf.