Israël ben Yossef Al-Naqua, rabbi and moralist in Toledo, lived in the 14th century. He is the first of the bearers of Jewish thought identified by David Encaoua.
According to Didier Nebot (Le Manuscrit Sacré, 2026), Israël Al-Naqua was burned alive on 6 June 1391 in the synagogue of Écija, near Seville, while he was praying. He is presented as the first martyr of the massacres of 1391. Tradition holds that he perished on the pyre holding a Sefer Torah in his hand. The Encyclopedia Judaica rather places the event in Toledo, where Israël was a rabbi. The two versions agree on the essential point: Israël Al-Naqua died sanctifying the divine Name (kiddush Hashem), refusing forced conversion to Christianity. This heroic act — choosing death rather than apostasy — belongs to the tradition of Jewish martyrs since the age of the Maccabees.
The Menorat ha-Maor (מנורת המאור, “The Candelabrum of Light”) is a major work of Musar (Jewish ethics) in 20 chapters, composed in Toledo in the second half of the 14th century. Its ambition was to make the wisdom of the Talmud accessible to all, including the simplest Jews, by gathering teachings scattered throughout rabbinic literature. The work is structured around a mystical symbolism: a seven-branched golden candelabrum, each branch representing a fundamental domain of ethical life. It should be noted that the work is distinct from another Menorat HaMaor composed by Rabbi Yisrael Alnakawa, a partial homonym. An abridgment was published in Cracow in 1593. The complete manuscript was published in four volumes in the United States in 1929–1934 by H.G. Enelow.
The massacres were preceded by the hateful sermons of the archdeacon Ferran Martínez of Écija, who for years travelled across Andalusia calling for the destruction of synagogues and the subjugation of the Jews. Despite royal edicts seeking to muzzle him, his incendiary rhetoric radicalized the lower classes, already stirred up by economic hardship and political instability during the minority of King Enrique III of Castile. On 6 June 1391, the populace stormed the judería of Seville. Within three months, more than 70 towns and villages were affected. Historical estimates speak of thousands of victims and tens of thousands of forced conversions across the Iberian peninsula.
The influence of the Menorat ha-Maor extended far beyond the family circle of the Encaoua. The work is frequently cited in major works of later rabbinic literature, notably the Shenei Luchot HaBrit (Shelah) of Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz and the Rema (Rabbi Moshe Isserles). Its popularity in the Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe attests to its universal reach within Judaism. For the Encaoua lineage, the Menorat ha-Maor plays a founding role: it is the family's intellectual birth certificate, the text that establishes the Encaoua among the families producing first-rank rabbinic knowledge. The ambition to make the Torah accessible to all runs through the seven centuries of the lineage — from the Menorat to the works of David Encaoua for the contemporary French-speaking readership.
Family tradition holds that Éphraïm, son of Israël Al-Naqua, carried with him a manuscript copy of the Menorat ha-Maor during his flight from Spain to Tlemcen in 1391. This symbolic gesture — saving the father's book at the peril of his own life — constitutes the founding act of Encaoua transmission. The manuscript crossed the Mediterranean just as the Hebrews of old crossed the Red Sea, carrying with them the Tablets of the Law. In Tlemcen, Éphraïm did not merely preserve his father's heritage: he prolonged it by composing his own treatise, the Sha'ar Kevod Hashem, thus establishing the model of transmission that would characterize the lineage for five centuries — each generation producing a work that both preserves and renews the heritage received.