A recent work considerably enriches our knowledge of the Al-Naqua family and the context in which it lived: Le Manuscrit Sacré (The Sacred Manuscript) by Didier Nebot, stomatologist and historian, published by Éditions Erick Bonnier in 2026.
Didier Nebot is honorary president of the MORIAL association (Memory and Traditions of the Jews of Algeria), former vice-president of the INSSEF (European Institute of the Sephardic World), and a member of the “Memory and Truth” Commission established by President Macron under the direction of Benjamin Stora. Trained as a stomatologist, he has over the decades established himself as one of the most important historians of Sephardic Judaism in France. His earlier works — Le Chemin de l'exil (Émile Roux Prize of the National Academy of Medicine, 1992), La Kahena (1998), Les Bûchers d'Isabelle la Catholique (Erick Bonnier, 2018), and Le Codex de Qumran (Erick Bonnier, 2024) — testify to a rare ability to combine historical rigor with narrative breath, making accessible to the general public episodes of Jewish history that are often little known.
The book was born of a providential encounter with Éphraïm Alfred Enkaoua, known as Fred, a direct descendant of the Rab of Tlemcen and bearer of his first name, who entrusted to him copies of the fifteenth-century manuscript of his forebear — the Chaar Kavod Hashem (The Gate of the Glory of God). This personal transmission, from descendant to historian, gives the book a unique emotional depth: it is not merely a work of history, it is the account of a six-century-old family memory resurfacing. Fred Enkaoua embodies the unbroken chain of transmission: his testimony connects the fifteenth century directly to the twenty-first.
The publication of Le Manuscrit Sacré by Éditions Erick Bonnier is part of a broader movement to rediscover the Sephardic intellectual heritage. The publisher himself, not Jewish, was deeply struck by the significance of the work of Ephraïm Al-Naqua, which he was discovering through the manuscript. His spontaneous reaction sums up the importance of this discovery for the history of philosophical and theological thought. This editorial fact illustrates the universal reach of the Chaar Kavod Hashem: an intellectual heritage that transcends communal boundaries and belongs to the history of human thought as a whole.
What distinguishes Le Manuscrit Sacré from the academic works on the Encaoua lineage is its narrative approach. Nebot does not merely cite sources and date events: he reconstructs the atmospheres, the human dramas, the heartrending choices that Israël and Ephraïm Al-Naqua had to face. This literary approach, nourished by rigorous historical documentation, allows the reader to understand that these figures are not merely names in genealogical trees or signatories of responsa: they are human beings who suffered, hoped, created, and transmitted — and whose light, to borrow Nebot's words, “slept in the shadow of the centuries” before returning, from hand to hand, from heart to heart.