The surname Encaoua has elicited from philologists and historians multiple and sometimes contradictory interpretations. Three principal hypotheses emerge from the scholarly literature.
The first interpretation takes the name Encaoua to be a phonetic transcription of the Hebrew-Aramaic expression עֵין קַוָּא (Ein Kawa), which may be translated as “source of the measure” or “fountain of the canon.” The term קַוָּא (kawa) would refer to the qav, a Hebrew and Aramaic unit of measure mentioned in the Mishnah.
The second interpretation connects the name to the Arabic ابن قاوة (Ibn Qawa), “son of Qawa.” The form Hencaoua is found in medieval Arabic documents, notably in notarial deeds from Granada and Séville preserved at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid.
A third school of thought, represented by the historian Gabriel Camps, suggests that the root kawa or cawa is of Berber origin, related to the Tamazight designating a particular type of terrain or human settlement. Camps recalls that many North African Jewish families bear names of Berber origin (Azoulay, Medioni, Berdugo, Abitbol), reflecting the antiquity of the Judeo-Berber symbiosis. According to this hypothesis, the name would have been adopted even before the arrival in Spain — which would contradict the idea of an exclusively Iberian origin of the family.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, there are at least four spellings in Hebrew characters and numerous calligraphies in Latin characters: Al-Naqua, Alnakaoua, Al-Naqwa, Alnucawi, Ankoa, Kaoua, N'Kaoua (Nkaoua), Ankaoua, Enkaoua, Encaoua, Ankawa, Enkawa, and Elnekave (or Elnecavé). This last form, Elnekave, is the modern Hebraized variant used mainly in Israël and in English-speaking countries, while the forms Ankawa and Enkawa are found in Morocco and Algeria. According to Alexander Beider, the name is monogenetic in nature, having appeared in a single place, at a given period, borne by a well-defined family.
The persistence of the surname Encaoua across seven centuries illustrates a phenomenon characteristic of the Sephardic tradition: the transmission of the name as a sacred marker of identity. Unlike many Ashkenazi Jewish families that adopted surnames imposed by European administrations in the eighteenth century, Sephardic families such as the Encaoua preserved their medieval name without interruption. This onomastic fidelity is explained by the communal structure of Maghrebi Judaism, where the family name guaranteed access to certain hereditary rabbinic functions. The surname thus functioned as a title of intellectual nobility, attesting to membership in a lineage of scholars and judges.
One of the questions most debated by historians is whether all the families bearing the different variants of the name descend from a common ancestor. Alexander Beider, in his Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Maghreb (2017), leans clearly in favor of monogenesis: the name would have appeared only once, in medieval Castile, probably in Toledo or Séville in the twelfth century, and all the present-day branches would descend from this single stock. This hypothesis is reinforced by the geographic coherence of the dispersion: the Encaoua are found only in places historically linked to the Spain → Maghreb itinerary (Tlemcen, Oran, Salé, Fès), never in the Ashkenazi communities or in the Ottoman Empire — which would be difficult to explain if the name had multiple, independent origins.