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Sephardic Surnames in North Africa

Captured 2025-11-22

81

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Sephardic Surnames in North Africa

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This webpage serves as a comprehensive resource for researching Sephardic Jewish surnames specifically originating from North Africa, housed within JewishGen's extensive genealogical database system. As part of "The Jeff Malka Sephardic Collection," the page addresses the fortunate position of those tracing North African Jewish family roots, noting that substantial scholarly work has been published on surname origins and meanings in this region. The resource is designed to help genealogical researchers understand the etymology and historical context of Jewish surnames from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya. The page details five major scholarly publications that form the foundation of this surname research, beginning with Ismael Hamet's pioneering 1928 work "Les Juifs du Nord de l'Afrique: noms et surnoms" (Jews of North Africa: names and surnames). The compilation draws from subsequent comprehensive studies by Maurice Eisenbeth (1938), Joseph Toledano (1999), Jacques Taieb (2004), and Paul Sebag (2002), with Abraham Laredo's 1978 Madrid publication being highlighted as the most detailed due to its extensive onomastic analysis and inclusion of pre-Expulsion Spanish archival sources. The authors acknowledge that onomastics—the study of names—is not an exact science, leading to occasional disagreements among scholars about surname origins. The database represents a significant scholarly achievement, compiling a cumulative index of all five major works to create an exhaustive list of 12,040 North African Jewish surnames. This compilation allows researchers to search a single name across all sources, revealing where authors agree or disagree on origins and variants. The database shows both main entry names and their variants from each author's perspective, providing a comprehensive view of scholarly consensus or debate around specific surnames. Notably, the compilation also includes reference numbers for locating entries in Laredo's Hebrew-alphabetized book, which lacks its own index. A practical limitation of the database is its adherence to copyright restrictions, meaning users cannot access the actual meanings and etymological explanations of surnames through the online interface—they must consult the original publications for this detailed information. This resource primarily serves Jewish genealogists, historians, and anyone researching Sephardic family histories, offering them a centralized starting point to identify which scholarly works contain information about their ancestral surnames before consulting the original texts for complete etymological and historical details.

Citation (APA Style)

Sephardic Surnames in North Africa. (2025, 11 22). jewishgen.org. https://jewishgen.org/databases/sephardic/NorthAfricaSurnames.html

Technical Metadata

Domain jewishgen.org
File Size 239 KB
Archived 2025-11-22T14:24:53.396200
Document ID #81
Languages 5 available