The Abuḥaṣera (Abiḥaṣera) family, a major saintly lineage of Moroccan rabbis in the modern era, embodies four facets of hagiographic identity in Jewish North Africa and its diaspora.

First, it represents the significance of patrilineal descent in the Moroccan hagiographic tradition (see also Barukh Azugh and Ḥayyim Pinto). The family traces itself back to Samuel Elbaz, sometimes said to have been a sixteenth-century rabbinic emissary (Heb. meshullaḥ or shadar) to Morocco from Jerusalem. According to well-circulated hagiographic narratives, Samuel took on the nam…