The Ascoli Family

To understand the Ascolis, one must first hear Gorizia. A city where Italian, German, Friulian and Slovene intersect, it belonged in the nineteenth century to the Empire of Austria while remaining profoundly Italophone in its learned culture. Ascoli was born into an Italophone Jewish family of the multiethnic city of Gorizia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today in Italy. It was in this tangle of languages that was born, on July 16, 1829, the child who would one day carry the name to the pinnacle of European science.

The family belonged to the city's cultivated Jewish circles, a milieu where piety and secular learning joined without contradiction. The Jewish community of Gorizia was not an abstraction: it had its places, its synagogue, its masters, and the city's attachment to its memory is such that a street in the old Jewish quarter today bears the name of the philologist, not far from the former Israelite temple. It was within this framework that the child's first education took shape. Ascoli was very closely linked to the Jewish cultural milieu of Abram Vita Reggio, Samuel David Luzzatto and Filosseno Luzzatto. These names are not indifferent: they designate the centers of Italian Jewish intellectual renewal, where one cultivated both knowledge of Hebrew texts and openness to the methods of modern philology. It was from one of these masters that the child received, from adolescence onward, the key to the sacred language: he learned ancient Hebrew under rabbi Samuel Vita Lolli, held to be one of the finest knowers of this language in all of Italy. This detail, long left in the shadow, illuminates with decisive clarity the calling to come: before being the scholar of Alpine dialects, young Graziadio was the disciple of a Hebraist rabbi, trained in the handling of a language thousands of years old, living text of the Covenant. This encounter, from the early modern age, between Jewish textual heritage and the instruments of Italian culture, was not unique to Gorizia: it runs through the entire history of the communities of the peninsula, where belonging to Israel and participation in learned Italian life long nourished one another [Ferrarin, 2015]. The Ascoli lineage thus inscribes itself, from this first documented chapter, in a tradition of learning — that reverence for study that the memory of Israel places at the heart of its virtues, where ignorance is poverty and knowledge a form of service.

From this soil, the child was to draw a remarkable linguistic precocity. Already as a child, he learned several languages. The Hebrew of the synagogue, learned under rabbi Lolli, the Italian of culture, the German of imperial administration, the Friulian of the streets: the Ascoli house was, before the university, the first laboratory of a mind that would make languages his life. This precocity did not remain a dead letter: at barely sixteen years old, in 1846, he was already giving his first learned essay on the Friulian idiom and its supposed kinship with Vlach — Sull'idioma friulano e sulla sua affinità con la lingua valaca — proof that attention to the speech of his native region long preceded his academic consecration. One sees here how the Jewish condition of the border city, far from being merely a constraint, could become a school of plurality — that aptitude to inhabit several worlds at once which has so often nourished the contribution of Jews to the thought of their nations [Isaiah Berlin, 1973]. And this plurality was not merely a matter of languages: it was a matter of belongings held together without any one annulling the other. The child of Gorizia grew up a subject of the Emperor of Austria, heir to Italian culture, son of the community of Israel — and he was later to make of this superposition, not a tearing apart but a method.

One must, however, for the sake of narrative honesty, add a shadow and a trial. Young Graziadio did not follow the classical university curriculum: at his father's death, he had to take over the family affairs, and it was as a self-taught man, stealing time from commerce, that he formed himself alone in linguistics. This constraint, which might have stifled a calling, reveals instead a second virtue of the lineage, more discreet than the brilliance of learning: the sense of family duty, the acceptance of an inherited burden without evasion, that loyalty to one's own that Jewish tradition places among the first commandments. The scholar who was one day to sit in the Senate began by keeping account books; and his entire science was wrested, hour after hour, from an existence of obligations. There is a lesson here that the Great Book must retain: Ascoli's genius was not a free gift, but the fruit of a will that refused to let circumstances have the last word. This marriage of commerce and loyalty to one's own, one will find it again, at the other end of the Mediterranean, in another bearer of the name, whose Tunisian shop spoke the same virtue of labor undertaken to make a family live.

The trait that, from the outset, honors the lineage is not solely intellectual excellence: it is that the young scholar placed his nascent authority in direct service to his people. From 1850 to 1852, he served as president of the Jewish community of Gorizia. Barely out of adolescence, scarcely more than twenty years old, he assumed the collective responsibility of his community. Here we touch upon a virtue that Jewish tradition holds in high esteem: involvement in the life of the collective, the acceptance of a public office not for honor but for the safeguarding of the group. The future academician was first and foremost a servant of his community.

This commitment to the collective was moreover not limited to the boundaries of the synagogue: as early as 1848, the year of revolutions and national hopes, the young man published a work with a programmatic title, pleading for an Italian Gorizia, tolerant and harmonious, and speaking his truths and hopes in the Austria of that springtime of peoples. The title alone is a moral manifesto: tolerance and concord are posed as the cardinal virtues of a city where multiple languages, multiple confessions, multiple allegiances must learn to coexist. That a young Jew of twenty, subject of the Austrian emperor and heir to Italian culture, should have made civic tolerance the heart of his first public engagement is no accident: it is the expression, in the political language of his century, of that virtue which the Law of Israel commands toward the stranger and the neighbor, and which the minority condition of the Jews of this border city rendered all the more vital.

This communal responsibility was articulated with genuine Jewish erudition. Trained through contact with Luzzatto, Reggio and Rabbi Lolli, Ascoli knew Hebrew not as a curiosity but as a living language of thought. From these years of Orientalist and Hebraist formation was born his first great work: in 1854 appeared his Studii orientali e linguistici ("Oriental and Linguistic Studies"), an inaugural work in which the young man, barely out of his presidency of his community, already brought into dialogue the languages of the Orient, the Hebrew of the sources and the nascent comparative method. This title is a manifesto ahead of its time: it says that for Ascoli, the study of language took root in the very soil of Semitic languages and Hebrew culture, and not in the classical languages of the West alone. He was, in a sense, an heir to the Italian Wissenschaft des Judentums, that movement which intended to apply to Jewish sources the rigor of historical and philological science — a movement where study ceased to be merely piety to become also method, without ever renouncing its source [Yerushalmi, 1984]. The Ascoli lineage illustrates that moment when traditional Talmudic knowledge and modern science joined hands without betraying each other.

The intellectual trajectory that followed was that of a largely self-taught man become master. After his formative years, Ascoli settled in Piedmont and then Lombardy, where he became professor at the scientifico-literary academy of Milan — a position he held from 1860 to 1907 — and forged the very word glottologia, the Italian equivalent of linguistics, of which he was the first teacher in the country. In 1873 he founded the journal Archivio glottologico italiano ("Italian Linguistic Archives"), which he directed until 1907. This date of 1873 marks the birth of a discipline: through this journal, historical and comparative linguistics found in Italy its organ, its school and its method. Between the Studii of 1854 and the founding of the Archivio two decades later, one reads the trajectory of a vocation: from the Orientalist erudition of the young community president to the learned institution of the national master. The passage is not rupture but deepening: the man who had borne the responsibility of a small threatened group subsequently gave himself the charge, broader but of the same essence, of gathering and defending languages themselves threatened with disappearance.

Graziadio Isaia Ascoli's contribution to knowledge rests first on a foundational gesture recognized unanimously. Born in Gorizia, he was the founder of scientific linguistics and dialectology in Italy, applying the German historical-comparative method, but with particular attention to Italian dialectal varieties. To import the rigor of the Germanic comparatist school while turning it toward Italian soil: such was the double operation that made him a founder. But it must be remembered that this operation had begun much earlier, from the side of the Orient: the Studii orientali e linguistici of 1854 show that the comparatist method was first, in Ascoli, a tool for interrogating the Semitic languages and the language of Hebrew sources before becoming the instrument of Italian dialectology.

The breadth of his scientific curiosity commands admiration. In 1861, on the basis of his research, he produced reference works on Indo-European languages, then the language of the Roma of Italy — these nomads whom Europe despised and whose speech he judged worthy of study — before he devoted himself to Indo-European and Romance languages. His works embraced in turn etymology, phonetics, Iranian languages and Celtic. He was the first to propose a classification of the Romance speech varieties of Italy and, a bolder gesture still, the first to recognize as autonomous languages the Rhaeto-Romance of the Alpine valleys, brought together in his Saggi ladini, and the Franco-Provençal of his Schizzi franco-provenzali. It was also he who forged, in 1863, the very name by which an ensemble of Alpine territories would be designated. One measures the reach of this work by one fact: the preface he gave to the first issue of the Archivio, in 1873, was held by the great historian of literature Carlo Dionisotti to be one of the masterpieces, in the full sense, of Italian letters — so that the son of a Jewish community on the frontier wrote one of the most beautiful pages of the prose of his nation of adoption.

This work bears a moral signature that the reader of the Great Book cannot fail to notice. The scholar did not first bend over the prestigious languages of courts and empires, but over those that were despised. In the first volume of the Archivio, he published an essay on the neglected Rhaeto-Romance dialects, and in the eighth his classification. To choose as object of study what is marginal, dominated, on the brink of oblivion — the Rhaeto-Romance speech varieties of the Alpine valleys, the language of the Roma, the dialects of peasants — partakes of an ethics as much as a science. There is, in this attention paid to the small and the threatened, an echo of the solicitude that Jewish Law commands toward the weak and the stranger: the scholar restores dignity to languages without power, as the righteous one renders justice to those who have no voice.

It is within this framework that Ascoli developed the notion destined for a long posterity: that of substrate. He was the first to use this concept and to apply it to Romance languages, subsequently adjoining those of superstrate and adstrate, thus forging the conceptual apparatus from which all twentieth-century linguistics was to inherit. In explaining the phonetic particularities of a language by the persistent influence of earlier populations and their speech varieties, he showed that nothing of the past disappears entirely, that the buried layers of a people continue to resound in the mouth of its descendants. One can read there, without overreaching, an intuition deeply consonant with Jewish consciousness of memory: the certainty that the substrate of generations endures beneath the surface of the present, and that the duty of the scholar, like that of the son of Israel, is to remember — zakhor — what the centuries have covered [Yerushalmi, 1984]. This notion of substrate carries, in a man born of a people of survival, a resonance that goes beyond phonetics alone: it says that a population can be submerged without being erased, that a dominated language continues to work from within the language that has covered it. It is, transposed into science, the very experience of Israel among the nations.

Ascoli's career embraced the very movement of Italian Jewish emancipation, which, with the unification of the peninsula, granted them full citizenship and access to the highest offices of the State. Established in Milan, he taught there and exercised an intellectual magistracy. Graziadio Isaia Ascoli was born on July 16, 1829 in Gorizia and died in Milan on January 21, 1907. From this city on the Austrian margins, he became a glory of Italian national culture — a trajectory that reveals how the generation of emancipation could, in a single lifetime, pass from the ghetto or the closed community to public recognition. This trajectory is inscribed in a long history, in which Italian Jews had for centuries taken part in the intellectual life of their cities without renouncing their identity — so that emancipation, in Ascoli's case, merely accomplished in broad daylight what the Adriatic communities had long been cultivating [Ferrarin, 2015].

This recognition culminated in civic honor. Recognized as founder of scientific linguistics and dialectology in Italy, Ascoli was called to the kingdom's highest learned bodies and honored as a senator, sitting under the sixteenth legislature of the Kingdom of Italy — a distinction which, for a man from a once-minority and subject Jewish community, marked the fulfillment of a promise of equality. Patriot as much as scholar, he had from his youth linked his name to the cause of his region's Italianness; in the evening of his life, he reaped from it the highest consecration that the nation could offer to one of its own. The Ascoli lineage becomes here emblematic: that of the Italian Jew who, without renouncing his origins or his faith, serves the res publica and finds his place in it. The virtue here expressed is that of implication in the city — not withdrawal, but contribution; not mere communal survival, but service to the common good.

However, honesty requires that we acknowledge the tensions of this generation. Emancipation had its reverse side, assimilation, and the great figures of successful integration were often confronted with the question of maintained fidelity. Ascoli, who is known to have presided over his community, learned Hebrew from a rabbi, published from 1854 onwards studies enriched by the Orient and by Hebrew, and was formed through contact with the Jewish masters of his time, stands among those who knew how to combine Italian citizenship with Jewish consciousness. His very science — attentive to languages that refuse to be absorbed into the dominant language, concerned with what resists and persists — perhaps bears, beneath the surface, the trace of this double fidelity. This is one of the lessons that Gershom Scholem drew from Jewish modernity: that the utopia of total assimilation always encounters the tenacious fidelity of a memory [Scholem, 1978]. Ascoli was not a man of renunciation; he was a man of conjunction, and his life bears witness that one could, in unified Italy, be fully a citizen without ceasing to be a son of Israel.

Before measuring intellectual legacy, we must pause over a sign that speaks without words: the coat of arms of the Ascoli family, found in the Venetian Hebrew Museum, where at the entrance are gathered the arms of Italian Jewish families . This document, passed from Jewish hand to Jewish hand, has come down to us through the living memory of the family itself — a descendant, Silvio Ascoli, having noted and preserved these arms found at the threshold of the Venetian museum, where the coats of arms of Italian Jewish families are gathered. This very place is a teaching: by assembling side by side, from the threshold itself, the heraldry of Jewish lineages of the peninsula, the Venice museum shows what the community of Israel in Italy was — not a scattering of individuals, but a web of houses recognizing one another, from Ancona to Trieste, from Pesaro to the lagoon. In the collection that brings them together, the house of Ascoli bears the number sixteen, explicitly linked to the three cities of Ancona, Pesaro and Trieste, and its escutcheon reads, in the very terms of the Italian document, as an equilateral triangle charged with a dove proper holding in its beak an olive branch. That this coat of arms was catalogued, numbered and preserved among the arms of other Jewish families of Italy is not a mere archival detail: it is material proof that the Ascoli counted among the recognized houses of the peninsula, worthy of being recorded on equal terms with the most ancient.

This is no mere decorative detail. The dove with the olive branch is one of the oldest symbols of biblical Memory: it is the bird that Noah releases from the ark, and which returns bearing the olive branch, a sign that the waters are receding and that the covenant between Heaven and earth is restored. A Jewish family that inscribes this motif in its arms places itself explicitly under the sign of peace recovered after the flood, of the survival of the remnant and of the promise kept — three cardinal figures of Israel's hope. That Jewish families of Italy should have endowed themselves with such coats of arms is not a matter of indifference: it is the sign of an ancient integration into the civic and heraldic usages of Italian society, where one adopted the forms of nobility and guilds while filling them with a meaning drawn from the Scriptures of Israel [Ferrarin, 2015]. The coat of arms is thus, in itself, a condensation of the condition of these families: Italian in form, Jewish in content, reconciling the one and the other in a single image.

The equilateral triangle that frames the dove adds a note of measure and stability, while the olive branch, universal emblem of peace, perhaps speaks of the vocation of a lineage that never wished to be warlike but building — of commerce on the Adriatic shores, of learning in studies. The geometric figure itself is not without resonance: the triangle, a form equal in all its sides, expresses a certain idea of justice and uprightness, that rectitude which the tradition of Israel places at the foundation of human life, while the dove that charges it deposits therein gentleness and mercy. Justice and kindness held together in a single image: the arms of the Ascoli say thus, in silent language, the balance that Jewish wisdom seeks between the rigor of the Law and the tenderness of compassion. That this coat of arms is preserved in Venice, alongside those of other Jewish families of Italy, attests that the Ascoli were not an isolated lineage but a recognized link in the communal fabric of the peninsula, present from Ancona to Trieste, that is, precisely on the Adriatic axis that connects the native Marches of the name to the Austrian borders where the philologist was born. The geography of the coat of arms thus overlaps with the geography of the family: Ancona and Pesaro in the Marches, probable lands of origin of the name; Trieste, great Jewish port of the northern Adriatic, a few leagues from Gorizia. The triangle formed by these three cities traces on the map the very space where the lineage unfolded, and confers upon the narrative a depth that archives of the nineteenth century alone would not have suggested: that of a multi-secular rootedness in Italian Jewish communities [Ferrarin, 2015]. Trieste and Ancona, in particular, were in the centuries of the ghetto great centers of Adriatic Jewish commerce, where merchant houses held in their hands a share of trade with the Orient and the Levant; that the arms of the Ascoli are linked to them situates the family in this world of honest economic activity, where commerce was, for Jews deprived of so many other professions, a way of serving the city and providing for their own.

There is a silent continuity between this coat of arms and the vocation of the scholar. The dove that brings back the branch is the messenger of what survived the flood; the philologist who gathers threatened dialects and exhumes the substrate of dead languages accomplishes, in his order, an analogous gesture — to bring back, from the depths of time, the sign that nothing of what was once alive is entirely lost. What the arms of the family said in heraldic language, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli will have said in the language of science: fidelity to what persists beneath the waters of oblivion.

The greatness of a lineage is not measured by the sole brilliance of its most famous member. The name Ascoli, borne by so many Italian Jewish families connected to the city of origin, was illustrated in the twentieth century by several figures whom the Memory of Israel cannot pass over in silence, and who extend, in registers other than philology, the virtues already visible in the scholar of Gorizia.

The first is that of a physician, Alberto — Albert Abram — Ascoli, who counts among the pioneers of the struggle against great infectious diseases and contributed notably to advances in vaccination. That the name thus became attached to the art of healing is not a matter of indifference for a Great Book attentive to values: medicine is, in the Jewish tradition, one of the highest forms of the sanctification of life, for to save an existence, teach the sages, is to save an entire world. The scholar who places his science at the service of the suffering body accomplishes, as a clinician, what the philologist accomplished by listening to voiceless tongues: he bends over what is threatened in order to preserve it. Care of the other, rifouï, healing, here joins the solicitude for the weak that runs through this entire lineage — from the language of the Roma exhumed by Graziadio to the sick person snatched from death by Alberto, it is one and the same attention to the vulnerable that makes itself known.

The second figure is more grave, and even loftier still. General Ettore Ascoli, a Jewish officer in the Italian army, fell in 1943 fighting Germany. His death is not a mere military incident: it is a testimony. Struck, like all Jews of Italy, by the fascist racial laws of 1938 that drove his people from the army, the universities, and public life, this man nevertheless took up arms again against the Nazi occupier when Italy turned, and he paid with his life for this refusal of barbarism. There is here a shattering reversal: the nation that had made an Ascoli a senator in reward for his genius had, two generations later, repudiated another Ascoli in the name of his race — and he, far from hating it, died to liberate it. This sacrifice questions the most difficult virtue of all, the relationship to war: not conquest war, but the struggle for justice, that which the tradition of Israel names milhemet mitzvah, the war of duty, waged when life itself and the dignity of men are at stake. Where the family coat of arms spoke of the dove and the olive, the vocation of peace, history imposed upon one of the bearers of the name the reverse trial; and he crossed it as a just man, turning against the executioner the arms that his ungrateful homeland had first taken from him. The olive branch of arms and the general's spilled blood do not contradict each other: they say that a lineage enamored of peace knew also, when it must, how to die so that it might return.

A third figure, more humble and more obscure, completes this picture and gives it its earthly foundation: that of Eduardo Ascoli, a leather-goods merchant in Tunis. A photograph preserved in the family archives, carefully transmitted by Silvio Ascoli, shows him standing before his shop on Rue Al Djazira, in the heart of the city. Born in Tunis in 1888 and died in that same city in 1940, he was established there as a leather-goods merchant, manufacturer and seller of those trunks and suitcases that equipped the travelers of the city. This detail, seemingly modest, nevertheless opens onto an entire chapter of the history of the name: for Eduardo Ascoli belonged to that world of Italian Jews of North Africa, the Grana of Tunis, that "Livornese Jewish Nation" that, from Livorno and the ports of the peninsula, had established itself on the southern shore of the Mediterranean from the seventeenth century onward. This Livornese community of Tunis spoke and wrote Italian, distinguished itself by its own culture — its capitulations, its suq el-Grana, its quarter of the Hâra — and maintained close ties with its country of origin, to the point of exercising a lasting influence on Italian life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That one finds an Ascoli leather-goods merchant in Tunis, bearing Italian given name and civil status, inscribes him quite naturally in that Adriatic and Mediterranean network that the Venetian coat of arms already suggested: the same Jewish Italianism that linked Ancona, Pesaro, and Trieste had been extended, by sea, to the shores of the Regency of Tunis, where families of the same culture conducted commerce in the European manner.

The photograph that Silvio Ascoli preserved and transmitted says, in its mute way, the continuity of this presence. Eduardo stands there, before his sign on Rue Al Djazira, in the years of his establishment in Tunis, in the ordinary posture of an honest merchant who poses for posterity without knowing that he poses for History. He died in 1940, the very year when the fate of Italy and its Jews began to turn — too soon to see the racial laws destroy, on the shores of Tunisia as on those of the peninsula, the life that his community had patiently built over generations. Eduardo Ascoli's shop is thus far more than a store: it is the point where the geography of the name, until then Adriatic, widens to embrace the entire Italian-speaking Mediterranean, and where the narrative of the lineage receives its last documented anchor before the great catastrophe.

There is, in the very profession of this man, a virtue that the Great Book must name: that of honest work and economic action as service to one's own. The trunk-maker fabricates the object of travel — the trunk, the chest, the baggage of those who depart and those who return — and it is not a matter of indifference that a Jew of the diaspora, distant heir of a people accustomed to departures, made a profession of outfitting travelers. Where the philologist of Gorizia had, as a young man, to keep the accounts of family commerce before devoting himself to science, Eduardo Ascoli made business his entire life, exercising with his hands a useful trade in a city-crossroads of three continents. Commerce was, for the Jews of the Mediterranean as for those of the Adriatic, a straight way of providing for one's own and serving the city that welcomed them; and the discrete virtue of labor — to persevere, to produce, to provide for, without fanfare or renown — deserves in this book the same dignity as the brilliance of knowledge or the heroism of the soldier. The Ascoli lineage, taken in its fullness, is not made only of senators and generals: it is made also of these anonymous artisan-merchants who, from one shore to the other of the sea, kept shop and honored, through their work, the name they bore.

Thus the name Ascoli, considered in its fullness, will have expressed several faces of the same fidelity to the living: knowledge in the philologist, care in the physician, courage in the soldier, and honest labor in the merchant of Tunis. So many ways of serving — truth, the body, freedom, the daily life of one's own — which are all declensions of that virtue that the memory of Israel places at the summit, the safeguarding of the life and dignity of man.

What remains of the Ascoli lineage? First and foremost, a living institution. The journal Archivio glottologico italiano, founded in 1873, was directed by Ascoli until his death in 1907. Thirty-four years of continuous leadership made this journal a monument, a classic of European dialectology that survived its founder and trained generations of linguists; it then passed into the hands of his student Carlo Salvioni, and exists to this day — proof that a well-founded work transcends the centuries. One man's achievement thus extended into scholarly tradition — just as, in Jewish Memory, a master's word is transmitted and perpetuated beyond his lifetime, from disciple to disciple. And if one wishes to measure the breadth of this life, one must embrace in a single glance the span from the Studii orientali e linguistici of 1854, the work of a twenty-five-year-old man steeped in the Orient and Hebrew, to the final issue of the Archivio he still directed in the year of his death: more than half a century of uninterrupted study.

The intersection of History and Memory is powerfully woven here. Ascoli's method — comparing languages, reconstructing strata, listening to the testimony of dialects — is not without kinship to the very gesture of Jewish tradition, which compares texts, superimposes commentaries, and makes successive layers of the Law speak. The philologist who exhumes the forgotten substrate of a language and the sage who unearths the hidden meaning of a verse accomplish, in different registers, the same work of fidelity to the past. The Jewish conception of study as a quasi-liturgical act finds in Ascoli's vocation a remarkable secular transposition [Hayoun, 2023].

It is fitting to measure the scope of these figures without exaggerating them. The genealogical documentation of the Ascoli lineage beyond its most illustrious members remains fragmentary, and it would be imprudent to reconstruct a continuous dynasty where the archives fall silent: nothing proves that the philologist of Gorizia, the physician, the general, and the leather worker of Tunis belonged to the same direct stock, and the reader of the Great Book must guard against a family romance that the sources do not authorize. What can be affirmed with certainty is that the name Ascoli — also attested under the variants Ascolli and Askoli — inscribes itself in the long history of Italian Jewish families who, from the Middle Ages to emancipation, bore and transmitted, from city to city and shore to shore, the dual culture of Torah and secular letters [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. The Venetian coat of arms, which lists the house under number sixteen and links it to Ancona, Pesaro, and Trieste, confirms this Adriatic dispersion and this communal rootedness: it provides, where the genealogical thread breaks, material and lasting proof that the name belonged to a recognized network of Jewish households. And Eduardo Ascoli's shop in Tunis, in the heart of rue Al Djazira, prolonged across the sea this Italian-speaking expansion: it attests that the name, Adriatic in its arms, had also become Mediterranean through commerce. The singularity of the lineage lies in having given to this dual culture, in the person of the philologist of Gorizia, an expression of European scale — but its rootedness was collective and ancient, inscribed in the arms of a family dispersed across three cities and recognized among the Jewish houses of the peninsula, and still living humbly in the workshop of a craftsman in Tunis. Where the illustrious man carried the name to the glory of science, the coat of arms, more silent, attests to its depth, and the photograph of the leather worker standing before his shop on rue Al Djazira, more modest still, attests to its persistence and daily dignity: the dove with the olive branch watches, at the entrance to the Venice museum, over the Memory of a house that was, before being learned, simply faithful — faithful to study, faithful to work, faithful to its own.

What the photograph transmitted by Silvio Ascoli adds to the narrative is not negligible. It anchors in the concrete of the street and the shop sign what the coat of arms said in the abstract language of heraldry: that the lineage was present, active, rooted in the material life of its cities, from Trieste to Tunis by way of Gorizia and Milan. The living Memory of a descendant, who preserves and transmits these images, itself accomplishes a form of that commandment which the sages of Israel placed above all others: zakhor, remember. Silvio Ascoli, in gathering the Venetian coat of arms and the photograph of rue Al Djazira, did what every custodian of family memory must do — refuse oblivion, transmit testimony, ensure the continuity of the name through time. This is, for the collective Memory of Israel, the most humble and the most indispensable form of the duty to remember.

From Gorizia the border town to Milan the learned, from the Adriatic of coats of arms — Ancona, Pesaro, Trieste — to the benches of the Italian Senate, from the battlefields where a general fell for freedom to Al Djazira Street in Tunis where Eduardo Ascoli kept a leather goods shop, born in 1888 and died in 1940 in the very city where he came into the world, the Ascoli lineage traversed centuries and the shores of the Mediterranean embodying one virtue above all: the love of knowledge placed in service, in turn, to his community and to the city of mankind. This virtue is not abstract; it was born of established facts. It was born from the teaching of Hebrew received, from adolescence onward, from rabbi Samuel Vita Lolli, who made the future linguist a disciple of the sacred tongue. It was born from the presidency assumed at twenty of the Jewish community of Gorizia, a gesture of collective responsibility, and from a youthful plea, in 1848, for a tolerant and harmonious city. It was born from an inaugural work, the Studii orientali e linguistici of 1854, where Hebrew and Oriental erudition became method. It was born from the founding of an entire science, Italian linguistics, and of a journal, the Archivio glottologico italiano, which bore it for thirty-four years and lives still. It was born, above all, from the constant choice to listen to despised languages, the dialects of valleys, the speech of Roma, languages without power — attention to the weak and the marginal which, in this secular scholar, was justice itself.

But the lineage, taken in all its breadth, would say still more. For the name Ascoli was also that of a physician who placed science in service of life, of a general who, expelled from his army by racial laws, took up arms nonetheless against Nazi Germany and died in 1943 for the freedom of all, and of a craftsman-merchant who, in Tunis, sustained his own by the honest work of his hands, extending beyond the sea the Jewish Italianism born on the shores of the Adriatic. Knowledge, care, courage, labor: four ways of serving life and the dignity of man, four faces of one and the same fidelity which the memory of Israel recognizes above all.

And this virtue, the family had as if foreseen it in its coat of arms: a dove bearing the olive branch, sign of what survives the flood and of peace recovered, inscribed in an equilateral triangle linked to Ancona, Pesaro and Trieste — three cities which say, by themselves alone, the Adriatic rooting of the house, and whose coat of arms was recorded and preserved among the arms of Jewish families of Italy in the museum of Venice, then transmitted by the living memory of a descendant. The straightness of the triangle and the gentleness of the dove already knotted there, in silence, the justice and kindness that the sons of the name were to unfold in their lives — one in science, another in healing, another in sacrifice, the last in the patient labor of a Mediterranean shop, standing before his sign on Al Djazira Street, in an interwar Tunis that did not yet know what history would make of his own. For the people who made study a commandment and remembrance a law recognizes its own in these men who devoted their lives to deciphering the buried substrate of languages, to healing bodies, to defending the living, to outfitting travelers, to remembering what history covers and to giving voice to what fades. Zakhor — remember: this word which commands Jewish memory [Yerushalmi, 1984] could serve as a motto for an entire life of a philologist, and for an entire lineage placed under the sign of the bird who bears, from the depths of the waters, the branch of survival. The Ascoli lineage thus best expressed this cardinal virtue of Judaism: that knowledge is never an end in itself, but a service — to the community, to truth, to life, to the daily bread of his own, and to the voices which time would wish to silence.

Pièces, témoignages et documents déposés par la communauté et versés à ce Grand Livre.