The Ascoli Marchetti Family

The patronymic Ascoli belongs to the category of toponymic names, those that designate the geographical origin of an ancestor. According to Italian onomastic reference works, the cognomen Ascoli derives from the toponym of Ascoli Piceno, the capital of the Marches, or from Ascoli Satriano in the province of Foggia [Cognomix ; Venere]. This dual possible origin is not a hesitation, but the reflection of a reality: the Jews of Italy, in adopting the name of their city of departure, left in their patronymic the very trace of their movements. The name Ascoli, thus, indicates almost always that the founding ancestor came from one of these cities [Venere].

Yet the Jewish presence in Ascoli Piceno is attested from a long time ago. As early as the 14th century, the Ascolan cadastre mentions Israelites who owned houses and lands, among them Deodato di Alevuzio, Angelo and Genattano di Elia, as well as the heirs of a certain Bonaventura [Italia Judaica, Tel-Aviv University]. In 1389, the Jews of the city lent sums to the Commune, and sources from the late 15th century indicate that they supplied linen and vessels to the municipal administration [Italia Judaica]. This community also knew its intimate dramas: before 1450, an Ascolan Jew converted by taking the name Domenico, and other neophytes followed over the decades [Italia Judaica]. It is from this soil—a medieval rootedness made up of economic activity, pawnbroking and community life—that the name Ascoli drew its substance.

The history of the Jews of southern and central Italy, whose outlines Ferorelli and Milano have traced, shows how much these communities, often restricted, played a disproportionate role in the credit and commerce of the cities where they lived [ref:10 ; ref:11]. By lending to the Commune, by supplying its goods, the family of the first Ascoli already embodied this economic action that the Jewish tradition has never separated from collective responsibility: the moneylending Jew of the Marches was not a legendary usurer, but a necessary cog in an urban economy that, without him, would have ground to a halt. In this service rendered to the city—even if constrained by exclusion from other professions—there appears a discreet form of involvement in collective life, that of a minority that knew how to make itself indispensable.

The Ascoli Marchetti lineage, like all Jewish families in the peninsula, was caught up in the long movement that, from the Middle Ages to emancipation, shaped the condition of Italian Jews. Robert Bonfil showed how much the Renaissance was, for these communities, a time of ambivalence: intellectual flourishing, dialogue with humanist culture, but also the progressive hardening of constraints. The sixteenth century saw the institution of ghettos — in Venice in 1516, in Rome in 1555 — which closed off a bounded, regulated, surveilled space around the Jews.

The Ascoli dispersed throughout Italy experienced diverse fates depending on the States where the chance of expulsions had settled them. Attilio Milano, in his Storia degli ebrei in Italia, described this mosaic of conditions — each duchy, each pontifical city, each republic having its own laws regarding Jews. In Florence and Tuscany, whose history Roberto Salvadori has traced, the Jewish community was able, despite the Medici ghetto, to preserve a religious and learned life of remarkable density. It was within these frameworks that, generation after generation, Talmudic learning and the practice of halakha were transmitted.

For it must be recalled: the confinement of the ghetto was not merely servitude, it was also the crucible of an intense intellectual life. Within the cramped space of Jewish alleys were maintained the rabbinical academies, the confraternities of charity — the ḥevrot that provided dowries for orphan girls, care for the sick, and burial for the dead. This organized charity, this care for the other instituted as communal duty, are among the highest expressions of Jewish virtue. Italian families, and among them those who bore the name of Ascoli, were its anonymous custodians. The Jewish tradition names this solidarity tsedaqah — a word that means both charity and justice, as if giving to the other were first and foremost rendering justice. In living this requirement in daily life, the lineage inscribed itself in a millennial chain of mutual responsibility.

What does the juxtaposition of Marchetti with Ascoli signify?

Historical prudence demands that we distinguish here between what we know and what we suppose. The founding notice attests that the family Ascoli Marchetti was registered as a Jewish family of Italy by Schaerf in 1925. The rest belongs to interpretation.

In Italian onomastics, a double surname most often arises from the union of two lineages: through marriage, through alliance, or through the will to perpetuate a maternal name threatened with extinction. Marchetti, a diminutive of Marco, is a name widely spread throughout the peninsula, borne by both Jewish and Christian families. It is plausible—though the available archival record does not formally establish it—that the form Ascoli Marchetti consecrates the alliance of a house Ascoli, of Marche or Papal States toponymic descent, with a branch Marchetti. According to this hypothesis, the compound name would be the fossilized memory of a marriage, the onomastic monument of a union between two families.

Yet we must guard against any abusive reconstruction. Where Schaerf himself merely records the cognomen, without genealogy or annotation, the honest historian must stop at the threshold of the documented. The registered variants—Ascoli-Marchetti, Ascolì Marchetti—testify to a still-fluid orthography at the beginning of the twentieth century, a sign of a name relatively recent in its compound form, or of a small family whose spelling had not been fixed by administrative usage. This humility of the archive—this refusal to fill in gaps through fable—is itself a virtue, and not the least of them, in a tradition that has always held truth, emet, as one of the names of God.

If the Marchetti branch remains in the shadow of sources, the name Ascoli gave Italian culture one of its greatest figures — and it would be unjust, in evoking the lineage, to pass over this glory that reflects upon all those who bore the name. Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, born in Gorizia on 16 July 1829, was the founder of Italian glottology [Mosaico-CEM]. A Jewish child of a border town, he studied Hebrew for his bar mitzvah with Rabbi Samuel Vita Lolli, and came under the influence of the Shadal, the great Trieste scholar Samuel David Luzzatto, whose friend and contemporary of the son Filosseno he was, himself a Semiticist [Mosaico-CEM].

This biographical detail is not anecdotal: it reveals how, among the Ascoli, the most universal scientific knowledge — comparative linguistics, of which Graziadio Isaia was the undisputed master in Italy — was rooted in a traditional Jewish education. The study of Hebrew and the Talmud, the guidance of a master like Luzzatto, forged in this scholar a discipline of reading, an attention to text and language, that the Jewish tradition had cultivated for centuries. The glottologist of Gorizia was, in a profound sense, the secular heir of the medieval Hebrew grammarians, those who, from Saadia Gaon to David Kimhi, had made the analysis of language an act of piety.

Thus the lineage of the Ascoli — even when it does not coincide genealogically with the Marchetti branch — attests that this name was associated, in Risorgimento Italy, with the excellence of knowledge and with the contribution of emancipated Jews to the emerging nation. Gadi Luzzatto Voghera has shown how much the debate on emancipation, between 1781 and 1848, had opened to Italian Jews the doors of citizenship and public life. Graziadio Isaia Ascoli was one of its most brilliant fruits: a Jew who became, without renouncing his origins, a senator of the kingdom and a European authority in learning.

The nineteenth century was, for the Jews of Italy, a century of hope. The unification of the peninsula, between 1859 and 1870, abolished the last ghettos and made Jews full citizens. Gadi Luzzatto Voghera has traced the price of this equality — a long, fierce and learned debate over the place that society could grant its Jews. Families such as the Ascoli Marchetti, who had endured centuries of relegation, could at last enter the liberal professions, universities, the army, and the administration.

This integration was not a renunciation. Italian Jews of the Belle Époque often cultivated a dual loyalty: toward the rediscovered homeland and toward the faith of their fathers. They engaged in the life of the city — as physicians, lawyers, professors, officers, entrepreneurs — while maintaining, within the secrecy of synagogues and homes, fidelity to the Law. This engagement in collective life, this capacity to serve the nation without dissolving into it, was the hallmark of Italian Jewishness of the era. In this, the Ascoli Marchetti lineage embodied a virtue that the tradition of Israel had always upheld: that which the prophet Jeremiah expressed in exhorting the exiles to seek the good of the city where they dwell, for in its peace is their peace.

It was in this climate of accomplished emancipation that the name Ascoli Marchetti crossed the threshold of the twentieth century — and that Schaerf, in 1925, recorded it among the surnames of peninsular Jewishness. No one could then suspect the shadow that, thirteen years later, would fall upon all these families.

In 1938, the fascist regime enacted racial laws. For Italian Jewry as a whole, it was a brutal upheaval: Jews, citizens for three generations, were suddenly barred from schools, professions, the military, stripped of their rights. Michele Sarfatti and Enzo Collotti analyzed the relentless machinery of this persecution, which struck without distinction at both ancient families and newcomers [ref:6 ; ref:5]. Fabio Isman gathered the very documents of this administrative infamy, those gray papers where one could read the civil death of a people.

The Ascoli Marchetti family, registered as Jewish even before the persecution, could not escape this fatal registration. Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci showed how the fascist State transformed Jewish identity, hitherto a matter of faith or Memory, into a racial and police category. Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri collected the journals and letters of those terrible years, where one hears the very voice of the persecuted — their bewilderment, their dignity, their sorrow. Then came the worst: after September 1943 and the German occupation, persecution became extermination. Liliana Picciotto, in Il libro della memoria, established the nominal list of Jews deported from Italy between 1943 and 1945 — an absolute work of Memory, where each name recovered is a victory against oblivion.

Faced with this trial, the virtue of Italian Jewry was that of dignity in affliction and of fidelity — to itself, to its own, to the Law. Many testified, as shown by the diarists gathered by Avagliano and Palmieri, to a moral strength that barbarism could not break. In this, the stricken families — of which Ascoli Marchetti was one by its very inscription in the register of Jews of Italy — joined the long cohort of the martyrs of Israel, those who, through centuries and persecutions, made kiddoush ha-Shem, the sanctification of the Name, the ultimate response to violence. Their Memory is a sacred trust that this book has the duty to gather.

From the lineage Ascoli Marchetti, the archive has bequeathed us only a name — but a name that, by itself, condenses the entire history of Italy's Jews. In Ascoli resonates the toponymic cradle of the Marches or Puglia, the medieval time of pawn-lending and communal life; in the doubling Marchetti one discerns the alliance of two houses, the memory of a marriage that sources have not retained in detail. Recorded by Schaerf in 1925, the family traversed emancipation and the night of racial laws, sharing the glorious and tragic fate of peninsular Jewry.

What shall this lineage, among all others, have best expressed? In light of the facts that can be established, it is the alliance of knowledge and fidelity. Knowledge, first: the name Ascoli was associated, with Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, with one of the highest accomplishments of the spirit — that linguistics nourished at the Hebrew source, where the old Jewish passion for text and language found universal expression [Mosaico-CEM]. Fidelity, next: through the ghettos, emancipation and persecution, the lineage remained what it was, neither renouncing its faith nor withdrawing from the city, embodying that difficult balance between belonging to Israel and service to Italy.

In this, the singular history of a family of which we know only a name joins the collective memory of a people. For every Jewish name in Italy is a syllable of this great narrative — that of a minority which, from the pawn-lender of Ascoli Piceno to the glottologist of Gorizia, from the fellow of the ḥevrah of charity to the martyr of the years 1943, knew how to make of its dispersion a fidelity and of its vulnerability a grandeur. The Great Book of the lineage Ascoli Marchetti is, in the end, only a page of that vaster book which tradition names zakhor: remember.