The Bahorjudà Family

The only firm attestation of the surname Bahorjudà comes to us from the work of Samuele Schaerf, published in Florence in 1925 under the title I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia. This slim volume, modest in size yet considerable in its scope, constitutes the first systematic census of Jewish family names on the peninsula. Schaerf gathered within it, drawing from communal registers, civil records, and family memory, the surnames borne by Italian Jews, endeavoring at times to indicate their geographical or linguistic origin.

The inclusion of Bahorjudà in this catalogue confers upon it an incontestable documentary status: the name existed, it was borne, transmitted, recorded. This is the established foundation upon which everything else rests. That the name is rare — it does not appear among the great known families of the communities of Rome, Venice, or Livorno — perhaps testifies to a modest lineage, discreet, of those that compose the ordinary fabric of a people without leaving monumental traces. Yet it is precisely this discretion that calls for a form of humility in the historian's gaze: to acknowledge that a Jewish life worthy of being told need not have been illustrious.

Schaerf's very approach partakes of a virtue long cultivated by Jewish tradition: the care of the Memory of names. From the biblical genealogies to the communal registers, to name and to remember those who were is an act of fidelity. In recording even the most effaced surnames, the 1925 inventory participates in this collective duty of zakhor [Yerushalmi, 1984].

To understand Bahorjudà, it must be placed within the history of Italian Jewish names. The peninsula was, from Antiquity, one of the oldest centers of the diaspora, and its Jewish population became stratified over the centuries: "italkim" Jews of Roman origin, Ashkenazim from the North, Sephardim expelled from Spain in 1492 and then from Portugal, and Jews from North Africa and the Levant, notably toward the free port of Livorno.

The surname Bahorjudà bears the marks of this plurality. Its component Bahor — from the Hebrew bekhor, the firstborn — appears frequently in Sephardic and Maghrebi areas, where Bahor or Bohor was used as a given name bestowed upon the eldest son, particularly in the communities of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Its component Judà refers to the eponymous ancestor Judah. The fusion of the two suggests a lineage that, at a given moment, crystallized the given name of a founding ancestor — "Bahor, son of Judah" or "Bahor Yehuda" — into a hereditary name. This hypothesis, plausible in light of known name-formation mechanisms, remains conjectural in the absence of a specific document.

Robert Bonfil has shown how the Jewish society of the Italian Renaissance, far from being a mere object of tolerance or persecution, developed its own identity, articulated around family, synagogue, and learning [Bonfil, 1994]. In this world, the name was not neutral: it inscribed the individual within a chain of ancestry, linking each bearer to the Memory of Judah, that is, to the very heart of the identity of Israel. To carry Judà in one's name was to carry the name of the entire people — the humility of a particular family joining the pride of a collective belonging.

Whatever the locality where the Bahorjudà family took root, its life was necessarily shaped by the institutions of the kehillah, the organized community. The work of Robert Bonfil has illuminated this collective life: the synagogue as spiritual and social center, the charitable confraternities (ḥevrot), mutual assistance, the education of children, and the authority of rabbis in the interpretation of the Law [Bonfil, 1994].

It is here that the most enduring virtues of Italian Judaism become visible. Tsedaka — which is too narrowly translated as "charity," when it signifies above all "justice" — structured communal life: the confraternities cared for the sick, provided dowries for poor young women, buried the dead, and ransomed captives. A modest family like the Bahorjudà participated in this fabric of solidarity, not as a conspicuous benefactress, but as a member of a body in which each contributed according to their means. This involvement in collective life — the care extended to the other — constitutes one of the deepest expressions of Jewish Law, which subordinates individual salvation to responsibility toward others [Bonfil, 1994].

Armand Abécassis emphasized that Jewish thought never separates ethics from the sacred: to serve God is first and foremost to answer for the face of the other [Abécassis, 1987]. Léon Askénazi, for his part, insisted that Jewish tradition is transmitted less as a body of doctrines than as a way of inhabiting the world, from generation to generation [Askénazi, 1999]. An obscure lineage such as that of the Bahorjudà was, in its own measure, one of the links in this silent transmission.

Jewish Italy was an extraordinary cradle of written culture. Even before the invention of printing, Jewish scribes produced manuscripts of great beauty there, as Giulia Tamani demonstrated in her studies on illuminated Hebrew manuscripts of the peninsula [Tamani, 2010]. Bibles, Talmudic treatises, prayer books, and philosophical works circulated from hand to hand, copied, annotated, and bequeathed as inheritance.

There is no documented evidence that the Bahorjudà family produced renowned scholars or scribes; it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Yet the name itself, bearing the inscription of Judà, connects it to the culture of the Book, for Judah is also, in tradition, the figure of one who speaks up and stands as guarantor (Genesis 44). Colette Sirat has reminded us how thoroughly medieval Jewish philosophy can only be understood through the material history of its manuscripts, those fragile objects in which the thought of Israel was deposited [Sirat, 1983]. And Maurice-Ruben Hayoun has demonstrated the continuity of a Jewish philosophical reflection nourished by this written heritage, from Andalusia to Italy and beyond [Hayoun, 2023].

In this context, contribution to knowledge — Talmudic, literary, philosophical — was the cardinal virtue of the Jews of Italy. Even a family without a signed work participated in this civilization of the text: through religious literacy, through the education of children, through the veneration of the book. It is one of the great strengths of Jewish Memory to have made study an act of piety accessible to all, and not the privilege of an elite.

The Bahor component of the surname invites us to broaden our gaze beyond Italy, toward the Sephardic and Maghrebi diasporas where this given name was particularly alive. The free port of Livorno, studied by Lionel Lévy, was a hub connecting Italy to North Africa, Amsterdam, and Tunis: the "Portuguese Jewish Nation" flourished there, and many Livornese Jews spread to Tunis and Algeria [Lévy, 1999] [Lévy, 1996].

It is plausible — without the archive confirming it for this particular family — that a name combining Bahor and Judà may have traveled along these maritime routes, Italy and the Maghreb forming a single cultural and commercial space. The communities of Tlemcen, described by Eliahou-Éric Botbol [Botbol, 2000], and of Sidi Bel Abbès, whose rabbinical archives have been preserved [Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès], bear witness to the richness of this North African Judaism where the given name Bahor/Bohor was common. This hypothesis of a traveling name remains an avowed editorial conjecture, offered to the reader as a lead and not as a fact.

What these circulations reveal, on the other hand, with certainty, is a constant virtue: the relationship with the foreigner and hospitality. Livorno welcomed the exiles from Portugal, the fugitives of the Inquisition, the merchants of all origins. The economic action of Jewish merchants there was inseparable from an ethic of welcome and solidarity among dispersed communities [Lévy, 1999]. The Jewish people, tried by exile, knew how to make the exile of others an occasion for fraternity.

Every family history has its shadowed zones, and honesty demands that we name them. Of the Bahorjudà family, we know with certainty only the name and its attestation in Schaerf. All the rest — faces, trades, joys, bereavements — has been lost in the silence of the archives. This silence is not a flaw in the narrative: it is the narrative. It speaks to the condition of the vast majority of Jews, who lived, prayed, and transmitted without ever entering the books of history.

Dominique Natanson, through his work of memory and education, reminded us how important it is to rescue these anonymous lives from oblivion, to restore to them a name and a dignity [Natanson, 1997]. The twentieth century, with the Shoah and the upheavals of Mediterranean communities, swallowed entire lineages of which sometimes only a single line in a register remains. To keep Memory alive for Bahorjudà is therefore to perform a gesture that Jewish tradition holds sacred: to refuse to allow the name of a human being to disappear entirely.

Here is expressed the ultimate virtue, the one that encompasses all others: faithfulness. Faithfulness to the chain of generations, to the covenant, to the name received and transmitted. Yerushalmi showed that Jewish Memory rests not primarily on critical History but on liturgy and rite, on the repetition that renders the past present [Yerushalmi, 1984]. By bearing within the very name the firstborn (Bahor) and Judah (Judà), this family inscribed primacy and continuity at the heart of its identity — as if the name itself were a sworn pledge of faithfulness.

At the end of this journey, what can we take away from the Bahorjudà lineage? Few facts, but a profound meaning. A name attested by Schaerf in 1925 [Schaerf, 1925], composed of Bahor, the firstborn, and Judà, the eponymous ancestor of Israel. Around this firm nucleus, the history of the Jews of Italy and their Mediterranean diasporas unfolds an entire world of communal life, written knowledge, solidarity, and faithfulness.

Among all the virtues that Jewish tradition has carried, it is faithfulness to Memory and transmission that this lineage will have expressed most fully — not through brilliant works that no archive attributes to it, but through the very fact of its name: a name that, in joining the firstborn and Juda, speaks of the primacy of heritage and the continuity of the covenant. In its discretion, the Bahorjudà family embodies the humility of obscure lineages which, together, kept a people enduring across centuries and continents.

As Yerushalmi wrote, what has sustained Israel is not so much History as Memory — that commandment to remember which passes through each generation [Yerushalmi, 1984]. In restoring a voice to this nearly effaced name, this Great Book does nothing but obey, in its own way, the same imperative: zakhor. And that is perhaps the finest tribute one can pay to a family of which only a name remained: to hold it worthy of being told.