The Balachovsky Family

In 1925, a slim volume destined to become an indispensable working instrument was published in Florence by the publisher of the Rassegna Mensile di Israel and in the scholarly circles of Italian Judaism: I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, by Samuele Schaerf [Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, 1925 — ref:1]. The work responded to a need that Italian Judaism felt acutely at that time: to record, before they faded away, the surnames borne by a small but ancient community, dispersed among Rome, Livorno, Florence, Venice, Ferrara, Ancona, Turin, and a constellation of towns.

It is in this inventory that the name Balachovsky is entered. Its very presence there constitutes a fact: in the early twentieth century, one or more Jewish families bearing this surname were sufficiently established on Italian soil for Schaerf's census to register them. Schaerf's gesture is not neutral. To draw up a list of the names of a people is to accomplish an act of fidelity—the refusal of oblivion, that virtue which Hebrew tradition calls zakhor, "remember." In saving hundreds of surnames from dispersion, including that of the Balachovsky lineage, Schaerf posed, perhaps unknowingly, a barrier against the erasure that would, thirteen years later, befall the Jews of Italy.

The form of the name merits our attention. The ending in -ovsky / -ovski is characteristic of surnames of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian origin, formed from a toponym or a personal name followed by the Slavic adjectival suffix of belonging. A bearer of this name in Italy therefore signals, in all likelihood, a family whose roots ran deep into the Eastern Ashkenazi world, and which, at some point in its history, had made its way toward the peninsula. Here we touch upon the limit of what the cited archival item establishes: it attests to the name in Italy, not to its provenance. The rest belongs to historical context, which the following chapters will endeavor to illuminate without ever substituting it for the fact.

A name is an archival item in itself, but an archival item that must be read with caution. The Slavic physiognomy of Balachovsky invites us to place this lineage within the great movement that, from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, drove hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Russian Empire and Polish lands toward the west and south of Europe. The pogroms of the 1880s, the misery of the Pale of Settlement, persecutions and administrative restrictions precipitated massive emigration whose principal flows were directed toward America, but whose branches also reached France, England, and—more rarely, more discreetly—Italy.

That the name Balachovsky was recorded in Italy in 1925 accords with this hypothesis: that of an Ashkenazi family that arrived in the peninsula at the turn of the century, or shortly before, and came to join an Italian Jewish community that was predominantly Sephardic and italkim, with rituals and patronyms quite different. This encounter between a North-Eastern Judaism and a Mediterranean Judaism is, in itself, a figure of the virtue of welcoming the stranger—ahavat ha-guer, the love of the newcomer from elsewhere, which the Torah commands by constantly reminding us: "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The Italian communities, so ancient and so rooted, have many times received Jews from other horizons; in integrating a family bearing a Slavic name, they perpetuated this hospitality.

We must, however, clearly mark the boundary of conjecture. We have, in the corpus that forms the foundation of this book, no document, no migration register, no date that would document the precise path of the Balachovsky toward Italy. The hypothesis of an Eastern Ashkenazi origin is solidly suggested by the morphology of the name, but it remains a reading, not a proof. We formulate it as such, faithful to the principle that likelihood is not certainty, and that it is more honorable to name an uncertainty than to disguise it.

To understand the context in which a Balachovsky family came to be situated in early twentieth-century Italy, one must picture Italian Judaism as its great historians have described it. It is one of the oldest Jewish presences in Western Europe: established in Rome from the republican era, it has continued uninterrupted for two millennia [Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia, 1963 — ref:11 ; Nicola Ferorelli, Gli ebrei nell'Italia meridionale dall'età romana al secolo XVIII, 1966 — ref:10]. At the Renaissance, the communities of Italy experienced a remarkable intellectual, financial and spiritual flowering, blending italkim heritage, Sephardic contributions after 1492, and Ashkenazi presences from the North [Robert Bonfil, Gli ebrei in Italia nell'epoca del Rinascimento, 1991 — ref:9].

This plurality of origins is essential to our purpose. Italian Judaism was never monolithic: in Venice, communities distinguished themselves by "nation" — Levantine, Ponentine, Italian and tedesca — the latter, "German," designating precisely the Ashkenazim. A name with northern or eastern sonorities would therefore not stand out absolutely there; it joined a mosaic already constituted. In Florence, whose history from its origins to the present day Roberto Salvadori has traced, the community had been able over the centuries to integrate contributions from diverse horizons [Roberto G. Salvadori, Gli ebrei di Firenze. Dalle origini ai giorni nostri, 2000 — ref:12].

The long struggle for civil equality forms the other great backdrop. The debate over the emancipation of Italy's Jews, opened in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, reached its peak in the mid-nineteenth century: Gadi Luzzatto Voghera demonstrated how much this conquest of equality had its price and its contradictions [Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Il prezzo dell'eguaglianza. Il dibattito sull'emancipazione degli ebrei in Italia (1781-1848), 1998 — ref:7]. With Italian unification (1861) and the abolition of the last ghettos, the Jews of the peninsula acceded to full citizenship. It was in this liberal Italy, where Jews participated actively in the economic, scientific and civic life of the nation, that a family bearing the name Balachovsky could find a place and become established — a modest illustration of the Jewish aspiration to be implicated in the common city while keeping their loyalty. That Schaerf could, in 1925, peacefully enumerate the Jewish names of Italy testifies still to this integration; no one foresaw how soon it would be violated.

Thirteen years after the publication of Schaerf's book, the very gesture of naming and counting Jews underwent a radical change in meaning. In 1938, the fascist regime promulgated racial laws, brutally breaking with the centuries-long integration of Judaism in Italy. What, in Schaerf, had been an act of memory and preservation, became, in the hands of the State, an instrument of census, exclusion, and soon of death.

The great historians of this catastrophe have established its unfolding. Michele Sarfatti retraced the mechanics of persecution, from marginalization to annihilation [Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell'Italia fascista. Vicende, identità, persecuzione, 2000 — ref:6] ; Enzo Collotti analyzed the juridical machinery of the racial laws [Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei. Le leggi razziali in Italia, 2003 — ref:5] ; Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci illuminated their ideological logic [Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, L'Italia fascista e la persecuzione degli ebrei, 2008 — ref:4] ; and Fabio Isman gathered the very documents of persecution [Fabio Isman, 1938. L'Italia razzista. I documenti della persecuzione contro gli ebrei, 2018 — ref:2]. The 1938 census of Jews, expulsion from schools and professions, deprivation of rights: all of this struck indiscriminately at ancient families and newcomers alike, at Italian surnames and foreign names.

A family bearing the name Balachovsky found itself, from this point of view, doubly exposed: Jewish, and moreover bearing a name revealing a foreign origin, in an Italy that persecuted with particular rigor Jews of non-Italian and recent settlement. The diaries and letters gathered by Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri give a moving voice to these existences caught in the vise [Mario Avagliano, Marco Palmieri, Gli ebrei sotto la persecuzione in Italia. Diari e lettere 1938-1945, 2011 — ref:3]. One reads in them the shock of integrated families seeing turned against them the homeland they believed to be theirs. Facing this ordeal, the virtue that Jewish tradition calls kiddoush ha-Shem — the sanctification of the Name in adversity — manifested itself most often not through brilliant heroic gestures, but through the simple obstinacy to endure, to protect one's own, to transmit. We do not know, lacking nominative archives in our corpus, what the particular fate of the Balachovsky was under the racial laws; but we know in what world they stood, and that suffices to measure what they confronted.

After the fall of fascism and the German occupation of 1943, persecution became extermination. The deportation of the Jews of Italy to the death camps was documented with painful precision by Liliana Picciotto in Il libro della memoria, which lists by name the Jews deported from Italy between 1943 and 1945 [Liliana Picciotto, Il libro della memoria. Gli ebrei deportati dall'Italia (1943-1945), 1991 — ref:8]. This work is the tragic counterpart to Schaerf's book: where the latter recorded living names, the former draws up the list of names torn from life.

It is here that tradition and archive answer one another in a poignant way. The name Balachovsky, recorded by Schaerf in 1925 as a sign of presence, invites us to consult the Libro della memoria to know whether it appears there among the victims. Our corpus does not allow us to settle this question; we cannot affirm either the presence or the absence of the name in the deportation lists, and it would be unworthy to supply by imagination what only direct examination of the register could establish. This very uncertainty is a lesson: it reminds us that behind each surname noted in 1925 there unfolded, a generation later, a destiny of which we have not always kept the trace.

This documentary silence is not a void: it is an invitation to research and a duty of vigilance. The Jewish tradition holds that saving a name from oblivion is to participate in the resurrection of Memory. In devoting to the lineage Balachovsky this Great Book, even though the archive reduces to a single certain attestation, we accomplish the gesture that Schaerf himself had initiated: to refuse that the name disappear. The virtue of zakhor — to remember — does not require that one know everything; it requires that one not abandon the little that one knows. And this little, faithfully preserved, links the obscure destiny of a family to the collective Memory of a people who have made the preservation of names a sacred act.

From the Balachovsky lineage, documented history has left us only a slender thread: a name, noted by Samuele Schaerf in 1925 among the surnames of Jews in Italy [Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, 1925 — ref:1]. Around this thread, we have woven not the certainties we do not possess, but the true context in which this name took its place: that of an Italian Judaism two thousand years old and plural [Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia, 1963 — ref:11 ; Robert Bonfil, Gli ebrei in Italia nell'epoca del Rinascimento, 1991 — ref:9], capable of welcoming a surname with the resonance of Slavic borders ; that of an emancipation dearly won [Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Il prezzo dell'eguaglianza, 1998 — ref:7] ; then that of persecution and extermination [Michele Sarfatti, ref:6 ; Enzo Collotti, ref:5 ; Liliana Picciotto, ref:8].

If we must name, above all others, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed, it is not — for lack of documented individual figures — the brilliance of a work or a doctrine. It is something more discreet and more essential: persistence. The name Balachovsky, Slavic in form and Italian in inscription, embodies the very virtue of the diaspora — this Jewish capacity to cross borders, to be received by a foreign land and to take root there without losing one's identity. It carries within it the welcoming of the stranger and fidelity to the name, those two twin commandments that the tradition of Israel has never dissociated. That this name survived until it appeared in Schaerf's book, and that it reaches us still today, is in itself the modest and stubborn fulfillment of zakhor: the refusal of oblivion.

Thus the singular destiny of a family of which we know almost nothing joins the collective memory of a people who have made the preservation of names a form of holiness. Where the archive falls silent, fidelity continues to speak. And perhaps that, after all, is what the Balachovsky lineage transmits to us that is most precious: the certainty that a single name saved is worthy of being kept, honored, and transmitted.