The Bologna Family

The Jewish community of Bologna ranks among the oldest and most important in northern Italy. Its vitality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is confirmed today even in the earth itself: archaeological excavations conducted from 2012 to 2014, Via Orfeo, uncovered the city's medieval Jewish cemetery, revealing 408 tombs, making it one of the largest sets of medieval Jewish funerary remains exhumed in Europe [Soprintendenza di Bologna; Cairn.info]. This cemetery, located between the second and third walls of the city, had been destroyed in 1569 [Times of Israel]. Its rediscovery is like the material resurgence of a community that official history had long erased: it testifies to a numerous, structured population, concerned — according to Jewish Law — with burying its dead in a consecrated place, the bet ha-hayyim, the "house of the living."

It is in this Jewish Bologna that the patronymic takes root. The city was, at the threshold of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a premier intellectual center. Robert Bonfil, in Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, showed how the Jewish communities of central and northern Italy then combined talmudic learning, economic activity — often pawnbroking and commerce — and intense participation in the surrounding culture [Bonfil, 1994]. Bologna, seat of the oldest university in the West, offered Jewish scholars an environment where medicine, philosophy, and the study of the Torah could dialogue. The transmission of knowledge was experienced there as a cardinal virtue: talmud Torah, sacred study, existed alongside scientific and medical knowledge, in that intertwining which was the glory of Italian Judaism.

If there is one domain in which the city of Bologna inscribed its name in the memory of all Israel, it is that of nascent Hebrew printing. The glory of the Jews of Italy, historiography reminds us, consists notably in having printed among the first Hebrew books in the world [History of the Jews in Italy]. Bologna was one of the cradles of this art: it was from its presses that came, in 1477, the Psalter with commentary by David Kimhi, one of the very first dated Hebrew books ever printed, then, in 1482, the first complete printed edition of the Hebrew Pentateuch accompanied by the Targum of Onkelos and the commentary of Rashi.

This event far exceeds the Bolognese context. It touches on what tradition holds to be the highest: making the word of the Torah accessible, multiplying it, offering it to the study of the greatest number. Every family bearing the name of the city inherits it as a symbolic heritage. Giulia Tamani, in her study of Manoscritti ebraici decorati in Italia, recalled how much Italian culture of the Hebrew manuscript and then print united care for beauty with rigor of text [Tamani, 2010] — a way of venerating the Book by adorning it. Here is expressed, in the very facts of Bolognese history, one of the most constant Jewish virtues: love of study and service of transmission, making the sacred text a shared good rather than a guarded treasure.

The Bolognese golden age was brutally interrupted. In Bologna, the ghetto was established in May 1556, at the location of the streets known as via de' Giudei, via del Carro and vicolo Tubertini [Biblioteca comunale di Bologna]. Then came the rupture: Jews remained there until 1569, the year they were expelled for the first time, before a tolerated return between 1586 and 1593, the date of definitive proscription [Bologna Welcome]. The expulsion of 1569 was decreed on 26 February of that year by the bull Hebraeorum gens sola of Pope Pius V, who drove out all those still found in the city, said to number approximately eight hundred [Comunità Ebraica di Bologna]. The expelled Bolognese Jews had moreover to pay the sum of 40,000 ecus before leaving the city [Biblioteca comunale di Bologna].

It was most likely in the wake of these successive uprootings that the surname Bologna became fixed. A Jew forced to depart carried, engraved in his name, the memory of the city from which he was torn; his hosts in Ferrara, Mantua, Ancona or, later, Mediterranean ports, called him "the one from Bologna." The name thus became the portable monument of an exile. In this ordeal is read a discrete but profound virtue: faithfulness to Memory, that refusal to let persecution erase one's origin. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi taught in Zakhor, the Jewish people have been less the work of historians than guardians of remembrance, transforming ordeal into transmissible Memory [Yerushalmi, 1984]. The surname Bologna, borne across the centuries, participates exactly in this zakhor — "remember" — by which a community refuses the oblivion of what it was.

After the expulsions, Jewish families from central Italy redeployed themselves along the routes of commerce and tolerance. Free ports soon offered unexpected refuge. Livorno foremost among them, whose privileges granted by the Medici — the Livornine of 1591 and 1593 — attracted Italian Jews and Sephardim from the Iberian peninsula and throughout the Mediterranean basin. Lionel Lévy traced this history of the "Portuguese Jewish Nation" of Livorno, a crossroads where families of the Italian and Iberian diaspora converged, and from which lineages departed toward Tunis, Amsterdam and beyond [Lévy, 1999] [Lévy, 1996].

It is likely — though the archive does not allow us to trace continuous filiation — that bearers of the name Bologna followed these paths, mingling their fate with that of Sephardic communities. The name appears, moreover, in similar forms, even in the communities of North Africa, where Sephardic genealogical registers list surnames of Italian origin among families of Tlemcen, Sidi Bel Abbès and the cities of the Maghreb [Botbol, 2000] [Rabbinical Archives of Sidi Bel Abbès]. Here, the oral tradition of families and the archive of ports echo one another without always intersecting: the former affirms an Italian origin, the latter attests to its plausibility through documented migration flows. It is the nature of these Mediterranean lineages to unite, in a single name, several lands. By welcoming the exile and aggregating to new communities, these families embodied that virtue of Judaism that is hakhnasat orḥim, hospitality toward the stranger, and that solidarity of the kehillah which re-forms community wherever it settles.

What family tradition transmits from Italian families established after the expulsions is first and foremost a culture of learning and faithfulness to halakha. The Italo-Livornese communities distinguished themselves by the quality of their rabbis, the meticulous keeping of their records, the attention paid to education and charity — tsedaqah was not almsgiving but an obligation of justice, organized by confraternities of benevolence. Colette Sirat demonstrated how deeply medieval Jewish philosophy, transmitted through Italian manuscripts, had nourished the thought of these communities, where one continued to copy, comment upon and teach Maimonides and his interpreters [Sirat, 1983].

This intellectual and spiritual dimension runs through the memory of Italian families of the diaspora. Maurice-Ruben Hayoun recalled the singular place of Italy in the history of Jewish philosophy, a meeting ground between Sephardic heritage, Ashkenazi tradition and Renaissance humanism [Hayoun, 2023]. Léon Askénazi, for his part, emphasized this responsibility to "think tradition" at each generation, to receive it as living and not frozen [Askénazi, 1999]; and Armand Abécassis, that fruitful tension "from desert to desire" which animates Jewish thought [Abécassis, 1987]. A lineage bearing the name of a city of printers and scholars naturally inscribes itself in this genealogy of the spirit — not through genealogical vanity, but through faithfulness to the values that the city itself had upheld: study, Law, and service to the community.

It is here necessary to acknowledge the limits of our knowledge. The surname Bologna is solidly attested as an Italian Jewish name by Schaerf [Schaerf, 1925], and the historical context of the Bolognese community is richly documented; but no continuous genealogy, no family tree connecting the current bearers of the name to the medieval families of Bologna, can be established with certainty. The archives of the community were dispersed by expulsions, and many registers were lost. The honesty of this book demands that we name these silences rather than fill them with invention.

This is why Memory takes the place of the archive here. Dominique Natanson, through his work on Jewish Memory and Education, showed how transmission to new generations was itself an act of survival and faithfulness [Natanson, 1997]. The tragedy of nineteenth-century Bologna — the Mortara affair, that Jewish child taken from his family in 1858 by papal order — echoes, down to the contemporary age, the fragility of the Jewish condition in these lands [Biblioteca comunale di Bologna]. To bear the name Bologna today is to inherit both the splendor of the printers of 1477 and the suffering of the eight hundred expelled in 1569. The virtue proper to this lineage is perhaps this very thing: to make of one's name an active Memory, an embodied zakhor.

At the end of this journey, what the Bologna lineage will have expressed most clearly, among all Jewish virtues, appears evident: fidelity to memory and the service of transmission. For this name is not merely that of a family; it is that of a city which was, in turn, one of the cradles of Hebrew printing — offering the printed Torah to all Israel — and the scene of an expulsion that scattered eight hundred souls. By choosing to bear this toponym across centuries and continents, the Bologna families made their surname a monument: the refusal to let exile erase origin, remembrance carved across generations.

This singular virtue joins the collective virtue of Israel as a whole. As Yerushalmi has taught, the Jewish people constituted itself as a people of memory, transforming each trial into transmissible remembrance and each name into a guardian of the past [Yerushalmi, 1984]. In this, the modest Bologna lineage — attested by Schaerf, illuminated by the archaeology of a rediscovered cemetery, carried along the roads of Sephardic dispersion — participates fully in this cardinal virtue: zakhor, remember. The name itself, forever, remembers it.