The Civita Family

The entry of the name Civita in the Schaerf corpus constitutes the documentary foundation of this history. The philologist, compiling at the beginning of the twentieth century the first systematic survey of Jewish surnames in Italy, classified Civita among names derived from places, by far the most numerous category in Italian Israelite onomastics [Schaerf, 1925]. This preponderance of the toponym is not anecdotal: it tells of a way of being in the world. Forbidden from durably owning land in many places, often forced to move by successive expulsions — from France in 1394, from the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in 1492-1541, from the countryside into urban ghettos after 1555 — the Jewish population of Italy made the name of the abandoned city a portable homeland.

Robert Bonfil demonstrated how much the Jewish identity of the Italian Renaissance was constructed precisely in this ambivalent relationship with the Christian city: at once integrated into its economy and culture, and kept at distance by law and suspicion. Jewish life in Renaissance Italy unfolded in a permanent tension between participation in the surrounding society and fidelity to a distinct identity. [Bonfil, 1994] To bear the name Civita was thus to claim an urban belonging — that of the merchant, the craftsman, the moneylender, the physician established within the walls — while signaling that the city was never quite a permanent home. In this name is already readable a discreet virtue of the lineage: that of rooting without possession, the art of making community where one is merely tolerated, which the tradition of Israel has elevated to a requirement since the Babylonian exile.

From the papal bull Cum nimis absurdum of 1555, Jewish life in central Italy became confined to the narrow space of the ghettos of Rome, Ancona, Ferrara, and the papal cities. It is within this framework that the first documented Civita should probably be situated—a family of middling status exercising the trades permitted to Jews: the commerce in textiles and secondhand fabrics (strazzaria), moneylending on pawned goods, and craftsmanship. Bonfil reminds us that, far from being merely places of relegation, these ghettos were also centers of intense religious and intellectual life, where charitable confraternities and talmudic academies structured collective existence. Communal institutions—relief confraternities, schools, synagogues—ensured cohesion and the survival of the group within the enclosed space of the ghetto. [Bonfil, 1994]

It is here that the lineage expresses one of the cardinal virtues of Judaism: tsedaka, justice made charity. The registers of Italian confraternities, crowded with the names of modest and notable families alike, bear witness to a duty of mutual aid that knew no hierarchy of wealth; we can reasonably inscribe the Civita within this fabric of mutual obligations—the dowering of orphan girls, visiting the sick, ransoming captives, burying the dead—which made each member of the community the guarantor of the weakest. This implication in collective life, where the care of the other is not a supererogatory virtue but a commandment, connects the obscure fate of a family of the ghetto to the long Memory of a people that made kol Israël arevim ze la-ze—"all Israel is guarantor one of the other"—the very principle of its survival.

Italian Jewry was, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, one of the greatest workshops for the production and decoration of Hebrew manuscripts. Giulia Tamani has described the richness of these illuminated codices, where the art of the peninsula — its ornaments, its historiated margins, its carefully crafted colophons — was placed at the service of sacred text and secular learning. The richly decorated Italian Hebrew manuscript combined the scribe's technical mastery with the ornament proper to Renaissance art. [Tamani, 2010] The colophons of these manuscripts — brief signatures in which the copyist or patron inscribed his name, his city, the date — constitute an unequaled genealogical treasure, and it is in this type of source that a surname like Civita, associated with a city, was naturally destined to appear.

Without a precise manuscript being able to be attributed with certainty to a Civita here, the historical likelihood is strong: in a culture where access to the book defined human dignity and where Colette Sirat has shown how much the transmission of Jewish philosophy and science depended materially on the chain of copyists and book owners [Sirat, 1983], a cultured urban family almost necessarily participated in this economy of knowledge. Medieval Jewish philosophy has reached us only through the mediation of manuscripts, copied, annotated and passed from hand to hand. [Sirat, 1983] Here is expressed talmudic and bookish knowledge as virtue: not the erudition of display, but fidelity to study as the supreme form of divine service, which tradition places at the summit of works — talmud Torah ke-neged kullam.

The turning point of 1591-1593 reshapes the Jewish geography of Italy. Through the Livornine, the Grand Dukes of Tuscany invite to Livorno, with privileges unequaled in Europe, Jewish merchants — first the ponentini, these Sephardim come from Portugal and Spain. Lionel Lévy has masterfully reconstructed the history of this "Portuguese Jewish Nation" that made Livorno the pivot of a commercial and communal network linking Amsterdam, Tunis and North Africa. The Portuguese Jewish Nation of Livorno constituted, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, a crossroads linking Mediterranean Europe to the Maghreb. [Lévy, 1999]

A free and cosmopolitan city, Livorno also attracted Jewish families from Italian neighboring states, eager to escape the suffocation of ghettos and to access the great maritime trade. It is likely that some Civita joined this movement, founding their destiny on exchange rather than on lending alone. Livorno, without an imposed ghetto, offered Jews a freedom of residence and commerce exceptional in Italy, attracting merchants and scholars from throughout the Mediterranean. [Lévy, 1996] This economic action is not, in Jewish consciousness, a simple pursuit of gain: it carries the requirement of honesty in weights and measures, of loyal contract, of word kept — so many commandments that the Livorno merchant had to honor under the gaze of the rabbinical court. By opening itself to the foreigner, to the port, to the circulation of men and merchandise, the lineage also embraces that hospitality toward the traveler that the Law commands to place higher than the welcome of the Divine Presence itself.

The Livornese network naturally projected Italian families toward the shores of North Africa, where the Grana — Jews of Livornese origin, thus named after Gorni, the Arabic form of Livorno — formed in Tunis a distinct community, proud of its Italian culture and consular privileges. Lionel Lévy traced this Mediterranean extension of the Portuguese Nation to the communities of Tunisia [Lévy, 1999]. Family tradition, in many lineages of Italian origin in the Maghreb, preserved the memory of this Livornese ancestry as a title of dignity, and it is plausible that some Civita inscribe themselves in this memory.

Further west, in the Algeria of Tlemcen, Sidi Bel Abbès and Oran, one encounters communities where native Jews and families from Italy or Spain intermixed. Eliahou-Éric Botbol, retracing the life of the Tlemcen community, and the rabbinical archives of Sidi Bel Abbès preserve the fabric of these existences where daily piety and rigorous record-keeping — births, marriages, burials — served as written memory. The Jewish community of Tlemcen, ancient and devout, maintained throughout the twentieth century an intense religious life around its rabbis and saints. [Botbol, 2000] [Rabbinical Archives of Sidi Bel Abbès] It is here that the piety of the lineage manifests itself in its most concrete form: fidelity to the calendar, to ritual, to the neighborhood synagogue, this lived and transmitted religion which Dominique Natanson showed constitutes the beating heart of North African Jewish memory before the great upheavals of the twentieth century [Natanson, 1997].

Mediterranean Judaism, of which the Civita are a thread, was never separated from the great adventure of Jewish thought. From medieval philosophy reconstructed by Maurice-Ruben Hayoun to contemporary rereadings of tradition by Léon Askénazi and Armand Abécassis, unfolds an unbroken chain where each generation reinterprets the heritage without betraying it. Jewish philosophy has never ceased, from Saadia Gaon to the contemporary era, to confront revelation with reason and to rethink tradition in the light of its time. [Hayoun, 2023] Askénazi taught that Jewish fidelity is not repetition but living transmission, a call addressed to the present [Askénazi, 1999]; Abécassis recalled that the thought of Israel is born of desire and lack, never of quiet possession [Abécassis, 1987].

This contribution to thought that the great lineages carried through their scholars, more modest families assured through domestic transmission — the Shabbat table, the father teaching the son, the guarded word. Then came the trial. The twentieth century, with the collapse of North African communities after independence and, in Europe, the Shoah that also struck Italy after 1943, scattered what centuries had patiently woven. The educational memory assembled by Natanson preserves the trace of these engulfed worlds [Natanson, 1997]. Facing the silence of destroyed archives, to name again a surname, to construct its history even if uncertain, is part of that commandment which Yerushalmi places at the foundation of Jewish being: against forgetting, to remember [Yerushalmi, 1984].

From the Italian city inscribed in its name to the ports of Livorno, to the papal ghettos and the shores of the Maghreb, the lineage Civita traces in outline the trajectory of a Mediterranean Judaism: urban, mobile, faithful. No archival material here allows us to establish a continuous genealogy, and honesty demands we say so — but historical plausibility, supported by Schaerf's catalogue and the works of Bonfil, Lévy, Tamani, Botbol and Sirat, authorizes us to recognize in this name the signature of an ordinary and dignified family, of those who formed the substance of the Jewish people of Italy and its diasporas.

If we must name, above all, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed, it is that of rootedness without possession: the art of building community, of exercising charity and transmitting learning where one was merely tolerated, of carrying the lost city in one's name and refounding a new one at each exile. In this, the singular destiny of the Civita joins the most ancient vocation of Israel — to be faithful to Memory when the land slips away, and to make remembrance itself a homeland.