The Confino Family

The name Confino, with its variants Confinou, Konfino and Confeno, belongs to that class of Jewish surnames that carry, etched into their very substance, a condition endured. The most authoritative onomastic tradition in this matter — that of Joseph Toledano — ranks Confino among names of transparent meaning: that of the confined man, assigned to a place by decision of an authority [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles : les noms de famille juifs d'Afrique du Nord]. Such a name is not a coat of arms one chooses for oneself; it is a mark that history deposits and that generations decide, or do not decide, to keep. That families have retained it — without disguising it, without fleeing it — already says something about a virtue of humility and faithfulness to the truth of one's own condition.

The very spelling of the name travels with its bearers. The passage from Castilian to Italian, then to Ottoman or Maghrebi, explains the competing forms: the ending in "-ou" betrays a French or North African ear, the form "Konfino" the orthography of Judeo-Spanish communities in the Balkans, where the surname is particularly attested. This graphic plasticity is the sign of a truly diasporic name, which has followed the routes of Sephardic exile without ever breaking its fundamental identity.

The formation of these surnames is inscribed in a well-documented social context. In Rome, the study of Jewish family names reveals how much the onomastics of the ghetto constitutes a source of social history in its own right, in a milieu where, in the absence of sources comparable to those available for Christian society, it is often difficult to study lineages with the usual instruments of historical demography. The name then becomes, for lack of documents, one of the rare legible vestiges of an identity. In Italy, moreover, many Jewish surnames proceed from a learned Italianization of Hebrew or of the place of residence, as studies on the names of Italian Jews recall. Confino, if it indeed designates confinement, would fall into this second family: the name of the condition rather than that of the trade or virtue.

To understand what the name Confino preserves, one must return to the place that gave it, according to tradition, its reason for being. In 1516, the Serene Republic of Venice made a decision that would mark the history of Europe: to relegate its Jews to a circumscribed space in the sestiere of Cannaregio. The Venice ghetto is a closed zone where Jews were forced to reside separately from the rest of the population from 1516 until the city's occupation by Bonaparte in 1797; the first in history, it would give its name to all similar zones created thereafter in Europe. The word itself would go back to the Venetian word "getto," which designated the foundries installed in the neighborhood in the medieval period, although this etymology remains disputed.

Against the image of a simple prison, the history of the Venetian ghetto reveals a fruitful paradox. Confinement did not extinguish Jewish life: it concentrated it, densified it, and paradoxically made it radiate. The ghetto became a crossroads where Italian Jews of old stock, Ashkenazi from the north and especially Levantine Séfarades, those merchants from the Ottoman Empire who made Venice a hub of Mediterranean trade, met. It was there, in this constrained space, that sumptuous synagogues—the scole—were built, whose magnificence answered to the exiguity of the place, as if the beauty of worship had to compensate for the narrowness of condition.

This dimension deserves to be underlined, for it carries one of the cardinal virtues of the Jewish tradition: involvement in collective life and the building of an organized community right where power wanted isolation. Far from dissolving into relegation, the Jews of the ghetto equipped themselves with institutions of charity, confraternities for assistance to the sick and the dead, talmudic schools. The tsedaka—this charity that in Hebrew is synonymous with justice—took there the concrete form of a solidarity of survival. The name Confino, if it indeed comes from this experience, thus says not only the humiliation of confinement: it carries in outline the memory of a community that, confined, knew how to remain alive, learned and charitable. Venice, the city where the Republic confined its Jewish community to an islet of the sestiere of Cannaregio, was thus the theater of a resistance through fidelity rather than through revolt.

If the patronym Confino is Italian in its form and meaning, its densest diffusion is found in the Sephardic world, singularly in the Judeo-Spanish communities of the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. This observation invites us to confront the memory of the name with the history of migrations. The expulsion from Spain in 1492, followed by the forced conversion of Portugal, sent tens of thousands of Jews and Marranos onto the roads, a portion of whom reached Northern Italy, Venice, Ferrara, Ancona, before departing again toward the Ottoman Empire. It is likely that families bearing, or acquiring in Italy, the name Confino followed these same routes.

The itinerary of the New Christians who returned to Judaism in Italian ghettos constitutes one of the most moving chapters of this history. Yerushalmi masterfully demonstrated, through the figure of Isaac Cardoso, how men trained at the Spanish court made the choice, at the risk of everything, to join the Italian ghetto to live their Judaism openly there. This movement—from court to ghetto—reverses the ordinary sense of constraint: the space of confinement became the place of a recovered religious freedom. We touch here upon a virtue of piety and fidelity to the Law that runs through all Sephardic memory: preferring assumed enclosure to the comfort of concealment.

The Levantine Sephardim established in Venice maintained networks that connected the lagoon to Salonika, Constantinople, Sofia. It is along this network that the name Confino appears to have become fixed in the Balkans, where it is solidly attested in the modern period. This diffusion illustrates a constant of Jewish history recalled by the great syntheses: the capacity of communities to weave, beyond political frontiers, a commercial and learned fabric of remarkable coherence. The relationship to the foreign, here, is not only endured as exile; it is turned into competence: the man of confinement becomes the man of the roads, the mediator between worlds. Venetian tolerance, however self-interested it was, offered these Sephardic merchants a framework in which coexistence, even unequal, could establish itself durably.

The honesty of narrative forbids depicting modern Italy as a land of simple refuge. The fate of Jews and Marranos there hung suspended between the goodwill of princes and the alternating zeal of the Church. In Naples, dominated by the Spanish crown, the Inquisition pursued Judaizing new-Christians with a rigor that made any lasting settlement precarious. In Ancona, in 1556, Pope Paul IV had Portuguese Marranos burned, abruptly shattering one of the great ports of welcome for the diaspora — an event that remains one of the major scars in Sephardic memory in Italy.

The ghetto itself, even if it has been seen as a space of communal life, remained above all an instrument of relegation. Jews there were bound to wearing a distinctive sign, to the nighttime closing of gates, to restricted professions — moneylending, secondhand clothes, tolerated commerce. The medieval sources gathered by historians of Judaism document with precision this condition made of revocable authorizations and precarious contracts. In Northern Italy, the very establishment of a community assumed that an agreement — the condotta — was signed with urban authority to authorize lending activity, as recalled by the history of the Jews of Italy [History of Jews in Italy, Wikipedia].

It is precisely in this precarity that a discrete yet tenacious virtue reveals itself: endurance in Law and learning. Despite professional interdictions, despite surveillance, the communities of Italian ghettos produced rabbinical and humanist culture of the first order, maintaining Talmudic schools and printing houses, even dialoguing with the surrounding Christian culture. The name Confino, in keeping trace of relegation, also keeps the memory of those who, relegated, refused to be reduced to silence. The tension between oppression suffered and life maintained is not a contradiction to be erased: it is the very truth of this history.

From the entire lineage, one figure emerges in the full light of the archive: the historian Michael Confino, whose itinerary sums up in itself the migrations of a name. Michael, or Michel, Confino (1926–2010) was a historian of Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is revealing that a bearer of the Confino name was born in Sofia, in the Kingdom of Bulgaria, on April 2, 1926, at the very heart of that Sephardic diaspora of the Balkans where the surname had taken root, before dying in Herzliya, in Israel, on June 16, 2010. From supposed Venice to the shores of Israel, passing through Ottoman and then modern Bulgaria, it is the entire trajectory of a diasporic lineage that reveals itself in a single biography.

A man of double, even triple belonging, Michael Confino devoted his work not to his own history but to that of imperial Russia. His research embraced social, economic, and intellectual history, with particular attention to comparative history and agrarian history. His first major work, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie à la fin du XVIIIᵉ siècle (1963), focused on the structures of land ownership and Russian seigneurship; his study Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin-Nechaev Circle (1974) illuminated, from within, the Russian revolutionary constellation around Bakunin and Nechaev [Domaines et seigneurs en Russie à la fin du XVIIIᵉ siècle, Zakhor corpus; Daughter of a Revolutionary, Zakhor corpus].

His academic career was that of an institution builder. In 1970, he joined Tel Aviv University and founded there the Research Centre on Russia and Eastern Europe, of which he was the first director between 1970 and 1977. His international stature was recognized even in the United States, where he was received as a researcher at the National Humanities Center in 1984–1985 [National Humanities Center]. A critic hailed, in his last posthumous work, the mature reflections of a master historian.

In Michael Confino was thus fulfilled one of the highest virtues of the Jewish tradition: disinterested love of knowledge, limmud extended to the whole world. Son of a community long confined, he made historical knowledge—that of a country that was not his own—the instrument of universal freedom. That the heir of a name meaning "the one assigned to residence" spent his life probing the servitudes and revolts of Russian peasantry is not without profound irony: the descendant of confinement became the historian of great social constraints, as if the name, through him, had turned into lucidity. His work now belongs to the Jewish contribution to scientific knowledge and critical thought of the twentieth century.

The Confino lineage left neither an illustrious rabbinical dynasty nor a continuous chronicle spanning centuries; its archives are fragmentary, its probable origins more than established. Yet its name itself is a history lesson. Born, according to tradition, from the confinement order — that ghetto which Italy invented in Venice in 1516 [ref:7 ; ref:12] — it crossed the Sephardic Mediterranean, took root in the Judeo-Spanish Balkans, and ultimately produced, in the person of Michael Confino, a master of European history who died in the land of Israel.

What this lineage expressed better than any other virtue was the transmutation of constraint into scholarly dignity. Other families shone through charity, through halakha, through economic power. The Confinos, for their part, seem to have made confinement itself their school: the closed space became a space of study, relegation became a concentration of knowledge, and the memory of imprisonment turned, in their most illustrious heir, into a work of free intelligence. In this they partake of a virtue that the tradition of Israel carried through all its exiles — that which makes of suffering endured a matter for understanding, and of knowledge a refuge that no ghetto could ever seal off. The name that spoke of "the one confined to residence" ultimately says the opposite of what it states: the man one wished to fix, and who became the man of roads, of languages, and of books.