The Costantini Family

The starting point for any investigation into this lineage is a precise work, published a century ago. In 1925, Samuele Schaerf published in Florence I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, a reasoned catalogue of surnames borne by Jewish families in the peninsula. It is in these pages that the name Costantini appears, classified among the Jewish surnames of Italy. This mention, however brief, constitutes the verifiable foundation of our account.

Schaerf's undertaking deserves our attention, for it illuminates in itself the nature of the name that concerns us. At a time — the 1920s — when European antisemitism was seeking to uncover a supposed "race" behind surnames, the work demonstrated instead the opposite: that the names of Jews in Italy were, for the most part, Italian names, forged in the same matrices as those of all the people of the peninsula — place names, occupational names, given names become surnames. Costantini belongs to this last category: a surname derived from the given name Costantino, according to the most commonplace method of Italian naming, where the suffix -ini marks filiation ("the sons of Costantino").

This apparent banality is, for the historian, precious data. It situates the family not in overtly Hebrew or biblical surnames, nor in names of Iberian or German provenance, but in the vast ensemble of Italian Jews called italkim, rooted since Antiquity and perfectly acculturated to the language and usages of the country. As the great syntheses on Italian Judaism have shown, this community was the oldest in Europe and developed, over the centuries, its own identity, neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic. To bear a name such as Costantini is already to belong to this first stock, the one that spoke Latin then Italian before knowing Yiddish or Ladino.

We do not know, for lack of published archives, in which city the lineage took root or at what precise date it adopted this name. But the simple presence of the surname in Schaerf's repertory is enough to anchor it in an attested communal reality. Here, honesty demands restraint: it is an established name, not a history already written.

To understand what it means to be a Jewish family "from Italy," one must go back well before the 1925 registry. Italian Judaism is the oldest of the Western diaspora: Jews have been present in Rome and the southern regions of the peninsula since Roman times, forming an unbroken continuity of communal life across twenty centuries. No other Jewish community in Europe can claim such temporal depth.

In the Mezzogiorno, from the southern peninsula to Sicily, Jews long constituted a dense population, active in craftsmanship, commerce, medicine, and silk production, before the expulsions from the Kingdom of Naples at the dawn of the sixteenth century ended this southern presence of several millennia. Those who remained retreated toward the center and north, where the Papal States, duchies, and republics offered them changing conditions, sometimes hospitable, sometimes hostile.

It was in this crucible that the most discreet and most tenacious virtue of the italkim was forged: fidelity. Fidelity to place, first—this obstinacy in remaining where one was born, in rerootng communal life after each expulsion, in beginning anew. The Jewish tradition names this perseverance emounah, the patient loyalty that endures trials without renouncing. A family bearing a name as deeply Latin as Costantini embodies, through its very onomastics, this Jewish way of inhabiting Italy not as provisional exile but as a homeland where one learned to speak, to pray, and to survive since Antiquity. The name, here, speaks of rootedness, and rootedness speaks of fidelity.

This continuity was accompanied by considerable intellectual contribution: Italian communities were centers of talmudic learning, liturgical poetry, and later, of dialogue with the surrounding culture. Where other diasporas experienced withdrawal, the Italian one often practiced exchange—without ever abdicating what founded it.

If we cannot establish with certainty the lineage of Costantini, the Latinity of its name naturally invites us to turn our gaze toward Rome and central Italy, the historical heart of Italian Jewry. The Jewish community of Rome, the oldest in Europe, experienced in the fifteenth century a moment of relative openness. At the time of the Renaissance, as Robert Bonfil has shown, the Jews of Italy participated in the cultural life of their time: physicians, bankers, scholars, printers, they negotiated a singular place in a society that tolerated them while keeping them at a distance.

This insertion nurtured concrete virtues. The economic activity of Jewish lenders, often the only ones authorized to practice credit, made possible the economic life of many cities and, through the monti and charitable works, a redistribution within the community. For tsedaqah — this justice that becomes charity, this duty to aid the poor inscribed at the heart of the Law — structured the life of the Italian Jewish nazioni: confraternities for the dowry of girls without resources, societies for visiting the sick, funds for the burial of the indigent. A family like the Costantini, caught in this communal fabric attested for Italian Jewry as a whole, necessarily shared its obligations and solidarities.

Then came the walls. In 1555, the bull Cum nimis absurdum of Paul IV instituted the ghetto of Rome and hardened the condition of Jews everywhere: the wearing of a distinctive sign, professional prohibitions, confinement in closed quarters. For more than three centuries, the Jews of Rome and many cities lived enclosed, impoverished, yet alive. It was perhaps there that the virtue of the entire Italian lineage was forged most profoundly: enduring humility, the capacity to preserve the study of Torah, practice and dignity within abasement itself. The memory of Israel remembers these closed centuries not as a time of death, but as a long vigil where faithfulness to the Law was, day after day, an act of silent resistance.

The 19th century overturned this condition. The debate on Jewish emancipation, opened in Italy as early as the late 18th century in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, gradually led to civil equality. As Gadi Luzzatto Voghera has analyzed, this emancipation was not a gift: it was debated, contested, and conquered between 1781 and 1848, carried forward by Jewish intellectuals and Christian liberals convinced that the exclusion of Jews dishonored the nation it claimed to protect.

Italian unification, completed in 1870 with the conquest of Rome, abolished the last ghettos. The Jews of Italy became full citizens, and they engaged in the life of the new nation with remarkable fervor: in the army, administration, university, judiciary, and politics. The Risorgimento was experienced by many Jewish families as a second liberation, an exodus at the civic scale.

Here is expressed a cardinal value: involvement in collective life, what the tradition calls the concern for tiqqoun — the repair of the world through action within the city. Having left the walls, Italian Jews did not retreat; they gave. A family bearing a name as fully Italian as Costantini found itself, by that very name, ready for this entry into the nation, without the least gap to bridge with its fellow citizens. The name which, under the ghetto, had been unable to hide exclusion, became under emancipation the sign of a citizenship at last recognized. This is the fertile paradox of this lineage: the Latinity of its name, long without protective effect, at last seemed to coincide with a genuine citizenship.

This illusion of an accomplishment — being Italian among Italians, indistinct and free — would, in the following century, shatter in the most brutal way.

In 1938, the fascist regime enacted racial laws, stripping Italian Jews of the equality they had won seventy years earlier. The work of Michele Sarfatti, Enzo Collotti, Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci and Fabio Isman established in detail the mechanics of this persecution: census-taking, exclusion from schools and professions, erasures, spoliations, and the filing of the entire Jewish population of the country.

This moment reveals with cruel clarity the truth inscribed in the name Costantini. The regime did not stop at surnames: it conducted a census, cross-referenced civil registries and communal archives, and identified as "Jewish" families whose names, such as Costantini, were in every way similar to those of their Catholic neighbors. The most Latin name offered no protection. Persecution thus demonstrated that onomastic assimilation, however thorough, offered no refuge — a bitter lesson that every Jewish family in Italy, whatever their surname, had to learn at great cost.

The diarists and letter writers brought together by Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri reveal the measure of the shock: men and women who thought themselves fully Italian discovered overnight that they were no longer so in the eyes of the State they had served. Many had fought for their homeland in the Great War; some had even embraced fascism. The relationship to the nation, long experienced as a loyal certainty, became a wound.

Faced with this ordeal, a virtue well known to tradition manifested itself among the persecuted: kiddoush ha-Chem, the sanctification of the Name through dignity maintained in humiliation. Continuing to educate children excluded from public schools, organizing mutual aid, preserving books and faith — such gestures the Jewish communities of Italy, with whom the Costantini shared their fate, opposed to the annihilation of their rights.

After the armistice of September 1943 and the German occupation of central and northern Italy, persecution became extermination. Liliana Picciotto, in Il libro della memoria, catalogued name by name the Jews deported from Italy between 1943 and 1945, erecting the most rigorous documentary monument to this tragedy. Of the thousands of victims, nearly all were murdered at Auschwitz.

It is here that our narrative reaches the honest limit of what published sources allow us to assert. The reference corpus does not establish nominatively the fate of specific members of the Costantini lineage; the scrupulous historian must stop there and invent nothing. But collective memory illuminates the silence: the raid on the Rome ghetto on 16 October 1943 struck indiscriminately the families of the city, including those whose Roman roots extended back to Antiquity and whose names were among the most anciently Italian. The duty of memory commands us to presume no name absent from the archives, but also not to forget that behind each surname in Schaerf's repertory stood real beings, exposed to the same threat.

Yet from those dark years emerges a clarity: that of zakhor, the imperative of remembrance. The very work of Picciotto — cataloguing, naming, restoring each identity snatched from oblivion — accomplishes an immemorial commandment of Israel: "Remember." In inscribing the name Costantini in this Great Book, we participate in the same gesture. To name is to refuse the erasure that the persecutors had planned. The lineage, of which we possess only a name and a trace, becomes thus an anchor point of memory, a place where individual history and collective destiny answer to each other.

After the Liberation, the Jews of Italy, decimated but not annihilated, rebuilt their communities. Italian Judaism, the most ancient in Europe, continued its long duration, wounded and standing.

From the Costantini lineage, history has handed down to us only a name, gathered by Samuele Schaerf in 1925 and deposited in the great herbarium of Jewish surnames in Italy. This name is little, and it is immense. Little, because no continuous genealogy, no singular figure can be reconstructed from verified sources. Immense, because this single name suffices to inscribe the family in the oldest diaspora of the West and to make of it a witness to the great tides of Italian Jewish history: the ancient roots of the Mezzogiorno and Rome, the splendor of the Renaissance, the confinement of the ghettos, the hope of emancipation, the wound of 1938, the abyss of deportation.

Among all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried through the centuries, it is rooted fidelity that the Costantini lineage appears to have expressed best — this silent emounah that makes a family hold fast to a land from Antiquity, even coming to embrace its language and the most Latin syllables of its name, without ever ceasing to belong to Israel. The name Costantini, derived from the given name of a Christian emperor, is the most eloquent testimony to this Jewish way of dwelling in Italy: not as passing strangers, but as sons of an ancient homeland, faithful to two inheritances at once.

History teaches that this fidelity was never rewarded by security: neither the walls of the ghetto nor the Latinity of the surname shielded the Jews of Italy from suspicion and then from persecution. And yet, after each catastrophe, they began again. This is perhaps the last word of this Great Book: a lineage of which we know only a name reminds us that the memory of a people is not measured by the number of its documents, but by the tenacity of its presence. Remember — zakhor. The name of the Costantini is henceforth among those by which one remembers.