The da la Reina Family

The surname da la Reina — also found in the forms de la Reina, della Reina or, in Italicized registers, Delareina — belongs to the family of surnames recorded as Sephardic [List of Sephardic Jewish surnames — Wikipedia]. The preposition da/de and the article la betray a Hispanic or Luso-Hispanic origin, consistent with the region from which the Jews of the Iberian peninsula were expelled at the end of the 15th century.

The most plausible interpretation of the name is twofold. On the one hand, it may refer to a toponym: several localities and estates in Castile and Andalusia bore the name La Reina ("the Queen"), designating lands belonging to the royal dower or to the reigning queen; a Jew from these lands might have been designated by this place of origin. On the other hand, it may derive from a name of devotion or function — the proximity of a lineage to the household of a queen, a service rendered to the court, a position of stewardship. This second hypothesis is not implausible: the presence of court Jews, financiers, physicians and tax collectors at the courts of Iberian sovereigns is firmly established by scholarship, and Hispanic Judaism knew figures whose destinies were intimately bound to sovereigns — from Samuel ha-Naguid in Granada to Isaac Abravanel at the court of Castile.

What matters for the historian is that the name embodies from the outset a virtue that the tradition of Israel has carried through the centuries: the lucid relationship to temporal power. To serve a queen without being confused with her, to hold an office near the throne while remaining faithful to the Law of Moses, was the perilous exercise of generations of Iberian Jews. The name da la Reina bears the trace of this risky proximity to power — proximity that, in 1492, turned into catastrophe when those same sovereigns signed the edict of expulsion.

The inclusion of the name da la Reina in the corpus of Sephardic Jewish surnames [List of Sephardic Jewish surnames — Wikipédia] inscribes it within the shared destiny of those expelled in 1492. The Alhambra Decree, promulgated by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, forced the Jews of Spain to choose conversion or departure. The bearers of Hispanic names dispersed then according to the great routes of the Sephardic diaspora: Portugal first — from which a second expulsion drove them out in 1497 — then the welcoming lands of the Ottoman Empire (Salonique, Constantinople, Izmir, Sarajevo), North Africa (Fès, Tétouan, Alger), Italy (Livourne, Venise, Ferrare) and, later, the United Provinces.

It is within this dispersion that the graphical variability of the name becomes intelligible: the Castilian de becomes da upon contact with Portuguese or Italian, the article la persists everywhere as a Romance signature. Each form attests to a link in the itinerary.

The lineage, assuming it followed the fate of so many Sephardic families, will thus have expressed the cardinal virtue of the exiled people: faithfulness to identity beyond uprootedness. To renounce one's house, vineyards, and the tombs of ancestors rather than the Law — this choice, Jewish tradition has sanctified under the name kiddoush ha-Shem, sanctification of the Name. The families who preferred the road to apostasy transmitted to their descendants a language, Judeo-Spanish, which itself became a portable reliquary of the lost homeland. The name da la Reina, preserved without translation in the new languages of welcome, partakes of this memorial obstinacy.

If the archive of the lineage remains discreet, the queen who bears the name shines forth, by contrast, throughout the entire Sephardic oral tradition. No figure is more vivid in it than Queen Esther, heroine of the Purim scroll, celebrated in the Romansa de la Reina Ester [Tradición oral sefardí, Romansa de la Reina Ester]. This romance, transmitted mouth to mouth in the Judeo-Spanish households of the East and the Maghreb, stages the young Jewish woman become queen of Persia, who risks her life to save her people from the extermination plotted by Haman.

The choice of Esther as the queen par excellence of Sephardic Memory is not fortuitous. Esther is the hidden queen — she who conceals her belonging until the decisive hour, before revealing it to intercede. The Jews of Spain who became marranes, compelled to live their Judaism in secret, recognized themselves intimately in this figure of salvific unveiling; the feast of Purim and the fast of Esther took on particular resonance among them. The Romansa de la Reina Ester thus celebrates a double virtue: the courage of intercession and the care devoted to the survival of the collective. Esther embodies she who, placed near the throne, does not enjoy her rank but engages it wholly in the service of her own.

For a lineage whose name itself means "of the queen," this figure serves as a memorial patroness. She binds the destiny of a patronym to one of the founding narratives of Jewish resistance: the conviction that Providence acts through the hand of beings apparently without power, raised to the court for a purpose they ignore. Tradition expresses it through the formula of the book of Esther — "who knows whether it is not for a time such as this that you have attained the kingship." This virtue of engagement at the critical moment, Sephardic Memory has inscribed it at the heart of its sung repertoire.

Beside Esther, another queen haunts Judeo-Spanish repertoire: the Queen of Sheba, whose coming to King Solomon is sung in the epic kantiga Selomó i la Reina de Shevá [Tradisión oral sefardí, Selomó i la Reina de Shevá — Kantiga Épika]. This piece, which extends the biblical narrative of the Book of Kings, stages the sovereign who came from afar to test Solomon's wisdom through riddles and depart amazed at the splendor of his court.

The kantiga teaches a value that the tradition of Israel places at the summit of its scale: wisdom as radiance. The Queen of Sheba does not come to wage war or demand tribute; she comes to learn, to test, to acknowledge. The narrative highlights the peaceful relation to the foreigner — the sovereign from elsewhere is welcomed, honored, and returns home enriched. In Sephardic imagination, often nourished by mysticism, the encounter between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba became also the symbol of an encounter of wisdoms, the Orient coming to recognize the revealed Law.

That these two queens — Esther the Jewess who became a stranger at the Persian court, the Queen of Sheba the stranger who came to recognize Israel's wisdom — frame the memory attached to the name da la Reina is not incidental. Together they draw a figure of Jewish royalty turned not toward domination but toward intercession, welcome and knowledge. The lineage that bears this name thus inherits, if not by blood at least by language and song, a patrimony where the queen is always mediator — never tyrant.

Where notarial archives fall short, song has kept the record. The romancero and the Judeo-Spanish kantigas constitute, for Sephardic families, a veritable oral archive: they preserved, across generations of exile, medieval Castilian language, biblical narratives, and the emotions of a scattered people. The Romansa de la Reina Ester and Selomó i la Reina de Shevá belong to this treasure, transmitted from mother to daughter in the home, at festive vigils, in domestic intimacy.

It is here that tradition and History converge. The historian does not have documents proving the deeds of a specific da la Reina family; but he observes that the name and the repertoire share the same central motif — the mediating queen — and the same language, that Judeo-Spanish which was the cement of the Sephardic nation in diaspora. This convergence, while not constituting genealogical proof, illuminates the way a name becomes laden with meaning: it becomes the bearer of a collective narrative that exceeds simple descent.

The virtue expressed here is that of transmission — masoret, that unbroken chain which, in Judaism, binds generations together. Sephardic women, in particular, were the guardians of this sung heritage: it was they who, often illiterate, knew by heart dozens of romances and bequeathed them to their children. A lineage whose name itself honors a queen finds in this feminine transmission a fitting resonance. The Memory of Israel owes as much to these domestic voices as to the treatises of the doctors of the Law; the Great Book must not forget it.

In modern times, Sephardic surnames such as da la Reina experienced the common fate of the diaspora: persistence in Ottoman communities until the upheavals of the twentieth century, migrations to Western Europe, the Americas, and after 1948, to the State of Israel. The forms of the name crystallized according to national civil registries — Frenchified, Italicized, Hispanicized depending on the host countries.

The listing of the name among Sephardic surnames [List of Sephardic Jewish surnames — Wikipedia] testifies to its documented survival, when so many others were lost to assimilation or erased by persecution. The catastrophe of the Shoah, which struck the Sephardic communities of Thessaloniki, Sarajevo, and the Balkans particularly hard, is part of the silences that honesty demands we name: many Sephardic lineages were destroyed there, and we cannot affirm, for lack of archival evidence, what part the da la Reina family took. The duty of memory requires us to leave this silence open rather than to fill it with invented narratives.

What the persistence of the name manifests, however, belongs to a tenacious virtue: fidelity to the name as fidelity to oneself. In a tradition where the name carries the soul and memory of ancestors, preserving da la Reina across five centuries of dispersion is to refuse erasure. It is, at the scale of a family, what the People of Israel accomplished at the scale of history: to endure.

At the end of this journey, the lineage da la Reina appears as a witness-name rather than as a documented dynasty. The archive gives us its essential fact — its belonging to the Sephardic onomastic heritage [List of Sephardic Jewish surnames — Wikipédia] — while Memory, through the romancero of the Reina Ester and the kantiga of Selomó i la Reina de Shevá, deploys its symbolic richness. Between the thin thread of the archive and the wide river of oral tradition, the name finds its truth: that of a patronym which, around the figure of the queen, condenses some of the highest values of Judaism.

Of all these virtues, one prevails and gives the name its unity: mediating intercession. The queens whose echo this lineage carries — Esther risking her life for her people, the Queen of Sheba coming to recognize the wisdom of Israel — do not reign for themselves; they stand at the hinge, between the throne and the people, between the foreigner and the Law, and convey salvation, knowledge or recognition. It is there, above all, that this lineage will have best expressed it: the conviction, deeply Jewish, that true greatness is not to dominate but to serve as mediation — that he who is placed near power is there only for a time, and for others. In this, a modest name joins the collective Memory of Israel, that people which, through exile, preserved language and transmitted song, will always have preferred the hidden queen who saves to the visible king who reigns.