The De Montel Family

The most reliable documentary anchor remains the inventory of Samuele Schaerf. The work closes with a chapter devoted to the origins and etymology of surnames, as well as a rich appendix on the noble Jewish families of Italy. The inclusion of a name in this list is no mere anecdote: it signals an attested presence, a familial continuity sufficient to be fixed in the nomenclature of a community.

The work of Schaerf, now reissued in facsimile, retains its value as a reference precisely because it was carried out at a pivotal moment. Published in 1925, it predates by a short while the period in which the onomastic identification of Italian Jews would become, under fascism, an instrument of persecution. The surname that, for the scholar, was a trace of History, would become for others a mark of death. This ambivalence of the name runs through the entire destiny of the De Montel family.

Italian Jewish onomastics is characterized by its geographical dimension: many families bear the name of the locality from which they came or which they fled. This practice speaks a profound truth of the Jewish condition in diaspora — the always provisional rootedness, the place inscribed in the name because it was lost. Here surfaces a first virtue, discreet but tenacious: faithfulness to Memory, the refusal to erase one's origins, which makes the surname itself an act of transmission in the sense understood by the tradition of Israel [Bonfil, 1994].

To understand the milieu in which a family like the De Montel could have made its place, one must turn to the work of Robert Bonfil on Jewish life in Renaissance Italy. Bonfil showed how Italian Jewish communities, far from being closed enclaves, participated in the surrounding culture while preserving an intense ritual and scholarly interiority [Bonfil, 1994]. Moneylenders, physicians, merchants, printers, rabbis: Italian Jewish society was differentiated, mobile, and learned.

Piedmont was one of the richest centers of this presence. Unjustly neglected as a destination, it ranks among the regions with the densest Jewish heritage in Italy, with its magnificent small Baroque synagogues. These sanctuaries, often concealed behind modest façades due to restrictions imposed on Jews, bear witness to an art of constrained humility transfigured into the beauty of worship. A Comtadin or Piedmontese family named De Montel would have moved in this world where piety found its dwelling in the discreet ornament of an aron or a tebah.

This is also the world of the illuminated Hebrew manuscript, studied by Giulia Tamani: Italian Jewish communities produced and commissioned codices of remarkable craftsmanship, in which Talmudic learning and liturgy were allied with aesthetic refinement [Tamani, 2010]. In this taste for the carefully crafted book, one reads a cardinal virtue of Israel: the love of study, talmud Torah, held equal to all the commandments. The De Montel family, if it truly belongs to this milieu, partakes of this devotion to the written word that allowed a dispersed people to make the book its portable homeland [Sirat, 1983].

The form Montel is particularly attested in the area of the "Jews of the Pope," those communities of the Comtat Venaissin and Avignon who, tolerated by the Church when the kingdom of France had expelled them, maintained a continuous presence over several centuries. Provence remained a relatively hospitable land; it was said of the good king René that no sovereign showed greater clemency toward the Jews. This tolerance, entirely relative and often belied, nonetheless outlines a space where families were able to endure.

The patronym Montel belongs precisely to the genealogy of the Jews of the Comtat Venaissin, their descendants and allied families. The existence, even in the twentieth century, of figures such as Gilbert Montel, one of the presidents of the Association Culturelle des Juifs du Pape, attests to the persistence of the name within this milieu [ACJP]. Here we touch upon an intersection: family memory and genealogical archive speak to one another, without our being able to determine with certainty the exact link between the Comtadin Montel and the Italian De Montel of Schaerf's catalogue. Historical prudence requires that we hold both together as branches of the same southern tree, in all likelihood related.

What is established, on the other hand, is the virtue these communities of the Pope embodied: patient endurance, the art of lasting without renouncing. Confined to the carrières — those Jewish streets of Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon, and L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue — subjected to compulsory sermons and the distinctive sign, they made of endurance a form of faithfulness. The conception of the Law they transmitted, adapted to constraint and confinement, illustrates that halakhic suppleness which made survival possible.

It is in the pontifical Italy of the 19th century that an event bearing the name Montel enters documented history. The Montel Affair broke out in 1840 in Italy when the authorities of the Papal States sought to remove from his French Jewish family an infant who had been baptized at birth, without his parents' knowledge, in order to be raised in the Catholic faith. Daniel Montel was a French Jew from Nîmes; traveling by sea, he disembarked at Fiumicino, on the shores of Lazio.

This affair foreshadows, by eighteen years, the resounding abduction of Edgardo Mortara (1858), which would shake European opinion. It reveals a formidable juridical and theological mechanism: in the Papal States, a baptized Jewish child — even if clandestinely, even if without the consent of his family — was deemed Christian and could be torn from his family. Diplomatic intervention, here, allowed for a less tragic outcome than in the Mortara affair. But the principle remains the same, and it illuminates the persistent legal vulnerability of Jews under pontifical sovereignty, even as emancipation was spreading across the rest of Europe.

The Montel Affair speaks a virtue through suffering: the defense of the home and the covenant. To reclaim a child, to refuse that he be turned away from the faith of his fathers, is to affirm that transmission is non-negotiable — that the bond of the generations, le-dor va-dor, cannot be broken by coercion. The struggle of a Jewish father for his son joins here the long lament of Israel before its lost children, from Rachel weeping for her sons to the families of modern times. The name Montel becomes, in 1840, a cry in the public square of Europe.

The fate of Italian Jewish families from the coastal regions was shaped, in the modern era, around Livourne. A free port opened by the Médicis, Livourne became the home of the Nation juive portugaise, that Sephardic diaspora which spread toward Amsterdam, Tunis and the Maghreb [Lévy, 1999]. The network of Comtadin and Italian alliances connects precisely to Tunis, Oran, Salonique and Venise. A De Montel family established in the Tyrrhenian sphere would naturally have participated in these mercantile and communal circulations.

Lionel Lévy has described how the Livornese — the Grana of Tunis — maintained, far from Italy, a distinct identity, a language, a merchant bourgeoisie and an intense synagogal life [Lévy, 1996]. In this world, economic action was not separated from virtue: honest trade, the solidarity of family households, tsedaka organized into charitable brotherhoods formed a single fabric. Charity, in these communities, was not a private gesture but an institution — the endowment of orphan girls, the ransoming of captives, the care of the sick — which embodied the precept of attending to the other.

To the west, the history of the communities of Tlemcen and Sidi Bel Abbès extends this Maghrebi narrative [Botbol, 2000]; [Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès]. If the precise presence of the De Montel family in these cities remains to be documented, the name belongs to that Jewish Mediterranean where one passed from Livourne to Tunis and from Oran to Marseille without ever fully leaving one's community. The virtue here is that of reciprocal hospitality: each port welcomed the exile who had come from another, and the relationship to the stranger — to the ger — was transformed into concrete fraternity.

The 20th century subjected the Jewish names of Italy to the ultimate trial. The patronym, which Schaerf had established in 1925 as an object of erudition, became under fascism and occupation a criterion of identification and deportation. The work of Memory pursued today — notably that gathered by Dominique Natanson around Jewish memory and education [Natanson, 1997] — seeks to restore the faces behind the lists, to transform the funerary inventory into an act of fidelity.

Here, Memory and History cross one another painfully. Family narratives transmitted orally — an ancestor who returned, another who disappeared, a prayer book saved — belong to the register of testimony, which the archive can sometimes confirm and often only graze. It is the hallmark of Jewish memory, as Yerushalmi conceived it, to carry the past not as a cold reconstruction but as a living and binding presence [Yerushalmi, 1984].

The virtue expressed in this chapter is that of remembrance as duty — zakhor. To name the dead, to restore the genealogies, to publish a "Great Book": these are gestures that partake of Israel's vocation to let nothing fall into oblivion. In lending their name to this work, the De Montel inscribe themselves in the community of those who refuse erasure.

From the nomenclature of Schaerf to the quarries of the Comtat, from the Affair of 1840 to the trading posts of Livourne and Tunis, the De Montel lineage traces an exemplary trajectory of the southern Jewish condition: a name born of a place, carried across borders, tested by constraint, preserved by memory. Much in this history belongs to the realm of the probable rather than the certain — the archives recede, the branches converge without definitive proof —, and honesty demands that this be said.

But if one asks what, among all the virtues of Israel, this lineage will have expressed most fully, the answer emerges from the facts themselves. It is neither learned glory nor power: it is the obstinate defense of transmission. In Daniel Montel's struggle to wrest his child from forced baptism, in the obstinacy of the Jews of the Pope to endure under pontifical tutelage, in the care devoted to the book and to the name, one and the same flame burns — that of le-dor va-dor, of the faithful passage from one generation to the next. The De Montel family, in this, is not merely a family: it is a fragment of the long vigilance by which Israel, century after century and shore after shore, has refused to forget who it was [Askénazi, 1999]; [Hayoun, 2023].