The De Nola Family

To understand the patronym, one must first understand the place. Nola is one of the oldest cities in Campania, situated in the fertile plain that extends between Mount Vesuvius and the Apennines, east of Naples. Its antiquity and its position within the southern Italian world make it a natural center of settlement, including Jewish settlement: Hebrew presence in this region dates back to Roman antiquity, as attested by archaeological remains. The custodians of Neapolitan Jewish memory indeed recall that there exist testimonies of epigraphs and tombs in Nola, Pozzuoli, Naples and Pompeii, signs of an ancient and deep-rooted implantation. This same learned tradition emphasizes that it is an ancient history spanning two millennia, and that the Jewish houses of Pompeii are of great interest because they testify to the presence of a rather affluent community.

The patronym De Nola belongs to the best-documented category of Italian Jewish onomastics: names derived from cities and towns of the peninsula. Schaerf, in his census, devotes a substantial portion of his inventory to these names of origin. The list of cognomi drawn from Italian cities is long and significant; among entries in the same onomastic family are names such as Alatri, Ancona, Anticoli, Ariccia, Ascoli, Asti, Bassano, Bologna, Cagli, Caivano, Camerino, and many others. This logic of the place-name constitutes one of the great strata of peninsular Jewish nomenclature: when a family left its city of origin, the receiving community designated it by its provenance, and this marker eventually became fixed as a hereditary patronym.

The work of Schaerf is itself a monument. This study is the first study of the onomastics of Italian Jews, comprising approximately 1,650 patronyms corresponding to 9,800 families — on average, one patronym for six families. The augmented version of the census, whose appendix addresses noble Jewish families of Italy, specifies that the list of names relating to approximately 10,000 Italian Jewish families produced by Schaerf is extended by a chapter on the origins and etymology of cognomi. It is within this framework that De Nola takes its place: a toponymic name, grounded in a real and ancient city, bearing a memorial geography.

It is necessary to note the methodological caution required. A toponymic patronym does not by itself establish continuous filiation; it indicates a geographical origin common to those who bear it, without guaranteeing that they descend from a single ancestor. The De Nola family is thus first inscribed in a regional history: that of the Jews of Campania and the Kingdom of Naples, before being the history of a singular lineage.

Jewish presence in the Italian Mezzogiorno was, for centuries, one of the most vibrant in the Christian Mediterranean. Naples and its surroundings — including Nola — were home to structured communities, organized around their reserved quarters, the giudecche. Neapolitan historiography recalls that these quarters were ancient: Jews lived entirely within three giudecche; a first giudecca almost certainly dates back to the Middle Ages and was called Vicus Iudeorum. These communities lived from commerce, craftsmanship and notably from textile work, an emblematic activity of Neapolitan Jewry, as recalled by the chronicles of the dyers' quarter.

This long history was not without upheaval. Southern Jewry experienced multiple episodes of persecution even before the great modern expulsions. Thus, in 1288, the Kingdom of Naples decreed the expulsion of Jews, under pressure from anti-Jewish preaching led by the mendicant orders. This first great trauma foreshadowed the catastrophes of the sixteenth century. For a family attached to a place like Nola, these shocks meant displacement, dispersions and, sometimes, forced conversions.

The intellectual and spiritual context of this southern Jewry deserves to be emphasized. Southern Italy was, in the medieval centuries, a crossroads of Jewish culture, a place where halakha, liturgical poetry and philosophical speculation were transmitted. Colette Sirat showed how well medieval Jewish philosophy developed through a dense network of manuscripts circulating across the Mediterranean, of which Italy was one of the major relay points [Sirat, 1983]. It was in this soil that families like De Nola could take shape, between religious practice, economic activity and participation in intellectual life.

Jewish life in Italy of this era, before the rupture of the sixteenth century, was characterized by real integration into the surrounding society despite restrictions. Robert Bonfil described with finesse this ambivalent condition of Italian Jews, at once separated and integrated, kept at a distance and yet participants in the ambient culture [Bonfil, 1994]. The De Nola family, as a family of medieval Campania, belongs fully to this history of a Jewry both rooted and vulnerable.

The decisive turning point in southern Jewish history, and therefore in the context within which families like De Nola operated, was the double expulsion of the sixteenth century. After the establishment of Spanish dominion, the inquisitorial policy of the Catholic sovereigns put an end to centuries of continuous Jewish presence. Historians note that the two great expulsions of Jews from Naples took place in 1510 and 1541, as a result of the inquisitorial policies of Spanish Christian kings.

The first act was formal and brutal. The pragmatic sanction ordering Jews and neophytes to leave the Kingdom of Naples within four months was published on November 23, 1510; the king was Ferdinand the Catholic, the viceroy Raimondo de Cardona. A reprieve was granted to a small number: two hundred families were permitted to remain until the final expulsion. Already before this date, discriminatory measures had hardened: in 1506, King Ferdinand ordered that all Jews wear a distinctive sign of red color on their clothing.

The scale of human disaster was considerable, even taking into account exaggerations in ancient sources. According to official figures, probably greatly exaggerated, 30,000 people are attested as expelled in 1510, and 42,000 others in 1541. This was a forced exodus whose consequences were felt in all the centuries that followed. It is here that the great turning point plays out, for the De Nola family as for so many others: the end of indigenous Neapolitan Jewry and the beginning of dispersal.

For a family identified by the place-name Nola, these expulsions very likely meant one of two classical fates: either exile to other lands — the Papal States, central and northern Italy, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa — or conversion, sincere or outward, with the clandestine maintenance of Jewish practices. The name De Nola, once it traveled beyond Campania, becomes a witness: it preserves, in the registers of distant communities, the trace of an origin that expulsion had made impossible to inhabit.

It is precisely in this post-expulsion context that there was born, around 1530, the man who would become the most documented member of the lineage: Elijah ben Menahem da Nola. Born some two decades after the first exodus of 1510, he represents a generation formed in the in-between — between the living memory of a lost Campania and the reality of a Jewish life reconstructed elsewhere on the peninsula. Whether his family was numbered among the two hundred households that obtained the right to remain provisionally in the Kingdom, or whether it migrated to Rome at the time of the first exodus, cannot be established with certainty. What we know is that Elijah became sufficiently educated to become, as an adult, one of the great rabbis of Rome in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Elijah ben Menahem da Nola (c. 1530 – c. 1602) is the best-documented figure of this lineage. His career, dense and turbulent, traces on its own an entire facet of the history of Italian Jews in the age of the Counter-Reformation. Tradition describes him as one of the leading rabbis in Rome in the second half of the sixteenth century, but also as a renowned physician and philosopher. This triple excellence — religious learning, medical science, philosophical speculation — was not uncommon in high Italian Jewish culture, where the figure of the rabbi-physician-philosopher approached the norm for the most learned families.

What distinguishes Elijah da Nola and makes him visible to the historian is first and foremost his activity as a copyist. He copied Hebrew manuscripts for Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, and many of these works in his hand are preserved in the Vatican Library. This detail is not insignificant. Hebrew calligraphy was a demanding art, associated with profound textual knowledge; a copyist was not a mere mechanical scribe but a scholar who mastered the variants of manuscript traditions, knew vocalizations and accents, and could sometimes annotate or correct the texts he reproduced. That manuscripts copied by the hand of Elijah da Nola were deemed worthy of enriching the Vatican collections is testimony to his recognized competence, even — or especially — in the cultivated Christian circles of his time.

This collaboration with the clerical world takes on full meaning when one knows that Elijah was also a teacher of Hebrew. He taught this language to Tommaso Aldobrandini, brother of the future Pope Clement VIII. For the Christian scholar of the sixteenth century, Hebrew was an indispensable key: it allowed access to Scripture in its original language, understanding of rabbinic exegesis, and refinement of theology. Moses Alatino, when charged with translating Hebrew texts into Latin, received precious assistance from Elijah da Nola for this work. These collaborations testify to a fact too often forgotten: Hebrew culture, far from being enclosed behind the walls of the ghetto, discreetly nourished the great libraries and chancelleries of Papal Rome.

It was this very interweaving, this intellectual proximity with the most cultivated Christian world, that opened the breach. In 1568, Elijah ben Menahem da Nola converted to Catholicism. He received the baptismal name Giovanni Paolo Eustachio. Tradition reports that this conversion was linked to the influence of Tommaso Aldobrandini, his student turned protector. The man himself, in his later writings, claimed a conversion through intellectual conviction rather than through fear or material interest — an affirmation that historians receive with the caution that any discourse of apostasy constrained by the power structures of Tridentine Rome inspires. Inner sincerity remains indecipherable; what the texts transmit is a trajectory of a man caught in the machinery of the highest ecclesiastical spheres and forced to choose.

The conversion of Elijah da Nola belongs to a tragic collective history, that of forced or induced apostasies in Counter-Reformation Italy. It diminishes in no way the scope of his earlier rabbinic work, nor the value of the manuscripts he copied and which remain in Roman collections. It also says something important about the condition of Jews in central Italy in the sixteenth century: even the most eminent of rabbis, recognized for his learning and solicited by the powerful, was not safe from the confessional pressure exerted by an Empire and a Church in full Catholic Reform.

After his conversion, Elijah da Nola published two works in Naples that constitute the only known printed works of the De Nola lineage. These two books, published three years apart, illuminate both the intellectual trajectory of their author and the singular situation of a man trained in the rabbinic tradition who attempted, under a Christian name, to rethink his relationship with Scripture.

The first, the Sacro Settenario raccolto dalle sacre Scritture, appeared in Naples in 1579. The work concerns the symbolism of the number seven in the Old and New Testaments. This thematic choice is revealing: the number seven is one of the great symbolic operators of Jewish and Christian thought alike — the Shabbat, the week, the seven days of creation, the seven branches of the Menorah, but also the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins. By choosing this bridging subject, Elijah da Nola was able to deploy his Hebrew and Talmudic training while inscribing it within a framework acceptable to his Catholic readership. The work is thus a work of passage, crossing the confessional boundary from above, by showing the symbolic continuity between the two Testaments — an undertaking that was as much a matter of intellectual survival as of theological conviction.

The second work, the Salutari discorsi, appeared in Naples in 1582. It is a collection of sermons, augmented by a modo utilissimo de la vita che denno tenere i Neophiti — a guide to life for the use of neophytes, that is, new converts from Judaism and Islam. The work was dedicated to Pope Gregory XIII. This papal dedication speaks to the level at which Elijah da Nola now moved: not in the margins of Christian society, but at the heart of its religious apparatus. The Salutari discorsi also contained an apology for his own apostasy, in which the author affirmed that he had grounded his conversion in knowledge and conviction rather than in fear or the lure of gain. This public self-defense, addressed to the highest authority of the Church, betrays the fragility of the convert's position: even after embracing Catholicism, he still had to justify himself, still had to prove the sincerity of a choice that his environment never ceased to suspect.

It is impossible to read these two books without measuring the dull pain that underlies them. The man who wrote on the symbolism of seven had copied Hebrew manuscripts for Roman libraries. The man who drafted a guide to life for new converts had been, only a few years earlier, one of the most respected rabbis in Rome. His printed work is a work of the frontier, written from a threshold impossible to cross completely in one direction or the other. It says, more eloquently than any general discourse, what the pressures of the Counter-Reformation did to some of the most brilliant minds of Italian Jewry.

The publication of these two texts in Naples — a city from which the Jews had been expelled in 1541, but where a convert could now publish under papal patronage — is itself a tragic irony of History. Nola, the city of origin of the lineage, lay some thirty kilometers from Naples; it was as if the geographical surname had brought this man, by a roundabout and wounded route, back into the orbit of the land of his fathers.

After the Dispersion, the toponymic surnames of the Mezzogiorno were scattered along the routes of Mediterranean exile. This is the nature of names of provenance: they gain in legibility as they distance themselves from their origin. In Nola itself, being "of Nola" distinguished no one; it was elsewhere, in the host communities, that the name took on meaning and became fixed.

Two major networks deserve to be mentioned, with the caution necessary in the absence of direct nominative archives linking the De Nola family to each of them. The first is that of the Portuguese Jewish Nation, which spread from the Iberian Peninsula to Livorno, Amsterdam and Tunis. Lionel Lévy studied in detail this merchant nation and its family networks that united the shores of the western Mediterranean [Lévy, 1999]. Livorno, free port of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, was the great crucible where Iberian, Italian and North African Jews met; it was there that many Italian surnames found a second life, in the cosmopolitan community that Lévy described until its twilight [Lévy, 1996].

The second network is that of North Africa, where many Italian and Iberian exiles flowed. The great communities of Algeria and Tunisia welcomed, over the centuries, families of Italian origin whose surnames preserved the memory of the peninsula. The works devoted to the communities of Tlemcen [Botbol, 2000] and the rabbinical archives of Sidi Bel Abbès testify to this permeability between Italian and Maghrebi Jewry, where a name like De Nola could have endured in local forms.

The case of Elijah da Nola also reminds us that the Dispersion did not pass only through geographical exile: it also passed through conversion. A family some of whose members embraced Catholicism, sincerely or by force, ceased to bear the name in Jewish communal registers while perpetuating it in civil and ecclesiastical archives. This confessional dispersion, less visible than territorial dispersion, was one of the great hemorrhages of Italian Jewry in the Tridentine era.

Here, the intersection between Memory and archive must remain honest. We know that the name De Nola is attested by Schaerf for Italy; we know that the routes of dispersion could have carried it far. But linking such a Livornese or Tunisian branch to the Campanian stock amounts, as matters stand, to plausible conjecture rather than demonstration. Family tradition and archive answer one another without yet fully confirming each other, and it is this very reservation that guarantees the value of the present chapter.

A surname is not merely a datum of civil status: it is a vector of memory. To bear the name De Nola is to bear, often unknowingly, the inscription of a city in Campania and a history of exile. Jewish tradition has always accorded a central place to this memorial function of the name, the name transmitted from ancestor to descendant, the name that binds generations across geographic ruptures.

This dimension joins the teaching of the masters of contemporary Jewish thought. Léon Askénazi reminded us how Jewish tradition holds together speech and writing, oral transmission and recorded trace, in the same movement of fidelity [Askénazi, 1999]. Armand Abécassis showed that Hebrew memory is structurally a memory of the path, of the desert traversed and the desire for return [Abécassis, 1987] — a schema that curiously echoes the fate of a name like De Nola, torn from its place and destined to circulate.

It is here that Yerushalmi's reflection illuminates our enterprise. He distinguished collective memory, made of rites and narratives, from critical history, made of documents and inquiries [Yerushalmi, 1984]. The Great Book of a family stands at the hinge of the two: it gathers what tradition transmits and confronts it, as much as possible, with what the archive establishes. For the De Nola family, the transmitted memory — the idea of a Campanian origin, of a southern rootedness — finds in Schaerf's catalogue its minimal documentary confirmation, and in the works of Elijah da Nola its most vivid flesh.

The fate of Elijah ben Menahem da Nola offers, moreover, a meditation on the value of individual humility and care for the other as Jewish tradition has borne them through the centuries. Copying manuscripts is an act of self-effacement in service to the text; teaching Hebrew to a student, even if he is the brother of a future pope, is a gift of one's language and culture; assisting Moses Alatino in translation is an act of intellectual generosity. These gestures, accomplished before conversion, constitute the most incontestable patrimony of this man: a legacy of transmission that depends on no confession and that exceeds the rupture of 1568.

Jewish philosophy, in the long duration that Maurice-Ruben Hayoun traces, offers a framework for thinking this continuity beyond dispersions [Hayoun, 2023]. And Isaiah Berlin, meditating on the Jewish condition, knew how to speak the tension between belonging and exile that traverses all diasporic existence [Berlin, 1973]. The name De Nola, in this sense, is a condensation of this condition: it speaks at once of where one comes from and the fact that one is no longer there. The manuscripts copied by the hand of Elijah, today preserved in the Vatican, are perhaps the most poignant form of this paradox: Hebrew culture preserved in the very library of he who exercises the pressure of conversion.

At the end of this journey, the De Nola lineage emerges less as a continuous genealogy than as a thread woven through the Jewish history of Southern Italy and its diasporas. The name, attested by Samuele Schaerf in his foundational census of 1925, is a toponymic surname: it designates an origin, the Campanian city of Nola, whose Jewish presence dates back to Antiquity and extends through the Neapolitan Middle Ages.

The history of this family follows that, both tragic and fertile, of Southern Judaism: millennial rootedness, communal life in the giudecche, participation in the civilization of the Hebrew book, then the rupture of the expulsions of 1510 and 1541 which dispersed the Jews of the Kingdom of Naples toward Northern Italy, Livorno, the Levant and North Africa. The name De Nola then becomes a marker of memory, more legible in exile than at its point of origin.

The figure of Elijah ben Menahem da Nola (c. 1530 – c. 1602) gave this lineage a face and a voice. A leading rabbi in Rome, physician, philosopher, copyist of Hebrew manuscripts for Cardinal Borromeo — whose works in his hand remain in the Vatican Library —, Hebrew tutor to the brother of Clement VIII, collaborator of Moses Alatino for Hebrew-Latin translations : this man embodied, before his conversion in 1568, a high form of what the Jewish tradition was able to express at its best — Talmudic learning joined to philosophical and medical knowledge, involvement in collective life, disinterested transmission. His two printed works, the Sacro Settenario of 1579 and the Salutari discorsi of 1582, are frontier works, written from the painful threshold of an apostasy that the structures of power in Tridentine Rome had made for him almost inevitable. They do not diminish his earlier work; they speak to its cost.

Among all the values that the Jewish tradition has carried, it is perhaps that of knowledge — knowledge as service, as a gift given to the other and to the community — that the De Nola lineage will have expressed best. In the Hebrew manuscripts copied for Roman collections, in the teaching of the sacred language to those who wished to learn it, in the assistance provided to translators, in the sermons intended to guide the most vulnerable of converts, the same conviction runs through the silences and ruptures: that the text, transmitted from hand to hand, from voice to voice, resists all catastrophes. It is this thread that the name De Nola, humble and tenacious, continues to hold.

Throughout, we have distinguished what is established — the existence of the name, the history of Nola and the expulsions, the works and the identity of Elijah ben Menahem da Nola — from what remains probable or conjectured — the precise branches of dispersion beyond Rome and Naples. This caution is the very condition of historical fidelity. As Yerushalmi suggested, writing the history of a Jewish family is to accept holding together transmitted memory and critical archive, without reducing one to the other [Yerushalmi, 1984]. The name De Nola thus continues to carry, discreetly, the memory of a city and a people who refused to efface themselves.