The De Paz Family

The obligatory starting point is the name itself. Paz is a common Iberian word, meaning "peace," and it figures among the surnames that Jews of the peninsula adopted or were assigned, particularly in the context of the mass conversions that followed the persecutions of 1391 and the expulsion of 1492. Many new Christians received at baptism names of virtue, devotion, or circumstance — among them Paz, Paço, or Castilian and Portuguese place names. The particle De refers either to a geographical origin or to a form of onomastic ennoblement common among Marrano families wishing to blend into Christian society.

This double memory — Hebraic in meaning (shalom), Iberian in form — places the De Paz family squarely within the Sephardic drama. The preservation, or reconstruction, of a Jewish identity beneath a Christian name of "peace" speaks to the tenacity of these communities: under duress, they kept in secret the Law of their fathers. This is one of the foremost virtues that Judaism has carried across the centuries and that the trajectory of the name illustrates: fidelity, transmitted in silence, to a threatened identity. Colette Sirat and the historians of medieval Jewish thought have shown how profoundly Sephardic culture, even before the exile, had woven a unique synthesis between rabbinical learning, philosophy, and the sciences [Sirat, 1983] — a heritage that families of Iberian origin carried with them.

The context in which a family like the De Paz emerges is that of Portuguese Marranism, a subject extensively documented. Following the forced conversion of Portugal's Jews in 1497, an entire population of "New Christians" continued, to varying degrees, to practice Judaism clandestinely, under the permanent surveillance of the Inquisition established in 1536. For many, flight became the only path toward an open return to the faith of their ancestors. Lionel Lévy has described with precision how, from these fugitives, the "Portuguese Jewish Nation" took shape — a transnational network linking Lisbonne, Anvers, Amsterdam, Venise, Livourne, and North Africa [Lévy, 1999].

It is within this framework that the De Paz family must be situated, whose name lends itself to the classic Marrano itineraries. The return to open Judaism, once the borders of the inquisitorial Christendom had been crossed, was at once a religious and an existential act: it required the courage to renounce a hard-won social security in order to reconnect with halakha. This dimension — the demanding relationship with Jewish Law, chosen rather than merely inherited — constitutes a major spiritual hallmark of these families. Robert Bonfil has shown how Renaissance Italy offered these refugees a space in which Jewish life could reconstitute itself, between princely tolerance and restrictions, in a fruitful dialogue with the surrounding culture [Bonfil, 1994].

If the name De Paz is attested in Italy, it is most likely in Livorno that one should look for its most significant anchor. The Tuscan city experienced, from the Livornine — the patents granted by the Medici in 1591 and 1593 —, an exceptional development of its Sephardic Jewish community. These edicts guaranteed to the Marranos who had come from Spain and Portugal the freedom to practice Judaism openly, amnesty for their past as conversos, and broad commercial privileges. Lionel Lévy devoted to this community studies that have become standard references, showing that it was one of the most prosperous and most cultivated in the western Mediterranean [Lévy, 1996] [Lévy, 1999].

Livorno was a hub: a free port, a crossroads of trade between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Maghreb, a center of Hebrew printing and rabbinical learning. Portuguese families there combined economic activity — the trade in coral, textiles, and spices — with communal engagement, financing synagogues, Talmudic schools, and charitable works (sedaqa). It is within this milieu that one best understands what a lineage such as the De Paz may have embodied: the articulation between mercantile success and collective responsibility. The Livornese community practiced institutionalized mutual aid in an exemplary fashion, with benevolent confraternities ensuring dowries for poor young women, the ransoming of captives, and the care of the sick. Charity there was not an isolated gesture but a social structure — one of the highest expressions of the commandment of justice (tsedeq) in Judaism.

The presence of the surname De Paz in Samuel Schaerf's inventory, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia (Florence, 1925), constitutes the most solid documentary anchor of this history. Schaerf methodically catalogued the Jewish family names of the peninsula, distinguishing their origins — indigenous Italian, Ashkénaze, and Séfarade, the latter introduced by successive waves of exile. The attribution of De Paz to this last group confirms the hypothesis of a family descended from the Iberian diaspora, integrated into the Italian communal fabric between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Jewish Italy of that era was not a single entity but a mosaic: the communities of Venice, Ferrare, Ancône, Rome, Florence, and Livourne each had their own rites, statutes, and equilibria with power. Bonfil emphasized the intellectual vitality of this world, in which rabbis, physicians, publishers, and scholars sustained a Jewish culture in dialogue with Renaissance humanism [Bonfil, 1994]. The illuminated Hebrew manuscripts produced or preserved in Italy — studied by Giulia Tamani — bear witness to this refinement, in which the care lavished on the sacred book was at once a form of piety and an art [Tamani, 2010]. A family bearing a Séfarade name and settled in Italy partook of this dual belonging: heir to Sephardism, participant in Jewish Italianness. It is at this crossroads that its contribution to collective life, the transmission of Talmudic knowledge, and the reverence for the book as a vehicle of the Memory of Israel find their full expression.

The network of the Portuguese Nation did not stop at the Italian ports: it extended to the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Tunis, in particular, welcomed a significant Livornese community — the Grana —, whose continuity with the Italian and Dutch centers Lionel Lévy has traced [Lévy, 1999]. Sephardic families circulated, traded, and formed alliances from one shore to the other, weaving a coherent diaspora beyond political and confessional borders.

In Algeria, the communities of Tlemcen and Sidi Bel Abbès preserved a dense rabbinic life, described respectively by Eliahou-Éric Botbol and by the local rabbinic archives [Botbol, 2000] [Archives de Sidi Bel Abbès]. Without being able to assert a precise settlement of the De Paz family in any one of these cities, its name belongs to the onomastic type that circulated along these routes. What is expressed here is the virtue of the relationship to the stranger and to the host: the Sephardic diaspora knew, wherever it settled, how to make itself useful to the city while preserving its Law, in turn welcoming the more destitute exiles. The hakhnasat orḥim, the hospitality owed to the traveler and the refugee, was a constant of these port communities — a concrete expression of the goodness and care for the other that tradition places at the heart of the just life.

Beyond the archival facts, it is important to situate the De Paz lineage within the long history of Jewish thought, of which Sephardic families were privileged carriers. Maurice-Ruben Hayoun has recalled how Jewish philosophy, from Maimonides to modern thinkers, sank its roots in the Iberian world before spreading through exile [Hayoun, 2023]; Armand Abécassis and Léon Askénazi have each shown, in their own way, how this tradition articulates study, ethics, and fidelity to the Law [Abécassis, 1987] [Askénazi, 1999].

A family whose very name means "peace" cannot be separated from this spiritual dimension. In Jewish thought, peace — shalom — is not merely the absence of conflict but fullness, completion, the very name of God according to certain rabbinic traditions. To bear this name across generations, through exile and reconstruction, is to carry an aspiration: that of reconciliation and wholeness. This is, no doubt, the portion of Memory transmitted more than of proven History, yet it illuminates the way in which a lineage understands itself. Dominique Natanson has shown how memorial transmission, within Jewish families, constitutes a duty of faithfulness to the departed as much as a teaching for the living [Natanson, 1997]. The name De Paz, in this sense, is a legacy as much as an identity.

From the Iberia of forced conversions to the Italy of the Medicis, from the free ports of Livorno to the Maghrebi communities, the name De Paz traces the trajectory of a Sephardic lineage swept along by the great movements of Jewish history. The documentary certainties are measured: the name is attested by Schaerf as a Jewish cognome of Italy, its etymology and form connect it to the Iberian world, and the milieu of the Portuguese Nation provides its most plausible framework. Around this established core, the history of the communities — Livorno, the Italy of the Renaissances, the Tunisian and Algerian extensions — allows us to reconstruct, without fabricating it, the atmosphere in which this family lived.

Of all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried, it is faithfulness that the De Paz lineage will have, above all others, expressed most fully: faithfulness to Judaism preserved under a Christian name in the secrecy of the Marrano existence, faithfulness recovered in the open return to the Law once exile was accomplished, and faithfulness finally to an aspiration inscribed in the name itself — peace, shalom, wholeness and reconciliation. In embodying this perseverance, the family partakes of a virtue that the collective Memory of Israel has carried from one continent to another: that of the people who, dispersed, never allowed themselves to be erased, and who made faithfulness to their Law the thread running through their survival. The Great Book De Paz is thus not merely the story of a family, but a fragment of the great narrative of Jewish dispersion and constancy.