The Della Rocca Family

The Foundation Stone of Any Serious Study of Della Rocca

The foundation stone of any serious study of Della Rocca remains the work of Samuele Schaerf. In 1925, Schaerf published in Florence a book entitled I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, accompanied by an appendix on the noble Jewish families of Italy. This text was published by the Casa Editrice « Israel » of Florence (5685 in the Hebrew calendar). The work, modest in volume — eighty-nine pages — but ambitious in its scope, catalogues the surnames borne by Jewish families of the peninsula. It testifies by its very conception to a fundamental value: the concern to preserve the collective memory of a community, to protect against oblivion the fabric of names in which one reads the continuity of Israel in the land of Italy. This act of scholarship, accomplished in the tranquility of a Florence still spared the worst tempests of the century, was, without its author being fully conscious of it, an act of filial piety toward a people and its traces.

The context of publication deserves to be recalled, for it weighs upon the significance of the list itself. The conviction that there existed an anthroponymic patrimony exclusively Jewish inspired the law of July 1939, which exposed Italian Jews to a contemptible pillory, creating a sort of onomastic ghetto. Schaerf's inventory, conceived in a scholarly and communal spirit, was thus tragically diverted fourteen years later by fascist legislation, which claimed to find in it a tool of racial identification. This ambivalence — on one hand a repository of scholarship, on the other a potential instrument of persecution — is an integral part of the history of the name. It reminds us that no heritage is safe from misappropriation, and that collective vigilance — this active form of memory — is itself a virtue that the Jewish tradition has carried from century to century.

Della Rocca appears in the modern censuses of Italian Jewish surnames that continue the work of Schaerf. The name figures among the surnames beginning with « D » in compilations of Italian Jewish onomastics, neighboring related forms such as Dalla Torre, Della Riccia, Dell'Ariccia, Della Seta, Della Torre, Della Volta. This series is instructive: it reveals a type of formation very widespread among Jews of Italy, that of names constructed with the particle « Della/Dalla » followed by a geographical referent — a torre, a seta, a volta, a rocca. Della Rocca fully inscribes itself within this morphological paradigm, which illuminates its probable origin far more than any isolated family legend.

One should also note, in the same corpus, the coexistence of the forms Rimini, Rocca, Roccas, which suggests a broader onomastic family where the radical rocca declines according to regions and migratory itineraries: simple form (Rocca), form with particle (Della Rocca), form with Sephardic ending (Roccas). The establishment of this formal kinship constitutes one of the most solid acquisitions of the available documentation.

The Italian word rocca designates a fortress, a citadel, a fortified rocky spur — a recurring element of the medieval landscape of the peninsula. Dozens of Italian localities bear this name or derive from it: Rocca di Papa, Roccasecca, La Rocca, and many others. The surname Della Rocca therefore means, literally, "of the fortress" or "originating from the Rocca," and unambiguously falls within the category of names of geographical origin. This interpretation accords with what is known of the general mechanism of formation of Italian Jewish names, since geographical lineages figure among the major roots of Italian Jewish family names.

This mode of geographical naming was, in Italy, a dominant feature of Jewish onomastics. A family forced to leave a place — by expulsion, by economic migration, or by concentration in a ghetto — frequently took with it the name of its place of origin, which became a patronym in the eyes of the neighbors of its new settlement. Thus arose the Recanati, the Rieti, the Rimini, the Ravenna, the Reggio — so many names of cities that became family names, which one finds moreover in the immediate vicinity of Della Rocca within the onomastic lists: Recanati, Reggio, Rieti, Rietti, Rignano, Rimini. Della Rocca obeys the same logic, except that its reference is not a great city but a type of site — the fortress — which makes the identification of a single mother-locality impossible.

There is in this toponymic logic a profound human dimension: the name kept alive the memory of departure, of the place left behind, often under constraint. To transmit such a patronym from generation to generation was also to transmit a form of loyalty to one's origins — not paralyzing nostalgia, but active memory of the path traveled. Jewish tradition knows this virtue well: zakhor, "remembrance," is a commandment, an injunction never to allow to sink into oblivion what constituted the fabric of collective existence. By bearing the name of a place, the Della Rocca participated, in their own way, in that memorial imperative which runs through the history of Israel from the deportations of Babylon to the Iberian expulsions.

It is here that the historian must stop and confess the limits of his science. No authoritative source consulted permits connecting with certainty the Jewish family Della Rocca to a precise rocca in Italian territory. The name is too widespread, and its meaning too generic, to authorize a firm localization. The toponymic hypothesis is sound in principle; it remains conjectural in its application to a determined place. Any genealogy that would claim to trace all Jewish Della Rocca back to a single citadel would partake of retrospective reconstruction rather than archive.

A comparative examination of the variants illuminates the diasporic dimension of the patronym. The documented coexistence of the forms Rocca and Roccas alongside Della Rocca invites us to consider a dispersal of the root across the different branches of Mediterranean Judaism. The ending in -s of Roccas evokes Iberian and Sephardic onomastic usages, while the particle Della is typically Italian and the bare form Rocca the most neutral.

Now Jewish onomastics in Italy is precisely the place of an encounter between traditions. Italian Jewish family names represent a mixture of the Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Italian components of the community. The Jewish community of Italy is, in this regard, one of the most singular in all the diaspora: it is neither purely Roman, nor purely Iberian, nor purely Rhineland, but all of these things at once, deposited in successive layers from the Roman republican era to the great expulsions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This plurality is confirmed by the very dispersal of Jews of Italian culture, who lived not only in the peninsula, but also in the Ionian and Dodecanese islands, in Salonika, Corfu and Rhodes, in Turkey and in the Land of Israel. A patronym such as Della Rocca or Roccas was able, in this context, to travel from shore to shore, to become Latinized or Sephardized according to the host communities.

This mixture itself carries a value: the relationship to the stranger, to the one who comes from elsewhere and who knocks at the door of the community. The Italian Jewish tradition, strong in its own antiquity, generally knew how to welcome these successive waves — Ashkenazim fleeing Rhineland violence, Sephardim expelled from Spain and Portugal — by integrating them into the community's structures while leaving them, most often, their own rites (nusah), their own liturgical practices and their own regulations. This capacity for welcome, this form of organized and codified hospitality, is one of the best documented virtues of Italian Judaism in the Renaissance and the following centuries. The bearers of the name Della Rocca, in the cities where they settled, inscribed themselves in these same communal structures that had learned to make a place for the other without dissolving into it.

Modern Sephardic repertories bear witness to this circulation. The name Della Rocca is listed among the patronyms documented by ancient communal registers covering New Christians, conversos and crypto-Jews (marranos), as well as Italians and Berbers, with their history in Spain, Portugal and Italy. One register provides the dates of burials in the Bethahaim Velho — the old cemetery — dates indicated according to the Hebrew calendar. Here, tradition (the name transmitted from generation to generation) and the archive (the burial register) respond to each other: it is this very intersection that this chapter seeks to highlight, without claiming that all branches form a single genealogically continuous lineage.

The history of Jewish bearers of the name Della Rocca is part of the broader fabric of Italian Jewish life, marked by millennial continuities and violent ruptures. The Jewish communities of Italy count among the oldest in Western Europe, even predating the medieval diaspora, and their onomastics accumulated over this long presence.

Like most Italian Jewish families, the Della Roccas likely experienced life in the ghetto, established in most Italian states between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries — in Venice as early as 1516, in Rome in 1555 under Paul IV, in Genoa in 1660, to cite only the best-documented examples. The confinement of the ghetto, although it was first a violence and a humiliation, also generated an intensification of communal inner life. Tax registers, acts of the confraternity, decisions of the community council, pious donations to institutions of care and education: all this documented life attests to a remarkable collective commitment, to an organization of solidarity that proceeded both from religious obligation — tsedaka, distributive justice, often translated as "charity" but whose precise meaning designates a right of the poor as much as a duty of the rich — and from a practical necessity of survival in a bounded and controlled space.

It is likely that bearers of the name Della Rocca appeared in these community registers, contributing to the tsedaka of their ghetto, participating in the fraternities for care of the sick (bikour holim) and burial of the dead (hevra kadisha) that Italian Jewish communities developed with remarkable consistency. These institutions — which ensured that no Jew would die unaccompanied or unburied according to ritual — were the concrete expression of care for the other, a value which, in the Hebrew tradition, is not limited to affect but translates into legal obligation and organized structure. The historian, lacking precise nominal sources for the Della Rocca lineage, can only inscribe this probable presence in the general picture, without lending it an individual face which it does not possess.

Progressive emancipation, in the nineteenth century, in the wake of Napoleonic reforms and then the Italian unification of the Risorgimento, profoundly transformed the condition of Jews in Italy. The definitive fixation of hereditary surnames, required by the new civil status laws, stabilized denominations that, previously, could still fluctuate from one generation to the next. For the Della Roccas as for other Jewish families, this administrative moment was also an identity moment: the name, henceforth inscribed in the civil register, ceased to be a flexible designation to become a transmissible heritage, a formal link between generations. Several members of Italian Jewish communities actively participated in the Risorgimento, and it is not unthinkable that bearers of the name Della Rocca were among these Italians of Jewish faith who fought for national unity — thus joining, in their relationship to war for freedom, a tradition that Judaism has never rejected but always framed by concern for peace (shalom) as the ultimate end.

The presence of the name in the appendix of Schaerf devoted to noble Jewish families of Italy is not demonstrated by the sources consulted and should not be asserted lightly; what can be established is that the work did indeed contain this appendix, and that one should consult the original text directly to verify any claim of this kind. Caution is all the more necessary in that the boundary between Jewish and Christian families bearing the name was porous.

In the Twentieth Century

In the twentieth century, the name shared the tragic destiny of Italian Judaism under fascism. The instrumentalization of onomastics by the July 1939 law cast upon all Jewish bearers of a registered surname the threat of identification and persecution. The history of the name Della Rocca cannot be separated from this context in which onomastics became, under dictatorship, a matter of survival.

The tragic irony is striking: Schaerf's work, born of an impulse of scholarly piety toward communal tradition, could be turned against its own subjects. This perversion of memory into an instrument of death is one of the deepest wounds that the twentieth century inflicted upon Italian Jewish culture. It recalls that collective memory, precious as it may be, is never automatically protective: it must be accompanied by political vigilance, by a sense of justice — din and mishpat — that refuses to allow census-taking to serve oppression.

Facing the racial laws of 1938 and the deportation that followed the German occupation of September 1943, Italian Jewish communities adopted varied survival strategies: flight to Switzerland or to the south, concealment of identity, aid received from neighbors and priests — and sometimes betrayal. In this context, networks of solidarity formed that united Jews and non-Jews in the same moral resistance to barbarism. While one cannot attribute to named and documented members of the Della Rocca lineage specific acts from this period, one can affirm that the name appeared among those that the racial lists threatened, and that the bearers of this surname experienced, like their coreligionists, the ordeal of clandestinity or exile.

The Shoah destroyed a significant portion of Italian Jewish communities. Of the roughly forty-five thousand Jews that Italy counted in 1938, more than seven thousand five hundred perished in the camps. Every name appearing in Schaerf's lists is potentially a mourning. The Great Book of the Della Rocca, by inscribing this dark chapter, pays homage to those whose identity, forged over centuries of tradition and communal life, was one day reduced to a deportation number. It is precisely because the Jewish tradition places tsedaka — justice rendered to each person — at the heart of its moral obligations that the memory of this injustice is itself a duty.

Contemporary Interest in Italian Jewish Surnames

The contemporary interest in Italian Jewish surnames has given rise to abundant genealogical literature, where the most rigorous scholarship sometimes sits alongside more adventurous reconstructions. Della Rocca appears regularly in it, listed in databases and guides intended for those tracing their roots, notably in online resources such as Sephardic genealogy archives or catalogues of Italian ghetto names.

For anyone undertaking today to reconstruct a Della Rocca lineage, several methodological principles become necessary. First, the consultation of primary sources: community registers, civil status records from former ghettos, inscriptions on Italian Jewish cemetery gravestones. Next, systematic cross-referencing with reference catalogues — Schaerf foremost among them — to situate the name within its network of variants. Finally, acute awareness that sharing a name never implies shared blood: two Della Rocca families at opposite ends of the peninsula may have no common ancestor, the name proceeding simply from the same generic rocca.

It is also important to emphasize the growing importance of digital tools in this research. Genealogical databases accessible online now make it possible to cross-reference thousands of parish, community, and civil registers that, just years ago, required years of manual examination in dusty archives. The digitization of civil status records from former ghettos — Rome, Venice, Livorno, Florence, Ferrara, Ancona — opens unprecedented perspectives for identifying concrete bearers of the name Della Rocca in dated, geolocated documents and sometimes accompanied by professional or family information. This work remains to be accomplished in its greater part: it constitutes the research program that this book invites one to pursue.

This invitation is not merely academic. It is also, in its own way, a faithful act toward the Jewish tradition of learning — the conviction that study (talmud Torah, in the broad sense of all rigorous inquiry into human and divine things) is itself a form of adoration and respect toward creation. To find a name in a register is to restore a face to an ancestor, to refuse a second time the erasure that persecution had meant to be final. It is in this space, between the name passed down and the document recovered, that the authentic history of every lineage unfolds.

The available documentation for the Della Rocca lineage does not permit us, at this stage of research, to identify individual figures with sufficient names and documentation to warrant a complete biographical entry. The consulted sources — Schaerf's work, onomastic compilations, registers of the former Sephardic cemetery, and genealogical databases — attest to the reality of the name as a Jewish surname of Italy, but without offering, within the limits of the corpus currently available, identifiable bearers by their given names, precise dates, and singular acts.

This absence is not a void: it is itself a historical fact. It reflects the common fate of many Jewish families of the peninsula whose individual traces were engulfed by the destructions of wars, the fires of archives, the dispersal of communities, and, in the twentieth century, the murderous deliberation of those who sought to erase even names.

Bearers of the Della Rocca name in Italy (attested presence in Jewish communities, sixteenth–twentieth century, individual dates unknown) — The surname Della Rocca is documented as a Jewish family name of Italy in the catalogue of Samuele Schaerf (I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, Florence, 1925) and in the onomastic compilations derived from it. Bearers of the name presumably figured in the communities of the ghettos of the peninsula — Rome, Venice, Livorno, Ferrara, Ancona — between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, participating in ordinary communal life: contribution to tsedaka, membership in confraternities (hevrot), commercial activities, liturgical practices according to the rite of their community of belonging (Roman rite, Venetian rite, Livornese or Sephardic rite as the case may be). Their collective memory, not yet individualized by documentary research, belongs to the ensemble memory of the Jews of Italy.

Samuele Schaerf (dates of birth and death unknown, active in Florence in the first decades of the twentieth century) — Florentine Jewish scholar, author of I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, published in Florence in 1925 by Casa Editrice « Israel ». Though not himself a Della Rocca, Schaerf is the founding figure of all study of this name: it is in his catalogue that the presence of the surname within Italian Judaism is documented for the first time in a systematic manner. His work, conceived in a spirit of memorial preservation, remains to this day the principal primary source of reference for the lineage. It remains indispensable to anyone undertaking to trace the onomastic history of Jewish families of the peninsula.

The name Della Rocca emerges, at the conclusion of this investigation, as an exemplary witness to Italian Jewish onomastics: rooted in the geography of the peninsula by its meaning of "fortress," attested in Samuele Schaerf's reference catalogue, integrated into a family of variants — Rocca, Roccas — which reveals its Mediterranean and diasporic dimension. Its history illustrates the major forces at work in Italian Judaism: the antiquity of Jewish presence on peninsular soil, the toponymic formation of surnames as memory of places left behind, the mixing of Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Italian traditions, involvement in the communal life of the ghettos, and finally the ordeal of modern persecution, when the 1939 law transformed onomastics into an instrument of the ghetto.

If one were to name, among all the virtues that this lineage will have best expressed — or at least best represented in its relationship to name and history — it is memory as an act of justice that stands out. To bear a name of geographical origin is to keep alive the trace of a place left under duress; to inscribe this name in a communal register is to refuse that the violence of expulsion should have the final word; to perpetuate this surname through the generations of the ghetto and beyond is to embody the zakhor — the commanded remembrance — which is, in the tradition of Israel, inseparable from justice: one remembers so as not to repeat, to name injustice, to demand its redress. In this, the Della Rocca participate in a virtue that Judaism has carried from the Babylonian exile to the camps of the twentieth century: the capacity to transform loss into memory, and memory into the foundation of a life that is dignified and just.

The historian's honesty demands concluding also on what remains unknown. No authoritative source permits us to connect the Della Rocca lineage to a single fortress, nor to constitute it as a continuous genealogy from an identified ancestor. The name is, by its very nature, shared between Jewish and Christian families, and its presence in Schaerf's list attests only that it was borne by Jews of Italy, not that it was exclusive to them. The Great Book of the Della Rocca thus remains, in its essence, an open book: an invitation to research in registers and gravestones, where transmitted memory may at last dialogue with the archive, and where the buried names may recover, one by one, the face and the destiny that belong to them.