The Di Porto Family

The first solidly attested fact concerning the Di Porto lineage is the very existence of its name in the corpus of Italian Jewish surnames. Samuel Schaerf, in his reference work I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia published in Florence in 1925, surveys and classifies the family names of Jews in the Peninsula, offering one of the rare systematic catalogues allowing one to date and locate the appearance of a surname. It is in this repertory that Di Porto appears, among names formed on a place-name indication.

The formation of a Jewish surname in Italy obeys logics that research has well identified. At the heart of Italian Jewish culture during the Renaissance, described by Robert Bonfil, communities lived in a fruitful tension between integration into surrounding society and fidelity to the Law, and the names they bore reflect this dual belonging [Bonfil, 1994]. The name Di Porto — "of the Port" — belongs to a category where the Italian locative di ("of") precedes a toponym. Such a construction almost always indicates provenance: the family so designated was the one identified within its community as having come from a place named Porto, or from a place where there was a port.

This manner of naming is not neutral. It bears witness to a discreet yet essential virtue of Jewish Memory: fidelity to the place of origin, kept alive through the name transmitted from generation to generation. Where other peoples forget their displacements, Jewish nomenclature inscribes them in the civil status of the family. This obstinacy not to lose memory of one's provenance joins the very vocation that Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi assigns to Judaism: that of a people summoned to remember, for whom zakhor — "remember thyself" — is a commandment as much as a manner of being [Yerushalmi, 1984]. To bear a place-name is already to accomplish, at the domestic scale, this duty of Memory.

The hypothesis most frequently advanced by researchers connects Di Porto to the Jewish community of Rome, the oldest in the Western diaspora. This reading rests on a precise geographical fact: Rome possessed, at the mouth of the Tiber, a port complex — the ancient ports of Ostia and Portus, the latter having given its name to the locality and diocese of Porto. A Jew originating from this zone, or whose family had engaged in activity linked to the river and river commerce there, would naturally have been designated as "the one from the Port."

This hypothesis accords with what we know of Roman Jewish settlement. Confined from 1555 onwards in the ghetto instituted by Pope Paul IV's bull Cum nimis absurdum, the Jewish community of Rome developed a dense nomenclature of toponymic surnames — Di Castro, Di Segni, Di Nepi, Di Veroli, Di Porto — each referring to a city or place in Latium and its surroundings from which families had flowed toward the capital. In the confined space of the ghetto, where exiguity imposed promiscuity and where permitted trades were reduced to the commerce in second-hand clothing, moneylending, and small crafts, the place-name served to distinguish families from one another.

It is here that a value borne by this community and, with it, by families such as the Di Porto comes to light: involvement in collective life and mutual aid, the sole bulwarks against precarity. Life in the Roman ghetto relied on a tight network of confraternities — the ḥevrot — devoted to charity, assistance to the sick, dowries for poor girls, and burial of the dead. In a world where membership in a charitable confraternity structured daily existence [Bonfil, 1994], bearing one's modest share of community solidarity amounted less to heroism than to a shared ethic, that of tsedaqa, justice rendered as charity. The Di Porto lineage, if it indeed belonged to this world, will have participated in that ordinary goodness which was, more than any glory, the honor of Roman Jews.

The intersection between tradition and archive remains nonetheless partial: no document known to date permits establishing a continuous filiation connecting a specific ancestor to the port of the Tiber. The Roman hypothesis is plausible; it is not proven.

A second, more uncertain lead invites us to look westward, toward the Portuguese city of Porto. The Jewish community of Porto was, in the Middle Ages, one of the most important in the kingdom; its history, studied by Elvira Mea, ended abruptly with the policy of forced conversions and the expulsion of Jews from Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century [Mea, 1997]. Many families driven from Iberia then took the path of exile toward welcoming lands in the Mediterranean — the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Italy.

Yet Italy was precisely one of the great refuges of this "Portuguese Nation," as the Sephardic diaspora issuing from the Iberian peninsula was called. Livorno, free port of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, became from the end of the sixteenth century the very seat of this merchant nation, whose extraordinary destiny from Amsterdam to Tunis Lionel Lévy has traced [Lévy, 1999]. An exile from Porto settled in Italy might have been designated there by the name of his city of origin — becoming, in the mouth of his Italian coreligionists, "he from Porto," Di Porto.

This Sephardic hypothesis remains conjectural. Sephardic Italian surnames most often retain their Iberian form or a recognizable Italianization, and nothing formally attests to the passage from a Portuguese "de Porto" to an Italian "Di Porto." But the hypothesis has the merit of recalling a cardinal virtue of Italian Jewish history: hospitality toward the stranger and the exile. Italy of the free ports, and Livorno foremost, knew how to make the refugee a citizen of its community [Lévy, 1996]. To welcome he whom Iberia had rejected, to restore to him a name, a synagogue, a cemetery, a place in commerce and study — it is this generosity toward the persecuted that the Jewish tradition calls hakhnassat orḥim, the welcoming of the guest, and which echoes the repeated commandment of the Torah to love the stranger, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Whatever its exact geographical origin, the lineage's Italian anchorage situates it within a well-documented social history: that of the economic condition of the Jews of the Peninsula between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the establishment of ghettos, the trades permitted to Jews were drastically reduced. In Rome, the overwhelming majority lived from the commerce of used textiles — the strazzaria, the trade in rags and secondhand clothing — from pawnbroking, from peddling and from a few tolerated crafts.

This economy of necessity was not merely a constraint endured; it became the site of a form of discreet excellence. The trade in fabrics required an acute sense of value, scrupulous honesty in a trade where reputation made all the credit, and a guild solidarity that protected the weakest. Italian Jewish culture, as Bonfil described it, did not separate economic activity from ethical requirement: respect for one's given word, the prohibition of fraud in weights and measures, the protection of the debtor stemmed directly from the halakha, Jewish Law applied to the affairs of this world [Bonfil, 1994]. The economic action of families such as the Di Porto, however modest it may have been, was thus inscribed within a religious conception of work where earning one's bread honestly was already to serve God.

To this dimension was added study. Even in the poorest strata of the ghetto, Talmudic instruction remained an accessible ideal: the son of the humblest merchant could become, through knowledge, a respected man. The illuminated Hebrew manuscript, whose flourishing in Italy Giulia Tamani has demonstrated, bears witness to the value these communities attached to the beauty of the book and to the transmission of text [Tamani, 2010]. Talmudic knowledge was, for the families of the ghetto, a wealth that no decree could confiscate.

The decisive turning point in the history of Italian Jews — and therefore of every family bearing a surname like Di Porto — was emancipation. With Italian unification and the breach of the Porta Pia in 1870, which ended the temporal power of the popes, the walls of the Rome ghetto fell and Jews became full citizens of the new Italian kingdom. Italian Jews then engaged massively in the life of the nation — administration, liberal professions, university, army, arts — with a loyalty and gratitude toward the State that had freed them.

This entry into modernity was experienced as the fulfillment of long patience. After centuries of relegation, the generation of emancipation translated its gratitude into civic engagement. Here too, a Jewish value manifests itself: involvement in collective life, no longer only that of the community, but that of the entire city. Contemporary Jewish thought, in a Léon Askénazi as in Armand Abécassis, has emphasized that the vocation of Israel is not to withdraw from the world but to bear witness in it, to introduce the demand for justice at the heart of the life of nations [Askénazi, 1999] [Abécassis, 1987]. Roman Jewish families, by becoming fully Italian while remaining faithful to their faith, embodied this fertile tension between particularity and universality.

The twentieth century shattered this impetus. The fascist racial laws of 1938 stripped Italian Jews of their rights, and the German occupation of 1943 triggered deadly persecution. The raid on the Rome ghetto on October 16, 1943, tore away more than a thousand people deported to Auschwitz, of whom few returned; the surnames of the old ghetto — Di Porto among them — appear in the registers of this tragedy [Natanson, 1997]. The duty to name the victims, to preserve their Memory against forgetting, extends today the biblical zakhor into an imperative that binds the living [Yerushalmi, 1984].

Beyond Italy, the name Di Porto — or its related forms — could be found in other centers of the Mediterranean diaspora, carried by the movements of Sephardic and Livornese communities. The Grana, those Jews of Livorno established in Tunis, transported with them their Tuscan surnames, weaving a network that connected Italy to North Africa [Lévy, 1999] [Lévy, 1996]. In western Algeria, the communities of Tlemcen and Sidi Bel Abbès, whose rabbinic archives are known, welcomed over time families from both Italy and Spain [Botbol, 2000] [Rabbinic Archives of Sidi Bel Abbès].

These ramifications belong more to transmitted Memory than to continuous archival evidence: they remind us that the Mediterranean Jewish world was a space of permanent circulation, where a name could travel from one shore to another according to expulsions, matrimonial alliances and trade routes. Jewish philosophy, as Maurice-Ruben Hayoun traces it, constituted itself in this back-and-forth between the centers of the diaspora — Spain, Provence, Italy, North Africa — each exile becoming an occasion for a new flowering of thought [Hayoun, 2023].

What these dispersions teach us is the virtue of mobile rootedness: the capacity of a people to remain itself in every place, to rebuild everywhere the synagogue, the school and the rabbinic court, without ever renouncing either its Law or the hope of return. The Di Porto lineage, insofar as it participated in these migrations, belongs to this History of a fidelity that knows no borders.

At the end of this journey, the Di Porto lineage reveals itself less through the brilliance of illustrious figures than through its obscure and tenacious fidelity to a way of being Jewish in the world. A toponymic name attested by Schaerf in 1925, probably rooted in the Jewish community of Rome and its port on the Tiber, perhaps also marked by the distant memory of the Portuguese city of Porto and its Sephardic exile, this surname condenses in two syllables an entire geography of the diaspora — the place left behind, the threshold crossed, the port where one arrives.

Of all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried through the centuries, the one that this lineage will have, above all others, best expressed is fidelity — fidelity to the memory of the place of origin, inscribed even in the name, and fidelity to the people whose fate one shares. For bearing the name of a port is to bear the memory of an origin and the experience of a passage; it is to refuse oblivion in favor of zakhor. In the humility of the ghetto, in the honesty of commerce, in the mutual aid of confraternities, in the welcome of the exiled and in loyalty toward the emancipating city, families like the Di Porto did not make history with great noise: they held it, patiently, as one holds a promise. It is this humble constancy that links their singular destiny to the collective memory of Israel, that people which, from port to port and from exile to exile, never ceased to remember where it came from and to believe where it was going.