The Di Veroli Family

In the beginning, there is a place. Veroli is an ancient city of Latium, former stronghold of the Hernici and then a Roman municipality, dominating the valley of the Sacco. The Jewish presence in southern and central Italy is very ancient: Jews have been present on Italian territories since remote times; citizens of the Roman Empire, they were recognized as such during the early phases of Christianization. For the period spanning the 4th to 11th centuries, historians counsel caution: one speaks of Jewish groups rather than communities, and the meaning of the rare information available for the center-north must be carefully reconsidered.

It is within this thin fabric, made up of small scattered presences throughout the towns of Latium and Campania, that the distant origins of the family must be situated. The history of the Jews of southern Italy, from the Roman age until the 18th century, was patiently reconstructed by Nicola Ferorelli [Nicola Ferorelli, Gli ebrei nell'Italia meridionale, ref:10], who shows how these communities, long flourishing, were progressively worn down by expulsions and forced conversions from the late 15th century onward. The near-total disappearance of Judaism in the South, under Aragonese and then Spanish rule, drove northward — and notably toward Rome, a papal territory more tolerant of a presence that was tolerated though constrained — the families that refused abjuration.

That the Di Veroli left their city of origin for Rome is not a fact dated by archival records; it is an inference supported by this well-established historical mechanism. Obstinate faithfulness to the Law, even in uprooting, is here the first virtue that the name itself allows us to discern: that of a people who, rather than deny their covenant, carry with them, as a viaticum, the memory of the lost place.

The first solid documentary foundation for this lineage is a reference work: the repertory of family names of the Jews of Italy established by Samuele Schaerf and published in Florence in 1925 [Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, ref:1]. It is in this pioneering catalogue that the surname Di Veroli is registered as an Italian Jewish family name — an entry that establishes, for modern scholarship, the attested existence of the lineage.

Schaerf's work belongs to a learned tradition that understood that the name is a document. When the first ghettos were instituted — Rome, Venice, then gradually the others — Jews from many localities were forced to move there and were called by the names of these places. The surname Di Veroli, like Volterra or Terracina, thus bears the fossil trace of a constraint: that of confinement and displacement, turned into a sign of identity.

This study of names is not mere scholarly curiosity. In fixing in writing the onomastic memory of Jewish families in Italy on the eve of catastrophe, Schaerf accomplished, without fully knowing it, an act of preservation — a form of zakhor, that commandment of memory that runs through all Jewish thought. To register a name is to refuse that it disappear; it is, on the scale of a scholar, to participate in the collective virtue of Israel that has made transmission the heart of its survival.

Family tradition and contemporary testimony converge here to anchor the Di Veroli in the Roman ghetto. A member of the Jewish Community of Rome, Dino Di Veroli presents himself as belonging to an ancient ghetto family dating back to the 16th century; in place of the former ghetto stands today the Tempio Maggiore, the Great Synagogue, a monumental testimony to the emancipation of Roman and Italian Jews.

This testimony precisely intersects with the archive's chronology. The ghetto of Rome was instituted in 1555: on July 12, 1555, Pope Paul IV, born Giovanni Pietro Carafa, through the bull Cum nimis absurdum, revoked all rights granted to Roman Jews and ordered the institution of the ghetto. A family "of the ghetto since the 16th century" is therefore, literally, a family present from the very origin of the confinement — among those seven thousand souls crowded into a few alleyways on the banks of the Tiber.

Life in the ghetto imposed tight solidarities, even in matrimonial alliances. Roman memory recalls without ambiguity that the ghetto's population was numerous, but too small to avoid marriages between relatives; in Antiquity people also married cousins. From this enforced endogamy was born a people of exceptional continuity: Roman Jews form one of the rare communities in the world whose presence has never been interrupted since Antiquity. To belong to the Di Veroli is to belong to this singular Roman nusach, to this Italian rite distinct from both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, kept alive in precarity. The virtue here is not in brilliance, but in perseverance: the capacity to remain a community, to support one another in confinement, to make constraint the very place of fidelity.

The history of the Di Veroli lineage is not that of a dynasty of bankers or great rabbis, but that of the humble working people of the ghetto and their heirs. This social humility is itself a part of historical truth: economic historians emphasize that the role of Jews in Italian economic history was, from the perspective of development, fundamentally modest, similar to that of Christians of the middle and working classes. Far from the myth of the Jewish financier, reality was most often that of the peddler, the rag merchant, the small craftsman.

This reality is evident even in the Di Veroli of today. At the San Lorenzo market in Florence, a member of the family practices the itinerant trade that was, for centuries, that of the Jews of Italy. The testimony gathered is eloquent: most passersby, and many Italians, would never know that Di Veroli is Jewish; all the merchants know one another, they grew up together and help each other in commerce. In these words two linked virtues emerge: solidarity — gemilut hasadim, concrete mutual aid among members of the same community — and the discretion of an identity lived without ostentation.

The Florentine settlement moreover refers back to a community whose own history has been traced from its origins [Roberto G. Salvadori, Gli ebrei di Firenze, ref:12]. But the soul of the Di Veroli remains Roman, and Roman is this manner of holding a stall as one holds a post: with the awareness that honest work, however humble, is in itself a form of dignity. Jewish tradition has never despised manual labor; it has made it, on the contrary, a pillar of upright living. In this, the peddler Di Veroli are the faithful heirs of a millennial ethic.

Any history of an Italian Jewish family in the twentieth century necessarily encounters the year 1938 and what followed. The fascist racial laws, promulgated in 1938, plunged into persecution a community that had believed in emancipation. This rupture has been meticulously documented by reference historiography [Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell'Italia fascista, ref:6 ; Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, ref:5 ; Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, L'Italia fascista e la persecuzione degli ebrei, ref:4]. Census-taking, exclusion from schools and professions, administrative outlawing struck all Jewish families in Italy [Fabio Isman, 1938. L'Italia razzista, ref:2].

For the Roman community, the catastrophe reached its peak on 16 October 1943, when the raid on the ghetto delivered more than a thousand Jews to deportation to Auschwitz. The fate of Jews deported from Italy has been established name by name in the monumental Libro della memoria of Liliana Picciotto [Liliana Picciotto, Il libro della memoria, ref:8], a work of census-taking which, like Schaerf's but in the register of mourning, restores to each victim their identity. The voices of those who endured these years are preserved in collections of journals and letters gathered by historians [Mario Avagliano, Marco Palmieri, Gli ebrei sotto la persecuzione in Italia, ref:3].

Rigor demands it: the sources mobilized here document the general context and the fate of the Roman community of which the Di Veroli were a part, without it being possible, in the present state, to draw up the nominative list of members of this family struck by deportation. This reservation is not a gap in the narrative but its condition of honesty. What can be affirmed, on the other hand, is that the lineage, rooted in the Rome ghetto since the sixteenth century, stood at the very heart of the target designated in October 1943. The memory of these days engages a cardinal virtue of the tradition of Israel: testimony — the obligation to speak what was, so that murder does not receive, moreover, oblivion.

After the storm, persistence. That the name Di Veroli still resonates in contemporary Jewish Rome testifies to a continuity that, in itself, is a victory over the persecutors. This continuity is embodied in diverse figures. In sport, Giovanni Di Veroli, born in Rome on 11 August 1932 and died in the same city on 1 June 2018, was an Italian professional footballer who played for Lazio as a defender — the path of a child of Rome who grew up in the very years of persecution and lived long enough to see his community reborn.

In communal life, transmission takes on a more explicit turn. Dino Di Veroli, guide of the Great Synagogue, becomes a keeper of the memory of the vanished ghetto, explaining to visitors how the Tempio Maggiore rises on the very site of confinement, transforming the place of shame into a monument of emancipation [Meer, interview with Dino Di Veroli]. Even today, nearly half of Italy's thirty thousand Jews live in Rome — and among them, the Di Veroli continue to hold their place.

This dual presence — on the playing field and in the synagogue, at the market and in memory — speaks to the deepest accomplishment of the lineage: involvement in collective life. To be a guide, to be a merchant helping one's peers, to transmit to the passing stranger the history of a sacred place: so many discreet ways of honouring what tradition calls klal Israël, the community of Israel as a living body that each generation is charged with perpetuating.

What to retain, at the end of this journey, about the Di Veroli lineage? A family without celebrated rabbinical dynasty, without brilliant fortune, without a name engraved in the great treatises of Jewish thought. And yet an exemplary lineage — precisely because it has nothing exceptional about it. Born, in all likelihood, from the uprooting of a small city in Latium, noted by scholarship as early as 1925, rooted in the Rome ghetto since the sixteenth century, tried by twentieth-century persecution, and alive still today in the Eternal City: it is the faithful portrait of Italian Judaism itself, in its stubborn endurance.

Among all virtues, it is perseverance in faithfulness — the capacity to remain, to transmit, to hold a community together through confinement, peddling, roundup and rebirth — that the Di Veroli lineage will have best expressed. Not the brilliance of the scholar or the power of the prince, but the humble tenacity of the common people who, generation after generation, refused to disappear. In this, the Di Veroli participate fully in the great collective virtue of Israel: that of making memory a force and continuity an act of faith. Their name, which is ultimately only the memory of a city, has become the monument of a faithfulness. Zakhor — remember: therein lies their heritage, and therein lies their greatness.