The Giuli Family

The certain anchor point of this lineage is a work. In 1925, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia by Samuele Schaerf was published in Florence, a pioneering undertaking aimed at cataloguing and interpreting the surnames borne by Jews of the peninsula. The work, reissued in facsimile, remains a reference, including for modern bibliographic catalogues of Italia Judaica. It is in this inventory that the name Giuli is attested as a Jewish surname of Italy, which constitutes the first and indisputable fact of our account.

Schaerf's work was not mere scholarly curiosity. To catalogue the names of a community is to assert its existence, its density, its legitimacy in the national landscape. In 1925, Italy had not yet descended into persecution; Schaerf's gesture still belonged to the age of emancipation, that long conquest of civil equality whose debate Gadi Luzzatto Voghera traced for the years 1781–1848. To name and classify Jewish families was then to inscribe them in the Italian nation as full citizens — not as tolerated foreigners.

In this act of Memory is already expressed a virtue that Jewish tradition holds very high: zakhor, the injunction to remember. To record names is to refuse oblivion, is to keep a register of a people who, through the Mishna and Talmud, made faithful transmission a sacred obligation. The surname Giuli, upon entering Schaerf's catalogue, ceased to be private data to become a link in this chain of Memory. The family thus participated, perhaps unknowingly, in the care that Judaism brings to the preservation of its own traces.

What does the name Giuli itself say?

Here prudence is necessary, and honesty demands speaking of hypotheses rather than certainties. Jewish surnames in Italy are distributed, according to typologies established by historians, into several major families: toponymic names, derived from a place of origin; patronymic names, stemming from an ancestor's first name; occupational names; and Hebrew names adapted to the Italian language.

The name Giuli could fall into several of these categories. One may read in it, with caution, a form derived from a first name — that of Giulio, from the Latin Iulius — a plausible hypothesis for an ancient community deeply Romanized, many of whose members had borne Latin names since Antiquity. One could also link it to a toponym, such as Giuliano, frequent in Italian geography. No source in the corpus settles the matter: we are here in the realm of assumed editorial conjecture, and it would be dishonest to present as established what remains a plausible reading.

This very uncertainty is instructive. It recalls that the Jews of Italy, present on the soil of the peninsula since the Roman era, adopted local onomastics very early, to the point that their names often blended with those of their Christian neighbors. Nicola Ferorelli and Attilio Milano have shown how rooted this community of the South and center was, speaking the language of the country, bearing its names, and yet faithful to its Law. The name Giuli, in its very ambiguity, bears witness to this capacity for integration without renunciation — a discreet way of inhabiting two worlds, the city of men and the covenant with God.

To understand what life could have been for a Jewish Italian family bearing a name such as Giuli, one must turn to the documented history of the community from which it came. The Jews of Italy form the oldest core of the diaspora of Western Europe: established in Rome from the 2nd century before the common era, then throughout the Mezzogiorno, they lived there, according to Ferorelli, a continuity from the Roman age until the 18th century.

At the time of the Renaissance, whose Jewish culture Robert Bonfil has masterfully described, these communities experienced remarkable intellectual and economic vitality. Italian Jews were lenders and physicians, printers and Talmudists, poets and philosophers; they held academies, copied and printed Hebrew books, engaged in dialogue with Christian humanism while deepening their own tradition. It was the age when Talmudic learning and Italian Jewish thought flourished, when rabbis administered justice according to halakha within autonomous communities.

In this world, a family like the Giuli, had it lived then, might have belonged to this fabric of craftspeople and scholars. Without direct proof, we cannot attribute a named work to it. But collective history illuminates the probable: the lending of money, practiced because other paths were closed, was often accompanied, in these communities, by an intense practice of tsedaka, obligatory charity, and by the founding of mutual aid confraternities. Economic action and care for the other went hand in hand there — wealth acquired transformed itself into duty toward the poor, the sick, the passing stranger. It is one of the most constant virtues of Italian Jewry, and the Giuli family, as a fragment of this body, was likely heir to it.

That the foundational source of the lineage — Schaerf's work — was published in Florence in 1925 is not without significance. Florence occupies a singular place in the history of Italian Jewry, traced by Roberto G. Salvadori from its origins to the present day. A city of lending and banking in the age of the Medici, then the seat of a ghetto under the grand duchy, it became after emancipation one of the great centers of Italian Judaism, endowed with a monumental synagogue and an intense intellectual life.

We possess no archival items explicitly linking the Giuli family to the Florentine community. But the intersection of the place of publication and the subject matter of the book invites us to consider Tuscany as one of the possible horizons of this lineage, just as much as Rome or the Mezzogiorno. It is here that Memory and archive respond to each other without merging: the name is attested, the place is evocative, but the direct link remains to be established.

What Florence teaches, however, is certain: the Jewish community there long embodied involvement in collective life, participating in the city's economic life while maintaining its own institutions — schools, rabbinical courts, charitable works. Tolerance, when it prevailed, was never a given but a fragile conquest, endlessly rediscussed in the debate on emancipation studied by Luzzatto Voghera. A Florentine Giuli family would have lived to the rhythm of these alternations between openness and withdrawal, bearing witness to the constancy of a people in remaining faithful to itself under changing regimes.

The history of every Italian Jewish lineage encounters, in the twentieth century, the abyss. In 1938, the fascist regime promulgated racial laws, stripping Italy's Jews of the citizenship that emancipation had granted them less than a century earlier. The work of Enzo Collotti, Michele Sarfatti, and Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci has established in detail the mechanisms of this legal persecution: census, exclusion from schools and professions, spoliation, administrative marking. Fabio Isman has assembled the very documents of this bureaucratic machine of exclusion.

What these investigations reveal is that persecution began with names. The 1938 census of Jews relied precisely on patronymic identification — the kind of knowledge that a work like Schaerf's, conceived thirteen years earlier in quite another spirit, could inadvertently overlap with. A name entered in the 1925 catalog to affirm belonging became, in 1938, a filing datum. The reversal is vertiginous and must be named without circumlocution: it is the shadow that runs through this book.

Then came the worst. After September 1943, German occupation and the Italian Social Republic organized deportations. Liliana Picciotto, in Il libro della memoria, has recorded name by name the Jews deported from Italy between 1943 and 1945. The diaries and letters gathered by Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri give voice to those who lived through the hunt, clandestinity, waiting. In these pages, virtue was no longer study or commerce, but the simple dignity of surviving, of protecting one's own, sometimes of welcoming and hiding — the hakhnassat orḥim, hospitality, pushed to the point of risking death. It is in this ordeal that the collective memory of Israel, that of exile and renewed persecution, joins the destiny of each Jewish family in Italy, including, in all likelihood, that of the Giuli.

What remains, at the end of this journey, of the Giuli lineage? A name, first of all — and that is already much. In the Jewish tradition, the name is not an empty envelope: it is shem, it carries the memory of an ancestor and the hope of continuity. The Talmud teaches that the righteous leave behind three crowns, one of which is good reputation. That a patronym has survived to appear in Schaerf's inventory, and then in this Great Book, is a sign that a chain has not been broken.

We must acknowledge the silences. We know neither the faces, nor the precise professions, nor the halakhic decisions, nor the named acts of charity of this family. The corpus archive has not yet yielded a manuscript mentioning it. This gap is not a failure of the narrative: it is its truth. An honest Great Book prefers to admit what it does not know rather than to invent what would flatter. The Giuli lineage remains, essentially, a lineage awaiting archives — and this book is an invitation extended to genealogists, to keepers of community registers, and to the descendants themselves.

But what is transmitted through this name transcends the singular family. In bearing a Jewish patronym from Italy from Roman times to our own day, through emancipation, the Renaissance of letters, and the abyss of racial laws, the Giuli lineage participated, like one thread among thousands, in the weave of the italkim — this community that knew how to remain itself under all powers. This is its legacy: discreet perseverance, quiet fidelity, survival as a form of fidelity to the Covenant.

At the close of this Great Book, it is fitting to name, with the rigor promised, what the Giuli lineage will have, among all the virtues of Israel, best expressed. It is neither a celebrated theological work, nor a resounding fortune, nor a foundational rabbinic ruling — none of these have come down to us under its name. What it embodies pertains to a humbler and no less essential virtue: the persistence of memory and faithfulness to belonging, that capacity of a Jewish name to traverse the centuries of the peninsula without dissolving, from the Roman world to the 1925 catalogue, from emancipation to the ordeal of racial laws.

This virtue, tradition calls it zakhor — remember. It may be the most fundamental of all, for it is what makes the others possible: without memory, no transmitted Law, no justice taught, no charity perpetuated. By enduring, by leaving its name engraved where the register of the Jewish people of Italy is kept, the Giuli family has accomplished, in its discreet measure, the work of remembrance.

This book will thus remain open. It awaits the birth certificates and ketubbot, the cemetery inscriptions and communal lists which, one day, will give faces to this name. Until then, the Giuli lineage remains what it has always been in the long history of Israel: a faithful link in a chain greater than itself, and worthy, for that alone, of a Great Book.