The Guglielmi Family

The documentary anchor point of this lineage is unique and precise. The name Guglielmi appears in the work of Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, published in 1925 by the "Israel" publishing house in Florence, with an appendix devoted to noble Jewish families of Italy. This work constitutes the first systematic inventory of Israelite surnames on the peninsula and remains, a century later, the reference source for any onomastic inquiry into Italian Judaism.

Schaerf's inventory records approximately sixteen hundred surnames, as they were registered with the statistical office of the Keren Hayesod — the Reconstruction Fund for Palestine — in Italy, including the so-called "German" communities of the northern peninsula but excluding the colonies of Tripoli, Benghazi, and Rhodes. The author's rigor deserves to be emphasized: he himself warns that the list is purely indicative, and that a name appearing in it is not necessarily Jewish, since it includes surnames of non-Jews who married a Jewish woman. This methodological precaution, far from weakening the source, constitutes its value: it expresses an intellectual honesty that refuses to fabricate certainties where the archive provides none.

This spirit of moderation is not incidental to the history of the lineage. Schaerf was writing in 1925, at a time when Jewish onomastics could already be diverted for purposes of classification and stigmatization — and indeed, his work was later consulted in a context quite different from that of disinterested scholarship. That the name Guglielmi passed through such a learned filter, both inclusive and cautious, reminds us how knowledge — here the patient erudition of a librarian — was one of the virtues that Italian Judaism carried through the centuries, and how this knowledge could, depending on whose hands seized it, serve memory or threaten it.

What does it mean to bear, as a Jew of Italy, a name like Guglielmi? The answer lies in the very nature of this diaspora. The Jews of Italy form, with the communities of the peninsula attested since Roman times, one of the oldest branches of the Western diaspora [ref:10, ref:11]. This antiquity explains a distinctive feature of their onomastics: unlike Sephardic names marked by Iberian exile or Ashkenazi names forged in the Germanic sphere, a portion of Jewish Italian surnames derives from Latin or Romance given names fully integrated into local culture.

Guglielmi belongs to this family of names. Formed from Guglielmo — William — it is a patronym constructed according to the Italian model of the genitive of filiation: "(son) of Guglielmo". Its Latinized variants, Gulielmi and Guilielmi, betray a notarial and learned usage, that of documents drafted in Latin where the name became fixed in a clerical form. This very Latinization is a sign of deep insertion into the institutions of the peninsula.

It is here that tradition and archive answer one another. The family memory of a name as Italian as a Christian given name might seem paradoxical for a Jewish lineage; history, however, provides the key. The Jewish communities of medieval and Renaissance Italy experienced remarkable acculturation, adopting the language, onomastic usages and sometimes the given names of their environment, while preserving their religious identity and their Hebrew names for ritual use. An Italian Jew could thus be called Guglielmo in the city and bear a wholly different name in the synagogue. This double belonging — rootedness in Italian soil and fidelity to the covenant of Israel — constitutes one of the most delicate expressions of the virtue of reciprocal tolerance and of a people's capacity to dwell fully in a culture without dissolving into it.

To understand the environment in which a name like Guglielmi could be born and transmitted, one must embrace the long course of Italian Jewish history. Jews have been present in Rome since the second century before the Common Era, making the community of the Eternal City the oldest in the European diaspora in continuity of settlement. From this ancient stock sprang, over the centuries, the communities of southern Italy — Naples, Puglia, Calabria, Sicily — whose destiny Nicola Ferorelli traced from the Roman age until the eighteenth century.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Italian Judaism experienced exceptional intellectual vitality. Robert Bonfil demonstrated how the Jews of the Italian Renaissance managed to combine Talmudic study, medicine, finance and humanism, participating in their own way in the great cultural movement of the peninsula while deepening their own tradition. Jewish lenders, often the only ones permitted to exercise credit, fulfilled an essential economic function; many of them were also men of letters, physicians, copyists of Hebrew manuscripts. This conjunction of knowledge and economic action — both exercised under the constraint of prohibitions but transformed into instruments of survival and influence — characterizes the Italian Jewish condition at that time.

It is in this landscape that a Guglielmi family fits, by hypothesis. Whether it lived in Rome, Tuscany, the Papal States or one of the duchies of the North, it would have shared the common condition of these communities: the legal precariousness of status, but also the richness of a collective life structured around the synagogue, study and mutual aid. Roberto Salvadori, tracing the history of the Jews of Florence from the origins to the present day, describes precisely this Tuscan communal life where involvement in collective life — charitable confraternities, societies for assistance to the sick and the dead, dowries for poor girls — was the cement of Jewish solidarity. Tzedakah, justice made charity, was not a moral ornament but the very backbone of the community.

The turning point in Italian Jewish history was emancipation. Gadi Luzzatto Voghera analyzed the debate over the emancipation of Italian Jews between 1781 and 1848, demonstrating how deeply the question of civil equality occupied the political thought of the peninsula on the threshold of the Risorgimento. Italian unification, completed in the 1860s and 1870s, consecrated the legal equality of Jews: for the first time since Antiquity, they ceased to be tolerated subjects and became full citizens.

This emancipation transformed surnames themselves. Jewish family names, which until then had sometimes been fluid, became definitively fixed in the civil registers of the Kingdom of Italy. Thus a name like Guglielmi, in its stabilized form, entered administrative modernity. Italian Jews then integrated with remarkable intensity into national life: they counted ministers, generals, university professors, industrialists, and patriots among their ranks. Attilio Milano, in his great Storia degli ebrei in Italia, emphasizes the scope of this participation in the construction of the liberal State.

This integration expresses a value known to the tradition of Israel by several names: involvement in the life of the city, service to the common good, loyalty to the land of refuge without renunciation of self. The prophet Jeremiah had enjoined the exiles to seek the peace of the city in which they dwell; Italian Jews of the nineteenth century gave a brilliant illustration of it. A Guglielmi family, in the decades of emancipation, likely experienced this quiet ascension: access to the professions, to public school, to the trades of the city, in the sincere feeling of fully belonging to the Italian nation. This sentiment, so natural that it seemed secure, was soon to be betrayed.

The year 1938 marks the rupture. The fascist regime, until then ambiguous, promulgated that year the racial laws that excluded Jews from the Italian nation. Michele Sarfatti traced with precision the mechanism of this persecution, from the census of Jews to their exclusion from schools, universities, the administration, the military and the professions. Enzo Collotti documented the legal architecture of this enterprise, showing that the Italian racial laws were not a servile importation of the German model but an indigenous construction of fascism. Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci established on her side how much the fascist State engaged all of its administrative machinery in this policy of exclusion.

It is in this context that onomastics resurged, tragically. The 1938 census relied on the identification of Jews by their name, and inventories such as that of Schaerf could serve as a landmark for a bureaucracy of stigmatization — a sinister reversal of a work of erudition. Fabio Isman assembled the documents of this administrative persecution, revealing the methodical coldness with which a population was censused, filed, then stripped. Every family bearing a name censused, including the Guglielmi, found itself potentially exposed to this classificatory gaze.

The testimonies of these years — the journals and letters gathered by Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri — give a voice to this ordeal: the stupor of citizens who believed themselves Italian, the humiliation of children excluded from school, the obstinate dignity of families who continued to live, to study and to pray. It is here that a virtue is revealed that the Jewish tradition holds as cardinal: the sanctification of life in the face of oppression, the refusal of despair, the transmission maintained against all odds. In persecuted communities, clandestine Jewish schools multiplied, networks of mutual aid tightened, charity became collective survival. The Guglielmi lineage, if it crossed these years, crossed them in this community of ordeal and fidelity.

The culmination of persecution was deportation. After the German occupation of September 1943 and the establishment of the Italian Social Republic, the Jews of Italy were declared foreigners and enemies. A police order of 30 November 1943 provided for the arrest of all Jews and their concentration in camps, and the decree-law of 4 January 1944 established the confiscation of all their movable and immovable property. These confiscations, published in the Official Journal, were executed with extreme rigor, the seized assets being entrusted to EGELI, which organized their sale. The manhunt then unleashed itself in the north and center of the peninsula, conducted by the Germans joined by the fascists.

It is the monumental work of Liliana Picciotto, Il libro della memoria, that established the nominal census of Jews deported from Italy between 1943 and 1945. This book is at once a work of History and an act of Memory: it restores to each victim their name, their date of birth, their place of arrest and their fate, wresting the disappeared from the anonymity of the number. It is in a work of this nature that one would verify, should the case arise, the presence of persons bearing the name Guglielmi among the persecuted — the same onomastics that had served to identify now serving to commemorate.

This reversal speaks to what is essential. Where the fascist archive had made of the name an instrument of death, post-war Jewish historiography made of it again an instrument of life and dignity. To name the dead is to fulfill the duty of Memory — zakhor, "remember" — which runs through all the tradition of Israel. The Guglielmi lineage, whether it was struck or spared, partakes of this collective Memory: that of an Italian Judaism which, after having been denied, rebuilt itself and made fidelity to remembrance the highest form of resistance. The Italian Jewish community, decimated but not annihilated, resumed after 1945 the thread of its secular life, reaffirming the ancient promise of the survival of Israel.

Of the Guglielmi lineage, history has left us only a faint trace: an entry in the catalogue of Samuele Schaerf, this Italian name derived from Guglielmo, form of a people rooted in the peninsula since Antiquity. Around this single thread, this Great Book has woven the grand narrative in which it takes meaning — that of Italian Judaism, from ancient Rome to emancipation, from emancipation to persecution, and from persecution to reclaimed Memory.

For lack of archives proper to the family, we could not attribute to it illustrious figures nor singular great deeds; honesty demands that we acknowledge this, and invent nothing where silence reigns. But this very silence is eloquent. It is that of thousands of ordinary Italian Jewish families who, without leaving a name in the books of history, bore daily the virtues of their tradition: patient study, communal charity, loyalty to the city, the sanctification of life.

If one were to name what this lineage, among all the virtues of Israel, will have expressed best, it would be rooted fidelity: the capacity of a Jewish name to become fully Italian without ceasing to be Jewish, to inhabit a land and a culture to the point of embracing even its given names, while remaining faithful to the covenant. This fidelity was put to the test in 1938, when the nation denied its Jewish children; it survived persecution and deportation; and it continues today in the duty of Memory that restores their names to the disappeared. In this, the Guglielmi lineage, however modest its trace, partakes of the collective Memory of a people who have made rooted fidelity and stubborn remembrance their way of traversing the centuries.