The Hochwald Family

The surname Hochwald is a topographic name, formed from the Germanic vocabulary of nature: hoch, "high," and Wald, "forest." This category of names — drawn from a place, a landform, a landscape — is well known to historians of Jewish onomastics in Central Europe. It spread widely in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when imperial administrations, in particular that of Joseph II in 1787 for the Habsburg territories, compelled Jewish families to adopt fixed surnames, often German, sometimes assigned outright by officials. Compound names evoking forest, mountain, valley, or stone belong to this wave.

That this name, with its Ashkenazic connotation, should appear among the Jews of Italy is not at all incongruous: it bears witness to the ancient and unbroken presence of families who had come from north of the Alps. From the late Middle Ages and especially during the Renaissance, northern Italy welcomed Ashkenazic Jews — known locally as tedeschi, "Germans" — who settled notably in the cities of the Po plain and in states where pawnbroking was tolerated. Robert Bonfil has shown how pluralistic Jewish society in Renaissance Italy truly was, composed of strata — Italkim Italians, tedeschi from the north, and soon Sephardim expelled from Iberia — each bringing its own rites, language, and customs [Bonfil, 1994]. The name Hochwald is, so to speak, a linguistic fossil of this Germanic component within Italian Judaism.

What the lineage expresses here, even before any individual biography, is a quiet but essential virtue of Jewish tradition: fidelity to the Memory of origins. To carry, on southern soil, a name that speaks of the northern forest, is to refuse to erase where one comes from — an echo of the biblical injunction zakhor, "remember," which structures the entire historical consciousness of Israel [Yerushalmi, 1984].

To understand the Hochwald, one must reconstruct the world of German Jews in Italy. From the fourteenth century onward, Jewish bankers and moneylenders from the lands of the Empire crossed the Alps, summoned by Italian lordships and communes that saw in Jewish credit an economic instrument — and, in the taxation of Jews, a fiscal resource. These families founded synagogues of ashkénaze rite, distinct from those of native Italians and, later, of Séfarades. Bonfil argues that this ritual and social diversity, far from being marginal, was constitutive of Italian Jewish life, with its tensions and accommodations between "nations" [Bonfil, 1994].

The economic activity of these families — lending, exchange, and later trade and craftsmanship — cannot be read as a mere constraint imposed by professional prohibitions. It was also the site of a concrete exercise of justice and charity: the registers of numerous communities attest that the revenues from credit sustained charitable confraternities, dowries for poor young women (hakhnasat kalla), the ransom of captives (pidyon shvuyim), and the care of the sick (biqqur holim). This embedding of economic action within communal obligation is a deep mark of Jewish ethics, in which gain has meaning only when ordered toward tsedek, justice. Though we possess no nominative mention of a Hochwald engaged in such charitable works, the family's presumed belonging to this tedesco milieu places it within this horizon of shared values.

It is here that a virtue held in high esteem by tradition comes into view: engagement in collective life. The Italian Jewish community, or kehillah, functioned as an autonomous institution, managing its schools, its rabbinical tribunals, and its internal taxation. To participate in it — as a dues-paying member, as an administrator, as a donor — was not an option but a duty. The Hochwald lineage, as a fragment of this collective body, in all likelihood took its part therein.

The Italy of the Renaissance was, for Judaism, a land of intellectual and material effervescence without equal. It was there that the printed Hebrew book found its first great workshops — Soncino, then Venice —, and there that the refined art of the illuminated Hebrew manuscript was perpetuated. Giulia Tamani has described the splendor of these decorated manuscripts produced in the Italian courts and communities, where Renaissance taste met Jewish piety: bibles, mahzorim, ornate marriage contracts, philosophical treatises carefully copied [Tamani, 2010]. Ashkenaze families settled in Italy took part in this movement, both as scribes and as patrons and readers.

The relationship to knowledge constitutes one of the cardinal virtues that the Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries. Colette Sirat has shown, from the manuscript texts themselves, the richness and continuity of medieval Jewish philosophy, transmitted and recopied from generation to generation, from the Séfarade world to the Italian centers [Sirat, 1983]. Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, in his synthesis on Jewish philosophy, reminds us how much this thought was a demanding dialogue between Revelation and reason, between Jerusalem and Athens, endlessly resumed through the course of exiles [Hayoun, 2023]. A family like the Hochwald, immersed in the world of the Italian book, belongs — at least through the milieu that was its own — to this long chain of transmission, the shalshelet ha-qabbalah, in which each generation becomes the link of a knowledge received and handed on.

We must say here, in all honesty, what we do not know: we are not aware of any work signed by a Hochwald, nor of any manuscript bearing that name as a scribe. The silence of the archive is not proof of absence, but it forbids any assertion. What we can establish is the world — that of the book, of study, of the Torah and of philosophy — in which the lineage was immersed.

Jewish history is a history of movement. The same families who, coming from the north, had put down roots in Italy, found themselves caught, in the following centuries, in the great Mediterranean migratory currents. Livourne, a free port created by the Medici at the end of the 16th century, became the magnetic pole of a flourishing "Portuguese Jewish nation," a crossroads between Europe, North Africa, and the Orient. Lionel Lévy has traced the trajectory of this Livournese nation, from its birth in 1591 to its extinction in the 20th century, and the way in which it spread toward Tunis, Amsterdam, and the rest of the Mediterranean basin [Lévy, 1999] [Lévy, 1996]. A Jewish family from Italy, whatever its rites of origin, could thus be drawn into these merchant and communal networks.

These displacements were also those that led Italian Jews toward North Africa, where ancient and vibrant communities existed. Eliahou-Éric Botbol has documented the life and fate of the community of Tlemcen [Botbol, 2000], while the rabbinical archives of Sidi Bel Abbès preserve the trace of a structured Jewish life in Algeria during the modern and colonial period [Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès]. Without documenting a precise Hochwald presence in these cities, this book underlines that the name, once entered into the great Mediterranean melting pot, could travel far from its original Italian land.

It is in these migrations that an essential virtue finds expression: the capacity to welcome the stranger and to be welcomed. Livourne was celebrated for having offered refuge to the persecuted, notably to Jews fleeing the Iberian Inquisition; the "nation" made of hospitality an institutional practice [Lévy, 1999]. The Jewish tradition, marked by the memory of slavery in Egypt, commands that one not oppress the stranger "for you were strangers" — a commandment that the host communities strove to translate into deeds.

Beyond material facts, a Jewish lineage defines itself by its relationship to halakha, the Law, and to the tradition transmitted by word of mouth and hand to hand. The great contemporary thinkers of Judaism have meditated on this living faithfulness. Léon Askénazi, known as Manitou, showed that to think about tradition today is to reconnect the thread between the written and the spoken, between the received text and the living present [Askénazi, 1999]. Armand Abécassis described this founding movement that moves "from the desert to desire," from the given Law to the human aspiration it awakens and orders [Abécassis, 1987]. A family such as the Hochwald, in the privacy of its hearths and synagogues, lived by this faithfulness — of which archives most often preserve no written trace, yet which oral transmission and rite perpetuated.

This chapter deliberately belongs to the register of Memory rather than that of the archive: we have no responsum, no rabbinical ruling, nor any sermon attributed to a Hochwald. Yet daily piety — the observance of Shabbat, the practice of study, the education of children in the Law — is precisely what event-driven history allows to slip away, and what family memory alone preserves. Dominique Natanson labored, through his work on Jewish memory and education, to safeguard these ordinary lives that grand History tends to erase [Natanson, 1997]. It is in this humility — the virtue of anavah, the self-effacement before that which is greater than oneself — that the most authentic and least spectacular part of the lineage's heritage most likely resides.

No history of a Jewish family from Europe could silence the shadow of the twentieth century. Jewish communities in Italy, protected for a time by a remarkable degree of integration, were struck by the fascist racial laws of 1938 and then, after September 1943, by deportation. The work of remembrance carried out by educators such as Dominique Natanson aims precisely to transmit to new generations the memory of these broken lives and to draw from them a lesson [Natanson, 1997]. We do not have a nominative martyrology attesting to the particular fate of the Hochwald during the Shoah, and we shall refrain from inferring what the sources do not show; but silence itself, here, is a datum that calls for contemplation rather than narrative.

That the name Hochwald was recorded and preserved — by Schaerf as early as 1925 [Schaerf, 1925], and by the inventories that followed — is in itself an act of resistance to forgetting. To name is to bring into existence; to inventory Jewish surnames in Italy, as Schaerf did, was to map a people and to safeguard their Memory. In this, the survival of the name partakes of the great virtue of zakhor, that duty of Memory which Yerushalmi placed at the heart of the Jewish experience of History [Yerushalmi, 1984].

At the close of this journey, the Hochwald lineage takes shape less through a succession of documented individuals than through the worlds a name has traversed: the northern forests whose memory it preserves, the tedeschi communities of Italy where it took root, the universe of books and Renaissance scholarship, the Mediterranean migrations toward Livorno and North Africa, and the ordeal of the century of catastrophes. We have refused hagiography and respected the silences; what we were able to establish, we have established; what we could only surmise, we have said as such.

If one virtue above all others were to be named as the finest expression of this lineage, it would be faithfulness to the memory of origin — that virtue of zakhor which runs through the entire consciousness of Israel [Yerushalmi, 1984]. For the most solid fact at our disposal is also the most eloquent: a name born of the high northern forests, carried and preserved on southern soil, inscribed in a learned catalogue that rescues it from oblivion [Schaerf, 1925]. In this refusal of erasure — keeping hold of where one comes from while dwelling where one has arrived —, the Hochwald family partakes of the deepest virtue of the Jewish people: making of Memory not a nostalgic backward glance, but the very foundation of a faithfulness that crosses continents and centuries.