The Jenda Family

Any study of the Jenda lineage must begin with the source that attests to it. The text of the Cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia was published by Samuele Schaerf in 1925, corresponding to the year 5685 of the Hebrew calendar, under the auspices of the publishing house « Israel » of Florence. The work enjoyed a lasting editorial posterity: it was notably reissued under the title I cognomi degli ebrei in Italia, with an appendix devoted to the noble Jewish families of Italy, in an anastatic reprint of the 1925 Florentine edition [Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, rist. anast., Alberti / Libreria Piani].

The context of publication deserves the historian's attention. The year 1925 finds Italy in the midst of profound political transformation, on the eve of the fascist regime, yet more than a decade before the racial laws of 1938. At that time, the Italian Jewish community, deeply integrated into the nation since the emancipation of the Risorgimento, was manifesting a scholarly and patrimonial interest in its own history. The compilation of an onomastic repertoire was part of this movement of identity and historical enumeration — a gesture that, in itself, carries a value: that of engagement in collective life and of the care given to transmission. To enumerate names is to refuse erasure; it is to inscribe within the long sweep of time a presence that history always threatens. The publishing house « Israel » of Florence, to which the work is linked, was one of the focal points of Italian Jewish culture in the interwar period, a place where knowledge was placed at the service of Memory [Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, 1925].

It is in this repertoire that the name Jenda appears, among the hundreds of surnames that Schaerf undertook to enumerate. The encyclopedic character of the enterprise — covering all the communities of the peninsula — lends the attestation of the name a documentary value that may rightly be described as established. But one must emphasize what this onomastic approach also reveals of the ethos of Italian Judaism in the first quarter of the twentieth century: a people who, having enjoyed full and complete citizenship since the Risorgimento, chose to remember their names, their origins, their families, refusing to allow national integration to dissolve communal identity. In this, Schaerf partakes of a virtue that the Jewish tradition calls zikaron — Memory as a moral duty — and the Jenda lineage, by allowing itself to be enumerated, belongs to that tradition, if only through the sole presence of its name [Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, 1925].

The mere presence of a name in a repertoire, however, yields of itself neither the genealogy, nor the chronology, nor the precise geography of the family concerned. One must therefore, in order to reconstruct this context, turn to the broader history of the Jews of Italy, and accept that the narrative of the Jenda lineage is, in large part, the narrative of the people from whom it springs.

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The Jenda lineage, identified as a Jewish family from Italy, belongs to one of the oldest Jewish presences in Europe. The Jewish community of Rome is generally regarded as the oldest on the European continent to have maintained continuity, its origins dating back at least to the second century before the common era, at the time of the first diplomatic and commercial contacts between Hasmonean Judea and the Roman Republic [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Italy"; Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy]. This extreme antiquity is, in itself, the mark of a virtue: resilience — that capacity to traverse the centuries without dissolving, to maintain an identity transmitted from generation to generation despite persecutions, expulsions, and forced conversions. The Jenda family, whatever the precise era of its appearance in the documentary record, inherits this long persistence.

Over the centuries, this presence diversified. To the ancient nuclei of Rome and the Mezzogiorno, the Middle Ages and the modern period added successive contributions: the indigenous Italian Jews, known as italkim, heirs of the Roman substratum; the Ashkenazi Jews who came from the Germanic lands across the Alps; the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497; and finally the Jews known as "Ponentines" and "Levantines" of Mediterranean trade. This stratification explains the extraordinary diversity of surnames documented by Schaerf, some of which reveal an Italian toponymic origin, others a Hebrew root, and still others a foreign provenance [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Italy"; Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia].

The relationship with the foreign is precisely one of the dimensions this stratification illuminates most clearly. With each wave of exile — the Sephardim of 1492, the Marranos from Portugal, the refugees of medieval Germanic persecutions — the Jewish communities of Italy opened their doors, their synagogues, their networks of solidarity. The Legge Livornina of Ferdinand I de' Medici, at the end of the sixteenth century, made Livorno an explicitly offered haven for refugees; and in other cities, specific brotherhoods — the ḥevrot — took charge of welcoming and integrating newcomers [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Leghorn"; Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia]. This movement of active hospitality is not merely a historical fact: it is the expression of a fundamental commandment of the Torah, hakhnasat orhim, the welcoming of the guest, which the Italian communities lived out under circumstances of a dramatic intensity that few other communities experienced on such a scale.

The great communities — Rome, Venezia, Livorno, Ferrara, Mantova, Ancona, Firenze, and the cities of Piedmont — each knew distinct fates. The ghetto of Venezia, established in 1516, lent its very name to the segregating institution that subsequently spread across the peninsula. Livorno, by contrast, welcomed through the Leggi Livornine a flourishing and relatively protected community, a major pole of Sephardic Judaism in the Mediterranean [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Leghorn"; Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia]. It is within this communal mosaic — without it being possible to designate with certainty its precise seat — that the existence of the Jenda family unfolds.

The analysis of the name Jenda itself calls for a cautious approach, belonging in part to the realm of the assumed editorial hypothesis. Jewish surnames in Italy follow, according to accepted onomastic classifications, several patterns of formation: toponymic names drawn from a place of origin, patronymics derived from an ancestral first name, occupational names, nicknames, and names transposed from Hebrew or from foreign languages in the course of migrations [Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, 1925; Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Names"].

The spelling Jenda presents a physiognomy that is not typically Italian: the initial J and the ending -a evoke rather the transcription of a name of non-peninsular origin. Several avenues may be formulated on a conjectural basis, without any of them being considered proven.

Jenda could constitute a derived or hypocoristic form of a given name — one thinks of the feminine name Yenta or Jentl (itself derived from the Old French gentille, "noble, of good birth"), widespread in the Yiddish-speaking world and attested in patronymic variants [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Names"]. If this avenue is correct, the surname Jenda would have originated with a woman — a remarkable ancestress whose given name was so prominent in communal memory that it transformed into a lineage name. This matrilineal formation, rare but attested in Jewish onomastic repertories, would constitute in itself a precious clue about the social organization of the family of origin, and perhaps about the weight of a feminine personality in the transmission of identity.

Another hypothesis would link the name to a Central European root: Jenda is in Czech a common diminutive of the given name Jan, and Jewish families of Bohemia or Moravia bore patronymics derived from local given names, notably at the time of the Napoleonic decrees fixing family surnames at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This avenue would open a line of inquiry toward the Jewish communities of the lands of the Bohemian Crown. Both hypotheses remain strictly conjectural and cannot be put forward as established [Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, 1925; Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Names"].

What onomastics teaches us, beyond conjecture, touches on something essential in the Jewish tradition: a name is never an accident. In Hebrew thought, the shem — the name — carries identity, ancestors, a possible destiny. Jewish families do not abandon their names; they transmit them. And this transmission — whether it concerns a patronymic derived from an ancestress, a lost city, or a foreign given name converted into an inheritance — is an act of memorial piety. That the Jenda family bore its name through the vicissitudes of Italian history is, in this sense, already a form of humility and fidelity: to preserve a modest, non-aristocratic, non-illustrious name is to accept being only what one is — a family among the families of Israel.

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Whatever its locality of residence, a Jewish Italian family bearing a name such as Jenda lived under the legal and social regime specific to the Jews of the peninsula. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, most communities were confined to ghettos, following the bull Cum nimis absurdum issued by Paul IV in 1555, which established the ghetto of Rome and imposed heavy restrictions [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Italy"; "Ghetto"]. Jews were then subject to constraints regarding dress, profession, and residence, excluded from many trades and often confined to moneylending, the secondhand clothing trade, and a few tolerated activities [Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia].

It is precisely within this framework of constraint that the dimension of halakha — Jewish Law as a discipline of life — reveals its deepest significance. Far from being merely a system of ritual prescriptions, halakha constituted for the Jews of the ghetto the very armature of their daily existence: it governed commercial contracts, relations with non-Jews, obligations of mutual assistance, dietary practices, and the cycles of the Sabbath and festivals that gave rhythm to a life which surrounding society sought to constrain or erase. To observe halakha in the ghetto was to maintain an inner dignity where outward dignity was denied; it was to inhabit, even within the cramped space of a lane closed off by gates, a just and meaningful order of the world. For the Jenda family, as for its neighbors of ordinary condition, halakha was not an additional burden: it was the framework of meaning within which life had a form and a direction [Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia; Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy].

Communal life was organized around the Università degli Ebrei, the administrative and fiscal institution specific to each city, and around the synagogue, the bet midrash, and the mutual aid confraternities (ḥevrot). These structures ensured the recording of births, marriages, and deaths, religious instruction, assistance to the poor and the sick, and the management of cemeteries. Yet these institutions all rested upon a principle that the tradition calls tsedaqah — justice-charity, an obligation not optional but commanded. The confraternities — known as ḥevra qadisha for the accompaniment of the dying and the dead, ḥevrat biqur ḥolim for visiting the sick, ḥevrat gemilut ḥasadim for interest-free loans to those in need — formed a network of care extended to the other of remarkable institutional sophistication. An ordinary family of the community, such as the Jenda, necessarily participated in this network: by contributing to it as donors, by drawing upon it as beneficiaries, or by serving within it as volunteer administrators [Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia; Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Charity"].

It is precisely the keeping of these communal registers that makes it possible, when they have been preserved, to recover the nominal traces of families. But beyond their archival value, these institutions speak to something in the conception of community that Judaism elaborated: not a collection of individuals, but a solidary body in which no one is left alone before suffering, illness, or death. This involvement in collective life was not a moral option for a Jewish Italian family of the Ancien Régime: it was the very condition of its survival and its dignity.

Emancipation, which came about in stages during the nineteenth century in the wake of the French Revolution and the Risorgimento, radically transformed these conditions. With Italian unification and the recognition of civil equality for Jews, families were able to leave the ghettos, gain access to all professions, and participate fully in national life. It is this accomplished integration that characterizes the generation contemporary with Schaerf's publication in 1925 [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Italy"; Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia]. And this integration, as we now know, was experienced by the great majority of Italian Jews not as an abandonment of their identity, but as an extension of their participation in the world: italians of the Mosaic persuasion, according to the established formula, full citizens and Jews without renunciation.

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If the Jenda family belongs, as the absence of its name from Schaerf's noble appendices suggests, to the ordinary condition of the Italian Jewish people, its probable economic history traces a familiar arc: the activities tolerated under the Ancien Régime, followed by a gradual expansion toward the liberal professions and trade after emancipation.

Before 1848, the Jews of Italy — depending on the city and the era — were engaged primarily in the trade of cloth and secondhand goods, banking and pawnbroking, and a few permitted artisan crafts. The secondhand trade, often scorned by outside observers, was in reality an extraordinary school of market knowledge, object appraisal, and engagement with a diverse clientele. Economic historians have noted that the constraints imposed on Jews led them, paradoxically, to develop skills in negotiation, adaptation, and reading of economic contexts that other groups would not acquire until much later [Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia; Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy]. In this sense, the economic activity of the Jenda family, within the limits its condition imposed, partook of a form of practical intelligence that is also a value: the capacity to create, within assigned margins, the conditions for a dignified existence.

Learning deserves particular mention. In Judaism, study is a commandment — talmud Torah — that cannot be confined to a clerical elite: every father has the obligation to teach his sons, every community that of maintaining a school. The bet midrash, the house of study, was the intellectual counterpart of the synagogue, and the great Italian yeshivot — in Rome, in Mantua, in Venice — trained generations of readers of the Talmud and rabbinic literature [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Italy"; Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy]. Italian Jews were also distinguished by a particular openness to the culture of the Renaissance and humanism: Jewish physicians, philosophers, poets, and astronomers contributed actively to the intellectual life of Italian courts and universities. This tradition of dialogue between talmudic learning and secular knowledge — between Torah and madda — is one of the distinctive hallmarks of Italian Judaism. Whether an ordinary family such as the Jenda participated in this tradition cannot be established with precision; but that they were formed within this ethos is probable, for it was the very ethos of the community in which they lived.

Emancipation then opened the universities, the legal, medical, and military professions. Dozens of Italian Jewish families, previously of modest condition, produced in one or two generations lawyers, physicians, officers, and professors. This movement of ascent through learning — always valued in the tradition, now freed from its legal constraints — is one of the great transformations the nineteenth century brought to the Judaism of the peninsula [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Italy"]. For the Jenda lineage, whose attestation in the 1925 directory means it still existed as an identified Jewish family at that date, this probable journey of elevation through learning and work belongs to the narrative that can be reasonably sketched — without inventing it.

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The genealogical reconstitution of a lineage such as that of the Jenda encounters a major obstacle: the dispersion and partial loss of Italian Jewish archives. Where family tradition might preserve an oral memory — origins, trades, migrations, remarkable ancestors — the archive yields only a name in a catalogue. This asymmetry is constitutive of the history of modest Jewish families, who left behind neither noble titles nor private archival collections.

Schaerf's work includes, in certain of its editions, an appendix devoted to the noble Jewish families of Italy; but the name Jenda does not appear to belong to this aristocratic category, which suggests a family of ordinary condition, as was the majority of the Italian Jewish population. Yet this ordinariness deserves to be noted not as a deficiency but as a truth. The great majority of Italian Jews were neither court bankers nor physicians to popes nor celebrated philosophers. They were merchants, artisans, peddlers, clerks, teachers in communal schools. Their virtue lay not in brilliance but in constancy: the constancy of Sabbath observance, of discreet charity, of raising children, of participation in confraternities, of presence in the synagogue. This individual humility — the virtue of one who does good without publicity, without monument — is perhaps the most difficult to document, and yet the most widespread among the Jewish people across the centuries [Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia; Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy].

The Italian Jewish archive suffers moreover from specific gaps rooted in history. The destructions of the Second World War, the dispersals of communities, the deaths without descendants left irreparable voids in communal registers. Names that existed in 1925 could vanish from collective memory in less than a generation. This is one of the reasons why Schaerf's work holds such particular value: it constitutes, for hundreds of families, the last written testimony of their nominal existence before the storm.

The approach of collective memory — reconstituting what can be reconstituted, naming what can be named, transmitting what can be transmitted — is precisely what this work endeavors to accomplish. It belongs to a long Jewish tradition of the memory book, the yizkor-bukh, born in the communities of Eastern Europe ravaged by pogroms and the Shoah, but whose spirit — refusing oblivion, honoring the humble — applies to every human group that has existed, suffered, and created [Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Memorial Books"].

The tragic shadow of the twentieth century weighs upon every Italian Jewish family. The racial laws promulgated in September 1938 stripped Jews of their civil rights with a brutality that many of them — deeply integrated into the nation — had not anticipated. Children were excluded from public schools, adults expelled from public office, the liberal professions closed off, mixed marriages forbidden. This legal violence represented a betrayal all the more painful for coming from a State to which Italian Jews had contributed since the earliest hours of the Risorgimento, serving in its armies, participating in its institutions, inhabiting its culture [Encyclopaedia Judaica, « Italy » ; Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia].

Then came the German occupation in the autumn of 1943, following the armistice and the fall of Mussolini. The SS undertook the systematic hunting down of Italian Jews. More than 8,000 Jews of Italy were deported to Nazi extermination camps, the great majority of whom never returned [Encyclopaedia Judaica, « Italy »]. In this catastrophe, which touched every community on the peninsula, entire families vanished leaving no trace other than their names in communal registers — and sometimes in the lists of Schaerf.

Whether the Jenda lineage directly experienced these persecutions cannot be asserted in the absence of nominative documentation. But the historical context demands that it be mentioned, for it would be morally untenable to recount the history of an Italian Jewish family of the twentieth century without naming the Shoah. The rigour of the historian — to affirm nothing without a source — must not become complicit silence.

What can be said, on the other hand, is that the mere documented existence of the name Jenda in the 1925 directory attests that the lineage passed living through, at that date, more than two millennia of Jewish history on the peninsula — from Roman persecutions to the ghettos of the Counter-Reformation, from the flames of the Inquisition to expulsions and forced conversions. This long-duration survival is itself a fact, and that fact says something about the resilience of being — the capacity to exist, generation after generation, without relinquishing what one is. This is not spectacular heroism, but something more difficult still: the daily tenacity of identity, transmitted from father to son, from mother to daughter, in the quiet observance of domestic rites and communal practices.

The relationship to war, finally, merits mention in the context of the twentieth century. Italian Jews participated in Italy's wars — the war of 1866, the Libyan war, the First World War — with a sincere patriotism that expressed their attachment to the nation that had emancipated them. Thousands of Italian Jews fought and died for the national flag, and their names appear on the war memorials of their communities. This military participation, which contrasts so tragically with the subsequent persecutions of 1938, illustrates the complexity of a relationship to citizenship that the violence of the Fascist State was to shatter in so devastating a fashion [Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia ; Encyclopaedia Judaica, « Italy »].

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At the close of this inquiry, the Jenda lineage proves to be an exemplary case of the documentary condition of Jewish families in Italy: a name solidly attested, a richly known context, yet a genealogy of its own that has remained in shadow. The inscription of the patronym in Samuele Schaerf's register, published in Florence in 1925, constitutes the established foundation of our knowledge; all else belongs to the inscription of this name within the broader fabric of peninsular Jewish history, more than two millennia old [Encyclopaedia Judaica, « Italy »].

The historian's honesty demands acknowledging the limits of this restitution. Where the source is absent, we have preferred prudent silence or an avowed hypothesis to invention. The Jenda family remains a slender but authentic thread in the great tapestry of Italian Judaism. And if one must name, at the close of this journey, what this lineage will have expressed above all others — not through some singular exploit of which the archive has kept trace, but through the very inscription of its existence in collective Memory — it is the virtue of faithful continuity: that form of individual humility coupled with involvement in collective life which characterizes families that did not seek to shine but to endure, to transmit, to keep alive within themselves what the community of Israel had taken centuries to build.

This faithful continuity is a virtue that Judaism sometimes names emunat avot — faithfulness to the fathers. It does not make the great figures of history; it makes the peoples who survive. And it is precisely because thousands of families like the Jenda — ordinary, discreet, without monument — maintained this faithfulness generation after generation that Italian Judaism was able to traverse two millennia of presence on the peninsula, from the first Judeo-Roman embassies to the ghettos of the Counter-Reformation, from the Risorgimento emancipation to the trials of the twentieth century. To preserve and transmit this name is to honor that continuity itself [Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, 1925 ; Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia].

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