The Kaminka Family

The study of Jewish surnames constitutes an indispensable auxiliary science to genealogy, and the case of Kaminka offers a clear illustration. The repertoire of Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, remains the reference source for the identification of Jewish family names present in the peninsula during the first third of the 20th century [Schaerf, 1925]. The inscription of the name Kaminka in this catalogue establishes an incontestable fact: at that date, bearers of this name were part of the Italian Jewish landscape.

The meaning of the name falls within Slavic toponymy. The root kamień ("stone") generates a family of diminutives — kamionka, kaminka — designating small localities built on stony ground or near a quarry. This type of patronymic formation is characteristic of Ashkenaze onomastics as it became established between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, when the imperial administrations — Austrian, Russian, Prussian — imposed upon Jews the adoption of hereditary family names. Many then chose the name of their town of origin, transforming a geography into an identity.

In this apparently arid dimension of onomastics, one can already discern a virtue that Jewish tradition has held in high esteem: the relationship to place and to the Memory of one's origins. To bear the name of a village is to perpetuate its memory long after having left it — a humble form of fidelity, in which the patronym becomes a monument. The Italian peninsula, a land of welcome for diverse communities since Roman Antiquity, offered precisely the setting for these encounters between traditions — indigenous italkim, Séfarades driven from Iberia, Ashkénazes come from the North and East [Bonfil, 1994]. The name Kaminka bears witness, by its very morphology alone, to this circulation of peoples and memories.

How could a family with an East Slavic name have become inscribed in the register of the Jews of Italy? The answer lies in the long history of Ashkenaze communities on the peninsula. From the fourteenth century, and especially the fifteenth, Jews from Germanic lands and, later, from Poland settled in the cities of northern Italy, founding lending banks, synagogues of the ashkenazi rite, and Talmudic academies. Robert Bonfil has shown how greatly Jewish life in the Italian Renaissance constituted a space of cross-fertilization, where the ritual and intellectual traditions of the various diasporas coexisted and engaged in dialogue within a single city [Bonfil, 1994].

It is in this context that one must in all likelihood situate the arrival — whether ancient or more recent — of a Kaminka family in Italy. The cities of Veneto and Emilia — Venice, Padua, Ferrara — were home to significant Ashkenaze nazioni, endowed with their own charitable and religious institutions. Involvement in collective life was a duty: each nazione maintained its benevolent confraternities (ḥevrot), its alms funds, its societies for accompanying the sick and the dead. A Jewish family integrated into such a community necessarily participated, through dues and service, in this fabric of solidarity — a concrete expression of tsedaqah, the justice-charity which, in Jewish thought, is not supererogatory but obligatory.

Italy was also a land of intellectual production and manuscript beauty. The Hebrew workshops of the peninsula produced, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, some of the most sumptuous illuminated manuscripts of the entire Jewish world [Tamani, 2010]. While no manuscript can be attributed to the Kaminka family itself, it is worth recalling that belonging to this world meant immersion in a culture of the book and of knowledge — respect for the text, transmission of the Law, the love of study (talmud Torah): values that structured the existence of every learned Jewish family on the peninsula.

The history of a surname is never confined to a single territory. The Jewish Mediterranean world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was traversed by constant flows between its shores: Livourne, a Tuscan free port, became the hub of a merchant diaspora linking Italy to North Africa, Amsterdam, and the Orient [Lévy, 1999]. The Nation juive portugaise of Livourne, in particular, maintained colonies and business relationships with Tunis, where many Italian families — the Grana — settled [Lévy, 1996].

It would be rash to claim that the Kaminka family followed precisely this route; sources are lacking here, and we enter the realm of hypothesis. But the history of North African communities shows how thoroughly lineages circulated from one shore to the other. The rabbinical archives of Algerian communities — Tlemcen, Sidi Bel Abbès — preserve traces of families from multiple horizons, including Italian ones, integrated into the local fabric through marriage, commerce, and study [Botbol, 2000] [Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès]. These communities, where Sephardic and Ashkenazic rites intermingled, offer a model of what the integration of a family bearing an Eastern name and coming from Italy or the North may have looked like.

What, in this movement, belongs to the realm of virtue is the relationship with the stranger and reciprocal hospitality. Jewish tradition makes the welcoming of the ger, of one who comes from elsewhere, a repeated commandment: "you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." A family that migrates is by turns welcomed and welcoming; it experiences in its very flesh the condition of the exile and, by that very fact, learns the duty of hospitality. The Kaminka diaspora, whose name bears the imprint of a place left behind and whose trace is found in a land of adoption, embodies this founding dialectic of exile and welcome.

The name Kaminka resonates, in the memory of modern Judaism, in a way that Italian onomastics alone cannot exhaust. It evokes a tradition of erudition which, without being attributable with certainty to the Italian family of Schaerf, illuminates what the name may have represented in the Jewish imagination: that of a lineage of scholars. The Jews of Eastern Europe bearing this patronym counted, in the modern era, figures devoted to study — rabbis, philologists, men of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, that science of Judaism which, in the nineteenth century, applied critical methods to the rabbinical heritage.

Whether or not this erudition belongs, by blood, to the Italian family, it belongs to the name and to its collective memory. Now, attachment to Talmudic learning and to Jewish thought constitutes one of the cardinal virtues that tradition has carried through the centuries. Léon Askénazi recalled that Jewish fidelity is expressed first and foremost in the transmission of the spoken and written word, in the living maintenance of dialogue between generations around the text [Askénazi, 1999]. Armand Abécassis, likewise, has shown how deeply Jewish thought is born of a movement — "from the desert to desire" — in which study is inseparable from ethical aspiration [Abécassis, 1987].

Medieval and modern Jewish philosophy, as reconstructed by Colette Sirat from manuscripts [Sirat, 1983] and by Maurice-Ruben Hayoun in his syntheses [Hayoun, 2023], forms the intellectual backdrop against which every family of scholars must be understood. The virtue carried here by the memory of the name Kaminka is that of the humility of study: not knowledge as power, but knowledge as service — to comment, to transmit, to correct, to render the text accessible to the next generation. This is one of the highest expressions of the Talmudic ideal, in which the master does not possess the Torah but receives it and passes it on.

The 20th century was, for Jewish families in Italy as in Eastern Europe, a time of extreme ordeal. The ancient and deeply rooted Italian Jewish community suffered, from 1938 onward, the fascist racial laws, and then, after 1943, deportations. Families bearing names of Eastern origin, as well as those of Italian origin, were struck without distinction. The duty of Memory with regard to these broken destinies has been carried, in France as in Italy, by pedagogical and documentary endeavors such as that of Dominique Natanson, who worked to preserve Jewish memory and to inscribe it in the education of new generations [Natanson, 1997].

It is here that the approach of this book meets its deepest necessity. To seek the trace of a rare name — Kaminka —, to attest its presence through a catalogue, to interrogate its origin and its migrations, is to accomplish an act of zakhor, of active Memory, against erasure. Yerushalmi masterfully distinguished Jewish memory, liturgical and collective, from modern critical History [Yerushalmi, 1984]; the present work attempts to bring the two into dialogue: the rare archival item (the Schaerf repertory) and the memory of the name.

The virtue expressed here is no longer that of the individuals of the lineage, of whom the sources tell us little, but that of the community which remembers. To restore a name to History, to refuse that it disappear into the anonymity of destroyed lists, is to honor the principle according to which every life and every name possesses an infinite value. In this, the humble patronym Kaminka partakes of a wider struggle: that of the memory of Israel against oblivion.

At the end of this journey, what do we know with certainty about the Kaminka family? Very little, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise: a name, an attestation in Samuele Schaerf's directory [Schaerf, 1925], a Slavic morphology that reveals an Eastern toponymic origin, and an Italian anchorage that bears witness to the great circulations of the diaspora. The rest — the Mediterranean routes, the communal insertions, the erudition attached to the name — belongs to reasoned hypothesis and to the dialogue between the archive and memory.

Yet this very scarcity of sources traces, in relief, what the lineage will have expressed above all others. A name formed on that of a place left behind, carried from Eastern Europe to Italy and perhaps beyond, is by its very nature the name of a faithful traveler: one who migrates without forgetting where he comes from, who inserts himself into new communities without renouncing himself, who makes of exile not a loss but a transmission. The defining virtue of this lineage is therefore that of memory of origin in exile — that distinctly Jewish capacity to carry one's place as a name, to make of remembrance an identity, and of mutual welcome an ethic. In this, the Kaminka family embodies, in its discreet measure, the vocation of all Israel: to remain oneself while in motion, to remember in order to transmit, and to transmit in order not to disappear [Yerushalmi, 1984]. The learning and the humility of study, bound to the memory of the name, are its natural extension: for to remember one's origin, among Jews, is always also to return to the study of the text that founds it.