The Lenghi Family

The most solid anchor point of the Lenghi lineage is its presence in the catalogue compiled by Samuele Schaerf. The work, published under the auspices of the "Israel" publishing house in Florence, constitutes what has rightly been called the principal — if not the sole — instrument for the study of Italian Jewish nomenclature. Schaerf undertakes therein a systematic survey of the surnames borne by Jewish families across the peninsula, a survey whose documentary significance has been confirmed by subsequent scholarship. The original edition has moreover been the subject of an anastatic reprint, a testament to its enduring value: I cognomi degli ebrei in Italia. Con un'appendice su le famiglie nobili ebree in Italia (rist. anast. Firenze, 1925) è un libro di Samuele Schaerf [Schaerf, 1925].

It is nevertheless necessary to approach this source with the critical caution that modern historians require. The authority of the catalogue is not absolute, and recent research has relativised its scope. Thus, secondo lo storico Roberto Bizzocchi, l'elenco di cognomi ebraici catalogati dall'autore non ha un fondamento storico [Bizzocchi, I cognomi degli italiani]. This caveat does not disqualify the inclusion of the name Lenghi in the repertory — it invites us, rather, not to confuse the listing of a surname with proof of an exclusive "Jewishness" or of a singular origin. The same name may be borne by both Jewish and non-Jewish families, and the presence of a cognome in Schaerf's catalogue signals a documented occurrence among the Jews of Italy, not a monopoly.

What can be established with certainty is therefore circumscribed but real: as of 1925, a methodical scholar judged that the name Lenghi merited its place in the great inventory of Jewish surnames of the peninsula. It is from this foundation that any subsequent reconstruction must take its departure [Schaerf, 1925].

To situate Lenghi, one must understand the general mechanisms by which Jewish names were formed in Italy. Specialists distinguish several broad categories: toponymic names, derived from a place; occupational names; nicknames; and patronyms derived from a biblical or Hebrew name. This typology is recalled by the reference genealogical studies, which note that Italian Jewish surnames are distributed among geographical, occupational, and patronymic origins. As the MyHeritage synthesis highlights, Italian Jewish surnames are those carried by people with Jewish ancestry in the territory of Italy, as well as in other territories where Italian Jews have lived [MyHeritage Wiki, Italian Jewish surnames].

The most striking feature of this onomastics is the abundance of toponymic names. One observer has quite rightly summarized the common astonishment at these surnames that are also the names of towns: avendo vissuto la mia infanzia vicino a famiglie ebraiche mi sono sempre chiesto perché avevano nomi sempre uguali a piccole o medie Città o Paesi italiani Volterra, Terracina e così via [Salamone, I cognomi degli Ebrei d'Italia]. This phenomenon finds its historical explanation in the fixing of surnames at the time of confinement in the ghettos: quando furono istituiti i primi ghetti (Roma, V...), the administration and the community consolidated designations often drawn from the place of origin of displaced families [Salamone].

The work of Schaerf is specifically cited as the seminal study on this question. Italian genealogy makes it one of its starting points, distinguishing between Toponymics = derived from the name of a place. Occupational = derived from a profession. Nicknames = derived from some feature of an ancestor. Foundlings = chosen by the person declaring the birth or by law, and presenting a seminal study, Samuele Schaerf's "I cognomi degli ebrei in Italia", published in Florence [Italyheritage, Italian surnames]. It is within this interpretive framework that one must attempt to read the name Lenghi.

In the absence of an explicit etymological note in the consulted sources, the precise origin of the surname Lenghi falls here within the realm of reasoned hypothesis, which must be acknowledged as such. Several avenues merit consideration, each consistent with the onomastic mechanisms established in the preceding chapter.

The first avenue, and perhaps the most natural for an Italian Jewish surname, is toponymic. Many surnames on the peninsula derive from a microtoponym — a village, a hamlet, a locality — whose trace has sometimes vanished from modern maps. Lenghi could thus refer to a place of origin of a family branch, following the general model that research has established for Jews displaced during the ghetto era [Salamone]. This hypothesis remains conjectural in the absence of a clearly identified toponym.

The second avenue is morphological: the ending in -i is, in Italian, the typical marker of the patronymic plural, designating "those of the house of Lengo / Lenghi." This structure recurs in a multitude of Italian names, Jewish or otherwise, and suggests that Lenghi derives from a personal name or a founding sobriquet. Here again, the mechanism is generally documented, but its application to this particular name remains an editorial deduction.

The third avenue, more cautious, consists in acknowledging the plurality of possible origins. Historians emphasize that one and the same cognome may encompass families of different extractions — italqim, Sephardic, Ashkenazic — and that life in the ghetto sometimes homogenized distinct trajectories. The observation that una donna di origine sefardita poteva avere benissimo un cognome ebraico romano illustrates this fluidity of onomastic affiliations [Calipso, La storia del cognome]. For Lenghi, intellectual honesty demands that these hypotheses be held open rather than arbitrarily resolved.

Whatever the exact origin of the name, the Lenghi family lived and perpetuated itself within the singular world of Italian Judaism. This world is characterized by its antiquity, the diversity of its rites, and its dispersal across urban communities spread from Piedmont to Sicily, from Venice to Rome. The Jews of Italy do not form a homogeneous bloc: they are subdivided into several liturgical traditions — the Italian rite proper, the Ashkenaze rite imported from north of the Alps, the Séfarade rite of the Iberian exiles, and the Levantine usages.

The geographical horizon of these families extends, moreover, beyond the current borders of the peninsula. The Italian diaspora spread, through commerce and exile, to the eastern margins of the Mediterranean. It is thus recalled that Italian Jews have lived in other territories where Italian Jews have lived, from the Ionian and Dodecanese Islands and the city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) in Greece, which includes the islands of Corfu (Kerkyra) and Rhodes, as well as Turkey and Israel [MyHeritage Wiki]. A family such as the Lenghi may well have, through the great Mediterranean movements, known ramifications in these distant hearths, without the available archive permitting us to trace that thread.

The decisive episode of this collective history remains the institution of the ghettos from the sixteenth century onward. It was there, in the confined space of the enclosed street, that surnames were lastingly fixed, that communal solidarities were structured, and that family memory was forged. The founding moment of Italian Jewish nomenclature coincides with quando furono istituiti i primi ghetti (Roma, V...) [Salamone]. It is in this crucible that the Lenghi lineage most likely took the stable form under which Schaerf would record it three centuries later [Schaerf, 1925].

The Italian Jewish name is not merely an object of scholarly curiosity: it has been, in recent history, an identity marker with tragic consequences. Popular culture long sustained the idea that one could "recognize" a Jew by his name, an idea whose fragility has been demonstrated but whose deadly power was real under fascism and the Occupation.

A striking image condenses this Memory. Commentators on the work of Schaerf recall the scene from a film by Luigi Comencini in which a German soldier examines the papers of a young woman whose name evokes an Italian city: una scena toccante del film di Luigi Comencini "Tutti a casa" (1960), ambientato dopo l'8 settembre 1943, mostra un soldato tedesco che esamina sospettoso i documenti dell'ebrea Silvia Modena, con i compagni della ragazza che cercano di proteggerla fingendo di ignorare l'esistenza di una città con quel nome [Startmag, I cognomi degli ebrei italiani]. This scene says everything about the danger that bearing an identifiable surname represented for Jewish families in Italy — and about the saving ambiguity that a name not immediately "readable" as Jewish could, conversely, provide.

For the Lenghi, who do not figure among the obvious toponyms of the type Modena, Volterra, or Terracina, this relative onomastic discretion may have constituted, depending on the era, a protection as much as a genealogical enigma. The Memory transmitted in such families often bears the trace of this double condition: the openly assumed belonging to the community and the caution imposed by surrounding hostility. This chapter belongs as much to transmitted narrative as to established History, and it is at their intersection that it takes on its full meaning.

The survival of a surname across the centuries is in itself a remarkable historical fact. That the name Lenghi should have traversed the upheavals of Italian Jewish history — the emancipation of the ghettos in the nineteenth century, integration into unified Italy, the persecutions of the twentieth century, the recompositions of the post-war period — to appear in the 1925 register and beyond, testifies to a continuity of lineage.

This permanence is part of the broader movement of preservation of Italian Jewish cognomi, whose documentary value has been recognized precisely because they make it possible to trace filiations over the long term. The very reissue of Schaerf's work, in the form of an anastatic reprint available from specialist booksellers, shows that interest in this nomenclature has never been extinguished [Schaerf, rist. anast., IBS]. Each consultation of the catalogue revives the Memory of the families listed therein, and Lenghi benefits from this in equal measure to the others.

It is probable, though it cannot be stated with documentary certainty for this particular lineage, that the bearers of the name dispersed in the course of emancipation and modern migrations, toward the great Italian cities, and subsequently at times toward France, the Americas, or Israel, following the classic routes of the Italian diaspora. The transmission of the name, under these conditions, becomes the tenuous yet tenacious thread connecting the present to the attestation of 1925 [Schaerf, 1925].

The Lenghi lineage can be understood as a Jewish family from Italy whose most certain trace is its mention in the onomastic register of Samuele Schaerf. Around this fixed point unfolds a constellation of honestly acknowledged hypotheses: a probably toponymic or patronymic origin, rootedness in the world of the Italian ghettos, membership in the mosaic of rites of the peninsula, and survival through the ordeals of the twentieth century.

What this book establishes firmly, it establishes through lexicography and the general history of the Jews of Italy. What it conjectures, it marks as conjecture. This discipline of doubt is the most fitting tribute one can pay to a family whose archive has bequeathed us little, save this name — Lenghi — carried across the centuries within one of the oldest diasporas of the Jewish world. To honor this name is to acknowledge at once the portion of knowledge and the portion of irreducible mystery that constitute all family memory [Schaerf, 1925 ; MyHeritage Wiki].