The Levy (Érythrée) Family

The surname Levy is, together with Cohen, one of the oldest and most widespread in the Jewish diaspora, as it refers not to a place or a trade but to an ancient tribal belonging, that of the Levites. Among the Sephardim, it underwent variants — Levi, Halevi, de Leon in certain branches — and appears from the Middle Ages in the great communities of Castile, Aragon and Portugal. As research into Sephardic genealogy has shown, these families bearing the name of a sacerdotal function long maintained an awareness of a ritual continuity, transmitted independently of geographical ruptures [Avigdor Levy, 2012].

The expulsion of 1492, then that of Portugal in 1497, sent these families out onto the roads of the Mediterranean. A significant portion found refuge in Italian ports, and especially in Livorno, whose Leggi Livornine from the late sixteenth century offered "merchants of all nations" — and notably Sephardic Jews — guarantees of residence and commerce of exceptional liberality for the time. Livorno thus became one of the capitals of the western Sephardic diaspora, a hub of trade that linked the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean [Trivellato, 2009]. It was there, in this "familiarity of strangers" that made the strength of Sephardic commerce, that the social type was forged from which the Levy of Eritrea likely descended: that of the Italian-speaking Jewish merchant, anchored in a network of kinship and transMediterranean trust.

From this matrix, the lineage inherited a virtue that the Jewish tradition holds highest: emunah, faithfulness — in the sense at once of faith and of reliability in business. Sephardic commerce rested less on the written contract than on the given word and the honor of the name, and this ethic of mercantile loyalty was, for these families deprived of a State, a concrete way of embodying the commutative justice that halakha surrounds with meticulous prescriptions. The merchant who kept his word from Alexandria to Amsterdam prolonged, in his measure, the Talmudic requirement of honest commerce. The double diaspora — Iberian then Italian — was therefore not merely an uprooting: it was, in the elegant formulation of historians of Sephardic culture, a way of making exile a space of creation and faithfulness [Wacks, 2015] [Raz-Krakotzkin, 1993].

The nineteenth century reshuffled the cards of the diaspora. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the Red Sea, until then a secondary route, into a major artery of global commerce. The ports of Aden, Djeddah, Massawa and Hodeida became essential relay points, and Jewish merchants — Adenites, Yemenites, but also Italians and Livornese Sephardim — settled there to conduct business in coffee, hides, ivory, mother-of-pearl and textiles. It was in this context that Italian-speaking Jewish families, including the Levy, moved up the Red Sea toward the Horn of Africa.

The link between the Mediterranean Sephardic world and these eastern trading posts is not a gratuitous hypothesis: the resettlement patterns studied by historians show that the diaspora after 1492 never ceased to reconstitute itself, following commercial opportunities and the protections offered by [Hacker, 2001] [García-Arenal, 2014] powers. The Livornese Sephardi, a Tuscan then Italian subject, possessed a precious asset in late-century Africa: the nationality of an expanding European power. When Italy established its presence in Massawa in 1885 and then founded the colony of Eritrea in 1890, these merchants already present on the coast found themselves naturally associated with the colonial enterprise, not as conquerors but as commercial intermediaries, brokers and importers.

One must measure the ambiguity of this moment without concealing it. The presence of the Levy in Eritrea is part of a colonization of which the historian cannot speak in praise. But it also illustrates a constant of the Jewish diasporic condition: that of the intermediary people, neither quite of the host country nor quite foreign, bearing on their shoulders commerce and translation between worlds. This exposed position required a discreet but essential virtue — the capacity to live among the other without renouncing oneself, to honor the host while keeping one's law. The relationship to the stranger, which the Torah established as a repeated commandment — "you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" — turned back upon itself here: the Jew was the welcomed stranger, bound to merit his hospitality through integrity.

It was in Asmara, capital of Italian Eritrea perched at more than 2,300 meters altitude, that the lineage found its most durable anchorage point. From the years 1900-1910 onwards, a Jewish community organized itself there, composed of families from Aden, Yemen, Egypt, North Africa and Italy. It always remained modest in number, but fervent and structured. In the 1950s, the Jewish community of Asmara numbered some 500 members. This community equipped itself with a synagogue and a cemetery, institutions through which a diaspora, however small, affirms its permanence and its refusal of oblivion.

The name of Levy figures, according to family tradition transmitted, among the active centers of this community — merchants, importers, craftsmen of textiles and food, sometimes notables engaged in the administration of the synagogue and the maintenance of the cemetery. Here we touch upon what Jewish life has that is most concrete: the kehila, the community, as a structure of solidarity. A community of this size could not survive without an intense practice of mutual aid — the tsedaka, this charity which, in Jewish thought, is not optional almsgiving but justice owed. Ensuring the minyan of Shabbat, maintaining a ritual bath, guaranteeing a proper burial, assisting the impoverished newcomers who had descended from the boats of Massaoua: these are the ordinary gestures, borne by families like the Levy, that held together the small Jerusalem of the highlands.

The destiny of this community was subsequently one of slow effacement, not by violence but by dispersion. Today, emigration, deaths and the end of community life have reduced the Jewish presence to almost nothing, and it is diplomats in transit or United Nations officials who sometimes participate in a service in the synagogue. The extreme care that the last members, and exiled descendants, took to preserve the synagogue and cemetery of Asmara — those places one does not abandon even when one leaves — speaks to a profound virtue: fidelity to the dead and to Memory, the refusal to let the name of those who were fade away. It is zakhor, the imperative of remembrance, that commands Israel to let nothing fall into oblivion.

What do we know, precisely, about the Levy of Asmara? Here the historian must acknowledge the limits of his knowledge: the archives of a community so small, in a country that experienced war, federation with Ethiopia, annexation, and then a long struggle for independence, are fragmentary. What family tradition transmits must therefore be received as Memory rather than as established History, while engaging with what we know from elsewhere about the sociology of Italo-Eritrean Jews.

According to transmitted accounts, the Levy were first a merchant family, extending the ancestral trade inherited from Livorno: importation of textiles, fine groceries, European manufactured goods, resold in the markets of Asmara, Massawa, and the hinterland. This economic activity, far from being a mere pursuit of profit, embodies a value that Jewish tradition fully recognizes: honest work as a form of dignity and as service rendered to the city. The merchant who supplies, who extends credit, who links producers to consumers, participates in his own way in tikkoun, in the ordinary repair of the world through concrete usefulness.

Tradition also reports — and here we follow the thread of Memory, not of archive — the family's attachment to religious observance and transmission. In a community without a great seminary or talmudic academy, piety was lived at home and in the synagogue: teaching Hebrew to children, the Sabbath table, observance of festivals according to the Sephardic rite. This domestic piety, humble and without doctrinal brilliance, was perhaps the most authentic contribution of the lineage to Jewish life: not the learned work of a master, but the stubborn fidelity of ordinary people who, at the edges of Africa, refused to let the Law die. There is a form of humility — this anavah that tradition holds to be the crown of virtues — which consists in serving without distinction, in holding one's place in the rank of the levites of song rather than at the summit of honors.

The second half of the twentieth century sounded the death knell of the Jewish presence in Eritrea. The annexation to Ethiopia in 1952, followed by growing instability and the war of independence that engulfed the country from the 1960s onward, drove the small community into exile. The Italo-Eritrean families, including the Levy, retreated primarily toward two poles: Italy, and notably Milan, where a dynamic Jewish community existed and where ties of nationality and language facilitated resettlement; and Israel, where Tel-Aviv welcomed some of the descendants in the great movement of gathering the exiles.

This dual destination is significant. Milan represented a return to the Italian and Sephardic matrix from which the family derived — the closing of a circle opened in Livorno three centuries earlier. Tel-Aviv embodied the fulfillment of the millennial hope of return to Zion, the shivat Tsion. The lineage thus realized, in a single generation, what the diaspora had carried as a fertile tension since 1492: fidelity to a cultivated heritage of dispersion and aspiration toward a recentering [Kaplan, 2000] [Méchoulan, 1992]. The journey of the Levy illustrates on a small scale what Béatrice Leroy called the Sephardic adventure — this capacity to make of each exile not an end but a recommencement [Leroy, 1986] [d'Oliveira Martins, 2015].

Exile carried its share of mourning: houses left behind, graves abandoned, community dissolved. But it also bore a virtue, that of the quiet courage to begin again. The descendants who, in Milan or in Tel-Aviv, rebuilt a life, opened businesses, educated their children in the double consciousness of Italy and East Africa, transmitted a rare and precious identity: that of Italian-speaking Jews born on the shores of the Red Sea, living memory of an engulfed world.

What remains today of the Jewish presence in Eritrea amounts to very little: a preserved synagogue, a maintained cemetery, a few families scattered throughout the world who keep the memory of the place. This near-disappearance confers upon the descendants a particular responsibility — that of witnesses. By recording the names, the professions, the rites, the graves, they fulfill the cardinal duty of zakhor, remembrance, which makes memory a religious obligation as much as a historical one.

The history of the Levy family of Eritrea dialogues here with the whole of Sephardic history, which the finest historians have shown was less a long lament of exile than an extraordinary capacity for resilience and recomposition [Benbassa, 1993] [Hacker, 2001]. The small community of Asmara, born of the encounter between Sephardic commerce, Adeni migration and Italian colonization, was one of the last flowerings of this inventive diaspora — a community which, to the very end, maintained the table, the synagogue and the cemetery, these three pillars of Jewish permanence.

It is fitting, as an honest historian, not to idealize. This community lived within the framework of a colonial order from which it benefited; it knew its internal tensions, its inequalities, and history has not preserved for us a figure of sanctity or of talmudic genius whom we might make into a legendary hero. The grandeur of the Levy family of Eritrea is not that of the great names of Jewish thought: it is that, more modest and perhaps more moving, of a family which, at the margins of the map, held its place as Levite — guardian of the threshold, of song and of remembrance.

At the end of this journey, from Livorno to Asmara, from Asmara to Milan and Tel-Aviv, a figure emerges: that of a lineage of service, faithful to the etymology of its name. The Levy of Eritrea left behind neither treatises on halakha nor philosophical works; they did not govern famous communities. Their contribution was of another order, and it is the one this book has sought to name above all others: faithfulness — faithfulness to the word given in Sephardic commerce, faithfulness to the Law maintained at the edges of Africa, faithfulness to the dead and to the memory of a place that one does not disown even in leaving it.

This faithfulness, Jewish tradition calls emunah, and it unfolds in several virtues that the lineage will have expressed most fully: the loyalty of the honest merchant, a form of justice; communal mutual aid, a form of tsedaka; domestic piety and the humble transmission of Hebrew and ritual, forms of anavah and love of the Law; and above all the zakhor, the duty of remembrance, which makes the descendants of Asmara the guardians of a vanished world. In this, the singular destiny of this family joins the collective memory of Israel: for what the Jewish people carried through its dispersions was not first and foremost power or glory, but the stubborn capacity to remain oneself in foreign lands, and to let nothing fall into oblivion. The Levy of Eritrea, a small tribe of Levites at the gates of the Red Sea, were, in their measure, its faithful witnesses.