The Loevinson Family

The History of Jewish Names

The history of Jewish names is a history of the laws that imposed them. In Central Europe, the obligation to bear a fixed and heritable surname was decreed by modern States — Joseph II's edict in 1787 for the Habsburg lands, Prussian measures in the first decades of the nineteenth century — in the dual movement of emancipation and administrative control that accompanied the entry of Jews into citizenship. It is from this crucible that names in Löw-, Löwen-, Löwin- emerged, formed on the leonine image, one of the most fertile in Ashkenazi onomastics because it unites a German linguistic reality with a biblical symbol.

The lion of Judah is not an ornament: it is the blazon of a tribe and the emblem of a messianic hope. In adopting, even by way of a detour through a German name, the figure of the lion, families of the Löwe stock were prolonging, unknowingly, a long symbolic chain. Jewish tradition has always read its names as bearers of meaning; it is one of the springs of collective Memory that Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi analyzed, for whom the Jewish people constituted itself as a community of remembrance long before thinking of itself as an object of History [Yerushalmi, 1984]. The patronym is, in its humble way, a fragment of this zakhor, this commandment of Memory.

The transcription of the name onto Italian soil — Loevinson rather than Löwinson — is a matter of common graphical italianization: the inflected vowel ö becomes oe, the Germanic w becomes v. Schaerf, in listing side by side Loevinson, Loewinson and neighboring forms, documents precisely this work of adapting a name from the North to the language of the peninsula [Schaerf, 1925]. The catalogue is not a mere register: drawn up in 1925, on the eve of the racial laws of 1938, it became despite itself an instrument which fascism intended to use for its "onomastic ghetto." The history of the name Loevinson is thus, from the outset, caught between two opposed uses of the list: the learned inventory and persecutory filing.

It is important to clarify the family background. Ermanno was the son of Salomone Loevinson and Rosalia Hirschberg — two names that sketch out, by themselves, a universe: Salomone bears the name of the king who built the Temple, a figure of wisdom and justice, while Hirschberg is a toponym of Silesia, a region of passage and mixing of Central European Jews. The mother, Rosalia, whose italianizing first name coexists with the Germanic patronym, perhaps already suggests that dual linguistic and cultural belonging that her son was to carry to its end. These elements, recorded in the deportation registers reconstituted after the war, are the only direct vestiges of that generation [Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, 2015].

To understand the settlement of an Ashkenazi family in the peninsula, one must recall the singularity of Italian Judaism. It is the oldest in Christian Europe: present in Rome since Antiquity, it experienced during the Renaissance an age of intellectual vitality and coexistence, where the Italian rite, the Sephardic rite of Spanish exiles, and the Ashkenazi rite of arrivals from the North intersected. Robert Bonfil showed how Jewish life in Renaissance Italy, far from being mere survival, was a space of creation — cultural, economic, religious — where communities constantly negotiated their place between integration and loyalty [Bonfil, 1994].

This plural Italy knew how to welcome. The illuminated Hebrew manuscripts produced in the peninsula, studied by Giulia Tamani, testify to a refined book culture, where the sacred text adorned itself with the arts of the time without losing any of its dignity [Tamani, 2010]. The coexistence of rites — Italian, Sephardic, Ashkenazi — made Italy a laboratory of intra-Jewish tolerance: communities learned to live together in distinct liturgical traditions, each maintaining its minhag while participating in the same civic community. It was in this tradition of hospitality that a Loevinson from Berlin could find, at the end of the nineteenth century, not an exile, but a second homeland.

For Italian emancipation, completed with unification in 1870 and the opening of the ghettos, had opened to Jews the careers of the State, the university, the administration. The Kingdom of Italy was, until 1938, one of the places in Europe where Jewish integration seemed most accomplished. That the Archivio di Stato of Rome was able to entrust its holdings to an archivist of Jewish origin and foreign birth says enough about this trust, and that this archivist was able, later, to direct the Archivio di Stato of Bologna, says even more: the Republic of learning had its own criteria of merit, distinct from origin.

The virtue here is not merely that of the family: it is that of a society which, for a time, knew how to make a place for the foreigner — that ger whom the Law commands us to respect, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22, 20). Liberal Italy played, for Ermanno Loevinson, this role of a land of welcome in an almost biblical sense; and one cannot reread this hospitality without measuring the abyss of the betrayal of 1938, when the State that had naturalized him designated him in turn as an enemy of race.

The best-documented figure in the lineage is that of Ermanno Loevinson. Born in Berlin on June 3, 1863, in a Jewish family whose father was named Salomone and mother Rosalia Hirschberg, he pursued his studies in the German-speaking university system and obtained his philosophy degree in 1888. It was that very year of his degree that he chose to settle in Italy, in Rome, a decision that definitively redirected his life [Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, 2015 ; i quaderni del chiostro, 2019].

This displacement of a Berlin Jew toward Rome is not anecdotal. It reverses the habitual direction ascribed to Jewish migrations of the nineteenth century, often oriented toward the West and the New World. Loevinson chose Italy, its language, its archives, and he became Italian in culture and service. The naturalization he obtained was the legal condition for his recruitment at the Archivio di Stato of Rome, where he entered as alunno di I categoria — an entry rank in the hierarchy of State archivists, which required both solid university training and demonstrated aptitude for reading ancient documents. To become an archivist is to embrace a profession of patience and self-effacement: to bring order to the memory of the State, to render the documents of others legible, to serve the truth of facts rather than the glory of one's own name.

There is a form of intellectual humility here — a discreet but cardinal virtue, which the Jewish tradition places at the very foundation of transmission: it is by effacing oneself before the text that the master transmits it faithfully. For a man trained in philosophy at the Berlin universities, nourished by Wissenschaft des Judentums, to choose the archives rather than the chair, the document rather than commentary, is an orientation of existence, an ethical choice as much as a professional one.

Ermanno Loevinson's Roman career lasted from 1888 until his appointment, around 1930, as director of the Archivio di Stato of Bologna — a post he held until 1934. These four decades in Rome were ones of profound integration: he collaborated on the Enciclopedia Treccani, a monument of Italian encyclopedic knowledge, and on the Dizionario del Risorgimento coordinated by Michele Rosi for the publisher Vallardi of Milan — two national enterprises to which he contributed, as an archives specialist, his work as a scholar [i quaderni del chiostro, 2019]. Contributing to these collective works was not a trivial act for a naturalized person of foreign origin: it was to affirm, through scholarly work itself, a belonging to national culture.

His private life was also woven in Rome. He married Vally Buetow, born in Berlin on September 8, 1880, daughter of Guglielmo Buetow and Anna Birth — a Berliner like him, who followed him in his Italian life. From this union was born Sigismondo Loevinson, on October 10, 1921, in Berlin, presumably during a family sojourn in Germany. This only son, who was only twenty-two years old in 1943, is the third and last generation of the lineage whose traces are attested [i quaderni del chiostro, 2019 ; Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, 2015].

The work of Ermanno Loevinson illustrates a fertile tension inherent to Jewish modernity: that between memory transmitted from generation to generation and history established by the archive. Yerushalmi made this tension the heart of his reflection: Jewish tradition was first founded on the commandment to remember, not on the ambition to write history in the modern sense; it was only in the contemporary era that the Jewish historian appeared, submitting the past to documentary criticism [Yerushalmi, 1984]. Loevinson belongs fully to this generation of scholars for whom studying Judaism was a way of serving it.

This gesture inscribes itself within a broader movement. Wissenschaft des Judentums, the "science of Judaism" born in Germany in the early nineteenth century, had made historical erudition an instrument of emancipation: to prove, through documents, the antiquity and dignity of Jewish presence was to claim a legitimate place in European nations. A Berliner of Loevinson's generation was its natural heir. By transporting this critical rigor into Roman archives, he brought German scholarly precision into dialogue with Italian historical depth.

His most thoroughly documented scientific work concerns a precise and revealing domain: the economic and legal relations between the Holy See and the Jewish communities of Italy in the modern period. In the Revue des études juives, the most important academic journal of French-language Jewish history, Loevinson published between 1932 and 1933 a vast study in several installments entitled "The Concession of Loan Banks to the Jews by the Popes of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. A Contribution to the History of Italian Finances". The very scope of the publication — four installments spread over two years in an international journal — testifies to the density of archival work accomplished and the novelty of the materials exploited.

The subject chosen was not fortuitous. In studying how the popes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries granted Jews concessions to establish loan banks (banchi di prestito), Loevinson brought to light a reality that historiography had until then left in shadow: the complex coexistence, conflictual yet regulated, between papal power and Jewish communities in the Papal States. He noted himself at the opening of his study that there was still lacking a comprehensive history of the Jews of the Papal States, and that only patient exploration of local monographs and archival holdings would make it possible to fill this void. It was precisely this work he undertook [Revue des études juives, vol. 92, 1932].

This historiographical choice carries an ethical significance. In reconstructing the legal mechanisms by which Jews obtained — and sometimes lost — the right to exercise usury, Loevinson restored to his economic ancestors their full dignity as actors in the financial history of the peninsula. It was not the history of victims, but that of contractors, negotiators, businessmen who dealt with papal legates on a precise legal terrain. Research thus became an act of memorial justice: making visible what official history had silenced. Jewish tradition, which places tzedek — justice — among the fundamental commandments, would recognize in this intellectual gesture the same demand for right as in a rabbinic decision or an act of charity.

Philosophy and the history of Jewish thought have extensively meditated on this passage from received tradition to reflective knowledge. Colette Sirat showed, working from the manuscripts themselves, how medieval Jewish thought had constituted itself as a transmissible and studiable corpus [Sirat, 1983]; Maurice-Ruben Hayoun traced its continuities up to the modern era [Hayoun, 2023]. In this long chain, the archivist occupies a modest but necessary place: he is not the thinker, but he without whom the thinker's texts would be lost. Loevinson's contribution to the memory of Israel was of this order — not speculative, but conservatory and, in the final instance, justificatory.

Beyond these works published in the Revue des études juives, Loevinson produced numerous articles in Italian and German devoted to the Jewish communities of Rome and Italy. These studies, scattered in the learned journals of the first decades of the twentieth century, form a corpus that is only now beginning to be inventoried systematically. Their existence attests that Loevinson did not work on a single subject in a sporadic way: he built, decade after decade, a coherent work as a historian of the Jews of Italy, a work that intended to do for the peninsula what others had done for the communities of Germany or Poland. In choosing Italy as a field of study, he accorded to his country of adoption the same scientific dignity as to his country of origin — a gesture of accomplished integration as much as an intellectual program.

In 1930, Ermanno Loevinson received a nomination that marked recognition of an entire career: he became director of the Archivio di Stato of Bologna, a post he held until 1934 [Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, 2015]. Bologna was then a leading university city, home to an ancient Jewish community and active cultural institutions. For an archivist who had spent four decades in Rome, the move to Bologna represented both a hierarchical promotion and entry into a new network of scholarly relations.

The directorship of an Archivio di Stato is not an honorary post: it is a position that requires managing collections, training staff, responding to researchers, deciding inventory and conservation priorities. During his four years in Bologna, Loevinson was notably involved, in collaboration with medievalist Giorgio Cencetti, in the exploitation of the Carte del secolo XI dell'archivio di S. Giovanni in Monte e S. Vittore [i quaderni del chiostro, 2019] — work in paleography and diplomatics that required precise knowledge of medieval Latin and notarial practices in medieval Italy. This type of work, which has only an indirect bearing on Jewish history, speaks to the breadth of non-communal learning: Loevinson was a complete archivist, not merely a specialist in his own tradition.

It is in Bologna that we can also measure what involvement in collective life meant for a scholar of his generation. Being director of archives in a university city implied a presence in learned societies, in local journals, in the circles where regional culture was shaped. The Deputazione di storia patria per le province di Romagna — the institution that later collaborated in commemorating his memory — testifies to the lasting inscription of his name in local scholarship. Communal involvement, for him, was not confined to the frameworks of Judaism alone: it embraced the city in the broader sense, contributing to the intellectual life of the nation that had welcomed him.

His departure from Bologna in 1934 — the precise term congedo (leave) used by sources suggests an administratively ordered departure rather than a voluntary one [Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, 2015] — occurred in an increasingly dark political context. Fascism had long shown its traits; the first measures of antisemitic discrimination, still tentative, were accelerating. The return to Rome may have been a constrained decision. Perhaps too it was a return to origins, to the city of a lifetime, to the Roman Jewish community that had been his since 1888.

The family's trajectory shifted dramatically with the fascist racial laws of 1938, then with the German occupation of Italy beginning in September 1943. The 1938 laws struck Loevinson hard: he was struck from all the cultural institutions to which he belonged [Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, 2015]. An honored scholar and adopted citizen, he found himself erased from the rolls of the country's intellectual life — the same onomastic eradication by which fascism had turned inventories of the Schaerf type against their subjects. A catalog, depending on how it is used, can honor or condemn.

On October 16, 1943 — a date that the Jewish community of Rome has etched into its collective memory — the great Nazi roundup descended upon the ghetto and the quarters where the city's Jews lived. On that day, Ermanno Loevinson, his wife Vally, and their son Sigismondo were arrested by the Germans at their Roman residence. They were first detained at the Military College of Rome. On October 18, 1943, they boarded the convoy departing for the East. On October 23, 1943, Ermanno and Vally Loevinson were murdered upon their arrival at Auschwitz. Sigismondo, their twenty-two-year-old son, was killed shortly after [i quaderni del chiostro, 2019 ; Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, 2015].

These dates — October 16, 18, 23, 1943 — are facts, not symbols, and it is as facts that they must be read: an arrest, a transit, an industrial death. Ermanno Loevinson had devoted more than fifty years to preserving the memory of others. He died without a grave. His memory became the subject of scholarly work rendered by the very institutions he had served: the work Ermanno Loevinson. Un archivista vittima della Shoah, edited by Salvatore Alongi and Massimo Castoldi, with a name index established by Eleonora Cangemi, appeared in the i quaderni del chiostro series of the Friends of the Archivio di Stato of Bologna in 2019. A commemorative exhibition, organized by Giorgio Marcon and Massimo Giansante and inaugurated on January 25, 2015 at the Archivio di Stato of Bologna, brought together the Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, the Bologna Jewish Community, the Judeo-Christian Friendship Association of Bologna, and the Deputazione di storia patria to restore the archivist to his place in history [Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, 2015].

There is a tragic vertigo in seeing the keeper of archives become himself an archival item. The kaddish that institutions rendered him was not a prayer but an act of scholarship — the only one within their reach, and perhaps the most fitting for a man who had made knowledge his mode of being in the world. The memory of Ermanno Loevinson thus joins the great collective memory of Israel as defined by Yerushalmi: that of a people who, precisely because they were so often erased, made remembrance a sacred duty [Yerushalmi, 1984]. This memory is now engraved in the registers of Yad Vashem, in the catalogs of the Biblioteca Nazionale dell'Ebraismo Italiano "Tullia Zevi," and in the sessions of the Giorno della Memoria where archivists and scholars speak his name so that it is not lost.

Beyond the figure of Ermanno, the surname Loevinson designates a family whose membership in the body of Italian Judaism between the wars is attested by Schaerf [Schaerf, 1925]. The presence of several graphic variants of the name in onomastic repertories — Loevinson, Loewinson, Loevy, Loew — suggests, without it being always possible to establish ties of kinship with certainty, a diversified Germanic root implanted in several cities of the peninsula. Here we must exercise the caution of the historian: homonymy is not kinship, and the catalogue records names, not family trees.

What can be affirmed concerns the framework. The Italian Judaism into which the family was inserted was structured in communities — the comunità — which assured worship, mutual aid, instruction and charity (tzedakah). Membership in such a community was not a private choice but an implication in collective life: contributing to the poor box, supporting schools, honoring the dead. The vitality of these institutions, whose historical depth from the Renaissance Bonfil has demonstrated [Bonfil, 1994], constituted the very fabric into which a family like the Loevinson came to take its place.

The question of transmission is here crucial and painful. Ermanno and Vally had a son, Sigismondo, born in 1921: the third generation, the one that might have ensured continuity. This generation was murdered before it could produce a work, a family, a memory of its own. With Sigismondo the direct branch of the lineage as it is documented was extinguished. The name Loevinson does not disappear from Italian Jewish onomastics — other bearers of the name, attested by Schaerf, were able to survive — but Ermanno's lineage was cut short, without descendants, without an heir to mourn.

This extinction is the most intimate face of destruction: it does not merely eliminate individuals, it eliminates the chain of transmission itself. Yet the chain of transmission is, for the Jewish tradition, one of the cardinal values: through it knowledge passes from generation to generation, father teaches son, collective memory perpetuates itself. In the case of the Loevinson, the Shoah broke this chain in a definitive manner. This is why the work of Memory undertaken by institutions — archives, foundations, scholars — is not a substitute for natural transmission, but its sole possible equivalent in a world after catastrophe.

The History of this Judaism is not reducible to the tragedy of 1943–1945. It is also that of a lasting contribution: to knowledge, through scholars and archivists; to economy and the professions, through an emancipated bourgeoisie; to the life of the city, through sincere Italian patriotism. The Loevinson family, through its most illustrious member, expressed above all the first of these contributions — that of knowledge placed in service of common Memory. It is little, one might say, the life of an archivist; it is much, tradition answers, for one who "saves a single Memory saves a world."

From Berlin to Rome, from Rome to Bologna, and from Bologna to the fatal return to the city that had been her whole life, the Loevinson lineage traces a trajectory that is like a condensed history of Western European Jewry: the emancipation that opens careers and adopted homelands, accomplished integration into learning and state service, the creation of a scientific work on the Jewish communities of Italy, then the collapse of the Shoah that catches up even with the most assimilated. The name, coming from the Lion of Judah by way of German, inscribed in Schaerf's catalogue and then in the memory of the victims, carries within it all this history [Schaerf, 1925].

Ermanno Loevinson was the son of Salomone and Rosalia, husband of Vally, father of Sigismondo. He was also the scholar who exhumed from papal archives the contracts by which the popes granted or denied Jews the right to hold banks, and who published in the great learned journals of his time a major contribution to the history of Jews in the Papal States. He was director of the Archivio di Stato of Bologna, collaborator of the Enciclopedia Treccani, author of numerous articles in Italian and German on the Jewish communities of Rome and Italy. And he died on 23 October 1943 at Auschwitz, with his wife and son, after having been struck from all the institutions he had served.

If one must name, among all others, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed, it is care for memory — that patient and humble form of service that the tradition of Israel places at the heart of its faithfulness. But this care, in Loevinson's case, took on a particular hue: it was a care for justice. In restoring to their true authors the economic acts of Italian Jews, in naming what had been silenced, in ordering the archives so that others could read after him, Loevinson practiced what the tradition calls tzedek — justice rendered to the dead as to the living. His individual life thus joins the collective commandment of zakhor, that duty of remembrance which, according to Yerushalmi, founds the very existence of the Jewish people as a community across the centuries [Yerushalmi, 1984]. The Loevinson family will not have left behind a great speculative work; it will have left something more discreet and more tenacious: the proof that a man can make the preservation of memory at once his profession, his virtue and his destiny — and that his name, precisely because it was threatened with erasure, deserves to be spoken.