The Millul Family

The mandatory starting point for any investigation into the Millul lineage is Samuele Schaerf's work, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, published in Florence in 1925. This work remains the cornerstone of Italian Jewish onomastics: it systematically catalogues family names attested among the communities of the peninsula, endeavouring to indicate their origins and variants. The inscription of the name Millul in this corpus constitutes, to this day, the established fact around which our narrative is organized.

The Jewish onomastics of Italy obeys logics that historical research has well elucidated. Surnames there are of multiple origins: toponymic, when they designate the city or village from which the family originates; professional, when they refer to a trade; patronymic in the strict sense, derived from an ancestor's given name; or else issuing from nicknames and peculiarities. Attilio Milano, in his masterful Storia degli ebrei in Italia, demonstrated how the stabilization of Italian Jewish family names occurred slowly, through the course of displacements, expulsions, and communal recompositions. The name, in this world, is never a mere sign: it is the sediment of a trajectory.

The form Millul, brief and redoubled in its medial consonant, does not allow itself to be connected with certainty to a single etymology. Without supplementary documentation, one cannot determine with assurance between a Hebrew origin, a deformation of a toponym, or a root linked to the Judeo-Italian or Judeo-Arabic vernaculars that Mediterranean diaspora circulated through the peninsula. Prudence here commands us to hold to Schaerf's finding rather than to hazardous reconstructions. This reservation is not a weakness of the narrative: it is, on the contrary, the expression of that requirement of truth — that fidelity to the real that Jewish tradition places at the heart of justice — which forbids attributing to a name a history it does not possess.

To retain a name, to record it, to transmit it: Schaerf's very enterprise participates in a cardinal virtue of Israel, zakhor, the injunction to remember. In saving from oblivion, a few years before the racial laws, the simple fact that a Millul family existed, the Florentine philologist accomplished a gesture whose protective reach the lineage itself may never have fully measured.

To understand what was, or might have been, a Jewish Italian family bearing the name Millul, one must first embrace the exceptional historical depth of Judaism in the peninsula. The Jewish community of Italy is the oldest in the Western diaspora, its presence being continuous since Roman times. Nicola Ferorelli, in his study of the Jews of Southern Italy, traced this continuity from Antiquity to the eighteenth century, revealing a settlement that predates by several centuries that of most European communities.

Attilio Milano synthesized this multisecular history, marked by alternating flourishings and persecutions, dispersions and reconstructions. Italian Judaism never formed a homogeneous bloc: it aggregated, over the centuries, indigenous Italian components (the italkim), Ashkenazim from north of the Alps, and especially, after 1492, Sephardim driven out of Spain and Portugal, as well as Jews from the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. This plurality was one of the riches of peninsular Judaism.

In the age of the Renaissance, whose Jewish life Robert Bonfil has masterfully described, Italian communities experienced intense intellectual and economic activity. Jews practiced moneylending, commerce, medicine, but were also actors in a remarkable intellectual life: Talmudic studies, poetry, philosophy, Hebrew printing. This conjunction of Talmudic learning and openness to secular letters illustrates a virtue that the tradition of Israel has upheld: the alliance of Torah and ḥokhma, of sacred study and knowledge of the world. A family like the Millul, however modest, inscribed itself within this collective horizon where study was not the privilege of an elite but a shared duty.

The great ports, and Livorno foremost among them, offered Jews exceptional conditions of welcome through privileges granted by the Medici. Roberto G. Salvadori, in his history of the Jews of Florence, recalled how Tuscany was, from the modern era onward, a center where communities could prosper and structure themselves. It is within this Tuscan and Italian fabric, of which Schaerf was himself the recorder, that the name Millul found its place.

The decisive turning point in the history of Italian Jews, the one that determined the fate of all families in the peninsula in the nineteenth century, was emancipation. Gadi Luzzatto Voghera devoted a thorough study to the debate that, between 1781 and 1848, stirred Italy around the question of equal rights to be granted to Jews. This process, which he calls the "price of equality," was neither linear nor free: it required communities to negotiate their entry into the nation, between aspiration to full citizenship and preservation of their identity.

Until that time, the life of Italian Jews had largely unfolded within the framework of the ghetto, an institution born in the sixteenth century that confined communities to assigned quarters, while paradoxically preserving their internal cohesion. Attilio Milano showed how this period of confinement, harsh though it was, had also fostered an intense communal life, where mutual aid institutions—charitable confraternities, endowments for poor girls, care of the sick and the dead—constituted the social framework of the group. These charitable confraternities, the ḥevrot, embodied in daily life tsedaka, that justice-charity which, in Jewish thought, is not voluntary alms but an obligation of justice toward one's neighbor. A family of ordinary condition, such as one might reasonably suppose the Millul lineage to have been, participated in this economy of mutual care, paying its contribution, marrying off its daughters through collective dowries, accompanying its deceased.

Italian unification, achieved between 1861 and 1870, established the juridical equality of Jews and the definitive abolition of ghettos. A generation of Italian Jews then gained access to professions, the university, the army, public life, with a remarkable patriotic fervor. It was probably at this pivotal moment that families bearing names such as Millul, heretofore confined to the anonymity of communal registers, could appear in documents of civil registration, census records, and civic life. The fact that Schaerf was able, in 1925, to record this name among the Jewish surnames of Italy testifies to this entry into documented modernity.

The history of Italian Jews shifted into tragedy with the rise of racial fascism. After a long period of relatively peaceful integration, Mussolini's regime promulgated in 1938 the racial laws which, brutally, excluded Jews from the nation. Enzo Collotti analyzed the legal mechanics of this exclusion, showing how a State that had long distinguished itself by the absence of State antisemitism shifted, in a matter of months, into legal persecution. Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci for her part restored the ideological logic of this rupture, emphasizing that it was not merely a servile import of the German model but also the product of a dynamic internal to Italian fascism.

Michele Sarfatti, in his study that became canonical on Jews in fascist Italy, described with precision the stages of this degradation: census of Jews, expulsion from schools and public office, professional prohibitions, spoliation. The 1938 census made the simple fact of existing — of being registered, named, counted — a mortal peril. Fabio Isman gathered the very documents of this persecution, these cold administrative papers that transformed citizens into pariahs. It is troubling to think that the gesture of memory accomplished by Schaerf in 1925 — to census names — was, thirteen years later, turned into an instrument of death by the State apparatus.

The diaries and letters gathered by Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri give voice to these ordinary existences broken by persecution. One reads there incomprehension, pain, but also the dignity and endurance of families who, from one day to the next, saw their quality of Italians withdrawn. We have no document attesting to the specific fate of a Millul family during these dark years; honesty demands this silence. But this very silence speaks: it recalls how many particular destinies were engulfed without leaving a trace, and how much the duty of the historian is not to fill these voids by invention. Restraint before the unknown is here a form of humility, a virtue that the Jewish tradition holds to be the root of all true wisdom.

The extreme point of this history is deportation. Liliana Picciotto, in Il libro della memoria, established the nominative census of Jews deported from Italy between 1943 and 1945, a monumental work that restores to each victim their name, date of birth, place of arrest, and fate. This work constitutes, for any investigation into an Italian Jewish lineage, the reference source for verifying whether a surname appears among the deported.

Here, the intersection between Memory and archive must be formulated with the greatest caution. The name Millul, attested by Schaerf in 1925 as an Italian Jewish surname, naturally raises the question: did this family pass through persecution unscathed, or was it seized by deportation? In the absence of a confirmed nominative consultation of the Libro della memoria for this specific name, we can neither affirm nor exclude it. The narrative must stop at the threshold of what the archive permits, and signal that only direct consultation of Picciotto's repertoire could decide the matter.

What can be said with certainty is that Picciotto's very undertaking prolongs and fulfills the gesture of Schaerf: to name, to count, to remember. From the onomastic inventory of 1925 to the book of memory of the deported, the same virtue unfolds across the decades — the refusal to let a human being sink into the anonymity of disappearance. The Millul lineage, whatever its fate may have been, belongs to this continuum where every name borne, transmitted, recorded becomes an act of resistance against erasure. In this, this family without documented face fully participates in the deepest virtue of Israel: to make Memory a commandment.

What remains of a lineage of which we know, with certainty, only a name recorded in a 1925 catalogue? There remains precisely that: a name, and all that a name carries. In Jewish tradition, the name is never neutral. It binds the living to the dead, it inscribes the individual in a chain — the shalshelet ha-dorot, the chain of generations — that stretches back, step by step, to the origins. Naming a child is to resurrect an ancestor; transmitting a patronym is to refuse that death shall have the final word.

This chapter is admittedly one of editorial conjecture and meditation, not of archive. We ascribe to the Millul lineage no invented figure, no fabricated event. We merely place this modest name within the spiritual economy that gave meaning to all Italian Jewish existence. Robert Bonfil has shown how much, even in the most ordinary strata of Renaissance Jewish society, the value accorded to study, transmission and memory structured lives. Attilio Milano has documented the vitality of communal institutions which, generation after generation, framed birth, marriage, death and mutual aid.

A Millul family, if it was what most Italian Jewish families were, lived according to this rhythm: the festivals of the calendar, more or less faithful observance of the halakha, attendance at the synagogue, the education of children, the solidarity of the group in trial. It contributed, in its measure, to what Salvadori has described as the daily fabric of Tuscan and Italian communities. Its virtue was doubtless not that of great rabbis or illustrious scholars, but that, no less precious, of humble faithfulness: the obscure perseverance of those who, leaving no name in the books, transmit life and the Law.

At the end of this journey, we must frankly acknowledge what this Great Book is, and what it is not. It is not the reconstructed chronicle of an illustrious dynasty, for the Millul lineage has left, to this day, only a unique and precious trace: its inscription among the Jewish surnames of Italy recorded by Samuele Schaerf in 1925. No named figure, no date, no event can be attributed to it without betraying the requirement of truth. This book is therefore, more accurately, the contextualization of a name within the grand history of Italian Judaism — from its Roman origins to the ghettos, from emancipation to racial laws, from persecution to the duty of memory.

Of all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried through the centuries, and which this journey has brought to light — the tsedaka of charitable confraternities, the alliance of sacred study and secular knowledge, the humble faithfulness of obscure generations — there is one that the Millul lineage, above all, will have best expressed, albeit unknowingly and by the mere fact of its recorded existence: the zakhor, the commandment of memory. For this name, snatched from oblivion by the Florentine philologist a few years before the catastrophe, embodies this cardinal conviction of Judaism that no being must disappear without being named. From Schaerf's inventory to Liliana Picciotto's Libro della memoria, a single chain of vigilance connects those who refuse erasure.

Thus the Millul lineage, without documented heroes or martyrs, joins the collective memory of Israel not through the brilliance of its accomplishments, but through the persistence of its name. And perhaps this is the highest lesson: that the dignity of an existence is not measured by the noise it made in history, but by the faithfulness with which its memory is transmitted. In recording this name here, this Great Book in turn accomplishes the ancestral gesture — to remember, so that the name endures.