The Mondovì Family

Mondovì was founded in the twelfth century on a hill overlooking the Ellero valley, and quickly became one of the most dynamic merchant cities of southern Piedmont, endowed as early as 1560 with a short-lived university. It was in this urban, commercial, and literate context that a Jewish presence became established. As with most communities in Piedmont, this presence traces back largely to waves of immigration from Jews who came from France — following the expulsions from the Kingdom of France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — and from the Ashkenazi and Provençal sphere, rather than to Sephardic settlement.

According to the onomastic logic that Schaerf describes, the surname is born when a Jewish family originating from Mondovì settles elsewhere: it is the host community that, in order to distinguish it, designates it by its place of origin [Schaerf, 1925]. Thus the name Mondovì is, to be precise, attested far more outside Mondovì itself — notably in Turin — than in the eponymous city. This paradox is that of all toponymic surnames: they mark departure as much as origin.

The settlement of Jews in Piedmontese cities rested on condotte, contracts negotiated with municipal or ducal authorities, authorizing the exercise of pawn lending and commerce in exchange for dues. This economic integration, often reduced by older historiographies to usury alone, actually encompassed a credit function essential to urban economy, and was accompanied by structured community life. Robert Bonfil demonstrated how much the Jewish life of the Italian Renaissance, far from being a mere tolerated survival, was a space of intense intellectual and religious creation, where Jewish bankers were also patrons, manuscript collectors, and supporters of study [Bonfil, 1994]. The Mondovì family, as a Piedmontese lineage, presumably fits into this fabric where economic activity nourished, rather than contradicted, the vocation of study — one of the most constant expressions of Judaism, which always knew how to make subsistence the foundation of spiritual elevation.

The history of the Jews of Mondovì is inseparable from that of Piedmontese Judaism as a whole, a community with its own language and liturgical rite — the rite known as APaM, an acronym for Asti, Fossano and Moncalvo, distinct from Ashkenazi rite and Italian rite. This liturgical singularity testifies to a communal creativity: from their Franco-Provençal and German origins, the Jews of Piedmont forged a hybrid prayer tradition, adapted to their new land, preserving texts and melodies that liturgical scholarship considers a precious witness to the lost Jewish rites of medieval France.

The Jewish condition in Piedmont oscillated between negotiated tolerance and precarity. The Dukes of Savoy promulgated regulations alternating protections and restrictions: wearing of a distinctive sign, limitation of trades, periodic prohibitions. This ambivalence culminated, in the eighteenth century, in the belated institution of ghettos. Yet, through these constraints, the communities developed an intense life of internal solidarity, structured by charitable confraternities (ḥevrot) responsible for the dowries of poor girls, care for the sick, accompaniment of the dying and burial. This organized charity — tsedaka made institution — constitutes one of the cardinal virtues that Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries: the care of the other as a duty of justice, not merely as alms.

Attachment to the Law (halakha) structured this collective life. Piedmontese community leaders, often in correspondence with major Italian decisors, endeavored to reconcile rigorous observance and the necessities of a mercantile existence subject to Christian calendars. This daily casuistry — how to respect the Sabbath when one keeps a shop, how to lend without transgressing the prohibition of ribbit among Jews — reveals a practical intelligence of the Law, where fidelity to commandment is conjoined with humility before the complexity of reality.

In the 18th century, the States of Savoy established ghettos in their principal Jewish cities. Mondovì did not escape this movement: Jews were required to reside in a reserved quarter, closed at night, under often unsanitary and overcrowded living conditions. This confinement, contemporary with that of Turin, Asti, or Cuneo, left a lasting mark on the memory of Piedmontese communities. The ghetto was nonetheless, paradoxically, a crucible: by concentrating the Jewish population, it intensified synagogal life, study, and transmission.

The turning point came with the French Revolution and Napoleonic occupation, which abolished the ghettos and proclaimed civil equality. After the retrenchment of 1815 and the partial restoration of former constraints, emancipation was definitively secured in 1848: the Lettere Patenti of King Charles-Albert of Sardinia granted the Jews of the kingdom full citizenship. This foundational moment opened to Piedmontese families — and, in all likelihood, to those from Mondovì — access to the liberal professions, to the university, to the army, and to the political life of Italy in formation.

Entry into the city was experienced by Piedmontese Judaism as an opportunity for involvement in the collective life of the nation. Many Jews of Piedmont participated in the Risorgimento, Italian unification, seeing in it the fulfillment of an ideal of justice and freedom consonant with prophetic values. This patriotic commitment — to serve the city that, at last, recognized its Jewish sons as full citizens — illustrates a virtue that the tradition of Israel names the care for the common good of the city where one resides, according to the ancient injunction of Jeremiah to "seek the peace of the city." The name Mondovì, henceforth borne by physicians, jurists, merchants, and teachers, ceased to be a mark of relegation to become a name among the names of Italian citizenship.

Like any mobile Italian surname, the name Mondovì did not remain confined to Piedmont. The great crossroads of Italian Judaism — and first and foremost Livorno, the free port where the Nazione ebrea flourished from 1591 onwards — attracted families from throughout the peninsula and mixed names from the North with those from the Mediterranean basin. Lionel Lévy described this "Portuguese Jewish nation" of Livorno as a world open to Amsterdam, Tunis and the Levant, where merchants, printers and scholars crossed paths [Lévy, 1999] [Lévy, 1996]. It is plausible, though not documented with certainty for this precise lineage, that bearers of the name Mondovì participated in these Mediterranean circulations, carrying south the name of a Piedmontese city.

This hypothesis rests on a well-established general fact: the extreme mobility of Italian Jewish families in the early modern period, whose toponymic surnames dispersed along commercial routes. Where direct documentation is lacking, honesty demands that we speak of possibility rather than certainty. What remains assured, however, is the virtue that presided over these movements: the welcome of the stranger and mutual aid among scattered communities. The Jewish nations of the Mediterranean practiced hospitality toward the co-religionist passing through, the redemption of captives (pidyon shevuyim) and assistance to the exiled — gestures through which Jewish solidarity transcended political borders and made each community a link in one same body.

This chapter admittedly belongs to editorial conjecture: it situates the lineage within a plausible horizon without lending it invented adventures. Restraint here is a form of respect owed to truth — a virtue of the historian's humility before the silences of the archive.

Italian Judaism was, among all others, a civilization of the book and the manuscript. Long before printing, and for long after it, the communities of the peninsula copied, illuminated and preserved Hebrew manuscripts of remarkable beauty. Giulia Tamani studied these manoscritti ebraici decorati in Italia, witnesses to a Jewish art of the book where ornamentation served the veneration of the sacred text [Tamani, 2010]. Piedmont, a crossroads of Franco-German and Italian traditions, participated in this manuscript culture.

Although no specific work can be attributed to a named member of the Mondovì lineage, this family's belonging to the Piedmontese Jewish world connects it to this universe of study and copying. Colette Sirat recalled how much medieval Jewish philosophy and learning came down to us through the patient mediation of scribes and manuscript owners, whose marginal notes and colophons constitute an irreplaceable archive [Sirat, 1983]. Each preserved manuscript, each book transmitted from one generation to the next, embodies this major virtue of Judaism: study as an act of fidelity, limmud Torah as the supreme form of divine service.

Jewish thought in Italy, carried by figures whom Maurice-Ruben Hayoun places in the long history of Jewish philosophy [Hayoun, 2023], knew how to articulate Talmudic rigor and openness to surrounding culture. Léon Askénazi and Armand Abécassis, twentieth-century thinkers of tradition, insisted on this genius proper to Judaism: constantly rethinking the Law afresh, making transmission not a repetition but a creation [Askénazi, 1999] [Abécassis, 1987]. That the Mondovì family was, like so many Piedmontese families, a custodian of books and transmitter of texts, is highly probable: it is in this humble and stubborn gesture — to keep, to copy, to teach — that the survival of a people is at stake.

The history of Italian Jews in the twentieth century pivoted with the Fascist racial laws of 1938, which stripped Jews of their civil rights, excluding them from schools, universities, and professions. Piedmont, a land of emancipation ninety years earlier, became a land of persecution once more. After the German occupation of September 1943, Jews in northern Italy were hunted, arrested, and deported to extermination camps. The small Piedmontese communities, including those in the Mondovì and Cuneo regions, were decimated.

The work of Memory undertaken by historians and educators such as Dominique Natanson, who labored to transmit the Shoah to younger generations, recalls the imperative to name the victims and preserve their trace [Natanson, 1997]. Not to forget is, for Judaism, a commandment — zakhor, "remember" — which Yerushalmi placed at the center of Jewish consciousness [Yerushalmi, 1984]. Where bearers of the name Mondovì may have been struck by persecution, the duty of the encyclopedic work is to keep the name alive, against the enterprise of erasure.

Piedmont was also a land of rescue. Righteous Gentiles, networks of resistance, and village communities hid Jews and smuggled them across to Switzerland. This solidarity, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, attests that even in the darkest night, the virtue of kindness — ḥessed — was not extinguished. After the war, survivors rebuilt a reduced communal life, and the Memory of Piedmontese lineages was gathered by archives, cemeteries, and onomastic registers of which the work of Schaerf remains the matrix.

From the hill of Mondovì to the registers of Italian citizenship, from the eighteenth-century ghetto to the shadows of the twentieth, the name Mondovì traces the furrow of an Italian Jewish lineage among the communities of Piedmont. Direct sources on this particular lineage remain sparse — the essentials rest on Schaerf's mention and on the historical framework of Piedmontese Judaism [Schaerf, 1925] — and honesty has required, throughout this work, to distinguish the established from the probable and the conjectured.

If one were to name, among all others, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed, it would be the fidelity of transmission: that capacity, proper to Piedmontese Judaism from which the Mondovì issued, to keep alive a singular rite (the APaM), a language, books and a name, through the seclusion of the ghetto, the trial of emancipation and the catastrophe of the Shoah. This fidelity was doubled by a profound concern for the other — the organized charity of confraternities, the welcome of the stranger, solidarity among scattered communities — and an attachment to civic life, from the Risorgimento to conquered citizenship.

In this, the destiny of the Mondovì is not theirs alone: it partakes of the collective memory of Israel, that people who, as Yerushalmi writes, made remembrance a sacred duty [Yerushalmi, 1984]. To bear the name of a city is to bear the memory of a place; to transmit that name is to refuse oblivion. The Great Book of the Mondovì is, in its measure, an act of zakhor.