The Montagnana Family

C'est à Fossano, bourg du Piémont méridional à une quarantaine de kilomètres au sud de Turin, que la famille Montagnana est attestée avec précision avant de faire mouvement vers la capitale régionale. Le père, Moisè Montagnana, y est né ; il dirige un entrepôt de confection, activité qui s'inscrit parfaitement dans le tissu économique des familles juives piémontaises du XIX^e siècle, longtemps spécialisées dans le commerce du drap, de la friperie et du textile depuis les communautés dispersées de la région. Sa femme, Consolina Segre, est native de Saluzzo — ville qui possède elle aussi une longue histoire juive, inscrite dans les registres communautaires du Piémont. Le patronyme Segre, qui est l'un des noms les plus répandus parmi les Juifs du Piémont, désigne une famille d'origine ligure ou lombarde ; en l'unissant à Montagnana, ce mariage noue deux branches d'un judaïsme piémontais ancré dans plusieurs villes à la fois.

Le couple s'installe à Turin, dans le quartier de Borgo San Paolo, au tournant du XX^e siècle, et élève sept enfants. Ce déplacement de Fossano vers Turin s'inscrit dans la grande migration interne qui caractérise le Piémont industriel de la Belle Époque : la ville attire les travailleurs, les commerçants et les familles qui cherchent de meilleures opportunités. Pour une famille juive, Turin offre aussi une communauté structurée, une synagogue et des institutions éducatives. Les Juifs du Piémont bénéficiaient depuis 1848 de l'émancipation accordée par le Statut albertin de Charles-Albert — première émancipation civique accordée à des Juifs en Italie —, et cette liberté nouvelle s'était traduite par une participation croissante à la vie économique, intellectuelle et bientôt politique du royaume.

Borgo San Paolo, quartier populaire et ouvrier à l'ouest de Turin, n'est pas le quartier bourgeois où s'installent les Juifs aisés de la ville. Ce choix topographique dit quelque chose de la condition de la famille : elle appartient à la petite bourgeoisie laborieuse, proche des milieux ouvriers, dans une ville qui devient, avec ses usines Fiat, Lancia et Diatto, le moteur industriel du pays. C'est dans ce milieu que grandiront Rita et Mario — une enfance entre le quartier de l'atelier et la communauté juive, entre l'identité héritée et le monde du travail en mutation.

La valeur mise en œuvre ici, avant même que Rita ou Mario prennent la parole en public, est celle de l'implication dans la vie collective — cette vertu que la tradition juive nomme tikkun olam, la réparation du monde par l'action dans la cité des hommes. Fossano, Saluzzo, Turin : une géographie de petites villes juives piémontaises qui forment le terreau de cette famille avant qu'elle entre dans l'histoire nationale.

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To understand where the Montagnana family comes from, one must restore the world of Piedmontese Jewish communities, which constitutes one of the most singular chapters of Italian Jewish history. Unlike the great centers of Venice or Rome, the Jews of Piedmont were dispersed across a multitude of towns: Mondovì, Fossano, Saluzzo, Cuneo, Alba, Asti, Casale Monferrato, Carmagnola. These communities of modest size, often numbering a few dozen to a few hundred persons, lived by local commerce principally centered on textiles, moneylending, and secondhand clothing—trades to which centuries of legal restrictions had confined Jews in the Savoyard States, as elsewhere in Old Regime Europe.

Mondovì, which the source designates as the family's town of origin, possesses an ancient Jewish history. Fossano, where Moisè Montagnana is born, is one of these small Piedmontese cities where Jewish presence is attested since at least the seventeenth century. This network of rural and semi-urban communities constitutes what historians have called the "Jewish Piedmont"—a space of intense communal life, marked by strong endogamy among families of different towns (hence the Montagnana-Segre marriage, two families from different towns who knew each other and were united by the communal network), loyalty to Italian rites (nusah Italia) and a culture where the local language—Piedmontese—coexists with liturgical Hebrew and administrative Italian.

The emancipation of 1848, granted by the Albertine Statute, opened new perspectives to these communities: access to universities, the liberal professions, public offices, political life. The result was a rapid and profound integration into Italian society, which made Piedmontese Jews among the most ardent patriots of the Risorgimento, then of unified Italy. Many fought in Garibaldi's armies or served under the flags of Victor-Emmanuel II. This fusion between Jewish identity and Italian patriotism constitutes the mental context in which the Montagnana children, born in Turin in the last years of the nineteenth century, grew up—before taking a path even more radical than patriotism, that of workers' internationalism.

What Jewish Piedmont transmitted to the Montagnana family was first and foremost a strong communal belonging, a culture of work and commerce, and an openness to the political world that flows directly from emancipation. The virtue of tsedaka—charity, but also in its full sense justice—is inscribed in the practice of these communities which organized relief funds, burial confraternities, schools, and which did not abandon their own in need. It is on this soil that the social conscience germinates which will lead Rita and Mario toward political engagement.

It is in the heart of industrial Turin, in the first decades of the twentieth century, that the Montagnana lineage enters into History. Mario Montagnana, born on June 22, 1897, begins his working life as an apprentice mechanic before becoming a fitter in the Diatto and Lancia factories — two of the jewels of nascent Turinese automobile industry. Rita, born on January 6, 1895, works as a seamstress. These two professional trajectories — the mechanical workshop and the tailoring workshop — place them in direct contact with the conditions of exploitation experienced by the Italian working class of the era: twelve-hour days, meager wages, absence of formal trade union rights, and a gendered division of labor that condemns women to undervalued and underpaid jobs.

It is in this milieu that the political commitment of Rita and Mario germinates. Both first joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), before shifting, in 1921, toward the communist faction that separated from the PSI at the Livorno Congress to found the Partito Comunista d'Italia (PCd'I). This rupture, conducted under the intellectual impetus of Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga, is one of the founding events in the history of the Italian left.

Mario Montagnana participates intensely, between 1919 and 1920, in what would be called the biennio rosso — the "two red years" marked by massive strikes, factory occupations, and revolutionary ferment. He gravitates around the group of L'Ordine Nuovo, the journal founded by Gramsci in May 1919, which sought to theorize a form of workers' democracy based on factory councils. Mario contributes to this journal as a direct witness of the Turinese working world, and plays a role during the factory occupation of September 1920. After the founding of the PCd'I in Livorno, he becomes editor at the daily L'Ordine Nuovo, which becomes the organ of the new party under Gramsci's direction.

Rita, for her part, is active from adolescence in socialist youth organizations, rising rapidly through the movement's structures. Her commitment is not merely a matter of family or conjugal allegiance — she had built her own militant experience even before marrying Palmiro Togliatti in 1924. This precision is important: if the name of Togliatti has long eclipsed hers in collective Memory, Rita Montagnana was a political leader in her own right, whose autonomous itinerary precedes her union with the future general secretary of the PCI.

The value that these two destinies embody with force is that of justice — tsedek — this cardinal virtue of Judaism that is not satisfied with mere formal observance of the Law but demands action against lived injustice. That a Piedmontese Jewish family stemming from textile commerce engaged two of its children in the workers' struggle says something of the capacity of Jewish tradition to nourish commitments that transcend and renew it.

The rise of fascism and Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922 quickly forced communist activists into clandestinity and exile. For Mario and Rita Montagnana, as for most of the leadership of the PCd'I, the 1920s and 1930s were years of persecution, flight, and sustained commitment despite everything. Mario successively exiled himself to France, the Soviet Union, Spain — where he closely followed the events of the civil war — and finally to Mexico, where many Italian communist activists found refuge after the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939. This trajectory of exile, which traversed the great capitals of international left-wing politics in the thirties, made him a privileged witness to the convulsions of his era.

Rita underwent a similar path of clandestinity and exile. Their trajectories intersected with those of other great figures of Italian communism — Gramsci, imprisoned by fascism from 1926 onwards, whose memories of the editing of L'Ordine Nuovo Mario would later relate in precise detail; Togliatti, with whom Rita formed a couple and a durable political association, despite their later separation. The international dimension of this commitment — Moscow, Madrid, Mexico City — inscribed the Montagnana in the network of European antifascists who, from outside, tried to keep alive the opposition to Mussolini.

Mario returned to Italy in 1941, in the midst of war, under conditions of clandestinity. This clandestine return to a country occupied by fascists was an act of rare political courage, which spoke to the depth of a conviction carried to the point of physical risk. It also testified to a loyalty to the idea that struggle must be waged as close as possible to the people concerned, and not from the comfortable capitals of exile.

The racial laws of 1938, promulgated by Mussolini under German pressure, added another layer of persecution to the Montagnana's situation: as Jews, they were henceforth struck by a regime of exclusion that deprived them of civil rights, professions, and access to schools. This dual exposure — to anticommunist repression and to antisemitic persecution — made the Montagnana one of the most eloquent cases of what the condition was for certain politically engaged Italian Jews under fascism: persecuted twice, twice resistant.

The virtue at work here is that of courage linked to justice — the gevurah of tradition, the moral force to hold firm in adversity — coupled with a loyalty to lo ta'amod 'al dam re'ekha, the biblical commandment not to stand passive before the blood of one's neighbor, which grounds commitment against all oppression.

The return to legality after the Liberation of 1945 opened a new political space for Rita Montagnana. In 1946, she was elected to the Italian Constituent Assembly in the Bologna constituency as a candidate of the Communist Party. This election placed her in the historic group of Italy's first women parliamentarians — a fact that deserves to be situated in its time: women's suffrage had been granted in Italy only in 1945, after decades of suffragist struggle, and the first women elected to the Constituent Assembly were simultaneously founders of an institutional framework they had never been able to shape until then.

The Constituent Assembly's mission was to draft the Constitution of the Italian Republic, adopted on 27 December 1947 and entered into force on 1 January 1948. Rita Montagnana participated in this foundational work in a complex political context: Italy emerged from a disastrous war, foreign occupation, twenty years of fascist rule, and had to invent the foundations of a parliamentary democracy. The women elected to the Constituent Assembly — numbering twenty-one — contributed to inscribing in the constitutional text principles concerning notably equality between the sexes, labor, and the family.

In 1948, Rita was also elected to the Senate of the Republic for the mandate 1948–1953. This dual presence at the Constituent Assembly and then in the Senate made her a figure of Italian democratic reconstruction in the same way as the men of her generation — with the added dimension of having, as a woman, helped to forge the institutions from which women had always been excluded.

Her trajectory cannot be reduced to her relationship with Togliatti, from whom she separated in 1948: the woman politician outlasted the married woman, and historians who have begun to restore her an autonomous place in accounts of the PCI and Italian Resistance emphasize that her commitment preceded, accompanied, and exceeded this union. The work by Giorgina Arian Levi and Manfredo Montagnana, I Montagnana: una famiglia ebraica piemontese e il movimento operaio (1914–1948) (Giuntina editions), contributed to restoring the family and Jewish dimension of these trajectories, showing how the house at Borgo San Paolo was both a Jewish home and a militant home.

The value that Rita embodied in a particularly clear way is that of involvement in collective life — not as an observer but as a legislator, as an architect of common rules. This involvement recalls the political dimension of mishpat, institutional justice in the Jewish tradition: not only to act justly oneself, but to ensure that the laws of the city are just for all.

Mario Montagnana is not only an activist: he is also a memoirist. After his return to Italy and the Liberation, he publishes in 1952 Ricordi di un operaio torinese (Rinascita, Rome) — a book of memoirs that reconstructs from within the Turin working-class world of the 1910s and 1920s, the biennio rosso, the birth of L'Ordine Nuovo and the founding of the PCI at Livorno. This testimony has been used by historians of the Italian workers' movement, notably to restore the atmosphere of the L'Ordine Nuovo editorial office: it reports, among other things, the constant pressure exerted on Gramsci to produce texts through the nights of publication deadlines, the intellectual secretary literally forced to write by his fellow editors when articles were lacking.

This memorial vocation is in itself a value: in a Jewish tradition that has always accorded a central place to transmission — l'dor va-dor, from generation to generation — the act of writing what one has lived so that those who follow may know it is a form of secular piety, which extends the imperative of zakhor (remember) into a political and working-class register. Mario Montagnana does not write only for the PCI; he writes so that Turin remembers its workers.

After the war, Mario sits in the Senate of the Republic as a senator. His complete trajectory — from apprentice mechanic of Borgo San Paolo to senator of the Republic, passing through Moscow, Madrid and Mexico City — is one of the most romantic that the Italian left has produced. He dies in Turin on August 8, 1960, in the city where he was born and which was the theater of his most intense struggles.

Before Piedmont established itself as the documented center of the family, the name Montagnana belongs to Italian Jewish onomastics over the long term. Samuel Schaerf, in his I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia (Florence, Casa Editrice Israel, 1925), the first systematic repertory of Jewish surnames of the peninsula, lists Montagnana among the many toponymic names — Modena, Ravenna, Recanati, Ancona, Montefiore — that speak of the place left behind become a sign of identity. Such a name generally becomes fixed when a Jewish family leaves its place of origin to settle elsewhere — Padua, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua — where the city of origin becomes a distinctive marker.

The city of Montagnana, in the province of Padua, is inscribed in one of the most important regions for Italian Jewish life in the Renaissance and early modern period. Padua was, for centuries, the only place where Jews could obtain a doctorate in medicine, attracting Jewish students from all over Europe. An illustrious namesake, Bartolomeo Montagnana the Elder, a Paduan physician and professor active in the fifteenth century, author of widely circulated Consilia medica, is documented as Christian — and it would be dishonest to incorporate him into a Jewish lineage. But his presence in the memory of the city speaks to the prestige attached to the name and the place, in a Padua that also trained generations of Jewish physicians from Italy, Germany, the Levant, and the Maghreb.

Venice, very nearby, was the world capital of Hebrew printing in the sixteenth century, with the presses of Daniel Bomberg where the layout of the Talmud still in use today was established. The Jews of Venetia participated in this immense project of transmission — proofreaders, typographers, patrons, library owners. Ferrara, under the Este, housed one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in Italy, which produced in 1553 the Ferrara Bible, the first translation of the Bible into Spanish intended for the Marranos. This world — medicine in Padua, printing in Venice, patronage in Ferrara — constitutes the historical backdrop within which the name Montagnana finds its horizon of meaning, even if the archives do not allow us to trace certain individuals bearing this name.

Robert Bonfil has shown well how Italian Jewish life of this period combines local rootedness and fidelity to the Law: the Jewish physician of Padua, the Hebrew proofreader of Venice, and the cloth merchant of Fossano participate in the same civilization, which has made the care given to text, to the sick, and to the other a form of daily piety. It is within this long continuity that the Montagnana of Piedmont are also inscribed, whose commitment to justice in the twentieth century does not arise from nowhere: it extends, in a secular and political register, a tradition of service to the community of mankind.

Moisè Montagnana (dates de naissance inconnues, actif à la fin du XIX^e siècle – début du XX^e siècle) — Natif de Fossano (Piémont), directeur d'un entrepôt de confection, Moisè Montagnana est le père de la branche turinoise de la lignée. Époux de Consolina Segre, native de Saluzzo, il s'installe avec sa famille dans le quartier populaire de Borgo San Paolo à Turin au tournant du XX^e siècle. Père de sept enfants, il appartient à la petite bourgeoisie commerçante du judaïsme piémontais dont l'émancipation post-1848 avait ouvert les portes de la vie économique et civique italienne. Son métier dans le textile s'inscrit dans la longue tradition des familles juives piémontaises spécialisées dans ce secteur depuis des générations.

Consolina Segre Montagnana (dates inconnues, active à la fin du XIX^e siècle – début du XX^e siècle) — Native de Saluzzo (Piémont), elle appartient à la famille Segre, l'un des patronymes les plus répandus et les plus anciennement attestés du judaïsme piémontais. Son union avec Moisè Montagnana noue deux lignées de bourgs différents selon l'usage endogame des communautés juives du Piémont. Elle est la mère de Rita et Mario Montagnana, et le foyer qu'elle tient à Borgo San Paolo constitue à la fois une maison juive et le premier milieu militant de ses enfants. Peu documentée à titre individuel, elle incarne la part féminine et souvent silencieuse de la transmission familiale.

Rita Montagnana (Turin, 6 janvier 1895 – Rome, 18 juillet 1979) — Couturière de profession, Rita Montagnana milite dès l'adolescence dans les organisations de jeunesse socialiste de Turin avant de rejoindre le Parti communiste d'Italie à sa fondation en 1921. Élue à l'Assemblée constituante italienne en 1946 dans la circonscription de Bologne, elle fait partie du groupe historique des premières femmes parlementaires d'Italie. Sénatrice de 1948 à 1953, elle fut aussi l'épouse de Palmiro Togliatti (mariés en 1924, séparés en 1948). Son engagement politique autonome, qui précède et excède sa vie conjugale, est restitué notamment par l'ouvrage de Giorgina Arian Levi et Manfredo Montagnana.

Mario Montagnana (Turin, 22 juin 1897 – Turin, 8 août 1960) — Ajusteur chez Diatto et Lancia, Mario Montagnana participe activement au biennio rosso (1919–1920) dans le cercle d'L'Ordine Nuovo gravitant autour d'Antonio Gramsci. Cofondateur du Parti communiste d'Italie au Congrès de Livourne (1921), il en devient rédacteur au quotidien L'Ordine Nuovo. Contraint à l'exil sous le fascisme — France, URSS, Espagne, Mexique —, il rentre clandestinement en Italie en 1941. Après la Libération, il est élu sénateur de la République. Auteur de Ricordi di un operaio torinese (Rome, Rinascita, 1952), mémoires précieux pour l'histoire du mouvement ouvrier turinois.

Samuel Schaerf (dates précises inconnues, actif dans les années 1920) — Érudit italien, auteur de I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia (Florence, Casa Editrice Israel, 1925), premier répertoire systématique des noms de famille juifs de la péninsule. C'est à lui que l'on doit l'attestation savante du patronyme Montagnana comme nom juif italien d'origine toponymique. Son inventaire demeure l'ouvrage de référence pour l'onomastique juive italienne et le point de départ obligé de toute recherche sur ces lignées.

Bartolomeo Montagnana l'Ancien (dates de naissance inconnues, † vers 1460) — Médecin et professeur à l'Université de Padoue, auteur de Consilia medica largement diffusés et imprimés. Cité ici comme homonyme illustre de la cité de Montagnana, et non comme membre d'une lignée juive : il est documenté comme chrétien. Sa présence dans ce livre éclaire le prestige médical attaché au nom et au lieu dans une Padoue qui fut aussi le grand foyer de formation des médecins juifs d'Europe, seule université où ceux-ci pouvaient alors accéder au doctorat.

Bartolomeo Montagnana le Jeune (dates inconnues, actif vers 1500) — Petit-fils du précédent, également professeur de médecine et d'anatomie à Padoue. Comme son aïeul, il n'est pas juif et est mentionné pour attester la continuité d'une famille savante attachée au toponyme vénète, dans le même milieu universitaire où des générations de Juifs italiens, allemands et levantins vinrent conquérir le doctorat de médecine que seule Padoue leur ouvrait en Europe.

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De Fossano à Turin, de Turin à Rome, de Rome à Mexico City et retour, le nom Montagnana a traversé le XX^e siècle en portant une chose avec une constance rare : la conviction que la justice ne se contemple pas, elle se fait. Rita, couturière et parlementaire, contribuant à rédiger la Constitution de la République italienne comme l'une des premières femmes législatrices de son pays. Mario, ajusteur et mémorialiste, écrivant depuis les usines et les exils l'histoire du mouvement ouvrier comme on accomplit un devoir de mémoire. Moisè et Consolina, commerçant et mère de famille, portant de Fossano à Borgo San Paolo l'identité discrète et tenace d'un judaïsme piémontais qui n'a jamais dissocié la fidélité à la Loi de l'attention portée aux conditions de vie des plus humbles.

Ce que cette lignée aura, entre toutes, le mieux exprimé est la vertu de justice active — ce tsedek que la tradition juive ne réduit pas à la charité ni à la piété, mais qui exige de changer les structures qui produisent l'injustice. Les Montagnana n'ont pas seulement aidé leurs voisins : ils ont voulu transformer les règles du jeu, réécrire les lois, refaire la société. Ce geste politique est aussi, en profondeur, un geste juif : il hérite de la prophétie biblique, de l'idée qu'Israël est appelé à être témoin et acteur d'un monde meilleur, non spectateur de son propre destin.

Mais la lignée enseigne aussi une leçon d'humilité sur les silences de l'archive. Avant le Piémont du XIX^e siècle, les Montagnana ne nous ont pas laissé, dans les sources ici mobilisées, un corpus de figures individuelles nommées et datées avec certitude. Le nom existe — Schaerf l'atteste comme patronyme juif italien d'origine toponymique —, le lieu existe, le cadre historique des communautés juives de Vénétie et d'Italie du Nord existe. Mais les individus qui portèrent ce nom entre la cité murée de la Vénétie et les bourgs piémontais sont encore dans l'ombre. Cette rareté n'est pas un échec : elle est le lot de la plupart des familles, dont la grandeur fut d'être fidèles sans être illustres. Yerushalmi l'a dit mieux que quiconque : c'est dans la fidélité obscure de ceux qui transmettent que se noue le lien entre destin singulier et mémoire collective d'Israël.

En inscrivant Montagnana dans le Grand Livre, on accomplit à notre tour ce geste de mémoire — zakhor — qui fait de chaque nom retrouvé, de chaque trajectoire reconstituée, une victoire sur l'oubli.

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