The Nemni Family

The surname Nemni is part of the family of North African Jewish names whose very brevity testifies to their antiquity. Sephardic and Maghrebi lexicography, to which Abraham Laredo devoted his monumental work, shows that these names proceed sometimes from an eponymous ancestor, sometimes from a place, a trade, or a nickname that became hereditary [Abraham I. Laredo, Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc, CSIC, 1978]. For Nemni, no certain etymology imposes itself; according to the prudence required by such matters, we must refrain from too assured a reconstruction and acknowledge that the name belongs to the stratum of Tripolitanian surnames whose origin is lost in the oral memory of the community.

The family tradition, as it can be glimpsed through the memoir of Sion Nemni, situates the anchorage of the lineage in the dense fabric of Tripolitanian Jewry—a world of alleyways, synagogues and trades passed from father to son [Sion Nemni, Mémoire inédit (souvenirs de Libye), XXᵉ s., corpus Zakhor]. This mode of transmission, in which name and memory travel together, illustrates one of the cardinal virtues of Judaism: fidelity to the lineage as a form of living memory. André Neher showed how, in Jewish thought, the word transmitted against oblivion constitutes a quasi-sacred act, a bulwark of meaning against the silence of history. By preserving its name through vicissitudes, the Nemni family participates in that stubborn fidelity that the tradition of Israel has carried from exile to exile.

We must beware here of any overinterpretation. We have no continuous genealogy connecting each generation to a named ancestor; what we hold is the attested presence of the name in Tripoli and its persistence to our day. For a lineage of the diaspora, this is already precious testimony.

To understand the Nemni, one must first contemplate the world that shaped them. The Jewish presence in Tripolitania dates back to Antiquity, and the community of Tripoli was, throughout the Ottoman and Italian periods, one of the great communities of Mediterranean Jewry. Organized around its synagogues and its quarter — the hara — it lived by commerce, craftsmanship, trans-Saharan trade, and the maritime links that connected Tripoli to Livorno, Malta, and Tunis.

This community was structured by its rabbis and its charitable institutions, embodying two central values that the Jewish tradition holds as inseparable: the study of the Law (talmud torah) and charity (tsedaka). The fraternities for poor relief, the dowry funds for orphan girls, the upkeep of synagogues testify to a communal fabric where care for the other was not an ornament but a religious obligation. This intertwining of the religious and the social, where involvement in collective life was an integral part of piety, corresponds to what Yeshayahu Leibowitz described as the primacy of practice and communal service in historical Judaism.

The insertion of Tripoli's Jews into Mediterranean trading networks also connects them to that larger phenomenon studied by Jonathan Israel: these "diasporas within the diaspora" that made Jewish communities actors in maritime empires, weaving commercial and family solidarities between shores. The Nemni family, whose presence is attested in this Tripoli of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, belongs fully to this world. It shares its knowledge of languages, its aptitude for commerce, and that capacity to make linking between shores a second nature — the discrete virtue of economic action placed at the service of collective survival.

In 1911, Italy seized Tripolitania and Cyrenaica; Libya became an Italian colony. For the Jews of Tripoli, this period opened an ambivalent era. On one hand, Italianization brought schools, European language, access to new professions, and modernization of community structures. On the other, it would lead, in the late 1930s, to fascist racial laws that also struck the Jews of Libya, then, during the Second World War, to internment and persecutions.

It is in this cultural in-between — Arab by soil, Hebrew by faith, Italian by administration — that the generation grew up whose memorialist Sion Nemni became. His unpublished memoir, preserved in the Zakhor corpus, belongs to that precious genre of first-hand testimony that restores the texture of a vanished world: the celebrations, the trades, the figures of the neighborhood, the language of the home [Sion Nemni, Unpublished Memoir (Memories of Libya), 20th c., Zakhor corpus]. In writing so as not to forget, Sion Nemni accomplishes a gesture whose reach André Neher demonstrated: against the silence that threatens exile, the written word becomes an act of resistance to erasure.

The belonging of Libyan Jewry to Italianness also explains the later destiny of the lineage. Many Tripolitanian families maintained cultural and sometimes administrative ties with Italy, which would make Rome a more natural choice as a land of refuge in 1967. The Jewish community of Rome, one of the oldest in Europe and whose richness in the Renaissance era Robert Bonfil has illuminated, was to welcome these refugees from the southern shore.

The tragic turning point emerged in June 1967. When the Six-Day War broke out, the Jewish community of Tripoli, already tested by the riots of 1945 and 1948, was caught in a wave of violence. According to historical works devoted to this episode, the Tripoli pogrom of June 1967 resulted in several Jewish victims and precipitated, within weeks, the near-total exodus of a millennial community [Wikipedia, "Tripoli Pogrom of 1967"; "The Departure of Libyan Jews in 1967", Diasporas, OpenEdition]. What the Jews of Libya at first believed to be a temporary departure — "we thought we would return at the end of summer," the testimonies collected by historians report — became an exile without return ["The Departure of Libyan Jews in 1967", Diasporas, OpenEdition].

Here, family memory and the historical archive speak to each other. The memoir of Sion Nemni bears witness, at the scale of a life, to what research establishes at the scale of a community: uprootedness, loss of property, sudden dispersion [Sion Nemni, Unpublished Memoir (memories of Libya), 20th century, Zakhor corpus]. This convergence between intimate narrative and documented fact gives the event its full truth.

The 1967 exile inscribes the Nemni lineage in the long chain of galout, that imaginary of exile which Yitzhak Baer showed to be at the heart of Jewish consciousness — not as mere misfortune, but as a structuring experience of a people who made wandering a matrix of meaning. In this ordeal, the family manifests a virtue that tradition holds in high esteem: the capacity to preserve dignity and family cohesion in the midst of destitution, to carry with them, lacking material goods, memory and faith. Facing the stranger turned hostile, the lineage chooses not vengeance but reconstruction — an echo of that ethics of survival which Gershom Scholem placed at the principle of Jewish vitality in history.

In Rome, the Jews of Libya had to reinvent their identity. Sociological and historical works devoted to this community show that being a "Libyan Jew" in Rome entailed a double allegiance: to the Tripolitanian heritage on one hand, to the welcoming Roman Jewishness on the other ["Composing memories and recomposing identities: being a 'Libyan Jew' in Rome", Communications, Cairn.info]. Far from dissolving, the Libyan specificity persisted through synagogues of Tripolitanian rite, cuisines, celebrations and liturgies of their own, forming within the Italian capital a community within a community.

This recomposition illustrates a virtue that Jewish history has carried through all its exiles: fidelity to the minhag, custom, as a form of resistance to assimilation and spiritual continuity. In transmitting to Rome the practices of Tripoli, families like the Nemni extended the very gesture of memory — the one accomplished, in its own way, by the memoir of Sion Nemni. The Jewish community of Rome, whose historical depth and cultural vitality since the Renaissance Robert Bonfil demonstrated, thus offered the framework for a renaissance.

This destiny is inscribed in the great movement of Sephardic and Eastern diasporas after successive expulsions and exiles, as Esther Benbassa has traced it: everywhere, the diaspora rebuilt its networks, solidarities and institutions, making dispersion not an end but a metamorphosis. The Nemni lineage, which passed from Tripoli to Rome, is a concrete incarnation of this. It also testifies to the value of hospitality — that of the Roman hosts — and to the recognition of the welcomed stranger, a theme that Jewish tradition constantly recalls through the biblical injunction not to oppress the stranger, for one has oneself been a stranger.

Part of the Libyan diaspora, and of the Nemni lineage, chose Israel. For these families, settlement in the Hebrew State was not merely a refuge but the fulfillment of an ancient hope—that of return to Zion inscribed at the heart of the liturgy. The Jews of Libya thus joined the great waves of immigration that, in the decades following 1948, transformed the demographic and cultural face of Israel, bringing with them the traditions of Tripolitanian Judaism.

The coexistence, within a single lineage, of the Roman branch and the Israeli branch says something essential about the contemporary Jewish condition: the fertile tension between diaspora and ingathering, between Rome and Jerusalem. Gershom Scholem explored this dialectic between faithfulness to tradition and the utopia of national renewal, showing that it runs through all of Jewish modernity. Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, in his study of Jewish philosophy, similarly emphasized how the thought of Israel has always been nourished by this plurality of places and experiences.

This chapter belongs at once to transmitted Memory and to History: the trajectory of Libyan families toward Israel is well documented, but the detail of the individual choices of the Nemni lineage reaches us chiefly through testimony and family tradition [Sion Nemni, Unpublished Memory (memories of Libya), 20th c., Zakhor corpus]. In choosing Zion, this branch of the family expresses the virtue of persevering hope—tikva—that the Jewish people has kept alive for two millennia, and which gives the conclusion of this family history its gravity and its light.

At the end of this journey, the Nemni lineage appears as a drop of water in which the ocean of Mediterranean Jewish history is reflected. Born in the Tripoli of synagogues and commerce, Italicized under colonial rule, torn from its land by the violence of 1967, it rebuilt itself in Rome and in Jerusalem, on the two shores of faithfulness and return. Its name, brief and tenacious, crossed these ordeals like a thread that nothing broke.

What this lineage will have, above all virtues, best expressed is the faithfulness of memory — this obstinacy in letting nothing fade away, of which Sion Nemni's unpublished memoir is the purest monument. Where many exiles fell silent, a son of Tripoli took up the pen to transmit the engulfed world. In this, the Nemni family accomplished what the tradition of Israel holds to be one of its highest obligations: zakhor, remember. André Neher wrote it with force: against the silence of history, speech remains the ultimate dwelling of meaning. And Yitzhak Baer showed that exile itself, borne with memory and dignity, becomes for the Jewish people a place of spiritual fecundity.

The Nemni lineage was neither princely nor illustrious in the sense of chronicles: it was faithful. Faithful to its name, to its customs, to its dead, to its God. And it is this modest faithfulness, woven of communal charity, of hospitality received and given, and of hope never extinguished, that binds it to the great collective memory of Israel — that of a people who, from Tripoli to Rome and from Rome to Jerusalem, made of dispersion a path and of memory a homeland.