The Notrica Family

The origins of the Notrica family recede, like those of most Sephardic families, into the silences of the expulsion. No archive today allows us to reconstruct, with certainty, an ancestor by name established in Castile, Aragon, or medieval Andalusia. What history does permit, however, is to place the name within the great movement of the Jews of the peninsula, whose life was governed, from the 12th to the 15th century, by the alternation of royal tolerances and persecutions [Borrero Fernández, 1985].

The patronym itself is a clue. Notrica derives in all likelihood from notario — the notary — that office which, in the Jewish communities of Spain, designated the sofer or the nôter, the one who kept the registers, drafted marriage deeds (ketubot), contracts, and the decisions of the community. One may read in it, as an avowed editorial hypothesis, the trace of a family of scribes and men of the written word, guardians of the pledged word and of the recorded Law. This vocation, were it confirmed, would immediately connect the lineage to one of the highest values of Judaism: respect for the text, fidelity to the written word, service rendered to the community through the faithful maintenance of its acts. The notary is, in a society of Law, a discreet servant of justice — the one without whom commitments would be lost.

Caution is warranted here: no document in the corpus directly attests to an Iberian Notrica. The reconstruction remains conjectural, supported by onomastics and by what is known of the common fate of the Sephardim. The Sephardic families of the Iberian Peninsula who found new homes in the Ottoman Empire generally preserved a large part of their heritage. It is in this transmitted heritage — the Judeo-Spanish language, the names, the customs — that the Memory of a lost Spain survives.

The expulsion of 1492 drove tens of thousands of Jews onto the roads. Some made their way to the Maghreb — Fès, Tlemcen, Oran — where Castilian communities reconstituted an ordered life, going so far as to promulgate their own ordinances, the famous takkanot of the Castilians of Fès which, as early as 1492, established the matrimonial and succession law of the exiles [Sefer ha-Takkanot, 1871] [Schwarzfuchs, 1997]. Others, more numerous in the end, turned toward the Ottoman Empire, whose sultans saw in the welcome of the proscribed both a political act and an economic windfall.

The Judeo-Spanish community that was to be born within the Empire was one of the most enduring creations in Jewish history: a civilization with its own language and culture, which spanned four centuries [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000]. It is within this framework that the arrival of the Notrica in Rhodes must be situated. The island, conquered by Soliman le Magnifique in 1522, became a refuge where Iberian families transplanted their synagogues, their trades, and their bonds of solidarity.

It is fitting to name honestly a tension: Ottoman hospitality was never equality. Jews lived there as dhimmis, protected but subject to particular taxes. The virtue carried by this period is not that of a triumph, but that of a faithfulness maintained within the minority condition — the capacity of a people, and of the families who compose it, to make of a subaltern status the foundation of a dense communal life. In this, the Notrica partake of the collective virtue of Israel that tradition names perseverance in exile: galout lived not as abandonment, but as the locus of a faithfulness.

In Rhodes, the Jewish community gathered in the Juderia, the old city quarter, around its synagogues. The name Notrica figures durably there, attested by cemetery surveys and by the family lists that the Jewish museum of Rhodes has reconstructed. The list of patronyms from Rhodes is established from the Jewish museum's website, cemetery section; some of these names, and others, came to Rhodes from Turkey, Italy, or other places between the 16th and 19th centuries; among them one finds notably Alhadeff, Amato, Angel, Benatar, Benveniste, Capelluto. The patronym Notrica belongs to this ancient stock, interwoven through alliances with the great families of the island — the Levi, the Hasson, the Tarica — as shown by the preserved family photographs, in which a Miriam Notrica appears within a large kindred [Rhodes Jewish Museum] [Messinas, 2008].

The life of this community, described in the works of Elias Messinas on the Jewish community of Rhodes, was organized around the synagogue, study, and mutual aid [Messinas, 2008]. Rhodes was nicknamed the "little Jerusalem" for its piety and its scholarly density. The Notrica, embedded in this world, shared its ordinary virtues: observance, attachment to Judeo-Spanish, transmission. One measures, in the mere fact of the persistence of the name on the cemetery's tombstones, the fidelity of a lineage to its adopted land — for the cemetery is, in Jewish tradition, the beit ha-hayyim, the "house of the living," the site of the unbreakable bond between generations.

It is here that the lineage offers its most luminous and best-documented testimony. The Memory of Rhodes has preserved the name of Joseph Notrica, a man of fortune whose destiny exemplarily illustrates the virtue of charity. Joseph Notrica was a prominent banker who had no children; the revenues he bequeathed were intended to help the poor of the community, in particular children in need.

This fact, attested by the island's commemorative foundation, condenses in itself several of the highest values of Judaism. First, tsedaka — not occasional almsgiving, but justice made obligation: a man without direct heirs chooses to make the community his heir, and the poor his children. Then hakhnasat orehim and the care of the orphan and the destitute, which tradition places at the summit of duties. A prominent banker, who remained childless, directed the revenues of his bequest toward the relief of the community's poor, most particularly children in need.

The very form of the monument dedicated to his memory speaks to the universality of this gesture. The monument has six faces, each bearing a different language: Greek, Hebrew, English, French, Italian. This polyglottism engraved in stone is not ornamental: it speaks to the place of a Jewish family at the crossroads of Mediterranean languages — Ottoman, Italian, and then European — and to the inscription of a Jewish act of charity in the public space of a cosmopolitan island. Here transmitted Memory and monumental archive answer each other exactly — hence the register of intersection. The benefactor's name survives not through his sons, of whom he had none, but through the good he instituted: this is the purest form of zékher tsaddik li-verakha, "the memory of the righteous is a blessing."

The 20th century shattered this continuity. Having been Ottoman and then Italian, the island of Rhodes fell under German occupation, and its Jewish community, one of the oldest in the Aegean, was annihilated: in July 1944, nearly all the Jews of Rhodes were deported to Auschwitz, at the end of one of the longest deportation journeys of the entire Shoah [Messinas, 2008]. The Juderia that had sheltered the Notrica for more than four centuries was emptied of its inhabitants. The gravestones endured; the living did not.

From this catastrophe, a few families escaped — those who had emigrated before the war to the Belgian Congo, Rhodesia, America, North Africa, or Europe. The Sephardic migratory movements of the early 20th century had already scattered Rhodesli across the world [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000]. It is through these surviving branches that the name Notrica endures today, all the way to the family trees that descendants patiently reconstruct, cross-referencing records and memories [MyHeritage / Geni — Arbre Encaoua, 2024].

The virtue of this chapter is of another order: it is that of Memory itself, the duty of zakhor — "remember." Reconstructing the lists of the deported, recording names on graves, rebuilding the tree of a decimated family: this work is an act of resistance against forgetting, and it extends, in its own way, the notarial vocation that the name perhaps carries within it — to preserve, to attest, to transmit. The lineage that had, in Joseph Notrica, saved poor children, is in turn saved from total annihilation by the faithfulness of its descendants to its memory.

The fate of the Notrica can only be understood within the vast web of Sephardic alliances. Contemporary genealogical research connects the name, through marriages, to the Benveniste, the Tarica, the Hasson, the Amato — those families whose branches run from Rhodes to Salonika, from Smyrna to Italy [MyHeritage / Geni — Arbre Encaoua, 2024]. The recorded ancestries include Alhadeff, Berro, Bardavid, Israel, Benatar, Hasson, Russo, Tarica, Menashe, Capeluto, and through marriage Amato and Notrica.

These networks are not mere genealogical curiosities. They are the very structure of Sephardic survival: through marriage, dispersed communities maintained a fabric of solidarity, mutual assistance, and halakhic transmission across political borders. The same communal vitality can be observed elsewhere in the Sephardic world, in Larissa as in Tlemcen or Sidi Bel Abbès, where rabbinical registers and cemetery inscriptions bear witness to an equal density of religious life and mutual aid [Messinas, 2012] [Botbol, 2000] [Registres du cimetière juif de Tlemcen] [Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès].

The Notrica's belonging to this constellation expresses a collective virtue: arevout, the mutual responsibility by which "all Israel is surety for one another." Here, tradition (the accounts of family alliances) and archive (the genealogical records and registers) confirm and nuance one another — hence, once again, the register of intersection. The name of a family from Rhodes reveals itself to be a node in a net stretched across the entire Mediterranean.

From this journey — from conjectured Iberian roots to Ottoman refuge, from the splendor of Rhodes to the rupture of 1944 and the dispersion —, one figure stands apart and gives the lineage its unity of meaning: the gesture of Joseph Notrica, a banker without heirs who made the poor and destitute children his beneficiaries. The revenues of his bequest were intended to assist the poor of the community, particularly children in need.

If one must name, above all others, the virtue this lineage will have expressed most fully, it is charity elevated to justice — the tsedaka in its highest sense, where the wealthy man becomes the father of orphans and private fortune becomes a common good. To this cardinal virtue is joined, inseparably, the faithfulness to memory and to the written word that the very name of the family suggests — the notarial vocation of one who attests, preserves and transmits —, carried forward today by descendants who reconstruct the tree of a family struck by the Shoah.

In this, the Notrica fully share in the collective Memory of Israel: they embody, at the scale of an island lineage, what Judaism has borne across the centuries — the conviction that care for the other is not a favor but a duty, and that remembering the dead is a way of honoring the living. The monument in six languages raised on an island in the Aegean says it all: a Jewish charity, spoken in all the languages of men, so that no poor child be forgotten. Zékher tsaddik li-verakha.