The Ottolenghi Vallepiana Family

The origin of a name fixes the origin of the people who bear it. The Ottolenghi descend, according to the constant onomastic tradition of scholars, from Jews of Ettlingen, driven or pushed from German lands during the waves of expulsions and persecutions which, from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, cast entire Ashkenazic communities onto the roads leading south. Northern Italy, fragmented into rival principalities, then offered Jews letters of condotta — those contracts by which dukes and communes authorized pawnbroking and commerce in exchange for dues and financial services. It is through this narrow yet real door that the future Ottolenghi settled in Piedmont, in the duchy of Savoy and the Montferrat, notably around Acqui, Asti, Moncalvo, and Casale.

This migration was not a simple material displacement: it was also the transport of knowledge. The Jews who came from German-speaking lands brought with them the Rhenish Talmudic tradition, that of the Tosafists, and the strict ritual demands of Ashkenazic observance. Their encounter with the Italian Jewish world, older and possessed of its own rite, produced precisely that intellectual fertility which Bonfil describes as one of the hallmarks of the Italian Jewish Renaissance: a capacity to combine heritages without dissolving them [Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 1994]. In this lineage's contribution to the life of the mind — the faithful transmission of Talmudic knowledge on the soil of exile — one recognizes one of the cardinal virtues that Israel has carried through the centuries: to make of study not an ornament but a form of survival, a means of remaining oneself while becoming the guest of a new land.

The Ottolenghi family gave Italian Judaism several rabbinical and scholarly figures whose traces are solidly documented. The most illustrious remains that of Rabbi Joseph b. Nathan Ottolenghi (died in Cremona around 1570), who led the yeshiva of Cremona in the sixteenth century and oversaw one of the city's great Hebrew printing workshops, contributing to the printed dissemination of the Talmud and rabbinical texts at a moment when Italian Hebrew printing was at its zenith. His editorial and pedagogical activity attests that the lineage was inscribed very early at the heart of the written transmission of tradition — precisely that bond between the book and Memory that Yerushalmi places at the foundation of Jewish identity [Y. H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 1984].

The halakhic commitment carried by these rabbis illustrates one of the great Jewish virtues: the conception of the Law as a living discipline, patiently interpreted and applied. To lead a yeshiva, to form disciples, to rule on questions of rite and law, was to assume collective responsibility for the community — involvement in communal life raised to the level of duty. And the manuscript and printed Italy of that era has left us material testimonies of this: the illuminated Hebrew codices, studied by Giulia Tamani, reveal the care devoted to the sacred text, the modest luxury of the prayer books and books of Law that learned families commissioned and copied [Giulia Tamani, Manoscritti ebraici decorati in Italia, 2010]. In this devotion to the exact text, the lineage partakes of a virtue that Israel has cultivated everywhere: the love of the book as the place of presence.

Like most Jewish families in Piedmont under the Ancien Régime, the Ottolenghi long drew their livelihood from pawnbroking and trade — activities to which the Christian authorities confined them while depending on them in turn. Far from being a mere constraint endured, this economy was, for the Italian Jewish communities, an art of necessity: it financed the synagogues, the schools, the charitable confraternities, and the ransoming of captives. Bonfil has shown how the lending trade, morally suspect in the eyes of surrounding society, was turned by Italian Jews into an instrument of internal solidarity and communal dignity [Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 1994].

It is here that the virtue of organized charity appears, borne out by the facts — tsedaka not as sentimental almsgiving but as justice owed. The Jewish bankers and merchants of Piedmont, among them the Ottolenghi, fed the coffers of the hevrot that endowed orphaned girls, aided the sick, and buried the destitute. Economic action, within this lineage, cannot be separated from care for the other: it is its material condition. In this, the family joins the long Memory of Israel, which has always held that subsistence earned creates an obligation toward the poor, and that wealth is legitimate only when redistributed.

The nineteenth century radically transformed the condition of the family. Emancipation, brought first by the French Revolutionary armies and then enshrined by the Statuto Albertino of 1848 in the kingdom of Sardinia, opened to Piedmontese Jews the liberal professions, the university, the army, and the civil service. The Ottolenghi seized these new freedoms: the name appears thereafter among the physicians, jurists, academics, and officers of unified Italy. The most eminent figure of this ascent was Giuseppe Ottolenghi (1838–1904), general of the Italian army, senator, and Minister of War of the kingdom of Italy from 1902 to 1903 — one of the first Jews to attain such a rank in the Europe of his time.

The trajectory of an Ottolenghi who became Minister of War engages a delicate theme of Jewish tradition: the relationship to war and to service of the State. Judaism, though it never made force a value in itself, has always recognized the duty to defend the city that welcomes and protects. To serve Italy loyally, even in its armed forces, was for this generation the civic expression of a gratitude — and the expression of an integration that did not renounce faithfulness to one's origins. This entry into the collective life of the nation, without abjuration, embodies a virtue that emancipation made possible: commitment to the service of the common good, held to be an fulfillment and not a betrayal of the self.

The story of the lineage cannot be told without its shadows. The fascist racial laws of 1938 struck the entirety of Italian Jewry, revoking professorships, striking officers from the rolls, excluding children from public schools; the most integrated Jews — precisely those whom the previous century had honored — were brutally returned to their condition as outcasts. After the German occupation of 1943, deportation reached Italy, and bearers of the name Ottolenghi figure among the victims of the Shoah, alongside thousands of Italian Jews torn from their cities. The work of Memory carried out by historians and educators such as Dominique Natanson reminds us that these names are not abstractions but singular existences, which the living are obliged to name and to transmit [Dominique Natanson, Mémoire Juive & Éducation, 1997].

Here, the archive and remembrance speak to one another painfully, according to the dialectic described by Yerushalmi: the historian establishes the facts, but it is Memory that preserves them from oblivion [Y. H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 1984]. The virtue this ordeal reveals is not heroic in any spectacular sense; it is that of an obstinate fidelity to an identity that others sought to abolish. To continue bearing the name, transmitting it, engraving it in registers and on steles, is to fulfill the zakhor — the commandment to remember — that structures the entire consciousness of Israel.

If the cradle of the Ottolenghi is Italian and Ashkenazi in origin, the lineage participated, like so many Jewish families, in the great Mediterranean circulations that blurred the boundaries between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic worlds. Livorno, the free port where the "Portuguese Jewish Nation" studied by Lionel Lévy flourished, was one of those crucibles where northern Italian families encountered the Sephardim of the Iberian diaspora, weaving bonds of commerce, marriage, and learning [Lionel Lévy, La Nation juive portugaise. Livourne, Amsterdam, Tunis, 1591-1951, 1999] [Lionel Lévy, La Communauté juive de Livourne, 1996]. From Livorno, these networks extended toward North Africa — Tunis, Tlemcen, Sidi Bel Abbès — where communities preserved the memory of their lineages in rabbinical archives whose richness is now widely recognized [Eliahou-Éric Botbol, Vie et destin de la communauté juive de Tlemcen, 2000] [Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès].

A distinction must be drawn here between what was established and what was transmitted: the family tradition of dispersions often exceeds what the archive confirms, and one cannot assert without proof any given North African branch of the Vallepiana lineage. Yet the virtue this openness illustrates is real and documented for the world to which the family belongs: the relationship with the stranger as fraternity, the welcoming of the coreligionist come from elsewhere, the mutual recognition across differing rites. The inner tolerance of Judaism — its capacity to make one nation of communities that geography separates — finds in these Mediterranean networks its most concrete expression.

From the Swabian Ettlingen abandoned under duress to the valleys of Piedmont, from the yeshiva of Cremona to the salons of emancipated Italy, from the lending counters to the mourning registers of the twentieth century, the Ottolenghi Vallepiana lineage traces in miniature the entire history of Italian Judaism: a history of exile transformed into rootedness, of constraint turned into dignity, of faithfulness maintained at the cost of blood. It bore several of the great virtues of the tradition — the love of the text and talmudic learning, charity raised to the level of justice, loyal service to the city.

But if one must name what this lineage, above all others, expressed most fully, it is faithful transmission — that discreet virtue uniting the printer-rabbi watching over the accuracy of the Talmud, the banker financing the school, the officer serving without abjuring, and the survivor engraving the names of the disappeared. By making the name itself — laden with the memory of Ettlingen and the Piedmontese valley — a deposit to be transmitted, the Ottolenghi Vallepiana accomplished, in their own measure, the zakhor that commands Israel to let nothing fall into oblivion [Y. H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 1984]. Their singular history thus joins the collective Memory of a people who made remembrance a form of faithfulness, and faithfulness a form of survival.