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Memory🌳 Italiancontemporaine· dès 1905 EC· Published on August 5, 2026

The Pardo (Érythrée) Family

פרדו

(Pardo (Eritrea))

Origin of the name, history and genealogy of the Pardo (Érythrée) lineage — a Jewish family name and the traces it left behind.

Sephardi-Italian family present in Asmara during the first half of the twentieth century, active in trade and import-export.

Geographic origin: Asmara

Memory register · custodian, not owner

Lineage Map

Salonique · XVIe–XVIIe s.SaloniqueAsmara · première moitié du XXe s.AsmaraVenise · XVIIe–XVIIIe s.VeniseRome · XIXe – début XXe s.RomePlace of Origin — Espagne · Moyen Âge – 1492 · Memory (transmitted)Espagne
Place of Origin Diaspora Memory (transmitted)Regions reconstructed from documented origins and diaspora.
Journey Through Time1950
The Great Book of this lineage

The Great Book — Pardo (Érythrée)

# Introduction

At the threshold of the Red Sea, in the sharp and limpid air of the Asmara highlands, there unfolded for a few decades the history of a Jewish presence as discreet as it was singular. The Pardo lineage belongs there to that particular category of Sephardic-Italian families whom the currents of commerce, colonization, and flight from persecution carried toward the southern margins of the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa. To understand it, one must hold together several threads: the history of an Iberian surname attested in Castile before the expulsion of 1492; the trajectory of a rabbinic branch which, from Venice to Sarajevo and then to Jerusalem, produced one of the monuments of Sephardic tannaitic literature in modern times; and, at the end of this multi-century trajectory, the settlement of a family of Italianized merchants on the African highlands, in the shadow of the Eritrean colony.

The Jewish community of Asmara provides the essential frame for this account. Once, Eritrea had a Jewish presence sustained by the arrival of individuals for economic reasons or fleeing persecution, a modest but well-organized community that peaked at around five hundred souls in the immediate postwar period. It is in this milieu—composed of Aden merchants, Italians, and refugees from Europe—that the Pardo family must be situated, Sephardic-Italian, present in Asmara in the first half of the twentieth century and active in commerce and import-export.

This Great Book, however, does not confine itself to Eritrea. Behind the merchants of Asmara stands a family of long standing, whose stages can be reconstructed from medieval Castile to the Red Sea, passing through Salonika, Venice, Ragusa, Spalato, Sarajevo, and Livorno. The central figure of this reconstruction is Rabbi David Pardo, born in Venice in 1719 and died in Jerusalem in 1792, whose work—commentaries on the Mishna, super-commentary on Rashi, commentary on the Tosefta—earned him a lasting place in the Sephardic rabbinic canon. Around him gravitate his father Jacob, himself a rabbi-poet, and his son Isaac, who perpetuated rabbinic dignity in Sarajevo.

The present work scrupulously distinguishes what belongs to established archival evidence from what belongs to prudent deduction as to the precise place of the Pardo family of Eritrea within this ensemble. It assumes this epistemic honesty as a virtue rather than a weakness: better a narrative in which the probable is named as such than an invented certainty.

Versions (1)
  1. v1 · current · Aug 5, 2026

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Variants of the name (2)

One name, a hundred faces.

The same surname, transcribed differently across languages, eras, and diasporas.

Latin1

Pardo

עברית · Hebrew1

פרדו

Does your family write this name differently?

In memory

The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names at Yad Vashem records the women, men, and children murdered during the Shoah. You can search there for the people who bore the name Pardo (Érythrée).

Search “Pardo (Érythrée)” on Yad Vashem

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Works & texts (5)

Documents published on Zakhor linked to this lineage through their keywords.

Notable figures of the lineage

Places along the journey

Communities crossed

The days of this book

This book bears no memory day yet. The sources that document Pardo (Érythrée) give years and centuries, never a day; we do not invent one.

You know a date — a remembrance, a hilloula, the anniversary of a departure? Give it its day

Bibliography

  • Alessandro Ferrarin, Ebrei e cultura italiana nella prima età moderna (2015)
  • Minna Rozen, Mediterranean Jewry in Early Modern Times: Social Organization and Family (2014)
  • Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, De la cour d'Espagne au ghetto italien : Isaac Cardoso et le marranisme au XVIIe siècle (1987)

Tags

#italienne#asmara#commerce#lieu-geo-auto

Other lineages — Italian