The Pardo (Érythrée) Family

The name Pardo takes root in the Iberian peninsula. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the patronymic is linked to Prado in Castille: it was there, in one of the many Jewish communities of the Castilian crown, that a family bearing this name lived before the expulsion of 1492. The Hispanic word pardo commonly designates an indeterminate shade, between brown and grey — a nickname that became a family name in the manner of dozens of other Sephardic patronyms that fix, in their consonant and vowel, a detail of the visible world. A properly Hebrew reading proposes to connect it to the word pardès — "orchard," "garden" — a term charged in mystical tradition with an altogether different depth: pardès also designates the acronym of the four levels of interpretation of sacred text, the peshat (literal sense), the remez (allegory), the derash (homiletic exegesis) and the sod (mysticism). That the name of a lineage of exegetes is phonetically akin to such a hermeneutical program has something of a happy irony that rabbinic history would take upon itself to sustain.

After 1492, the currents of exile scatter Sephardic families across several routes: the Ottoman Empire on one side, the Italian shores on the other. The Pardo branch takes both. A Levantine branch established itself in the Ottoman Empire; a Hakham Pardo is attested in Salonique in the sixteenth century in the outskirts of this Judeo-Spanish metropolis where Sephardic Jewish fishermen and stevedores, merchants and scholars coexisted. This Salonican presence constitutes a possible waypoint — documented for the Levantine branch of the name, possible but not certain for the direct branch that concerns us — between pre-expulsion Castille and the Italy of the centuries that followed. Salonique, which then numbered the largest Jewish community in the world and where Ladino reigned as the language of the street, represented the very type of those refuge-cities where Iberian memory preserved itself intact: the same prayers, the same liturgical melodies, the same rabbinic titles that had resonated in the synagogues of Toledo and Seville.

It is by this double route — Ottoman and Italian — that the name Pardo traverses the centuries. The branch that concerns us, Italianized, ultimately became established in Venice by the early eighteenth century at the latest. But the detour through Salonique, even if uncertain for this particular lineage, recalls that the patronym carries within it the entire geography of the Sephardic diaspora: no settlement erases the previous one, each port is at once a destination and a stopover.

Before turning to the intellectual giant of the lineage, it is fitting to pause on the father, whose figure is attested and whose own work deserves to be drawn from the shadows. Jacob ben David Pardo was himself a rabbi, author and poet: he served as rabbi in Ragusa — present-day Dubrovnik — and in Spalato (Split), two Dalmatian cities of the Venetian Republic that harbored active Sephardic communities on the Adriatic trade route. Jacob had also exercised his calling in Venice, where his son David was born on 29 March 1719.

His work, which has come down to us in three collections, testifies to a dual calling — pastoral and poetic — uncommon in the rabbinical world. The Marpe Lashon (Venice, 1780) gathers prayers and religious poems intended for children: it is a work of transmission, a liturgical guide for the young, which reveals in Jacob Pardo an unusual pedagogical concern. The collection Tehillah be-Erez comprises poems composed on the occasion of the Ragusa earthquake — a traumatic event for the local community, to which the rabbi responded not with a juridical treatise but through poetry, as if the natural catastrophe called first for the register of lamentation and faith. The Kehalat Yaakov (Venice, 1784) constitutes a commentary on the Former Prophets — Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings — testifying to an exegetical ambition that surpasses liturgy and ventures into the territory of sacred history.

This rabbi-poet father outlines the intellectual soil in which David Pardo would grow up. In Venice, in the midst of the ponentine Sephardic community — those Jews from the West distinguished, in the confessional geography of the Serenissima, by their own rite and Iberian culture — Jacob Pardo transmitted to his son the dual aptitude that defines the lineage: the rigor of the law and the music of language. The Chasdei David of the son and the Marpe Lashon of the father are not two separate works; they are two faces of the same heritage, that of a family for whom study is also a matter of beauty.

The figure that confers upon the Pardo lineage its highest intellectual and spiritual depth is Rabbi David Samuel ben Jacob Pardo, born in Venice on March 29, 1719 and died in Jerusalem in 1792. His work, preserved and transmitted in the Zakhor corpus [Zakhor Corpus id:dcdff30e-a524-4465-80e2-14026b698981 ; id:deb0f0cc-4718-474a-85ff-7278742eb905 ; id:4bf0dd0e-f8a8-44ca-afed-69e35c21c5cd], stands as one of the most significant contributions of Sephardic Judaism to the tannaitic rabbinical literature of modern times.

After his studies in Venice in the Sephardic Venetian environment, David Pardo left his native city following a succession dispute and first traveled to Ragusa — the Dalmatian city where his father had served — then to Sarajevo. It was there, in Sarajevo, that he devoted himself for a time to teaching before departing for Spalato (Split), where Rabbi Abraham David Papo engaged him as master at the local yeshiva. The trajectory is significant: David Pardo is not merely a scholar of the cabinet; he is a man who travels, who teaches, who adapts to different communities while maintaining the thread of his intellectual work. After the death of Papo's successor, Isaac Tzedakah, he was elected chief rabbi of Spalato. Among his disciples were Shabbethaï Ventura, David Pinto and Abraham Curiel — names that attest to the influence he exerted far beyond his own city.

In 1764, he accepted the position of chief rabbi of Sarajevo, succeeding Joshua Isaac Maggioro: it was there that he reached the height of his rabbinical influence in the Balkan world. Sarajevo was then a thriving center of Sephardic Judaism, a crossroads of the Ottoman Empire where Jewish communities maintained intense intellectual life. In 1776, David Pardo undertook the journey to the Land of Israel. He settled in Jerusalem, where he directed the yeshiva Hesed le-Avraham u-Binyan Shelomo until his death in 1792. His contemporaries held him to be the greatest rabbi of Jerusalem.

His literary production is considerable. The works preserved in the Zakhor corpus constitute its most precious core, and each deserves careful attention.

The *Shoshannim le-David* (Venice, 1752) [Zakhor Corpus id:deb0f0cc-4718-474a-85ff-7278742eb905] is his first published work: an independent commentary on the Mishna, composed in the fullness of his intellectual youth. The originality of this work lies precisely in its independence: David Pardo confronts the tannaitic text directly, proposing readings that are his own, without systematically following the well-worn paths traced by amoraic interpreters. This exegetical boldness earned him some friction with contemporaries whose sensibilities were wounded by the vigor of his pen; but it assured him with lasting posterity, for it is precisely this freshness of vision applied to the text that renders the work irreplaceable. The "Roses of David" illustrate wonderfully the value that Judaism attaches to study as an act of piety as much as of intellect: to study the Mishna is to join the unbroken chain that reaches back to Sinai.

The *Maskil le-David (Venice, 1761) [Zakhor Corpus id:4bf0dd0e-f8a8-44ca-afed-69e35c21c5cd] constitutes one of the most original pieces of the corpus. It is a super-commentary on the commentary that Rashi devoted to the Pentateuch — a commentary on commentary, in a sense, which seizes upon the medieval gloss that founded Ashkenazic exegesis and subjects it to the demanding scrutiny of a Sephardic master. The gesture is remarkable: David Pardo, heir to the Iberian tradition, chooses to engage across the boundary of rites with the tradition of another Israel. This is not polemic but deepening: where Rashi proposes a reading, David Pardo excavates its foundations, debates its presuppositions, broadens its horizons. The Maskil le-David — "He who gives intelligence to David" — appeared in Venice in 1761 in a single edition; its bibliographic rarity has not diminished its prestige, and scholars who have studied it since have found in it one of the most penetrating works of the Sephardic tradition on scriptural commentary. To this same intellectual maturity belongs the La-Menatzeach le-David (Salonika, 1795) [Zakhor Corpus id:4bf0dd0e-f8a8-44ca-afed-69e35c21c5cd], a collection of hiddushim* — these "exegetical novelties" that are the proper mode of invention of talmudic genius — published posthumously in the great Sephardic metropolis of Macedonia, proof that the work of David Pardo circulated and radiated far after his death.

The *Chasdei David (Livorno, first part 1776; Jerusalem, second part 1790) crowns the edifice. It is a commentary on the Tosefta, this tannaitic collection parallel to the Mishna, traditionally attributed to the circle of Rabbi Hiyya. The Tosefta had awaited for centuries a systematic commentary worthy of its importance: David Pardo gave it to her. Moreover, he corrected numerous transmission errors that had slipped into the text through copies over time—work of philologist as much as exegete, which illustrates the consciousness that the rabbinical giant had of his responsibility toward future generations. The very title of the work, Chasdei David—"the Graces of David"—is an act of humility: the author effaces himself behind the value of hessed, faithful loving-kindness, as if the commentary were not his own work but a gift made to the community of Israel. Its publication in two stages testifies to an entire life devoted to study: first part in Livorno in 1776, when David Pardo was preparing to go to the Land of Israel; second part in Jerusalem in 1790, from the holy city where he would die two years later. Even today, the Chasdei David* is universally regarded as one of the most important commentaries ever written on the Tosefta; it has been reedited in ten volumes by the Lev Sameach Institute.

To these three monuments is added the *Sifre deBeRab, commentary on the tannaitic collection Sifre* (on the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy), begun in Jerusalem in 1786 and published posthumously by his son Isaac: a fourth proof that, until the last years of his life, David Pardo never interrupted his work of elucidating the foundational texts.

Through this fourfold contribution—to the Mishna, to Rashi, to the Tosefta, to the Sifre—David Pardo inscribes himself in the highest tradition of Sephardic talmudic learning. He embodies better than anyone in the lineage the virtue of talmud Torah as service rendered not only to God but to the entire Jewish people: his commentaries are not academic exercises confined to an elite, but instruments of transmission intended to keep the foundational text alive through the generations. It must also be emphasized the dimension of mobility that structures this life: Venice, Ragusa, Sarajevo, Spalato, Jerusalem. David Pardo lived and taught in five centers of the Mediterranean Jewish world, at each stage enriching his perspective without ever abandoning the thread of study. This ability to carry learning from one shore to another without letting it fragment prefigures, at two centuries' distance, the movement that would lead other members of the Pardo name to the African highlands.

The intellectual lineage of David Pardo did not end with him. His son, Isaac Pardo, who remained in Sarajevo when his father undertook the journey to Jerusalem, held the position of chief rabbi that David himself had once occupied. This dynastic continuity in rabbinic office was common in the Balkan Sephardic world, where religious authority was often transmitted from father to son, the son having been trained through direct contact with the master.

Isaac Pardo is the author of the To'afot Re'em, a commentary on the responsa of one of the great decisors of the Sephardic tradition — an evocative title that places this work from the outset within halakhic rather than exegetical lineage. He also published his father's posthumous Sifre deBeRab, thereby fulfilling the filial duty of a man who ensures that his father's work does not remain buried in inaccessible manuscripts. This act of transmission — ensuring the publication of a text left unfinished by death — is precisely the kind of hessed that the Chasdei David proclaimed in its very title: the faithful kindness that continues to act after the death of he who was its source.

The next generation prolonged this trajectory in a new direction. Jacob Hayyim Pardo, born in Ragusa in 1818 — David's grandson through Isaac —, received training at the University of Padua and distinguished himself through remarkable abilities in the secular academic world. This detail is not insignificant: it signals that the Pardo branch, without abandoning anything of its rabbinic tradition, also knew how to inscribe itself within the institutions of Italian modernity, which in a sense prepared subsequent generations for integration into the colonial world of liberal and then fascist Italy. From Venice to Padua, from Ragusa to Livorno, the Pardos maintained the coherence of a Sephardic-Italian identity in which rabbinic learning and general culture were conjugated rather than contested.

Another member of the family, attested in Dubrovnik over several generations, symbolizes in himself the permanence of Pardo presence in the Adriatic arc: Jacob Pardo son of Isaac was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Dubrovnik, having served the communities of Ragusa and Spalato as his grandfather had done before him. The synagogue of Dubrovnik, founded in 1532 — the second oldest active synagogue in Europe after that of Prague —, remains associated with this memory.

Jewish presence in Eritrea is inseparable from Italian colonial expansion on the shores of the Red Sea in the late nineteenth century. Yemenite Jews were drawn to newly colonized Eritrea by the commercial opportunities opened up by Italian administration. Asmara, capital of the territory, became a crossroads where Yemenite merchants, Italian officials and traders, and merchants from all origins met.

The core of this presence crystallized at the turn of the century. From 1905-1906 onwards, the communal structure took shape: the Hebrew congregation of Asmara was established and continued to grow throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The synagogue, completed in 1906 under Italian colonization, soon housed classrooms and a cemetery — clear signs that this was no longer a mere trading post but a rooted community.

The composition of the community is revealing of its cosmopolitan character. The congregation was founded by Yemenite Jewish immigrants from Aden, to whom were added a few Italian Jews. It is precisely in this stratum of Italian Jews — numerically minority but socially integrated into the colonial sphere — that the Pardo family belonged. The city of Asmara, a product of Italian colonialism, also counted, in the 1930s, refugees from Nazi Europe, further reinforcing the composite character of this community.

This founding duality — a majority Adenite base and an Italian elite — structured the whole of communal life. The Pardo, Sephardim of Iberian descent but Italian in culture and language for several generations (Livorno, Padua, Verona formed their most recent peninsular stages), embodied this link between the European Mediterranean and the Arabian peninsula that the Asmara community incarnated in its entirety. It is tempting to see in this double belonging — Sephardic by origin, Italian by culture — a distant echo of the trajectory of David Pardo, born in Venice but nourished by the traditions of Sarajevo and Jerusalem: in the Pardo lineage, the boundaries between Jewish worlds are never walls but passages.

The reference note presents the Pardo of Eritrea as a family active in commerce and import-export. This characterization, far from being anecdotal, precisely overlaps with the documented economic profile of the Jewish community of Asmara, and it fits into a broader Sephardic tradition: since the great merchants of Livorno and Amsterdam, the Pardo had always known how to combine aptitude for trade with faithfulness to religious life.

Commerce was indeed the very driver of Jewish settlement in Eritrea. The first arrivals were drawn by the commercial outlets opened by Italian colonization. Urban geography itself bears the trace of this mercantile vocation: many members of the community lived and conducted business in streets near the synagogue, making the Jewish quarter a dense fabric of dwellings and shops.

For a Sephardic-Italian family like the Pardo, import-export represented the natural conjunction of several assets: mastery of Italian language and networks, access to Red Sea ports—Massaoua foremost—and trans-Mediterranean links inherited from an ancient diaspora. Asmara's position, connected by rail to the coast, made it a commercial platform oriented at once toward metropolitan Italy, toward Aden, and toward the Indian subcontinent.

It is worth emphasizing the profound continuity that unites this mercantile vocation to the intellectual heritage of the lineage. In the classical Sephardic world, commerce is never dissociated from culture: the great rabbis of Livorno or Amsterdam were often the sons or brothers of merchants, and trading posts were frequently also centers for the dissemination of Hebrew books. David Pardo himself had his works published in Venice, Livorno, and Salonika—three mercantile no less than learned places. His Chasdei David was published in Livorno, foremost place of Jewish Mediterranean commerce, before even being completed in Jerusalem. If the Pardo of Asmara held cargoes rather than libraries, they nonetheless participated in the same economy of connection—between men, between communities, between shores—which is one of the distinctive traits of Jewish presence in the Mediterranean and its extensions.

One should nonetheless maintain a sense of uncertainty: if the economic framework is solidly established, the details of Pardo enterprises—company names, merchandise, partners—are not preserved in accessible sources. The continuity between family tradition and the documented collective profile remains probable rather than proven piece by piece.

No history of a Jewish family from Asmara can be conceived outside the building that was its center. The synagogue of Asmara, completed in 1906, remains the founding monument of this presence and the oldest synagogue in the country — the sole surviving vestige of the once-flourishing Jewish community of Eritrea.

The edifice was designed to meet the needs of a growing community. It comprises a main sanctuary capable of accommodating up to two hundred people, classrooms, and a small cemetery. This scale — a sanctuary, a school, a cemetery — testifies to the ambition of a lasting home, not merely a temporary encampment of passing merchants. The presence of classrooms is particularly significant: it signifies that the community intended to transmit to its children not only the Hebrew language and rites, but something of the culture of the text that the name Pardo had carried for generations. In a building where one studies as one prays, the shadow of the Shoshannim le-David and the Chasdei David is not entirely absent.

The 1930s brought an unexpected reinforcement. In that decade, the Jewish community was strengthened by numerous European Jews who emigrated to Eritrea to escape Nazi persecution. Asmara, under Italian administration and then, after 1941, British administration, became one of these improbable refuges where Jews from Europe found respite far from the camps. This influx brought the community to its highest level: some five hundred souls in the years immediately following the war — a density sufficient to sustain a living synagogue, a school, practices, and a memory.

It must, however, be recalled that Italian Jews held a delicate position in this context. Subjects of a State that had promulgated the fascist racial laws in 1938, yet established in a colony where life continued to unfold far from the great theaters of persecution, they experienced in their flesh the contradiction of belonging to a nation that rejected them. The Italian defeat of 1941 and the arrival of the British altered this framework, paradoxically opening a window of relative safety.

The welcome that the community of Asmara extended to refugees from Nazi Europe deserves to be noted as a collective act of hospitality: in a colonial city where racial hierarchies were the rule, Jewish families opened their quarter and their synagogue to strangers bearing the same star. This solidarity toward the stranger — the hakhnasat orehim, the welcoming of the guest, which is one of the cardinal virtues of the Jewish tradition since Abraham — finds expression here in a context of peril that lends it particular resonance. For a family like the Pardo, who had themselves been welcomed in Italy after the exile of 1492 and formed in the virtue of hessed by the example of David Pardo, this welcome was not a posture but a way of being.

The heyday of the 1950s already contained the seeds of decline. The political upheavals of the second half of the century — the end of colonial tutelage, federation and then annexation to Ethiopia, the long Eritrean war of independence — caused the progressive effacement of the community. Each political crisis was also a wave of departure: toward Israel, toward Italy, toward Europe or the Americas, according to the opportunities and constraints of each family.

The contemporary assessment is striking. Today, it is diplomats on visits or UN officials who occasionally participate in a religious service in the synagogue, because emigration, deaths, and successive revolutions have dissolved communal life. A single man, Sami Cohen, is now the last native Jew of Eritrea still living in Asmara. From several hundred members, the community has shrunk to a symbolic presence. The upkeep of the premises now rests on this sole guardian, who manages every aspect of the synagogue alone and has remained in the country to watch over the building. The synagogue, its Torah scrolls and its cemetery subsist as a frozen memorial, on a quiet street in Asmara that seems almost suspended in time.

For the Pardo family as for others, the fate was one of dispersion. A Sephardic name born in Castile, transplanted to Salonika then to Venice, carried by a father who was a rabbi-poet between Ragusa and the Serenissima, elevated to its intellectual zenith by a son who was a commentator on the Torah and the Tosefta, transmitted to a generation of merchants who laid it down for a few decades on the highlands of East Africa, and finally scattered to the four corners of the contemporary world. This trajectory is, in itself, a parable of modern Jewish history: no community is definitive, no synagogue guarantees itself against silence, but names, texts, and memories survive exiles.

It is fitting to evoke here the thread of continuity that the work of David Pardo stretches across the centuries to the synagogue of Asmara. The Chasdei David, published in two installments — in Livorno in 1776 and in Jerusalem in 1790 — is a work of transmission: its raison d'être is to ensure that the tannaitc text is not lost, that future generations may approach and understand it. The synagogue of Asmara, in its obstinacy to remain standing under the guardianship of Sami Cohen, accomplishes the same gesture: to maintain the form, to keep the place, to testify that someone, once, lived here in faithfulness to Israel. Names change, continents change, but the virtue is the same — that of hessed, of faithful kindness that will not be vanquished by absence.

Where the archive falls silent on the detail of the individual trajectories of the Pardo family in Eritrea, family Memory takes over. What we know with certainty is that a name as charged with history as Pardo does not traverse the centuries with impunity: it carries with it, in its merchants as in its rabbis, something of a commitment to continuity.

Jacob ben David Pardo (dates unknown, active in the 18th century) — Rabbi, author and liturgical poet, father of David Pardo and son of an earlier David Pardo. He served as rabbi in Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Spalato (Split) and Venice, at the heart of the Adriatic Sephardic network. His work includes the Marpe Lashon (Venice, 1780), a collection of prayers and religious poems for children, and the Kehalat Yaakov (Venice, 1784), a commentary on the Former Prophets. His poetic sensibility, expressed in the Tehillah be-Erez composed on the occasion of the Ragusa earthquake, reveals a rabbi as much pastoral as erudite. He constitutes the direct link between the Italian Sephardic tradition and the genius of his son.

David Samuel ben Jacob Pardo (1719–1792), in Hebrew דוד שמואל פארדו — Born in Venice on 29 March 1719, died in Jerusalem in 1792. Rabbi, talmudic commentator and liturgical poet, he is the central figure of the lineage. After studies in Venice, he passed through Ragusa, Sarajevo and Spalato, where he was elected Chief Rabbi before accepting in 1764 the position of Chief Rabbi of Sarajevo. In 1776, he settled in Jerusalem, where his contemporaries held him to be the greatest rabbi of the city. He is the author of the Shoshannim le-David (Venice, 1752), the Maskil le-David (Venice, 1761), the Chasdei David (Livorno, 1776; Jerusalem, 1790), the La-Menatzeach le-David (Salonica, 1795, posthumous) and the Sifre deBeRab (posthumous) — a corpus that makes him one of the greatest Sephardic exegetes of modern times [Zakhor Corpus id:dcdff30e-a524-4465-80e2-14026b698981 ; id:deb0f0cc-4718-474a-85ff-7278742eb905 ; id:4bf0dd0e-f8a8-44ca-afed-69e35c21c5cd].

Isaac ben David Pardo (dates unknown, active late 18th–early 19th century), in Hebrew יצחק בן דוד פארדו — Son of David Pardo, he remained in Sarajevo when his father undertook the journey to Jerusalem and succeeded him as Chief Rabbi of the city. He oversaw the posthumous publication of his father's Sifre deBeRab, thereby fulfilling the duty of transmission that defines the lineage. He is himself author of the To'afot Re'em, a commentary on the responsa of a great Sephardic decisionist — a work that perpetuates the halakhic vocation inherited from his father. His fidelity to Sarajevo symbolizes the permanence of the Pardo presence in the Balkan world after the departure of the founding giant.

Jacob Hayyim Pardo (born circa 1818, Ragusa — date of death unknown) — Grandson of David Pardo through the Isaac branch, born in Ragusa in 1818. He received training at the University of Padua and distinguished himself by abilities much noted in the secular academic world — a detail that signals that the Pardo branch was able to inscribe itself in the institutions of Italian modernity without breaking with its Sephardic moorings. His figure illustrates the transition between the rabbinical world of his ancestors and the Italo-Sephardic culture that would lead the lineage to the Eritrean colony in the following century.

The Pardo Family of Asmara (first half of the 20th century — individual dates unknown) — Italo-Sephardic family established in Asmara, capital of Italian Eritrea, in the first half of the 20th century. Active in trade and import-export, it was part of the stratum of Italian Jews of the Hebrew congregation of Asmara, founded in 1906. Heir to a family tradition running from Castile to Venice and from Ragusa to Livorno, it represents the ultimate documented stage of the lineage's multi-century journey before contemporary dispersal. The names and individual trajectories of its members are not preserved in accessible sources.

The Pardo lineage of Eritrea can be grasped as a point of condensation where several great histories converge. That of a secular kind, concerning an Iberian patronym born in Castile, scattered by the expulsion of 1492, attested in Salonika, established in Venice and in the Dalmatian ports of the Venetian Republic. That, intellectual and spiritual, of a rabbinical dynasty — Jacob Pardo the poet, David Pardo the exegetical giant, Isaac Pardo the faithful heir — whose commentaries on the Mishna, on Rachi, on the Tossefta and on the Sifre represent a major contribution to Jewish thought in the modern era. That, colonial, of Italy on the highlands of the Horn of Africa. That, communal finally, of a small Jewish settlement in Asmara which, from 1906 to the 1950s, experienced flourishing and then effacement.

What the archive establishes with certainty is the framework: a synagogue founded in 1906, a composite community of Aden merchants, Italians and refugees, an apogee of approximately five hundred souls after the war, an almost total decline today. What the manuscripts in the Zakhor corpus add with all the force of documentary proof is the stature of the rabbinical branch: the Shoshannim le-David of 1752, the Maskil le-David of 1761 and its posthumous counterpart La-Menatzeach le-David (Salonika, 1795), the Chasdei David of 1776 and 1790, together constitute one of the most original exegetical works of the eighteenth-century Sephardic [Zakhor Corpus id:dcdff30e-a524-4465-80e2-14026b698981 ; id:deb0f0cc-4718-474a-85ff-7278742eb905 ; id:4bf0dd0e-f8a8-44ca-afed-69e35c21c5cd]. What prudent deduction inscribes, finally, is the place of the Pardo family of Eritrea: a Sephardic-Italian family, devoted to commerce and import-export, integrated into the thin Italian stratum of this cosmopolitan congregation, bearing in its own way a heritage as weighty as it was discreet.

Among all the values and virtues that Jewish tradition has cultivated through the centuries, the Pardo lineage will have best expressed, as a whole and over the long term, the value of talmud Torah — study as an act of piety, of transmission and of service to the community of Israel. It is David Pardo who embodies its highest expression, with his commentaries written from Venice to Jerusalem passing through Spalato, Sarajevo and Livorno. But this fidelity to transmission extends otherwise among the Pardo family of Asmara: running a business in the shadow of a synagogue equipped with classrooms, raising one's children in the knowledge of tradition in the heart of an African colonial city, is also, in its own measure, to participate in this immemorial effort so that nothing is lost. And it is Isaac Pardo who, in seeing to the publication of the Sifre deBeRab after his father's death, embodied the very gesture of this transmission: putting back into circulation what might have remained buried in silence.

It remains that a part of this history dwells in the shadow of sources. The names, the faces, the shops and the precise itineraries of the Pardo family of Asmara have not all found an echo in the accessible catalogues. This Great Book assumes this lacuna with the serenity that honesty deserves: it is better to have a narrative where the probable is named as such than an invented certainty. In the silent street of Asmara where the synagogue still keeps watch, it is an entire Sephardic-Italian world, and the Pardo lineage with it, that awaits for Memory and the archive to continue answering one another.