The Pardo-Roques Family

The composition of the patronym Pardo-Roques illuminates in itself the profound movements that shaped Italian Judaism. The name Pardo — which means "brown," "tawny" in Spanish and Portuguese — belongs to the best-attested Sephardic patrimony. Borne by families of Iberian Jews scattered after the expulsions of Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497), it spread throughout the entire Mediterranean basin, to Amsterdam, to Livorno, to Venice, to the Ottoman Balkans and as far as the Levantine communities. Tradition traces this name to the lineages of merchants and scholars who reconstructed, in their host lands, the dispersed networks of the Portuguese nation.

The element Roques, for its part, is received by tradition as a marker of geographical origin, evoking the stony heights of the Midi and Provence — those lands from which many Jewish families, driven from the kingdom of France at the end of the fourteenth century, reached northern Italy and the Comtat. The juxtaposition of the two names suggests, by all likelihood, a matrimonial alliance between two houses, usage dictating that in such a case the memory of both ancestries be preserved in a compound patronym — a practice widespread among the Jews of Italy and the West.

What the name transmits thus, before any document, is fidelity to the memory of ancestors. To preserve in one's name the remembrance of two lineages is to refuse oblivion, it is to make identity itself an act of transmission. In this, the house Pardo-Roques participates in a cardinal virtue of the tradition of Israel: zakhor, the injunction to remember, which makes each family the guardian of a link in the long chain of generations. The rooting of the name in Italy is inscribed in the broader movement by which the peninsula welcomed and absorbed the exiles of all the diasporas [Attilio Milano, History of the Jews in Italy, 1963].

To understand the Pardo-Roques lineage, one must place it within the long duration of Jewish presence in Italy, one of the oldest and most continuous in the Western diaspora. Jews lived in Rome as early as the 2nd century before the Common Era, and the peninsula never experienced a total rupture of their presence, unlike England, France, or Spain [Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia, 1963]. This continuity made Italy a crossroads where three great traditions met: the native italkim, Ashkenazim coming from the north, and Sephardim arriving after the Iberian expulsions.

During the Renaissance, Italian Jewish communities experienced intense intellectual and economic life, centered around major hubs — Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Rome, Livorno and Tuscany — where Hebrew printing, Talmudic study and international commerce flourished [Robert Bonfil, Gli ebrei in Italia nell'epoca del Rinascimento, 1991]. Livorno in particular became, from the late 16th century onward, thanks to privileges granted by the Medici, the principal center of welcome for Sephardic Jews of the "Portuguese nation" — a context in which families bearing the name Pardo prospered along the Tuscan coasts.

Tuscany thus offers the most likely soil for the rooting of the Pardo-Roques. Florence and its community, whose history from its origins to the present day has been traced by Roberto Salvadori, formed with Livorno and Pisa the living triangle of Tuscan Judaism [Roberto G. Salvadori, Gli ebrei di Firenze, 2000]. It was in this Tuscany of merchants, bankers and scholars that the lineage found its place, participating in this collective life — the kehillah — where community solidarity, mutual aid and support formed the foundation of Jewish existence. Involvement in community life, far from being a choice, was the very mode of belonging to the people of Israel, and the Pardo-Roques lineage was, like so many others, an active part of it.

The nineteenth century radically transformed the condition of Jews in Italy. The long debate on emancipation, opened since the Enlightenment and the reign of reforms, resulted, in the course of the Risorgimento, in civil and political equality. Gadi Luzzatto Voghera demonstrated how contested this path — from 1781 to 1848 — was, and how much emancipation had its "price": the expected integration often presupposed identity discretion, full adherence to the nation in formation [Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Il prezzo dell'eguaglianza, 1998].

Italian unification made Jews full citizens. They committed themselves with fervor to national life: in the army, administration, the professions, the university, finance and industry. This emancipated generation combined fidelity to tradition with full participation in civic life — a way of fulfilling, within the frameworks of modernity, the ancient value of involvement in collective life, now extended to the entire nation. Jewish families of the great Tuscan cities, including the Pardo-Roques, inscribed themselves in this movement of social advancement and bourgeois integration.

It is in this context that we understand the place occupied in Pisa by Giuseppe Pardo Roques, a figure on which rests the bulk of the documented Memory of the lineage. A man of good Pisan society, he embodied this generation of Italians of Jewish faith fully rooted in their city, active in its economic life and committed to the conduct of communal affairs. Yet this century of integration carried within it a fragility that nothing presaged: the promise of equality, so dearly acquired, was to be brutally repudiated by the fascist regime and its racial laws of 1938 [Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 2003]. The history of the Pardo-Roques shifts here from the chronicle of integration to that of persecution.

At the heart of the lineage's memory stands Giuseppe Pardo Roques, president of the Jewish community of Pisa in the darkest years. A respected man, of profound piety and renowned charity, he devoted his existence to the service of his own. The family home on via Sant'Andrea, today identified as Casa Pardo Roques, remains attached to his memory and to that of the tragedy that unfolded there; it stands among the places of Jewish memory in Pisa [Casa Pardo Roques, Comune di Pisa – Turismo].

His role as president made him the representative and protector of a community weakened by the racial laws of 1938, which excluded Jews from schools, professions, and Italian public life [Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell'Italia fascista, 2000]. In this period when persecution moved from laws to persecution, then to deportation after German occupation in September 1943, Giuseppe Pardo Roques remained at his post. Tradition reports that, afflicted by a phobia that prevented him from leaving, he could not — or would not — flee, and made his house a refuge where other Jews and threatened persons gathered.

This gesture, in which personal infirmity became a place of protection for others, embodies to the highest degree two virtues that the tradition of Israel places at the summit: hessed, active kindness, and care for the other, even to the point of making one's own home a shelter. In taking upon himself the burden of a persecuted community when he might have thought only of himself, Giuseppe Pardo Roques embodied the figure of the parnass, the community leader who answers for his people. His faithfulness joins the long lineage of those who, in the diaspora, stood firm in the midst of theirs when everything collapsed — collective memory of a people for whom the abandonment of the weak is the cardinal sin, and solidarity, the first law.

The name Pardo Roques passed into history through the tragedy that struck the house on via Sant'Andrea. On August 1, 1944, as the front approached Pisa and the city was soon to be liberated, German soldiers broke into the residence where Giuseppe Pardo Roques had taken in several people. They perpetrated a massacre there: Giuseppe Pardo Roques was killed along with the Jews and non-Jews who had placed themselves under his protection, as well as members of the household staff. This episode, known as the eccidio Pardo Roques, ranks among the most striking crimes of the occupation in the region [Carla Forti, Il caso Pardo Roques. Un eccidio del 1944 tra memoria e oblio, Einaudi].

The very date — on the eve of the city's liberation — gives the tragedy its character of absurd cruelty: death struck at the threshold of salvation. The residence that had been a refuge became a tomb. Historian Carla Forti devoted a methodical inquiry to this event, seeking to establish the facts and to question the uncertain divide between Memory and oblivion that long surrounded the massacre [Carla Forti, Il caso Pardo Roques, Einaudi]. Her work restores both the circumstances of the killing and the slow process by which the city recognized, then commemorated, what had occurred within its walls.

This murder is inscribed in the vast martyrdom of the Jews of Italy under occupation, which Liliana Picciotto exhaustively catalogued in Il libro della memoria, a work that names, one by one, the Jews deported and murdered from Italy between 1943 and 1945 [Liliana Picciotto, Il libro della memoria, 1991]. The diarists and letter writers of those years, gathered by Avagliano and Palmieri, left direct testimony to the anguish, the persecution, and the annihilation of an entire world [Mario Avagliano, Marco Palmieri, Gli ebrei sotto la persecuzione in Italia, 2011]. In this landscape of destruction, the death of Giuseppe Pardo Roques speaks to the price paid by those who refused to abandon their own.

The fate of the Pardo-Roques cannot be understood outside the persecuting machine that crushed them. The racial laws promulgated by the fascist regime in 1938, whose damning documents Fabio Isman compiled, had methodically stripped Italian Jews of their rights, their property and their dignity, long before the German occupier organized their extermination [Fabio Isman, 1938. L'Italia razzista, 2018]. Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci showed how this persecution, long minimized in national Memory, was the work of a properly Italian State antisemitism, not merely a foreign import [Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, L'Italia fascista e la persecuzione degli ebrei, 2008].

The Pardo Roques case exemplifies the tension between Memory and History. For a long time, the eccidio remained in a zone of half-silence, as if the city hesitated to face what had occurred within it. The work of historians — that of Carla Forti foremost — moved the event from the domain of buried Memory into that of established History, restoring names, facts and responsibilities. In this, the History of this lineage touches upon an essential virtue: justice as a duty of truth, the imperative to name the victims and not allow the crime to dissolve into oblivion.

This imperative extends, at the scale of a family and a city, the great work of Memory conducted on the Shoah in Italy, from the pioneering surveys to the syntheses of Sarfatti and Collotti [Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell'Italia fascista, 2000] [Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 2003]. That the dwelling on via Sant'Andrea became a place of Memory testifies to this reversal: the refuge become tomb is today a place of teaching, where the city and its Jews remember [Casa Pardo Roques, Comune di Pisa – Turismo]. Thus the Pardo-Roques lineage, through its very end, contributes to the fulfillment of zakhor — to remember so that justice may be rendered.

At the end of this journey, the Pardo-Roques lineage appears as a drop of water in which the entire history of the Jews of Italy is reflected: the Iberian exile preserved in a name, the Tuscan rootedness in merchant cities, the emancipation of the nineteenth century and its full integration into the nation, then the betrayal of that promise by persecution and massacre. From Schaerf's scholarly mention in 1925 to the tragedy of via Sant'Andrea in 1944, the name traverses the centuries to come to rest on a face: that of Giuseppe Pardo Roques.

What this lineage will have, among all virtues, best expressed is the care bestowed upon the other carried to the point of sacrifice — the hessed of a man who, prevented from fleeing, made of his weakness a shelter, and of his house the last bulwark of a threatened community. By remaining with his own when death drew near, Giuseppe Pardo Roques fulfilled the most demanding of the laws of Israel: not to turn away from one's brother in misfortune. His tragic end, long buried beneath silence, then brought to light by the work of historians, adds to this virtue that of justice as a duty of Memory.

Thus the house of Pardo-Roques, obscure among so many others and yet luminous by what it reveals, takes its place in the long chain of the Memory of Israel. It reminds us that the greatness of a lineage is not measured by the number of its illustrious members, but by the fidelity of its members, in the hour of trial, to the commandments of kindness and remembrance.