The Perpetuo Family

The cornerstone of any inquiry into the Perpetuo family remains the entry by Samuele Schaerf. In I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, published in Florence in 1925, the author undertook a systematic inventory of Jewish surnames of the peninsula, distinguishing those of biblical, toponymic, professional, or augural origin. The inclusion of the name Perpetuo in this repertory establishes it by full right among the attested family names of Italian Jewry [Schaerf, 1925].

To understand the significance of this inscription, one must recall the context in which Jewish surnames became fixed in Italy. Unlike other diasporic areas where stable patronymy was imposed relatively late, Italy witnessed a remarkable diversity of family names from an early period, the fruit of a long Jewish presence on the peninsula and of the encounter between indigenous nuclei, Ashkenaze immigrants from the Alps, and Sephardic exiles who arrived after 1492. Robert Bonfil has shown how profoundly the Jewish society of the Italian Renaissance was traversed by these dynamics of local rootedness and partial integration into the surrounding world, where the name became at once a mark of belonging and a sign of social distinction [Bonfil, 1994].

Names of augural value such as Perpetuo belong to a well-identified cultural logic. In the Italian and Romaniote communities, the use of names expressing life, longevity, or blessing — often Romance calques of Hebrew terms such as Hayyim (life) or of auspicious formulas — answered a sensibility shared across the entire Mediterranean world. The name Perpetuo, by its root signifying duration without end, belongs to this semantic family. It is nonetheless important not to over-interpret: Schaerf records the name without providing a certain etymology, and one must guard against reconstructing a single origin for a surname that may have arisen independently in several places [Schaerf, 1925].

The absence, in the reference entry, of a precise communal localization invites caution. The name may have been attached just as readily to the ancient communities of the Centre and South — those southern communities whose heritage reached back to late Antiquity before the expulsions of the sixteenth century — as to northern settlements. This very ambiguity is instructive: it bears witness to the internal mobility of Italian Jewry, in which families moved according to the rhythm of banishments, residence permits, and commercial opportunities [Bonfil, 1994].

To give flesh to a name, one must restore the world that carried it. Jewish life in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, long read through the sole prism of the ghetto, was in reality of considerable richness. Robert Bonfil profoundly renewed this understanding by showing that the institution of the ghetto, established in Venice in 1516 and then generalized after the bull Cum nimis absurdum of 1555, did not reduce itself to a purely negative confinement: it was paradoxically accompanied by a consolidation of internal communal life, an intensification of intellectual production, and an affirmation of identity [Bonfil, 1994].

Within this framework, Italian Jewish families developed a culture that mingled fidelity to the rabbinical tradition with participation in the forms of the surrounding civilization. The practice of medicine, lending and trading activities, Hebrew printing — of which Italy was one of the world's cradles — and the production of refined manuscripts characterized this Jewishness. Giulia Tamani studied the splendor of the illuminated Hebrew manuscripts produced in Italy, witnesses to an aesthetic sensibility shared with the Christian Renaissance and to commissions often originating from wealthy Jewish families mindful of prestige and piety [Tamani, 2010].

It is in this world that families such as the Perpetuo, if one follows the likelihood of their Italian anchorage, must have moved. Without any document allowing us to link them there individually, they in all likelihood shared the common lot: the assigned residence, the bounded communal autonomy, the mutual-aid confraternities, the school and the synagogue as poles of life. The culture of the book held a central place there, and one may reasonably suppose that a family durably rooted in the peninsula was, to varying degrees, a participant in that civilization of the text which defines Italian Jewishness [Bonfil, 1994] [Tamani, 2010].

The intellectual life of that era was not limited to halakhic erudition. Jewish philosophy, heir to the great medieval masters, continued to nourish minds. Colette Sirat traced the transmission of this philosophy through manuscript and printed texts, underscoring how greatly Italy served as a center of copying, diffusion, and discussion of the works of the Jewish rationalist tradition [Sirat, 1983]. A learned Italian family was steeped in this heritage, between liturgical devotion and philosophical speculation.

The history of the Jews of Italy cannot be understood without the great movement that, from the end of the sixteenth century onward, made the Tyrrhenian ports into hubs of the western Sephardic diaspora. The founding of the free port of Livorno, encouraged by the Livornine — the charters issued by the Grand Dukes of Tuscany in 1591 and 1593 — offered Jews, and particularly marranos who had returned to Judaism, conditions of freedom and protection that were exceptional for the era [Lévy, 1996].

Lionel Lévy has masterfully reconstructed the trajectory of this "Portuguese Jewish nation" that linked Livorno to Amsterdam and Tunis, forming a merchant and cultural network of remarkable cohesion. This nation, distinct from the older Italian communities, lived between several shores, combining fidelity to a recovered Iberian identity with integration into Mediterranean economies [Lévy, 1999]. Livorno thus became, in the established expression, a capital of the western Sephardic diaspora, and the crucible of a cosmopolitan Jewish culture [Lévy, 1996].

The name Perpetuo, with its Romance resonance and its attested Italian grounding, could circulate within these networks. The free ports attracted families of all origins, Italian as well as Iberian, and a mosaic of surnames was to be found there. It is plausible — though we cannot state it with certainty, given the absence of a nominal register available here — that a family bearing such an auspicious name may have participated, in one capacity or another, in this Mediterranean mobility that led Livornese merchants toward North Africa, the Levant, and the trading posts of commerce. This hypothesis remains an informed conjecture, formulated from the general logic of Sephardic migrations and not from a document specific to the lineage [Lévy, 1999].

The communities of North Africa, toward which Livornese influence radiated, constituted one of the endpoints of this movement. The Gorneyim — the Jews originating from Livorno, named after the Hebraized form of the port's name — settled in Tunis and spread throughout the Maghreb, bringing with them rites, language, and Italian surnames. The study of communities such as Tlemcen or Sidi Bel Abbès reveals the depth of these exchanges between Italy and Ottoman, and later colonial, Algeria [Botbol, 2000] [Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès].

One of the great lessons of recent historiography is that Jewish patronyms do not respect the boundaries one might wish to assign them. A name born in Italy could, through the workings of migration, find itself in the rabbinical registers of North Africa, and vice versa. This circulation explains why the study of an Italian lineage must necessarily embrace the southern shores of the Mediterranean.

The Jewish communities of Algeria offer in this regard a privileged field of observation. Eliahou-Éric Botbol, in his study of the community of Tlemcen, demonstrated the complexity of this Judaism of western Algeria, shaped by successive strata — indigenous, Andalusian, Livornese, and French — and by the contribution of families who came from Italian ports [Botbol, 2000]. The Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès likewise document the life of a community in which these heritages intermingled, and where patronyms of Iberian and Italian origin stood alongside indigenous names [Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès].

The presence of a name such as Perpetuo in these spaces would belong precisely to the intersection between family memory and the archive: where oral tradition would preserve the memory of an Italian or Livornese origin, communal registers would come to confirm or nuance that narrative. In the absence of a nominative record accessible within the scope of this inquiry, we confine ourselves to structural probability: Italian families bearing augural patronyms were indeed part of this world of circulation, and their trace can, in all logic, be sought as readily in Livourne as in Tunis, Tlemcen, or Oran [Lévy, 1999] [Botbol, 2000].

This double belonging — Italian by name, Mediterranean by destiny — is in no way exceptional. It is, on the contrary, the very signature of western Sephardic Jewishness, whose unity depended less on a territory than on a network, and whose identity was transmitted through language, rite, and the Memory of names. The patronym Perpetuo, by its very permanence inscribed in its meaning, becomes here the unwitting emblem of this diasporic continuity.

Beyond facts and migrations, a lineage is defined by what it transmits. And transmission, in Judaism, is the subject of millennial reflection whose contemporary thinkers have renewed our understanding. To grasp what it means to "bear a name" and "keep Memory" within a Jewish family demands recourse to this thought.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi laid down the decisive terms of the debate in Zakhor, distinguishing Jewish memory — collective, liturgical, ritual — from history in the modern, critical sense. He showed that, for centuries, Jews remembered less through historiography than through rite and commemoration, the zakhor — "remember" — being a religious imperative before it was a scholarly discipline [Yerushalmi, 1984]. For a lineage such as Perpetuo, this means that family memory belongs to a different order of truth than the archive: it is transmitted through narrative, the blessing of names, domestic liturgy.

This thinking on transmission found fertile extensions among contemporary masters. Léon Askénazi, in La parole et l'écrit, reflected on the way in which Jewish tradition conceives of itself as living transmission, articulating the received text and the renewed word at each generation [Askénazi, 1999]. Armand Abécassis, in Du désert au désir, explored the anthropological and spiritual springs of Jewish thought, showing how identity is constructed in movement, exile, and desire, rather than in fixity [Abécassis, 1987].

The history of Jewish philosophy, retraced by Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, recalls on its part the continuity of a reflection which, from the medieval masters to modern thinkers, never ceased to interrogate the relationship of reason to revelation, of the individual to the community [Hayoun, 2023]. This intellectual tradition constitutes the background from which every learned Jewish family drew its relationship to knowledge and to Memory.

Finally, Isaiah Berlin, in his Trois essais sur la condition juive, illuminated the singular situation of Jews in modernity, torn between belonging and universality, fidelity and emancipation [Berlin, 1973]. A lineage such as Perpetuo, whose very name proclaims duration, embodies in its own way this tension: that of a heritage which wills itself perpetual in a world given over to change. This chapter, founded on transmitted thought rather than on the archival act, belongs avowedly to the register of received Memory.

At the close of this inquiry, the Perpetuo lineage remains, in part, a name still in search of its full history. The archive yields one firm milestone — the inscription in Schaerf's directory, which anchors it to Italian Jewry [Schaerf, 1925] — but it has not delivered, within the scope of this research, the detail of generations, places, and individual destinies. This reserve is not a failure: it is the honest condition of all serious genealogy, which prefers acknowledged silence to imaginary reconstruction.

What we have been able to establish, by contrast, is solid: the name Perpetuo belongs to the augural onomastics of Jewish Italy, that world whose intellectual and material richness Robert Bonfil and Giulia Tamani have restored [Bonfil, 1994] [Tamani, 2010]. What we have been able to render plausible is equally so: the possible insertion of such a family into the Mediterranean networks of the Portuguese nation and the Maghrebi diasporas, as mapped by Lionel Lévy and Eliahou-Éric Botbol [Lévy, 1999] [Botbol, 2000]. And what we have wished to honour, finally, is the distinctive register of family memory, which cannot be measured by the sole standard of the archive [Yerushalmi, 1984].

The name Perpetuo carries within it a promise — that of duration. That this duration was embodied in a Jewish family of Italy, and perhaps beyond the seas thereafter, is what History suggests and what Memory affirms. The Great Book is not meant to close the inquiry, but to fix its present state: an attested name, a probable horizon, a memory to be transmitted. It falls to future generations to continue, register by register, the research that these pages have only begun to open.