The Great Book — Perugina

Introduction

The name Perugina belongs to that large family of Italian Jewish surnames known as "toponymic" names — that is, names formed from a place name. It derives unambiguously from the Umbrian city of Perugia (in Italian Perugia), of which it constitutes an adjectival variant in the feminine form. The mechanism that governed its formation is well documented: throughout the peninsula, the Jewish merchant or moneylender was commonly identified by his place of origin or provenance. Coming from a neighboring country, or from another nation, drawn by the small and large periodic fairs, the merchant was identified by his place of origin [Treccani, Nomi di mercanti e nomi di ebrei]. When a Jewish family emigrated from Perugia to another city — Rome, Florence, Ancona — it would often come to bear, in the registers and in collective Memory, the name of the city it had left behind.

The surname appears in the definitive reference work on the subject: the volume by Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia (Florence, 1925), which remains the documentary foundation for any inquiry into the names of Italian Jewish families. A foundational study, "I cognomi degli ebrei in Italia" by Samuele Schaerf, was published [Italy Heritage, Italian surnames]. This census, which catalogues the surnames of nearly ten thousand Jewish families, places Perugina — along with its cognates Perugia and Perugino — among the toponymic names drawn from Umbrian cities.

This book sets out to reconstruct, insofar as the sources allow, the historical background of this name: the Jewish community of Perugia whose trace it bears, the paths of dispersal through which it spread, and the very nature of the onomastic phenomenon that gave rise to it. Where the archive speaks, we shall follow the archive; where it falls silent, we shall say so.

Chapter 1: At the Origins of a Name — Perugia and Its Jews

Jewish presence in Perugia is attested by documentary evidence as early as the 13th century. A local law dating from 1279 ordering the expulsion of Jews from the city attests to their presence in Perugia during that century [JGuide Europe, Perugia]. This mention, paradoxically, establishes the chronology: an expulsion order presupposes a constituted community, sufficiently visible to call forth an institutional response.

During the 14th and 15th centuries, the Jews of Perugia occupied a precise economic function, that of credit, within a Christian society that condemned usury while resorting to it nonetheless. Municipal sources show that the commune regularly called upon the community in times of crisis. When Fortebraccio attacked the city in 1416, the commune imposed a new forced loan on the Jews, under penalty of a fine ten times the sum demanded. But Fortebraccio succeeded in conquering the city and was its lord until 1424, and he too was compelled to turn to the Jewish community to request a substantial loan [Morashà, Ebrei a Perugia]. Pawnbroking and lending to public authorities thus formed the economic foundation of a Jewish presence tolerated out of necessity.

The life of this community was not reducible to commerce. A manuscript written in Hebrew dated 1414 has been found, illustrated by the local artist Matteo di Ser Cambio [JGuide Europe, Perugia], bearing witness to the cultural refinement and rootedness of the Umbrian Jews within the artistic fabric of their city. It is in this milieu — mercantile, learned, and religious — that the collective identity was forged, of which Perugina is the onomastic seal.

Chapter 2: The Formation of the Toponymic Surname

The name Perugina belongs to a category well identified by onomasticians. Toponymic names derive from a place name; occupational names derive from a trade; nicknames derive from a trait of an ancestor [Italy Heritage, Italian surnames]. In the case at hand, the founding place is Perugia, and the denomination was formed through the shift of a gentilicial — "the Perugian," "la Pérugine" — into a hereditary family name.

Italian onomastic repertoires confirm the Jewish and toponymic character of this family of names. According to genealogical databases, Perugia has a small cluster in Ravenna, one in Capannori in the Lucca region, a very significant one in Rome, and one in Palermo; it is a Hebrew family name whose origin derives from the name of the city of Perugia [Heraldry's Institute, Origine cognomi PERUGIA]. The same observation holds for the feminine form Perugina and the masculine form Perugino, which constitute variants of the same root.

This mode of designation was by no means incidental: it was the normal means of identification for itinerant merchants, Jewish or Christian alike. Often, this place was fundamental to trade, because, for example, its fabrics or products had acquired a kind of appellation contrôlée [Treccani, Nomi di mercanti e nomi di ebrei]. The surname Perugina is thus, in itself, a document: it preserves for centuries the memory of a departure from Perugia.

Chapter 3: The Expulsion and Dispersion

The fate of the name Perugina is inseparable from the fate of the Jewish community of Perugia, marked by an alternation of tolerance and rejection. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Jews were expelled and then welcomed back, on several occasions [JGuide Europe, Perugia]. Each of these ruptures cast entire families onto the roads of the peninsula, and it is precisely in these displacements that toponymic surnames crystallize: one is called "of Perugia" only once one has left it.

The pontifical archive sheds light on the financial and religious mechanisms behind this precariousness. In 1541, Cardinal Guido Ascanio Sforza addressed the Israelites of Perugia so that they might diligently discharge the "vigesima" intended for the crusade against the Turks. The accumulation of debts toward the Apostolic Chamber, as well as the annual contribution owed to the House of Catechumens, weighed heavily upon their situation [Italia Judaica, Perugia]. The fiscal pressure, combined with campaigns of forced conversion, made residence in Perugia increasingly untenable.

The genealogical tradition and scholarly analysis converge here on the same finding. According to historians of the Roman community, the gradual absorption of Jews from the Papal State into the capital explains the concentration of Umbrian names in Rome: thus is explained the presence of families bearing the names of Umbrian cities such as Perugia and Orvieto [Gazzetta di Foligno, Gli ebrei in Umbria]. The surname Perugina, transmitted from generation to generation, becomes the quiet witness of an internal exile.

Chapter 4: Traces in the City — Topographic Memory

If the bearers of the name Perugina have spread far and wide, the city of origin has preserved their imprint in its stone and its toponymy. The Jewish community of Perugia was structured around identifiable places of worship. In Perugia, in the Porta Sant'Angelo quarter to which the Jewish community of Fratta had been annexed, stood one of the city's two synagogues, and it was there that the greatest number of Israelite dwellings were found [Storiaememoria, La comunità ebraica]. This residential concentration foreshadows the ghetto and bears witness to a dense communal life.

The Memory of places survives today in the urban fabric of Umbria. The ancient Giudecche are being rediscovered, as in the case of Perugia with the Arco Etrusco quarter where a synagogue once stood, or in Spoleto where the toponymy still preserves the "via San Gregorio della Sinagoga" [Gazzetta di Foligno, Gli ebrei in Umbria]. For those who bear the name Perugina, these alleyways constitute an identifiable cradle, a material anchor for an otherwise dispersed genealogy.

The history of the Jews of Perugia is part of a broader and very ancient regional fabric. It is a long and complex history, at times troubled, that of the Jewish presence in Umbria [Gazzetta di Foligno, Gli ebrei in Umbria]. The name Perugina is one of the threads of this fabric: a fragment of the long Jewish duration in Umbria, condensed into a single word.

Chapter 5: The surname in Schaerf's repertory

Any reconstruction of the Perugina family ultimately rests on the authority of Samuele Schaerf's census. His 1925 work remains the reference inventory of Jewish surnames on the peninsula. A foundational study, "I cognomi degli ebrei in Italia" by Samuele Schaerf, was published in 1925 [Italy Heritage, Italian surnames]. It is within this framework that the original entry situates the name Perugina, recording it as a Jewish surname of Italy.

The scope of Schaerf's undertaking gives measure of its documentary value. The list of names relating to some ten thousand Italian Jewish families established by Schaerf stops there; the volume continues with a chapter on the origins and etymology of names and a rich appendix on the noble Jewish families of Italy [Libero Pensatore, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia]. The classification of Perugina among toponymic names follows directly from this etymological section.

It is nonetheless worth keeping in mind a methodological caveat formulated by recent scholarship: the distinction between Jewish and Christian names is, to say the least, problematic; only certain names can truly be considered as belonging exclusively to members of Italian Jewish communities [Startmag, I cognomi degli ebrei italiani]. The name Perugina, like any toponym, may also have been borne by Christian families; it is its inscription in Schaerf's repertoire, and its documented association with the community of Pérouse, that establish its Jewish identity.

Conclusion

The name Perugina is not the story of a dynasty, but that of a place and an uprooting. It condenses into two syllables the history of a Jewish presence in Umbria attested from the thirteenth century, shaped by credit and culture, then scattered by the repeated expulsions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries toward Rome and the other hearths of the peninsula. The patronym belongs to the well-defined category of toponymic names, and its inclusion in Schaerf's register anchors it firmly in scholarly documentation.

The inquiry reveals a broader truth: for Jewish families in Italy, the name was often the last portable homeland, the memory of a city one had been forced to leave. Perugina speaks of Perugia as Orvieto speaks of Orvieto — a slender thread connecting descendants to the Arco Etrusco and the alleyways of the Giudecca. Where genealogy is lost in the silences of the archive, the name endures: an obstinate witness to a long, complex, and fertile Umbrian history.