The Torres Family

The surname Torres belongs to the Iberian stratum of Jewish names. Toponymic by nature — it evokes a fortified locality, a "tower," a place widespread in the geography of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal — it was borne by both Jewish and Christian families of the peninsula. This ambiguity is no accident: at the turn of the 15th century, forced conversions and mass baptisms produced a population of conversos who often retained the name they bore before baptism. Learned tradition thus reminds us that many of these Sephardic families, once they returned to Judaism in their lands of refuge, kept names of Christian appearance — Fonseca, Lopes, Mendes, Pinto, Rodrigues — inherited from their life as converts [I cognomi degli ebrei italiani / JoiMag].

Torres belongs to this same family of "Portuguese" names that the Sephardic diaspora scattered around the Mediterranean. Family memory, as it is transmitted in these lineages, places the origin in the Iberian kingdoms before 1492, before the decree of expulsion from Spain, and then the forced conversion of Portugal in 1497, dispersed these communities. One must here separate what tradition affirms from what the archive can prove: no archival item continuously links a medieval Torres family of Spain to those encountered later in Italy. What can be established with certainty is the presence of the name among Italian Jews in the 20th century, as Schaerf fixed it [Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, 1925, ref:1].

In this name one already reads a cardinal virtue of Judaism: the fidelity of memory. To bear, in a land of exile, a patronym inherited from the lost peninsula, was to refuse oblivion — to make of one's own name a stone of remembrance, in the manner of the biblical zakhor that commands us to remember. The Torres lineage, like so many other Sephardic families, thus embodies this obstinacy in not breaking the thread, a value that the tradition of Israel has carried from generation to generation.

Historical Context for the Torres Name's Arrival in Italy

The historical context in which a name like Torres reached Italy is solidly documented. The expulsion from Spain in 1492 and Portuguese measures in 1497 precipitated flows of exiles toward Italy that redrawn the map of peninsular Judaism. Venice was one of the first refuges: as early as 1492, Sephardim — among whom the famous Isaac Abravanel — transited through the city of the Doges, and as early as 1516 the Venetian government forced Jews to reside in the ghetto, a name destined for universal posterity [Sephardic Genealogy, Jews of Venice].

The welcome afforded these exiles was unequal, but real. In the Mezzogiorno as in the states of the center and north, Iberian Jews found preexisting communities — italkim of Italian rite — with which they sometimes mingled, from which they often distinguished themselves, gradually introducing the Sephardic rite [Nicola Ferorelli, Gli ebrei nell'Italia meridionale dall'età romana al secolo XVIII, 1966, ref:10 ; Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia, 1963, ref:11]. The Renaissance period, studied notably by Robert Bonfil, saw these communities achieve a remarkable intellectual and economic density, among merchants, physicians, printers and Talmudists [Robert Bonfil, Gli ebrei in Italia nell'epoca del Rinascimento, 1991, ref:9].

It is within this collective movement — and not by a personal attested achievement — that the arrival of the Torres name in Italy must be situated. The virtue expressed there is twofold. On the side of the exiles, it is the strength of soul of the uprooted who rebuild a life of faith far from their land; on the side of the host communities and the princes who received them, it is hospitality toward the stranger — the ger of the Bible — this repeated commandment that enjoins one not to oppress the stranger "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The Italian peninsula was, in this regard, one of the theaters where the memory of Israel concretely experienced the relationship to the stranger, alternately a land of refuge and a land of confinement.

If one place concentrates the history of Sephardic families in Italy, it is Livorno. The chronology is clear: in 1593, the Jews received from the Medici the right to settle in this port of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; the first Jewish cemetery was founded around 1600 near the Fortezza Nuova, and the first synagogue, the Tempio Maggiore, in 1603 [Sephardic Genealogy, Jews of Livorno]. These rights — the famous Livornine — made the city a magnet for Sephardic merchants throughout the Mediterranean.

Livorno presents a singularity that historians emphasize: it was the only Italian city with a significant Jewish presence that never instituted a ghetto, which made it the center of Sephardic Jewish life in Italy [JoiMag, Né Ashkenaziti né Sefarditi]. The population was predominantly composed of "Portuguese" Sephardim and italkim, the latter largely integrated into the Sephardic world [Sephardic Genealogy, Jews of Livorno]. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jews from North Africa came to join them, bearing names such as Busnach, Elhaik, Racah or Sasportas, which gives a measure of the complexity of this Mediterranean melting pot [JoiMag, Né Ashkenaziti né Sefarditi]. It was in this type of community — Livorno, but also Pisa, Ancona, Ferrara, Modena and Venice, cities where the houses of Este and Medici authorized Sephardic settlement [MyHeritage, Italian Jewish Surnames] — that a family bearing a Portuguese name such as Torres naturally found its place.

Livorno was also, and above all, a center of Jewish erudition [MyHeritage, Italian Jewish Surnames]. There affirms itself a major virtue of the tradition of Israel, the love of study and the transmission of Talmudic knowledge. The Portuguese "nations" maintained schools, academies and Hebrew printing houses; commerce nourished communal charity — the confraternities of benevolence, the dowries of orphan girls, the redemption of captives — concrete expressions of tsedaka, that justice-charity which Jewish Law establishes as a duty. In inscribing itself in this society, a Sephardic lineage of Italy participated in a double vocation: economic action in service of the city and the maintenance of religious knowledge that made these ports spiritual capitals of the diaspora.

The documentary anchor point for this lineage remains Samuele Schaerf's work. In 1925, this Italian Jew published in Florence a small treatise entitled I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, accompanied by an appendix on the "noble Jewish families of Italy" [Startmag, I cognomi degli ebrei italiani ; Samuele Schaerf, ref:1]. Schaerf explained therein that there was then no complete or incomplete work on the surnames of Italian Jews, and that he was thus committing to print material patiently gathered, which had served as the subject of lectures he had given in several Italian cities [Libero Pensatore, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia]. It is in this foundational repertoire that the name Torres appears.

Honesty demands that we nuance the scope of this classification. Historian Roberto Bizzocchi has emphasized that the list of surnames compiled by Schaerf does not rest on a rigorous historical foundation, and that the distinction between "Jewish" and non-Jewish names remains fragile [Startmag, I cognomi degli ebrei italiani]. This is precisely an intersection between Memory and archive: tradition retains Torres as a Jewish name of Italy, the 1925 source records it as such, but historical criticism invites us not to see therein proof of continuous Jewish descent. The name attests to a presence; it does not demonstrate, by itself, a lineage.

This caution is itself a virtue — that of intellectual humility and respect for truth, which rabbinic tradition places at the heart of study: not to assert more than what one knows, to distinguish the certain from the probable, the transmitted from the proven. In this respect, Schaerf's approach, however imperfect it may have been, partakes of a concern for Memory — to save from oblivion the names of a community — which joins the zakhor of Israel. That this work appeared in 1925, thirteen years before the racial laws, confers upon this census a gravity that its author could not then measure.

The history of Jewish families in Italy pivots in 1938. The fascist racial legislation, promulgated that year, deprived Italian Jews of their rights, excluded them from schools, professions, and public life, and prepared the conditions for catastrophe [Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 2003, ref:5 ; Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell'Italia fascista, 2000, ref:6 ; Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, L'Italia fascista e la persecuzione degli ebrei, 2008, ref:4]. Population censuses of Jews, including that of 1938, transformed lists of names—similar to those Schaerf had drawn up for other purposes—into instruments of persecution [Fabio Isman, 1938. L'Italia razzista, 2018, ref:2].

The diaries and letters of this period, assembled by Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri, give human measure to the ordeal: the bewilderment, dignity, solidarity, and fear of Italian Jews confronted with exclusion from their own homeland [Mario Avagliano, Marco Palmieri, Gli ebrei sotto la persecuzione in Italia. Diari e lettere 1938-1945, 2011, ref:3]. After the German occupation of 1943, persecution became extermination. Liliana Picciotto's Libro della memoria lists by name the Jews deported from Italy between 1943 and 1945: it is in this type of martyrology, where each name is an individual torn away, that one reads the fate of Sephardic families long rooted in the peninsula [Liliana Picciotto, Il libro della memoria, 1991, ref:8].

We do not have here a nominative file specific to members of the Torres lineage; honesty demands that we not ascribe to this family an individual fate that the consulted archive does not establish. But the presence of the name in the Italian Jewry recorded in 1925 is enough to inscribe it in the shared fate of these dark years. The virtue revealed there is courage—that of surviving, of saving, of bearing witness—and that form of ordinary holiness that tradition calls kiddoush ha-Shem, the sanctification of the Name through faithfulness maintained even in trial. The relation to war here was not one of aggression but of endurance: that of a minority which, stripped of the citizenship conquered a century earlier, had to learn anew how to survive.

Between the reception of exiles and the twentieth-century catastrophe unfolds the great movement of emancipation. The debate over equal rights for Jews in Italy, opened in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, runs from 1781 to 1848 and culminates with the emancipations of the Risorgimento [Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Il prezzo dell'eguaglianza, 1998, ref:7]. The Jewish families of Tuscany, including those of Florence, then experienced remarkable integration into the economic, cultural, and civic life of the emerging nation [Roberto G. Salvadori, Gli ebrei di Firenze, 2000, ref:12].

For a Sephardic lineage established in Tuscan cities, this century was one of a dual movement: full entry into the Italian city and the preservation of religious identity. It is the supreme intersection — the archive of law and citizenship on one side, community memory on the other. The Jews of Italy became Italian without ceasing to be Jewish; they served the State, letters, sciences, and the arts, while maintaining synagogues and confraternities. This involvement in collective life — municipal, national, learned — expresses a virtue that tradition values without reservation: concern for the common good, participation in building the city where one lives, according to the teaching of the prophet Jeremiah to "seek the peace of the city" where one dwells.

One must measure here the tragic irony of history: this so thorough integration made the repudiation of 1938 all the more brutal, when the State that had granted equality withdrew it. The Torres lineage, like the families of its world, will have known this great cycle — exile, refuge, erudition, emancipation, persecution — which is also that of Italian Judaism as a whole.

At the end of this journey, the Torres lineage reveals itself less through a chain of attested individuals than through the collective trajectory of which its name is the witness. An Iberian name carried by the Sephardic diaspora, recorded among the Jews of Italy by Samuele Schaerf in 1925, it traverses the great sequences of this history: expulsion and the route to Venice, Livorno and the Tuscan ports; the flowering of a merchant and learned world; the emancipation of the Risorgimento; finally the abyss of racial laws and deportation.

If one must name, among all others, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed, it is the fidelity of memory — the zakhor. To bear, from generation to generation, a name inherited from the lost peninsula; to transmit it through exile, settlement, emancipation and persecution; to see it recorded in 1925 by a man concerned with saving from oblivion the surnames of a community, thirteen years before other lists would serve to destroy it: everything in this name speaks the refusal of forgetting. In this, the Torres lineage participates in the highest vocation of Israel, that which makes remembrance a sacred duty and continuity, despite everything, a victory.

The rest remains open. Where the archive fails, memory stands watch — and this Great Book, rather than filling silences with invention, chooses to honor them.