The Usigli Family

The attested cradle of the lineage is Modena, capital of the Este duchy, where Jews had formed since the late Middle Ages one of the most vibrant communities in northern Italy. It is there that the name Usiglio takes root in the very landscape. Local research into Jewish presence north of the city, in the area known as "between Naviglio and Panaro," identifies among the families that owned country estates the Usiglio, alongside the Formiggini, the Nacmani and the Sacerdoti — some houses still surviving, others vanished [Marta Affricano, Tra Naviglio e Panaro, Modena].

This inscription in the land merits emphasis. To own dimore di campagna meant, for a Jewish family of the ducal era, to have crossed the narrow threshold of the ghetto to deploy into rural space, to conduct commerce, lending and agriculture there. Modena, whose Jewish community was one of the most significant in Emilia, offered its own a dense web of solidarities: synagogues, charitable confraternities, talmudic schools. Tzedakah — that charity which, in Jewish tradition, is not alms but justice owed — structured collective life; and the lasting settlement of the Usiglio in this network testifies to their full belonging to this communal body.

The great History of Italian Jews confirms this framework: the peninsula harbored, from Roman Antiquity and across the Renaissance, one of the oldest Jewish presences in Western Europe, neither quite Sephardic nor Ashkenazi, but italki, forged in place. Under the Este dukes, in Modena as in Ferrara, this community experienced periods of relative openness before the enclosure of the ghetto in the seventeenth century. The Usiglio of Modena belong to that people: neither newcomers nor foreigners, but sons of a land where they had lived for centuries.

The patronym itself appears in Schaerf's great inventory under its two contiguous spellings, Usigli and Usiglio, a sign of the same stock declined through the course of civil records. The coexistence of the two forms — one with final vowel, the other without — reflects Italian usage where the passage from Usiglio to Usigli often follows francization or administrative abbreviation.

It was at the heart of the Risorgimento that the lineage gave its most brilliant figure. Modena was, in 1831, one of the centers of insurrection against ducal power, and among the patriots who took up arms was found an Usiglio. The Modenese chronicles report that he was one of the forty-two "animosi" — the bold ones of the 1831 revolt — and that exiled for his cause, he followed across half of Europe his friend Giuseppe Mazzini, before dying in London and being buried in Highgate Cemetery [Sassuolo 2000, after Marta Affricano].

This fate condenses an entire span of Italian Jewish history. The Jews of the Risorgimento embraced with fervor the cause of national unity, for it promised civil equality and the end of ghettos; many of them counted among the companions of Mazzini and the fighters of Young Italy. That it was a son of Modena, of Jewish faith, who figured in the front rank of the insurgents of 1831 then in the circle of Mazzinian exiles, speaks volumes about how the lineage knew how to bind its fate to that of the nation in gestation.

There is a virtue that the Jewish tradition recognizes above all others: the pursuit of tzedek, justice, and engagement in the city — tikkoun olam, the repair of the world. In risking exile and death for an Italy where all would be citizens, this Usiglio served not only an earthly homeland: he embodied that conviction, carried by emancipated nineteenth-century Judaism, that the freedom of one people is inseparable from the freedom of all. The grave at Highgate, far from Modena, is the seal of this ideal paid for at the price of uprootedness.

The debate on the emancipation of Italian Jews, which extended from the Enlightenment to 1848, found in such men its actors and not merely its beneficiaries. The Usiglio lineage, through this figure, inscribes itself in the movement that led, with Italian unity, to full civil equality of the Jews of the peninsula.

With the unification of the Italian kingdom, Jews acceded to full citizenship, and Emilian families, including the Usiglio, were able to disperse throughout cities and beyond borders. Modernity opened new roads: the liberal professions, international commerce, emigration toward the great ports of the Mediterranean.

A branch of the lineage illustrates this centrifugal movement. Alexandria in Egypt, a cosmopolitan city where a large community of Italians and Livornese Jews flourished, welcomed members of the Usigli. It was there that Alberto Usigli was born, in 1861 — Albert Jérôme Emmanuel by his full name —, an Italian citizen of the Egyptian diaspora, who was destined to emigrate even further [Cervantes Virtual, biography of Rodolfo Usigli]. This trajectory, from Emilia toward Alexandria, follows that of thousands of Italian Jews who made the ports of the Levant the relays of their commerce and mobility.

The son of this Alberto, Rodolfo Usigli, was born in Mexico in 1905, son of an Italian born in Alexandria and of a Jewish mother born near Lviv, in the confines of the Austro-Hungarian empire; his father died prematurely and he was raised by his mother, a young widow [Cervantes Virtual]. Here we have an exemplary case of diaspora within diaspora: an Italian Jewish lineage which, in two generations, connects Modena, Alexandria, and Mexico, and crosses on its path the Galician Jewry of Eastern Europe.

Rodolfo Usigli became one of the great figures of letters in the New World, held to be the father of modern Mexican theater, dramatist and theorist with a mind turned toward the psychological analysis of his adopted society [EBSCO Research]. One should refrain from making him a conscious heir to a religious tradition: nothing attests to Jewish practice in him, and his work belongs to Mexico. But the lineage will have given, through him, a remarkable contribution to literary knowledge — that virtue of the word that Jewish culture has always held in high esteem — in the language of a distant continent. The thread is thin, but it runs: from a surname of the Emilian ghetto to a glory of Spanish-American letters, the same stock.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a branch that remained in Emilia offered the image of a family fully integrated into liberal Italian society. Olga Usiglio was born in Modena on May 24, 1892 [Archivio di Stato di Bologna, La razza nemica]. Married, she formed a household of the Emilian petty bourgeoisie, and her children — Clara, born in 1921, and Franco — were both born in Modena, before the family settled in Bologna in 1930 [Archivio di Stato di Bologna].

Archival documents, drawn up later by the fascist police, describe her as a housewife, not registered with the National Fascist Party and "indifferent" to the regime [Archivio di Stato di Bologna]. This notation, extracted from a surveillance file, sketches in outline the portrait of an ordinary family of interwar Italy: neither activist nor marginal, simply established in the life of a major university city, in Bologna, where Jews numbered among the educated professions and the cultivated middle class.

This quiet anchorage is in itself a matter of Memory. The Jews of Italy, on the eve of persecution, were so intimately merged into the nation that they counted themselves among its most loyal citizens, often patriotic, sometimes even fascists from the outset. The family of Modena and Bologna belonged to that confident Italian Jewry in its integration — a confidence that history would shatter.

In 1938, Mussolini's regime promulgated racial laws, erasing with a single stroke the emancipation gained in the previous century. Jews were excluded from schools, professions, public office, and registered as members of an "enemy race." Schaerf's little book, conceived for honor, became a tool of identification in the hands of persecutors.

The Bolognese branch of the lineage was caught in this vise. The State Archives of Bologna, in their work on the theory and practice of Fascist antisemitism, have reconstructed the history of the family in which Olga Usiglio appears. Faced with the escalation of measures, her daughter Clara, her son Franco, and she herself renewed their passports with a view to departure to various European countries, Argentina, and Brazil — presumably to leave the city as quickly as possible in the face of the hardening of laws — but, in reality, they did not leave [Archivio di Stato di Bologna].

This detail is heartbreaking in its human truth. It speaks of hesitation, attachment to one's country, the stubborn hope that the turmoil would pass — and the trap that closes. Thousands of Italian Jews faced this same dilemma, between saving exile and the refusal to believe in the abyss, as evidenced by the journals and letters of those years collected by historians. In-depth studies on persecution — those of Sarfatti, Collotti, Matard-Bonucci — have shown how Fascism's bureaucratic apparatus transformed peaceful families into administrative targets.

Honesty demands that we acknowledge here a zone of shadow: we do not follow with certainty, beyond the expatriation plans, the ultimate fate of each member of this branch. The great register of Jews deported from Italy established by Liliana Picciotto remains the source where one reads, name by name, the destiny of those whom the Shoah engulfed; it is to that one would have to return to close this chapter. But what the archive gives us is sufficient to inscribe the Usiglio of Bologna in the long list of Italian Jewish families that 1938 tore from their homeland without their having left the native soil.

If one embraces all the collected traces in a single glance, a figure of the whole emerges — an editorial hypothesis deliberately assumed, for no continuous family tree yet reliably connects all these branches. On one side, the Modenese root, anchored in Emilian soil since the ducal age, giving the Risorgimento its martyr of Highgate; on the other, an Egyptian branch in Alexandria, extended to Mexico by the playwright Rodolfo Usigli; and finally the Bolognese branch, engulfed in the darkness of 1938.

What these destinies have in common is not merely the name. It is a single way of dwelling in the world: rootedness without withdrawal, mobility without renunciation, fidelity to a cause larger than oneself. The exile of 1831 dies for Italy in London; the son of Alexandria carries the name to Mexico; the Bolognese family, trapped, dreams of Argentina and Brazil. The Usigli lineage is thus, almost in its entirety, a history of thresholds crossed and homelands chosen.

Jewish tradition names galout this exile which, from constraint, sometimes becomes vocation — the dispersion of Israel among the nations, where each family becomes a bearer of itinerant memory. In this, the trajectory of the Usigli, from Modena to Highgate, from Alexandria to Mexico, from Modena to Bologna, illustrates on a small scale the great movement of the Jewish people of Italy: profoundly Italian, and yet always ready to take to the road when history demands it.

What to retain, at the end of this journey, from the name Usigli?

A lineage whose archives have yielded only fragments — a surname in a 1925 catalogue, a tomb at Highgate, country houses north of Modena, a police file in Bologna, a Mexican biography — yet each fragment bears its own light.

Among all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried through the centuries, it is the commitment to justice and freedom in the city that this lineage will, it seems, have expressed best. The founding gesture of its memory is that of the insurgent of 1831 who follows Mazzini along the roads of exile and dies far from his own so that an Italy of equal citizens might be born. This act — where tzedek, justice, and tikkoun olam, the repair of the world, converge — gives meaning to the entire lineage: the Usiglis did not content themselves with being welcomed by the nation, they desired it, fought for it, loved it unto sacrifice.

Tragic irony of history: that same nation, which an Usigli had served at the peril of his life, decreed a century later that his people were of an "enemy race." The Bologna branch knew the vertigo of 1938, the disappointed hope of departure, the anchorage become a trap. In this, the lineage embraces the entire destiny of Italian Jews: emancipated by the Risorgimento, betrayed by fascism, and yet faithful.

There remains, beyond the silences of the archive, a lesson that the Memory of Israel recognizes as its own: that belonging to a people and love of a homeland do not exclude one another, but that each sometimes demands the courage of exile. The name Usigli, two spare syllables fallen from the silence of registers, says all this — provided one knows how to listen to it.