The Valabrega Family

Jewish Italian onomastics has this singular feature: it preserves, engraved in surnames, the map of migrations. As Schaerf showed, a considerable portion of Italian Jewish family names derives from place names, marking the place from which the ancestor came when he settled in a new community [Schaerf, 1925]. Valabrega falls precisely within this type: it designates a native — or a family come — from Valabrègues, a town in the Gard neighboring the Comtat Venaissin.

This provenance is nothing anecdotal. After the expulsions from Provence at the end of the 15th century, many Jewish families from the South flowed back either toward the pontifical lands of the Comtat, or toward Italy, where the princely States — Savoyard Piedmont, duchies of the Po plain, Republic of Venice — offered varying but real conditions of welcome. The Jewish life of the Italian Renaissance, as Robert Bonfil described it, was precisely made of this mosaic of "nations" — Italian, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Provençal — cohabiting in the same cities and sometimes in the same synagogues, each proud of its own rite and memory [Bonfil, 1994].

It is in this movement that the name Valabrega takes on its Italian meaning: that of an assumed and transmitted identity of exile. There one reads a first virtue, discreet but foundational — faithfulness to memory, the requirement of zakhor, "remember." By keeping in their very name the memory of the lost place, these families made of onomastics an act of fidelity, refusing erasure. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi masterfully showed how memory, more than learned history, was the great mainspring of Jewish consciousness through the ages [Yerushalmi, 1984]; the surname Valabrega is a modest and striking illustration of it.

The family tradition of the Italian Valabrega attaches the lineage to the communities of the southern Rhône region, and the onomastic archive confirms this intuition. The passage from Valabrègues to Italian cities is part of a well-documented phenomenon: the constitution, notably in Piedmont, of a composite Judaism where descendants of French, Provençal, and Spanish exiles lived side by side.

One must be wary here of any continuous genealogical reconstruction: we do not have, for the Valabrega, an unbroken chain of documents from the Middle Ages, and honesty demands that we say so. What can be established is the framework. In the States of Savoy, Jews were for a long time subject to restrictive conditions, but were able to maintain communities there in Turin, Cherasco, Moncalvo, Alessandria, Casale, and Vercelli. It is in this Piedmont, and then in the cities of the plain and Venetia, that the name Valabrega appears and becomes permanently fixed.

The history of these transplanted Provençal families joins that, more vast, of the Jewish "nations" of the western Mediterranean that Lionel Lévy studied with regard to Livorno and the Portuguese nation — this great archipelago of exiles which, from France to Northern Italy and as far as Tunis, constantly reconstituted communal centers [Lévy, 1999] [Lévy, 1996]. In this diaspora of recommencement, implication in collective life was the very condition of survival: without institutions — synagogue, confraternity of charity, rabbinical court — none of these communities would have endured. Families like the Valabrega, by aggregating themselves to these structures, participated in a cardinal virtue of Judaism: the sense of mutual responsibility, the kol Israël arevim ze la-ze, "all Israel is surety for one another."

Rooted in Italy, the Valabrega participated in the ordinary life of the Northern communities, those very communities whose daily reality Bonfil has restored for the Renaissance and beyond: a world of bankers and tolerated moneylenders, merchants, physicians, scribes and scholars, where domestic piety and the study of the Law structured existence [Bonfil, 1994]. Italian Jewish life was distinguished by a remarkable balance between openness to surrounding culture — humanism, music, sciences — and rigorous fidelity to halakha.

This world was also one of the book. Northern Italy was one of the great centers of illuminated Hebrew manuscript production, an art in which Jewish patrons and scribes excelled, as demonstrated by the work of Giulia Tamani on decorated Hebrew manuscripts of Italy [Tamani, 2010] and, more broadly, Colette Sirat on the manuscript transmission of medieval Jewish thought [Sirat, 1983]. That families established in these cities took part, as patrons or readers, in this written culture is more plausible than proven for the Valabrega in particular; but attachment to talmudic learning and to the book is inseparable from the milieu in which the lineage developed.

It is there that another virtue carried by this Judaism can be read: knowledge as a form of piety. Study was not an ornament but a commandment, and charity (tsedaqa) organized by communal confraternities — dowries for poor girls, ransom of captives, aid to the sick — translated into action the Jewish conception of social justice. In inserting themselves into this fabric, the Valabrega inherited and transmitted an ethic in which kindness toward the other was not private feeling but collective institution.

The decisive turning point, for the Valabrega as for Italian Jewry as a whole, was the emancipation of the nineteenth century. The Statuto Albertino of 1848, in the kingdom of Sardinia, then Italian unification (1861), abolished legal discrimination and opened to Jews full access to citizenship, to the liberal professions, to university, to the army and to administration. Piedmontese Judaism, of which the Valabrega were a part, was one of the first beneficiaries of this emancipation and one of the quickest to integrate into national life.

From that period onward, the name Valabrega appears in the cultivated and professional circles of liberal Italy. The lineage thus illustrates the passage — common to so many European Jewish families — from the closed community to full civic participation, without renunciation of identity. This balance between Jewish belonging and patriotic commitment was, in Italy perhaps more than elsewhere, experienced without major upheaval until the 1930s.

Here manifests a virtue that the Jewish tradition holds in high esteem: contribution to the city, service to the common good. In investing themselves in the professions, the arts and public service of the young Italian nation, the descendants of the exiles from Valabrègues accomplished in their own way the prophetic injunction to "seek the welfare of the city" (Jeremiah 29:7) — no longer as tolerated, but as full citizens.

Among the bearers of the name in the twentieth century, the best-documented figure is that of musicologist Cesare Valabrega. A specialist in the history of Italian music, he was the author of a Breve storia della musica italiana and took part, between 1958 and 1963, in a major editorial project: the creation, for the Discoteca di Stato, of a Storia della musica italiana in forty records, an enterprise of safeguarding and transmitting the national musical heritage [Discoteca di Stato ; Biblioteche.cultura.gov.it]. His name also appears in the archives of the Ricordi house and in the collections of cultural auditions where he intervened as a lecturer on the history of music [Archivio Storico Ricordi ; musica.san.beniculturali.it].

The work of Cesare Valabrega extends, in the secular register, an ancient disposition of Italian Judaism: the taste for learned knowledge and the sense of transmission. To gather, to order, to edit, to make known — this enterprise of conserving a collective heritage echoes, on another terrain, the Jewish imperative of Memory dear to Yerushalmi [Yerushalmi, 1984]. That the heritage thus preserved was that of the entire Italian nation and not solely of the Jewish community alone testifies precisely to the particular contribution of this emancipated Judaism: to put Jewish erudition at the service of a shared culture.

It should be noted moreover the musical continuity within families bearing this name, since the registers of contemporary concerts mention performers — a violinist, a viola player Valabrega — perpetuating, it would seem, this link to the art of sounds [Discoteca di Stato]. Without claiming to establish a certain filiation with the musicologist, one can see in it the sign of a transmitted cultural tradition.

No history of an Italian Jewish family could remain silent about the shadow cast by the racial laws of 1938 and the Shoah. The Jewish community of Italy, long spared state-sponsored antisemitic violence, was brutally struck: exclusion from schools and professions, then, after 1943, deportations. The memorials and documentary databases dedicated to the victims and to memory education, such as those gathered by Dominique Natanson, remind us of the duty to name and not forget [Natanson, memoirejuive.fr].

For the Valabrega lineage, the historian must here acknowledge the limits of his documentation: without verified nominative records in hand, he cannot assert more than he knows, and prudence forbids him from attributing a precise fate where the archive remains silent. This silence is itself part of the narrative — the mark of a catastrophe that broke so many genealogical threads. What memory transmits and what history confirms within its general framework is that Italian Jewish families endured this trial between exile, clandestinity, resistance, and mourning.

The very persistence of the Valabrega name after the war — in musicology, the university, the professions — testifies to a virtue that tradition names netsah Israël, the Eternity of Israel: the capacity, after each destruction, to begin anew. This endurance, made of attachment to study and to life, connects the singular destiny of the family to that, centuries-old, of a people who made of survival and transmission a form of faithfulness.

At the end of this journey, the Valabrega lineage appears as a microcosm of Italian Jewish destiny: born from a place in the Rhône region — Valabrègues, on the margins of the Papal State —, transplanted by exiles to Northern Italy, inserted into the community life of the Renaissance and early modern period, then fully entered, at emancipation, into the Italian nation, until giving to the twentieth century a figure of learning in the person of the musicologist Cesare Valabrega. The surname, attested by Schaerf, is the guiding thread of this history [Schaerf, 1925].

Of all the virtues that this lineage will have encountered or embodied, it is undoubtedly faithfulness to memory and the transmission of knowledge that it will have expressed best. Faithfulness, first, in the name itself, which made a lost place a sign of lasting identity, accomplishing in its own way the zakhor of which Yerushalmi made the heart of Jewish consciousness [Yerushalmi, 1984]. Transmission, next, in the taste for knowledge and art — Talmudic in the original milieu, musical and learned in Cesare Valabrega —, which joins the long vocation of Italian Judaism for the book and study, as illuminated by Bonfil, Tamani and Sirat [Bonfil, 1994] [Tamani, 2010] [Sirat, 1983]. In this, the history of a family come from Valabrègues participates in the collective memory of Israel: that of a people which, from exile to new beginning, has made faithfulness to the past and the transmission of knowledge the very instruments of its permanence.