The Verona Family

The surname Verona stems from an ancient and well-attested logic in the Italian Jewish world: that of names derived from one's place of origin. When a family left a city — by exile, expulsion, or economic migration — it carried with it, in the eyes of others, the name of its provenance. Thus were born the Ancona, the Modena, the Pisa, the Rimini, the Volterra, and therefore the Verona. Samuele Schaerf, whose 1925 work remains the reference for Italian Jewish onomastics, explicitly ranks this name among the surnames borne by Jews of the peninsula.

The city that gave its name to the lineage itself possessed a Jewish history of remarkable depth. The presence of a Jewish community in Verona is very ancient and documented at least since 978, even though it was on certain occasions removed until, in 1408, the Republic of Venice officially authorized its settlement in the city, granting it moreover the possibility of engaging in lending. This intersection — the tradition of a name carried by family memory, the archive of a community dated to the 10th century — is what grounds the honesty of this chapter: the name is probable, the city is established, and their encounter illuminates each other.

To name a man after his city is already, in the Jewish tradition, to inscribe the individual within a collectivity. The toponymic name speaks of belonging before it speaks of the person. It reminds us that the Verona lineage was never conceivable outside the kehillah, the community, that solidary body where charity, prayer, and study were organized together. In this, the simple name already carries the first of the virtues that will traverse this book: implication in collective life, the idea that one does not save oneself alone.

The history from which the name Verona originates is rooted in a long Middle Ages when the Jews of northern Italy occupied a place both precarious and essential. After the Venetian authorization of 1408, the Veronese community structured itself around activities that Christian society, while condemning them, could not forbid itself to entrust to them: pawnbroking and money trading. Robert Bonfil demonstrated how, in the era of the Renaissance, the condition of Italian Jews was made of this ambivalence — tolerated for their economic utility, constrained by religious suspicion, yet capable within their walls of an intense intellectual and spiritual life.

This economic life was not merely endured; it was, for the northern communities, an instrument of collective survival. Jewish lending banks financed also, through communal taxation, institutions of charity: confraternities for aid to the sick, endowments for poor girls, assistance to travelers. Economic action, among the Jews of Venetia, thus regularly transformed itself into organized charity — the tzedakah, that duty of justice which the tradition of Israel does not distinguish from almsgiving, for giving there is an act of righteousness before being a gesture of pity.

Medieval Verona was nonetheless not a peaceful refuge. Attilio Milano, in his magisterial Storia degli ebrei in Italia, retraced the uneven rhythm of these northern Jewish presences, made of interested welcomes and brutal expulsions, according to the vicissitudes of preaching, political circumstances and the pressures of the Church. The Verona lineage, if it takes its name from this city, thus also takes from this history a bitter lesson and a strength: that of communities which, between two edicts, tirelessly rebuilt their schools and their synagogues.

The major event in Veronese Jewish memory is the creation of the ghetto, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A ghetto was established in Verona in 1599 following a threat of expulsion. The constraint of confinement, imposed throughout Catholic Italy after the bull of Paul IV in 1555, thus reached the city of the Adige. In 1604, in the area between via Mazzini and the squares Erbe and Portici, was fixed the reserved quarter where the Jews of Verona — and thus, presumably, the ancestors of the lineage that bears its name — were forced to reside.

But Verona's memory transformed this humiliation into a celebration. The community succeeded in obtaining the custody of the keys, an event commemorated by the Jews of Verona in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by an annual festivity. This detail is more than anecdotal: it expresses a Jewish way of living through ordeal. To entrust the confined with the key to their own confinement was to leave them a share of dignity; and to transform this concession into an annual celebration, in the manner of a local "Purim," was to refuse to let the oppressor have the final word. The tradition of Israel knows these particular deliverance festivals, where a community fixes in the calendar the memory of a danger averted. The Verona lineage, if it lived in this ghetto, partook of this singular virtue: the capacity to sanctify time and to convert fear into gratitude.

Yet the human cost of confinement remained heavy. The community suffered numerous deaths — approximately 200 — during the great plague that struck northern Italy in the 1630s. Behind the number, one must discern a fabric of families, funeral confraternities, and gestures of care for the dying: for in the ghetto, where crowding made the scourge even more deadly, watching over the sick and burying the dead according to the Law was an act of piety that did not waver even at the heart of terror.

The end of the eighteenth century broke down the walls. One of the major events in the Verona ghetto was its assault and burning by certain Christians in 1797; in general, the sanitary and structural conditions of the ghetto remained precarious. That same year, the eruption of the French Revolution overturned the old order. The situation changed with Napoleon, who granted Jews equal rights and abolished the ghettos. The Jews of Verona were emerging from two centuries of confinement.

Emancipation was not linear. Under the Austrians, they suffered further discriminations, which nevertheless ended with Italian Unification. Gadi Luzzatto Voghera described the long and bitter debate that accompanied, between 1781 and 1848, this march towards civil equality for the Jews of Italy — a debate in which the very definition of modern citizenship was at stake. Equality had a price, as indicated by the title of his work: that of integration, sometimes of erasure, in a nation that at last welcomed its Jews as citizens.

The freedom thus recovered proved fruitful. It was precisely in the nineteenth century that important Jewish figures appeared in Verona — Cesare Lombroso, Achille Forti and Eugenia Vitali Lebrecht — while the community grew to exceed a thousand members. The botanist and scholar Achille Forti, the naturalist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso embodied this flourishing of scientific knowledge that emancipation made possible: freed from the ghetto, the Jews of Verona could finally bring to light that thirst for learning that the tradition of Israel had nurtured behind closed doors for centuries. The talmudic knowledge of the ghetto thus continued, transfigured, into university and scientific knowledge offered to the entire city.

The opening of the nineteenth century had a setback: dispersion. The community began to decline at the end of the nineteenth century: in 1909, there were only 600 Jews left, and in 1931, there were only 429. The movement was paradoxical yet logical: successful integration dissolved the necessity for concentrated communal life. When Napoleon's troops arrived in 1797, the ghetto walls were demolished, but the Jews had already largely left the quarter, a sign of their inclusion in the economic and social life of Verona.

This inclusion was also cultural. It manifested itself in cultural life with the musicians Giacobbe Bassini Cervetto and his son Giacomo. The contribution of Veronese Jewish families to music and letters testifies to a discreet yet real virtue: the contribution to the common good of a city, the idea that Jewish culture never fully flourishes in withdrawal, but in dialogue with the city that surrounds it. A family named Verona, whatever their profession, belonged to this movement of a community that, having emerged from its walls, chose to contribute rather than withdraw.

The place of worship remained the beating heart of this small world. The synagogue of Verona, of German rite, is located in the historic center on via Portici, a side alley of via Mazzini, and was restored in 2002; a small museum is annexed to it. This Ashkenazi rite, inherited from communities that came from Germanic lands beyond the Alps, recalls that Verona was a crossroads, a meeting point between the traditions of the Jewish world — and that fidelity to halakha, the Law, was transmitted there in its own forms, from generation to generation.

The twentieth century inflicted upon the community of Verona the most terrible of trials. After the promulgation of the fascist racial laws of 1938, meticulously documented by Michele Sarfatti, Enzo Collotti and Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, Italian Jews — citizens since Unification — were brutally stripped of their rights, driven from schools, professions and public life. Fabio Isman gathered the documents of this administrative persecution, this bureaucracy of exclusion that preceded murder; Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri collected its intimate echoes in the journals and letters of the persecuted themselves.

Verona held a sinister place in this history: it was there that, in November 1943, the congress of the fascist republican party was held, which confirmed the exclusion of Jews from the "national community" and prepared their delivery to the Nazis. The city of the ghetto of 1599 became the city of a manifesto of death. Persecution then struck the small Veronese community with relentless violence. Forty-five Veronese Jews were deported by the Nazi-fascists. According to other counts, thirty-one Veronese Jews were deported and murdered during the Shoah. The gap between these figures is not a contradiction, but the mark of the very difficulty in counting the dead: Liliana Picciotto devoted her Libro della memoria to establishing, name by name, the list of deportees from Italy, a work of restitution that restores to each victim their identity against the anonymity that the murderer desired.

Therein lies an ultimate virtue, that of remembrance. To restore a name, to refuse oblivion, to inscribe each disappeared person in the memory of Israel: this is the fulfillment of the commandment zakhor, "remember." A lineage named after a city shared the fate of that city even into catastrophe — and this book, in naming it, participates modestly in this duty of memory.

After the abyss, the community did not die. At the end of the Second World War, the official community numbered around a hundred people, and so it has remained until today — 120 regularly registered members, including a dozen in the province of Vicenza. Other families of Jewish faith, not registered with the community, reside between the provinces of Verona and Vicenza. The persistence of this small kehillah, after so many centuries of expulsions, plague, ghetto and deportation, is in itself a testimony.

The city has moreover undertaken to reclaim its own Jewish memory. A recent municipal exhibition, Tracce e memorie del ghetto, created in collaboration with researcher Valeria Rainoldi, author of the work Il ghetto di Verona e la sua sinagoga published in 2020, has restored visibility to the urban remnants of the former Jewish quarter. The work of the Veronese Institute for the History of the Resistance, associated with the city's archives, extends this enterprise of restitution. Verona finally looks squarely at its Jewish past, its glories and its shames.

From this long history, the Verona lineage bears the name as both a burden and an honor. It was not, in the archives, a dynasty of great rabbis or merchant princes; it was, more humbly and more profoundly, the daughter of a city and a community, a thread among the innumerable threads of which the tapestry of Italian Judaism is woven.

At the end of this journey, the Verona lineage reveals itself less as a singular family than as the name-bearer of a millennial community. Born from a toponym recorded by Schaerf in 1925, it condenses in a single word the history of a city where Jews are attested since 978, where a ghetto was built in 1599, where confinement was transformed into a festival of keys, where plague was known, the fire of 1797, Napoleonic emancipation, then the scientific and cultural flourishing of the nineteenth century, before the night of racial laws and the Shoah.

Of all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried through the centuries, the one that this lineage will have, above all others, best expressed is communal loyalty — this stubborn perseverance in remaining, in rebuilding and in remembering. A family that takes its name from a city cannot be conceived outside of the collective: it is, by its very name, inseparable from the kehillah. Now it is precisely this Veronese community that we see, century after century, keeping its keys against despair, watching over its plague-stricken, transmitting its German rite, returning its scholars to the city, then, after forty-five of its own torn from life, rising up again around a hundred faithful and reopening its synagogue in 2002. In this tenacious loyalty of the small number, the Verona lineage joins the most ancient and most heroic virtue of the memory of Israel: that of the she'erit, the remnant that subsists, and through whom the promise continues.