Verceil (Vercelli)

The question of Jewish origins in Vercelli requires caution. Piedmontese scholarly tradition evokes very ancient presences: Jews are said to have begun to settle stably in Piedmont only in the early 1400s, but before that there would have been settlements in the time of Saint Maximus, bishop of Turin around 423, perhaps in Asti and Vercelli in the Carolingian period. These mentions belong more to hypothesis than to documentary evidence. An act of 1297 makes it possible to establish that groups of Jews passed through Piedmont and paid a toll for doing so, attesting to circulation before any permanent settlement.

Documented stable presence begins in the fifteenth century. The presence of Jews in the city is attested from 1446, when Abraham della Vigneria and his son Angelo obtained permission to open a loan bank. This entry through credit was nothing exceptional: it corresponds to the general pattern of Jewish settlement in northern Italy, where urban and seigneurial authorities authorized the opening of banchi to circumvent the canonical prohibition of usury imposed on Christians. The earliest notices thus date back to the fourteenth century, while the 1446 document attests to two Jewish residents in the city, named individually.

To this first nucleus were soon added other families, following the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal. The Sefardic influx, consequent to the decrees of 1492 (Spain) and 1497 (Portugal), thus marked the formation of the Vercelli community, as it marked all of Piedmont, placing this History in the great movement of Iberian diasporas that redrawn the map of Mediterranean Judaism. It should be recalled that these are the same currents of exile that fed, at the same time, the communities of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, so that the Memory of Iberian expulsion constitutes a common denominator for communities geographically far removed [Borrero Fernández, 1985]. In Vercelli, this influx resulted in progressive growth of the group and the establishment of elementary institutions of worship: an oratory, a cemetery, an embryonic communal organization.

The decisive turning point in the history of Italian Jews, and thus Vercellese Jews, occurred in the mid-16th century. Ghettos in Italy emerged between the 16th and 19th centuries as a result of Pope Paul IV's bull Cum nimis absurdum, issued in 1555. This text, promulgated during the height of the Counter-Reformation, imposed on Jews the obligation to reside in enclosed quarters, to wear a distinctive sign, and severely restricted their economic activities. In the Papal States, enforcement was immediate; in Savoyard Piedmont, it was more gradual and progressive, but ultimately became established.

In Vercelli, communal religious life first found modest spaces before formal confinement. From 1601 onward, the Vercelli ghetto had a prayer room. In 1630, the Jewish community required a larger space, and a surprising solution was found: a building that had belonged to the monks of Sainte-Agathe. This detail — a Jewish community praying in a former monastic building — illustrates the improvisations and paradoxes of coexistence during the Counter-Reformation era.

The ghetto as a formal institution came in the 18th century, under the authority of the House of Savoy. In 1723, when the ghetto was instituted, 158 Jews resided in the city. This figure, precious because documented, gives measure to a restricted but well-established community. The arrangement was subsequently reconfigured: in 1740, the ghetto was relocated to the area around present-day via Elia Emanuele Foa (formerly via degli Orefici); the boundaries and buildings of the new ghetto remain clearly identifiable today. The Vercelli ghetto, in the heart of the city, overlooks the street leading to the Dome of Sant'Eusebio, a symbol of the city through its historical importance and artistic beauty. This physical proximity between the Jewish quarter and the cathedral encapsulates the ambiguous condition of Jews under the Ancien Régime: tolerated, useful, yet kept at a distance and marked by the seal of segregation. The closure of these ghettos would come only in the 19th century, as a consequence of the emancipation of Italian Jews.

The year 1848 constitutes the absolute turning point in the history of Piedmontese Jewry. In the wake of the Statuto Albertino granted by King Charles-Albert of Savoy, the Jews of the Kingdom of Sardinia obtained equality of civil and political rights. For Vercelli, this emancipation opened a new era. After the Restoration, the era of the ghetto came to an end and the community decided to build the current great Neo-Moorish synagogue; many Jews of Vercelli, now fully integrated into civil society, were able to participate in the economic, professional and political life of the city.

The period immediately following the 1848 emancipation marks the moment of the community's greatest flourishing. It was in this momentum that Vercelli became a reference point for the whole of regional Judaism: in 1856 the first major assembly of the università israelitiche of the royal states was held there, a major institutional event documented in the work by Rossella Bottini Treves, Vercelli 1856-2006, dedicated to this path leading to the Rattazzi law. This event made Vercelli, for a time, a nerve centre of community organization, bringing together representatives of the various communities under the authority of the new liberal framework.

Integration is also visible in the urban and social fabric. The emancipated community produced benefactors whose generosity extended throughout the entire city. Research conducted on the district recalls the figure of the former Asilo Levi, founded by benefactor Salvador Levi, also known for his bequests to the Ospedale Maggiore, whose portrait appears in the Gallery of Benefactors. This patronage, directed towards the whole city and not solely towards the community, expresses the ideal of a Jewish bourgeoisie now fully fledged citizens, participating in municipal charitable works. This dynamic of social ascent within a long-marginalized community is not unique to Vercelli: it runs through all nineteenth-century Mediterranean Judaism, from Piedmont to the cities of the Maghreb, where the transition from Orientality to Westernization follows comparable logics of emancipation and integration [Rubinstein-Cohen, 2011].

The monument that embodies this entire history is the synagogue itself. The Vercelli Synagogue, inaugurated in September 1878, is located in the center of the former ghetto and is one of the largest in Italy. Its construction translates into stone the ambition of a newly liberated community. The history of its construction is well documented. The initial project was entrusted to Marco Treves, a Jewish professional from Vercelli, already author of the great synagogue of Florence; but his project proved too costly. Consequently, the architect Giuseppe Locarni (1826–1902), a polytechnic graduate and Vercelli politician, oversaw its realization between 1874 and 1878. In the European panorama, this choice was part of a broader movement: the great synagogues of the second half of the nineteenth century frequently took as their model the Leopoldstädter Tempel in Vienna, inaugurated in 1858 and tragically destroyed during Kristallnacht in 1938, this Viennese temple having established the foundations of the Neo-Moorish vocabulary adopted from Berlin to Florence.

The stylistic choice is in no way fortuitous. The building adopts this Moorish style widespread in European synagogues of the nineteenth century, expressing both a concern for identity affirmation and an Orientalizing imagination, associating Judaism with an Iberian and Mediterranean golden age. The façade features bicolored sandstone with horizontal bands and a large rose window; above the entrance are the Tables of the Law in stone. The Vercelli Synagogue is reputed to be the most opulent of the Piedmont synagogues, built in a structure that, from the outside, fits into the urban fabric of the former ghetto, on the vicolo Salomone Olper.

The synagogal complex today houses museum institutions: the Museum of Jewish Art and History and the Museum of Lights — a permanent exhibition of Hanukkah menorot. The building comprises two matronei (women's galleries), the first of which has already undergone significant restoration and museum development work, giving rise to a unique exhibition space in the Piedmont landscape. The historical and artistic heritage from the Jewish communities of Vercelli and Biella, enriched by works restored on deposit by the communities of Turin and Casale Monferrato, tells here a story that extends far beyond the city's boundaries alone. On the outskirts of the city, funerary memory completes the ensemble: there are two Jewish cemeteries, the Old Cemetery of via Negri, dating from 1732, and the New Cemetery, still in use, dating from 1904, via Cardinale Massaia.

Art historian Samuel Gruber observed that the Vercelli Synagogue speaks of the aspirations—perhaps excessive—of the emancipated Italian Jewish community, and that the fact that the synagogue stands today silent, greatly in need of repairs, is a moving testimony to how illusory these aspirations were. It is here that monumental memory and actual history answer and nuance each other: the grandeur of the building, conceived for a flourishing community, has become the measure of a demographic decline that nothing, at the end of the nineteenth century, could have foreshadowed.

The Twentieth Century

The twentieth century reversed the upward curve of the previous century. Demographic decline, initiated by emigration to major cities — Turin, Milan, Genoa — and by a general decrease in birth rates, was brutally aggravated by Fascist persecution and the Shoah. The racial laws of 1938 deprived Italian Jews of their rights, and the German occupation of 1943 opened the period of deportations. The community of Vercelli, already reduced, was severely struck by this, as were the small Piedmontese communities whose members were arrested and deported to Auschwitz.

The memory of this tragedy was inscribed in the public space of the city through the laying of Stolpersteine. A long work of meticulous research, conducted notably by Rossella Bottini Treves, made it possible to update the History of the Jews of Vercelli and to provide renewed material for the narrative linked to the ghetto zone, where the first seven Stolpersteine were laid in 2023. These brass plaques, sealed in the pavement in front of the former dwellings of the victims, materialize the encounter between archival research and the duty of Memory, in accordance with that fruitful tension between History and remembrance that contemporary Jewish thought has theorized [Yerushalmi, 1984] [Goldberg, 2000].

The educational project Ogni giorno è Memoria (Every Day is Memory) is part of this same dynamic. Launched by the community in the years following the laying of the Stolpersteine, it shed renewed light on the necessity of remembrance, on the History of the Jews of Vercelli, on the places and on the deported. Between October 2023 and March 2024, the synagogue and the Jewish cemetery welcomed more than 300 pupils from different school levels, a flow that continued in the following months. Each visit was an opportunity for specific deepening on Jewish holidays, on the presence of the community in Vercelli, and on the customs of the Jewish world, adapted to the precise requests of teachers and their school curricula. These figures, documented by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Vercelli, testify that the synagogue became, even before the latest wave of funding, a place of education for generations to whom the community itself can no longer directly transmit a living tradition.

After the war, the community never recovered its former numbers. A very small Jewish community lives in Vercelli today, now structured on an inter-community basis that brings together Vercelli, Biella, Novara and the Cusio-Ossola. The synagogue, too vast for reduced worship, experienced a long period of abandonment — roughly fifty years of closure — before restoration campaigns sought to save it. Some work was carried out in 2003 and 2004, and a 700,000 euro project was launched in 2007. These gradual efforts paved the way for the current ambitions, more structured and better funded, which make the synagogue a continuous site of rehabilitation and transmission.

In July 2026, the Jewish community of Vercelli announced that it had won two major project calls: one launched by the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, the other by the Piedmont Region as part of its program to enhance Piedmontese museum heritage. These two combined funds enable the launch of the project called "Custodire la bellezza" — Preserving beauty —, whose ambition is to consolidate and transform into a museum space the second matroneo of the synagogue, thus completing the recovery and enhancement initiative undertaken in previous years ["The Jewish community of Vercelli wins two grants to expand its synagogue museum", Valsesia Notizie, July 3, 2026].

This double success represents symbolic recognition as much as concrete economic support. In the words of the community president herself, Rossella Bottini Treves: "Custodire la bellezza significa preservare la memoria, ma anche trasmetterla alle nuove generazioni attraverso la conoscenza, lo studio e il dialogo" — Preserving beauty means preserving memory, but also transmitting it to new generations through knowledge, study and dialogue. She sees in it "the riconoscimento del valore nazionale del patrimonio custodito dalla Comunità" — the recognition of the national value of the heritage preserved by the community —, and the fruit of work accomplished in recent years to make it increasingly accessible.

The "Custodire la bellezza" project articulates two complementary axes. The first, of a patrimonial and architectural nature, consists of carrying out the necessary work to consolidate the second matroneo and to arrange it as an exhibition space. The first matroneo, already restored and arranged, paved the way for a unique space in the Piedmontese landscape, housing the artistic heritage of the communities of Vercelli and Biella as well as pieces returned by the communities of Turin and Casale Monferrato. The second matroneo, once completed, will complement this visitor itinerary and enrich the museum offering of the entire synagogue complex.

The second axis is pedagogical. Educational programs, designed in collaboration with teachers, will include visits to the synagogue and museum, workshops on Jewish culture and religion, itineraries in Jewish Vercelli, as well as specific workshops on the Shoah, the racial laws of 1938 and local Stolpersteine. Registrations for the 2026-2027 school year were already open at the time of the announcement, with a structured offering ranging from preschools to high schools. This educational continuum fits within the line of the Ogni giorno è Memoria project and the school attendance documented since 2023, now giving it an institutional framework and permanent means.

There is in this announcement something that goes beyond the simple logic of cultural funding. The Vercelli synagogue, closed for fifty years, then reopened, then restored in successive phases, continues its metamorphosis: from a religious building designed for a large and confident community, it becomes "a house of memory open to the city and the territory" — to borrow the words of Rossella Bottini Treves. This transformation illustrates, in all its complexity, the tension that Yerushalmi had identified between zakhor — living memory, inscribed in ritual and communal practice — and scientific history, which takes the place of memory when the bearers of tradition grow scarce. In Vercelli, it is now the entire city, its schools, its visitors from Italy and beyond, who inherit the guardianship of this memory.

The history of the Jews of Verceil would not be known without the patient work of archiving and scholarship conducted since the twentieth century. The collections are catalogued by the information system of the Italian archival superintendencies (SIUSA), which lists scholarly production on the community. Among these are the pioneering studies of Dino Colombo, whose "Some Notes on the Ghetto of Vercelli," excerpted from the Rassegna mensile di Israel, Perugia, July-August 1976, inaugurated the modern historiography of the Vercellese Jewish quarter.

The most substantial contribution belongs to Rossella Bottini Treves, whose work renewed the field. The bibliography records her major works: Vercelli 1856-2006. From the First General Assembly of the Israelite Universities of the Royal States to the Rattazzi Law, Comunità ebraica di Vercelli, Vercelli, 2006; The Israelite Temple of Vercelli. History of a Project, excerpted from the Bollettino Storico Vercellese, no. 2, 1995; and Histories of the Ghetto of Vercelli. These publications provided the documentary foundation upon which current knowledge has been built, both regarding the history of the built environment and of families and institutions. Her commitment goes beyond pure scholarship: she conducted the research that enabled the installation of Stolpersteine in 2023 and presides over current heritage valorization projects.

Other contributions broaden the regional picture. The bibliographic collection mentions the study by Mariacristina Colli and Claudia De Benedetti, In the Ghettos of Piedmont, Turin, Comunità ebraica di Torino, 2001, as well as the work of Giulio Disegni on the temple's stained glass windows and on the 1856 assembly, and Gadi Luzzatto Voghera's book on the debate regarding emancipation. Also noteworthy is photographic documentation on Jewish presence in Piedmont in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, assembled by Giorgio Avigdor for the Archives of Jewish Traditions and Costume "Benvenuto and Alessandro Terracini," Turin, 1983.

This ensemble of sources—medieval deed records, ghetto registers, communal archives, monographic studies, and iconographic documentation—makes it possible to reconstruct a history that, for a small community, is remarkably well attested. The example of Verceil thus illustrates how the Memory of a diaspora is preserved and transmitted not only through oral tradition, but through the patient accumulation of archival documentation, the first condition of all historical writing of the Jewish fact [Yerushalmi, 1984]. The events of 2026 add a new layer to this documentary fabric: the local press articles that reported on the announcement of the double funding now constitute themselves sources on the contemporary History of the community, witnesses to the way in which a tiny institution succeeds in inscribing its heritage within regional and national agendas of cultural conservation.

Abraham della Vigneria (dates unknown, active c. 1446) — First Jew named and documented in Vercelli, Abraham della Vigneria obtained in 1446, jointly with his son Angelo, the license to open a lending bank (banco) in the city. This date marks the attested beginning of stable Jewish presence in Vercelli. Nothing is known of his precise geographical origin or subsequent fate; he nonetheless represents the type of itinerant lender who, throughout fifteenth-century Northern Italy, founded by his presence the first urban Jewish communities.

Angelo della Vigneria (dates unknown, active c. 1446) — Son of Abraham della Vigneria, Angelo appeared alongside his father in the licensing deed of 1446. His name figures in the sources as co-holder of the family lending bank. His mention in the original document makes him one of the two first Jewish residents named and identified in Vercelli's history. No other known document permits us to trace his trajectory beyond this founding act.

Salvador Levi (dates unknown, 19th century) — Prominent member of the Jewish community of Vercelli in the post-emancipation era, Salvador Levi is known for his philanthropic action extending beyond the bounds of his own community. He founded the Asilo Levi and made significant bequests to the Ospedale Maggiore of Vercelli, to the point that his portrait was admitted to the city's Gallery of Benefactors. His figure embodies the ideal of the emancipated Jewish bourgeoisie of the 19th century, a citizen in full standing and committed to civic charitable works.

Marco Treves (dates unknown, 19th century) — Jewish architect of Vercelli to whom the project for the great synagogue of Vercelli was initially entrusted. He was already the author of the great synagogue of Florence, which gave him legitimacy in the field of synagogal architecture. His project for Vercelli was deemed too costly, and it was ultimately Giuseppe Locarni who realized the edifice. Treves' role nonetheless remains that of the initial designer of this emblematic monument of Piedmontese emancipation.

Giuseppe Locarni (1826–1902) — Architect and politician of Vercelli, Giuseppe Locarni was responsible for the realization of the great synagogue of Vercelli between 1874 and 1878. A polytechnician, he adopted the neo-Moorish style then in vogue in European synagogal architecture, producing an edifice considered the most opulent of the synagogues of Piedmont. His Vercelli work stands in the line of the great temples of emancipated Judaism in nineteenth-century Europe, of which the Leopoldstädter Tempel of Vienna constituted the dominant stylistic reference.

Dino Colombo (dates unknown, 20th century) — Pioneer scholar of Vercelli Jewish historiography, Dino Colombo is the author of the first learned studies on the ghetto of Vercelli, published in the Rassegna mensile di Israel in July–August 1976. His "Some Notes on the Ghetto of Vercelli" constitutes the point of departure for all modern historiography of the community. No precise biographical data concerning him is available beyond his published work.

Rossella Bottini Treves (born in 20th century, precise dates unknown) — President of the Jewish Community of Vercelli and historian of the community, Rossella Bottini Treves is the central figure of contemporary Vercelli Jewish Memory. Author of several foundational works — including Vercelli 1856-2006 and Stories of the Ghetto of Vercelli — she conducted the research that enabled the laying of the first seven Stolpersteine in 2023 and carried the project "Custodire la bellezza" through to funding secured in 2026. Her action combines historical scholarship, institutional leadership, and pedagogical transmission to new generations.

The history of the Jews of Vercelli reads as a microcosm of the entire Jewish experience in northern Italy. Born in the fifteenth century from the right to lend money, enriched by the influx of Iberian exiles, the community traversed the long night of segregation — from the prayer room of 1601 to the Savoyard ghetto of 1740 — before experiencing, with the emancipation of 1848, a golden age whose great Moorish synagogue of 1878 remains the monumental witness. This upward trajectory was shattered in the twentieth century by emigration, racial laws, and the Shoah, leaving today a tiny community watching over a heritage disproportionate to its numbers.

This very disparity makes Vercelli's exemplary value. The synagogue, conceived for a flourishing community confident in its future, became, first through its silence and then through its reopening, a place of meditation on the hopes of emancipation and their fragility. The Stolpersteine placed in the former ghetto in 2023, the gradual restoration of the temple, and now the "Custodire la bellezza" project announced in July 2026: so many gestures by which a history threatened with oblivion transforms itself into living memory, accessible no longer only to members of a diminished community but to the entire city and its visitors.

The novelty of the present moment lies precisely in this shift. The synagogue of Vercelli is no longer merely a monument to preserve; it has become, in the very words of its president, "a house of memory open to the city and the territory." The hundreds of students who pass through its doors each school year, the workshops on the racial laws of 1938 and the Stolpersteine, the walks through Jewish Vercelli: all of this expresses a will to transmit that now takes over from the community itself. Between the archive that establishes and the tradition that transmits, Vercelli offers a case where documents abound and where memory, precisely because the community has shrunk, relies more than ever on the combined work of historians and cultural institutions. The "Great Book" of Vercelli is thus that of a small community which, through the beauty of its temple, the rigor of its archivists, and the energy of its contemporary leaders, has known how to render its past legible — and its present active — for generations to come.