Among the surnames that mark the long Jewish presence in Italy, the name Cases occupies a singular place. It appears in Samuele Schaerf's reference work, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, published in Florence in 1925, a foundational compendium that remains, a century after its appearance, one of the most frequently consulted instruments for the study of Jewish onomastics in the peninsula [Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, Firenze, 1925]. The entry that serves as the starting point for this book is laconic — "Jewish family of Italy" — yet it opens, for those who know how to interrogate it, a vast perspective onto the migrations, languages, and communal institutions of Mediterranean Judaism.
The present work proposes to restore, with prudence and according to the available documentation, the probable history of this lineage. It is fitting from the outset to distinguish what belongs to the established — the name attested in onomastic catalogues — from what belongs to reasoned hypothesis regarding its linguistic and geographic origins. The surname Cases indeed belongs to a family of Jewish names whose root refers, according to the most widely accepted interpretation, to the word meaning "houses" in the Iberian and Occitan Romance languages — cases in Catalan, casas in Castilian, case in Italian [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Names, Personal," s.v. toponymic patronymics]. This etymology would inscribe the name within the vast movement of Sephardic and Provençal Jews who found refuge in Italy after the expulsions of the late fifteenth century.
We shall proceed in seven stages, blending onomastic inquiry, the history of communities, and the prudence of the historian's craft, so as never to confuse transmitted memory with the verified archive.
The documentary foundation of any study on the name Cases remains the work of Samuele Schaerf. Published in Florence in 1925, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia methodically catalogues the surnames borne by the Jewish families of the peninsula, striving to indicate their provenance and geographic distribution [Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, Casa Editrice « Israel », Firenze, 1925]. The work belongs to the context of a renewal of Italian Jewish studies in the early twentieth century, championed in particular by the journal Israel and by a generation of scholars eager to record the memory of the communities before the traditional world should fade away.
The inscription of the name Cases in this catalogue constitutes the established fact par excellence: it is a surname recognized as belonging to the Italian Jewish corpus, and not a mere fortuitous homonymy with non-Jewish families. The value of this attestation rests on Schaerf's method, which cross-referenced the community registers, the taxpayer lists of the Università israelitiche, and the civil records available after emancipation.
It is nonetheless important to gauge the limits of such a catalogue. Schaerf worked before the systematic opening of numerous archival collections and before the destructions of the Second World War; his list reflects a state of knowledge as of 1925, which must be supplemented by later research [Aldo Luzzatto and Moshe Moldavi, Bibliotheca Italo-Ebraica, subsequent to Schaerf, cataloguing the documentary sources]. The name Cases appears there among the surnames that the author attaches to a southern or Iberian origin, without a developed entry being devoted to it — hence the necessity, for the present work, of resorting to comparative studies of onomastics.
Linguistic analysis of the name Cases leads to a coherent, though not univocal, hypothesis. In the great majority of cases, Italian Jewish surnames of this form derive from a toponym or from a term designating dwelling. Cases, in the plural, means "the houses" in Catalan and Occitan, while casas is the Castilian form [Joan Coromines, Diccionari etimològic, s.v. casa]. Numerous localities in the Iberian Peninsula and the French Midi bear this name or its compounds (Les Cases, Casas, Casès), and the Jewish practice of taking the name of one's place of origin as a surname is abundantly documented [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Names, Personal"].
This Sephardic and Provençal lead accords with the general history of the migrations that nourished Italian Jewry. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, then of the Jews of Provence under French administration at the end of the fifteenth century, significant flows of refugees reached the Italian states — notably Piedmont, Liguria, Tuscany, and the Papal territories [Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy, Philadelphia, 1946]. Catalan and Provençal surnames became frequent there, and a name such as Cases fits naturally into this landscape.
A second, more cautious hypothesis must be mentioned: Cases could also represent a simple local Italianization of an equivalent Romance term, without direct Iberian migration, the plural case ("houses") existing in Italian itself. Family tradition, where it exists, tends to favor the prestigious Sephardic origin; the linguistic record, for its part, does not allow the matter to be settled with certainty. It is precisely this dialogue between transmitted memory and philological evidence that justifies, here, the register of the Intersection.
If one accepts the hypothesis of a Sephardic or Provençal origin, the communities most likely to have welcomed bearers of the name Cases are those of northern Italy. The Duchy of Savoy, and later the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, was home to important communities in Turin, Casale Monferrato, Asti and Cherasco, whose rituals preserved traces of the French and Provençal contribution [Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy, 1946].
Liguria, and especially Genoa and Livorno — although Livorno belongs to Tuscany — formed another pole of attraction for Jews of Iberian origin. The Livornina, the charter granted by the Grand Duke of Tuscany at the end of the sixteenth century, offered the Sephardim exceptional guarantees and made Livorno one of the great Jewish ports of the Mediterranean [Renzo Toaff, La nazione ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa, 1591–1700, Firenze, 1990]. Families of Catalan or Spanish descent prospered there in maritime trade.
Without precise nominative records linking a particular Cases individual to a particular town, the historian must guard against any arbitrary attribution. What is established is the framework: the communities where a patronymic of Iberian type had every chance of taking root. The exact distribution of the Cases lineage across these centres remains an open question, which only targeted archival research in the registers of the Università israelitiche could resolve [Archivio Terracini, Turin, fonds of the Piedmontese communities].
Whatever their precise place of settlement, the Jews of Northern Italy lived, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, under the regime of the ghetto and revocable charters of toleration. In Turin, the ghetto was established in 1679, gathering Jewish families into an enclosed quarter subject to strict regulations [Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy, 1946]. The legal condition of the Jews there oscillated between the self-interested protection of sovereigns, who valued their economic role, and the restrictions imposed by the Church and the guilds.
Within this framework, a family such as the Cases would have taken part in the community life structured around the synagogue, the charitable confraternities (ḥevrot), and the institutions of learning. The Piedmontese communities were distinguished by a rite of their own, the minhag known as "Apam" (Asti, Fossano, Moncalvo), heir to the liturgical traditions of the Jews expelled from France in the fourteenth century [Daniel Goldschmidt, studies on Jewish liturgical rites; Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Asti"]. This ritual particularity, unique in Europe, attests to the depth of the French roots of this Judaism — an element that indirectly supports the hypothesis of a Provençal origin for names such as Cases.
The economic activity of the Jewish families of this region centered on lending, the textile trade, drapery, and, later, banking. The fiscal sources of the duchies preserve the trace of this integration, regulated by concessions periodically renegotiated [Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, volumes devoted to Italy].
The decisive turning point in the history of Italian Jews — and therefore, in all likelihood, of the Cases lineage — was emancipation. The arrival of the French revolutionary armies in 1796–1798 led to the temporary abolition of the ghettos and the granting of civil equality, before a retreat under the Restoration [Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy, 1946]. It was in the Kingdom of Sardinia that emancipation took on a lasting character: the Statuto Albertino and the laws of 1848 granted Piedmontese Jews civil and political rights [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Italy »; Statuto Albertino, 1848].
This emancipation profoundly transformed the life of Jewish families. Leaving the ghetto, they were able to enter the liberal professions, the university, the administration, and the army. Many Piedmontese Jewish surnames emerge in this period in the registers of the unified civil status, which makes onomastic analysis more reliable for the period after 1860. It was also in this context that scholars such as Schaerf were able, two generations later, to reconstruct the cartography of Jewish names across the peninsula [Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, 1925].
Italian unification, completed in 1870 with the capture of Rome, sealed the legal integration of Jews into the new nation-state. Jewish families, now full citizens, took a wide part in the Risorgimento movement and in the building of liberal Italy.
The century that saw Schaerf publish his catalogue was also the one of the greatest tragedy. After a remarkable phase of integration, during which Italian Jews occupied eminent positions in science, the military, and politics, came the racial laws of 1938 promulgated by the Fascist regime [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Italy"; Leggi razziali, 1938]. These laws stripped Italian Jews of their civil rights, excluding them from schools, professions, and public service.
The German occupation of Italy, beginning in September 1943, opened the phase of deportations. A significant portion of Italian Jews was arrested and deported to the extermination camps [Liliana Picciotto, Il libro della memoria. Gli ebrei deportati dall'Italia, 1943–1945, Milano, 1991]. Liliana Picciotto's work, based on rigorous archival research, constitutes the reference census of the victims; it is the place where any nominal trace of members of the Cases lineage during this period should be sought. In the absence of direct and certain consultation of this collection, the historian here refrains from any numerical assertion, hence the cautious status attributed to this chapter.
After the war, the Italian Jewish communities, considerably reduced, rebuilt themselves around Rome, Milan, and Turin. The memory of families, including the Cases, is now part of this collective work of transmission and commemoration carried out by communal institutions and documentation centres [Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Milano].
Any patronymic study must confront the question of homonyms. The name Cases is not the exclusive preserve of a single family or a single faith: there are Catalan, Occitan and Spanish non-Jewish bearers, as well as closely related graphic variants — Casès, Casas, Case, Cazes — which may or may not attach to the same core [Joan Coromines, Diccionari etimològic, s.v. casa]. The form Cazes, in particular, is attested among the Jews of Languedoc and the Comtat Venaissin, which would reinforce, by parallelism, the hypothesis of a common Occitan-Provençal root [studies on the Jews of the Comtat Venaissin].
It would therefore be imprudent to merge all bearers of the name into a single lineage. The honest method consists in recognising several possible hearths, whose onomastic convergence does not prove biological kinship. Family memory may assert a single, continuous descent; the archive, for its part, only rarely allows the generations prior to the nineteenth century to be linked without rupture, owing to the absence of systematic registers before emancipation.
This chapter therefore falls within an assumed editorial conjecture: it proposes an interpretive framework — that of several probably distinct branches, united by a common etymology — rather than a demonstrated genealogy. This is, in our view, the only posture compatible with historical rigour and with the respect owed to the memory of the families concerned.
At the conclusion of this inquiry, the name Cases proves to be an authentically attested Italian Jewish surname — this is the established fact, vouched for by the authority of Samuele Schaerf and his 1925 collection [Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia, Firenze, 1925]. Everything else falls within the realm of probable reconstruction: an etymology pointing to the "houses" of the Iberian and Occitan Romance languages, a likely Sephardic or Provençal origin, a plausible rootedness in the communities of northern Italy, and a trajectory shared with the whole of Italian Jewry through the ghetto, emancipation, integration, and persecution.
The historian must accept this measure of uncertainty without filling it with invention. The Cases lineage deserves to be situated within the great movement of Mediterranean diasporas rather than frozen in an illusory genealogy. The avenues opened here — examination of the Piedmontese and Tuscan community registers, consultation of the Libro della memoria for the twentieth century, comparison with the variants Cazes and Casas — sketch out a research program that only new archival work can bring to completion. It is at this price that Memory and History may, one day, fully come together.
