The patronym Catarivas belongs to that singular category of Iberian Jewish names that history has, in a sense, uprooted twice: first during the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and a second time by confining them to a specific geographic area — that of the Ottoman Empire — where they survived, sometimes to this day, as living fossils of Sephardic Memory. According to the onomastician Joseph Toledano, Catarivas is "a patronymic name of Spanish origin, indicative of a provenance"; after the expulsion, bearers of the name were found only within the Ottoman Empire, the name not being carried into the Maghreb [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles].
This twofold indication — Iberian origin on the one hand, exclusively Levantine diffusion on the other — constitutes the guiding thread of this work. It places the Catarivas lineage not within the trajectory of the Jews who, fleeing the Iberian Peninsula, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to settle in Fès, Tétouan, or Tlemcen, but rather within the distinct trajectory of those who took the road to the East: Salonique, Constantinople, Smyrne, Andrinople. Where other Sephardic patronyms spread simultaneously across both shores of the Mediterranean, Catarivas remained, it seems, a name of the Ottoman East exclusively.
The purpose of this Great Book is to reconstruct, with the caution imposed by the scarcity of direct sources, the history of this name: its probable Iberian etymology, the context of the exile that carried it toward the Levant, the Judeo-Spanish world in which its bearers lived for four centuries, and finally its contemporary survival. We shall carefully distinguish, at each stage, between what belongs to established archive, to probable deduction, and to transmitted tradition.
The analysis of a rare surname always begins with its structure. Catarivas has the appearance of a compound or agglutinated name of Romance, and more precisely Iberian, origin, in keeping with Toledano's description of it as a "name of Spanish origin" [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles].
Several etymological hypotheses may be advanced on a conjectural basis. The first breaks the name down into cata- and -rivas. The segment rivas is, in both Spanish and Portuguese, an extremely widespread toponym and surname: it denotes riverbanks or shores (from the Latin ripa), and has given rise to numerous place names — Rivas, Ribas, Riba — several villages on the Iberian Peninsula still bearing this name today. Sephardic Jewish surnames of toponymic origin are legion: they frequently indicate the locality from which a family originated before settling elsewhere, and it is well known that this practice of designation by place of origin was common among the Jews of Spain [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Names]. Under this reading, Catarivas would refer to an Iberian microtoponym that is today difficult to identify with certainty.
A second hypothesis, more speculative, would see in the prefix cata- a transformation of casa ("house of") or an agglutination of a regional determiner, the name then meaning something like "[those] of the riverbanks." Judeo-Spanish phonetics — ladino — did indeed preserve and transform many Castilian forms from the fifteenth century, fixing pronunciations that Peninsular Spanish subsequently abandoned. Sephardic surnames from the East often bear the mark of this archaic language, and their spelling, fixed late and in a variable manner depending on Ottoman, Italian, or French administrative contexts, accounts for the graphic variants encountered (Catarivas, Cattarivas, and related forms).
It is appropriate here to be honest: no authoritative consultable source establishes the etymology of
To understand why the name Catarivas is found in the Ottoman Empire rather than in the Maghreb, one must return to the major historical turning point of Iberian Jewish history: the expulsion decree issued by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the Alhambra Edict, signed on March 31, 1492 [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Spain]. Ordered to convert to Christianity or leave the kingdoms of Spain within a matter of months, tens of thousands of Jews took the road of exile.
The destinations of this diaspora were distributed along distinct geographical axes. Some of the exiles made their way to neighboring Portugal — from where they would in turn be expelled or forcibly converted in 1497. Others crossed over to North Africa, swelling the communities of Morocco and founding the Judaism known as megorashim (the "expelled ones"), as opposed to the toshavim, the indigenous Jews. Still others chose the route of the eastern Mediterranean and found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, whose sultan Bayezid II welcomed these skilled populations, whose commercial, artisanal, and medical abilities he valued [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Ottoman Empire].
It is within this last migratory current that the Catarivas lineage must be situated. The absence of the name in the Maghreb, underscored by Toledano, is not a minor detail: it indicates that the family was not part of the branch that settled in North Africa, but of the one that followed the Levantine route [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles]. The Iberian exiles thus flowed toward Salonique — which became in the sixteenth century a majority-Jewish city and was nicknamed the "Jerusalem of the Balkans" —, toward Constantinople, toward Smyrne (Izmir), Andrinople (Edirne), and the cities of Anatolia and the Ottoman Balkans [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Salonika]. The very distribution of those bearing the name is therefore, in itself, a historical document: it traces in outline the itinerary of the exile.
Once settled in the Ottoman Empire, Sephardic families formed a cultural world of remarkable coherence and exceptional longevity. At the heart of this civilization lay language: Judeo-Spanish, or ladino, an idiom derived from fifteenth-century Castilian, enriched by borrowings from Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, and Italian, and transmitted from generation to generation for more than four centuries [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Ladino]. A family such as the Catarivas would have lived, prayed, traded, and sung in this language, whose persistence constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of linguistic preservation in the Jewish diaspora.
The Ottoman Sephardic world was organized around communities (the kehilot), often structured according to the town of origin of the exiles from Spain: in Salonika one found congregations known as those "of Castile," "of Aragon," "of Catalonia," "of Lisbon," thus perpetuating the Memory of the lost lands [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Salonika]. In this context, a surname "indicative of an origin" such as Catarivas carried its full meaning: it bound its bearers to a precise place on the peninsula, a mark of belonging and continuity.
On the economic and social level, the Sephardic Jews of the Empire played a leading role in trade, textile craftsmanship — Salonika was a major center for the production of wool and cloth —, finance, medicine, and printing, one of the first Hebrew typographic workshops in the Orient having been established in Constantinople as early as the end of the fifteenth century [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Ottoman Empire]. It is within this dense fabric of communal, religious, and economic life that the successive generations of the Catarivas lineage most likely moved, until the upheavals of the twentieth century.
The long equilibrium of Ottoman Sephardic Judaism broke with the advent of modernity. The decline of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, then its dismemberment after the First World War, redrawn the map of the Balkans and Anatolia. Salonika passed under Greek sovereignty in 1912, and the Jewish communities found themselves incorporated into new nation-states — Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia — where their status and future were profoundly altered [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Salonika].
The catastrophe came with the Second World War. The Shoah struck the Sephardic Judaism of the Balkans with full force: the community of Salonika, which numbered some fifty thousand souls, was almost entirely deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and annihilated [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Salonika]. The Judeo-Spanish communities of Greece, Yugoslavia, and part of the Balkans were destroyed in a proportion that ranks among the highest of all occupied Europe. The Ladino language, until then spoken by hundreds of thousands of speakers, saw its numbers collapse within a few years.
For a family such as the Catarivas, whose bearers were concentrated precisely in this Ottoman and post-Ottoman space, this period very likely represents a major demographic rupture. The survivors of this world scattered toward new shores: France, the Americas, and above all the State of Israel, founded in 1948, which became the principal center of reconstitution for Eastern Sephardic Jewries. It is there, in this migration of survival, that one must seek the contemporary trace of the name.
In the contemporary period, the surname Catarivas is found primarily in Israel and, more marginally, in the Western diaspora descended from the Sephardim of the East — in keeping with the migratory logic described above. The rarity of the name, which made our research in open sources difficult, is itself significant: Catarivas is not a widely distributed surname, but a niche name, belonging to a limited number of families, which reinforces the hypothesis of a single stock or a few related stocks tracing back to a common Iberian point of origin.
This rarity corresponds well to Toledano's note, according to which the name was found, after the expulsion, only within the Ottoman Empire and was not carried in the Maghreb [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles]. A surname so geographically circumscribed mechanically yields a more limited pool of bearers than a name spread across both shores of the Mediterranean. The current Israeli concentration is thus easily explained: the State of Israel having welcomed, after 1948, the survivors of the Sephardic communities of Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans, it is there, quite naturally, that the heirs of the name have gathered.
On this chapter, one must exercise redoubled caution: having been unable, at the time of writing, to access civil registry records, communal censuses, or reliable genealogical databases, we can document neither a nominative genealogy nor the existence of specific individuals bearing this name. We therefore confine ourselves to projecting, upon the established historical framework, the most plausible trajectory of a rare Eastern Sephardic surname: a displacement from the Ottoman East toward Israel and the Western diaspora in the twentieth century. Any more precise assertion would amount to invention — which the scholarly ethics of this work forbid.
The history of the Catarivas lineage, as it can be reconstructed from the rare available evidence, is less the history of a documented family than that of a name-as-witness. Every element of this patronym tells a fragment of Sephardic history: its probably Iberian etymology evokes the shores of lost Spain; its quality as a name "indicative of an origin" points back to the memory of native lands that the exiles carried as a viaticum; its exclusively Ottoman diffusion traces in negative the itinerary of an exile — not the road of the Maghreb, but that of the Levant.
It is in this that tradition and archive answer one another. The onomastic note by Toledano, which belongs to the tradition of scholarly transmission, is confirmed and illuminated by the documented general history of the Sephardic diaspora: the expulsion of 1492, the Ottoman welcome, the Judeo-Spanish civilization of Salonika and Smyrna, the catastrophe of the Shoah, and finally the Israeli reconstitution [J. Toledano, Une histoire de familles; Encyclopaedia Judaica, Spain, Ottoman Empire, Salonika]. The name Catarivas, through its geography alone, validates and illustrates this great collective narrative.
What remains is the confession of humility that must close every honest work: the precise nominative genealogy of this lineage remains, at this stage, beyond the reach of the sources we have been able to mobilize. The present Great Book is therefore not the final word of a research, but its first stone — a solid historical framework, upon which family archives, communal registers, and Sephardic genealogical databases will be able, when the time comes, to inscribe the names and faces that History has here sketched in silhouette.
