At the threshold of the Red Sea, in the crisp and limpid air of the highlands of Asmara, there unfolded over a few decades the history of a Jewish presence as discreet as it was singular. The Pardo lineage belongs to that particular category of Sephardic-Italian families carried by the currents of commerce, colonization, and flight from persecution toward the southern margins of the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa. To understand it, one must hold two threads together: on the one hand, the history of an illustrious patronym of the Sephardic diaspora, attested from Venice to Amsterdam; on the other, the concrete and brief history of a small Jewish community forged in the shadow of colonial Italy.
The Jewish community of Asmara forms the indispensable framework of this narrative. In former times, Eritrea had a substantial Jewish community, fed by the arrival of individuals drawn there for economic reasons or fleeing persecution. This community, modest but well organized, saw its population peak at around five hundred souls in the immediate postwar period. It is within this milieu — composed of Adenite merchants, Italians, and refugees from Europe — that the Pardo family must be situated, whose reference notice recalls that it was a Sephardic-Italian family present in Asmara during the first half of the twentieth century, active in commerce and import-export.
The present work scrupulously distinguishes between what belongs to established archive — the history of the synagogue, the demographic contours, the colonial framework — and what belongs to careful deduction regarding the precise place of the Pardos within this whole. It embraces this epistemic honesty as a virtue rather than a weakness.
The name Pardo belongs to the best-documented register of Judeo-Spanish onomastics. It appears explicitly among the catalogued Sephardic patronyms, alongside names such as Pinto, Toledano, or Sasportas — Pardo · Parra (surname) · Partouche · Perez (patronym) · Pinto · Ricardo · Saadia (homonymy) · Sabban · Sadoun · Safdie · Salama · Salmona · Samama · Saporta · Sarfati · Sasportas. This inscription within the Sephardic corpus is far from incidental: it situates the family within the great movement of expulsion of 1492 and along the routes of the Iberian exile.
Several hypotheses converge regarding the origin of the word. The most widespread connects "Pardo" to a Hispanic root. It is believed to have originated as a nickname meaning "brave" or "strong." Another reading, distinctly Jewish in character, traces it to Hebrew: "Pardo" can also have Sephardic Jewish origins. It is derived from the Hebrew word "pardes," which means "orchard" or "garden." The term pardès, which denotes the orchard but also, in the mystical tradition, the four levels of interpretation of the sacred text, lends the name a particular resonance.
An additional tradition, reported with due caution, puts forward a bold phonetic reading. However, a tradition whose basis in evidence I cannot confirm holds that the name is an Italianization of Safardi, a term designating Sephardic Jews of Spanish origin who converted to Christianity after 1492. This last hypothesis, expressly presented as uncertain by the source itself, must be handled with circumspection: it nonetheless illustrates the Iberian depth that family memory attaches to the name.
Historically, the Pardo family ranks among the most prominent rabbinical and mercantile families of the Western diaspora, present in Venice, in Amsterdam, and in the Sephardic trading posts of the Mediterranean. It is from this Italo-Sephardic soil — where maritime commerce and rabbinical culture were intertwined — that the branch established in Eritrea most likely descends.
The Jewish presence in Eritrea is inseparable from Italian colonial expansion along the shores of the Red Sea at the end of the 19th century. Eritrea once had a small community of Yemenite Jews who arrived in the country after having been attracted by new commercial opportunities driven by Italian colonial expansion in the late 19th century. Asmara, the capital of the territory, became a crossroads where Yemenite merchants, Italian officials and traders, and merchants from all origins converged.
The nucleus of this presence crystallized at the turn of the century. Built in 1906 during Italian Colonial rule, the sanctuary was once also home to classrooms and a cemetery. Many Jews settled in Eritrea in the late nineteenth century in search of economic opportunities. As early as 1905, the communal structure began to take shape: the Hebrew congregation of Asmara was established, and it would continue to grow throughout the first half of the 20th century.
The composition of this community reveals its cosmopolitan character. The congregation was founded in 1906 by Yemenite Jewish immigrants from Aden. Along with the Adeni Jews, some congregants were Italian Jews. It is precisely within this stratum of Italian Jews — numerically a minority yet socially integrated into the colonial sphere — that the Pardo family finds its place. As a product of Italian colonialism, Asmara also included a handful of Italian Jews and well those from an assortment of countries as refugees of Nazi Europe.
This founding duality — a majority Adeni foundation and an Italian elite — structured the entirety of communal life. The Pardo, Sephardic Jews of Iberian descent yet Italian in culture and language, thus participated in that hyphen between the European Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula that the community of Asmara embodied in its entirety.
The reference entry presents the Pardo as a family active in trade and import-export. This characterization, far from being incidental, aligns precisely with the documented economic profile of the Jewish community of Asmara, where family memory and the archive mutually corroborate one another.
Trade was indeed the very engine of Jewish settlement in Eritrea. The earliest arrivals, as noted above, were drawn by the commercial openings created by Italian colonization. The urban geography itself bears the mark of this mercantile vocation. During the heyday of Jewish life in Asmara, many of its Jews lived and operated businesses in the street near the synagogue, making the Jewish quarter a dense fabric of residences and shops.
For a Sephardic-Italian family such as the Pardo, import-export represented the natural convergence of several advantages: command of the Italian language and Italian networks, access to the ports of the Red Sea — Massawa above all — and the trans-Mediterranean ties inherited from an ancient diaspora. Asmara's position, connected by rail to the coast, made it a commercial platform oriented simultaneously toward metropolitan Italy, toward Aden, and toward the Indian subcontinent.
One must nonetheless observe due caution regarding uncertainty: while the economic framework is solidly established, the details of the Pardo enterprises — company names, goods, partners — are not preserved in the accessible sources. The continuity between family tradition and the documented collective profile thus remains probable rather than proven piece by piece.
No history of a Jewish family from Asmara can be conceived apart from the edifice that stood at its center. The Asmara Synagogue, completed in 1906, remains the founding monument of that presence. In 1906, the construction of the Asmara Synagogue was completed in Asmara, the capital of the country.
The building was designed to meet the needs of a growing community. It comprises a main sanctuary capable of accommodating up to 200 people, classrooms, and a small cemetery. This scope — a sanctuary, a school, a cemetery — bears witness to the ambition of a lasting home, not merely a waystation for passing merchants.
The synagogue was, and remains, the only tangible remnant of that vanished world. The oldest synagogue in the nation, the Asmara Synagogue is the only surviving remnant of the once-flourishing Jewish community in Eritrea. Built in 1906 during Italian Colonial rule, the sanctuary was once also home to classrooms and a cemetery. A family such as the Pardo would have celebrated its festivals there, educated its children in the adjoining classroom, and buried its dead in the neighboring cemetery.
The cemetery itself offers a valuable demographic marker. By the early years of the twentieth century, Asmara in central Eritrea had a large and sustainable enough Jewish community to require a cemetery. The community, which peaked according to some accounts at five-hundred people shortly after World War II and into the early 1950s, was made up mostly of Jews from Aden, yet there were others. Among those "others" who complemented the Adenite core, the Pardo found their place.
The interwar decades and World War II mark both the peak and the turning point of the community. The arrival of refugees played a decisive role. In the 1930s, the Jewish community was bolstered when many European Jews emigrated to Eritrea to escape Nazi persecution. Asmara, under Italian administration and then, after 1941, British administration, became one of those unlikely refuges where European Jews found respite far from the camps.
This influx brought the community to its highest point. The community, which peaked according to some accounts at five-hundred people shortly after World War II and into the early 1950s, was made up mostly of Jews from Aden, yet there were others. For the Pardo, already established as an Italian family of Sephardic origin, these were years of a community at its zenith, rich in exchange and religious life.
It must nonetheless be recalled how precarious the position of Italian Jews was in this context. Subjects of a state that had enacted the fascist racial laws in 1938, yet established in a colony where life continued to unfold, they experienced in their very flesh the contradiction of belonging to a nation that rejected them. The Italian defeat of 1941 and the arrival of the British altered this framework, paradoxically opening a parenthesis of relative security.
It was in this climate — that of a community both prosperous and fragile, suspended between the upheavals of war — that the last fully living phase of the Pardo presence in Eritrea most likely unfolded.
The apogee of the 1950s already contained the seeds of decline. The political upheavals of the second half of the century — the end of colonial rule, federation then annexation by Ethiopia, the long war of independence — brought about the gradual disappearance of the community.
The contemporary observation is strikingly desolate. Today, it is visiting diplomats or UN officials who occasionally take part in a religious service in the synagogue, for emigration, deaths and revolution have upended the life of the Jewish community of Asmara. Sami Cohen is now the last native Jew of Eritrea still living in Asmara. From several hundred members, the community has been reduced to a symbolic presence.
The upkeep of the premises now rests on a single man. All aspects of the synagogue are managed by Samuel Cohen, an Asmara native who remained in the country to look after the edifice. The synagogue, its Torah scrolls and its cemetery survive as a frozen memorial. On a quiet street in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, stands a striking synagogue that seems almost suspended in time.
For the Pardo as for other families, the fate was one of dispersion: departure toward Israel, Italy, Europe or the Americas, according to opportunity and circumstance. Where the archive falls silent on the detail of individual trajectories, family memory takes over — hence the probable status that honestly accompanies this reconstruction.
The Pardo lineage of Eritrea reveals itself as a point of condensation where several great histories converge. That of a Sephardic surname, centuries old, born on the Iberian Peninsula and carried along the roads of exile after 1492. That of Italy's colonial presence on the highlands of the Horn of Africa. That of a small Jewish community in Asmara which, from 1906 through the 1950s, experienced both flowering and erasure.
What the archive establishes with certainty is the framework: a synagogue founded in 1906, a composite community of Adenite merchants, Italians, and refugees, a post-war peak of five hundred souls, a near-total decline today. What careful deduction inscribes within it is the place of the Pardo: a Sephardic-Italian family, devoted to commerce and import-export, integrated into the thin Italian stratum of this cosmopolitan congregation.
Yet a portion of this history remains in the shadow of its sources. The names, the faces, the shops, and the precise itineraries of the Pardo family have not all left traces in the accessible catalogues. The present work acknowledges this gap: an honest account, in which the probable is named as such, is preferable to an invented certainty. In the silent street of Asmara where the synagogue still keeps watch, an entire Sephardic-Italian world — and the Pardo lineage with it — awaits the moment when Memory and archive continue to answer each other.
