The name Pegna belongs to the onomastic repertoire of Italian Judaism and figures among the surnames recorded during the first half of the 20th century, at a time when the peninsula undertook, for reasons at first scholarly and then administrative, to draw up an inventory of the Jewish families of its territory. The reference notice links this name to the foundational work of Samuele Schaerf, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia. This work, published in Florence in 1925 under the auspices of the publishing house "Israel," remains one of the pillars of all research on Italian Jewish surnames: it is an elenco of the cognomi of the Jews of Italy, comprising 1628 names, drawn from the book by Samuele Schaerf, with an appendix on the noble Jewish families of Italy. This list, dated 1938, comprises the surnames of the Jewish families of all Italy as they were recorded.
To inscribe the Pegna family within this collective memory requires examining two orders of reality: on the one hand the available onomastic and genealogical documentation, and on the other the broader context of the Sephardic diasporas which, from the 15th century to modern times, spread across the shores of the Mediterranean. The present work intends to retrace, with the prudence that the uncertainty of the sources imposes, the probable course of this name, from its likely Iberian roots to its rooting within the Italian Jewish fabric, and particularly the Tuscan one.
The first certainty concerning the Pegna family is of a bibliographical nature. The surname is attested in the great onomastic census of Italian Jewry compiled by Samuele Schaerf. This work, whose library record specifies a physical description of 89 pages, was published in Florence and enjoyed lasting circulation, to the point of being reissued in facsimile. Samuele Schaerf's work, entitled "I cognomi degli ebrei in Italia. Con un'appendice su le famiglie nobili ebree in Italia," is an anastatic reprint of the 1925 Florence edition, reissued by the Libreria Piani.
The interest of Schaerf's undertaking lies in its method: to record, classify, and explain the surnames borne by the Jews of the peninsula, blending names of biblical origin, toponyms, occupational designations, and surnames inherited from the diasporas. A small number of Sephardic surnames had an occupational origin, while many others adopted names constructed with a Hebrew prefix, which illustrates the diversity of linguistic strata that these inventories strive to untangle. The name Pegna lies precisely at the intersection of these strata: its physiognomy is neither biblical nor Hebrew, but Iberian, which immediately directs research toward the communities originating from the Iberian Peninsula.
The value of this source is that it is a reference catalogue, that is, a reliable documentary anchor: the presence of the name in Schaerf's repertory establishes, without conjecture, that Jewish families bearing this surname were present and recognized in Italy on the eve of the Second World War.
The form Pegna most likely refers to the Spanish word peña (“rock,” “escarpment,” “rocky height”), whose Italianized spelling preserved the digraph gn to render the palatal sound of the Castilian ñ. This type of toponym is extremely widespread throughout the Iberian Peninsula, where countless localities bear a name derived from peña. The surname would thus belong to the category of names of geographical origin adopted by families according to their place of provenance.
This onomastic filiation is part of a historical phenomenon of considerable scale. Sephardic surnames belong to the descendants of the Jews who lived in Spain and Portugal before the Spanish Inquisition forced Jews to convert to Christianity or to flee the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 15th century. Many expelled or fugitive families carried with them, as a mark of identity, names rooted in the geography of their lost land. It must nevertheless be emphasized that this interpretation, based on linguistic analysis and on analogy with other Sephardic surnames, belongs to the register of reconstructed Memory rather than to that of direct documentary proof: no record confirms the precise moment when a family adopted this name. We therefore offer it as probable, not as established.
The most concrete testimony to the establishment of the Pegna name in Italy comes from Livorno (Leghorn), the great Tuscan port that became, in the modern era, one of the principal centers of Mediterranean Sephardic Judaism. The genealogical inventories of the Jewish families of Livorno explicitly mention the name in a compound form. Indeed, among a long series of surnames, one finds the variants "Gutierres Pegna," "Guttieres Pegna," and "Guttierres Pegna," alongside other names of Iberian origin such as Gomes, Gutierres, or Garzia.
This observation is doubly instructive. On the one hand, it confirms the Sephardic nature of the name: the juxtaposition of a Castilian surname (Gutierres / Gutiérrez) and the toponym Pegna is characteristic of the "Portuguese" and "Spanish" families of the Western diaspora, who maintained double names attesting to lineage and provenance. On the other hand, it situates the family geographically within the Livornese crucible, where a decisive portion of Italian Sephardic Jewish life was concentrated. Livorno was, moreover, the cradle of an original Jewish culture: it is from this city that came, for example, Guido Bedarida (1900-1962), an Italian Jewish writer, the principal source of Judeo-Livornese literature, a sign of the cultural vitality particular to this milieu where the Pegna family found its place.
The simultaneous presence of the name in Schaerf's national repertoire and in the lists specific to Livorno constitutes a solid documentary convergence, which allows the family's Tuscan rootedness to be regarded as established.
To understand how a family of Iberian origin could prosper in Tuscany, one must evoke the singular status of Livorno. From the end of the 16th century, the grand dukes of Tuscany made this port a haven for foreign merchants, and in particular for the Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula or fleeing the Inquisition tribunals. The privileges granted to these newcomers guaranteed freedom of worship and trade, which attracted a numerous, prosperous Jewish population strongly marked by the Hispano-Portuguese heritage.
The panorama of southern diasporas sheds light on this movement. Southern Italy, too, became the home of a considerable Sephardic Jewish population after the Kingdom of Naples was placed under Spanish rule, while Italian Judaism as a whole displayed a remarkable onomastic diversity: some of their surnames are found in other languages associated with Jews, such as Sacerdotti (priest), Diamanti (diamonds), Stella (star) and Gioia (joy). In this plural landscape, families of Sephardic extraction — among whom the Pegna appear to belong — formed a distinct group, attached to their rites, their language (Spanish and Portuguese long preserved) and their Mediterranean commercial networks.
In the absence of published nominative archives on the precise activities of the Pegna family, this chapter remains conjectural: it reconstructs the likely framework of their existence without being able to document, deed by deed, their economic and social integration into the city.
The study of the name's forms reveals an instructive tension between family memory and the written trace. The Livornese registers offer a range of spellings — Gutierres Pegna, Guttieres Pegna, Guttierres Pegna — that bear witness to the orthographic instability common before the administrative fixing of surnames. The doubling of the t, the oscillation between one and two consonants, the retention or omission of the first Sephardic element: so many variations that recall how the name first lived orally, transmitted and transcribed according to the ear of the scribes.
This plurality of forms is precisely the point where Memory and the archive answer one another. The Sephardic tradition attached an identitary value to the double name, a marker of lineage nobility; the archive, for its part, fixes contingent variants at the whim of the pens. Schaerf's index, in retaining the simple form Pegna, performs a retrospective normalization that effaces part of this richness. Comparing the two states — the unified national list and the abundant local registers — allows us to measure how far a surname is a living object, whose "official" spelling represents only a cross-section at a given moment. We therefore hold this reading to be probable, in that it rests upon real attestations while acknowledging that the precise genealogical link between the compound Livornese form and the simple form recorded by Schaerf cannot be asserted without reservation.
The fate of the name Pegna is bound up with that of Italian Jewry as a whole. The family's inscription in Schaerf's list takes on particular significance when one recalls the context of its circulation. The list, dated 1938, records the surnames of Jewish families throughout Italy as they were then registered — yet the year 1938 is that of the promulgation of the Fascist racial laws, which turned the census of Jewish names into an instrument of persecution. What had been conceived as a work of onomastic scholarship found itself, by force of circumstance, cast into a climate of menace for the families concerned.
The Sephardic surnames of Livorno passed through this ordeal along with the rest of the community. The preservation of the name Pegna, attested in the reference repertories, bears witness to a continuity of memory: it links the Sephardic merchant of the grand-ducal age to the Italian Jew of the twentieth century, beyond ruptures and persecutions. Without exhaustive genealogical documentation on the recent generations, one cannot construct an unbroken tree; but the persistence of the name in scholarly catalogues is enough to affirm that it has not been extinguished into oblivion. It remains today one of the threads — tenuous yet real — of the great weave of Mediterranean Jewry.
At the close of this inquiry, the figure of the Pegna family can be sketched with a nuanced honesty. Three certainties form its foundation: the name is attested in Samuele Schaerf's reference repertory; it appears, in the compound form Gutierres Pegna, in the lists of the Jewish families of Livorno; and its physiognomy clearly ties it to the Iberian Sephardic sphere. Around these firm points a cluster of probable hypotheses takes shape: the etymology through peña, "the rock"; the arrival in Tuscany in the wake of the great migrations following the expulsion of 1492; the settling into the free port of Livorno, a haven and springboard of Mediterranean Jewish commerce.
What the Great Book cannot offer, for want of sources, is the unbroken chain of generations, the names and faces of a continuous lineage. What it offers instead is a rigorous framework: a name rooted in Iberian memory, gathered by Italian erudition, and borne by a community that knew how to make exile a source of fruitfulness. The Pegna family thus belongs, modestly but surely, to the onomastic heritage of Italian Judaism.
