The name Szirmay belongs to that singular category of Italian Jewish surnames whose graphic form betrays a complex migratory trajectory, where the Mediterranean world and the Danubian world converge. The reference entry places it among the Jewish families of Italy, as recorded by Samuele Schaerf in his foundational inventory, I cognomi degli ebrei d'Italia (Florence, 1925) [Schaerf, 1925]. This work, the first systematic attempt to catalogue the names borne by the Jews of the peninsula, remains a primary source for anyone undertaking the study of an Italian lineage. Its mention there carries the weight of a founding act: it attests that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the surname was indeed circulating within Italian Jewish space, sufficiently established to appear in a scholarly repertory.
Jewish historiography has long established that the family name, in the Jewish world, is never to be read as neutral data. It bears the trace of a place, a trade, an ancestor, sometimes of an administrative decree imposed by a Christian or imperial authority. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi reminded us, Jewish Memory has long favored ritual and liturgical transmission over precise genealogical record-keeping, so that the surname often becomes one of the few continuous threads allowing us to trace our way back through time [Yerushalmi, 1984]. In the case of Szirmay, this thread leads us simultaneously toward the Jewish communities of the Italian peninsula and, through its Hungarian morphology, toward Central Europe.
This volume sets out to retrace, with the caution imposed by documentary scarcity, the probable contours of a lineage bearing this name. It scrupulously distinguishes what is attested by the archive from what belongs to deduction or transmitted tradition. Where documentation is lacking, we say so; where onomastic analysis permits a hypothesis, we formulate it as such.
The undeniable starting point is Schaerf's attestation. When Samuele Schaerf published his census of Italian Jewish surnames in 1925, he pursued a dual objective: to preserve the onomastic memory of an ancient community and to offer researchers a reference instrument. The inscription of Szirmay in this corpus means that, at the time of Schaerf's survey, bearers of this name were identified as belonging to the Jewish community of Italy [Schaerf, 1925].
To understand the significance of this attestation, one must recall the nature of Italian Jewry. As Robert Bonfil has masterfully demonstrated, the Jewish communities of the peninsula, since the Renaissance, constituted a mosaic in which distinct "nations" coexisted — indigenous Italian (italqim), Ashkenazic communities from north of the Alps, Sephardic and Levantine communities established after 1492 [Bonfil, 1994]. Each migratory wave brought its own names, rites, and networks. A surname with Central European resonance such as Szirmay fits naturally within the Ashkenazic component of this mosaic, the one whose currents trace back toward the Germanic and Danubian lands.
Bonfil insists on the fact that Jewish Italy of the early modern period was a crossroads, where identities were recomposed according to successive settlements, and where the name often became the enduring marker of a geographical origin [Bonfil, 1994]. The historian also underscores the considerable mobility of Jewish families between the Italian states, a mobility that explains how a name could appear in several cities without it always being possible to reconstruct the exact chain of transmission. This documentary dispersion is one of the major difficulties of Italian genealogical research.
The very form of the name Szirmay demands linguistic analysis. The digraph "sz," which in Hungarian renders the sound [s], along with the -ay/-y ending typical of Magyar noble patronymics derived from place names, points unambiguously toward a Hungarian origin. In classical Hungarian nomenclature, Szirmay is a toponymic name formed from the locality of Szirma, in the comitat of Borsod, in northeastern Hungary; it was borne by a lineage of the Hungarian nobility. This linguistic filiation is well established.
The delicate question is how such a name came to designate a Jewish family recorded in Italy. Several paths are conceivable, and it is appropriate here to reason by hypothesis. The first hypothesis, the most economical, is that of the adoption of a Hungarian-sounding name by a Jewish family of Central European origin, either because it had passed through Habsburg lands, or because a territorial patronym was conferred or adopted during the great campaigns of name attribution imposed across the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second hypothesis, that of a direct migration of Hungarian Jews to Italy, is plausible given the intense exchanges linking Habsburg territories to Italian ports, notably Trieste and Venice.
Here, transmitted tradition and the archive enter into dialogue without always confirming one another. If family memory ties the lineage to a Danubian origin, the Italian archive, through the sole voice of Schaerf, does no more than attest to the presence of the name on Italian soil without documenting its provenance [Schaerf, 1925]. The historian of Jewish philosophy Maurice-Ruben Hayoun recalls how profoundly the itineraries of Central European Jewish families were shaped by imperial policies of administrative assimilation, which bore directly on the fixing of patronymics [Hayoun, 2023]. The name Szirmay, in this perspective, would be the sediment of an imperial history as much as of a family History.
If we accept the Danubian hypothesis, the most natural route connecting Hungary to Jewish Italy passes through the Adriatic. Trieste, the Habsburg free port, was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a major pole of attraction for Jews from the imperial territories. Its cosmopolitan and prosperous community welcomed families from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary and the Balkans, many of whom subsequently settled in Venice, Padua or further south.
This mobility was part of a broader Mediterranean dynamic, the kind described by Lionel Lévy in relation to the networks of the "Portuguese Jewish nation" and Livourne. Lévy shows how the great ports — Livourne above all — functioned as clearing houses where families of diverse origins converged: Sephardic, Italian and North African [Lévy, 1999]. The Livournese model, founded on commercial freedom and the relative tolerance extended to Jewish merchants, attracted lineages from every provenance, creating an onomastic mixing whose traces are preserved in repertories such as that of Schaerf [Lévy, 1996].
It would be imprudent to assert that the Szirmay family settled precisely in Livourne or Trieste: no source in the corpus directly documents this. But one can, as a historian, reconstruct the framework of plausibility within which a Jewish lineage of probably Central European origin made its way to Italy. Lévy insists on the fundamentally transnational character of these port communities, where belonging was defined less by one's territory of birth than by membership in a network of kinship and commerce [Lévy, 1999]. A Szirmay family could, in this context, have retained a Hungarian name while becoming fully integrated into Italian Jewish life.
Whatever the precise origin of the Szirmay may have been, their integration into Italian Jewry placed them within a communal civilization of remarkable richness. Bonfil has demonstrated that Jewish life in Renaissance Italy combined strong institutional autonomy — the communità endowed with statutes, rabbinical courts, and schools — with a remarkable cultural porosity toward the surrounding Christian world [Bonfil, 1994]. Italian Jews read, wrote, and debated within a universe where the Hebrew tradition engaged in dialogue with the humanism of the peninsula.
This culture found one of its chief expressions in the book. Italian communities were exceptional centers of illuminated Hebrew manuscript production, as Giulia Tamani has studied: the peninsula offers some of the finest examples of decorated codices in the medieval and modern Jewish world [Tamani, 2010]. The manuscript, as a medium for both halakhah and liturgy, bore witness to the refinement of a society in which the written object carried considerable prestige. A family integrated into this world participated, however modestly, in this economy of learned transmission.
Jewish thought itself found fertile ground there. Colette Sirat has shown that Italy was, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, an essential relay in the circulation of Jewish philosophical texts, connecting Spain, Provence, and the Orient [Sirat, 1983]. Italian Jews were transmitters: translators, copyists, commentators. To belong to this tradition was to inherit an intellectual exigency whose permanence the great contemporary thinkers, from Armand Abécassis to Léon Askénazi, have recalled: fidelity to study as the very mode of Jewish existence [Abécassis, 1987] [Askénazi, 1999].
The inquiry into the Szirmay lineage encounters a limit familiar to every genealogist of the Jewish world: the scarcity, or even absence, of continuous sources. Between the isolated attestation of Schaerf and family memory stretches a vast space of documentary silence. This space is not a failure of research; it is constitutive of the Jewish experience of Memory.
Yerushalmi formulated this tension in a decisive manner: the Jewish tradition cultivated a relationship to the past grounded in liturgical commemoration and the obligation of remembrance — zakhor — far more than in historiographical writing in the modern sense [Yerushalmi, 1984]. The memory of a family was transmitted through the names given to children, through stories told at festive vigils, through tombstones, more than through systematic archives. When these living supports break — exiles, persecutions, dispersions — the chain is severed, and the historian must work with fragments.
Isaiah Berlin reflected on this condition of dispersion as a structural feature of modern Jewish existence, shaped by migrations, multiple belongings, and identity recompositions [Berlin, 1973]. The Szirmay case illustrates this condition: a Hungarian name borne by an Italian family is the distillation of a history of passages. We conjecture, without being able to prove it through the archive, that the lineage knew, like so many others, a trajectory of migration and adaptation, preserving the name as the ultimate seal of an origin that had grown distant. This conjectural part we assume: it is the only honest response to the silence of the sources.
The 1925 attestation places the Szirmay at a pivotal moment. The Italian Jewish community was then entering the darkest period of its modern history. The fascist racial laws of 1938, followed by the German occupation and the deportations of 1943–1945, struck the entire Jewish population of the peninsula. Every Jewish lineage recorded in Italy at the beginning of the century was traversed by this catastrophe, and post-war genealogy inevitably bears the ruptures it imposed.
The Mediterranean Jewish world experienced other parallel upheavals in the twentieth century. The communities of North Africa, closely linked through commerce and alliances to the Italian port cities, lived through their own exodus. The work of Eliahou-Éric Botbol on Tlemcen and the rabbinical archives of Sidi Bel Abbès document the end of a Maghrebi Jewish world whose networks intersected with those of Livourne and the Adriatic [Botbol, 2000] [Archives de Sidi Bel Abbès]. These parallel destinies remind us that the Jewish diaspora forms an interconnected fabric, in which the fate of one family is illuminated by the light of neighboring communities.
For the Szirmay as for so many lineages, the post-war period was a time of renewed dispersion — toward Israel, the Americas, or reconstruction in place. The very persistence of the name, wherever it survives, attests to a continuity that neither exile nor persecution has erased. It is in this persistence that the true substance of this book perhaps resides.
At the close of this inquiry, the Szirmay lineage presents itself as a fruitful enigma rather than a fully reconstructed history. One fact is firmly established: the name appears among the Jewish surnames of Italy catalogued by Schaerf in 1925 [Schaerf, 1925]. Around this anchor point, onomastic analysis imposes with near-certainty a Hungarian, toponymic origin, tied to the locality of Szirma — making this patronym a witness to the ties between the Danubian Jewish world of the Habsburgs and the Jewry of the peninsula.
The rest belongs to careful reconstruction. The migration routes — through Trieste, the Adriatic, the great ports such as Livorno — compose a framework of plausibility that the works of Lévy and Bonfil render intelligible [Lévy, 1999] [Bonfil, 1994]. The integration into an Italian Jewish culture of the book, of study, and of transmission lends this lineage, however modest, a dignity shared with the entire Jewish civilization of the peninsula [Tamani, 2010] [Sirat, 1983]. And the silence surrounding so many episodes returns us, with Yerushalmi, to the very nature of Jewish Memory, composed of ritual remembrance as much as of archive [Yerushalmi, 1984].
This Great Book does not claim to close the history of the Szirmay; it lays its honest foundations, distinguishing the established from the probable and the conjectured. It will fall to the still-dormant archives — communal registers of Trieste, Venice, and Livorno, civil records of the Habsburg territories — to confirm or to nuance the hypotheses advanced here. Until then, the name endures, and it is through it that Memory continues.
