Alain Nedjar, Liliane Nedjar, Gilles Boulu, and Raphaël Attias
REGISTRES DE KETUBBOT DE LA NATION JUIVE D LIVOURNE: GENEALOGIES ET ITINERARES FAMILIAUX
Paris : Cercle de Généalogie Juive, 2020
Vol.I ISBN: 978-2-912785-71-8
Vol.II ISBN: 978-2-912785-72-5
Reviewed by Bernard Dov Cooperman1
Livorno’s Jewish community stands out within early modern Jewish history for a number of reasons. Perhaps most famously, at a time when the rest of Italy’s Jewish communities were being expelled or confined behind ghetto walls, Jews from all over the world were invited to come to this Mediterranean seaport and settle there. The Medici grand dukes who ruled Tuscany simply refused to legislate a restricted housing zone for Jews in their new port city, and their policy of tolerance was continued when the state passed to the House of Lorraine. From the community’s beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, the Jewish population grew steadily, and Livornese Jewry became one of the largest and wealthiest communities in Western Europe.
But for historians and genealogists Livorno’s Jewry stands out for another reason. During the early Renaissance, the Medici had become wealthy and powerful as bankers, and even after they became the rulers of Florence, they retained the banker’s obsession with keeping records. The Uffizi, now a museum, was originally built, as its name indicates, as an office building where records could be organized and archived. In their keenness for record keeping the Medici pointed the way to the modern bureaucratic state. They seemed literally to have thrown nothing out, and they bequeathed not only their collection of art but also their enormous archive to posterity. The Jewish community in Livorno was also subject to this state-driven imperative for bureaucratic accuracy and accountability, and its large archive is the result. Despite losses when American G.I.s burned archive volumes just to try to keep warm at the end of World War II, Livorno’s Jewish archives remain a unique treasure trove of information for those interested in tracing Jewish genealogy. And among these documents are some two dozen volumes containing copies of over five thousand ketubbot or marriage contracts that were carefully copied in full into registers kept by the community between 1626 and 1890. Almost all of these registers have survived. Together they provide an unparalleled record of the population of a Jewish community, snapshots in time that give testimony to the ongoing ebb and flow of population and family alliances over more than two centuries.
Through an enormous amount of patient and diligent work, the authors have summarized these ketubbot registers, presenting them in a five-hundred-page annotated table or chart. Each ketubba is summarized, with its date, the surnames of the two families and the personal names (and patronymics) of both groom and bride. The sum offered in the marriage arrangement is also given. What makes this enormous table usable for an investigator trying to follow a family line is the thirty-page index of family names that identifies each occurrence of a family name. And as the investigator works, he or she will undoubtedly also enjoy the marvelous images that adorn this beautifully produced book. Original documents, occasional engravings and family photographs, the elaborate paraphs (stylized signatures with arabesque curlicues common among Mediterranean Jewish rabbinic figures), and even photos of gravestones accompany the dry data; there are also historical images of Livorno itself and colorful, stylized maps to show the cities and towns referred to by toponymic surnames. The authors have also tracked down and reproduced quite a few colorful and beautifully decorated ketubbot that were prepared by wealthier couples to be displayed in their homes, making this genealogical guide something of an art-book worth owning in its own right.
Also useful is the column of “observations” that accompany each record. Here are listed the names of the witnesses and officiants who appear on each ketubba, as well as information gathered from other archival sources and the secondary literature on Livorno’s Jewish history. These references are by no means exhaustive, but they do provide leads for the more ambitious genealogist who wants to go further. The authors have also used these observations to build a set of “genealogies and family itineraries” that trace between four and seven generations in each of thirty Livornese families. In each case, a detailed investigation of the mobility, marriages, and occupations of the family is followed by a family tree and relevant images.
This volume is the work of a team of experienced and multi-faceted amateur genealogists. Together with their collaborators, Alain and Liliane Nedjar have already published volumes that focus on the Sephardic/Livornese (Grana) community in Tunisia using ketubbot registries kept in Tunisia,2 as well as the French government records regarding Jews who received French consular protection in Tunisia.3 Their personal interest in Tunisian Jewry explains why they emphasize links with that country, for example in their “family itineraries.” But it is worth noting that this is not just a reflection of their personal backgrounds. It also highlights for us the fact that Livornese Jewry was a part of the networked, cross-Mediterranean world. Jewish historians have treated Italian Jews as a curious sub-set of European Jewries, reflecting in their own way the social and cultural processes taking place in the rest of Europe. But as we see clearly from the case of Livorno, there was another Jewish world in the Mediterranean basin with its own complex version of modernization and cultural adaptation from the late sixteenth century on. These volumes are one of the keys to understanding that process.
The authors are to be complimented for trying to go beyond their genealogical expertise to use their documents to draw patterns of Jewish demographic, economic, and social history. They offer brief essays on marriage patterns and mobility, and they survey demographic crises deriving from epidemics and famines. One of their lengthier chapters tries to evaluate and trace toponymic surnames. If these chapters will not satisfy professional historians, they will certainly be appreciated by genealogical researchers. And the “observations” column, however limited, does raise interesting questions and points to ways that the original documents might be used to follow up on issues of social history. For example, the authors record a number of cases where illiterate grooms could not sign their own names. It would be possible to use such information to evaluate patterns of literacy among Jews. Similarly, even though the ketubbot and the tna’im (pre-nuptial conditions of marriage) are often quite formulaic, there are enough differences both within individual documents and over time that we may be able to use them to understand evolving issues of class, identity, gender, and the like.
The authors faced a particular challenge in dealing with toponymic prepositions. For example, many of the people listed are identified as “from” somewhere else. Sometimes this designation can itself become the family name, as in Burgos, Cordovero, Lattes, or Sienna. Such surnames are sometimes accompanied by a preposition (del in Italian, or me- in Hebrew). When do such geographical tidbits become surnames to be passed on to members of later generations who have no personal experience of that place of origin? And if so, should the prepositions be included in the name? The authors err on the side of over-specificity, indexing separately names like Ancona, D’Ancona, De Ancona/De Ancone, and Me Ancona; Anversa and Meanversa; De Tivoli, Detivoli, Me Tiboli/Me Tivoli, Metivoli, and Tivoli. They sought to be as inclusive as possible by treating all possible variations individually, thus multiplying the indexed terms but making the names appear more stable than they probably were. The approach may also occlude links between individuals. Beyond pedantry, this is significant since it has affected how names were presented and indexed, and how families can be reconstructed by readers.
It may seem churlish to complain about the limitations of such handsome volumes, obviously the product of dedicated work and enormous effort. Still, in the hope that the next volumes to be produced by the French Jewish genealogical society will be even better, let me note a few problems. First, the authors have gone to the trouble of publishing this as a dual language volume with English facing or following the French in the text and in the footnotes and tables. Unfortunately, the English translation is often somewhat mechanical, done by someone who is not a native speaker. The results are frustrating. This is especially so when whole lines of the English are omitted or printed twice.
Hebrew is also a problem for the authors and the type-setters. Too often, the order of the letters in Hebrew words is reversed or mistaken (Jona as הנוי; Schmuel appears as לאומש; Shoshana appears as שנשוה), word order is reversed (Mazal Tov becomes טוב מזל), or the transcription is simply an error (Stella becomes איטליא; Semaria, סמריה and שריה are offered as transcriptions for a scan of שמריה). Scans of Hebrew names are mis-interpreted or attached to the wrong transcription. The authors don’t always understand the historical significance of Hebrew terms. Just to give a few examples, a maskil, which they equate with “enlightened” followers of modernizing philosophies, is a term of praise in rabbinic texts for a religious scholar in general and sometimes specifically for someone who holds a lower level of ordination. A rofe muvhak is an excellent (and possibly a licensed) physician; not a “doctor emeritus.” A figure described as a “Torah teacher in Israel” (II, 384) should not be labeled a “professor d’hébreu” (I, 159).
One can understand, but regret, the authors’ decision to limit their name indexing to the principals in each marriage, choosing to omit the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other individuals who appear in the “observations” columns as witnesses or officiants. At least this reviewer wishes that they had more consistently identified the roles of officials in the “observations” column. For example we happen to see that Selomo Monis was Gabai de la Talmutora [!] (treasurer of the Talmud Torah fund) and Isach Israel Henriquez was cancelliere (recording communal secretary) in the photo of a 1679 ketubba register (I, 158) but this information is omitted when they appear in the summary of this document (#530, II, 86).
In the end, the volumes are like a wonderful candy land in which we can roam to make constant discoveries and links. French speakers who want to know more about the book before purchasing it may enjoy the interview and discussion of this volume with the Nedjars on the website Akadem.
1 Bernard Dov Cooperman holds the Louis L. Kaplan Chair in Jewish History at the University of Maryland. His recent studies on Sephardic and Italian Jews include “Defining Deviance, Negotiating Norms: Raphael Meldola in Livorno, Pisa, and Bayonne,” in Yosef Kaplan, ed., Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 157–194 and “Cultural Pluralism from the Ghetto, What Might It Have Meant?” in Pierre Savy and Alessandro Guetta, eds., Non contrarii ma diversi (Rome: Viella, 2020), pp. 21–43. His current project deals with the demographic and constitutional history of Livornese and Pisan Jewries.
2 Alain Nedjar and Gilles Boulu, La communauté juive portugaise de Tunis dite livournaise ou Grana: registres matrimoniaux 1812-1844 et 1872-1881 (avec notices généalogiques) (2015), complements the earlier two volumes by Robert Attal and Joseph Avivi, Registres matrimoniaux de la communauté juive portugaise de Tunis (1989 and 2000) to complete the indexing of marriage registers kept by the Livornese Jewish community (the so-called Grana) in Tunis from the middle of the eighteenth century.
3 Lilliane Nedjar and Thierry Samama, Les protégés israélites du Consulat de France à Tunis (1830–1913) (2015). In addition, Mme. Nedjar has indexed genealogical material from Livorno and Florence in the database BECANE on the website of the Cercle de Génálogie juive de France, available at www.genealoj.org.