Nomen Omen: The Onomastica as a Source for Understanding the Formation of the Modern Italian Jewish Population and Internal Migrations

Italy has a very important role in Jewish history: it is located centrally on the Mediterranean sea and served as an important crossroad between South and North, East and West.

The Sixteenth century is a period of overturnings for the Italian Jews: expulsions, large internal migrations and ghettoizations. From then on some communities were immobilized in the ghettos for centuries while other were open to further migrations.

When did the Italian Jews adopt surnames? I’ll try to determine with scientific criteria the reasons that lead to the fixation of surnames.

I’ll illustrate a database of etymologies that cross-reference the main publications on the matter: new research tools give an extraordinary possibility to solve philological doubts and to understand the denotation of unclear words.

Some relevant censuses of Italian Jews will be selected from the inventory of around 1,000. The choice will focus on the intersection of geographical and chronological relevance.

The high percentage of toponymic surnames among the Italian Jews gives possibility to spatial analysis of the origin of the communities: static maps display the origin of the Jewish population for a specific area, dynamic maps focus on pivotal periods for migrations. Also the etymology or the language in which surnames are expressed give a direct indication about the composition of the communities.

Examples will concern Livorno, Piemonte, Roma and Veneto.

I’ll illustrate the complete census of Tuscany of 1841 and the surprising results of the analysis of only country-wide census of the period of the Ghettos.