Stone on Paper: The Preservation of the Ancient Jewish Epigraphs of Trieste

The first bet ha-ḥayyim of Trieste, no longer used since 1843, disappeared in 1909 due to the urban reorganization of the city. In that year, after clearing out the ancient Jewish cemetery area in Via del Monte, about 800 burial stones were transported to the new burial ground in Via della Pace. They were entrusted to the protection of the then caretaker of the cemetery in Sant’Anna, who should have provided for their conservation or at least their safeguard. However, the current situation reflects a completely different scenario from the expectations, as only 25 maṣevot arrived, of which a few intact and some reused as building reuse material.

In 1908-1909 Giacomo Misan, a religious officiant of the Jewish community of Trieste, wrote a complete collection of transcriptions of all the epitaphs in Hebrew and Italian then existing in the cemetery shortly before their disappearance. This manuscript has a very simple mise en page composed exclusively of the inscriptions of 853 tombstones, mainly date back to the 17th and 19th centuries, some erroneously repeated even twice, and only a very few refer to earlier dates. On the completion of this work Salvatore Sabbadini, an expert on the subject, coordinated a team in a cataloguing campaign to compile analytical cards in which he drew pencil sketches of the funeral monuments and sometimes of the family coats of arms engraved on the stones. The comparison of these two precious manuscript sources is the only available means to be able to reconstruct the Jewish cultural heritage of the past and to give them new prestige.

In my lecture, I will reconstruct the history of the ancient Jewish burial ground of Trieste, talk about the progress of the study of its tombstones and show the characteristics of the manuscript produced by Misan, an unpublished and very valuable source of information about the local Jewish community.