Livorno and Venice have their own pages. This page covers everywhere else in Italy, and explains what Italy means for Sephardi research, which is not what it means today.
There was no Italy until 1861. Before then the peninsula was a dozen sovereign states with different rulers, different laws, different currencies and different attitudes to Jews. A family in Ancona and a family in Turin lived under separate governments, and their records today sit in separate archives.
More importantly, those states competed with one another for Jewish merchants, and that competition is the single most important fact in Sephardi Italian history. When one ruler turned hostile, another was usually offering terms. Families moved accordingly, and they moved often.
This is why an Italian Sephardi line so rarely stays put. The same family can appear in Ancona in the 1540s, Ferrara in the 1550s, Venice in the 1590s, Pisa in the 1600s and Livorno in the 1630s, and then in Amsterdam, Hamburg or London. Studying one town in isolation will not work.
Three populations that are often confused
Italkim, or Italian Jews, of the ancient Roman rite. They have lived in Italy continuously for over two thousand years, predate both Sephardim and Ashkenazim, and are not Sephardi. But in several cities, Livorno above all, they merged so completely into the Sephardi community that for genealogical purposes they can be treated together.
Western Sephardim, from Spain and Portugal, arriving from 1492 and in a second wave from the 1530s as the Portuguese Inquisition took hold. These are the subject of most of this page.
Levantine Sephardim, from the Ottoman lands, who arrived from the east and were legally a quite different category: they had never been baptised, so the Church had no claim on them.
Ashkenazim came south across the Alps from the fourteenth century, mostly into Piedmont, Lombardy, the Veneto and Emilia. Many Italian Jewish families with Italian-sounding names are Ashkenazi in origin.
Where were the Sephardim in Italy?
The geography inverted.
Before 1492 there were Jewish communities the length of the peninsula, and the largest were in the south: perhaps 40,000 in Sicily alone, and substantial populations in Apulia, Calabria and Naples. A century later there were almost none south of Rome.
Spain expelled the Jews of Sicily and Sardinia in 1492 and 1493. Naples followed in 1510, with a final expulsion in 1541. What makes the southern expulsions worse than the Spanish one is that a second decree expelled the converts too, on the grounds that it was impossible to tell whether they were living as Christians. Spain at least allowed conversion as an alternative to exile; southern Italy did not.
The practical consequence for research is that claims of Sephardi ancestry in Sicily or southern Italy are almost always mistaken. No Jews and no New Christians remained. Anyone with genuinely Jewish ancestry there is looking at the eleventh or twelfth century, not the fifteenth.
From 1500 the Jewish population of Italy sat from Rome northward, and that is where Sephardi records are.
Ancona and Ferrara: where the Portuguese nation began
This is the most overlooked part of Italian Sephardi history, and for many families it is where their documentary trail starts.
Livorno and Venice dominate the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and therefore dominate the literature. But the Portuguese Jewish nation in Italy was founded sixty years before Livorno, at Ancona and Ferrara, and the first surviving record of a great many Portuguese families is there.
Ancona was one of the seven Italian maritime republics and the Papal States’ main Adriatic port, facing Dubrovnik and the Balkan trade routes. In 1532 Cardinal Accolti invited merchants from the eastern Mediterranean — Turks, Greeks and Jews — to settle, exempting them from the badge and allowing free movement to and from the Levant. The invitation was extended explicitly to Jews from Spain and Portugal. Papal edicts of 1544 and 1553 confirmed that Portuguese Jews enjoyed the same benefits as Levantines. A Portuguese nation was constituted at Ancona in the 1530s, the first in Italy.
Ferrara, under Ercole II d’Este, matched it. Building on his grandfather’s 1492 welcome to Spanish Jews, Ercole extended the same privileges to Portuguese Jews in the 1530s and again in 1550, defining them all as Hebrei Hispani and passing over in silence the fact that most had been baptised. Gracia Mendes, Beatrice de Luna, settled there after Antwerp and Venice. The Abravanel family arrived in 1541 after the Naples expulsion and stayed half a century.
The two towns worked as a pair, on the same trade route linking Florence and central Europe to Ancona, Dubrovnik and the Levant, in deliberate competition with Venice. Many families lived and traded in both.
How it ended
Abruptly. Pope Paul IV reversed papal policy in 1555.
Twenty-four Portuguese Jews were burned at the stake at Ancona in 1555 and 1556 as relapsed Christians. Around a hundred were sent to the galleys, and many escaped to Malta or fled to Ferrara. Gracia Mendes organised a boycott of the port in retaliation, attempting to divert trade to Pesaro, which failed because Pesaro’s harbour was too shallow for large ships. The Portuguese Jews there were expelled in 1558.
The Levantine community at Ancona survived, because Levantines had never been baptised. The Portuguese nation did not. When the Papal States expelled the Jews from their territories in 1569 and again in 1593, Rome and Ancona were the two exceptions, Ancona because its Levantine trade was too valuable to lose.
Ferrara lasted longer but ended the same way. The Duke imprisoned Portuguese Jews in 1581 under papal pressure, relented a year later, and in 1597 Ferrara passed to the Papal States altogether. The Portuguese community left. Most went to Venice, taking their communal statutes with them; a few followed the Este family to Modena.
Between them, Ancona and Ferrara supply the earliest Italian records of families later famous elsewhere: Ergas at Ancona in 1546, De Paz in 1549, Attias in 1550, Altaras in 1551, Abudiente in 1545, Alfarin at Ferrara in 1549, Abendavid at Ancona in 1555. Trivellato’s study of the Ergas firm begins with Isaac Ergas at Livorno in 1598 without saying where he came from; the answer is very probably Ancona and Ferrara half a century earlier.
On records: the Ancona community archive was transferred to Jerusalem and is being digitised. Luca Andreoni’s Una nazione in commercio gives census data for the principal Ancona families at ten-year intervals through the eighteenth century. Luciano Allegra’s Una lunga presenza gives full census data for Pesaro, Urbino and Senigallia in 1626 and for Ancona in 1761. For Ferrara, Laura Graziani Secchieri’s Ebrei a Ferrara prints the complete census of 1692, family by family, with ages and addresses.
Rome and the Papal States
Rome has the longest continuous Jewish history of any city in Europe, documented from the second century BC and never interrupted. That community is Italkim, not Sephardi, with its own rite and its own traditions.
Sephardim entered it after 1492, when Alexander VI, himself Spanish, admitted refugees from Spain. Rome’s existing Jews opposed this and are said to have offered the Pope money to keep them out; he fined them for asking. Portuguese and Spanish families continued to arrive through the sixteenth century, and Spanish and Sicilian congregations existed alongside the Italian ones.
The ghetto was established in 1555 by Paul IV, the same Pope who destroyed the Ancona community, and it was the last in western Europe to close, in 1870.
The Descriptio Hebreorum
For genealogy the Roman ghetto has one outstanding source.
The Descriptio Hebreorum, the house-by-house enumeration of 1733 with a further survey of 1773, lists every inhabitant by family group with their relationship to the head of household and their age written out in words. It runs to some 4,000 entries across 563 family blocks, with folio references to the manuscript.
Because the enumeration is by household rather than by individual, it reconstructs families directly rather than requiring them to be inferred.
The Roman surnames are overwhelmingly toponymic and the pattern is visible in the census itself: di Segni, di Tivoli, Sermoneta, Sonnino, Veroli, Terracina, Capua, Pontecorvo, della Riccia, Anau, di Nola, Tagliacozzi, Modigliano, del Monte, di Castro, di Porto. These are towns in Lazio and Campania, and they record where a family came from when it moved to Rome.
Roman families moved north in numbers during the eighteenth century, particularly to Livorno after the Motu Proprio of 1715 opened communal office there to Italian Jews. Rome is the largest single Italian origin recorded in the Livorno ballot register.
Angela Groppi has published the full census for 1733. Shlomo Simonsohn’s The Apostolic See and the Jews prints some 3,250 documents covering the medieval and early modern periods.
The other Papal States communities — Pesaro, Urbino and Senigallia — held Sephardim in the sixteenth century, particularly the refugees who went to Pesaro after the Ancona burnings, but were substantially Italian after the expulsions of 1626.
The northern states
Piedmont and the Duchy of Savoy
Savoy tried to recruit Sephardim and mostly failed. In 1572 Emanuele Filiberto invited Levantine Jews and New Christians to settle at Nice, and families from Coimbra arrived. Spain objected; the privileges were rescinded within a year, and in 1581 Charles Emmanuel I ordered the expulsion of all Portuguese Jews from the duchy. The pattern repeats through the following century.
Piedmont’s Jewish population was therefore mostly Italian and Ashkenazi rather than Sephardi, concentrated in Turin, Alessandria, Cherasco, Vercelli, Casale Monferrato, Asti, Acqui Terme, Chieri and Nizza Monferrato, and largely occupied in banking. Ghettos came late, Turin in 1679 and the smaller towns in the 1720s, and were opened for good in 1848.
One curiosity is worth recording: as a result of a debt renegotiation with Spain in 1592, Alessandria was for the next century and a half the only openly Jewish community anywhere in the Spanish global empire.
Renata Segre’s three-volume The Jews in Piedmont is outstanding, with roughly 4,000 documents from 1297 to 1798 and census data for fifteen towns.
Genoa
Genoa admitted Jewish refugees in 1492 but would not let them stay; twenty-one of those families went to Ferrara. Residence rights were granted and withdrawn repeatedly: 1550, renewed 1578, 1582, 1586, banishment in 1598, recognition in the free harbour laws of 1648 and 1658, a ghetto in 1659 with residence limited to ten years, an attempted expulsion in 1669 blocked by the Senate, and a ten-year extension in 1674. By then many had left for Livorno. The Sephardi population was perhaps 700 in the seventeenth century.
Urbani and Zazzu’s The Jews of Genoa prints documents from 507 to 1799 with resident lists for 1705, 1724, 1735 and 1743, including Rosas, Alvarez, Mocatta, Fonseca, Costa, Lucena and Arias. The State Archives of Genoa hold the originals.
Milan and Lombardy
Under Spanish rule from 1535 and therefore closed. Jews were expelled from Alessandria and Cremona, and there were none in Milan itself, though some lived at Lodi and Pavia.
The route from Antwerp to Ferrara ran through Lombardy, and Portuguese Jews travelling it were imprisoned and their goods confiscated, which is why the Antwerp families had such difficulty reaching Ferrara.
Simonsohn’s four-volume The Jews in the Duchy of Milan covers 1300 to 1700. See also the Archives of the State of Milan.
Mantua
Ruled by the Gonzaga, generally unsympathetic. The population was mainly Italian rather than Sephardi, though there is a record of foreign Jews being expelled who may have been Sephardim. Its records were damaged in the sack of 1630. The Jewish archives of Mantua are partly digitised, and the Archives of the State of Mantua hold the remainder.
Modena and Reggio
The Este family’s consolation prize after losing Ferrara in 1597, and consequently the destination of some of the Ferrara Portuguese. Modena’s Jewish population was 750 at the establishment of the ghetto in 1638, and 1,262 by 1767. Nine synagogues operated in the ghetto between 1638 and 1721, and the city was a centre of kabbalistic study.
Aron di Leone Leoni’s La nazione ebraica spagnola e portoghese negli stati estensi is the key source and is not widely known. It lists Sephardi and Portuguese families in Modena and Reggio — 59 Portuguese families in the 1657 list alone — and records where they came from: Livorno, Venice, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Izmir, Salonika and Ancona. The Archivio di Stato di Modena holds the originals.
Parma and Trieste
Parma had a Jewish presence from at least 1348, with privileges granted by the Sforza in 1449. Conditions worsened from 1488, badges were imposed in 1570 and expulsion followed shortly after; communities formed in nearby towns including Colorno and Busseto. Jews returned under Maria Luisa after 1815. Not a significant Sephardi centre. See the Archives of the State of Parma.
Trieste was Habsburg rather than Italian for the whole relevant period, and the Adriatic successor to Venice. When the Habsburgs made it a free port in the eighteenth century it drew directly on the declining Venetian world: of the Jews in the censuses of 1735 and 1765 whose birthplace is recorded, the largest outside contingents come from Gorizia, Venice, Padua and Ferrara, with smaller numbers from Ancona, Pesaro, Mantua, Modena and Rome. Surnames include Alprón, Capriles, Curiel, Navarro, Parente, Almeida, Camondo, Campos and Saraval.
Carlo Gatti’s Gli ebrei di Trieste nel Settecento lists immigrants from 1725 to 1765 with full census data for 1735, 1765 and 1775.
Tuscany beyond Livorno
Pisa had the older community and is covered on the Livorno page, since the two are inseparable. Portuguese families frequently appear at Pisa a generation before Livorno.
Florence, the Tuscan capital, held a community that was ghettoised in 1571, reportedly as the price of the Grand Duke’s elevation. Its records matter for Livorno research because the Grand Duchy’s central archives are here.
Massa and Carrara supplied a stream of families into Livorno that is not widely recognised even among specialists. Iacopetti’s study includes family trees, and several Livornese Jewish families originate there.
Siena and Pitigliano had communities that were mainly Italian rather than Sephardi.
For the smaller states not covered here, see our page on the minor Italian states.
Italian Jewish surnames
They are mostly late and mostly geographical. Jews in Italy were generally recorded as X son of Y until surnames crystallised in the sixteenth century, apart from a few prominent families — Finzi, Treves, Foa — that had them earlier.
Most are toponymic, taken from the town the family came from. The Marche region alone accounts for twenty-three of them, Montefiore among them.
Sephardi surnames appear in Italianised form: Lusitano, Castellano, Navarra, Algranati, Almansi, Campos. Ashkenazi names were Italianised too — Ottolenghi from Ettlingen, Morpurgo from Marburg, and Tedeschi and Ashkenazi both simply meaning German.
Two warnings. The same surname does not mean the same family: Bueno and Baruch families reached Italy from several different directions and are not one lineage, whereas the Alconstantini genuinely are. And brothers sometimes carried different surnames, particularly among Portuguese families concealing a Christian past.
Alexander Beider’s dictionary is the standard reference. See also our page on Sephardic surnames.
Records
Civil registration runs from 1809 for most of Italy, available through the Antenati portal. This does not cover territories acquired later, such as Libya and Rhodes after 1911.
Beyond that, records are held state by state and town by town. The regional works listed above are the practical starting point, because many of them print census data in full.
Community archives survive unevenly. Livorno’s is substantially digitised; Ancona’s went to Jerusalem; Mantua’s was damaged in 1630. The Italia Judaica resource at Tel Aviv University holds information on hundreds of localities.
The University of Padua admitted Jews to study medicine when almost no other European university would, and its graduates are separately documented from 1670 to 1870, with theses and family details.
Italian consular archives, held through the Archivio Storico Diplomatico in Rome, cover Italian-protected families around the Mediterranean and are underused. The Italian Family History site is a useful English-language guide.
Sephardic World lectures on Italy
- The Jews of Italy: their history, genealogy and surnames — Luca Ascoli
- Sephardic Migrations in Sixteenth-Century Italy — Luca Ascoli
- Five Centuries of Five Italian Jewish Families — George Sacerdote
- The Portuguese Conversos of Ancona, 1556 — Martina Mampieri
What has and hasn’t been researched
Italy is exceptionally well served by historians and poorly served by genealogists.
There is a strong tradition of Italian scholarship publishing archival documents in bulk: Segre on Piedmont, Simonsohn on Milan, Mantua, Sicily and the Papacy, Urbani and Zazzu on Genoa, Leoni on the Este states, Graziani Secchieri on Ferrara. The school around the late Michele Luzzati has produced dozens of studies cross-tabulating names and events from local archives. Much of this is in Italian and little of it is known outside Italy.
What is missing is the connective work. Almost nobody has traced individual families across the moves that define Italian Sephardi history — Ancona to Ferrara, Ferrara to Venice, Venice to Livorno, Livorno to Tunis. The evidence exists in the published document collections; it has not been joined up.
Ancona and Ferrara in particular deserve the treatment Livorno has received.
Further reading
Renata Segre, The Jews in Piedmont, three volumes.
Shlomo Simonsohn, The Jews in the Duchy of Milan, four volumes; The Apostolic See and the Jews; Storia degli Ebrei in Sicilia; and his volume on Mantua.
Rossana Urbani and Guido Nathan Zazzu, The Jews of Genoa.
Aron di Leone Leoni, La nazione ebraica spagnola e portoghese negli stati estensi.
Laura Graziani Secchieri, Ebrei a Ferrara, including the 1692 census.
Luca Andreoni, Una nazione in commercio, on Ancona.
Luciano Allegra, Una lunga presenza.
Angela Groppi, on the Roman Jewish community and the 1733 census.
Carlo Gatti, Gli ebrei di Trieste nel Settecento.
Iacopetti, on the Jews of Massa and Carrara.
Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France and Portuguese Communities (Avotaynu).
Guilherme Faiguenboim and others, Dicionário Sefaradi de Sobrenomes (Avotaynu).
Attilio Milano, Gli ebrei italiani nel Levante; and his Bibliotheca Historica Italo-Judaica (1954) with its supplement, continued to 1995.
The Family Tree Italian Genealogy Guide.
Organisations and repositories
Antenati, the national portal for civil registration.
Italia Judaica, Tel Aviv University, for individual localities.
Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane and its Centro Bibliografico, Rome, reachable through Moked.
Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Milan.
J-Italy, an English-language guide to Jewish Italy.
Archivio di Stato di Torino, Genova, Milano, Modena, Parma, Ferrara, Pesaro, Firenze and Trieste.
Archivio Storico Diplomatico, Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome.
Dr Meir Padoa Collection of Italian family trees, ANU Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv.
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- Any index or transcription of the Ancona community archive now in Jerusalem
- Portuguese nation records from Ancona and Ferrara before 1555
- Lists tracing families from Ancona to Ferrara, and from Ferrara to Venice after 1597
- The Descriptio Hebreorum of 1773 in transcribed form, to sit alongside the 1733 census
- Sephardi congregational records from Rome, as distinct from the Italian congregations
- Anything on the Portuguese Jews invited to Nice by Savoy in 1572, and where they went after 1581
- Records of the Pesaro community between 1555 and 1558
- Family papers from any Italian Sephardi family
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].
Research services
Italian research means a dozen separate archival systems, records in Italian, Latin, Hebrew, Portuguese and Spanish, and families that moved between states every generation or two. The published document collections are excellent but almost entirely in Italian. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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