Livorno was the most successful Sephardi settlement in the Mediterranean, and it was built deliberately.
In 1591 and again in 1593 Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, issued a charter — the Livornina — inviting merchants of any nation and any religion to settle in his new port, with freedom of worship, immunity from prosecution for past offences abroad, the right to own property, and the right to trade. It was aimed squarely at Portuguese and Spanish New Christians, and it worked.
Why did Livorno never have a ghetto?
Because the charter was written to attract merchants rather than to contain a minority, and the Medici understood that a ghetto would defeat the purpose.
Jews in Rome, Venice, Florence, Siena, Ferrara, Ancona, Turin and Mantua were locked in at dusk. In Livorno they were not. They could live where they liked, buy property, employ Christian servants, practise any trade, and move freely through the Grand Duchy without a yellow badge.
The charter also promised that no investigation or denunciation could be made against a newcomer who had previously lived as a Christian. That is what made the port safe for families coming out of Portugal, and it is the single most important clause in the document.
Who lived in Livorno?
The community was unusually mixed, and it changed character over time.
Its founding families were overwhelmingly Iberian: around 80 per cent of the earliest surnames are Spanish or Portuguese. Over two and a half centuries that shifted to roughly a third Iberian, a third Italian, and a third everything else.
Alain Nedjar’s analysis of some 12,500 people from the marriage registers gives 40 per cent Iberian surnames, 34 per cent Italian, 10 per cent Hebrew, 9 per cent North African, and the remainder Ashkenazi and Ottoman. Italian Jews assimilated so completely that for genealogical purposes they can be treated as part of the same community.
Livorno was also a parent community. The Grana of Tunis, the Livornese families of Algiers and Tripoli, the Francos of Aleppo and Damascus, and a substantial part of the Sephardi presence in Egypt all descend from merchants who went out from here and kept their Tuscan nationality. If you are researching a Portuguese family in North Africa or the Levant, Livorno is very often where they came from.
What Livorno means here
Livorno — Leghorn in older English writing, Liorne or Liorna in Ladino, and Gorni in Arabic, from which the Tunisian Grana take their name — was a port in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, not an independent state. That matters for finding records.
The Grand Duchy was ruled by the Medici until the line failed in 1737, then by the House of Lorraine. Its capital was Florence, and the central government records are in Florence, not Livorno. Grand-ducal correspondence, notarial protocols, wills and commercial papers relating to Livornese Jews are held at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze.
Pisa is fifteen miles away and had the older Jewish community. The Livorno congregation was founded as a branch of Pisa’s, and Pisan families were among the first settlers. Many Portuguese families appear in Pisa first and move to Livorno afterwards. Until 1637 the officers of the Livorno community were chosen by lot by the community of Pisa. Early Livornese material is often Pisan material.
Massa and Carrara, north along the coast, supplied a further stream of families that is not widely recognised. If a Livornese line runs out, it is worth checking there. See our page on Italy.
Livorno was a free port, which is the basis of its prosperity. That status was abolished in 1858.
The political history runs: Grand Duchy of Tuscany to 1799; French occupation; Kingdom of Etruria 1801–1807; annexed directly to France 1807–1814, when Livorno was capital of the Département de Méditerranée; Grand Duchy restored 1815; Kingdom of Italy from 1861. Each change altered which records were kept and by whom. The French period introduced civil registration.
Where they came from
From everywhere, and this is measurable rather than impressionistic.
The register of men balloted for admission to the community from 1765 records each man’s birthplace or previous residence. Of 489 entries, the largest single origins are Tunis (55) and Algiers (33), followed by Rome (23), Venice (16), Ancona (14), Gibraltar (13), Nice (12), Smyrna (11), Aleppo (10), Jerusalem (10) and Tripoli (10). Beyond those: Mantua, Florence, Modena, Hebron, London, Ferrara, Turin, Amsterdam, Mogador, Salonika, Tetuan, Constantinople, Alexandria, Siena, Reggio, Pesaro, Genoa, Bordeaux, Sarajevo and Belgrade.
That list is the argument for Livorno’s importance in one table. A single Italian port was recruiting simultaneously from the Maghreb, the Ottoman Levant, the Papal States, the Atlantic Sephardi communities and the Balkans.
Read it with one caution. Being balloted into the community, the ballottazione, was not only about settling. Livornese status carried Tuscan protection abroad, which mattered enormously to a merchant trading in Ottoman or North African territory, where it meant the benefit of the Capitulations rather than the disabilities of a local Jew. Some of the men in that register were acquiring a passport, not a home. A Tunis merchant might be balloted in Livorno and continue to live in Tunis.
The founding stream was Iberian and Pisan. Portuguese and Spanish New Christians came directly and by way of Pisa, Venice, Ancona and Ferrara from the 1590s.
The Italian stream came later and by a specific legal change. The Motu Proprio of 1715 opened the office of parnas, previously reserved to the Judeo-Portuguese oligarchy, to Italian Jews. Families from Rome and elsewhere arrived in numbers through the eighteenth century, and the Roman toponymic surnames in the registers date largely from then.
How they made a living
Mediterranean trade, and specifically the role of intermediary.
Livornese Jewish houses stood between Christian Europe and the Muslim Mediterranean, with correspondents in Tunis, Algiers, Smyrna and Aleppo who were frequently relatives. Coral was the classic Livorno trade — worked in the city and shipped to India in exchange for diamonds — alongside silk, spices, sugar, tobacco and grain. Francesca Trivellato’s study of the firm of Ergas and Silvera, which failed in 1747, traces one such network from Livorno to Aleppo and on to Goa.
Not everyone was a merchant, and the wealth gap was extreme. The 1809 census records occupations for the whole community: alongside the trading families are packers’ assistants, domestic servants, porters and the poor. Lucia Frattarelli Fischer’s work on the household lists finds a striking number described as povero, misero or miserrimo — poor, wretched, utterly wretched. That is part of why people left.
The charitable foundations existed because a substantial part of the community needed them: Moar Abetulot for dowries from 1644, Malbisc Harumim for clothing the poor from 1654, Beneficenza Israelitica from 1683, Opera Pia Franco from 1772.
Livorno was also a centre of Hebrew printing, with presses operating from 1650 and again from 1703, supplying prayer books and kabbalistic works throughout the Mediterranean.
Why did the community decline?
The usual explanation is the abolition of the free port in 1858. That is too late.
The marriage curve falls much earlier. The Napoleonic period, and above all the Continental Blockade between 1808 and 1814, cut the port traffic that the whole community lived on. Merchants were impoverished, and emigration followed. The Risorgimento years from the 1820s continued it.
They went to Tunis, where the Livornese formed the Grana community — from Gorni, Livorno in Arabic — formally constituted in 1710 as the Portuguese holy community. They kept separate from the indigenous Tunisian Jews, to the point of a wall dividing the cemeteries, and retained Tuscan or Italian nationality to claim the protection of the Capitulations.
As Livorno’s population fell from around 5,000, the Tunis Grana rose from a few hundred to some 5,000 to 6,000 over the same period. The two curves are the same people. See our page on Tunisia.
The same pattern produced Livornese groups in Algiers, Tripoli and Egypt.
To the Levant, where Livornese and other Italian merchants were known as Señores Francos in Aleppo and Damascus, usually too few to build their own synagogues and praying in each other’s houses.
To London and Amsterdam. The Livorno–London connection was constant, and Livornese families appear in the Bevis Marks records throughout. A number of Livorno and Pisa merchants registered their wills in London because they held commercial interests there — Ergas, Carvalho, Rodrigues, Pegna and Attias among them.
To Marseille, Nice, Bordeaux, Gibraltar and the Americas in the nineteenth century.
The population figures tell the story: perhaps 10,000 Jews at the peak, about 7,000 still in 1848, roughly 3,000 by 1904, and a few hundred today.
If you lose a Livorno family, look next at Tunis, Algiers, Alexandria, Smyrna, Aleppo, London, Marseille and Gibraltar.
Synagogues
The Tempio Maggiore was built in 1603, rebuilt on a larger scale in 1642, its interior demolished and completely rebuilt in 1700 with a ladies’ gallery on three sides, and given a new façade in 1926. It was among the finest synagogue buildings in Europe. Allied bombing largely destroyed it in 1944; the ruin was demolished and a modern building by Angelo di Castro opened on the site in 1962, reusing some marble balusters from the old synagogue.
There were also numerous private chapels, two of them named for the rabbis Ergas and Azulai. From 1767 the community taxed private synagogues specifically to stop them multiplying, which tells you how many there were.
The community governed itself. It had jurisdiction over civil cases between Jews and some minor criminal ones, its own judge, and the right to grant safe conduct to incoming settlers. Governance was by massari, five at first, elected annually, chosen by lot by the Pisa community after 1637 following disputed elections. The 1693 constitution created a great council of sixty. Jewish house-owners became eligible for the municipal general council in 1780.
Pisa is older than Livorno and was eclipsed by it. It is reported to have had around 600 Jewish residents in the early seventeenth century, not all of them Sephardim. Portuguese families frequently appear in Pisa a generation before they appear in Livorno — the De Paz, Aboab, Arias and Ergas families among them.
Cemeteries
Four in succession, and the earlier ones are largely lost.
Il Campaccio, from 1600, near the Fortezza Nuova on what is now Via Pompilia. Before this the dead were buried on the beach in the area of Via della Bassata. The Campaccio was unfenced and has disappeared entirely.
Il Cimitero Nuovo, from 1694, between what are now Via Garibaldi and Via Galilei. It served until the 1830s and was closed as the city expanded around it. After the Second World War the ground was expropriated and a school complex built on it. Some stones went to the Lupi cemetery; others were used as building material during the Fascist period.
Viale Ippolito Nievo, 1840 to 1900. This survives, with the tombs of Elia Benamozegh and Israel Costa, monuments to the Montefiore and Belforte families, and the Attias family chapel. Restoration began in 2015 after long neglect.
Santo Stefano ai Lupi, from 1901 and still in use. It holds seventeenth-century stones moved from the demolished cemeteries, the Chayes mausoleum, and the grave of Elio Toaff. Among the transferred stones is that of Jacob Zadik, died 20 March 1691, in white Carrara marble, carved with a palm tree and the verse tzadik katamar yifrach — the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree — with inscriptions in Hebrew on one side and Spanish on the other. In 1964 thirty-three late seventeenth-century tombs were transferred here from the abandoned Jewish cemetery at Portoferraio on Elba, also inscribed in both Hebrew and Spanish.
Alain and Liliane Nedjar and their team have photographed both surviving Livorno cemeteries and the Pisa cemetery in full. The images are not yet published. The International Jewish Cemetery Project holds a summary.
What are the Livorno ketubot registers?
They are the central series, and the reason Livornese genealogy is possible at all: twenty-four registers holding more than 6,300 marriage records, covering the community from its foundation in 1626 to its effective end in 1890.
Alain Nedjar, Liliane Nedjar, Gilles Boulou and Raphaël Attias transcribed and translated the whole series over roughly three and a half years, published as Registres de ketubbot de la nation juive de Livourne, in two volumes.
Four things about this source are worth knowing before you use it.
It is in Aramaic. Not Hebrew, not Italian. The registers were written by scribes across three centuries, and the language is the Aramaic of the ketubah formula with Hebrew and Italian words mixed in — armalta for widow rather than almanah, saed for witness rather than ed. This is why the work took years and why no casual reading of the originals is possible.
The names in the headings are not always the names in the text. A groom recorded as Alessandro may be Elisha in the Aramaic body; Stella, Estrella and Esterina are all Esther. Nedjar’s team built an equivalence table between the Italian and Hebrew forms. If you search a published index on the Italian form alone you will miss people.
Three registers are missing, covering 1750 to 1783, some 200 marriages. About half were reconstructed from birth certificates, death records and other sources. The loss is visible in the surviving data: those years run at roughly a quarter of the surrounding rate, then jump sharply from 1784.
The entries carry more than names. The date in both Gregorian and Hebrew form, both fathers with an indication of whether either was deceased, the dowry amount in the currency of the day, the signatures of the rabbi and witnesses, and sometimes the country of origin of the spouses. For rabbinic families the text can name ancestors back several generations: one Abudarham ketubah of 1808 names seven.
The four tenaim, the conditions protecting the wife, appear in every Livornese ketubah. They derive from the Takkanot of Toledo of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the same four appear in the Tunis Grana registers. They are direct evidence of Iberian continuity.
Rabbinic signatures are calligraphic monograms encoding the rabbi’s name, unique to each man and effectively impossible to forge. Nedjar has decoded them. They allow a signatory to be identified with certainty, and the same convention appears in Tunis.
Around 1,500 distinct surnames appear, rising to roughly 3,300 if spelling variants are counted separately.
Other series
Birth registers, 1668 to 1865, around 11,000 entries. The Livorno provincial archive has published page images online, so an entry can be checked against the original scan.
Civil status records from the French period, 1808 to 1865, more than 15,000 documents, indexed by Liliane Nedjar in the Cercle de Généalogie Juive database.
Burial records, 1800 to 1865, also in the Cercle database.
The 1809 declaration of names, in the Florence state archives: about 2,300 people, heads of household with their minor children where applicable, giving age and occupation.
The 1841 census, adding address, birthplace, marital status and household composition.
The ballot register from 1765, with places of origin.
Members of the community in 1644, with addresses, giving a street-level picture a generation after the founding.
The charitable foundation records, especially Moar Abetulot from 1644. Membership was hereditary, so the foundation preserved the genealogies of its member families.
Records elsewhere
The Archivio storico della Comunità Ebraica di Livorno, the community’s own archive, holds thousands of volumes in Hebrew and Italian, most of them unworked, with some digitised documents online. The ketubot registers themselves are not online and the community has not authorised their publication. The community libraries hold rare Hebrew manuscripts, catalogued and partly scanned.
The Archivio di Stato di Firenze holds the Grand Duchy’s records: Mediceo del Principato, the notarial protocols including the testament series, Libri di commercio e di famiglia, and Testamenti forestieri for foreigners’ wills. The notarial series is enormous, largely unexamined, and by common account the richest untouched source for Livornese families.
The Archivi del Comune di Livorno and the Archivio di Stato di Livorno. A guide to the latter appears at page 536 of this document.
Antenati, the Italian state archives portal, for civil registration from 1809.
Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes, holding the archive of the French consulate general in Tunis, which runs from 1582 and is among the oldest consular archives anywhere. It holds deeds, powers of attorney and ship manifests naming Jewish merchants, and it is the bridge between Livorno and Tunis for the eighteenth century. Because Tunisian community records before 1750 do not survive, these consular registers plus the Livorno ketubot are the only route back into the seventeenth century for Grana families.
Italian consular archives more generally, at the Archivio Storico Diplomatico in Rome, for families who went out to the daughter communities and kept Italian nationality.
The Leghorn Merchants project covers the British side of the port. Yad Vashem holds the names of those murdered in the Holocaust.
Sephardic World lectures on Livorno
- Sephardic Genealogy in Livorno — Alain Nedjar
- Jewish Marriage in Livorno — Alain Nedjar
- The Jews of Italy: their history, genealogy and surnames — Luca Ascoli
What has and hasn’t been researched
Livorno is better served than most, and the gaps are specific.
The Nedjar team’s edition of the ketubot is the foundation of Livornese genealogy and is, as far as we know, the only complete genealogical reconstruction of an entire Sephardi community from its founding to its end. Ariel Toaff’s La nazione ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa gives complete household lists for both towns for 1591 to 1700. Lucia Frattarelli Fischer’s Vivere fuori dal ghetto adds census material with indications of wealth. Francesca Trivellato’s The Familiarity of Strangers is the standard study of the commercial networks. Alexander Beider’s dictionary covers the surnames.
What is missing is connective work in three directions.
Backwards, to Iberia. The Nedjar team found a couple married as Catholics in Tavira, Portugal in 1683 and remarried as Jews in Livorno in 1689 under different names — Luis da Costa and Leonor Fajardo becoming Daniel Arroyo da Costa and Judica. Portuguese descendants of the family that stayed behind found their relatives in the book. That kind of link between the Livorno registers and Portuguese parish and Inquisition records is barely begun.
Sideways, to Ancona, Ferrara, Venice and Pisa. Many Portuguese families appear in those communities decades before Livorno. Livorno is late, sixty years after the Portuguese nation was established at Ancona and Ferrara.
Outwards, to the daughter communities. The Tunis link is now well served, but Algiers, Tripoli, Alexandria and the Levant are not.
The notarial and testamentary records in Florence remain the great unworked source, and working them would require someone resident in Italy with Italian, Hebrew and Portuguese.
Further reading
Alain Nedjar, Liliane Nedjar, Gilles Boulou and Raphaël Attias, Registres de ketubbot de la nation juive de Livourne (1626–1890), two volumes.
Alain Nedjar and Gilles Boulou, Les registres matrimoniaux de la communauté juive portugaise de Tunis, dite livournaise ou grana (1788–1881).
Ariel Toaff, La nazione ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa (1591–1700); Renzo Toaff, La Nazione Ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa.
Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, Vivere fuori dal ghetto.
Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers (Yale University Press, 2009).
Lionel Lévy, La nation juive portugaise: Livourne, Amsterdam, Tunis.
Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France and Portuguese Communities (Avotaynu).
Edwin Seroussi, “Livorno: A Crossroads in the History of Sephardic Religious Music”, in Horowitz and Orfali (eds), The Mediterranean and the Jews.
Iacopetti, Jews in Massa e Carrara.
Organisations and repositories
Comunità Ebraica di Livorno, Piazza Benamozegh 1.
Archivio storico della Comunità Ebraica di Livorno.
Cercle de Généalogie Juive, Paris, which holds the Bekhor database indexing Livorno births 1668–1865, civil status 1808–1865, burials 1800–1865, and Tunis material.
Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Viale Giovine Italia 6, Florence.
Archivio di Stato di Livorno.
Antenati, the Italian state archives portal.
Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes.
Archivio Storico Diplomatico, Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome.
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- The three missing ketubot registers covering 1750 to 1783, or any source that would help reconstruct the remaining hundred marriages
- Burial transcriptions for the Campaccio and the Cimitero Nuovo before their destruction
- Records of the Portoferraio cemetery on Elba, and identification of the thirty-three stones moved to Lupi in 1964
- Any list linking Livornese families to Algiers, Tripoli or Alexandria, comparable to what now exists for Tunis
- Consular registers from North African and Levantine ports naming Livornese families
- Community membership and taxation records between 1644 and 1765
- Records of the private chapels, including those of Ergas and Azulai
- Anything on the Pisa community before 1650 and its relationship to Livorno
- Anything connecting Livorno families to their Portuguese origins
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].
Research services
Livorno research means excellent records in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew and Aramaic, spread between the community archive, the Livorno and Florence state archives, and the consular records of a dozen Mediterranean ports. The material is there, but reading it and following a family out of Livorno to Tunis or Aleppo is skilled work. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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