Ancona and the Jews of the Adriatic: A Heritage Guide to the Papal Port
Most people who trace Italian-Jewish roots start with Rome, Venice or Florence. Ancona rarely makes the first list. It should.
For five centuries this port on the central Adriatic was where Italian Jewry met the Ottoman Levant. And for three of those centuries it was, with Rome, the only city in the Papal States where Jews were permitted to live at all. If your family passed through the Marche region, there is a good chance Ancona is in the story somewhere.
This guide covers what happened here, what still stands, and where the records are.
This guide covers what happened here, what still stands, and where the records are.
Ancona Jewish History: A Community Older Than the Ghetto
Jews appear in Ancona's documentary record from 967, and were almost certainly present earlier. The city's fortune was its harbour, and the community's fortune followed it. By the fourteenth century Ancona had a substantial Jewish population organised around trade with the eastern Mediterranean: merchants, brokers, artisans and moneylenders working the routes to Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Constantinople, Salonika and Alexandria.
In 1428 the city senate granted the community land outside Porta San Pietro for a cemetery. That grant, extended in 1468 and again in 1711, is the origin of the Campo degli Ebrei on Monte Cardeto, which we return to below. It is also a useful reminder that Ancona's Jewish presence predates the ghetto by a very long time.
Ancona lost its independence to the Papal States in 1532. For the next two decades the popes actively encouraged Jewish settlement here for commercial reasons. Paul III invited Jews expelled from Naples in 1541, and in 1547 extended an explicit invitation to Portuguese New Christians (people of Jewish descent who had been forcibly baptised in Portugal) promising them protection from the Inquisition. Around a hundred families accepted.
In 1428 the city senate granted the community land outside Porta San Pietro for a cemetery. That grant, extended in 1468 and again in 1711, is the origin of the Campo degli Ebrei on Monte Cardeto, which we return to below. It is also a useful reminder that Ancona's Jewish presence predates the ghetto by a very long time.
Ancona lost its independence to the Papal States in 1532. For the next two decades the popes actively encouraged Jewish settlement here for commercial reasons. Paul III invited Jews expelled from Naples in 1541, and in 1547 extended an explicit invitation to Portuguese New Christians (people of Jewish descent who had been forcibly baptised in Portugal) promising them protection from the Inquisition. Around a hundred families accepted.
Adriatic Jewish Trade: Ancona as a Bridge to the Levant
To understand Ancona you have to understand the sea in front of it. The Adriatic in the sixteenth century was a Venetian lake with one serious rival: this papal port, which offered Ottoman-bound merchants an alternative to Venice's tolls and politics.
Three overlapping Jewish populations worked that trade. The old Italian-rite community had the local networks. Levantine Jews brought the eastern connections and, crucially, the sultan's protection. And the Portuguese New Christians brought capital, Lisbon and Antwerp contacts, and expertise in the spice and textile trades.
By the early 1550s several thousand people of Jewish origin, the figure of three thousand is often cited, were living and trading in Ancona. Wool from the Marche went east; silk, spices, alum and leather came west. Ancona's Jews were not marginal to this economy. They were its connective tissue.
This is the period most likely to surface in a family's Sephardic or Levantine line. Ottoman Jewish merchants kept agents and relatives in Ancona; Ancona families kept them in Salonika. Surnames travelled both ways.
Three overlapping Jewish populations worked that trade. The old Italian-rite community had the local networks. Levantine Jews brought the eastern connections and, crucially, the sultan's protection. And the Portuguese New Christians brought capital, Lisbon and Antwerp contacts, and expertise in the spice and textile trades.
By the early 1550s several thousand people of Jewish origin, the figure of three thousand is often cited, were living and trading in Ancona. Wool from the Marche went east; silk, spices, alum and leather came west. Ancona's Jews were not marginal to this economy. They were its connective tissue.
This is the period most likely to surface in a family's Sephardic or Levantine line. Ottoman Jewish merchants kept agents and relatives in Ancona; Ancona families kept them in Salonika. Surnames travelled both ways.
1555–1556: Paul IV, the Bull and the Executions
The turn was sudden. Gian Pietro Carafa, elected as Paul IV in May 1555, was the architect of the Roman Inquisition and had already presided over the burning of the Talmud in 1553. On 14 July 1555 he issued Cum nimis absurdum, the bull that created the ghetto system in the Papal States. Jews were to live in a single enclosed quarter, locked at night; to own no real property; to keep one synagogue per city; to wear a distinguishing badge; and to trade in nothing but second-hand goods.
Ancona applied the bull in full. The ghetto was decreed in 1555 and built in 1556 on the slope of the Astagno hill.
For the Portuguese New Christians the consequences were worse. The protection granted by earlier popes was revoked, and a papal commissioner was sent to arrest them as baptised Christians who had "relapsed" into Judaism, under canon law, a capital heresy. Around ninety to a hundred people were imprisoned. Some escaped, with the help of bribes, to Pesaro, where the Duke of Urbino received them, and to Ferrara. Dozens who declared repentance were sentenced to the galleys and shipped to Malta.
Between April and June 1556, those who refused to renounce Judaism were executed in the Campo della Mostra, today's Piazza Malatesta. The sources disagree on the exact count: most give twenty-four, some twenty-five, among them one woman. Their names were recorded, and elegies composed for them were still being recited in Ancona on Tisha B'Av centuries later.
We include this not for drama but because it is documented, and because it shaped everything that followed for Ancona's Jews.
Ancona applied the bull in full. The ghetto was decreed in 1555 and built in 1556 on the slope of the Astagno hill.
For the Portuguese New Christians the consequences were worse. The protection granted by earlier popes was revoked, and a papal commissioner was sent to arrest them as baptised Christians who had "relapsed" into Judaism, under canon law, a capital heresy. Around ninety to a hundred people were imprisoned. Some escaped, with the help of bribes, to Pesaro, where the Duke of Urbino received them, and to Ferrara. Dozens who declared repentance were sentenced to the galleys and shipped to Malta.
Between April and June 1556, those who refused to renounce Judaism were executed in the Campo della Mostra, today's Piazza Malatesta. The sources disagree on the exact count: most give twenty-four, some twenty-five, among them one woman. Their names were recorded, and elegies composed for them were still being recited in Ancona on Tisha B'Av centuries later.
We include this not for drama but because it is documented, and because it shaped everything that followed for Ancona's Jews.
The Boycott of 1556: Doña Gracia Nasi and Its Limits
What happened next is one of the rare early-modern examples of organised Jewish economic resistance, and it is worth telling accurately.
Doña Gracia Nasi was a Portuguese-born banker who had herself fled the Inquisition and was by then established in Constantinople. She organised a boycott of the port of Ancona by Ottoman Jewish merchants, redirecting their trade to Pesaro. Sultan Suleiman intervened diplomatically on behalf of his subjects imprisoned in Ancona, and a number of Ottoman Jews were released on those grounds.
The boycott held for roughly a year and then collapsed. It split the Jewish world: the rabbis of Ancona and part of the Constantinople rabbinate opposed it, fearing reprisals against the Jews who remained in the papal port, and the merchant community could not sustain unanimity. By 1558 the Duke of Urbino, having gained nothing from the diversion, expelled the New Christians from Pesaro.
It was, in short, the first documented Jewish trade boycott. And a lesson in why such actions are hard to hold together. Both halves of that sentence belong in the record.
Doña Gracia Nasi was a Portuguese-born banker who had herself fled the Inquisition and was by then established in Constantinople. She organised a boycott of the port of Ancona by Ottoman Jewish merchants, redirecting their trade to Pesaro. Sultan Suleiman intervened diplomatically on behalf of his subjects imprisoned in Ancona, and a number of Ottoman Jews were released on those grounds.
The boycott held for roughly a year and then collapsed. It split the Jewish world: the rabbis of Ancona and part of the Constantinople rabbinate opposed it, fearing reprisals against the Jews who remained in the papal port, and the merchant community could not sustain unanimity. By 1558 the Duke of Urbino, having gained nothing from the diversion, expelled the New Christians from Pesaro.
It was, in short, the first documented Jewish trade boycott. And a lesson in why such actions are hard to hold together. Both halves of that sentence belong in the record.
The Ancona Ghetto and Why Jews Stayed When Others Were Expelled
The Ancona ghetto ran along Via Astagno and Via Lata, climbing the hill from the main gate near today's Corso Mazzini. Because residents could not build outward, they built up: the houses on Via Lata are noticeably taller than contemporary buildings elsewhere in the city. Palazzo Ajò, at the corner of Corso Stamira, survives as the grandest of the ghetto's merchant houses.
Here is the fact that matters most for anyone researching the Marche. In 1569 Pius V expelled the Jews from the Papal States, and Clement VIII repeated the expulsion in 1593. Both times, two cities were exempted: Rome and Ancona. The port was simply too valuable. For the next two and a half centuries, Jewish families from across the papal Marche (Fano, Fossombrone, Recanati, Jesi, Macerata) either converted, left the state, or moved to Ancona.
This is why Ancona's communal records are unusually continuous, and why a family "from the Marche" very often turns out to be a family that consolidated in Ancona.
The ghetto was opened under Napoleonic rule in 1797, reimposed after 1814, and finally abolished with the Marche's annexation to the Kingdom of Italy in 1860; full legal equality followed in 1861. The community paid for its enthusiasm for Italian unification. In 1860 papal forces under General Lamoricière demolished the Levantine synagogue in retaliation.
Here is the fact that matters most for anyone researching the Marche. In 1569 Pius V expelled the Jews from the Papal States, and Clement VIII repeated the expulsion in 1593. Both times, two cities were exempted: Rome and Ancona. The port was simply too valuable. For the next two and a half centuries, Jewish families from across the papal Marche (Fano, Fossombrone, Recanati, Jesi, Macerata) either converted, left the state, or moved to Ancona.
This is why Ancona's communal records are unusually continuous, and why a family "from the Marche" very often turns out to be a family that consolidated in Ancona.
The ghetto was opened under Napoleonic rule in 1797, reimposed after 1814, and finally abolished with the Marche's annexation to the Kingdom of Italy in 1860; full legal equality followed in 1861. The community paid for its enthusiasm for Italian unification. In 1860 papal forces under General Lamoricière demolished the Levantine synagogue in retaliation.
The Ancona Synagogue: Two Rites Under One Roof
Ancona's two synagogues occupy a single building at Via Astagno 12, inaugurated on 14 September 1876. The Levantine-rite synagogue, upstairs, is the descendant of the one founded in 1549 on the initiative of Rabbi Moses Basola; its Baroque ark and a tevah brought from Pesaro were salvaged from earlier buildings. The Italian-rite synagogue, on the floor below, holds the furnishings of the Renaissance-era Italian synagogue that stood between Via Astagno and Via del Bagno until it was demolished in 1932 to widen Corso Stamira.
Two rites in one building is not a curiosity. It is the physical trace of the community's double origin: local Italian families and Levantine merchants who never fully merged.
A candid note for travellers: much of the historic ghetto did not survive. Sections were cleared for Corso Garibaldi in the 1860s and for Corso Stamira between 1931 and 1938. What remains is the synagogue building, Via Lata, Palazzo Ajò, the cemetery. It is genuine, but you will be walking through a partial map. In the What Still Stands guide we treat Ancona honestly for that reason.
Two rites in one building is not a curiosity. It is the physical trace of the community's double origin: local Italian families and Levantine merchants who never fully merged.
A candid note for travellers: much of the historic ghetto did not survive. Sections were cleared for Corso Garibaldi in the 1860s and for Corso Stamira between 1931 and 1938. What remains is the synagogue building, Via Lata, Palazzo Ajò, the cemetery. It is genuine, but you will be walking through a partial map. In the What Still Stands guide we treat Ancona honestly for that reason.
The Campo degli Ebrei: A Cemetery That Doubles as an Archive
On Monte Cardeto, above the sea, lies one of the largest and oldest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. The Campo degli Ebrei was in use from the fifteenth century until 1863. Coastal erosion carried many stones into the Adriatic; a major restoration completed in 2004 recovered more than a thousand of them, of which around 178 with legible inscriptions now stand in the park, facing east toward Jerusalem.
For heritage research the important part is what came with the restoration: the epitaphs are names, dates, places of birth, occupations, family relationships were transcribed into a digital database that can be consulted on site. For a Marche family with a Levantine or Portuguese line, this is often the first place a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century ancestor becomes a name rather than a hypothesis.
For heritage research the important part is what came with the restoration: the epitaphs are names, dates, places of birth, occupations, family relationships were transcribed into a digital database that can be consulted on site. For a Marche family with a Levantine or Portuguese line, this is often the first place a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century ancestor becomes a name rather than a hypothesis.
1938 to 1944: The Marche Jewish Community Under Persecution
The Italian racial laws of 1938 hit Ancona's community, then roughly a thousand people, in the ways they hit every Italian Jewish community: dismissal from public employment and the professions, expulsion from schools, loss of property. The local press, the Corriere Adriatico prominent among it, gave antisemitic propaganda a daily platform.
After September 1943 the pattern in the Marche differed from Rome or Florence. There was no single mass roundup in Ancona. Persecution was, as the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre in Milan describes it, individual rather than collective: arrests, extortion, denunciation. The provincial internment camp for the province of Ancona was set up at a seaside holiday colony in Senigallia. CDEC's research identifies ninety-nine Jews deported from the Marche as a whole, a figure it acknowledges is an undercount. Ancona was liberated in July 1944, and soldiers of the Jewish Brigade arriving that year helped the surviving community begin to rebuild. Stumbling stones (pietre d'inciampo) now mark the homes of the deported.
After September 1943 the pattern in the Marche differed from Rome or Florence. There was no single mass roundup in Ancona. Persecution was, as the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre in Milan describes it, individual rather than collective: arrests, extortion, denunciation. The provincial internment camp for the province of Ancona was set up at a seaside holiday colony in Senigallia. CDEC's research identifies ninety-nine Jews deported from the Marche as a whole, a figure it acknowledges is an undercount. Ancona was liberated in July 1944, and soldiers of the Jewish Brigade arriving that year helped the surviving community begin to rebuild. Stumbling stones (pietre d'inciampo) now mark the homes of the deported.
Ancona Today: The Community and Where the Records Are
The Jewish community of Ancona today numbers a few hundred people and maintains both synagogues, the cemetery and a programme of visits. It remains the reference community for the whole Marche.
For research, there is one thing about Ancona that surprises most families. The historic archive of the Jewish community is not in Ancona. It is held in Jerusalem, at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, where it was deposited in the twentieth century. Communal registers, tax rolls, correspondence and internal records of the ghetto centuries are consulted there, not on the Adriatic.
The rest of the paper trail is where you would expect it. The Archivio di Stato di Ancona holds notarial registers: contracts, dowries, wills and partnership agreements that are the richest source for merchant families along with prefecture and police records from the Napoleonic and unification periods. The Comune's civil registry runs from 1866, with an earlier Napoleonic series for 1808–1814. Diocesan and parish archives matter for lines that passed through baptism, which in the Marche was not rare. All of these are public archives, consultable by anyone under Italian law; the work is knowing which series to open and how to read what is in them.
Two regional notes. Pesaro and Urbino belonged to the Duchy of Urbino, not the Papal States, until 1631, which is why their Jewish histories diverge from Ancona's and why the same family can appear in both. And Senigallia's Fiera della Maddalena, one of the largest fairs in Europe, drew Jewish traders from across the Adriatic every July a place where Ancona, Pesaro and Levantine names met in the same ledgers.
For research, there is one thing about Ancona that surprises most families. The historic archive of the Jewish community is not in Ancona. It is held in Jerusalem, at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, where it was deposited in the twentieth century. Communal registers, tax rolls, correspondence and internal records of the ghetto centuries are consulted there, not on the Adriatic.
The rest of the paper trail is where you would expect it. The Archivio di Stato di Ancona holds notarial registers: contracts, dowries, wills and partnership agreements that are the richest source for merchant families along with prefecture and police records from the Napoleonic and unification periods. The Comune's civil registry runs from 1866, with an earlier Napoleonic series for 1808–1814. Diocesan and parish archives matter for lines that passed through baptism, which in the Marche was not rare. All of these are public archives, consultable by anyone under Italian law; the work is knowing which series to open and how to read what is in them.
Two regional notes. Pesaro and Urbino belonged to the Duchy of Urbino, not the Papal States, until 1631, which is why their Jewish histories diverge from Ancona's and why the same family can appear in both. And Senigallia's Fiera della Maddalena, one of the largest fairs in Europe, drew Jewish traders from across the Adriatic every July a place where Ancona, Pesaro and Levantine names met in the same ledgers.
If Your Family Traded Between Italy and the Levant
Families do not always know they have an Ancona chapter. What they know is a surname that sounds Portuguese in an Italian family, a great-grandmother born in Salonika, a story about "the port," or a Marche village that seems too small to explain anything.
If your ancestors moved between Italy and the Ottoman world (Salonika, Smyrna, Constantinople, Ragusa) Acona may have been their harbour. Our preliminary assessment, La Ricerca, tells you within a few weeks whether the records exist to follow that line, and where. It is the first step, and the fee is credited toward full research if you go on.
The stones on Monte Cardeto face east. For some families, the direction is the whole story.
If your ancestors moved between Italy and the Ottoman world (Salonika, Smyrna, Constantinople, Ragusa) Acona may have been their harbour. Our preliminary assessment, La Ricerca, tells you within a few weeks whether the records exist to follow that line, and where. It is the first step, and the fee is credited toward full research if you go on.
The stones on Monte Cardeto face east. For some families, the direction is the whole story.
Radici traces Italian-Jewish families through the archives where the records actually survive — municipal, state, notarial and communal — and takes families to the streets those records describe. Begin with La Ricerca, a preliminary archival assessment that tells you honestly what can and cannot be found.
