Padua, Genoa and the Other Jewish Cities of the North

Jews are documented in Padua from the fourteenth century, first as a few moneylending families. What made the city exceptional was its university. The first Jewish medical graduates qualified there in the fifteenth century, and for most of the period that followed Padua was the one medical school in Europe where Jewish students could study with relative freedom. A few Jews took degrees at Siena or Naples; a real alternative only emerged in the seventeenth century, as Leiden's reputation grew.

Admission did not mean the university simply opened its doors. Degrees were normally conferred in a Catholic ceremony. Jewish students received theirs by a separate route: privately, before a notary and witnesses, from Counts Palatine who held imperial authority to grant doctorates. From 1615 a Venetian body, the Collegio Veneto, took over the task for non-Catholic students. Surviving diplomas show the adjustment on the page: they open in the name of the eternal God rather than invoking Christ.

Most students came from Venetian territories, but others travelled from as far as Poland-Lithuania. Estimates vary, but over roughly four centuries several hundred Jewish physicians left Padua with a degree, and many went home to lead their communities as well as treat them.

Padua built its rabbinic reputation twice.

The first time was in the Renaissance. Judah Minz arrived from Mainz around 1462 and served as rabbi of Padua for some forty-seven years, until his death in 1508. His pupil Meir Katzenellenbogen, born in Prague in 1482 and known as the Maharam of Padua, married into the Minz family and became an authority for communities across the region until 1565. In the year Minz died, Isaac Abravanel (statesman, exile from Spain, biblical commentator) was buried in Padua. His grave was destroyed during the siege of the city a year later, and its place is unknown.

Many Ashkenazi families have been told they descend from the Maharam. The Katzenellenbogen line is a documented rabbinic dynasty, but a family tradition of belonging to it is a starting hypothesis. Every generation in between still needs its own proof.

Padua was also the birthplace, in 1707, of the kabbalist Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the Ramchal, whose circle there drew fierce opposition from rabbinic authorities in Venice and beyond.

The second time came in 1829, when Padua opened the Istituto Convitto Rabbinico, generally regarded as the first modern rabbinical seminary, teaching traditional and secular learning together. Its teachers included Samuel David Luzzatto, known as Shadal, and Lelio Della Torre. The school closed in 1871 and was revived in Rome in 1887 before moving to Florence. Shadal is buried in Padua's Via Sorio cemetery.

Padua passed under Venetian rule in 1405. In 1603, following the Venetian model, the city enclosed its Jews in a ghetto just south of Piazza delle Erbe. Four gates closed it at night, each watched by one Jewish and one Christian guard. Two stone plaques, in Latin and in Hebrew, still stand at the corner of Via Roma and Via San Martino e Solferino, reminding residents to be inside by sunset.

The population reached around 800 by 1680, and with no room to spread, the houses grew upward. Three synagogues served three rites: German (founded in 1525, rebuilt on Via delle Piazze in 1682), Italian (1548) and Spanish (1617). The obligation to live in the ghetto ended with the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797.

The community numbered about 500 people in 1938. From December 1943, Jews in the province were interned at Vo' Vecchio, in a villa in the Euganean Hills. In July 1944 the 47 people held there were deported to Auschwitz. According to the Padua community, three women came home.

The Italian synagogue at Via San Martino e Solferino 9 is the only one still used for prayer. The German synagogue, set on fire by Fascists and later restored, now houses the Museum of Jewish Padua, which also runs tours of the synagogue and cemeteries. Stumbling stones along the ghetto streets mark the last homes of those deported.

Four of the community's historic cemeteries survive; only Via Sorio is still in use. The oldest, on Via Wiel, is dated by the museum to 1384. The Maharam lies there beside his son Samuel, both gravestones carved with a cat, the family emblem. Via Wiel is open by booking only, with regular Sunday tours (allow at least two days' notice).

Padua was the hub of a wider Venetian mainland. Its community archive preserves the proceedings of an assembly representing the Jewish settlements across the Paduan territory, which is one reason families in the records move so easily between city and small town.

Verona formally admitted Jews in 1408, soon after it came under Venice, and enclosed them in a ghetto in 1604; its large synagogue, begun in 1864, was only inaugurated in 1929. Rovigo's community became a section of Padua's in 1930, so its later records are sought through Padua. Conegliano, north of Treviso, confined its Jews to a ghetto in 1637 and built a synagogue there in 1701. In 1951 the interior was shipped to Jerusalem and rebuilt at the Nahon Museum of Italian Jewish Art, where it still hosts services: a Veneto synagogue in use today, just not in the Veneto.

Genoa's Jewish history begins early. Letters from the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, dated 507 and 511, allowed the city's Jews to restore their synagogue. What follows, though, is less the story of a settled community than of a republic arguing with itself.
In 1492, ships carrying refugees from Spain reached the port. Those without safe-conducts were left camped on the Molo through a brutally cold winter; many converted, and some were sold into slavery. On 31 January 1493, fearing plague, Genoa ordered them out.

The familiar version stops there, with Genoa as a uniquely hostile city. That picture owes much to the chronicle of the Republic's chancellor, Bartolomeo Senarega, written some twenty years later. Notarial documents tell a messier story: expulsion decrees issued again and again, repeatedly left unenforced, with exceptions for valued physicians. Jews were expelled in the 1510s, in 1550 and in the late 1590s, and kept coming back.

The turning point was commercial. Genoa's free-port policy, renewed in the mid-seventeenth century, led to a formal charter for a "Jewish nation" in 1658. By 1660 a ghetto existed at Vico del Campo, and the required badge was a green ribbon on the hat. In 1674 the ghetto moved to Piazza dei Tessitori under harsher terms, including compulsory sermons, and many families left for Livorno. The community was expelled in 1679, readmitted in 1710, and expelled again by a vote of 1737 that took effect in 1743, when only three families, the Foa-Malvano, Rosa and Del Mare, were allowed to stay. Not until 1752 did a new charter drop the ghetto, the badge and the forced sermons, over the protests of Pope Benedict XIV.

For two centuries Genoese Jews prayed in a modest oratory near the Malapaga walls by the harbour. The present synagogue at Via Bertora 6, designed by Francesco Morandi, was inaugurated in June 1935; its winter oratory preserves furnishings from the old one. Visits are arranged through the community.

Eight years later the building became a trap. In early November 1943 the SS forced the custodian to hand over the membership registers and summon members to the synagogue; those who came were arrested. Chief Rabbi Riccardo Pacifici had refused to abandon his community. He was deported and murdered at Auschwitz with his wife, Wanda Abenaim, in December 1943. The community counts 261 Jews of Genoa deported. Twenty returned.

Genoa was also where rescue was organised. DELASEM, the Italian Jewish refugee agency led by Lelio Vittorio Valobra, had its headquarters here, and after the occupation its work continued through Cardinal Pietro Boetto and his secretary, Father Francesco Repetto, both recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

Padua's Jewish life was shaped by Venice for four centuries: Venetian law, the Venetian ghetto model, and constant traffic of marriages and business between lagoon and mainland. Its rabbis tied Italy to the Ashkenazi world of Mainz and Prague.

Genoa's link ran west. By the mid-eighteenth century most of the city's small Jewish population had come from Piedmontese towns, with others from Livorno and Tunis.

From 1792 newcomers arrived from Alessandria, Saluzzo and Nice, but also from Germany, Avignon, Rome and Gibraltar. After 1815 Genoa belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin, and its Jews shared in the Savoyard emancipation of 1848.
The currents crossed, too. Lelio Della Torre, raised in Piedmont and ordained in Turin, came to Padua in 1829 to teach at the new seminary. A family found in Genoa in the 1790s may well have Piedmontese roots; a family in Padua may have cousins in Venice and, further back, an origin north of the Alps.

Padua: A Community Archive That Survived
The historic archive of Padua's Jewish community runs from the late fifteenth century to the early nineteenth: 188 units, mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, part of the earliest material in Hebrew. It is held by the community and can be consulted on request; microfilms are at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, and the council minute books for 1577–1630 have been published. There are losses, including some ketubbot.

The State Archive of Padua holds Napoleonic civil registration for 1806–1815. Under Austrian rule civil registration passed to parish priests, so for Jewish families between 1816 and 1871 the community's records matter most. Italian civil registration began in the Veneto on 1 September 1871 and is held by each town hall. Conscription lists survive from 1846, and those for men born in the provinces of Padua and Rovigo between 1846 and 1902 are indexed online. The university's Jewish medical graduates of 1617–1816 appear in a published list.

Genoa: Records Scattered Through the State
Little of the Genoese community's own record survives from before emancipation. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a single book of deliberations covering 1769–1776 is known to remain, and in 1943 the modern membership registers were seized. The magistracy that issued residence permits to Jews from 1628 kept a register of them, but its archive has never been located.

What survives lies in the records of the Republic itself: its councils, magistracies and notaries. The indispensable guide is Rossana Urbani and Guido Nathan Zazzu's two-volume The Jews in Genoa (1999), which summarises more than two thousand of those documents. Genoa's Restoration-era civil registers are online through the Antenati portal, and Italian civil registration begins in 1866.

For both cities, the persecution years are documented through the CDEC Foundation in Milan and the prefecture files of the 1938 census of Jews.

A surname like Padoa, Verona or Conegliano points to a place, not to proof of descent. The first practical question is what kind of archive that place left behind. In Padua, the record very likely exists and has to be read, often in Hebrew or in the Italian and Latin of Venetian-era documents. In Genoa, it has to be found, one state series at a time.

If your family has a thread in the Veneto or on the Ligurian coast, a free 30-minute consultation is a good place to start. We will tell you honestly which of those two situations you are likely in, and what it would take to follow the thread.