I Del Banco/Warburg: una impresa errante da Venezia ad Amburgo : Nota sulle origini veneziane della famiglia Warburg

Asher Meshullam, Italianised as Anselmo Del Banco (died 1532), is recognised as the head of the Warburg family and as a leading member of the Venetian Jewish community during the crucial years of the Ghetto’s creation. In fact, in February of 1510 he became responsible for the distribution of the tax burden due to the Jews. Later, in 1559 the Del Banco family decided to leave the city and move to Warburg (near Kassel in Hesse, central Germany), where they adopted the name of the city as their new last name. 250 years later, in 1798, the brothers Moses Marcus Warburg and Gerson Warburg, great-grandparents of Aby Warburg, founded the M. M. Warburg & Company Bank in Hamburg, where the family had moved in the meantime. In the 19th Century, thanks to Aby’s drive and incentive, the Warburg family will be the first sponsor of the University of Hamburg, and from the banking institution Aby will later attain the building that will become the headquarters of the city’s most prestigious Cultural Foundation. The historical origins of the family that still today greatly lack in documentation: the provenance, on which have been made only unproven speculations; the period of life in the Ghetto of Venice: the complexity of the historical, social, political, economic and cultural Venetian reality of the time; the period of stabilisation in Germany and the foundation of the Bank in Hamburg.