Italian Jews’ colonial encounters stemmed from their self-understanding as both Italians and as Jews. As Italians, they colonized in order to boost their country’s prestige and its coffers. As Jews, they used the conquest to promote Jewish causes, reaching out to help indigenous African Jews in the conquered areas.
Yet the act of colonizing had the unintended effect of challenging that very self-understanding. Jews in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Libya frequently appealed to their coreligionists in the metropole to intervene on their behalf with the colonial government, who discriminated against them because of their dark skin. Whose side would Italian Jews take? The comfortable dual identity, that of Italian-and-Jewish, was suddenly called into question.
This work fills a glaring void in the study of European Jewry, and by extension, European history. Little research has been done on how European Jews participated in their countries’ colonial enterprises, and virtually no work exists on Italian Jews and colonization. The scarcity of scholarship has led to a common misconception that Italian Jews resisted colonization, just as they later opposed Fascism; in fact, as I will show in this presentation, colonialism reflected – and eventually tested – their sense of belonging in Italy.
