In the era of the unification of Italy and its colonial expansion, Italian Jews were confronted with new ways to look at the Mediterranean world which, in ever-changing configurations, had been for centuries part of their life. In 1935, ten years into the fascist dictatorship, against the background of European antisemitism and Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, two exponents of the tiny Italian Zionist movement undertook journeys to the world beyond the peninsula: Leo Levi to British mandate Palestine and Carlo Alberto Viterbo to Italian-occupied Ethiopia.  

Their stories will be the topic of our Fall program.   

 

October 22, 7:00 pm - Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Park Pl. 

The Man with the Nagra, 2013, Written and Directed by: Yaala Levi Zimmerman. Produced by: Yaala Levi Zimmerman and Yohanna Levi

The Man with the Nagra, narrates the life and work of Leo Levi, a prominent Italian intellectual, educator and ethnomusicologist who settled in Israel in 1936. The film combines Levi's life story with that of the small community of the "Italkim", his political work as a religious Zionist with his activity as a writer and ethnomusicologist to whom we owe the largest collection of Italian cantorial music preserved both at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome and at the Jewish Music Research Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Read 

 

October 23-24 

Two days of study and film on the Italian Occupation of Ethiopia

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marim�, New York University, Auditorium

24 West 12th Street 

 

October 23, 4:00 pm - 7:00 pm

The Jews of Ethiopia Under Fascist Rule

Emanuela Trevisan (University of Venice C� Foscari) and Brook Abdu (Capucin Franciscan Research and Retreat Center, Addis Ababa)  

 

This seminar focuses on the figure of Taamrat Emmanuel (1888 - 1963) a member of the Beta Israel Community in Ethiopia who, as a young man, was sent to study in France by the Polish Zionist and Orientalist Jacques Faitlovitch. Taamrat continued his education at the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano in Florence and went on to become a leader of Ethiopian Jewry as well as an Ethiopian leader during the dramatic years of the fascist colonial rule, World War II and the subsequent establishment of sovereign Ethiopia and the State of Israel. 

Emanuela Trevisan and Brook Abdu will explore Taamrat Emmanuel's work and life through documents he left in European and Ethiopian languages, concerning the colonial period and in its aftermath.  

 

October 24 | 10:00 am - 4:00 pm 

Legacies of the Italian Occupation of Ethiopia

Organized by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (History, Italian Studies) and Maaza Mengiste (Creative Writing). Three panels of scholars, writers and public figures from Ethiopia will examine the local legacies of the Italian occupation. Visual and storytelling cultures have been main vehicles of postcolonial expression. The panels will analyze how performance, historical fiction, and film incorporated the narratives of  this difficult period and its legacies through several generations.  

 

 

Vittorio Dan Segre (1922-2014) 

A talk delivered at Centro Primo Levi in 2005 

 

Many years ago, at a lunch in Princeton, a venerable professor asked me whether Jews still existed in Italy. Was it a justified question?  

In a sense, yes. Of the 40,000 Jews who, on the eve of World War II, could claim to have resided in the peninsula for several generations, some 10,000 disappeared through conversion, another 12,000 emigrated abroad (including 2,000 to Palestine), and more than 7,000 died as a result of deportation. Add to this the effect of mixed marriages and the decline in the birthrate, and you come up with about 10,000 Jews of old Italian origin among the 30,000 currently registered ones, in a country of 57 million inhabitants. Yet if you ask any Italian to tell you how many Jews he thinks live in Italy, the answer will be between half a million and two million. Read 

 

 

Richard Pankhurst  

 

Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in the autumn of 1935, and the development of anti-Semitism in both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, led to a number of plans for the mass settlement of Jews in Italian-occupied Ethiopia and other parts of the fascist colonial empire. The object of the present article is to trace the progress of such plans which have thus far been inadequately studied. Read

 

Ofer Aderet, Haaretz, 2011

  

A century before global Jewry reached out to Ethiopia's community, a researcher named Jacques Faitlovitch sowed the seeds for a future ingathering. The relationship between the Jews of France and Ethiopia began a century ago, with one man who devoted his life to the latter community. The new sculpture stands opposite Tel Aviv University's central library, where a small, crowded room on the second floor stores the archives of that man, researcher Dr. Jacques Faitlovitch, who died in 1955. Read   

 

 

 Andr� Naffis-Sahely, The Nation   

 

"Darling, this is Alessandro Spina, who is trying to make Italians feel guilty about their colonial crimes."

 

Spina had been quietly publishing a number of novels and short stories since the early 1960s. It was an oeuvre that charted the history of Libya from 1911, when Italy invaded the sleepy Ottoman province, all the way to 1966, when petrodollars sparked an economic boom, exacerbating the corruption and nepotism that eventually paved the way for Muammar Qaddafi's coup d'�tat in 1969. Read