Matteo D’Avanzo, Jews as Agents of Colonization: Italian Jewry, Carlo Alberto Viterbo and the Ethiopian Jews, Contemporanea, Rivista di storia dell’800 e del ‘900, 1/2024, pp. 25-46.
This article investigates an underexplored aspect of modern Jewish and modern Italian history: the role of the Italian Jewish community during the Fascist invasion and colonization of Ethiopia in the mid 1930s. D’Avanzo follows the journey of the Florentine lawyer Carlo Alberto Viterbo, a prominent representative of the Jewish community tapped by the Unione delle Comunità Israelitiche Italiane in 1936 to travel to Addis Ababa to carry out a survey of Ethiopian Jews. As D’Avanzo shows, Viterbo’s journey–which received the endorsement of Fascist authorities–left a rich archive, documenting the transnational nature of the Italian imperial project and the surprising role of Italian Jews as agents of colonization. Viterbo’s activism indeed had two goals: on the one hand, he encouraged Italian Jews to participate in the colonial project of “civilizing” Ethiopia and Ethiopian Jews, while on the other, he mobilized a transnational philanthropic network to endorse Italian Fascist actions in a bid to assimilate “black Jews” into a Western Jewish framework. In this way, D’Avanzo offers preliminary answers to crucial questions asked by early pioneers in the field: Where are Jews in colonial history? And where is colonialism in Jewish history? At the same time, he foregrounds an additional question, which we hope will continue to receive more scholarly attention: Where are Italian Jews in the Fascist colonization of Ethiopia, and in the transnational legitimation of the Fascist imperial project?