Historian Explores Complex Story of How Italy’s Jews Helped Contribute to an Empire – And Their Own Victimization
September 15, 2020
If you’re looking for a complex and multifaceted chapter of history that few people have deeply studied, consider the relationship between Italy’s Jews and their counterparts in Italian colonies during the years leading up to World War II, says Shira Klein, Ph.D., a Chapman University, Wilkinson College, professor of history.
Klein, a scholar of Italian Jewry, Jewish migration and the Holocaust, is writing a book about the role Italian Jews played among Italian fascists.
Like a pendulum, Italian Jews swung from support to disdain for their counterparts in colonies such as Libya, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Throughout, though, they stayed loyal to the fascist state, believing that as Italians they, too, would benefit from their nation’s drive for its “place in the sun” amid the European colonies across Africa. So explains Klein, a scholar of Italian Jewry, Jewish migration and the Holocaust. Read more …