Italian Jewish Studies Project - ETHIOPIAN JEWS UNDER FASCIST RULE
Presented with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, Department of Italian Studies, Department of History.
This year the Italian Jewish Studies Project is held in connection with the international symposium Legacies of the Italian Occupation in Ethiopia organized by Maaza Mengiste and Ruth Ben Ghiat
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 Italian occupation, World War II and the subsequent return to sovereign Ethiopia and the establishment of the State of Israel.
Throughout his story one seems to revisit the ambivalence mentioned by Albert Memmi about those Jews situated half way between colonizers and colonized, in that social reaction that kept the colonizer chained to the colonized, but in a more complex configuration, because it involves two types of Jews: the European Jew and the native Jew in a context such as the Ethiopian one, colonized both by the Jewish “counter mission” and the Italian occupation.
In the 1940s after slowly parting ways with his long-time mentor Faitlovitch, Taamrat found a new patron in the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975) - a strong relationship that endured until the end of Taamrat's life.
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OCTOBER 23 | 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò
24 West 12th Street, NYC
more info: CENTRO PRIMO LEVI
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