Ethiopia and the Jews: Between Empires and the Persecution 

Conversation on a work in progress with historian Matteo D’Avanzo (fellow at the USHMM)

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In the years of Nazi persecution, as borders slammed shut across Europe, some Jews began looking for escape where no one expected it: Ethiopia. An independent African empire and home to an ancient Jewish community, Ethiopia suddenly appeared on the maps of desperation. For a brief moment, it seemed to promise what Europe no longer could—distance, uncertainty, and the possibility of survival.

This talk uncovers the little-known story of how, in the 1930s and 1940s, European Jews imagined Ethiopia as a possible refuge—and what this sudden attention meant for the Ethiopian Jews, the Beta Israel, who had lived there for centuries. As Fascist Italy invaded and occupied the country, as British forces replaced it, and as Emperor Haile Selassie struggled to reclaim sovereignty, Ethiopia became a tense crossroads of empire, war, and survival. Refugees searched for exits. Colonial officials calculated advantages. Jewish activists spoke of solidarity and rescue—often without asking who they were speaking for.

At the same time, the Beta Israel found themselves drawn into an unexpected and dangerous spotlight. Italian Jews, acting as intermediaries for the Fascist regime, took an interest in them. They became entangled in Fascist religious policy, involved in colonial administration, and scrutinized through racial categories imported from Europe. When Fascist racial laws reached Ethiopia, an unsettling question emerged: what was the status of these Jews? Were they protected as colonial subjects, excluded as Africans, or marked as Jews? And who had the power to decide?

Ethiopia was repeatedly imagined as a place of Jewish rescue at the very moment when rescue was most urgently needed. The plans were real, the expectations intense, and the consequences lasting. What remains is a story of suspense and moral uncertainty—of identities examined under imperial rule, of decisions made far from the people they affected, and of a collision between empire and the Holocaust that unfolded well beyond Europe.

Matteo D’Avanzo is currently Sosland Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. He earned his PhD in History from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, in joint supervision with INALCO (Paris). His publications focus on Jews and colonialism in the Italian imperial context, with particular attention to Ethiopia and they examine Jewish actors in Ethiopia under Fascist colonial rule—such as Carlo Alberto Viterbo—the construction of Jewish otherness in colonial guidebooks published by the Touring Club Italiano, and Jewish engagements with Italian colonial intellectual culture.

Image: Scarf with Mussolini speech on the invasion of Ethiopia, 1936