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Jews, Italians, and competing empires in Egypt: a local school perspective in the interwar period

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  • Martino Oppizzi orcid logo (Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, France)

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Oppizzi, M., (2026) “Jews, Italians, and competing empires in Egypt: a local school perspective in the interwar period”, Jewish Historical Studies: A Journal of English-Speaking Jewry 57(1), 102–123. doi: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.jhs.2026v57.06

Rights: © 2025, The Author(s)

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28 May 2026
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This article examines the relations between Italian emigrants and Jewish communities in Egypt between 1918 and 1940, through the perspective of local representatives of the Italian state: consuls and teachers. In analysing these interactions, it explores the impact of global diplomatic strategies in contested imperial regions, where different European interests overlapped and collided. The article also offers insight into the ways indirect power was exercised within colonial societies, contributing to current debates about the concept of informal empire.1 In investigating how fascist Italy targetted local Jews in Egypt, the article uncovers how two forms of influence – in this case, British and Italian – generated a complex interplay of competition and emulation. These entanglements of imperial policies have previously been described in other Mediterranean contexts, such as the Dodecanese and Tunisia.2 In these sites, local Jews became both the objects and intermediaries of competing foreign nations, generating a specific form of agency. Building on this literature, this article also contributes to a broader understanding of the plurality of Jewish experiences within the British Empire, a dimension already underscored by several works.3 For example, the broader Italian community in Egypt (about 50,000 people at the beginning of the twentieth century4) integrated about eight thousand Jewish citizens in the 1920s, mainly in Alexandria.5 These Jews composed a small but prominent middle class, particularly active in the liberal professions and involved in local Italian institutions6 while preserving a distinctly cosmopolitan profile. Some of them did not speak Italian and corresponded with authorities in Rome in other languages, such as French, even during the fascist period.7 Within Egyptian society, their plurality fostered frequent interactions with other Jewish communities, facilitating economic ties, cultural exchanges, and intermarriage. The relations with Jewish communities in Egypt were cultivated and oriented by several local Italian agents, within the broader framework of an imperial strategy aiming to revive Italy’s pre-1882 cultural and political influence in the country. Focusing on the consular staff and Italian teachers employed in fourteen local governmental schools, this study examines how fascist Italy exerted its influence on local Jews in a space dominated by British power. This perspective has rarely been adopted: while the role of consuls has recently been re-examined (especially in studies on the French Empire and the Balkans8), the role of teachers in Italy’s imperial strategy remains largely unexplored. In general, in imperial contexts, schools have been interpreted as tools for shaping social identities and cultural affiliations. The Egyptian case has inspired both global work9 and more specific analyses.10 For instance, Dario Miccoli has examined the evolution of the Jewish minority in Egypt, describing its emergence as an “imagined bourgeoisie”11 influenced by European cultural models. Similarly, Frédéric Abécassis has highlighted the role of French secular and religious schools in disseminating cultural and political influence across the Mediterranean, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt.12

By examining Italian local schools not only as institutions of cultural transmission but also as local connectors of imperial policy and propaganda (a crucial dimension of the Anglo-Italian rivalry in the Eastern Mediterranean13), this study confirms and expands these previous works. As with their French and British counterparts, Italian teachers had frequent and direct interactions with the local population. The documentation they produced reveals the evolution of their relationship with Jews in Egypt (perceived variously as a resource, competitor, or obstacle), and sheds light on the hidden interplay between political, cultural, and demographic influence in contested imperial spaces. However, in contrast to their French and British rivals, Italian schools displayed two distinctive features. The first was structural. From 1889, Italian schools abroad were – directly or indirectly – administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and therefore fully integrated into an imperial agenda. Moreover, Italy’s informal power in Egypt relied heavily on emigrant communities, which were part of a broader “demographic imperialism”.14 This peculiar aspect shaped local propaganda and affected social relations between Italian migrants and local communities. The second feature was a product of Italian’s distinctive political features. In the interwar period, Italy became an authoritarian regime whose totalitarian ambitions distinguished it from both France and Britain. Fascist Italy was also the only totalitarian regime to possess a colonial empire, and by the late 1930s it also became the first European empire to apply explicitly racial and antisemitic legislation to its possessions. Italian schools in Egypt thus provide a valuable case study to examine this specificity. Their relations with local Jewish communities show how the fascist imperial agenda operated even outside areas of direct Italian rule. This was evident in Egypt, a country under British occupation from 1882 and, despite the formal independence accorded in 1923, still within London’s sphere of influence during the interwar period.

Jewish communities, local powers, and the Italian presence: entangled imperial policies

Relations with Egypt’s Jews were part of Italy’s broader effort to extend its influence across the Mediterranean, which represented both a key geostrategic horizon and a major hub for its emigrants. The need to assert a political and cultural presence was particularly acute in countries bordering Libya, Italy’s main colony since 1912. Italians had maintained a stable presence in Egypt since the mid-nineteenth century, when the country began attracting merchants, entrepreneurs, political exiles, and workers for the construction of the Suez Canal (1859–69). The creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 gave them a unified and stronger diplomatic protection, enhancing their presence in local society. In 1871, Italians in Egypt had reached nearly 15,000, more than 20 per cent of the country’s European population. Italian served as the common diplomatic language and remained the official language of the postal service until 1871.15 The British occupation in 1882 triggered the decline of Italy’s political and financial influence in the country, since it had become part of a rival colonial empire. Italy shifted its focus to the cultural and economic spheres, facing fierce competition from both the British and French.

In this political context, establishing new forms of informal power became essential: among the various initiatives undertaken between 1918 and 1940, Italian diplomacy actively sought to exploit the transnational connections between Italian Jews and Sephardic networks. In 1911, Jews in Italy constituted a small minority of approximately 33,000 individuals, who maintained close ties with many Sephardic communities across the Mediterranean. These connections had been cultivated since the eighteenth century, when many Italian Jews – notably from the port city of Livorno – had settled along the North African and Levant coast, establishing local communities and trade networks. Furthermore, during the nineteenth century a significant number of Jews in the Ottoman Empire had acquired Italian citizenship or the protection of Italian consuls (the Consular Regulations of 1866, article 94).16 As a result, like many other foreign communities,17 Egypt’s Italian population itself was quite heterogeneous. In 1917, a Catholic majority (80 per cent in 1897) lived alongside sizable religious minorities: 2,884 Muslims (5.5 per cent), primarily from Libya; 6,242 Orthodox Christians (12 per cent), mainly Dodecanese islanders who became Italian subjects after the 1912 occupation;18 and 7,471 Jews (14.2 per cent), composed of both emigrants from Italy and local subjects under Italian consular protection.19 While relations between Catholics and Jews were generally good, particularly among the community’s elites, tensions occasionally surfaced among the poorest segments of the population, due to the economic prominence of the Jewish minority and religious prejudices coming from the Catholics. The internal plurality was also a distinctive feature of the local Jewish population, to the point that it was difficult to define a single, cohesive community: the 75,000 Jews living in Egypt in the interwar period, despite being predominantly Sephardic, represented more than twenty different national backgrounds.20 Unlike other Mediterranean countries, no single language, nationality, tradition, or cultural heritage served as a unifying force.21 In this complex, cosmopolitan environment, Rome’s cultural diplomacy took distinct forms to promote interactions with other minorities, adapting to Egypt’s political, legal, and social context, which dramatically changed in the aftermath of the First World War.

From a political perspective, Egypt passed from the formal domination of British rule to an indirect control, following the independence unilaterally declared in February 1922. This situation created a competitive imperial arena in which multiple European nations sought to assert their influence. The transformation coincided with the deterioration of Anglo-Italian relations, which moved from prewar friendship to open rivalry by the 1930s. British repression of the nationalist Egyptian party, the Wafd, sparked a 1919 insurrection, which eventually resulted in the country’s formal independence and the adoption of an Egyptian constitution in April 1923. However, despite the formal transition to an independent monarchy, the country remained a semi-colonial state under British influence, struggling to affirm national sovereignty while preserving its cosmopolitan profile. The theoretical royal authority was eroded by British “advisers” who exercised substantial executive power within government structures. Still, the informal nature of British influence opened up the possibility for other European nations to expand their own authority in Egypt. The Egyptian juridical framework encouraged this rivalry, multiplying claims and interventions: until 1937, the Capitulations system,22 a holdover of the Ottoman era, guaranteed legal immunity to every European citizen, placed under the jurisdiction (and the protection) of their own consulates, beyond the reach of local justice. This system allowed local foreign communities to manage their economic, religious, and cultural institutions independently. It also significantly affected the position of local Jews, who sought foreign citizenship to benefit from the protections offered by Capitulations, especially since naturalization was difficult for non-Muslims under Egyptian law. The “nationality market” granted by the Capitulations system allowed Jews to acquire a variety of European nationalities: the censuses of 1927 and 1937 show that in the interwar period only 25 per cent of Jews living in Egypt had Egyptian citizenship.23

For these reasons, Egypt emerged as a key theatre of British–Italian rivalry, an unforeseen consequence of the Great War. During the conflict, Italy’s colonial agenda increasingly collided with British aims to defend its Mediterranean supremacy. From Italy’s perspective, the non-ratification of the 1917 St. Jean de Maurienne Agreement, which had recognized Italy’s imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean, was the demonstration of a “colonial conspiracy” and a betrayal from its own allies. The postwar negotiations amplified this feeling. Isolated at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and denied many of its territorial aspirations, which were often framed as “extravagant” by Britain, Italy experienced a humiliation that fuelled nationalist resentment and ultimately contributed to the rise of fascism in 1921.24

While the conflict troubled the friendly diplomatic relations between the two imperial powers, the fascist regime brought them to the breaking point, as each imperial agenda increasingly diverged. For Britain, the postwar moment represented the peak of its influence: the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire allowed London to assume mandates in Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan (1920), extending its informal empire in the Middle East. But the Mesopotamian mandate encountered major problems. In Iraq the uprising of 1920 exposed the limits of direct control, prompting London to improvise a system of “indirect administration” through the creation of the Kingdom of Iraq (1921). While Transjordan developed into a more stable (and less costly) client monarchy, the British Mandate in Palestine quickly became unstable, leading to increasing militarization during the interwar period.25 In this troubled scenario, Britain’s new Mediterranean policy throughout the interwar years was fundamentally conservative: the primary concern was to preserve international peace and stability, secure maritime and aerial routes to the East, safeguard commercial interests, and ensure access to oil for the Royal Navy. In other words, for Britain, the Mediterranean region became key to maintaining control of its new mandates.26 For Italy, by contrast, the Mediterranean became its main arena of imperial expansion. Mussolini viewed the postwar order as a betrayal of Italy’s wartime sacrifices. From 1925, breaking with the cautious diplomacy of the liberal era, he launched an aggressive foreign policy.27 Imperialism was considered a national imperative; Italy, cast as a victim of the postwar settlement, had to break free and extend its reach from the Mediterranean to the Middle East, at the expense of British hegemony. As Massimiliano Fiore has shown, tensions between Rome and London had already escalated in the second half of the 1920s, well before Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, driven by fundamentally incompatible objectives: Britain sought to preserve the geopolitical status quo, while fascist Italy aimed to disrupt it in order to make itself a great imperial power.28

This rivalry played out not only in diplomatic spheres but also on the ground, particularly in contested regions like the Eastern Mediterranean,29 where indirect influence became an essential manifestation of imperial power. In Egypt, Italy’s strategy was shaped by the need to compete with British influence in a context in which foreign formal sovereignty was limited but political stakes remained high, both for Rome and for London. The expression of this strategy in everyday practices affected local dynamics, especially in minority communities. From this point of view, the evolution of Jewish–Italian relations was not just a local issue but a manifestation of a geopolitical confrontation between two forms of indirect rule – British and Italian. From 1918, both Italian diplomats and Jewish elites in Italy actively worked to develop a coherent strategy towards the local Jewish population, ensuring national interests in the region. In 1926, following some initiatives launched by prominent representatives of Italian Zionism, Italy’s Foreign Ministry resolved to use the local Jewish community in Egypt to help promote Italy’s commercial and cultural penetration in the Mediterranean region. The following year, the Livorno-born rabbi and Zionist leader David Prato (1882–1951) was nominated as Chief Rabbi of Alexandria, assuring a stronger presence among local Jews.30 Before his departure from Rome, Prato even met Mussolini, discussing legal issues affecting Italians in Egypt, the promotion of connections with Sephardic communities across the Mediterranean (including a rabbinical seminary founded in 1926 in Rhodes, part of the Italian Dodecanese), and the creation of a specific office for Jewish affairs in the Italian Foreign Ministry.31 While Britain’s Jewish policy became increasingly focused on Palestine,32 Italy concentrated its efforts on the Dodecanese and Egypt. In this strategy, government schools became a crucial instrument to develop an influence among local Jews or, at other times, when pro-Jewish policies became politically inconvenient, to marginalize them.

Jews and local Italian schools: between education and influence

During the colonial era, Italian schools abroad were a key instrument of cultural diplomacy. Their mission was both educational and political, to shape national identity and promote collective bonds among Italian migrants, while also enhancing Italy’s prestige across the Mediterranean. As noted earlier, this global school network was part of a broader diplomatic strategy that combined a flexible imperial agenda with the political use of the numbers of Italian emigrants as a diplomatic tool in key regions.33 Beyond national borders, however, the mission of these schools required a more pragmatic approach, adapting to local social and cultural contexts. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs expected these institutions to tailor their programmes to the educational needs of emigrants and to the specificities of each country. A 1926–8 report from the Direzione degli Italiani all’Estero (DIE), the bureau for migrants’ affairs, praised the growing enrollment rate in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, and Bulgaria, thanks to the schools’ ability to align with local demands.

This flexible approach extended to Jewish students too, notably in the eastern Mediterranean, the main theatre of Italian diplomacy directed at Sephardic communities. In 1920, for example, the Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza encouraged Sephardic Jewish admission to Italian schools abroad and proposed optional Hebrew courses for Italian schools in Constantinople, a major hub in the educational network of the Levant. In Egypt, Italy initially took advantage of the cultural prestige that European culture enjoyed among the Jewish community. Since the nineteenth century, European languages had become a status symbol among wealthier Jewish families, while the local Sephardic community, composed of many Jews from Livorno, was highly multilingual. Notably, women of the Jewish bourgeoisie often adopted Italian and French.34 Until 1876, Italian was the language of Egyptian bureaucracy, and it remained the primary language of instruction in Alexandria’s Jewish schools until 1905. As Gudrun Krämer has shown, the use of Italian was evenly distributed across the social spectrum of Jewish communities, with a strong preference among the Sephardic upper and middle classes.35 Under British occupation and during the interwar period, however, Italian schools had to compete with other educational systems targetting both European and Egyptian pupils, developed by other foreign powers in order to capitalize on the needs of a growing middle class seeking opportunities in the public administration of the newly independent state. British and French schools – both secular and religious – were particularly valued by the broader Egyptian population. In parallel, the Jewish population was targetted by a network of specific institutions. The schools of the French Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) promoted French cultural and political ideals: in 1908, the AIU’s school network enrolled 1,181 pupils across Cairo (387 boys, 294 girls), Alexandria (132 boys, 142 girls), and Tantah (105 boys, 121 girls). However, most of these institutions were transferred to local community management between 1912 and 1919.36 There were also local Jewish schools that were supported by local Jewish Community Councils (the authority of a city or region responsible for religion and education), or by private philanthropists. In Alexandria these included the École Chadaï-Yaazor for girls, the École Etz Haim, the École Fondation de Menasce, the École Della Pergola, the Lycée de l’Union Juive pour l’Enseignement, and other childcare institutions like kindergartens.37

Although often overlooked, documents produced by Italian consuls and teachers offer valuable insight on how Italy’s educational policies shaped the relations between Jews and Italians in this complex imperial landscape. For instance, annual reports and regular correspondence between local agents and authorities in Rome clearly show that, until the mid-1930s, Egypt’s Jewish population was seen as a powerful minority which could support Italy’s cultural and commercial expansion thanks to its established influence and social status. Hence, this vision of local Jews as “agents within empire” contributed to their recruitment to Italian schools. In 1923, the Italian consul in Alexandria reported that Jewish pupils composed 20 per cent of the students at the Regina Elena girls’ primary school, 30 per cent at the Vittorio Emanuele boys’ primary school, and 40 per cent at the Francesco Crispi mixed primary school (which mainly attracted children from the urban bourgeoisie). The next year, when the Federazione Coloniale Italiana founded a new school in the neighbourhood of Ibrahimia, about half the students were Jews.38 Italian authorities recognized the importance of maintaining good relations with Jewish families and encouraging their children’s enrolment. School reports frequently emphasized this attitude. In 1926, the director of Alexandria’s primary schools, Francesco Fera, described Jewish students as a “precious element in this country, for well-known reasons”. The following year, he welcomed the increase in the number of Jewish pupils, highlighting its significance for Italy’s policies.39

The relative openness of local Italian schools in Egypt, designed to attract this diverse student population, is also evidenced in other records, including curricular programmes, which integrated elements of local culture specifically to attract non-Italian (and/or non-Catholic) students. In 1926, the Italian consul in Alexandria reported that Italian primary schools offered a course on “the history of all religions”, even though it was not officially legitimate according to Italian law.40 At Regina Elena, students and teachers produced a monthly, handwritten journal reflecting both their patriotism and their belonging to Egyptian society. In March 1927, the journal included a letter written by a young Muslim girl who explained Ramadan to students in a school in Italy and declared that “even though I am a foreigner, I feel that I love beautiful Italy and all Italians very much”.41 The preference for secular over religious schooling was another key element of this inclusive strategy, notably in the early 1920s. In Alexandria, where students came from many religious and national backgrounds, teachers sought to keep good relations with other communities, especially Christian Orthodox and Jewish families, to compete with French schools, which attracted most of the upper-class families. Missionary schools were seen as a source of tension with the Jewish community. A striking example was the case of Giovanni Maria Cattaui Menasce, heir to two prominent Jewish families, who converted to Catholicism after attending Italian missionary schools, becoming a priest and even celebrating a mass in Alexandria in 1932. The affair was seen as a provocation by the local Jewish community, sparking protests and controversy. Roberto Cantalupo, Italy’s Plenipotentiary Minister in Egypt, regretted the backlash and hoped “that the widespread esteem enjoyed by all Italian schools in Egypt will prevail over any purely religious considerations”.42

Local staff sometimes took pragmatic initiatives to accommodate Jewish families, even at the risk of contradicting official policies of the Italian government. Following the 1923 education reform of Giovanni Gentile, which had made Catholic instruction mandatory in metropolitan institutes and even in Italian schools abroad, many principals proposed to introduce Jewish religion classes to prevent tensions with Jewish families. In a 1926 school report, the principal at the time, Francesco Fera, defended this measure, in the name of an Italian tradition of tolerance, as well as for the political necessity of maintaining strong ties with Jewish élites in Egypt:

I have already noted on several occasions the decrease of Jews in our schools. This significant trend suggests a measure that I hope will be well received: the introduction of Jewish religion classes into our curriculum. There are precedents for this proposal, as this religion is already taught in some of our schools abroad. Moreover, a recent directive from the Ministry of Instruction allows other religions, in addition to our own, to be adopted in the Kingdom’s schools at the request of parents – further proof of the Italian spirit of tolerance, always serene and fair-minded. Here, such a measure would be a politically appropriate step, helping to dispel prejudices and misunderstandings while fostering new goodwill towards our institution among a community that, as is well known, was largely alienated from us due to the tactical errors of colonial politicians. This community is particularly valuable, as our local élite is composed predominantly of Jews, who, given their family and business ties with coreligionists of other nationalities, could greatly enhance Italy’s influence in this country. This proposal, therefore, deserves careful consideration.43

This initiative initially met opposition from the Italian consul in Alexandria, torn between avoiding any sign of weakness to local authorities and promoting Italian influence. It was ultimately approved by the Italian government, and later by the new director of Italian schools abroad, the fascist leader Piero Parini. A note sent in 1929 by the principal of an Italian primary school in Alexandria to the local consul reveals the informal arrangements that emerged between the teachers’ openness and the consul’s hesitant position:

Allow me to draw your attention to the rule concerning religious instruction for Jewish pupils whose parents request it. It was stated that no official communication should be made to the leaders of the Jewish Community about this concession, and that is reasonable. However, I do not think that Jewish parents should be kept unaware of this decision, because in that case it would be as if it did not exist at all and would have no practical effect… . I believe that it would be convenient to inform them that the study of Hebrew and Jewish history has been accepted for Jewish pupils. This would make the measure even more acceptable to many Italian Jews, who often do not openly show much attachment to the religion of their forefathers.44

By early 1933, Jewish religion classes in Italian primary schools in Egypt were officially provided under the supervision of the Grand Rabbinate. This policy extended to secondary education as well: when the new Italian high schools of Alexandria – the Scuole Littorie – were inaugurated in 1932, the new principal obtained permission from the local Fascist Party and the consulate to open classes for Jews. He organized the programmes with the Chief Rabbi of Alexandria, David Prato, who had previously advocated for the optional teaching of Judaism in Italian schools. These coordinated and mutually reinforcing initiatives among Italian authorities, religious leaders, and the school staff also aligned with the broader policy set by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, showing that local agents not only supported this agenda, but also took independent initiatives actively to promote it, even by adjusting certain measures when they appeared counterproductive.

This approach appears even more striking when compared with British educational policy in Egypt at the time; British officials and educators struggled to accept the idea of a school system accessible to Egyptian pupils and did not consider attracting Jewish students a strategic priority. Although some elements in the British Foreign Office acknowledged that educating the local élite was vital to the future of the British Empire (particularly where the propaganda of other foreign countries was stronger, including in Egypt), access to British schools was deliberately restricted. Miles Lampson, High Commissioner to Egypt, feared that the open enrolment of local pupils would make it difficult to resist pressure to admit candidates deemed unsuitable for political or social reasons.45 Some cultural initiatives were nonetheless undertaken in the interwar period, though not explicitly tailored to the Jewish population, including for example the establishment of the British Council in November 1934, the opening of new schools in Egypt’s major cities (Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez) and the granting of greater financial support to existing institutions, such as Victoria College in Alexandria. This relatively restrictive and socially exclusive model stood in contrast with the more inclusive policies pursued by the Italian government and, until the 1930s, by the local agents of the fascist regime. Italian schools actively sought to attract students both from the upper classes (through some prestigious institutes, like the Montessori schools) and from more modest backgrounds, by offering material incentives such as free meals, clothing, and textbooks. This action not only reinforced Italian cultural influence but also limited the appeal of anti-Italian sentiments, a critical component part in Italy’s broader strategy of indirect imperialism.

The impact of fascism: from continuity to rupture

The rise of fascism reshaped policies on Italian emigrants and diplomacy in general. The new regime redefined the emigrant as an “Italian abroad”, a sort of messenger of homeland culture to the world. Alongside this, an imperialist vision of foreign policy and a deep reorganization of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs transformed the consuls into watchmen of the Italian emigrants, and the school into an instrument of fascist propaganda among the local population. While Mussolini’s policies on Italian emigrants are well documented,46 the role of Italian schools abroad remains largely underexplored, despite their reorganization in the service of fascism’s imperial ambitions. Similarly, the development of specific propaganda directed at Jewish communities around the Mediterranean has been studied only in the Dodecanese region.47 Sources from schools and consulates can provide valuable insight into the effects of this propaganda both on global strategies and on everyday interactions in imperial contexts. In Egypt, the new fascist government affected Italian–Jewish relations well before the introduction of racial laws in 1938.

Among central authorities, forms of mistrust or even hostility to Jews emerged surprisingly early. Cornelio di Marzio, the secretary of the Fasci Italiani all’Estero (the Fascist Party or PNF sections created in 1922 to spread its ideology abroad) publicly declared in 1923 that “the elements that tend to weaken, if not wipe out, any sign of nationality are communism, Semitism, and Freemasonry”. He also attributed divisions among Italian migrants to the dominance of “Jewish-Masonic oligarchies” and promoted the expansion of Catholic schools, even at the risk of unsettling “Mediterranean circles”.48 Similarly, in the late 1920s, the central authorities that managed Italian emigrants underwent a deep fascistization. In 1928, the fascist regime created a new office to oversee Italian communities abroad, the aforementioned DIE,49 ruled by Piero Parini, who was already the secretary of the Fasci Italiani all’Estero. Parini promoted antisemitic rhetoric and notions of Jewish difference, integrating these ideas within a nationalist view of Italian emigration: “unlike the wandering instinct of the Jewish race or the Gypsy people, the Italian has in his blood the founding and colonizing instinct”.50 In this ideological framework, Italians abroad represented a “nation outside the nation”, deeply linked to the motherland, while the Jews, regardless of their nationality, were described as “a race without a nation”, a biological and moral counter-model to the Italian settler and the very antithesis of the “New Fascist Man”. Consular archives testify to the local fallouts of this growing new mentality: consuls’ reports frequently associated Jews with Freemasonry and antifascism; their private and confidential correspondence reveals deep-seated antisemitic prejudices.

Conversely, Italian schools abroad remained relatively cut off from this hostile attitude until the first half of the 1930s, confirming their enduring relevance as sociocultural mediators. However, they also became both a witness to and an instrument of the regime’s educational policy. The Egyptian case provides some key examples. Into the 1930s, the presence of Jewish students in Italian schools in Egypt remained significant, showing that the local context (and the educational policies adopted until 1920) still oriented local authorities towards a more tolerant and open-minded attitude. Moreover, as already mentioned, from 1933 the teaching of the Jewish religion in Italian schools in Alexandria was imparted by the Chief Rabbi, who came from Italy. Despite the personal ideas of Parini, the DIE also promoted collaboration with Jewish schools in Egypt. In 1931, it even approved a plan to improve the teaching of the Italian language in their curricula: the number of weekly hours was doubled, while the number of students rose from 417 to 1,150.51 Five years later, the positive outcomes of this initiative were expressed in essays written by Jewish pupils from the Goutte de Lait school about the visit of an Italian minister:

When our classmate Japhet Ibrahim recited the Duce’s words, His Excellency looked very surprised and pleased. He was happy to hear that we study Jewish history in Italian and asked our teacher how she taught it. (Rachele Manievitz, 4th grade)

On Tuesday, January 14th, His Excellency, the Italian Minister, visited our school. All the children were happy, though at first we were afraid he would be strict. But when we saw his kind face, we were overjoyed. When he entered our classroom, accompanied by the Italian consul, the principal, and Mr. Benaroio, we gave a proper Roman salute. We told him that we study the geography of Palestine, Egypt, and Italy because we are grown up. Before he left, we sang our national anthem in Italian. (Simeone Argi, 5th grade)

His Excellency was very happy to hear us foreigners sing the anthem Giovinezza. (Renata Chalom)52

The importance of Italian classes in local Jewish schools remained a priority even during the second half of the 1930s, when tensions between Britain and Italy escalated. The consul in Cairo was still actively promoting the expansion of Italian classes in 1937, despite growing friction with Egyptian Jews over Italy’s alliance with Hitler’s Germany.53

Some warning signs had already emerged earlier, by the mid-1920s, as rumours of fascist antisemitism began circulating in the Egyptian press and among the public, fuelled by the attitude of some of the agents sent to Egypt by the fascist regime. One of the first incidents occurred in 1925, when the prominent fascist orator Giovanni Wian delivered an incendiary speech at the inauguration of the Fascio of Alexandria, insulting Jews and urging them to return to Palestine. Despite official apologies, this scandal led several Jewish families to withdraw their children from Italian schools. The consequences were still felt years later, as noted by the director of local primary schools in 1928: “The wisdom of our leaders is now making disappear the seeds of discord that in past years had so deeply troubled the colony, causing harmful repercussions for this institution, where enrolments, particularly among Jews, had significantly declined. [This year] Jews constitute the majority in the first classes: 18 out of 33. This suggests that this group – crucial to our influence – is beginning to return to us in substantial numbers.”54

While the school environment remained fairly cosmopolitan during the 1930s, only occasionally disturbed by minor incidents, some major events in the broader political and diplomatic sphere reflected a deep change in the attitude of the fascist regime to Sephardi Jews. As previously mentioned, in the 1920s the Italian government had viewed David Prato’s election as Chief Rabbi of Alexandria as a strategic move to extend its influence in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1929, Prato had even proposed to Mussolini the creation of a central office to coordinate this diplomatic effort.55 But the opposition of the Foreign Minister Dino Grandi marked the end of the most ambitious part of this project and the beginning of the decline of Italy’s efforts to attract Jews across the Mediterranean. In the following years, Mussolini’s growing mistrust of Zionism, viewed as a British political tool, limited Italian efforts to cooperate with local Jewish communities. Meanwhile, the Rabbinical College of Rhodes, another key component of the initiative to strengthen Italy’s ties with Sephardi Jews, collapsed after the departure of one of its main promoters, Rabbi Pacifici, who left the Dodecanese in 1936. The following year, Prato’s successor in Alexandria, Alfred Tilche, withdrew his crucial support from the College, leading to its dismantling.56

These events reflected a deeper ideological transformation in Italian discourse about the empire and its relations with local minorities. During the 1920s, the concept of a “Mediterranean race” oriented Italian policies in the Aegean, promoting ethnic diversity in the framework of a pluralistic vision of the Italian nation-empire. But in the mid-1930s, the invasion of Ethiopia (1935) and the alliance with Nazi Germany (1936) marked a turn towards a new paradigm, dominated by the idea of Italian supremacy and an Aryan/Nordic racism. In June 1938, a few months before the official antisemitic turn, Mussolini had declared that “The concepts of ‘Latinità’ and ‘Mediterranità’ will be thrown out in place of ‘Arianità’”.57 This ideological shift, which reinforced strict racial hierarchies and boundaries between Italians and colonial subjects, directly affected educational policy abroad. In the Dodecanese in 1937 Governor Cesare de Vecchi banned the teaching of Greek, Hebrew, and Turkish in Italian schools and shut down all private and religious institutions. At the same time, he launched an aggressive campaign of cultural assimilation accompanied by the expulsion of Turkish and Jewish minorities.58

The antisemitic turn of the fascist regime, which introduced official racial legislation between September and November 1938, signalled the final blow to decades of Italian–Jewish relations in the Mediterranean region. In Egypt, how the antisemitic laws were applied among the Italian community remains ambiguous. Under the Capitulations, the Italian government exercised full legal authority over its nationals and local institutions: consuls applied Italian laws over Italian citizens, and could even arrest and deport them to Italy. During the interwar period, the fascist regime used these powers extensively to suppress antifascist activity. The Capitulations were formally abolished in 1937 by the Montreux Convention, but the agreement established a twelve-year period (until 15 October 1949) to dismantle the Mixed Courts and gradually transfer jurisdiction over foreign residents to Egyptian courts. From this perspective, the archival records of Italian schools in Egypt capture the ambiguity of this juridical transition. They also offer a vivid and direct example of the impact of racial laws on the daily lives of children, teachers, and families. Italian Jews, commonly described as a reliable élite – almost the backbone of the local Italian community – were suddenly portrayed as outsiders. Meanwhile, Jews of other nationalities, previously seen as a valuable resource, were from then on described as enemies. Thus, the introduction of antisemitic laws not only disrupted relations between Italian migrants and local Jewish communities, but also abruptly overturned a long-lasting imperial strategy towards the local population.

Reports from Italian schools abroad provide further evidence of the racial laws’ effects. All Jewish teachers were dismissed from governmental schools, whose staff were classified as state functionaries under the direct authority of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. All remaining teachers had to sign an official declaration affirming their Aryan descent and Catholic faith. In 1939, the director of Italian secondary schools in Cairo acknowledged that “the racial issue” had disrupted the delicate balance within these traditionally open and cosmopolitan institutions, where teachers interacted daily with foreigners and Jews. Faced with the challenge of severing these “overly close social ties imposed by the school’s attractiveness”, the director proposed to replace most of the teachers with new personnel from Italy – young, more loyal, and not influenced by “outdated mentalities”.59 The racial epuration also affected the schools’ employees, as shown by the case of the secretary of the Italian commercial school in Alexandria, Alessandro Abenaim, who was fired in 1938. The case of Abenaim is significant because although he was Italian, he was classified as “of Jewish race” only because his father (who had died in the First World War) was Jewish. His mother was Catholic, and he himself had never practised the Jewish religion. Although the Italian consul, Camillo Giuriati, asked the DIE for a measure of mercy (since Abenaim was a member of the Fascist Party and his father had died in the War), the reply from Attilio de Cicco, head of the DIE, was unequivocal: “The fact that Jewish pupils have been admitted to [Italian] schools abroad does not justify any exemption from the strict provisions contained in Royal Decrees of 15 and 17 November 1938, no. 1779 and 1728, which concern administrators, employees, and teachers.”60

Even if a large-scale, direct expulsion was never applied in Italian schools in Egypt, fascist antisemitism had serious consequences for schoolchildren. In the year 1938–9, the Regina Elena kindergarten in Cairo lost 50 Jewish students (31 Italians and 19 foreigners) out of 190, removed by their families after the implementation of the racial laws. In Alexandria, the effects were just as dramatic: at the Francesco Crispi elementary school, enrolment dropped by half, with 55 Jewish pupils removed.61 In the secondary schools of Alexandria, unified in 1932 into the Scuole Littorie, the director Cleto Crosta announced the loss of about 20 Jewish students out of 50 in 1938–9, and 16 out of 31 the following year.62 The antisemitic turn also affected youth-targeted associations and extracurricular policies. All Jewish and foreign students were expelled from the programmes of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio all’Estero, while the courses in Italian language and culture offered in the Jewish schools of Cairo and Alexandria were suddenly interrupted. Only a year earlier, in June 1937, the Italian consulate had praised their success and even encouraged their expansion.63 This contrast reveals both the efforts made by Italian local authorities to attract Egypt’s Jewish population, and the depth of the racial laws’ impact on Italian schools abroad. Disrupting a whole cultural and political strategy, 1938’s antisemitic turn ultimately weakened the very institutions it sought to fortify.

Conclusions

The relationship between Italian schools in Egypt and the local Jewish population reflected more than a peripheral dynamic in the British Empire: it was the echo of Italy’s broader imperial strategy in the eastern Mediterranean. Even before the fascist regime, Italy had sought to assert cultural and political influence in a region dominated by competing European powers, clashing with the British presence. In Egypt, Italian diplomacy pursued a consistent objective – to entrench a growing presence in an imperial space informally governed by Britain – although deployed through diverse initiatives.

On the ground, however, this strategy revealed the limitations and contradictions of Italy’s imperial agenda, which had to adapt to specific local dynamics, to the influence of other foreign actors, and sometimes to the initiatives of its own agents. Italian schools in Egypt illustrate how indirect imperial power was not only applied but also negotiated at the most local level. Italy actively sought the support of local Jewish élites in order to weaken British authority, developing partnerships with prominent figures such as the Chief Rabbi of Alexandria, and working together with other initiatives directed at the Sephardi Jewish communities of the Dodecanese and Aegean Sea. At the same time, the written records produced by consuls, teachers, and other local agents show that the interactions between Italians and local Jews sometimes redefined or subverted state decisions. In this light, the reach of fascist imperial ideology appears neither immediate nor monolithic. While antisemitic sentiment began to surface in diplomatic environments during the 1920s, it did not immediately translate into formal discrimination. In fact, it was during this period that Italy’s political outreach to Levantine Jews reached its height. Yet the introduction of the 1938 racial laws, which abruptly dismantled decades of cooperation, exposed the fragility of these policies. It also reveals the impact of authoritarian logic, which was a distinctive feature of the fascist regime (as recounted at the beginning of this article). In fact, unlike Britain or France, Italy radically overturned its previous strategy of cultural diplomacy, replacing it with an imperial project grounded in a racial reorganization of the Mediterranean.64 Only the Vichy regime would later adopt comparable antisemitic measures in its colonial territories, and only in 1940–1, in two distinct waves (the first Statut des Juifs, of 3 October 1940, excluded Jews from the civil service, the army, and the media; the second statute, of 2 June 1941, significantly expanded the range of professional prohibitions).65 By contrast, Italy’s shift appeared both earlier and was implemented with much greater speed. A single, formal political decision was enough to erase a longstanding tradition of dialogue, trust, and exchange, built through decades of informal power. Ultimately, the abrupt collapse of Italy’s longstanding alliances with Levantine Jews demonstrates how fragile its imperial influence could be, even if directed by an authoritarian regime, or maybe precisely because of that.

Notes

  1. Since the 1950s, the concept of “informal empire” has been widely used, debated, and critiqued: this article draws in particular on the works of Ann Stoler, who questioned the concept’s heuristic value itself, and Bernard Attard, who admitted its utility for describing the projection of power and influence beyond the boundaries of formal territorial control. Although I do not dismiss its utility, my analysis will prefer alternative terms (such as indirect rule, indirect government, or imperial influence) to describe the exercise of political, diplomatic, or cultural authority in contexts where imperial power was not directly asserted by a single country. Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty”, Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006), https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373612-005; see also Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, Empires in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Bernard Attard, “Informal Empire: The Origin and Significance of a Key Term”, Modern Intellectual History 20, no. 4 (Dec. 2023): 1219–50, https://doi.org/10.1017/S147924432200052X.⮭
  2. Alexis Rappas, “The Fascist Temptation: British and Italian Imperial Entanglements in the Eastern Mediterranean”, Contemporary European History 33, no. 2 (May 2024): 651–68, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777322000728; Martino Oppizzi, Les juifs italiens de Tunisie pendant le fascisme: Une communauté à l’épreuve (1921–1943) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2022).⮭
  3. Gudrun Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989); Dario Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt: An Imagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s–1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).⮭
  4. Ministero degli Affari Esteri (MAE), Censimento degli italiani all’estero alla metà dell’anno 1927, Rome, Provveditorato Generale dello Stato, 1928.⮭
  5. Krämer, Jews in Modern Egypt, 17.⮭
  6. Anna Scarantino, “La comunità ebraica in Egitto tra le due guerre mondiali”, Storia Contemporanea 17, no. 6 (1986): 1042–3.⮭
  7. Robert Ilbert, Ilios Yannakakis, and Jacques Hassoun, eds., Alexandrie 1860–1960: un modèle éphémère de convivialité. Communautés et identité cosmopolite (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1992), 105.⮭
  8. David Todd, A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); Fabrice Jesné, La face cachée de l’empire: l’Italie et les Balkans, 1861–1915 (Rome: Publications de l’École Française de Rome, 2021).⮭
  9. Mona Russell, “Competing, Overlapping, and Contradictory Agendas: Egyptian Education under British Occupation, 1882–1922”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 21, no. 1–2 (Aug. 2001): 50–60, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-21-1-2-50.⮭
  10. Marta Petricioli, “Italian Schools in Egypt”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24, no. 2 (1997): 179–91.⮭
  11. Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt.⮭
  12. Frédéric Abécassis and Patrick Cabanel, eds., Une France en Méditerranée: écoles, langue et culture françaises, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Créaphis, 2006); François Arnoulet, “L’enseignement congréganiste en Tunisie aux XIXe et XXe siècles”, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 72, no. 1 (1994): 26–36.⮭
  13. Massimiliano Fiore has recently examined Italian and British propaganda in the interwar Middle East, but schools and Jewish–Italian relations only in Palestine: Anglo-Italian Relations in the Middle East, 1922–1940 (London: Routledge, 2024), 35–86.⮭
  14. Mark Irvan Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2008).⮭
  15. Daniel Grange, L’Italie et la Méditerranée (1896–1911): les fondements d’une politique étrangère (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1994).⮭
  16. Marcello Arduino, Consoli, consolati e diritto consolare (Milan: Hoepli, 1908), 158–9.⮭
  17. Ministry of Finance, Population Census of Egypt, 1917 (Cairo: Government Press, 1921), 514–25 recorded that about 45 per cent of the 24,354 British subjects came from Great Britain, 25 per cent came from Malta, roughly 10 per cent from Greece, and 5,686 from other parts of the British Empire.⮭
  18. Davide Amicucci, “La comunità italiana in Egitto attraverso i censimenti dal 1882 al 1947”, in Tradizione e modernizzazione in Egitto, ed. Paolo Branca (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000), 84.⮭
  19. Marta Petricioli, “La comunità italiana in Egitto”, PoloSud 2, no. 3 (2013): 45.⮭
  20. Krämer, Jews in Modern Egypt, 9. The Egyptian Arabic dialect was generally spoken by local Jews and Karaites, although exact percentages are not available; ibid., 27.⮭
  21. Scarantino, “La comunità ebraica in Egitto”, 1034.⮭
  22. Anh Nga Longva, “From the Dhimma to the Capitulations: Memory and Experience of Protection in Lebanon”, in Religious Minorities in the Middle East: Domination, Self-Empowerment, Accommodation, ed. Anh Nga Longva and Anne Sofie Roald (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 47–70.⮭
  23. Krämer, Jews in Modern Egypt, 32.⮭
  24. Stefano Marcuzzi, Britain and Italy in the Era of the First World War: Defending and Forging Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 338, 9–10, respectively.⮭
  25. Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015).⮭
  26. Fiore, Anglo-Italian Relations in the Middle East, 2–4.⮭
  27. Enzo Collotti, Nicola Labanca, and Teodoro Sala, Fascismo e politica di potenza: Politica estera 1922–1939 (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000), 25–9.⮭
  28. Fiore, Anglo-Italian Relations in the Middle East, 4–5.⮭
  29. Rappas, “Fascist Temptation”.⮭
  30. Angelo Piattelli, “David Prato, una vita per l’ebraismo”, La Rassegna mensile di Israel 79, no. 1/3 (2013): 109–232, https://doi.org/10.1400/232835; Simonetta della Seta, “Gli ebrei del Mediterraneo nella strategia politica fascista fino al 1938: il caso di Rodi”, Storia Contemporanea 17, no. 6 (1986): 1008; Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt, 120–7.⮭
  31. Sergio Minerbi, “L’azione diplomatica italiana nei confronti degli ebrei sefarditi durante e dopo la 1a guerra mondiale (1915–1929)”, La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 47, no. 7/12 (1981): 86–119; Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt, 123–6.⮭
  32. David Kenneth Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44–58.⮭
  33. Choate, Emigrant Nation.⮭
  34. Krämer, Jews in Modern Egypt, 82.⮭
  35. Ibid., 27.⮭
  36. Jacob M. Landau, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 87; Abécassis and Cabanel, France en Méditerranée.⮭
  37. Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt, 121.⮭
  38. Marta Petricioli, Oltre il mito: L’Egitto degli italiani (1917–1947) (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007), 27.⮭
  39. Francesco Fera, report of the year 1927–8, June 1928, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri (hereafter, ASDMAE), Archivio Scuole 1923–1928, dossier 606. My translations unless otherwise stated.⮭
  40. Italian consul to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 16 July 1926, ibid., dossier 607.⮭
  41. Regia scuola elementare femminile Regina Elena, “Vedetta italica lontana”, March 1926, ibid., dossier 602.⮭
  42. Roberto Cantalupo to Mussolini, 12 Oct. 1932, ASDMAE, Affari politici (1931–1945), Egypt, dossier 4 (1932).⮭
  43. Francesco Fera, report on the year 1925–6, May 1926, ASDMAE, Archivio Scuole 1923–1928, dossier 606.⮭
  44. Francesco Fera to Italian consul of Alexandria, 20 July 1929, ASDMAE, Archivio Scuole 1929–1935, dossier 744.⮭
  45. Fiore, Anglo-Italian Relations in the Middle East, 73–4.⮭
  46. Anne-Marie Fortier, “The Politics of ‘Italians Abroad’: Nation, Diaspora, and New Geographies of Identity”, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 7, no. 2 (1998): 197–224; Patrizia Salvetti, “Le scuole italiane all’estero”, in Storia dell’emigrazione italiana: Arrivi, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Emilio Franzina, and Andreina de Clementi, 2 vols (Roma: Donzelli, 2002), II, 535–49.⮭
  47. Della Seta, “Gli ebrei del Mediterraneo”; Valerie McGuire, Italy’s Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895–1945 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020); Andreas Guidi, Generations of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).⮭
  48. Cornelio di Marzio, Il fascismo all’estero (Milan: Imperia, 1923), 11, 34.⮭
  49. Matteo Pretelli, Il fascismo e gli italiani all’estero (Bologna: CLUEB, 2010), 33–4.⮭
  50. Piero Parini quoted in Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, “Enjeux de la diplomatie culturelle fasciste: de l’Italien à l’étranger à l’Italien nouveau”, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Italie et Méditerranée 114, no. 1 (2002): 176–7.⮭
  51. Report, 29 May 1931, “Insegnamento italiano nelle scuole israelite in Egitto”, ASDMAE, Affari politici (1931–1945), Egypt, dossier 2 (1931).⮭
  52. Petricioli, Oltre il mito, 27.⮭
  53. Report, 21 Dec. 1937, ASDMAE, Archivio Scuole – I Versamento (1936–1945), dossier 75.⮭
  54. Francesco Fera, report on the year 1927–8, June 1928, ASDMAE, Archivio Scuole 1923–1928, dossier 606.⮭
  55. Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt, 123–4.⮭
  56. Della Seta, “Gli ebrei del Mediterraneo”, 1027.⮭
  57. Camilla Hawthorne, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022), 91–124; Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London: Routledge, 2002), 69.⮭
  58. McGuire, Italy’s Sea, 185–6.⮭
  59. Report, 11 April 1939, ASDMAE, Archivio Scuole – I Versamento (1936–1945), dossier 75.⮭
  60. Attilio de Cicco to Camillo Giuriati, 13 Dec. 1939, ibid., dossier 76 bis.⮭
  61. Report of 19 Oct. 1938, ibid.⮭
  62. Reports of 27 June 1939, 20 Aug. 1940, ibid.⮭
  63. Consular reports on the Goutte de Lait primary school, Cairo, 21 June 1937; on École Fondation de Menasce, Alexandria, 31 May 1937, ibid., dossier 73.⮭
  64. Davide Rodogno, Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo: le politiche di occupazione dell’Italia fascista in Europa (1940–1943) (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).⮭
  65. Denis Peschanski, “Les statuts des Juifs du 3 octobre 1940 et du 2 juin 1941”, Le Monde Juif 141, no. 1 (1991): 9–20, https://doi.org/10.3917/lmj.206.0009.⮭