Swapping Homelands: Italian Jews in the United States and Palestine, 1938–50

This paper studies the effect of national projects on refugee immigrants. It does so by comparing between the adaptation of Italian Jewish refugees in Palestine to that of Italian Jewish refugees in the United States. The several hundred refugees who arrived in Palestine following Italy’s 1938 racial laws met with a socialist-Zionist worldview. This worldview dismissed their previous life in Italy as bourgeois and ‘Diasporic’ and asserted Palestine as their only home. At the same time, the similar number of Italian Jewish refugees who migrated to the United States faced American wartime sentiment. Americans expressed hostility toward Axis Italy, treated refugees with suspicion, and demanded their full loyalty to the United States.

This paper shows how Italian Jews responded to these pressures. On the eve of the racial laws, the migrants-to-be still regarded Italy as their beloved homeland. But over the course of a decade, the majority of immigrants in both countries changed their concept of home. Refugees who decided to stay in Palestine after the war became hard-line Zionists. And those who remained in the United States became faithful Americans. Both groups ceased to think of Italy as their only home and some rejected their previous homeland altogether.

Although both American society and Zionists in Palestine pressed the immigrants to adopt new loyalties, this study also reveals how differently the two countries affected the refugees. When the war ended and some refugees sought to return to Italy, Americans’ suspicion of foreigners facilitated such a return. In contrast, Zionist pressure on the refugees to remain in Palestine led to emotional confrontations between those who stayed and those who left. By employing personal and familial sources, this paper contributes to the understanding of how national ideologies can transform immigrants’ identities, and how this impact depends on individuals’ class, age, and gender.