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FeatureWorld

Strangers connected by the indefinable bond of Jewish peoplehood

Michael Gawenda visits Italy for a taste of its Jewish history and is humbled by the sense of 'shared fate' he feels with his fellow travellers and locals.
Michael Gawenda
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Primo Levi grave

Primo Levi’s grave in Turin (Dariusz Kuzniar)

Published: 25 November 2024

Last updated: 26 November 2024

We were what the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has called October 8 Jews. Americans and Canadians and Australians. One of us was from Ecuador. She came from a Jewish community of around 400 people. We were Orthodox Jews, Liberal Jews, traditional Jews and secular Jews like me. But we were all October 8 Jews.

Most of us on this YIVO tour through Jewish Italy — well, northern Italy to be exact because we did not go to Rome where more than half of the country’s 30,000 Jews live — were middle-aged or older and it seemed to me that we all had been scarred, changed, by October 7 and its aftermath.

YIVO is based in New York. It is an archive of hundreds of thousands of books and documents, a research centre that has been used by hundreds of scholars, and a library. Its focus is on East and Central European Jewry and on Yiddish language and Yiddish culture.

YIVO for some time has run tours to Poland and Lithuania, places which were once the centres of the Yiddish world.  Now it was taking a group across northern Italy, from one small northern Italian town to another where once Jews had lived for hundreds of years and then to cities of my tourist dreams — Genoa and Florence and Venice and Modena and Parma ― in search of a Jewish past that was unlike my own.

I had come to Italy for a sort of respite from being an October 8 Jew. I had come to find exotic and even mysterious Jews who had a Jewish past that was not mine, and a culture and a language that I did not share and that was alien to me.

Italian Jewry has a long history, dating back to Roman times when after the destruction of the second temple in 70AD, the Romans took thousands of Jews to Rome as slaves and domestic servants. The descendants of these Jews are most of the Roman Jewish community.

For the rest of Italian Jewry, their history in the main goes back to 1492 when the Jews were expelled from Spain and were allowed into some of the kingdoms and provinces of Italy — this was almost 400 years before Italian unification — where they would be confined to ghettos.

We were all October 8 Jews: scarred, changed, by October 7 and its aftermath.

How would we be connected? What bound us to each other, the Jews of Italy and the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, Jews like me?  Were we bound together by something like Jewish peoplehood, which is hard to define, bound together by what the French Tunisian writer Albert Memmi memorably called our fate, that all of us were bound by a common fate: we were fated to be Jews?

Perhaps half of my fellow travellers spoke or at least understood Yiddish. There was a sort of immediate recognition of each other from the moment that we met, in the restaurant at the hotel in Turin where our journey was to start. We had a shared past. We looked familiar to each other, sounded familiar to each other. Were familiar to each other.

I spent two days alone in Turin before our journey together began. I had some hope that here in Italy I would be spared the graffiti of the red triangles in support of Hamas and the seemingly never-ending marches demanding an end to Zionism. I hoped to be back in a pre-October 7 world.

The tour started at a dinner in the hotel when we sat together and each of us stood to identify ourselves, say who we were, the sort of Jews we were. It became increasingly apparent to me that we were October 8 Jews. We were hoping for a holiday from the Jewish world into which we had been cast.

The Great Synagogue of Florence
The Great Synagogue of Florence
19th-century synagogue in Allessandria restored after WW2.
19th-century synagogue in Allessandria restored after WW2.

The next morning, we walked together to a square where a guide, a youngish Jewish man who wore a yarmulka, told us something about the history of the Jews of Turin. His Turin family history went back hundreds of years, and we stood there, in this small square looking at the centuries old buildings that surrounded it, a small city block of buildings, some three stories high, with small wood-framed windows and with low ceilings, which had been the Jewish ghetto of Turin.

For hundreds of years, from the time they were expelled from Spain in 1492 and were allowed into the kingdoms and independent city states of Italy, the Jews were separated from the general population, forced to live in walled ghettos. They could not own property. They were barred from most trades.

They were, in the main, engaged in various forms of moneylending and finance — banking for instance — which was forbidden by Catholic Church edicts. Even though they were consigned to ghettos, within decades, the Jews in the ghettos were speaking only Italian. The rabbis gave their sermons in Italian. In 1848, with the revolution that began the process of Italian unification, the walls of the ghettos began to be taken down.

The synagogues were like museums, the congregations mostly ghosts, the bimahs shrouded in silence.

From the square, we walked to the Grand Synagogue which is the only still functioning shul in Turin, Italy’s third largest city.  There is a primary school attached to the synagogue, though more than half of the children are not Jewish. There are only 700 Jews in Turin.

Soldiers were waiting for us outside the synagogue when we arrived and not far from the soldiers three security guards were standing by the synagogue entrance. They were all there to make sure nothing bad happened to this group of foreign Jews, this group of October 8 Jews.

And for the next two weeks, as we visited picturesque small towns and paused in front of buildings that had been the Jewish ghetto of the town, soldiers and police and security guards were there to watch over us. Even outside the synagogues we visited, many dating back to ghetto times, synagogues in the main hidden behind unmarked walls and large doors, police were waiting for us and security guards were there to protect us. 

In the small towns and villages and largish cities —Turin and Casale Monferrato and Genoa and Florence and Modena and Parma and even Venice — the synagogues were like museums, the congregations mostly ghosts, the bimahs shrouded in silence, the doors of the Aron Kodesh lovingly preserved and often stunningly beautiful. Sad and forlorn and exquisite.

And mysteriously familiar. I felt connected to these shuttered shuls in Italy, many in places where Jews no longer lived. I had long ago — when I was a teenager — abandoned shul-going. I was a secular Jew. I was a Jew who knew no Torah and no Talmud and could not, without help, even recite the Kaddish prayer.

What then bound us to each other, the Jews of Italy and the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, Jews like me? Were we bound together by what the great French Tunisian writer Albert Memmi — who died in May 2020 at the age of 99 in Paris ― memorably called our shared fate? In much of his writing Memmi wrestled with the question of what it meant to be a Jew. He described himself as an Arab, an anti-colonialist, and a universalist who nevertheless was a committed Zionist. A man, for all the seeming contradictions, fated to be a Jew.

In my bones I felt connected to these places, these ghost-inhabited shuls.

In my bones I felt connected to these places, these ghost-inhabited shuls. Even secular Jews like me, whether we liked it or not, even Jews who lived lives as if they were not Jews, remained Jews with an unbreakable connection to Judaism and connected by the complicated and sometimes terrifying reality of being — sometimes with murderous, genocidal consequences — the chosen people.

Some 7000 Italian Jews perished in the Holocaust. Most of them were murdered in Auschwitz. They were transported to Auschwitz from Nazi-built transit camps. They were Jews from all over northern Italy, from small towns and even villages and from cities like Turin and Florence. The round ups of Italian Jews, started in April 1943 when the Germans invaded northern Italy.

The war by then was lost — the allies were in southern Italy and moving north. There had been no deportations from Italy — Mussolini and his fascist government had refused to round up Italian Jews. In the main, the fascists were not antisemitic. Many Italian Jews were supporters of fascism in the 1920s and into the 1930s.

They considered themselves to be Italian patriots. They remained supporters, many of them, until 1938 when Mussolini, under pressure from Hitler, passed race laws that forced Italian Jews out of schools and universities and the professions and from most workplaces. Suddenly, Jews for whom their Jewishness meant very little, Jews who were first and foremost proud Italians, were suddenly outsiders, strangers, treated as if they were diseased, chosen in a way that they had never thought possible.

Among the Jews who were rounded up and forced into transit camps before they were shipped to Auschwitz, was Primo Levi who, when the race laws were passed, was a 19-year-old chemistry student at Turin University. The race laws allowed students like Levi to complete their degrees.

In February 1944, Levi, along with several hundred Italian Jews who had been held in a transit camp, was transported to Auschwitz. Most died there. Levi survived. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz in January 1945.

In the Jewish cemetery in Turin, there are graves going back centuries. We stood beside Primo Levi’s grave. There is a Japanese maple tree at the foot of the grave and the stone is fringed with ivy. It is inscribed with this:

PRIMO LEVI
1919 - 1987

Primo Levi's grave
Primo Levi's grave

That is all. Levi was ―and remains ― the greatest of writers about the Holocaust. If This Is a Man is a life-altering book describing what for most humans — most writers — is indescribable. If This Is a Man transcends memory and time and even the bearing of witness. It is magical, the way great writing is magical.

After visiting the grave, we went to the Primo Levi Centre in Turin. The Centre’s director talked to us about the importance of Levi in Italian literature. He said Levi was one of the great Italian writers of the 20th century. 

Today, Levi would be considered a Zionist by many on the Left and therefore a supporter of genocide.

But the director’s English was poor. He was frustrated by his inability to impress upon us what Levi meant to him and to the researchers at the Centre. And then he was asked what impact October 7 and its aftermath has had on the Centre and on the reputation of Primo Levi.

He understood the question. Primo Levi had been a staunch supporter of Israel. He believed Israel was vital as a refuge for Jews and for Jewish agency in the post-Holocaust world. He remained committed to Israel even though he was a fierce critic of the Begin Government, of the settler movement and in particular, of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

But today, Levi would be considered a Zionist by many on the Left and therefore a supporter of genocide. His book, If This Is a man, would be regarded by some as a form of Zionist propaganda. As the director struggled to answer the question, it was clear that he, too, was an October 8 Jew.

Chosen Jews. On a stone wall beside the entrance to the synagogue in Genoa were the names of 300 Jews of the city who were rounded up, sent to transit camps and then murdered in Auschwitz. On the front wall of the synagogue, beside the large wooden doors, were glued small bits of paper.

The caretaker of the synagogue, an old man with a brown weatherbeaten face, told us that on this wall, for the anniversary of October 7, the small and growing ever smaller community of Jews was going to put up photographs of the hostages still held in Gaza. He too was an October 8 Jew.

Our trip ended in Venice. We went to the ghetto at the centre of which was a large square surrounded by buildings that looked ancient — some of them three stories high — which had been the ghetto in Venice, the first Jewish ghetto in Europe, established by the Venetian rulers in 1516.

Around the square and in some of the narrow side streets, there were kosher cake shops, kosher restaurants, a community centre, a small Chabad centre and five synagogues, though only one synagogue had a rabbi and remained a functioning shul for the city’s 400 Jews. Beside a wall covered in Holocaust sculptures that was topped with barbed wire at the perimeter of the ghetto area, there was an army post and outside the little building stood four armed soldiers.

YIVO had organised for a young woman to be our guide in the ghetto. She was perhaps in her late thirties. She was modestly but fashionably dressed, and she wore a matching headscarf. She was a professional guide, and she gave us a little history lesson about the Jews of Venice and the ghetto.  She said the life of the Jews of the ghetto was not like we might imagine, that the Jews were not poor and that they lived Jewish lives and that the people of Venice were not always enemies of the city’s Jews.

As she spoke, I looked across the square and there, hanging out of the window of a third-floor apartment was a Palestinian flag. She, too, looked up at the flag and she shook her head just slightly and went on with her history lesson.

When she was finished, we gathered around her, and someone asked her about her life in Venice. She was silent for a while and then she said she had been lucky enough to find a Jewish boy, a local Jewish boy, who was religious like her and who wanted to have a Jewish family, a Jewish life. To find each other in a community of 400 people, she said, was almost a miracle.

They had two daughters. When her daughters were born, she gave each of them a Hebrew name—Shulamit and Zelda. But after October 7, she decided to give them Italian names so that when people asked, she would not have to reveal that her girls were Jews.

Then she said that one day, they would have to leave Venice if they wanted their girls to have the chance to lead Jewish lives, to marry Jews, to raise Jewish children. They would probably go to Israel when her mother — who would not leave — was gone. It would be the end of her family’s 500-year history there.

The tour ended in Venice, with a visit to the Jewish cemetery on the Lido. We were taken to the cemetery on launches, their engines working hard as we crossed the lagoon. The cemetery dates back to 1328 and is one of the oldest cemeteries in Europe. The 1200 dark stone tombstones had no names, the names erased by time. It was a desolate place and yet, at the same time, there was something about it — the fact that it was still there, this burial place of Jews going back more than a thousand years — that was affirming.

I went on to Rome alone More than half of Italy’s 30,000 Jews live there. Many live in the Jewish district which was once the ghetto. It is a place of Jewish life. Outside the Great Synagogue — the magnificent high-domed cathedral-like synagogue of Rome ― there were police cars and police posts but there were also beautifully dressed Jewish men and women, Jews lined up in the courtyard of the synagogue waiting to go inside ― I assume for afternoon services.

Not far from the synagogue, on the wall of an imposing white building, were 250 photographs of the Israeli hostages. The ones of the hostages who had died or been murdered were black-rimmed and where possible, beneath the photograph, was the date when they died.

From inside the building came the sound of children laughing and shouting. The children came streaming out of the main entrance where their parents were waiting for them. I watched these children whose ancestors most likely had been brought to Rome as slaves almost 2000 years ago. Roman Jewish children shouting and laughing.

Later that evening, not far from the synagogue, elderly Jewish men and women brought out chairs and sat across the road from the kosher restaurants that line the main street of the Jewish district. They chatted with each other in Italian, oblivious to the throngs of tourists passing by. I stood beside them and remembered the words of Albert Memmi.

We were fated to be Jews.

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About the author

Michael Gawenda

Michael Gawenda

Michael Gawenda is one of Australia’s best-known journalists and authors. In a career spanning more than four decades, Michael has been a political reporter, foreign correspondent in London and Washington, and was editor and editor in chief of The Age from 1997 to 2004. He has won numerous journalism awards including three Walkley awards.

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Comments3

  • Avatar of Rabbi Barbara Aiello

    Rabbi Barbara Aiello4 December at 12:46 pm

    A very thoughtful and moving article. On your next visit to Bella Italia I invite you to travel south to the “toe of the boot” to Calabria where our synagogue is located – the first in south Italy in 500 years since Inquisition times. We are a thriving community of b’nei anusim Jews. Benvenuto and Shalom. RBA

  • Avatar of Myer Bloom

    Myer Bloom27 November at 11:15 pm

    Excellent essay by Michael Gawenda

  • Avatar of Michele Alberth

    Michele Alberth26 November at 06:17 am

    Thank you so much for this article, Michael.
    8th October Jews! Interesting expression – that’s exactly how I feel, too!