Living in Liminal Spaces: Jewish Refugees in Italian Displaced Persons Camps, 1945-1951
How did refugees in postwar Italy create “homes” for themselves, and build community, in the midst of vertiginously navigating the past and future—and why did it matter? This book argues that this temporary “home” within the DP camps became a space for rewriting life narratives in anticipation of creating a new future for oneself. This rebirth of Jewish life, however, held tensions therein between the desire to hold on to the past while constructing an entirely new reality. It demonstrates that interactions between organization and individual in the camps created new understandings of home, family, and identity, in light of postwar ruptures. It explores themes of rehabilitation and agency in everyday life during displacement and migration. This is particularly important in relation to their involvement with North African Jewish migrants who were denied official refugee status and asylum. This project connects histories of displacement with the role of states and humanitarian groups in aiding or hindering refugees’ creation of new homes and futures. It intervenes in this literature to argue that their differing methods of rehabilitation clashed in the camps. My project is at once broad and focused: by examining the actions of Jews in DP camps within Italy, I am able to both bring together and advance the findings of studies from two continents and numerous historiographical trajectories. This scholarship includes Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe who were often Ashkenazi, traditional, and Zionist, North African Jewish refugees who were often Sephardic, traditional, and religious, and international aid workers.
Articles
When the Waters of the Mediterranean Parted: Jewish Libya and the Trajectory of Escape
Forthcoming in Sephardic Horizons, Vol. 11, no. 2. Since the end of World War II in 1945, Jews from Eastern and Central Europe had viewed Italy as the thoroughfare to British Mandatory Palestine/Israel. Although blockades and quotas had significantly prolonged their tenure in Italian Displaced Persons (DP) camps—camps set up by the Allied Forces and the United Nations in Germany, Austria, and Italy to handle the refugee crisis caused by the war—by 1949 many had made their way to Israel. Jewish refugees from North Africa were also hoping to follow the same trajectory. The experiences of Jews in postwar Libya were inextricably linked to their time as colonial subjects of Italy. The double-edged sword of racism and antisemitism created a dual burden for Jews in Italian- run Libya. Yet, despite this weighted situation, several thousand Libyan Jews still decided to use Italy as the byway to Israel. Postwar relations between Jewish Libyans and their non-Jewish Libyan neighbors and between the Jews and the British Military Administration (BMA) were tense at best. This tension erupted into violence, which sparked the mass exodus of nearly the entire Jewish population to Israel.
This paper examines the choice of a minority in the Libyan Jewish community to travel to Italy as an escape route to Israel following the 1948 riots. These were individuals, families, and small groups (often of youths) who paid smugglers or relied on the direct intervention of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to help them with this “mysterious migration” out of Libya. It looks first at the DP camps and the legacy of Fascism more broadly in Italy and Libya. It then demonstrates how the interweaving of support from various organizations and agencies made the journey of these Libyan Jewish migrants possible and ultimately enabled them to continue to Israel, despite their not acquiring the proper paperwork or refugee status.