Europe´s (In)Visible Jewish Migrants

By the end of the 1960s to the mid-1970s, some thousands of Jews were still living in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Their presence in the region, however, was almost put to an end by events that destabilised the entire area: colonial and post-colonial tensions, the rise of Arab nationalism and the Six- Day War between Israel and Arab countries in 1967. Since the 1950s, Jews started leaving the countries where they had been living for centuries and many of them chose Europe to start a new life because they were citizens of a European state or because they considered themselves as Europeans in terms of cultural and linguistic affiliations. In those decades, they were not alone crossing the Mediterranean. In the wake of decolonisation movements in fact, an impressive number of Europeans and non-Europeans were repatriated to Europe from former colonies, including North Africa. Despite the scale of this phenomenon, the impact that these return migrations had on migrants themselves and on host nations in Europe, remained until recently an invisible subject in academic literature. Inspired by this long neglected issue in European history, Europes (In)Visible Jewish Migrants focuses on Jewish migrations from the MENA region towards Europe during the second half of the twentieth century and addresses the following questions: How visible or invisible are Jewish migrations from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe in academic research? Is assessing their consequences on migrants themselves, as well as on host societies (nations and Jewish communities), possible at all? The project aims at assessing the impact that the arrival of Jews from the MENA region had on hosting European Jewish communities. To achieve its aim in an original way, the project explore the not yet explored case of Jewish migrations from Arab Muslim countries to Italy and in particular it considers how they transformed Italian Jewry in terms of demography, communitarian structures, religious praxis. On the one hand, the project will advance Jewish studies by portraying a richer picture of the multiple possible ways by which Judaism(s) can be lived in contemporary Europe. On the other hand, researching these migrations will allow us to unveil the social and cultural entanglements between Europe and the MENA region and their long-lasting legacies. This research is particularly important today, as the very idea and history of European integration, which promotes multiple religious, ethnic and cultural belonging as a factor that enables integration whilst respecting diversity, are put into question.

"Profuga egiziana conoscenza perfetta inglese, francese, spagnolo, offresi per bambini dama di compagnia. Signora C., Telefono" (Fondo comunità ORT, Profughi Egitto 1956-1962, Archivio storico della Fondazione CDEC, Milan). Less than two lines on a half sheet of paper: It was probably a note to be published in the small announcements section of the Bollettino, the main publication within the Jewish community of Milan. An Egyptian lady, fluent in English, French, and Spanish, was looking for a job as a babysitter or a chaperone. A phone number and a surname, that was all that was included: less than two lines that both show and hide, make visible and invisible - her hidden past, her precarious present, her uncertain future. Ms C. was one of the few thousands Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region who settled in Milan, Italy, between the 1940s and 1970s: individual fragments of the a complex, historical phenomenon during which, in the space of few decades, Jewish presence in those regions was dramatically reduced and put almost to an end. Although a marginal case in comparison to other resettlement directories-such as Israel, France, or Canada-Italy not only represented a transit point for but also became home to MENA Jews. The overall aim of the project was to get closer to the meaning MENA Jews make of their migration trajectories and lifestory, as they express it in interviews and testimonies. Oral sources then, of women and men who at various stages of their life were forced or decided to leave the place they used to live. Not all of them called that place "home," although many did. The challenge was, in a way, to reconcile the fragment and the whole in what I call an AesthEt(h)ics of the fragment: where with ethic I mean - anthropologically - the responsibility of the researcher "to acknowledge and communicate the emotional engagement of ethnography" (Carroll 2015: 693); and with aesthetic I refer to an experience connected to "our ability to develop a certain kind of knowledge through our feelings" and "related to our senses" (Ribeiro and Caquard 2018): the senses expressed by the testimonies, my own senses as they are mobilised by the testimonies, and the audience's senses. The results I offer to the general public are a series of creative and non-conventional maps which support the interpretation of personal and collective experiences of displacement and attachment, longing and belonging across the Mediterranean. I hope that, despite the negative impact that the Covid-19 pandemic had on my research, my project managed to map and shed some light on what has long remained uncharted territory: Jewish migrations from North Africa and the Middle East to Italy.