Yet hovering over all these interactions was the long shadow of Fascist policy. The regime’s strategy of »divide and rule« was well underway. Seeking to undermine Ethiopia’s dominant Orthodox Christian identity, Italian authorities had already begun funding mosques and Islamic schools in the occupied territory. Jewish groups, too, became objects of colonial manipulation. Viterbo’s mission, for all its ethnographic detail, was deeply embedded in this colonial matrix. He was to assess, categorize and court potential allies – especially among wealthier Jewish merchants – who could reinforce Italian authority.
The economic hierarchies laid bare in Viterbo’s census were ripe for exploitation. The Yemenite and Adenite Jews, thanks to their commercial acumen and transregional connections, occupied the upper rungs. The Beta Israel remained at the bottom. For colonial policymakers, this inequality offered a political instrument. By supporting wealthier Jewish networks, they hoped to create a loyal elite, willing to collaborate in exchange for privilege. The Menahem Messa company with its commercial sprawl and communal leadership became a lynchpin in these efforts.
Language, too, became a battleground. Viterbo proposed the teaching of Italian to Jewish children as a method of assimilation – a clear extension of Fascist ideology, which equated linguistic unity with political loyalty. But for Jews steeped in different tongues – Hebrew, Ge’ez, Amharic or Arabic – this imposition threatened to erode sacred traditions. Many resisted, refusing to let their identity be swallowed by imperial fiat.
Resistance was only amplified by the contradictory imperial policies towards Jews. While Fascist propaganda in the colonies touted tolerance and protection of minority communities, events in Italy told another story. The very year Viterbo completed his report, racial laws were enacted in the colonies, followed soon after by a full implementation in metropolitan Italy of anti-Jewish laws in 1938. Italian Jews, some of whom had served in the colonial administration overseas, found themselves caught in a paradoxical bind. Tasked with facilitating colonial agendas, they became emissaries of a regime that would soon turn on them. This betrayal of Italian Jews by their own government undercut any lasting trust between Jewish Italian emissaries and the colonial communities they sought to engage.
By the time the British-led forces liberated Ethiopia in 1941, and Emperor Haile Selassie triumphantly returned, the Italian occupation was not only broken – it was discredited. What remained of Jewish life in Addis Ababa was marked by fracture and fatigue. The brief hope that the Fascist regime might offer protection or advancement had long since dissolved under the weight of antisemitic persecution. As Viterbo’s mission shows, however, the story of Ethiopia’s Jews during the Fascist occupation resists simplistic binaries: it is not merely a tale of oppressor and oppressed but of intersecting diasporas, uneven power, cultural continuity and disruption. Viterbo’s census – both its content and context – reveals the paradoxes of Jewish life under colonialism: resilience and hierarchy, solidarity and suspicion, collaboration and coercion. More broadly, it reminds us how colonial powers often manipulate minority identities, drawing lines of difference not just to understand – but also to control.
