Mussolini in new edition

April 25. Italy’s day of liberation from Fascism.

I recently wrote about how Mussolini’s frasi celebri – quotes from his historical speeches, which, writes Umberto Eco, “marked all my childhood, and whose most significant passages we memorized in schools” – can still be read on many walls in Sicily. This may indicate that Sicilians still look with some nostalgia to the days that brought the island some economic boom and a harsh suppression of the mafia. Or also the fact that Italians are generally quite indifferent to political slogans, and actually don’t care if the inscription is there or not. This would probably be the most painful to Mussolini in hindsight. And finally, it also shows how the façades of many buildings have not been renovated for at least eighty years.

The problem emerges when they are finally being renovated.

Just ten years ago I wrote about those brush-painted or stenciled wall inscriptions in Budapest, on which the occupying Soviet army announced in Russian, in the spring of 1945, that Мин нет, i.e. the house had been searched and no mines were found in it. When I was a high school student, there were still plenty of such historical relics all over the city, but after the change of regime in 1990, they were not spared during the renovation of the façades, and they disappeared one after another. At the time of the 2013 post, I had only found two of them intact. Even a friend of mine, a restorer wrote me that he himself had removed one during the restoration of the façade of the palace at Andrássy út 4. While in Vienna, at the restoration of Bäckerstraße 13, special attention was paid to the preservation of the Soviet sign. Incidentally, this is the iconic house where The Third Man (1949) was filmed at the same time as the inscription was created.

Around this time last year, the owners of Lilie’s Café in Cefalù, roughly on the right edge of the panorama above, faced a similar dilemma. The façade of the building displayed for eighty years, increasingly worn, this quote of Mussolini:

«In sette mesi abbiamo conquistato l’Impero, in tre mesi appena lo abbiamo pacificato.»

“In seven months we conquered the Empire, and we pacified it in exactly three months.”

This quote is from Mussolini’s speech of December 18, 1936, given to the residents of Pontinia, the new town founded on drained Agro Pontino. It refers to the occupation of Ethiopia, which was conquered by brutal methods during the seven months between October 3, 1935 and May 5, 1936. In fact, Mussolini considered it to be part of the great Mediterranean Roman empire to be restored, so much that he was also willing to accept international sanctions for it (about which see the Gangi marble plaque, presented in the previous post).

For eighty years, the inscription did not disturb anyone, just like all the other ones throughout Sicily. But in October 2021, Harrison Ford came to Cefalù to film the last episode of the Indiana Jones series. The location was Lilie’s Café, which was renamed Clemente Cafè, and the sign on its façade was covered with a large Cinzano advertisement.

And when filming ended in January 2022, they left a generous sum of money to the bar to restore the façade. That’s when the question became relevant: what to do with the inscription? It is one thing to indifferently watch it disappear for eighty years, and another thing to intentionally remove it during restoration, or, on the contrary, to preserve it when there was an opportunity to remove it.

This question sharply divided Cefalù at this time last year. The local and provincial newspapers interviewed the residents one after another. These either feverishly demanded the removal of the inscription “reminding of the most terrible crimes in history”, or voted to keep it as a historical memento.

In the end, the second solution won, with the support of the local office of the protection of monuments, but in a rather contradictory way. The façade was completely repainted, and the inscription was subsequently repainted on it – with a modern typography different from the original, in a different color, and on a slightly different place.

“In this way, it’s worth nothing more than a graffiti hastily painted in the night”, says a comment in the Postazioni militari in Sicilia 1940-1943 Facebook group.

The result is actually worse than that. The action did not preserve the original historical memento painted in 1936, but merely updated the memory of Mussolini’s saying. At its sight, you don’t feel like seeing a historical ghost sign, but that this saying, which reminds us of a tragicomic “Empire” created through genocide and despite international public opinion and sanctions, is still important to someone there. Between the two original alternatives, removal and preservation, this third was certainly the worst choice.

Ethiopians greeting Mussolini’s portrait in occupied Mekele, November 1935

Easter Sunday in Sardinia

The Sardinian Easter calendar is unusual for a northern Catholic. On Good Friday there is no Passion, only an evening Deposition from the Cross. On Holy Saturday there is nothing at all, only wainting, and on Easter Sunday morning there is the meeting between the risen Christ and His mother, which takes place in the main square of every village and town.

The ceremony of the meeting, s’incontru, is perhaps most traditionally celebrated in Oliena, which I wrote about exactly seven years ago. The background atmosphere and noise is provided by the descendants of the bandits of Oliena, who stand on the rooftops from erly morning, and shoot blanks. You can see in this the evil-chasing noise of Carnival, or the framing of the men as courageous followers of Christ, but perhaps most of all a phallic fertility magic. An interesting change (because tradition changes, too) is that while seven years ago they would shoot from every rooftop and balcony in the entire village to emphasize the authority of each clan, today this is limited to the loggia of the Church of Mary in the main square, so it has become a purely community event specifically organized in honor of s’incontru. 

The statue of Mary spent the time between the deposition from the cross and Sunday morning in the church of St. Francis, and that of Jesus in the church of the Holy Cross, from where they will carry it to the meeting after ten in the morning. We infiltrate the church of the Holy Cross, where the boys and girls in traditional costumes who will make up the procession are dancing. Seven years ago they sang four-part Sardinian songs as a preparation. Today they just offer cakes around and adjust each other’s attire before the big event.

Our procession arrives at the corner of the main square before that of Mary. We stop and wait.

Finally, the procession of Marry appears at the far corner of the long square. It enters the square without stopping, since she must welcome there the risen Christ. Our procession also starts. As she enters the carpet of blooming wild lavender that has already been spread on the main square, the men and women in traditional costumes standing in line on both sides also join behind her to be the first witnesses of the meeting between mother and son. The bell is rung in the tower of the Mary Church. The bandits are firing their guns.

Then the whole community marches in two lines to the former Jesuit church of St. Ignatius, where the festive mass began at the ringing of the bells during the meeting.

It is interesting that there are hardly any believers in traditional costume at the mass. They have to show off outside. Those wearing traditional dress are dispersed on the street of the church and the nearby Aldo Moro square, greeting each other, toasting each other in and outside the bars, petting each other’s children, posing to and taking photos, marveling at the beauty of each other and themselves. And they are happy for the strangers taking their photo, and say thanks with a sincere smile. The children also practice this in a natural way. No one turns away from the camera, everyone takes it for grantd that in this costume they have to represent the common identity. From individuals, they become components of a jointly created ritual spectacle. Together they display and reinforce the traditional identity and cohesion of the village for themselves and the outside observer.

As the mass ends, the women begin to offer cakes and wine to everyone present. A girl with an accordion sits down on the Berlinguer square, and the round dance begins. Gradually everyone joins it, whether in traditional costume or not. This round dance is so important to traditional Sardinian communities that they had also arranged their thousand-year-old menhirs in this shape and presumable danced around them in this way to experience communion with the dead.

Around lunchtime, the community begins to disperse. As they walk through the main square, each takes with them a bouquet of the wild lavender with the footprints of Mary and Jesus on them.

Posed Jews

The Slat al-Azama or Lazama synagogue in Marrakesh was founded in 1492, which suggests that its founders were the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in that year. Today, the synagogue stands on Talmud Torah Street in the Mellah, the Jewish quarter, but it was not originally built there. How can this be? No, they did not move the synagogue there, but the Jewish quarter here. In 1557, the then-enthroned Saadi dynasty began the construction of “Renaissance” Marrakesh by building a beautiful mosque in the middle of the bazaar and surrounding it with a comprehensive urban development, the wealthy Mouassin district. And for the Jews living there up to then, they created the Mellah here, around the Lazama, right next to the royal palace: partly for a more effective protection, and partly so that the sultan would always have the inexhaustible wallet at hand.

The Jews resettled here were mainly Berber Jews, the oldest Jewish inhabitants of Morocco, about whom I have written before. Today, a photo exhibition organized in the synagogue’s former yeshiva testifies to their traditional culture, and especially to their schools active in the villages of the Atlas. These often employed Ashkenazi Hasidic rabbis as teachers who settled in Morocco from the 19th century, and they were financially supported by French Jews from the early 20th century.

The synagogue, which is the only functioning synagogue in Marrakesh after the aliyah of the 1950s and 1960s, is no longer a reminder of those times. In the 1930s and 1990s, it was renovated with the support of American and Israeli Jews,in the uncharacteristic modern style usual there.

In these months, this Jewish mix is enriched by a new, exotic shade. In two rooms of the yeshiva, a photo exhibition was opened from the pictures of Dorit Lombroso from Israel, which presents a very interesting Jewish group from India, the Bnei Menashe, the sons of Menasseh.

Menasseh’s sons, writes the exhibit’s introduction, live in North-East India, in the swampland between Mizoram and Manipur. They speak various versions of the local Tibeto-Burman languages. Before the 19th century, they were animists and feared bounty hunters. They were converted to Christianity by British missionaries, and from the parallels between their own mythology and the Bible, they came to the conclusion that they were actually Jews, and that their mythical ancestor, Manmási, was none other than Menasseh, the son of patriarch Joseph.

That’s it for the introduction. However, Israeli anthropologists * also add that the main evidence forthe parallels was that in 1951, one of the leaders of the then already Christian Mizo-Kuki-Chin tribes had a dream revealing him that his people came from Israel. With his followers, he founded a syncretic Presbyterian revival movement that recognized Jesus as the Messiah, but adopted several precepts of Jewish law and also incorporated many elements of pre-Christian local folklore into its cult.

The awakening to Jewish roots, writes Shalva Weil, probably would not have happened without the British Christian missionaries, who, wherever they appeared in the 19th century, tried to show out the traces of the “ten lost Jewish tribes” displaced by the Assyrians in the local population. Their most spectacular achievement is the Mormon Church, which, according to the self-produced second season of the Bible, The Book of Mormon, is descended from the ten tribes that fled to South America. It is quite ironic that the Mizo-Kuki-Chin tribes found their own Jewish identity through the guidance of lunatic Christian missionaries.

The movement would probably have remained a local Protestant cult, had Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, the founder of the Amishav organization working to resettle the lost Jewish tribes to Israel, not noticed them in 1983. Rabbi Avichail learned about the sensational discovery from a Mizo insurance agent, and he immediately traveled to the scene. During his local research, he found that the local legends in fact contain some elements that can be paralleled with the Bible. Based on these, he willingly recognized the ethnic group as Jews and introduced orthodox Jewish teachings among them. He even obtained money – from fundamentalist Christian organizations working to promote the Second Coming – to settle them in Israel, but the Israeli government did not recognize Menasseh’s sons as eligible for aliyah.

In the meantime, as it usually happens, another Jewish organization, Shavei Israel, was also created to repatriate the lost tribes under the leadership of Michael Freund, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, and the two men deadly fell out with each other. This was also facilitated by the fact that Menasseh’s sons also quarreled with each other regarding the leading clans – if nothing else, this is a strong evidence for their Jewishness. By 2005, Shavei Israel had Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, declare the Jewish descent of this ethnic group and its eligibility for aliyah. From then on, about 3000 of the movement’s members moved to Israel, where they were sent to Gaza and the occupied territories in the West Bank as Jewish settlers, to increase the Jewish population, for bullet catchers and, lacking other professional qualifications, for soldiers. This was probably the main motivation for right-wing Jewish politics to recognize the Mizo-Kuki-Chin as Jews.

There were also many opponents of the recognition. DNA tests carried out in the meantime and Israeli academics both testified against the group’s Jewish origins. The local Presbyterian church and Hindu organizations, the other Mizo-Kuki-Chin tribes who deny that Menasseh’s sons are different from them, and the Indian government, which looks suspiciously at another outward-looking people in the border region already plagued by numerous separatist movements, have raised their voices against the local proselytizing activities of the Israeli rabbies.

Dorit Lombroso’s photos definitely cast their vote in favor of the group’s Jewishness. The photographer captures the bearers of exotic Jewish blood renewal in the style of the orientalizing-idealizing soft porno portraits known from her site. In the bosom of unspoiled nature, the young swampland Jews perform the ceremonies of Judaism or their own traditional works that can be paralleled with biblical Jews, in their most beautiful clothes – which are often so new that they are probably costumes borrowed for the occasion – and in front of beautiful settings, rich fabrics, piles of holy books and carefully installed objects of the tradition. Serious-looking boys and girls with eyes cast into the future, dancing in fields of flowers and under blossoming trees, practicing traditional male and female roles. A growing generation of Jewish settlers. It’s like seeing propaganda photos of the settlement to Palestine from the 1920s and 1930s. And that is probably the case.