Ethiopia and the Jews: Beta Israel and European Jewry between the Holocaust and Colonialism (1933–1948)

This dissertation examines the entangled histories of Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) and European Jewry between the 1920s and 1948, situating them within the overlapping frameworks of Ethiopian, Fascist, and British imperialisms. It asks why Ethiopia—an independent African empire with an indigenous Jewish population—became a site of projection for European Jewish hopes of refuge, settlement, and solidarity during the age of colonialism and the Holocaust. Drawing on extensive multi-archival research across Europe, Africa, Israel, and the United States, the study reconstructs failed projects of Jewish emigration to Ethiopia, the ambiguous role of Italian and British authorities, and the marginal position assigned to the Beta Israel within both imperial and Jewish discourses. By foregrounding absence, mediation, and internal hierarchies, the thesis challenges linear narratives of persecution and rescue, revealing how colonial logics shaped Jewish identities, solidarities, and exclusions. It ultimately reframes Ethiopia as a crucial—yet neglected—laboratory for a global, imperial history of Jews and the Holocaust.