In 1939 Rabbi David Prato was ousted from his position as Chief Rabbi of Rome. His dismissal was the result of a bitter struggle in the Roman Jewish community between the opponents of the fascist Mussolini government and a nationalist faction who believed that the security of Jewish life lay in allegiance to the regime. The previous year Italy’s Jews had been stunned by the government’s sudden introduction of antisemitic, so-called racial laws. Jews could no longer attend schools, own businesses, work in the civil service, be employed in the professions or marry non-Jews. The nationalist faction in the Jewish community believed that their only option was to immerse themselves fully in their Italian identities, to oppose Zionism and to dismiss any suggestion that they were a separate community. Their opponents profoundly disagreed. Rabbi Prato, a Zionist, left Rome and settled in Tel Aviv. The Rome community appointed the Chief Rabbi of Trieste, Dr. Israel Zolli, to replace him.
Zolli was born as Israel Zoller in 1881, in the Galician town of town of Brody. The town is now in Ukraine but in those days it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied in Vienna, completed a PhD in Philology at Florence University and studied for his ordination in the Italian Rabbinical College. He was appointed to his position as Trieste’s Chief Rabbi just as World War One was coming to an end. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled and the city became part of Italy, Zoller changed his surname to Zolli, to give himself an Italian identity.
Zolli seems to have taken a far greater interest in academic matters than in his work as a rabbi. He became a sought-after figure in Trieste’s vibrant intellectual and cultural scene, delivering lectures and taking part in debates. He published many books and articles and, while still serving as Trieste’s Chief Rabbi, he accepted a second job at the University of Padua as Professor of Old Testament Studies. He was obliged to join the Fascist Party in order to accept the position, an act which doesn’t seem to have been particularly unusual for an ambitious Italian Jew at that time.
Zolli’s reputation, scholarship and his willingness to accommodate himself to fascism made him an attractive candidate to the nationalist leaders of Rome’s Jewish community, those who had forced Chief Rabbi Prato to resign. And Zolli did not simply pay lip service to fascism. A visitor to his synagogue reported that when the Torah scrolls were carried in procession through the congregation the aisles were lined with Jewish soldiers in fascist uniforms, giving fascist salutes.
The fascist soldiers saluting the Torah scrolls may have been an act of political expediency on Zolli’s part. But there was nothing expedient about his reaction when 200,000 of Mussolini’s soldiers overran Abyssinia, his aeroplanes dropping canisters of poison gas and bombs. Zolli hailed Mussolini and congratulated ‘the heroic brave sons of Italy who are fighting for the glory of the Fatherland in the name of civilisation against savage and contemptible enslavement’.
In the early part of World War II, Italy served as a transit point for Jews fleeing the Nazis and hoping to sail to Palestine. Many of those who passed through Rome turned to Zolli for succour and assistance. He supported them as best he could and negotiated with the city authorities on behalf of his local community whose livelihoods were at stake because of the racial laws. As far as anyone could see, Zolli’s behaviour was exactly that expected of a rabbi striving to help his community at the most difficult and unimaginable of times. Until September 1943, when everything changed. Mussolini was deposed and the Nazis entered Rome. Zolli said that between September 10th and 18th he went to the synagogue every day to warn the community to close their businesses, scatter and hide. Then he went into hiding himself, refusing to tell anyone where he was.
Zolli’s withdrawal from public life and his refusal to allow his whereabouts to be known irked the Roman community. Nobody was surprised that he was hiding, he would have been killed had the Germans found him. But they did not expect him to disappear completely from communal life, to abandon his community at the time of their greatest need. Particularly since another rabbi, David Panzieri, continued to hold secret services throughout the German occupation. They certainly did not expect Zolli to seek refuge with a Catholic family who did not know that he was the Chief Rabbi of Rome. Their outrage grew when members of the Italian Underground reported seeing him being escorted one night into the Vatican. He stayed there until the Allied liberation of Rome in September 1944.
When Rome was liberated the leaders of the community demanded his resignation. They accused him of deserting his community, maintaining no contact of any kind with them during the German occupation. The Allied Military Government, who had bigger things on their minds, insisted he remained in post. In September 1944 he preached at the Jewish New Year services in the Temple Maggiore before a congregation of 2,000 people. He preached again ten days later on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In his biography Zolli described what happened:
It was the Day of Atonement in the fall of 1944, and I was presiding over the religious service in the Temple. The day was nearing its end, and I was all alone in the midst of a great number of persons. I began to feel as though a fog were creeping into my soul; it became denser, and I wholly lost touch with the men and things around me. And just then I saw with my mind’s eye a meadow sweeping upward, with bright grass. In this meadow I saw Jesus clad in a white mantle, and beyond his head the blue sky. I experienced the greatest interior peace. If I were to give an image of the state of my soul at that moment I should say a crystal-clear lake amid high mountains. Within my heart I found the words: “You are here for the last time.” I considered them with the greatest serenity of soul. The reply of my heart was: So it is, so it shall be, so it must be.
Israel Zolli went home and told his wife about his revelation. She seems not to have expressed any great surprise; perhaps she had always known this day was coming. A few months later, on February 13th, 1945, Israel Zolli converted to Catholicism. At his baptism he took the name Eugenio Maria, the former name of Pope Pius XII, who had baptised him.
Several theories have been put forward to explain Zolli’s conversion. Some say that it was an act of revenge against the Roman community who had reviled him when he went into hiding. Others called him a coward, running away due to an inability unable to face his community after the war. More charitably, it has been suggested that he was fulfilling a promise made to the Pope, that if the Jews were protected during the Nazi occupation, Zolli would convert. Zolli rejected all these explanations. He said that it was the culmination of a process that had been going on for many years.
“I was a Catholic at heart before war broke out; and I promised God in 1943 that I should become a Christian if I survived the war. No one in the world ever tried to convert me. My conversion was a slow evolution, altogether internal. I am beginning to understand that for many years I was a natural Christian….”
This, he insisted, did not lessen his Jewishness or his affection for Jews:
Do you think I love the Jews less because I have become a Catholic? … No, I shall never stop loving the Jews. I did not compare the Jewish religion to Catholicism and abandon one for the other. This is the greatest tragedy of my life. I slowly, almost imperceptibly became a Christian and could no longer be a Jew.
Much has been written in recent years about Eugenio Maria Zolli, as he was known in the Catholic church. But perhaps the last word should go to the historian Cecil Roth, an expert in the history of Italian Jewry. Writing to the Jewish Chronicle in London in 1945, just a week after Zolli’s conversion, Roth declared:
I cannot recall when, even in recent years, I have been more profoundly distressed than by the news of the apostasy under exceptionally shameful circumstances of the Chief Rabbi of Rome. Here is no catchpenny, titular Synagogal dignitary, such as conversionists often acclaim, but the spiritual head of the oldest Jewish community of Europe, who has disgraced the superb tradition of his office and proved false to his flock at their hour of greatest need…. This appalling example, with its suggestion of long-continued insincerity, is likely to undermine the convictions of many more. I foresee rapid and widespread disintegration, which is likely to prove disastrous.
Devasted by the event, Cecil Roth was unsparing in his rebuke. Fortunately, the foresight with which he ended his letter turned out not to be the case. Zolli is now a footnote in the history of the Italian Jewish community.