A Mediterranean tale
An area in souther Italy reveal tales about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and how liberal capitalism is on a perpetual fight against traditional societies
A statue of the Virgin Mary lies under a small bridge crossed by southern Italy’s regional train, standing amid Calabria’s countryside. Ahead, the Ionian Sea, an elongated bay of the Mediterranean immersed in lush vegetation.
The underpass connects the seaside to the urban centre of Locri, an historic town of this Mediterrenean region, whose name derives from the ancient Greek region of Locris.
The Locride, this is how the whole urban centre is called, is an area on the coastline whose inhabitants proudly carry their Hellenic legacy, considered by many to be the cradle of Western civilisation.
It is also the utter place of Italy with the gaze turned firmly toward the East. From here, Palestine is straight ahead.
For a while, my family and I commute daily under that bridge hosting the Virgin Mary. Each time the statue was lying on the street. We pick it up, put it on the top of the wall that ran along. The day after it was on the street again.
From Rome to Beirut, the public devotion toward the street Madonnina is palpable. Yet that one crushed on the concrete, desacralised amid the indifference of all.
I was sure the statue did not fall due to natural events, such as winds or vibrations from the train crossing. Only later though, I had an hint on perhaps why in that god-fearing town of southern Italy a statue of a Virgin Mary was dishonoured.
The statues represented one of the few black Madonnas of Spain, Our Lady of Guadalupe. And our lady of Guadalupe enshrined in the Monastery of Santa Maria de Guadalupe, is mete of pilgrimages, but also home of a horrific past.
In 1484, the Inquisition Tribunal burned 52 Jews who converted to Christianity, accused of not being truthful enough. Those were times when even the breast milk of a Jewish woman converted to Christianity was considered impure. It was a time in which the Catholic church was obsessed with converting Jews, and excluding those who resisted from Christian society.
It was a time that continued for centuries, with one constant litany: the good Christians pray for the cunning Jews, may God forgive them for being so cunning.
Unspeakable secrets
It is widely believed that 40 per cent of Calabria’s population has Jewish background. Although some scholars assess this percentage to a much lower number, around 15 per cent, is still make it a relevant fringe of the population. It is a cultural heritage largely withheld by locals, and Italians in general.
Traces of our eastern roots are usually ignored in the mainstream culture, or simply pinned as estranger forces coming from the other side of a far away world. Yet, Jewish footprints in southern Italy go back to the earliest Christian years, and they form the very essence of its soul.
Many Jew landed to this side of the Ionian coast around the 4th century from Palestine and Egypt due to the Byzantine persecutions. Some began to live in the cave of the Aspromonte mountains as hermits, living a life of confinement and prayers, which would lead to the widespread monachism, a tradition of the area.
Others lived in hiding, secretly passing on practices that would preserve the history of their roots to the next generations. The Locride presence of hermits and saints is permeated by Jewish spirituality.
The Genius Loci of this land, a distinctive character that ancient Roman beliefs shape places according to its people, is a tale from the East.
The Mediterranean coasts served for centuries as conjunction of routes, before becoming the modern merciless frontier. Even in literature, Italy its often described as western civilisation tied to eastern culture. Yet, this past remain largely ignored, and not accidentally.
While much focus is put often put the Shoah and the crimes of the Nazis, too little is still talked about the anti-Semitic policies that characterises the history of the Catholic Church, and shapes the destiny of areas such the Locride, in Calabria.
The Vatican has often dismissed this period of history as dogmatic, claiming that it is primarily related to the Jewish rejection of Christ as the Messiah.
However, the violent rhetoric against Jews, accused of plotting and serving the liberal system to destroy the religious status quo has been behind the policy of forced conversions, which pushed many Italian Jews to formally abandon their faith.
The traumatic generational drama of these persecutions is still undoubtedly felt across the country. I always wonder why many jewish feel constantly attacked by any challenges or attempt to debate the Israeli-Palestinian questions, and I believe too little reflection is given to the latent, condiscending anti.-semitism that shape Europe way before the Shoah, as told by Andrè Schwarz-Bart master novel, “The Last of the Just”.
“Hasn’t the West colonised half of the world?”; “Have NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Somalia, been lesser brutal than the IDF?” “Why the focus, outrage of media and public opinion on the crimes in Palestine if not because the one perpetrating are Jewish?”
After all, it was Pope Pio XI, praise for its stand against the Fascist racial law in Italy, that refused to cut off from the liturgy of the Holy Friday the words “perfidious jew”, reiterating the then widespread idea that if Jewish have always been persecuted it was due to their cupidity, thus their fault.
Radicate hate
I still remember a lesson about my first lesson about war journalism at university. They show us first a reportage of UK soldiers in Iraq advancing the line in clean uniform, disciplined, as if war could be something aseptic and neutral.
Then a dispatches from Liberia, where militias composed largely by teen and covered with blood, shoot randomly, all edited with some hip hop song as sound track. Warfare changes, according to how you tell.
In western public perception the brutality of war is usually relegated only to certain populations, extraneous to any western moral code. It is also used quite strategically.
It was by slaughtering Western journalists that ISIS gained notoriety and rose to quick fame, self-declaring an Islamic State. The calculated media exposure of Gaddafi’s abuses prepared the public opinion to accept his quite violent murder and overthrow guided by the UK, US and French leaders.
I believe Israel is intentionally being so disgracefully inhuman and brutal, causing outrage but also exposing latent cultural bias, and used them to re-iterating the very reason of its own existence: Jewish can be equal - and safe - only within a Jewish State.
Alfter all, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern zionism, received no Jewish religious education but formed his idea of the need of a jewish State in Paris, during what has come to be known as the Dreyfus Affair, which exposed the widespread anti-semitism even in the post-revolutionary, egalitarian France.
Rather than some messianic promise, it was the gradual yet firm acknowledgement that no civic emancipation would ever solve the Jewish position in European land, if not their complete assimilation to the western world and society, that convinced him of the essential need of a Jewish State.
The very idea that Jews needed a separate citizenship, or they will be a threat to their nation they live in, was actually the leitmotiv for centuries of discrimination’s policies. By contrary, soon after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Morocco was accused of antisemitism for not sending its Jewish population to Israel.
In Jerusalem, group as the Naturai Karta, literally the Guardians of the City, choose to live amid Arabs in the old city, fearing to be contaminated and assimilated by Israel, which they consider a secular western state.
Manifesting the unseen
Jewish had always feared assimilation more than annihilation. The very first wave of Zionism was a call to spiritual revival of Judaism, promoting a simpler, mindful way of living and a return to the safer Orient to avoid being fully assimilated into the modern western world.
Only later it became a colonizer project, aim to establish and promote that very lifestyle they were escaping. “They want us to go to live in the city”, said Basel Adra in the movie No Other Land (2024) meaningfully.
With the Israeli-Palestinians conflict we are witnessing the ultimate brutal attack to the oriental culture and history, and the consequential gradual full assimilation of custom, practices, way of life.
It is not only about the annexation of Palestinians as a population, but it also regard the need to assimilate them as people into a modern world, like what happened to the oriental Jews arriving in Calabria.
It is something advanced restlessly locally in Europe as well as other part of the world such Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia by the soft hand of international Agencies such UN, the IMF, World Bank.
It is not casual that even among Palestinian defenders no one has dared to challenge the labelling of terrorist of Hamas as terrorists despite in-depth analysis, research, and books such as “Hamas, unwritten chapters”, written by Azzam Tamimi, academically confuting those claims.
Whether or not the people of Gaza and the West Bank will hold their ground won't matter in the long run. Their resistance already open pathways for many to be inspired, and follow.
And spread a certainty: the only way to peace is to acknowledge, and understood the past. Otherwise, its soul will always resurge, even randomly through a Vergin Mary lying abandoned in the dirt of a underpass.
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