Abstract
This essay demonstrates that it is impossible to appreciate the actions of the Italian communist Emilio Sereni without considering his Zionist background. Anyone who is interested in understanding the complexities of communism in the past century and to avoid simplistic conclusions about this ideology will benefit from the study. The problem at stake is that researchers often approach communism in a monolithic manner, which does not adequately explain the multiform manifestations (practical and theoretical) of that phenomenon. This ought to change and to this extent this essay hopes to contribute to that recent strand of historical research that challenges simplistic views on communism. More specifically, by analysing the Management Councils that Sereni created in postwar Italy, we can see that many of their features in fact derived from, or found their deepest origins in, his previous experience as a committed socialist Zionist. The study, then, also relates Sereni to and looks at the broader experiences of early twentieth-century Zionism and Italian communism in the early postwar years.
Highlights
In recent years, communist studies have been enjoying what one may call a renaissance after the apparent stagnation which lasted the quarter-century that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Gilman-Opalsky 2011, 20)
Promising scholarly trends on communism that developed in the 1970s and 1980s struggled to develop amid the ending of the USSR project, with the history of, for example, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) often becoming the stick with which neo-liberal politicians like Silvio Berlusconi hit at rivals, depicting them as supporters of one, monolithic communist project that was totalitarian in essence and, obviously, evil (Fantoni 2014, 822)
The so-called ‘second generation’ of historians of communism was enriched by geographical awareness, empirical abundance and theoretical acuteness but struggled through the 1990s ‘end of communism’ (White 1987, 209–11)
Summary
Communist studies have been enjoying what one may call a renaissance after the apparent stagnation which lasted the quarter-century that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Gilman-Opalsky 2011, 20). Enzo reiterated the point a few years later, writing in 1936 that the Zionist aim may be described in general terms as the effort to concentrate Jewish masses in Palestine in productive occupations on the basis of the possibilities of employment that will be created by private and national Jewish capital This concentration must lead naturally to the political as well as the economic autonomy of the Jewish masses. As Enzo and others emphasised, labour must be productive, though not necessarily associated with efficiency, and isolation avoided at all costs This second part of this essay, after a brief summary of the period between his alleged ‘conversion’ and the end of the Second World War, intends to demonstrate that the councils that Sereni envisaged at the end of the conflict reflected many of the Zionist themes discussed above. This, as I hope to have demonstrated, had been built on the substantial foundations of socialist Zionism and continued to be informed by them
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