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Gianluca Fantoni, "Soldiers, Angels, and Avengers: A History of the Jewish Brigade" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Roberto Mazza
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Roberto Mazza and you're listening to the New Books Network. Welcome. And today my guest is Gianluca Fantoni. Gianluca is the author of Soldiers, Angels and Avengers, the history of the Jewish Brigade, published by McGill Queen's University Press in 2026. Soldiers, angels and Avengers tells the compelling story of a Jewish Brigade infantry group, the 5 Military Unit recruited primarily from the Jewish population of Palestine and the only exclusively Jewish military unit to fight under the British flag during World War II. The Otto reconstructs the military and human experience of a brigade in Italy and investigates its enduring and controversial place in memory and public debate. Formed in 1944, the Jewish Brigade saw combat in the final stages of the Italian campaign, where its soldiers fought with distinction against German forces after the war. Many of its members, who often had little or no military training and included artists, scientists and farmers, engaged in clandestine efforts to smuggle Holocaust survivors and weapons into Palestine, laying the groundwork for the future Israeli state. Others sought retributions against Nazis and collaborators in acts that revealed both the trauma of genocide and the desire for justice. Before we delve into all of this, first things first. Gianluca, welcome.
- [01:36]
Gianluca Fantoni
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [01:37]
Roberto Mazza
Now, let's start with a simple question. Can you tell us something about yourself and the origins of the book?
- [01:44]
Gianluca Fantoni
Yeah. Well, I'm an historian of modern Italy and of modern Europe, and I teach at Nottingham Trent University in Britain. A central strand of my work concerns the relationship. The relationship between history, memory and politics. So not only what happened in the past, but also historical events are subsequently remembered, represented, used, sometimes abused, manipulated in public debate. I've always been interested in the moment when historical knowledge leaves the ivory tower of academia and enters the public sphere and thus acquiring meanings that historians cannot entirely control. The origins of this book lie precisely in a contemporary controversy. Every year on 25th of April, Italy celebrates its Liberation Day, marking the end of fascism and Nazi occupation and reaffirming the anti fascist foundation of the republic. Traditionally, representatives of the Italian Jewish community participated in the demonstrations alongside other fascists, other sorry anti fascist organization. From the early 2000s, however, the choice made by some Jewish groups to participate into the parade displaying the flag of this Jewish brigade, the Jewish Brigade infantry group. This choice began to generate increasingly bitter disputes. Historically, its presence was entirely legitimate. The brigade was a unit of the British army which had fought in Italy against Nazi Germany. So for all intents and purposes, they participated into the liberation of the country. Visually, however, its blue and white flag with the Star of David is virtually the flag of the State of Israel. So these demonstrators of the Jewish Brigades were parading with the flag of Israel. Clearly, many radical left and pro Palestinian groups read it not as an historical military banner, but as a statement about contemporary Israel in Palestine. Initially, I intended to study only these, only the so called 25th April as an example of the public and political use of history. Yet I soon discovered that almost everyone involved refer confidently to the Jewish Brigade and its history without having a reliable knowledge about this unit. The Brigade was celebrated by some as a proof that Zionist and Zionism had contributed to the liberation of Italy and condemned by others as this was as a symbol of oppression. Neither interpretation adequately reconstructed the actual unit and its history, the people who served in it and the circumstances in which they acted. I therefore decided that I needed to reconstruct the history of the Jewish Brigade as well as investigate its memory. Living and working in Britain placed me in a particularly good position because the Jewish Brigade Infantry Group was a formation of the British Army. So a large portion of the relevant documentation is held at the British Archives. The project developed over many years. There were several outputs. Conference paper, an article in the Journal of Modern History of Chicago, a very long article for 14,000 words article, and eventually an Italian book published by an Audi in 2022 and now, which was also recipient of a prize, and now the English edition of the book by McGill Quince. That gave me the opportunity to revise and expand the work for an international readership.
- [05:22]
Roberto Mazza
We will go back to the question of April 25, but at the moment I want to just start looking at the beginning of the book. So the book opens with a very good question. Why a book on the Jewish Brigade? So can you tell us a little more about how you structure the book itself, the goals and also the sources that you have used for your narrative?
- [05:43]
Gianluca Fantoni
Well, the first reason for writing the book is that the Jewish Brigade offers an unusually rich vantage point from which to examine several major histories at once. It belongs to the military history of the Second World War, but also to the history of Mandatory Palestine, Zionism, the Holocaust and its aftermath, the dissolution of the British Empire, the creation of Israel, pre war and post war migration to Palestine and the politics of memory. So all these aspects can be analyzed through the prism of the history. Using the history of the Jewish Brigade as a prison, if you like, a relatively small military formation, there were not even 5,000 men becomes therefore very interesting observation point on the transformation undergone by Europe and the Middle east before, during and after World War II, a second objective was corrective. Much of the popular literature that revived the interest in the Brigade from the late 90s onward rely heavily on memories and memoirs and interviews. It rely on memory, really intended to reproduce an heroic narrative. The literature performed a valuable role in preserving testimony and returning a neglected subject to the public attention. Nonetheless, it frequently inflated. The Brigade's military contribution, presented its members as politically homogeneous, 5,000 Zionists, so everyone thinking alike and treated later developments, especially the foundation of Israel, as though they were almost inevitable. So there is almost a teleological conception of history in the existing narration of the Jewish Brigade. I wanted to write a proper history, not just based on memoirs and memories, on oral statements, but on archival documents, which is what I did, and a history that was, as much as possible, well balanced, while also, as I said, investigating the memorialization, the post war memorialization of the Jewish Brigade. So this book is therefore both historical and in a sense, is metahistorical. The title of the book, Soldiers, Angels and Avengers, summarize three of the roles associated with the unit. The soldiers fought in Italy, so they were soldiers. They were also angels because they assisted the Jewish communities and Holocaust survivors, organizing relief and helping former refugees to travel towards Palestine. And they were also avengers because some sought extrajudice, sought retribution against former Nazis and collaborators. They formed a squad and they went into Germany hunting down Nazis and trying to kill them as many as they could. So that's, you know, that was what interested me, the fact that the same person can be so many different things in a little space of a few years, can be a soldier, an angel, an avenger, and even terrorist. Because some of these soldiers of the Jewish Brigade that they went back to Palestine, some of them joined their goon, and they started staging terrorist attacks against the British soldiers. So the very soldiers with whom they had served during, soldiers who don the same uniform they have been wearing during World War II. So history is complex and people can make different choices because of a variety of motivations.
- [09:26]
Roberto Mazza
Right? History is complex. And as you just mentioned, just looking at the Jewish Brigade, you see how many corners of history you can cover. So the history of a Jewish Brigade has been used or misused, probably better saying, for political purposes in various contexts. And you talk about that throughout the book. Can you elaborate more on your views in relation to the use of memory and history for such a use?
- [09:53]
Gianluca Fantoni
So memory and history overlap, but they're not the same thing. They're not identical. Memory is essentially individual and collective identity. But also memory selects experiences that the community Believes must be preserved, gives them emotional and moral meaning and transmits them from one generation to another. History has a different responsibility. The historian must ask what has been omitted, must compare competing testimonies. Competing versions must reconstruct context and remain open to conclusion. That might be uncomfortable for some side of actually for every side. So we could say that memory is knowledge from the past, but is not knowledge of the past? I don't know. If so, it's knowledge from the past, but not necessarily knowledge of the past. The political use of memory begins when the past is employed primarily as a weapon in present day political struggle. In the book I suggest several recurring features that help us recognize this process. So when we are in the presence of political use of history. One is the removal of an event from its original historical and geographical context, for example. Another is the disproportionate magnification of one episode while related to facts and episodes are deliberately ignored. The third is what I call the direct connection between the past and the present. Something that happened many decades ago, even centuries ago, is discussed as if it was automatically relevant for the present, as it supplied answer to political questions today. And finally, I must say, partisan interpretation often created and circulated by activists, journalists and politicians for political purpose. That doesn't mean that only historians should be doing history. Historians can be biased and there are non professional historians who can produce a great history. However, historians usually have more methodological concerns, they have more caveats. And an honest historian should try as much as possible to present, to present the complexity of history. While very often journalists and politicians tended to have a more partisan reading of the past because it serves their present day rhetoric, their present day discords.
- [12:22]
Roberto Mazza
Let's now start discussing the book. So every chapter of the book opens with a short story related to a British officer, Lieutenant Barclay. Could you share more about the story in general and how does the story connect with your narrative?
- [12:42]
Gianluca Fantoni
Yes, the story of Jack Barclay provides the book with a kind of detective story running through the larger historical narrative. On the morning of 5th of April 1946, this investigator of the British Military Police with the Special Investigation Branch was ordered to travel from Milan to Genoa, actually to La Spezia. And because during the night, the night before, South African military police, in collaboration with the Italian authorities, had detained several British army soldiers. And there was also a convoy full of Holocaust survivors, 36 lorries filled up with Holocaust survivors in the port of La Spezia. When new senators Barclay arrived in La Spezia, he realized that there was a smuggling operation organized by soldiers of The British Army. In fact, they were actually soldiers of the Jewish Brigade. They were Jewish Palestinian soldiers that while serving in the British army were also organizing the smuggling of refugees and also weapons to the Holy Land because with the aim of favoring of creating the conditions for the creation of. Of Israel. It is a very interesting story and I wanted, well, I wanted to introduce it, to have it in the book for several reasons. First of all, because, and this is something I've learned in the United States when it is good to start every chapter with a story, inviting the reader in with some anecdote or a story that might interest the readers. And this is what I do. Every. The story of this investigation, because this is a detective story, essentially opens in chapters of every. Every books. Every of the books. Sorry, every chapters of the, of the. Of the book is a prologue to every. To. To all the chapters of the. Of the book. And, and also it's in a document completely unpublished before and so analyzed for the first time. So while the La Spezia Fair is well known, it's a well known story. The biker report, which I had the fortune of discovering purely by chance, I must say, was until now unstudied. It is an important piece of historical evidence and also very intriguing. Defective story. One could hardly ask for more, I believe. So I don't want to anticipate the conclusion of the investigations, but you know, Lieutenant Jack Barclay will discover many things. The identity of the soldiers behind the operations, the destination, a vast ramification net of support to this magnet operation that saw the involvement of many other soldiers. They were also stealing a lot from the British army depots, particularly weapons, as I said before.
- [15:46]
Roberto Mazza
Now let's move to chapter one. So the first chapter focuses on the creation of the Jewish Brigade, which was, to be fair, preceded by other military formations like the Buffs. So can you talk about the negotiations that led to the creation of the Brigade? How did we get there?
- [16:08]
Gianluca Fantoni
So the creation of the Jewish Brigade was a result of a long and often frustrating negotiation rather than a single generous British decision. From the beginning of the war, the leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuva. So just to clarify a few terms, Yeshua were the Jews of Palestine before the war. And the Jewish Agency was a Zionist organization and the organization that had been entrusted by the British with representing the Yishuva, they wanted. They started lobbying the government immediately because they wanted the creation of a Jewish fighting fort, so fighting force that was unmistakably Jews. Zionist leaders argue that Jews should be allowed to fight against Israel. Not merely as Catholic individuals within different units, but as a recognized national formation. Of course, there were also reasons beyond that for the Jewish Agency. Of course, if the British allowed the formation of. Of Jewish, you know, military unity was in the implicity they would. They were accepting the idea of the. Of the Palestinian, of the Jewish national home. So they were accepting the idea of the existence of a Jewish state. Because if you create an army that is Jewish, then there is a state that is Jewish. Because this very reason particularly the Colonial Office tried to oppose the creation of this unit, successfully delaying it until summer 1994, 1944. It was because they did not want to officially say that Israel was a reality, but also they did not want to anger the Arab population because the Arab could have seen which suspicious the English army providing military training and weapons that might eventually be used against the Arabs or even against the British rule. So there were numbers of preoccupations linked to the creation of this unit. And these anxieties were not imaginary. Many volunteers were connected formally or informally to the Haganah and also to the Irgun and other organization or Zionist organization of the Holy Land, as you said. So instead of creating immediately the Jewish Brigade, they took some timid steps towards that direction of opening up the recruitment to both Jewish and Arabs volunteers. The first were these companies of the Boofs, the royalist Kent Regiment. Subsequently that was as soon as 1940. Then in 1942 it arrives the Palestine Regiment, which was established with separate Jewish and Arab battalions. It represented an advancement, but it still fell short of the autonomous Jewish fighting formation demanded by the Jewish Agency. The negotiations involved figures very important as Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion and even Winston Churchill was generally very sympathetic to the idea of the Jewish fighting formation. It was also quite pro Zionism. In September 1944, finally the British government announced that the formation of the Jewish Brigade could, you know, announce the formation of this brigade. So they decided that these could be done. One thing should be noted, the Jewish Brigade was only three quarter Jewish actually. So the new formation was built around the three Jewish. The three Jewish infantry battalions drawn from the Palestinian regiment, together with artillery, engineer, transport and other supporting units which were composed mainly by non Jewish personnel. They were mostly Scottish. I like stressing this because I lived seven years in Scotland and that land is particularly dear to me. So why that so? Well, there are a number of reasons. First of all, the Jewish Agency struggled to recruit 5,000 volunteers so late into the war. And also one thing was to serve as infantry soldiers, but serving in special units like for example, artillery units required specialized personnel. There was no time to train them. So they preferred just to import some kind of specialists from other units, Jews or non Jews. That was not an issue at that point. But also the British army did not trust the Palestinians Jews. They didn't trust the Palestinianians in general general, neither Arabs nor, nor Jews but, but they did not trust they, that they those subjects were completely reliable. And because, well, there were very strong anti Jewish prejudice prejudice against within the British army and within the British society too there was a lot of anti Semitism in fact. So for example low radio operator could be a Palestinian Jews because the radio codes were sensitive, sensitive information that could not be, could not end up in the hands of potential, potential traitors. That was that you know what the British thought of those soldiers. Nonetheless, the British Brigade received his own badge and flag, unmistakably Jewish in their appearance. And he was commanded by Jewish the Brigadier Ernest Benjamin, a Canadian born Jewish officer with a long career in the British Army. Brigadier Benjamin could not speak Hebrew. He was more of an Englishman than a Jew. But he learned he started studying Hebrew just to serve in the Jewish Brigade as its Brigadier General.
- [22:02]
Roberto Mazza
Brigadier, and actually you already mentioned a few things about my next question. So you talked about who are the people in terms of the structure of a Jewish Brigade. And I wonder if you can give us a sense of actually who were the Jews that signed up or they were conscripted to serve sort of a social and class and education background.
- [22:29]
Gianluca Fantoni
Well, these were men overwhelming volunteers rather than conscripts because the Palestinians, because there was a British Mandate, they were not subjects of the Crown so they could not be enlisted. They could only volunteer. So they were all volunteers at some point. All of the men, all of the men of the Jewish Brigade had volunteered here at some point, either in 1940 with the Buffs or in 1942 with the Palestine Regiment or 1944 when the creation of the Jewish Brigade had been announced. So all volunteers, As we said, there were four, around 5,000 men. However, we said they never, you know, they never reached full strength. So they were integrated with 1000 known Jews and its members and the soldiers were extraordinarily diverse. It is said that they came from more than 50 countries, so more than 50 counties were represented within the Jewish Brigade. So diverse was the nature of the Jewish Diaspora at the time. Some had been born in Palestine, while many others were immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. Most notably, there were a lot of Germans and Austrian were deaf to escape Germany. When Hitler went to power for Some of themselves meant also referring to Europe and for example, a chance to go look for their families. They spoke a variety of languages, including Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, not much Hebrew, because Hebrew was scarcely known at the time in Palestine. Politically, the unity was not a monolithic body of committed Zionists, although Zionism was naturally very influential. But its members included Labor Zionists, members of the kibbutz movement, revisionists, socialists, Communists, religious Jews, secular Jews, and people whose principal motivation was not ideological. Some enlisted because they wanted to fight Zionism. Some others, as I said, hoped that military service would allow them to locate relatives in Europe. Others viewed British training as a preparation for the coming struggle over Palestine, so they wanted simply to have the military training. Others followed the expectation of their community or simply wanted meaningful work during the war. There was a moment of unemployment in the early years of the war. So many volunteers for the British army because they were unemployed. One of the reasons why the Jewish Brigade struggled in 1944 to recruit 5,000 men was because at that moment in summer 1944, Palestinian was experiencing full employment. So there were jobs for everyone because of the production for the war. So not many were willing to join because they had the job. So there are so many different motivations. It should be remembered that the Arab of Palestine also joined in non negligible number. The the British army in the Palestine Regiment, for example. They never fought against the Nazis and against the Axis forces because they were never sent to Europe. However, there is a very special case, the case of the 51st Middle east commander that should be remembered. There was a mixed unit of Arabs and Jews who fought together against the Italians in Eritrea. So they were brothers in arms. And Arabs and Jews was a mixed unit. They were commanders of special operations and they fought in the battle of. Well, in the liberation of Eritrea, mostly. So there were even instances of military combat, military formation that saw Jews and Arabs of Palestine fighting side by side.
- [26:23]
Roberto Mazza
Now let's move ahead. So October 31, 1944, the Jewish Brigade sailed from Alexandria in Egypt to reach Taranto in southern Italy, and then was deployed in northern Italy, close to the city of Ravenna. And here I would recommend listeners, but particularly the readers of the book, to follow these pages with perhaps Google Maps or any app. There's something in the description of the book that if connected to a map, feels all almost as bringing back to life the actions of a brigade. Now, I want to say that I grew up not far away from that place, so I'm very familiar with the places that you mention in the book. But for the purpose of interview and reviewing the book, I started looking at the map and everything made sense. Can you describe the work of the Jewish Brigade in Italy and also provide some assessment of the same work?
- [27:21]
Gianluca Fantoni
Yes. Okay. The first point to emphasize is that the Brigade reached the battlefield very late. After landing in Taranto, it moved to. It was already October 1944. It moved to central Italy and underwent further intensive training, because those soldiers were not ready to fight the Germans and also the British were. The British High Command was very worried that what if they said they meet the German in a pitch battle and they are defeated, completely defeated. What a propaganda issue. We are going to offer a propaganda tool to the Germans. So they were a bit cautious in playing this unit. And first of all, they wanted it to be well trained. So the training took place in Fiji, not from Rome. Finally, the Brigade entered the line at the end of February and the beginning of March 1945. First, in the Alfonsine sector, north of Ravenna, there was a difficult landscape of flat agricultural land, canals, flooded fields, embankments. And the front was relatively static. But static did not mean safe. In fact, there were miners, snipers, mines, sorry, snipers, artillery, mortar fire, which produce constant pressure. In that phase, the Brigade was committed to what was called in the Brigade diaries active patrolling. Later in March, the Brigade was moved to a sector along the Seigneo river near Violo Terme, where it faced element of the German 4th Parachute Division. The Feni was a formidable defensive line, part of the more of the Gothic Line, in fact. And the Brigade had the honor or to participate in the final push of the war, the Operation Sonia, that is the attack to the Gothic Line, the final line of resistance of the Axis forces in Italy. There is a detailed reconstruction in the book of the military action fought in those days. Thank you for stressing it. I went actually there and I took photos and basically, I think I have walked every single step that the men of the Jewish Brigade worked back then did this sort of tracking, following the footsteps of the Jewish Brigade. The fighting lasted so only a matter of weeks. The fast casualties in the end amounted to 50 men, of course, so not a huge number in up if compared to the scale of losses of World War II, but an important contribution nonetheless, and something for which the Italians should be very grateful, because those 50 men came to liberate Italy and they died for Italy. Although, as we said, they also had a personal motivation or even political motivation, the one we remembered before. They wanted training, they wanted to rescue their relatives. They were committed Zionists. They wanted the formation of the state of Israel and thought that the brigade serving in the Jewish Brigade was an avenue to that. But also they fought for it. I like to point out that the Jewish Brigade was part of what was an international Army. The British 8th army included the Polish, Indian, Pakistani, soon to be Pakistani, Canadian people from New Zealand, including the Maori, the Gurkha, the South African, the Brazilian, the Irish and even the Italians, because they reconstituted the Italian army that fought on the side of the. Of the British against the Nazis forces was incorporated into the British 8th Army. So a very international multicultural force.
- [31:21]
Roberto Mazza
Obviously the members of the Jewish Brigade were very much aware of the Holocaust that took place in Europe. Some of them escaped from there. Can you tell us more about the role of a brigade in the post war period, particularly in relation to Jewish survivors? And I'm just going to adding up here a note of something that caught my attention a few years back. And this is only for Italian listeners and readers of the book, but I remember watching in 2020, so right during COVID there was this TV series by the Italian public television. I think the name was La guerre Finita the War is Over. And I think it was the first time that actually they, you know, the Italian television produced something about Jewish survivors, children coming back from the camps, essentially. And I remember there was one, one of the. The persons wearing a Jewish Brigade uniform. And I think it was the first time that was like publicly displayed.
- [32:24]
Gianluca Fantoni
I analyzed that. That TV show in the version of the book. Yes, there is analysis of that TV show. Yeah. So yeah. The encounters between the brigade soldiers and the survivors of the Holocaust were among the most emotionally powerful episodes in this unit's story. The soldiers had known that European Jews were being murdered. But knowledge in the abstract was different from meeting people emerging from concentration camps, hiding places, forests and destroyed communities. Many brigade members had relatives in Europe and did not know whether they were still alive. Some search for family members and discovered that the entire families had disappeared. There was a number of. An incredibly high number of deserters in the Jewish Brigade, but not because they didn't want to fight. The deserters arrived after the war because they wanted to go and look for their relatives and because they asked for permission. Sometimes they were denied the permission to go because they wanted to go as far as Budapest or Poland to look for their relatives. And the army said, no, you cannot go. So they deserted and they went nonetheless. So that was so committed. They were understandably to find out what had happened to their relatives. At the end of the fight, the Brigade was moved towards the northeastern Italy at the Intervisio, which is at the very border with the former Third Reich, the border with Austria. And there the soldiers encountered a lot of survivors of concentration camps that were coming to Italy in the hope of finding the safe passage to Palestine. The star of David painted on the vehicles and the uniform had an extraordinary meaning for those survivors. Imagine the scene survivors of the concentration camps of the Holocaust, seeing armed Jewish soldiers arriving not as prisoners or victims, but as representative of the Jewish community that had survived, organized itself and came from Palestine. It was a meeting of great emotional significance. And of course it was not just emotion. I mean, there was something basic and very material to be provided. These survivors needed everything. Food, clothing, medical help, transport, shelter, information. And the soldiers started to provide all of these, trying to create a network for the exchange of information about the survivors, for example, try to rebuild the families for what was possible. And also they organized a lot of cultural, educational activities. They taught Hebrew because it was important, because of course the Jewish Brigade also had many soldiers within the Jewish Brigade also had the political motivation in doing that. They were hoping that these people would move to Palestine and help build Israel. And of course one of the, you know, precondition for that to happen was that they would learn Hebrew because Hebrew had been chosen as the language of the new state as, as we know that the knowledge of that language was not, you know, so, so widespread in the Diaspora. More easily they could speak Yiddish. But, you know, that was one of the many, many activities that the soldiers undertook. And that made them a bit of angels. As I say in the book, the work became very systematic, also very political. The brigade members established a supported network that stretched from the north of Italy to the south of Italy. They used a lot of military lorries, document full uniform, very often stealing all this material from British depots. The La Spezia Fair investigated by Jack Barclay that, as we say, open every chapter is an example of this. Even if it happened when the brigade was already in the northern Europe. Because after parviso they were sent to Belgium and to the Netherlands. Right? Because the work that they were doing with, with the refugees, because this Maggie of refugees had become too conspicuous for the British army not to notice it. So they decided to send them to, to, to northern, to northern Europe. Yeah, I would say that is essential. And yeah, now there is one aspect
- [37:03]
Roberto Mazza
that you discuss in the book that has ever since divided people in their moral judgment. The avengers. In other words, you talk about those Jews that use their skills and in fact their deployment in Europe to find and kill Nazi officers and anyone connected to Nazi operations against the Jews.
- [37:26]
Gianluca Fantoni
Yes, this is perhaps the most morally difficult part of the story. And it is important to begin with two piece of news to pre qualifications. First, revenge activity was not undertaken by the Brigade as an official military formation. It involves relatively small groups and network of networks of individuals, some of whom were also soldiers of the Jewish Brigade and some of whom came from other Jewish unit or organization. Most famously, of course, it was the group Occupy Abba Kovner Autonomously. These were partisans who had fought in Latvia against the Nazis in northeastern Europe. And autonomously they started to take revenge against the Nazis. At some point they established contact with the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade and they asked for collaboration. Can you help us in carrying out the. The event, you know, the avengers act of, you know, avengeance against the Germans? Of course, the Brigade, you know, the officers of the Jewish Brigade asked the Jewish Agency for instructions and the answer was negative. They said no. We cannot waste time in hunting down Nazis. This is not our objective. Our objective is the foundation of the State of Israel. So focus on the smuggling of. On the. On transporting Jewish refugees to Palestine and on the smuggling of weapons. However, some of the soldiers of the Jewish Brigade decide autonomously to join. To join the effort of and to participate into the anti gang execution of Nazi officers. What we can establish is also that some Jewish soldiers use their freedom of movement military vehicles, uniforms, document and knowledge of European language and above all of German, because many of them were, as we said, German or Austrian men. To carry out this investigation. They gathered information from survivors from local community and they managed to kill a number of Nazi officers. Probably not, you know, not so many. I mean, the numbers have varies from from a few, probably 10 or 20 to more than a thousand, if you. And the precise figure cannot. Cannot be provided. This is also. This story is entirely based on, of course, oral statements because there are no documents and so there is no way of verifying the information that the oral witnesses provided over the years, particularly from the 1980s onward, about this extrajudicial execution. Of course there is a moral aspect there. Vengeance is never positive. It's not something that should be approved. However, you know, to understand these actions, we must reconstruct the situation of 1945. The soldiers were confronting evidence of a crime almost beyond comprehension. They met survivors whose family had been murdered and discovered sometimes the horrible fate of their own relatives. So in that context, revenge is somehow comprehensible.
- [40:47]
Roberto Mazza
So let's go to the last chapter of the book. And the last chapter looks at the legacy of the Jewish Brigade. And here we have to split the discussion in two essentially, you know, looking at Israel and obviously Italy. So let's start looking at the legacy in Israel. How the story, image and myth of the Brigade developed ever since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
- [41:16]
Gianluca Fantoni
Okay, so the Brigade possessed enormous symbolic value for Zionism because it appeared to demonstrate Jewish national agency. European Jews had been represented by the Nazis as powerless and condemned to destruction. Here was an armed Jewish formation carrying a blue and white flag, fighting Germany as part of the allied coalition. The Brigade could therefore be incorporated into a broader narrative of national rebate from persecution and absence of a state to an armed self defense and sovereignty. Also, the Brigade served to mark the distinction between the Zionists of Israel, of the Yishuv and future Israel and the Jews of the Diaspora. The Jews of the Diaspora, with few exceptions, the fighters of the Varsa of ghetto and other and the partisans of the forest of the north, with few exceptions, the Jews of the Diaspora were said were to have to have been murdered without resisting the famous brought to the slaughterhouse like lamps, which was an unjust actually depiction of what happened to them, but at the time was quite widespread. And instead on the other side, on the other hand, there was the Jewish Brigade fighting on the same plan against the German, confronting the Germans on equal terms. Right, because they belonged to the new Jewish, they were the new Jews. They represented the new Jews Zionist m and regenerated in Palestine. So that was, let's say, the moral or ideological legacy. There was a concrete military legacy as well. The veterans of the Jewish Brigade brought experiences in logistics, in artillery, in engineering, communication, staff work, discipline and large scale organization to the Haganah and later to the Israeli Defense Forces. There were, there was invaluable several, you know, the agana, they were like, well armed in some cases, but organized as a, you know, as an informal army. Well, the veterans of the Jewish Brigade, those 4,000 and something men brought professionalism, the professionalism that you could only learn within a professional army. And one of the best professional army of the family, which was the British Army. If you think that, you know, 35 soldiers of the British of the Jewish Brigade and became generals in the idf. So that's including also some chiefs of staff of the, of the ids. So the IDF emerged from the Palma, from the Palmac, but also from the, from the Jewish, the Jewish Brigade. Then there is an aspect of the memory of the Brigade that also changed over time. From the late 20th century, the brigade experiences a substantial revival in books, documentaries, exhibition and commemorative initiatives. This revival was connected to the growing centrality of the Holocaust in Israeli and global memory, but also to debates over Zionism at the time when the traditional heroic narrative of Israel creation was being challenged by the Israelis new historian and by the unresolved Israeli Palestinian conflict. The Brigade offered a very affirmative story. Jews fighting Israel as part of the allied armies, rescuing survivor and preparing the human and military foundation of a new state. So the Jewish Brigade really became a sort of a moral and ideological cornerstone in in Israel. Although there was more, you know, in the 50s, then in the 60s and 70s that subsided a little bit and the Brigade was almost completely forgotten by the rest of the of the world. I mean, even in Italy there were many, you know, there were. No, no much. There were a few publications in the beginning, but then it became a little bit. Was put on the side a little bit and then finally, as we said, rediscovered towards the end of the 90s, there also, for a number of political reasons. My theory is that the rediscovery of the Jewish Brigade at the end of the 90s is linked to the crisis of the Oslo peace process. When it became evident that the Oslo agreement was not going to create a lasting peace. Somehow the Brigade was brought back to the fore as an example to assess some to assert the rights of the Israeli of the Jews on the Holy Land. Not just because of the decision of the un, not just because of the compensation for the Holocaust, but also because they had defeated the Axis powers alongside the other three people.
- [46:31]
Roberto Mazza
Let's move now to Italy, which is the second part of the story, and particularly to Milan. Can you tell us how and why the presence of the Jewish Brigade flag, which you mentioned at the very beginning, so it's blue, white and blue with a star of David in the middle, become controversial during the celebration of April 25th. And for listeners who are not familiar with this, April 25th is the date chose to celebrate the liberation of Italy from Nazi fascist forces.
- [47:04]
Gianluca Fantoni
Yes. So the controversy began in a very specific 25th of April, the 1st of 2004. There was a group of young activists, Jewish activists and also members of the Italian Friends of Israel association proposed displaying the insignia of the Jewish Brigade in the annual Liberation Day march that was in Milan. These people later explained that they had rediscovered they didn't know anything about the existence of the Brigade until they read the book by Howard Blooms, which is called the Brigade, the translation in Italian of this book. And somehow they were fascinated by this story. And they decided that they wanted the presence of the Jewish as a military formation, not just as victims in 25 April. And there were of course very good political motivations for that. I mean, the Brigade had fought as part of the British 8th army in the liberation of Italy and therefore its place in the 25th of April March was legitimate. However, there was also a political message because the first banner that they displayed read as such And I quote, 5,000 Zionists also contributed to the liberation of Israel. So the wording, end quote, the wording made the underlying objective quite clear. The Brigade was used not only to recover Jewish participation in the war, but also to claim the anti fascist legitimacy of Zionism and indirectly of Israel, to recast, to reassess positively the word Zionism in the eyes of the Italian public opinion. There was of course, as I anticipated before, a visual problem though, that the Brigade's flag and the flag of Israel are virtually the same in the in fact the flag of the Brigade became subsequently the flag of the State of Israel. So many participants saw contemporary Israeli flags rather than the banner of a British army formation of 1944. 45 radical left pro Palestinian demonstrators argued that the flag associated in their minds with occupation of Palestine and dispossession had no place in a celebration of in a march that was supposed to celebrate liberation from dictatorship and military occupation. It should be noted here that Palestinian flags had themselves appeared in the 25 April demonstration and since the 1970s. So this is quite interesting. This happened because section of the Italian left interpreted the Palestinian cause to the language of anti imperialism and national resistance, sometimes drawing analogies between the Palestinian struggle and the Italian resistance. So you see, so from the 1970s we have Palestinian flags in 25 April because they left. The pro Palestinians say, well, there is a connection between the struggle of the Palestinians and the struggle with our grandfathers had done during the war again to liberate Italy. They're both war of liberations, if you like. And now in the early 2000s also Israeli flags were appearing, well, rather the flags of the British Jewish Brigade, but they are very similar or actually virtually identical to the flag of the State of Israel, because the Israeli because the Jewish Brigade had contributed to the liberation of the country. So now there was a clash of flags, if you like, of symbols. So the supporters of the Brigade saw Jewish soldiers who had fought Nazism and fascism. Their opponents saw the contemporary Israeli state and the oppression of the Palestinians. Neither side were responding only to the historical facts and they were both somehow reading those Symbols politically and in relation to the Israeli Palestinian conflict to present day Middle East. So the entire quarrel was not about what had happened on the banks of the Senior river in 1945, but the quarrel was about what was happening back then at the time those flags were displayed in the Middle East. The conflict intensified over the following years, with Jewish Organization, Castle association and pro Israeli groups containers continuing to carry the brigade banners. And sometimes, you know, even the just Israeli flags took over. Both in Milan, in Rome and in other cities, pro Palestinian activists protested. Sometimes there were even, you know, the Jewish participants were at times subjected to insult, to abuse, sometimes also to expression of anti Semitism. There was physical confrontation over the following years and eventually and almost very painful split within the Italian anti fascist front. Because now, from 2016, for example, in Rome, the Jewish community of Rome is organizing a splinter demonstration for Liberation Day, which is quite astonishing. So there is a split within the anti fascist front and they cannot be together in the same march, otherwise there will be clashes. What I try to explain in the book is that the Brigade should neither be turned into a weapon in contemporary political battles, not raised in order to avoid controversy. Criticism of Israel is not in itself antisemitic and Jewish history must not be used to silence Palestinian suffering. We need to be very, very clear about that. At the same time, however, excluding Jews from an anti fascist commemoration, abusing people who carry the symbol they've chosen, or threatening Jewish participation, sorry, Jewish participation as illegitimate represent a profound historical and moral failure. Anti fascism without Jews is not anti fascism. No, it's not complete. But of course this controversy tells us a great deal about Italy, as I said before, relatively little about the historical Jewish Brigade. My book tried to do both, to analyze the present day controversy, while also reconstructing narrating the actual history of the Jewish Brigade in all its complexity and importance.
- [53:55]
Roberto Mazza
If anything else. Again, the last parade for the celebration of April 25 here in 2026, show that this is a topic that is not going to go away and in fact is only increasing in intensity. We saw more clashes and more division. And that brings me to the last question. So in your conclusion, and you were just mentioning something, now you share reflections on the Jewish Brigade's history and memory antisemitism. And you are very much against a deterministic view of history, something that unfortunately seems pervasive through contemporary political discourse.
- [54:36]
Gianluca Fantoni
Well, you see, deterministic views of history that nowadays are quite fashionable treats the past as a straight road leading inevitably to the present. So once we know the outcome, we are Tempted to read every earlier event as a necessary steps towards it. In the case of the Jewish Brigade, this can mean representing its creation as an inevitable stage in the birth of Israel, the Holocaust as inevitably producing Jewish statehood or Jewish and Arab communities as always having been destined to a permanent conflict. But the historical records tell us something very different. The Brigade was not inevitable. Its creation followed years of visitation, negotiation, opposition and compromise. Britain and the Zionist movement. Movement where allies against Germany or against Axis power. But their relationship later became openly hostile and they were never on the same page. Not even when the decision of forming the Jewish Brigade was finally made. Men who served proudly in British uniform subsequently used British vehicles to undermine British immigration policy, to supply Haganah with smuggled weapons, and some of them even joined terrorist organization that carried out attacks against the British soldiers. So political identities and the alliances changed according to with the circumstances, if you like. The same is true for the Jewish Arab relations. Jews and Arabs from Palestine served within the Palestine Regiment and in some other formation like the aforementioned 51 Middle East Commando. And they fought alongside one another against the Axis. So cooperation did exist in the past. It did not prevent later conflict. But its existence matters because it proves that austerity was not timeless or biologically predetermined. Okay, history contains road not taken as well as outcomes that eventually occurred. So rejecting the feminism also changes how we approach Zionism. Why? Zionism was not a single unchanging ideology. In fact, I mean, there are many, many, many different forms of Zionism. I think I read books recently that say that there are as many as eight different types of Zionists and maybe more. And that Zionism should be interpreted, should be read as a. As an emotional state rather than an ideology. This is particularly important when discussing antisemitism and anti Zionism. Criticism of Zionism or criticism of the Israeli government is not automatically anti Semitic. It can be historically informed, morally necessary and politically legitimate. Equally, accusation of antisemitism should not be used to silence those who are in favor of the rights of the Palestinians. However, it is also naive to pretend that anti Semitism can never appear within anti Zionist discourse. It does so when Jews are treated as collectively responsible for the action of Israel, when Jewish historical experiences dismiss as fraudulent or manipulative, or when Jews are excluded from democratic spaces unless they renounce symbols or identities or beliefs of their choice. So it's, you know, as I say, it's very common. It is possible not only to criticize Israel, but to criticize Zionism in the same way you criticize every nationalism for example. At the same time, we should be aware that many actors why criticize Zionism or Israel? They end up proposing antisemitic prejudice, either willingly or unwittingly. I mean, sometimes even without realizing it. But that can happen. So we need really to, for all the actors involved to sort of self restraint and check of what we say and we do. That's also something that I think I advocate very much, really, in the final pages of the book. And to conclude, I would say that the wider message of the book is that history should create intellectual and moral space rather than close it. That memory is necessary, but memory is selecting and often seek certainties. While history asks us to compare evidence, to restore context and to recognize contingencies, it reminds history reminds us that yesterday's ally might become today's enemy, and then today's enemy might become tomorrow's interlocutors. And, you know, people that we managed to talk to. This is not an argument for forgetting injustice. It is an argument against treaties treating conflict as as a destiny.
- [59:34]
Roberto Mazza
This was Gianluca Fantoni, author of Soldiers, Angels and Avengers the History of a Jewish Brigade, published by McGill Prince University Press in 2026. Gianluca, thank you so much.
- [59:47]
Gianluca Fantoni
Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education.
- [60:00]
Roberto Mazza
If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and Bluesky with the handle EW Books Network and subscribe to our weekly substrate newsletter@newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations
- [60:20]
Gianluca Fantoni
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