Italian fascist officials admired Zionism’s New Jew as rejecting Jewish mysticism for modern power

Evidence

In 1935 Raffaele Guariglia, who was the head of the Middle Eastern desk at the Italian foreign ministry, wrote that Jabotinsky exhibited superior intellectual qualities and a strong character and was free of that brand of Jewish mysticism that beleaguered the Jewish people as a whole in the modern era. To Guariglia, Jabotinsky symbolized a new type of Jewish leader. Guariglia associated Judaism, and its leaders, with mysticism, spirituality, and idealism, qualities directly opposed to what he saw as the true virtues of the modern era: power and vitality. Jabotinsky and his movement, however, represented the “New Jew,” who turned away from traditional Jewish values and embraced the values championed by the Italian regime. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 579

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Orientalist framing of Jews as mystical/spiritual vs. Western power and vitality, echoing Edward Said’s Orientalism and the chapter’s theme of European projection onto Jews.
• SEED: Possible essay angle: how antisemitic tropes (Jewish mysticism, spiritual weakness) were repurposed by fascists as a charter for admiring a ‘New Jew’ — the same stereotype serving exclusion and annexation respectively.