Giuseppe Ottolenghi

Origins and early life

Giuseppe Ottolenghi was born in Sabbioneta, in Austrian Lombardy, on 26 December 1838, into one of the old Jewish families of the Po valley, and he remained a Jew all his life, which the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 recorded with pride while he was still a senator of the kingdom.

Work and career

At twenty he crossed the frontier into Piedmont to enlist in the war of 1859 against Austria, fought at Solferino, entered the military academy at Turin and was commissioned in the new Italian army, with which he fought again in 1866 at Custoza and was decorated for valor. His career was that of a soldier-scholar: professor of military history and strategy at the war school of Turin, author of works on tactics, he was chosen in the 1880s to teach the military sciences to the prince of Naples, the future King Victor Emmanuel III, and rose through the commands of a division and an army corps to the rank of lieutenant-general.

In May 1902 the prime minister Giuseppe Zanardelli called him into his cabinet as Minister of War, an office he held until November 1903 — the first Jew to be minister of war of a European state, and the highest office an Italian Jew had reached since the emancipation of 1848; he was named senator of the kingdom the same year. He died in Turin on 2 November 1904. His life belongs to the history of Italian Jewry's brief golden age, when the Jews of the Risorgimento gave the young kingdom a prime minister, a mayor of Rome, generals and ministers, thirty-five years before the racial laws.