The Zionist Youth Conference, held in Livorno from November 2 to 4, 1924, represented a pivotal moment in the history of Italian Zionism. The choice of Livorno as the venue for the conference was not coincidental. The city, due to its strategic position, represented a crossroads of Italian Jewry, centrally located in relation to other Jewish communities. This symbolic choice aimed to address all Italian Jewish communities, reinforcing the national scope of the event and its significance in shaping the future direction of Italian Zionism. With 644 delegates in attendance from both Italy and abroad, the conference marked a turning point: while it signaled the fragmentation of the movement's tradition-al social cohesion, it also accelerated its evolution, laying the groundwork for overcoming its historical limitations. As Enzo Sereni observed, until that point, Zionism in Italy had been «a movement of national and religious consciousness with a special reference to Zion, but not as an affirmation that the resolution of the Jewish question could occur solely in and through Zion».
Three distinct ideological currents emerged in Livorno, each leaving a lasting imprint on the Jewish experience in 20th-century Italy: Alfonso Pacifici's Jewish spiritualism, Enzo Sereni's integral Zionism, and Nello Rosselli's Jewish antifascism. The conference was not merely a site of debate but also a political laboratory where new intellectual trajectories and strategic visions took shape.
This paper aims to analyze the various proposals put forward at Livorno, highlighting their convergences and divergences, and to reconstruct the political language of Italian Zionism between the two world wars, in the sense articulated by J. J. Pocock. By examining the political tradition that shaped Zionist discourse in Italy, the study seeks to assess how the Livorno Conference contributed to redefining the movement's identity and its theories of politics.