Giuseppe Emanuele (Mene) di Flaminio Modigliani

The “other Modigliani,” Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani was one of Italy's earliest socialist and union leaders to be elected to Parliament. He was the younger brother of the legendary modernist painter, Amedeo Modigliani.



Born in Livorno, a town with a predominantly Jewish population, the Modigliani family were well-to-do Jews of Sephardic descent. Graduating with a law degree, Giuseppe Emanuele (Mene) Modigliani, became an advocate of education and welfare reform for the advancement of society, a director of a reformist newspaper, and was subsequently appointed president of the Glassworkers Union. He secured the first national union contract in the history of Italy, and in 1913 was elected to the Italian Parliament, where he was to serve for many years. 


Sophisticated, with international connections to world political leaders, Mene and his wife Vera were chief among a group of Italian intellectuals whose views and writings were later incorporated into the constitution of 1948.

A writer and lecturer of anti-war manifestos and a radical pacifist, Mene, with the advent of World War I, joined other European intellectuals and political figures in the Zimmerwald Conference, to voice their strong and vehement opposition to the horrors of war and openly articulated diplomatic alternatives.



In 1926, Mene, seeing the injustices and restrictions on civil liberties imposed by Mussolini, and being prescient of what was becoming a fierce and rapid rise of fascism, fled with his wife Vera to Vienna, then on to Paris.

When the German occupation of the city forced them to flee again, Mene’s spoke his now-famous words to the authorities: "I have the honor, the honor, if not the pleasure —  to belong to the Jewish race... four fourths of Jewish blood." Seeking a safe haven, the Modiglianis retreated to the neutrality of Switzerland.

Mene was asked by Luigi Antonini and David Dubinsky, the brilliant labor leader and president of the Ladies Garment Workers Union (Local 89) to visit and lecture in the United States on the extreme dangers of Nazi and Fascist policies.

Mene's staunch views and insights as well as his accomplishments in labor negotiations were such that between 1928 and 1938, he was a regular contributor to the American socialist magazine The New Leader.

In the 1930s he became a great admirer of Roosevelt and firmly advocated social reform within the boundaries of the law.



In 1947, the couple moved back to Italy where Mene died shortly thereafter. Vera Funaro Modigliani carried on the legacy of her husband and created the Modigliani Foundation, with the objective of documenting the history of this post-unification political circle, and of studying the contribution of Italian Jews to the history of socialism, labor unionism and democracy. 


• ‪Modigliani: A Life‬ By Meryle Secrest