of Italian Jews that operated within the regime until the enactment of the racial laws include Giorgio Morpurgo (lieutenant colonel, staff officer of the Corpo Truppe Volontarie), Aldo Finzi, Renzo Ravenna (podestà of Ferrara and personal friend of Italo Balbo), Ettore Ovazza and Guido Jung (the latter however eventually converted to Christianity in 1938). Furthermore, Margherita Sarfatti, a writer and socialite, was a close friend and possibly mistress of Mussolini and a propaganda and political adviser of his. She authored the popular biography of the Italian dictator entitled "Dux". Giorgio Bassani, a Jewish Italian author, has given an insight into the life of the Jewish middle class during the Fascist regime. Michele Sarfatti has written a thorough compendium of the situation of the Italian Jewish community under the fascist regime in his book The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: from equality to persecution. On the other hand, a significant number of Italian Jews were also active in anti-fascist organizations, and some joined the Resistenza: among them the most significant were the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli, Franco Momigliano, Leone Ginzburg and the brothers Ennio and Emanuele Artom. The Fascist regime also helped, at the request of Vladimir Jabotinski, the establishment in 1934 of a navy officer training camp in Civitavecchia for Mandatory Palestine Jews, laying the foundations of the Israeli Navy. By helping the Zionist cause, Mussolini hoped to gain influence in the Middle East at the expense of the British Empire. The Italian colonial authorities in Ethiopia after the conquest of this African state came into contact with the Beta Israel community and greatly favoured them, enacting special laws to protect them from offences and violences routinely committed against them by Christian and Muslim Ethiopians. The regime also encouraged cultural exchanges between the Italian Jewish community and the Ethiopian Jews. Incidentally, the first scholar to describe using a modern, scientific approach this ethnic group had been Filosseno Luzzatto, an Italki Jew. Starting in 1843, he collected and selected data about the Falasha. On 28 July 1938, Pope Pius XI made a speech at Propaganda Fide college, expressing the view that mankind is "a single, large, universal human race" with "no room for special races", and the Alliance Israélite Universelle thanked him for that speech. In September of that year in a speech to Belgian pilgrims, Pius XI proclaimed: Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and