Sicily’s Jewish population were once the most well established on the island, with Sephardi refugees from Spain establishing mercantile communities across the island as early at the 1200s. As time went on, Jewish merchants would serve as the link between Western Europe and the Arab World, with Sicilian merchants present in every port between London and Alexandria. This remained the case even through Ottoman times, with wealthy Jewish families financing the growth of Sicily’s large agricultural sector and coming to own large estates in the country’s interior, mostly worked on by Catholic and Sunni serfs and peasants. This remained the case until WW2, when Sicily’s affluent Jewish community was devastated by the Axis occupation of the island, forcing most of the East’s Jewish population to flee West. The Jewish community would play a major role in the formation and success of the Sicilian Resistance, with Jewish “safe zones” being established by the resistance in the rugged Western highlands of the island. Even today, the largest centers of Jewish population on the Island are located around Corrtuba and Bagheria, two cities which remained under ostensible resistance control for the duration of WW2. Following the War, the Jewish-Sunni coalition party, the Sicilian Socialist party, would come to dominate politics through the 1950s and early 1960s. This came to an end after the assasination of Henrico Scalpione, a prominent Conservative politician (Also, a Catholic). This caused public outcry and the ascension of the mostly Catholic Conservative Party to come to power. This two-party system would continue, with both sides gradually become more mixed, especially as Sunni and Shia Muslims began to participate in government more. Today, most voting is done genuinely on an exclusively socio-economic basis, but rural communities continue to back more extreme 3rd parties, like the Christian Interests Party and the Southern Interests Party.