 Sonne, however, complained that he was allowed to see only the second-best items in the library.From 1936 to 1938 he taught on the island of Rhodes, then part of the Kingdom of Italy, as the director of the Jewish Theological Seminar there, a post subsidised by the Italian government with the aim of spreading Italian culture.Sonne's aim, while on Rhodes, was to bridge the gap of knowledge between Eastern and Western Jews and, in the words of Salo Wittmayer Baron, "infuse the Levantine Jewry with the "Wissenschaft des Judentums"".