Mussolini’s Children

Since Renzo de Felice’s publication of Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascism (1961), scholars of Italian Fascism and the Holocaust have debated his claim that Italians had rejected antisemitism because it was inconsistent with Italian identity. Thanks to the sixty years of scholarship that followed de Felice’s erroneous assertion, it is now widely accepted that many Italians supported the state’s Fascist policies of xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism. Mussolini’s Children: Race and Elementary Education in Fascist Italy by Eden K. McLean, and The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews in Italy by Simon Levis Sullam—in the same vain as works by Christopher Duggan, Tracy H. Koon, Michele Sarfatti, Guri Schwarz, and many others—disprove the myth of Italian innocence during the Holocaust by focusing on Italian agency in the evolution of Fascism and the realization of racist policies. Both works analyze Italian agency, examining the “scientific,” social, regional, and economic influences that drove racism, antisemitism, and genocide in Fascist Italy. McKlean focuses on the links between Fascist ideology and racism from 1922 to 1940; Sullam investigates the connection between Italian Fascism and genocide, primarily from 1943 to 1945. To have different historical focuses is common within Italian scholarship. Unlike a German-centric study of the Holocaust, which typically spans 1933 to 1945 (studies focusing on antisemitism and anti-Judaism aside), Italian Fascism covers a much longer period, namely 1922 to 1945. The lengthy time period and its critical events—including the passage of the Italian Racial Laws (1938), Italy’s declaration of war (1940), the overthrow and reinstatement of Mussolini (1943), and the German occupation (1943–1945)—often result in the need to hone in on specific years instead of examining the whole of Italian Fascism. This trend within Italian research, however, limits scholars’ ability to elucidate factors that drove compliance, acquiescence, and resistance within the macro narrative of European, Fascist, and Holocaust history

Agency (philosophy · Antisemitism · Genocide · Ideology · Judaism · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Racism · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · The Holocaust · Xenophobia · European history and politics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious Studies