Shira Klein. Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism

Shira Klein’s Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism has the intellectual courage to wrestle with a key controversy in Italian history, which scholars have debated at length but still remains unsettled and deeply ingrained in public memory: the idealization of Italians as brava gente (“good people”). This “unshakable myth” (132) relies on two distorted assumptions that gloss over Italian complicity in antisemitic persecution: that Italians were impervious to antisemitism, and that Jews in Fascist Italy faced milder persecution while receiving help from large segments of Italian society. Klein argues that Italian Jews themselves, albeit victims of Mussolini’s regime, contributed to shaping this paradigm of Italian exceptionalism, thus obscuring both the severity of Fascist antisemitism and the involvement of Italians in the persecutions from 1938 to 1945. Klein demonstrates that not only did Jews’ praise for Italy pave the way for their responses to the antisemitic turn of the regime, but it conditioned their selective memory of Italians’ attitudes during the Holocaust

Antisemitism · Emancipation · Ethnology · Judaism · Persecution · Political science · Politics · The Holocaust · Theology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies