Review: The Jews In Fascist Italy: A History

Posted 11/14/01 on the home page for The Jewish Press

By Michael Skakun, Book Review Editor

Title: The Jews In Fascist Italy: A History

Author: Renzo De Felice
Publisher: Enigma Books

In recent years, Italy has been ranked just behind Denmark and Bulgaria as a European nation in which Jews stood a fair chance of survival during World War II. Italy's essential humanity — the common people's refusal to be tainted by racial anti-Semitism — is often attributed in part to the nation's anarchic spirit, distrust and general lawlessness (all exemplary virtues under Fascism). Byron understood this romantic spirit more than a century earlier when he wrote of Italy: "There is in fact, no law or government at all; it is wonderful how things go on without them."

Yet the full historical record is mixed. Italian Jews, among the most highly assimilated in Europe, did in fact survive in greater numbers than their brethren in other countries, but it cannot be denied that nearly 8,000 Jews out of a 1939 population of 35,000 never returned from the concentration camps. While it is true that Italians found racism, on the whole, repulsive, Mussolini did succeed in pushing through the notorious 1938 racial laws as a nod to Hitler. And while the Italian army was often humane in its behavior towards Jews, the fascist squads in Florence and elsewhere were infamous for their murderous cruelty.

Founded in New York in 1999 with the express purpose of offering the English-reading world important, but often neglected, historical works of the twentieth century, Enigma Books is to be congratulated for the publication of Renzo de Felice's magisterial The Jews in Fascist Italy, arguably the single most comprehensive study of the Holocaust in a single European nation. A masterpiece of interpretive subtlety and comprehensive sweep, the book was first issued in Italian forty years ago by the distinguished house, Einaudi and commissioned by the Union of Jewish Communities of Italy in an early attempt to set the record straight about what occurred to the Jews in Italy between the fateful years of 1938 and 1945. Over the decades the author, who died in 1996, expanded his book and today, the first English language edition is published with the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Professor Michael Ledeen is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the neo-conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C. He is a tough-minded historian and a student and friend of Renzo De Felice, Italy's foremost post-war historian of fascism, and an ex-member of his nation's Communist Party (he was the prize pupil of the Florentine Marxist historian Delio Cantinori). Professor Ledeen provides a useful introduction to the harsh ideological, political and cultural landscape that greeted the book's initial appearance. An intellectual projectile, it exploded on impact and eviscerated such cherished myths of the Italian Left as the notion that Fascism was purely a reactionary phenomenon of the middle class, its defense against the threat of a socialist revolution; that Italian Fascism was imposed by terror wielded by a small minority when in fact was a mass movement. DeFelice argues that, as in Germany, there was little effective resistance once the regime was consolidated; and, perhaps, most embarrassingly, that it was Italy's youth and intelligentsia who were most easily seduced by the Fascist regime and its racial laws, a class that in large numbers morphed into the Left after World War II and gave De Felice the greatest grief.

Ledeen writes "For daring to write the truth, [De Felice] was subjected to a campaign of cultural terrorism that could have destroyed any but the strongest man, and had the Left succeeded in silencing De Felice, it might well have confirmed its hegemony over Italian historical and political culture."

De Felice is forthright, reminding the reader that Mussolini, who met three times in 1933-1934 with Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Goldmann, was a supporter of Jabotinsky. He underscores that the modern Israeli Navy, in effect, was born at the maritime school at Civitavecchia in 1934, largely thanks to Fascist largesse, a result of Duce's anti-British Mediterranean strategy. De Felice draws an interesting Italianate distinction between Weizmann and Jabotinsky by quoting his French counterpart Francois Furet: "Weizmann is Cavour, and Jabotinsky reincarnates both Mazzini and Garibaldi; the first, a diplomatic visionary, but gifted as a tactician keeps to the official program on the home front, with an attentive eye on the international scene; the second, romantic, dazzling, always in a rush, seeks a short cut that lead to the state of Israel."

De Felice differentiates between Nazism and Italian Fascism. Many Jews were present among the ranks of the Fascist party and contributed financially to it. He reminds the reader that a handful of leading Fascists, including Giovanni Gentile, the regime's court philosopher, protested against anti-Semitism and that Mussolini himself was not tainted with racial prejudice against the Jews — after all his mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, was Jewish. De Felice is not suggesting, however, that Mussolini avoided wielding anti-Semitism as a political weapon.