Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Map 1. The Jews of Italy, 1938
- Map 2. Principal Centers of Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1938–1943
- Introduction
- Part One ITALIAN JEWRY FROM LIBERALISM TO FASCISM
- Part Two RISE OF RACIAL PERSECUTIONS
- 4 Characteristics and Objectives of the Anti-Jewish Racial Laws in Fascist Italy, 1938–1943
- 5 The Exclusion of Jews from Italian Academies
- 6 The Damage to Italian Culture: The Fate of Jewish University Professors in Fascist Italy and After, 1938–1946
- 7 Building a Racial State: Images of the Jew in the Illustrated Fascist Magazine, La Difesa della Razza, 1938–1943
- 8 The Impact of Anti-Jewish Legislation on Everyday Life and the Response of Italian Jews, 1938–1943
- 9 The Children of Villa Emma at Nonantola
- 10 Anti-Jewish Persecution and Italian Society
- Part Three CATASTROPHE – THE GERMAN OCCUPATION, 1943–1945
- Part Four THE VATICAN AND THE HOLOCAUST IN ITALY
- Part Five AFTERMATH: CONTEMPORARY ITALY AND HOLOCAUST MEMORY
- Index
- Plates A–D
4 - Characteristics and Objectives of the Anti-Jewish Racial Laws in Fascist Italy, 1938–1943
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Map 1. The Jews of Italy, 1938
- Map 2. Principal Centers of Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1938–1943
- Introduction
- Part One ITALIAN JEWRY FROM LIBERALISM TO FASCISM
- Part Two RISE OF RACIAL PERSECUTIONS
- 4 Characteristics and Objectives of the Anti-Jewish Racial Laws in Fascist Italy, 1938–1943
- 5 The Exclusion of Jews from Italian Academies
- 6 The Damage to Italian Culture: The Fate of Jewish University Professors in Fascist Italy and After, 1938–1946
- 7 Building a Racial State: Images of the Jew in the Illustrated Fascist Magazine, La Difesa della Razza, 1938–1943
- 8 The Impact of Anti-Jewish Legislation on Everyday Life and the Response of Italian Jews, 1938–1943
- 9 The Children of Villa Emma at Nonantola
- 10 Anti-Jewish Persecution and Italian Society
- Part Three CATASTROPHE – THE GERMAN OCCUPATION, 1943–1945
- Part Four THE VATICAN AND THE HOLOCAUST IN ITALY
- Part Five AFTERMATH: CONTEMPORARY ITALY AND HOLOCAUST MEMORY
- Index
- Plates A–D
Summary
In 1978, the great German American historian, George Mosse, characterized Mussolini's attitude to the Jewish question in the following passage:
In October 1938 Mussolini had proclaimed his racial laws, which forbade mixed marriages and excluded Jews from military service and large landholdings, but he immediately exempted from the law all those Jews who had taken part in the First World War or in the Fascist movement. Moreover, Mussolini himself put out the slogan: “Discrimination and not persecution.” […] Mussolini was no racist.
In the last years of his life, Mosse amended his view, writing the following in 1999:
By 1936 Mussolini had embraced racism. […] We shall never know whether Mussolini himself became a convinced racist, but he did increase the severity in the draft of the racial laws which had been submitted to him. […] Mussolini may have embraced racism out of opportunism […], or to give Fascism a clearly defined enemy […], to give a new cause to a young generation.
Mosse offered insight into his revised view of Mussolini in a 1997 interview with Corriere della Sera. “On antisemitism and racism,” Mosse declared, “I do not wholly agree with De Felice, also because in the meantime new material on Mussolini has come to light. At the time of the racial laws the dictator was enthusiastic, not a sceptic.” In fact, George Mosse's mistake in 1978 had been to rely on the book published in 1961 by the great Italian historian Renzo De Felice.
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- Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945 , pp. 71 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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