Saturday, June 3, 2017

Jews and Fascism

[caption id="attachment_2100" align="aligncenter" width="640"]in the front row you are, among others, Vittorio Emanuele III, Prince Chigi, Luigi Federzoni, John Jurors, Guido Jung and Angelo Manaresi, Rome, November 22, 1932 in the front, among others, Vittorio Emanuele III, Prince Chigi, Luigi Federzoni, John Jurors, Guido Jung and Angelo Manaresi, Rome, November 22, 1932[/caption]

Italian Jews were (and are) a really tiny minority (they were about 50,000, 0.1% of Italian population), and large areas of Italy (most of Southern Italy) hadn't Jewish communities. The provinces with more than a Jew per 1000 in 1938 inhabitants were only 20, and the highest concentration was in Trieste (a tiny 1.7% of the pop. was Jewish).
The integration of the Jews with Italian society was pratically complete by the end of the XIX century, in 1906 a Jew converted to protestantism, baron Sidney Sonnino, became Prime Minister, and in 1910 the Jew (still of Jewish religion) Luigi Luzzatti had the same charge. In 1920, 19 of the 350 senators were Jews.

Among the 119 founders of Fascism (23 March 1919 in Piazza San Sepolcro, Milan), 5 were Jews and one, Cesare Goldman, had organized the congress (that was made in a palace of the Union of the Industrialists of Milan), but another one, Eucardio Momigliano, soon left Fascism and even founded a short-lived anti-Fascist movement. Three Fascist Jews died during the fightings of 1919-1922 (Duilio Sinigaglia, Gino Bolaffi e Bruno Mondolfo) and more than 230 took part to the March on Rome. A Jew, Aldo Finzi, became member of the Gran Council of Fascism, but he was soon expelled from the Party because of his involvement in the murder of the Socialist deputy Matteotti (Finzi was executed by the Germans in the Ardeatine Caves in 1944, he had been arrested because of anti-fascist activity and links with the partizans).
Guido Jung became Minister of Finances in 1932-35 (then he had the same position in the second govern of Badoglio in 1943-44), and Maurizio Rava was vice-governor of Libya and then governor of Somalia.
And we haven't to forget that a Jewess, Margherita Sarfatti, was a close friend (maybe mistress) of Mussolini, and author of his first biography translated in English: "Dux".

[caption id="attachment_2107" align="aligncenter" width="450"]Margherita-Sarfatti Margherita Sarfatti[/caption]

To counterbalance this list of Fascist Jews, we shall remember that there were also prominent anti-Fascist Jews, like the socialists Treves and Modigliani, the senator Vittorio Polacco and the deputy Pio Donati (died in exile in 1926). When university professors were forced to make the oath of faith to Fascism, 3 of the 12 that refused were Jews (Giorgio Errera, Giorgio Levi della Vida and Vito Volterra). 33 Jews signed the Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce in May 1925.
The Montagnana familiy had a prominent position in the Italian Communist Party, and two Montagnana women married communist leaders (one was Palmiro Togliatti, the man of Stalin in Italy).
But the most important Jewish anti-Fascists were the Rosselli brothers (Carlo and Nello), founders of the left-winged movement Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty) and killed, in still rather unclear circumstances, by French cagoulards in 1937. In 1934 two members of Giustiza e Libertà, the Jews Sion Segrè and Mario Levi, were arrested; this caused the first mildly anti-Semite attacks by a member of the Fascist Party, Roberto Farinacci, who asked the Italian Jews to choose between being Fascist and being Zionist (as you can see it was a problem of ideology nationality, not of race).

[caption id="attachment_2103" align="aligncenter" width="759"]Sinigaglia Duilio Sinigaglia Duilio[/caption]

A few anti-Semitism was present in Italy (mostly in Catholic circles linked to the Jesuits), but also in Fascism. But more than generalizing against Jews, Fascists (untill the mid 1930's) distinguished between good Jews (perfectly integrated and nationalists) and bad Jews (those who had Zionist or anti-Fascist ideas, for example). This was the position of the strongest anti-Semites of the Fascist Party (Roberto Farinacci and prof. Paolo Orano, magnificus rector of the University of Perugia).
The first rather anti-Semite text by Mussolini, nevertheless, is very old: it's an article on the "Popolo d'Italia" (Mussolini's newspaper, partially financed also by the Jew Elio Jona) of 4 June 1919 ("About the Russian Revolution, I ask myself if it hasn't been a revenge of Judaism agaist Christianity, given that 80% of Soviet leaders are Jews [...] The finance of nations is in the hands of the Jews, and he who has the strong-boxes [money reserves] of nations leads their policy."), but Churchill in the same time didn't write different words.
The turn in Fascist policy (because of the political links with Germany, because of the birth of a racial question with the occupation of Ethiopia and because Mussolini was very disappointed because of the British and French policy towards Italy that, expecially for the French Socialists, was controlled by Jews, in his opinion) was in 1936: this year the first racial laws were promulgated, but involved only Africans. But later that year Mussolini wrote the article "Il troppo storpia" (31 Dic. 1936), that was about the Jewish influence on the French govern ("[...] Let's read the article of Béraud on the last issue of "Gringoire", that demonstrates, with name and surname, that in all the ministries of the Republic, with as First Minister the Jew Blum, has formed a Jewish cell that governs France quietly. This is the list: [...] This list of names is clear. Do you know what is the number of Jews in the mass of French population? Two per cent. Nobody will want to deny that, given the mass of Jews and the positions occupied by them, the sproportion is more than blatant. Now, let's invert the percentages. Imagine a France in which 2% were Christian and 98% Jewish. It's clear that, given the ferocious exclusivism of that tribe, Christians would be totally banned from public life and to them would be reserved, at best, the works of slaves, to let the Jew celebrate the resting of Saturday. The announcer and justifier of anti-Semitism is always and everywhere only one: the Jew. When he goes too far, and he does it often.").
This article was followed in 1937-38 by the book "Gli ebrei italiani" by prof. Paolo Orano (but in that book he still asked Italian Jews to become Italians tout-court, there wasn't racism), by a new edition of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (translated and published by the ex-priest Giovanni Preziosi in 1919, and again in 1937 and then in 1938 with the preface of the traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola, rather ignored by Fascism untill the anti-Semite policy), by the Manifesto of the Racist Scientists, signed by a group of professors (most important: prof. Nicola Pende), on 14 July 1938, and finally, on 1st Sept. 1938, by the Racial Laws, that banned Jews from government jobs and many other positions. Not all the Fascists supported anti-Semitism, Italo Balbo never applied the Racial Laws in Libya, and also the philosopher Giovanni Gentile and the artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (strongly anti-German, also because Nazism had banned his art movement: Futurism; he was instead pro-Japanese and became a good personal friend of the ambassador Hidaka) were against it.

The rest of the story of anti-Semitism in Italy is quite complex and very long; there were no more Fascist Jews, although those who had been Fascist (or patriot) were deeply sad because of the Laws (but those who had been decorated or had been Fascists at the beginning of Fascism were exempted, like those who had converted to Christendom before the laws) and not always they became anti-Fascists. Probaly the most interesting situation happened with Gen. of Naval Engineers Umberto Pugliese, projectist of the Pugliese anti-torpedo system, who, though banned from the Navy since 1939, was recalled to lead the exceptional team of engineers (included col. Armando Andri, who had took part to the spectacular salvage of the BB Leonardo da Vinci in WW1) for the raising of the BB Conte di Cavour, sunk in Taranto on 11 Nov. 1940 and refloated on 2 July 1941.

The best study about Jews and Fascism is avaible in English language, I strongly suggest it: "The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History" by Renzo De Felice.

From https://forum.axishistory.com (DrG user) 

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