In this revisionist history of Italy's role in the Holocaust, the author presents an account of how ordinary Italians actively participated in the deportation of Italy's Jews between 1943 and 1945, when Mussolini's collaborationist republic was under German occupation

The history of the Jews in Italy is the longest continuous one of European Jewry and lasted for more than two millennia. It started in the days of the Roman Republic and continued through the Middle Ages to Modern Times. Jewish Italy served as melting pot throughout its history, first for migrants from East to West and eventually from all over the Mediterranean littoral and beyond. Some of them moved on from Italy to other countries, while the majority stayed on in the country for generations. This volume of their history covers the first seven centuries of Jewish presence on the peninsula from the days of the Maccabees to Pope Gregory the Great. It is based on archaeological finds in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, on relevant literary and legal sources and on other records.

How did Italy treat Jews during World War II? Historians have shown beyond doubt that many Italians were complicit in the Holocaust, yet Italy is still known as the Axis state that helped Jews. Shira Klein uncovers how Italian Jews, though victims of Italian persecution, promoted the view that Fascist Italy was categorically good to them. She shows how the Jews' experience in the decades before World War II - during which they became fervent Italian patriots while maintaining their distinctive Jewish culture - led them later to bolster the myth of Italy's wartime innocence in the Fascist racial campaign. Italy's Jews experienced a century of dramatic changes, from emancipation in 1848, to the 1938 Racial Laws, wartime refuge in America and Palestine, and the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors. This cultural and social history draws on a wealth of unexplored sources, including original interviews and unpublished memoirs.

Publisher Description

Provides a comprehensive history from the rise of fascism in 1922 to its defeat in 1945. The author uses statistical evidence to document how the Italian social climate changed from relatively just to irredeemably prejudicial. He demonstrates that Rome did not simply follow the lead of Berlin.

With this heady exploration of time and space, rumors and silence, colors, tastes, and ideas, Robert Bonfil recreates the richness of Jewish life in Renaissance Italy. He also forces us to rethink conventional interpretations of the period, which feature terms like "assimilation" and "acculturation." Questioning the Italians' presumed capacity for tolerance and civility, he points out that Jews were frequently uprooted and persecuted, and where stable communities did grow up, it was because the hostility of the Christian population had somehow been overcome. After the ghetto was imposed in Venice, Rome, and other Italian cities, Jewish settlement became more concentrated. Bonfil claims that the ghetto experience did more to intensify Jewish self-perception in early modern Europe than the supposed acculturation of the Renaissance. He shows how, paradoxically, ghetto living opened and transformed Jewish culture, hastening secularization and modernization. Bonfil's detailed picture reveals in the Italian Jews a sensitivity and self-awareness that took into account every aspect of the larger society. His inside view of a culture flourishing under stress enables us to understand how identity is perceived through constant interplay—on whatever terms—with the Other.