The Great Divide? Notions of Racism in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: New Answers to an Old Problem (AV full text) (original) (raw)
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Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2017
Racism, especially anti-Semitism, is typically seen as a crucial point of distinction between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Based on a range of new materials, this article shows that Nazi policies of social exclusion were inspired by Mussolini’s regime. The main thesis is that racist thought and action were intrinsic elements of both regimes and constituted a unifying element between them. The paper looks at the way the National Socialists used Fascist Italy as a foil for their own dreams of racial regeneration before Hitler’s rise to power. It also examines the cooperation between the two regimes following the 1936 Axis alliance, especially in terms of policing and the exchange of information about ‘Aryanisation’. Conceptually speaking, the article argues that the methods of cultural history are highly useful for shedding new light on Axis relations.
2015
This article, through a ‘case study’ of essays and textbooks for primary school teachers published in Brescia, a town in Northern Italy, would provide a contribution to the reconstruction of a national history’s page (not yet completely studied and known), in which all intellectuals – although restrained in what they could say under a dictatorial regime – had to choose if they would provide a cultural contribution to an ideology that all democracies born in Europe after the Second World War would strongly reject and condemn. By adopting a research method intended to combine the history of the education system with political, cultural and social history, the reading of these texts offers a glimpse of the multifaceted cultural environment within which racist legislation was born and implemented in Italy. These authors demonstrate, at different degrees and levels, how their writings helped to spread the racist ideology of the regime. This page of the history of Italian racism and anti-Semitism, resulting in the end in concentration and death camps and extermination, shows us how words and ideas can become, once disseminated and assimilated, facts justifying the killing of innocent people.
This special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, edited by Annalisa Capristo and Ernest Ialongo, marks the 80th anniversary of the implementation of the Racial Laws in Fascist Italy. It is an opportunity to assess the evolution of the historical literature on Fascist anti-Semitism and to mark future directions for research, but also to pay homage to Michele Sarfatti, who was critical in the development of the current state of the historiography on the subject. Where the earlier work, before the 1980s, was founded on the idea of ‘Italiani brava gente’, wherein Italy’s role was downplayed in the persecution of the Jews and in the Holocaust, that Italians were simply too humane to have participated in such horrific events, Sarfatti’s work launched a veritable revolution in the field, which dismantled all the tenets of the original consensus. This introduction surveys these developments, and summarizes the contributions of the varied authors published here who continue to challenge old truths and bring us closer to a more full and accurate understanding of Fascist anti-Semitism.