Volume 67, Issue 4

Yeshiva Hosts International Historical Conference on Italian Jewry and the Holocaust
by Ruben Seth Fogel

From October 6-8, the Yeshiva community hosted a conference entitled “The Jews of Italy Under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945.” The conference, cosponsored by the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and the Eli and Diana Zborowski Chair in Interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies, featured more than twenty internationally renowned scholars in this particular area. 

The issues discussed amongst the gathering’s six different panels included the rise of Italian racial discrimination, Jewish responses to Italian racial laws, the Vatican and the Holocaust, the German occupation of Northern Italy, and Italian Jewry since 1945.  The wide-ranging topics addressed painted a comprehensive portrait of Italian Jewry’s Holocaust experience, while shedding new light on Fascist and postwar Italy.

Dr. Joshua Zimmerman, Assistant Professor of History and Holocaust Studies at Yeshiva University, undertook the Herculean task of organizing the conference and assembling historians from around the world. Zimmerman said that he hopes the conference will make Italian Jewry more visible as a living community today, in part to make up for the lack of attention the community has received in recent years. He speculated that part of the neglect stems from the unusually high mortality rate of Italian Jews during the Holocaust when contrasted to other Nazi-occupied European countries in World War II.

Another aim of the conference, as Dr. Zimmerman pointed out, was to serve as a reminder that the Italian state owes recognition to what actually happened in Italy, rather than disregarding “the independent Italian persecution that took place.” For a paradigm, Dr. Zimmerman presented the lack of official protest in Italian universities to the ban of all Jewish professors from careers in higher education in 1938, a measure that opened up 170 tenure-track positions. During his introductory speech to open the conference, Dr. Zimmerman also explained that Fascist Italy, while still a sovereign state, was a haven for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. This ended with the Nazi occupation of Northern Italy in 1943, which, as Dr. Zimmerman cited, was succeeded by the deportation of 8000 Jews and the confiscation of 1.9 billion lira by the end of 1944.

Dr. Arthur Hyman, Dean of Revel, similarly emphasized the importance of remembering the Italian Jewish community. “We can never forget the Holocaust…but that is not enough,” he said. “It is equally important that we remember the thriving communities that existed before the Holocaust, and their reinstitution today.”

To commence the conference, Alexander Stille, an author and journalist living in New York, delivered a keynote lecture entitled “The Double-Bind of Italian Jews: Acceptance and Assimilation” to a crowd of approximately 160 attendees at the Geraldine Schottenstein Cultural Center in midtown Manhattan. In his lecture, Mr. Stille cautioned that “the notion that Germans tried to hurt Jews while Italians tried to help them is a gross oversimplification,” addressing the peculiar relationship that Italian Jews had with their surrounding culture.

Italy, where many Jews were forced to live in walled ghettos well into the 19^th century, became one of the most enlightened countries, which allowed Jews to assume major roles within Italian society. “In medieval days,” Mr. Stille said, “when times were good, the Jews of Italy were valued bankers, but when times were bad, they were scapegoats.” But the Jews that lived in Italy during Mussolini’s Fascist regime were respected, fully patriotic, and especially loyal citizens. Unlike Jews in many other parts of Europe, the Jews of Italy spoke the language of the land, Italian. Even Mussolini regarded Jews as Italians, and although he was suspicious of Zionism, in Mussolini’s eyes, the Jews were not Zionists by default.

Fascism itself was largely free of anti-Semitic ideology until 1938 – Jews were Fascists of all ranks, and non-Jewish Fascists helped save Jewish lives during the Nazi-persecution that followed Italy’s occupation by Hitler’s forces. And yet during the German occupation between 1943 and 1945, some Italians willingly cooperated with the Nazis, aiding them to send Jews to their deaths rather than save Jewish life, although, as Mr. Stille asserts, it was much easier for Italians to help Jews than it was for Poles.

Appropriately, it seems, Mr. Stille then concluded his lecture with a thought for his audience to ponder about. “It was much easier for Italians to help Jews than it was for Poles, who lived under a ferocious Nazi regime,” he stressed. “This is especially interesting because a choice was possible, and much can be learned about human nature from the choices that were made.”

The panel presentations over the course of the subsequent two days – each panel featuring between three and four speakers – addressed Mr. Stille’s questions and other seemingly paradoxical problems. One of the issues raised was the lack of an explicit and outspoken papal response to anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution of the Jews, despite documented proof of aversion against anti-Semitism by certain elements within the Vatican.

Another highly absorbing presentation dealt with the rescue of Jews in Italy while the Vatican was headed by Pius XII as well as with the issue of “Papal Defenders” (as referred to by Susan Zuccotti, a New York historian and author and a speaker at the conference), who attempt to relieve Pope Pius XII from any fault in the deaths of 8000 Jews of Italy that, as those opposed to the ideology of the Papal Defenders argue, could have been saved through an open or concealed papal initiative.

A different set of panel presentations spoke of the post-Fascist, post-WWII, and post-Holocaust experience of Italian Jewry, and included discussions of how modern-day filmmakers confront Italian Holocaust History – a subject ignored for a long time in Italian cinema despite the courage traditionally expressed in other Italian films dealing with complicated and painful aspects of Italian history, society, and culture.

While some panels assumed a level of historical and political education and awareness rarely found in most undergraduate students, I tremendously enjoyed listening to the discussions and sometimes-heated debates. Historians assembled at the conference greeted undergraduate students, as well as all other unaffiliated attendees, with great warmth, and were always willing to explain some aspects of their presentations afterwards to the interested. Considering that the conference was free, open to the public, and publicized by some of Yeshiva’s history professors, it is saddening that so few undergraduate students cared enough to widen their intellectual horizons or knowledge of a historical period that affects us as Jews directly, in exchange for just a little of their time.

In the end, the conference left many questions unanswered and opened up even more questions for debate than it resolved. But answering all questions was hardly the aim, as the conference was also meant to broaden the already existing discussion of the experience of Italy’s Jews under Fascist and Nazi regimes and their aftermath. Such a continuing debate, inevitably, will focus more attention on not only the history of the Italian Jewish community, but also the Italian Jewish community as it exists, lives, and thrives today. ♦

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