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September 10, 2010
Mussolini’s impact on Italy’s Jews
Il Duce moved from nationalism to imperialism to racism to full-blown antisemitism.
EUGENE KAELLIS
For many Jews, the consciousness of the Holocaust, of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, is never far below the surface of their awareness and can spring to mind whenever there is even a vague precipitating stimulus. But in this context, Jews probably rarely, if at all, think of Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism.
The reasons are not hard to find. Before the Second World War, Italy had a population of about 35 million, with only about 35,000 Jews (0.1 percent). They were not the despised Ostjuden; most of them could trace their Italian ancestry back for many generations. Some were even descended from ancestors living in the capital city of Imperial Rome, others from Spain or Portugal after the expulsions of the late 15th century. Italian Jews were in the middle class, with a few in the upper class, as well. They were well integrated into Italian culture. Their major synagogues even resembled cathedrals in structure and embellishment.
After the ghettos had been abolished, there was still some, largely ecclesiastical, anti-Judaism in Italian life, but no significant racialized antisemitism. By contrast, in Germany, even before the Nazis, racial antisemitism was a major factor in the popular emotional and ideological armamentarium. Can anyone imagine Richard Wagner composing a chorale that very sympathetically portrays Jews, as Verdi did in Nabucco, a hymn that became associated with the Italian movement for independence from Austria and was sung spontaneously by the many thousands attending Verdi’s funeral.
So, although Italy was the first avowedly fascist country, it only belatedly developed antisemitic policies, which were often not strictly enforced. Indeed, in the first period of Mussolini’s rule, there were Jews prominent in the army and the fascist movement. For example, Mussolini’s appointment of Aldo Finzi, a prominent Jewish fascist, as national police chief, was roundly criticized in the Nazi press. Early among the many mistresses of Il Duce was Margherita Sarfatti, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. Initially, Mussolini publicly remarked that Hitler’s antisemitism was ridiculous.
But there is another reason for the erroneous belief that Mussolini did not become a serious, consistent and avowed antisemite. It has to do with what can be called “popular culture,” also expressed in one’s self-awareness. In this regard, Germans viewed themselves, and were viewed by others, as consistent, thorough, unyielding and highly ideological, whereas Italians were fun-loving, friendly, impulsive and, despite their imperial Roman past, not militaristic. Indeed, fascist Italy’s armies never attained the martial glory Mussolini hoped for, not even in their ultimately successful imperialist conquest of Ethiopia, where they had to resort to the widespread use of poison gas and the bombing of field hospitals. Italy attacked France only after French collapse was certain, and Mussolini’s later invasion of Greece was disastrous until Hitler bailed him out. When the British in North Africa and the Russians on the eastern front discovered where Italian troops were massed, they often successfully attacked there, knowing that resistance would not be fierce.
Another factor in Il Duce’s “soft antisemitism” was the presence of Pope Pius XII who, although he made only vague presentments opposing antisemitism and minimally protected Roman Jews after the Germans occupied the city following Mussolini’s downfall, nonetheless played a somewhat cautionary role.
Before Hitler took power in 1933, he greatly admired Mussolini, who initially had expressed his disdain for the German leader. It is sometimes stated that the antisemitism fascist Italy eventually developed was due entirely to Hitler’s pressure. This is not true, however. Hitler understood that the “logic” of fascism, its totalitarianism, its militarism, its sense of national – if not racial – superiority, would eventually move Mussolini down the road to antisemitism, which is precisely what happened. The history of all totalitarian movements is that they, either initially or ultimately, rely on some form of group hatred to acquire and retain power.
Under the influence of his father, a militant socialist, Mussolini developed an ideological propensity early in life. He became the fiery editor of a socialist newspaper and a frequent orator for the cause. It was his interventionist attitude during the First World War that precipitated his break with Italian socialism.
To accompany Mussolini’s imperialist designs in Africa, he very early promoted racism, prohibiting, for example, any liaisons between Italian troops and indigenous women in Italian colonies in North and East Africa. By 1938, the Jewish population of Italy significantly increased with an influx of about 8,000 Jews fleeing Hitler. Il Duce reacted to this by ordering all foreign Jews who had taken up residence in Italy, Libya or the Dodecanese Islands after Jan. 1, 1919, to leave within six months. He defined Jewishness in somewhat more “accommodating” terms than had the Nuremberg Decrees, as people whose parents (plural) “are of the Jewish race.” This was quickly followed by a decree prohibiting Jews to be teachers or students at any school or university, although the effects were “softened” by permitting students who had already started their studies to complete them. The fascist press, quite rightly, denied that these decrees resulted from German pressure.
The fascist Grand Council was more heterogeneous than were the highest echelons of Nazism. Some prominent members, who had participated in the 1921 march on Rome that brought Mussolini to power, openly opposed Mussolini’s antisemitic measures.
After the fall of France, and while the Vichy regime of Marshall Petain was actively rounding up Jews to send them off as slave laborers to Germany or to the death camps, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, complained to Mussolini that Italian officers in France were inhibiting the roundup of Jews. In occupied Athens, when Italian troops refused to enforce the mandated wearing of the yellow star, Mussolini agreed to issue an order, to satisfy the Nazis. This, and other similar occurrences, emphasize that it was not Mussolini, but many ordinary Italians who, by their failure to enforce racist laws, attempted to ameliorate fascist treatment of the Jews. Some Italian communities, defying the fascists and, later, the invading Nazis, hid Jews, often on Church property. Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis, was an outstanding example.
Mussolini, nonetheless, continued on his racist trajectory. By 1938, he publicly approved of Kristalnacht. The next year, he stated that “there was no room for the Jews in Europe,” just a small step behind Hitler’s plan for the Final Solution. After Italy joined Germany in the Second World War, Mussolini stepped up his anti-Jewish rhetoric, by referring to the war as a contest between “Jewish gold and Italian blood.” Il Duce had moved, in what had become a serially duplicated procession in other parts of the world: from nationalism to imperialism, from imperialism to racism directed against subject peoples, and from racism to antisemitism.
Unlike Germany, when Italy was invaded by the Allies, the fascist government quickly collapsed. Il Duce was arrested and replaced by Marshal Badoglio, who sued for peace. Mussolini was rescued by the Nazi SS but eventually was captured by communist guerrillas and shot. These episodes deserve comparison with the behavior of Germans during the last days of the war, when even children and the aged fought for the Third Reich.
The intellectual resources required for the transition from civilized social behavior to demonic, aggressive and violent actions is invariably supported by ideology: the application of a structured, allegedly reasoned, set of beliefs that transforms itself into an atrocity-justifying system. This is the transition that characterized the 20th century in the development of communism, fascism and Nazism. It is now appearing as militant Islamism.
There can be no doubt that Mussolini was the ideal demagogue for Italians, as Hitler was for Germans and Josef Stalin for Russians, each building on a culture and an ideology, a major element of which was ultra-nationalism and, additionally for Marxists and para-Marxists, “historic inevitability.”
The history of all totalitarian systems, regardless of their religious or anti-religious stance, is that group aspirations become a function of a will independent of basic humanity. In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, perhaps in anticipation of the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century, stated that without belief in an ultimately just and judging God, “everything is possible.”
Both Hitler and Mussolini picked up elements of pre-existing cultural and intellectual propensities and used them to justify and promote an evil ideology. Some claim that, because people look for simplicity and consistency, ideology is inevitable. Fortunately for humanity, the world is neither simple nor consistent.
Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.
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