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  • Mussolini's Children: Race and Elementary Education in Fascist Italy by Eden K. McLean, and: The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy by Simon Levis Sullam
  • Alexis Herr
Mussolini's Children: Race and Elementary Education in Fascist Italy, Eden K. McLean (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 348 pp., hardcover $55.00, electronic version available.
The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy, Simon Levis Sullam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 208 pp., hardcover $26.95, electronic version available.

Since Renzo de Felice's publication of Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascism (1961), scholars of Italian Fascism and the Holocaust have debated his claim that Italians had rejected antisemitism because it was inconsistent with Italian identity. Thanks to the sixty years of scholarship that followed de Felice's erroneous assertion, it is now widely accepted that many Italians supported the state's Fascist policies of xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism. Mussolini's Children: Race and Elementary Education in Fascist Italy by Eden K. McLean, and The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews in Italy by Simon Levis Sullam—in the same vain as works by Christopher Duggan, Tracy H. Koon, Michele Sarfatti, Guri Schwarz, and many others—disprove the myth of Italian innocence during the Holocaust by focusing on Italian agency in the evolution of Fascism and the realization of racist policies.

Both works analyze Italian agency, examining the "scientific," social, regional, and economic influences that drove racism, antisemitism, and genocide in Fascist Italy. McKlean focuses on the links between Fascist ideology and racism from 1922 to 1940; Sullam investigates the connection between Italian Fascism and genocide, primarily from 1943 to 1945. To have different historical focuses is common within Italian scholarship. Unlike a German-centric study of the Holocaust, which typically spans 1933 to 1945 (studies focusing on antisemitism and anti-Judaism aside), Italian Fascism covers a much longer period, namely 1922 to 1945. The lengthy time period and its critical events—including the passage of the Italian Racial Laws (1938), Italy's declaration of war (1940), the overthrow and reinstatement of Mussolini (1943), and the German occupation (1943–1945)—often result in the need to hone in on specific years instead of examining the whole of Italian Fascism. This trend within Italian research, however, limits scholars' ability to elucidate factors that drove [End Page 120] compliance, acquiescence, and resistance within the macro narrative of European, Fascist, and Holocaust history.

In Mussolini's Children, McLean sets out to explain the historical development of Italian racial theory and practice from Mussolini's assumption of power (1922) to Italy's declaration of war. Within each section, McLean scrutinizes how the Fascist regime leveraged educational institutions and classrooms to encourage racism, nationalism, and italianità ("Italianness"). In so doing she provides a well-researched account of what she calls the "intricate layers of definition and identification that compose the ideas of race and racism" (p. 3). In part one, she looks at "the infrastructural and pedagogical framework for racial education" from 1922 to 1929 (p. 19). Part two examines 1929 to 1934, the period during which Italy intensified "its project to make Italy's educational system totalitarian and 'Fascistized' through a more centralized infrastructure and curriculum" (p. 19). In section three, McLean "explores the Fascist imperial project and its relationship to the domestic racial campaign as it took center stage" from 1934 to 1938 (p. 19). The final chapters focus on the "ideological continuation of the fascist racial campaign" that evolved between 1922 and Italy's declaration of war on June 10 (p. 19).

According to McLean, she concludes her analysis in 1940 because the focus of the regime and its educational policy changed radically thereafter. Her decision, while practical, seems like a missed opportunity to link the advancement of Italian racial policy to genocidal antisemitism. Likewise, because the book is organized chronologically rather than thematically, McLean does not address the presentation of Jews in Italian textbooks until chapter 4 (p. 116), and she waits until chapter 5 to compare Italian and German racial views (p. 153). Likewise, it is not until later in the book that she analyzes eugenics, Roma and Sinti, and...

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