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1 Jews have been in Italy since Roman times. At the end of the fifteenth century they were expelled from southern Italy, then a Spanish possession, at the same time as the Jews from Portugal and Spain. Consequently, many southern Italians were hardly aware of Italian Jews even during the Fascist period. Jews were never expelled from Rome or other papal possessions in central Italy, in part because the Church needed them as living reminders of the sufferings of Christ. Yet life was not easy for Jews in Rome, at least not after the sixteenth century, when a ghetto was set up there. They were then forced to attend church to hear weekly sermons exhorting them to convert and to be exposed to the taunts of the populace. Jews fared best in the north. Enlightened princes brought in many of them to promote commerce and Jewish emancipation began early in the nineteenth century. The Royal House of Savoy, which united Italy between 1860 and 1870, was especially philo-Semitic. In return, as Alexander Stille points out in his excellent Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (New York: Summit Books, 1991), the assimilated and prosperous Jews of Turin , Genoa, and other northern cities were fierce royalists. Italian Jews became bankers, doctors, lawyers, judges, cabinet members, police chiefs, and army officers in numbers and proportions exceeding those in all other countries, except perhaps the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. During World War I fifty Jewish generals served in the Italian army, a bewildering figure, for it means that T H E E U R O P E A N S A N D T H E H O L O C A U S T The more extensive original of this article appeared in the November 5, 1992, edition of the New York Review of Books, under the title “Holocaust Heroes.” 137 more than one out of every thousand Italian Jews was a general. This may have exceeded the proportion of generals within the Prussian Junker class. After World War I such educated and assimilated Jews who did not happen to be Socialists, and not many were, enthusiastically embraced fascism, which presented itself as a necessary defense against Bolshevism and anarchy. Two hundred and thirty Jewish Fascists marched on Rome with Mussolini in October 1922; Jews sat in the Duce’s cabinet and in the Fascist Grand Council. As late as 1938, at the time the first anti-Jewish measures were adopted in Italy, more than ten thousand Jews, or about one out of every three Jewish adults, were members of the Fascist Party; this constituted a much higher proportion of party membership than among the gentile population. Even Jews who were not party members took part in holiday parades wearing Fascist uniforms of one kind or another, as, of course, did much of the rest of the Italian population .1 Within the party a few Fascist leaders had been anti-Semitic from the start, while others were philo-Semitic, but for most Fascists “the Jewish question ” simply did not exist. Nor did it concern the general public, among whom the forty-seven thousand Jews (one-tenth of 1 percent of the total population) were distinguished neither by physical characteristics nor by language and only a little by customs and habits. Mussolini does not seem to have had strong feelings about the Jewish issue, except when it suited the interests of this most accomplished of all opportunists . He carried on a long affair with Margherita Sarfatti, a Jewish journalist whom he first met in his socialist days and cast aside in the 1930s. During the first fifteen years of his rule, he welcomed Jews into the Fascist ranks, in part because he felt, quite naively, that they had influence in the Western democracies . Even after he had broken with Great Britain over the Ethiopian war in 1935 and 1936, the Duce would alternately support the Fascist Jews and incite them against other Western European Jews and against Zionism, or he would shunt aside the Jewish Fascists and flirt with Zionists, saying that he and the Zionist movement would together conquer the Middle East. All this changed under the influence of Mussolini’s growing friendship with Hitler, which led to the adoption of Italy’s first racist laws in 1938. What happened next to the Italian Jews is the subject of three fine new books. One is the abovementioned Benevolence and Betrayal, a quietly written yet exciting and heartbreaking account by Alexander...

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