Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under ...

THE OUTLOOK ON BOOKS
BENEVOLENCE AND BETRAYAL:
FIVE ITALIAN JEWISH FAMILIES UNDER FASCISM
Alexander Stille. Summit Books, 1991; Picador, 2003.
Other than the books of
Primo Levi, Italy is
not the first country
that comes to mind
when we think of the Jewish
experience under European fascism.
And we certainly do not
think about Jewish involvement
in the fascist movement itself.
North American Jews of a
certain age are familiar with
Vittorio de Sica’s Academy
Award-winning movie of 1970,
The Garden of the Finzi-Contini,
adapted from an elegiac 1962
novel by Jewish author Giorgio
Bassani about Jewish families
in the northern Italian city of
Ferrara before and during the
Second World War. Many were
astonished when the father of
the main male character, bewildered
at Mussolini’s turning on
the Jews in 1938, admits that
he is a member of the Fascist
Party. Jews cannot be fascists,
we thought.
But of course they can. Jews
are really not exceptional, nor is
there anything essential about
us. We are like anyone else.
Given half a chance, some will
be progressive and some will be
fascistic, as we see in Israel and
the Diaspora today. Only in
Nazi Germany, where anti-
Semitism was integral to
Hitler’s fanatical vision from the
start, were Jews totally excluded.
Of course, Jews are better
known for anti-fascist activity,
and certainly Italy had more
LARRY HAIVEN is a professor in the
Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s
University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A
long-time contributor to and supporter of
Outlook, he is a member of Independent
Jewish Voices-Canada.
than its share of Jewish antifascists
of the Communist,
Socialist and other political
varieties. Nevertheless, in the
early days of Mussolini’s Italy,
Jews were no strangers to the
far right. One estimate suggests
that in 1938, the year that Mussolini,
under the growing influence
of his ally Hitler, imposed
the infamous racial laws, more
than 10,000 Jews were Fascist
Party members—perhaps one
fifth of Italian Jewry. Among the
true believers was Aldo Finzi, a
member of the Fascist Grand
Council who was forced to
resign from parliament after
Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti
was assassinated. Finzi
left the Fascist Party over the
1938 racial laws and became an
anti-fascist partisan, later
killed by the SS in 1944. Mussolini’s
Jewish lover and biographer,
Margherita Sarfatti, was,
like him, first a Socialist and
then a Fascist. She too was
forced out in 1938.
But perhaps one of the
“purest” of Italian-Jewish Fascists
was Ettore Ovazza, from a
prominent Turin Jewish family.
A veteran of World War I, Ovazza
participated in, and was
honoured for, the 1922 “March
on Rome” in which Mussolini’s
Blackshirts began their national
seizure of power.
Evoking a 1929 audience
with the dictator where Mussolini
asked about his son,
Ovazza later gushed, “Il Duce’s
question moves me. I am
unable to speak. I don’t know
what to say in front of him.”
Swearing the undying loyalty of
Italian Jews, Ovazza recalled,
“His Excellency Mussolini looks
me straight in the eye and says
with a voice that penetrates
straight down to my heart: ‘I
have never doubted it.’…Such
is The Man that Providence has
given to Italy.”
Ovazza later edited the Jewish
Fascist newspaper La Nostra
Bandiera. Like other Italian
Fascists, his loyalty did him no
good after 1938, though he
claimed, “They’ll never touch
me, I’ve done too much for fascism.”
He was murdered, trying
to escape to neutral Switzerland,
by the Nazis in 1943, after
Mussolini’s fall from power and
the seizure of northern Italy by
Germany.
Ettore and the Ovazza family
is one of five portraits in
Alexander Stille’s 1991 first
book (reprinted in 2003) Benevolence
and Betrayal: Five Italian
Jewish Families Under Fascism.
The others are of antifascists,
also from Turin; a family from
the Rome ghetto; an interaction
between Jews and Catholics in
Genoa; and the horrors of the
Jews of Ferrara, one of the bastions
of their presence in Italy
from the eleventh century and
one which, under the Este
dynasty, gave them full rights
continued on following page
May/June 2013/ 31

THE OUTLOOK ON BOOKS
long before the rest of Italy
(though this was removed when
the Vatican and the Inquisition
took over in 1597.) While the
stories of Jewish fascists are
the most striking and unexpected,
several chapters deal with
Italian Jews who fought Mussolini
even before he took political
power in 1922, and certainly
before he allied his country with
Nazi Germany.
The word “ghetto” is in fact of
Italian origin. And even the
enlightened Italians of the
Renaissance were prone to
attack the Jews. During a tour
of the mountain city of Trento,
our guide pointed out a wall
plaque in a main street portraying
a little boy being savaged by
men in beards. The plaque
commemorates “Little Simon”
(Simonino), a two-year-old
Christian boy (later canonized)
whose death in 1475 was
attributed to ritual murder (the
so-called “blood libel”) by the
city’s Jews. Subjected to torture,
fifteen of them were burnt
at the stake and the rest
expelled, an act not repealed
until 1965.
The rehabilitation in Trento
came over 100 years after
emancipation in the rest of the
country. The Ferrara ghetto disappeared
in 1859 and the Jews
once again prospered, as generally
did their co-religionists
throughout the country until
1938.
Stille’s book is not new, but
one that needs to be read more
widely outside of Italy. I discovered
it only recently after
spending considerable time in
northern Italy and meeting the
author. Alexander Stille, himself
of Jewish background, was
born in the U.S. but is the son
of Ugo Stille, the former editor
of the major Italian newspaper
Corriere della Sera. I became
interested in Stille after reading
32 / Outlook
his very accessible and thorough
exposé The Sack of Rome:
How a Beautiful European
Country with a Fabled History
and a Storied Culture Was Taken
Over by a Man Named Silvio
Berlusconi (2006). He is also
author of Excellent Cadavers:
The Mafia and the Death of the
First Italian Republic (1995).
Stille is a professor at the
Jews are not exceptional,
nor is there anything
essential about us.
Given half a chance,
some will be progressive
and some will
be fascistic.
Columbia School of Journalism
and writes for The New York
Review of Books, The New York
Times and The New Yorker.
Focusing on five stories,
Stille is able to personalize a
complex history, not only of
Jews under Fascism, but of
Jews in Italian history. Many
were originally exiles from the
Spanish expulsion of 1492.
Ironically, they were treated
with respect in the South, but
came under greater segregation
in northern cities, and all suffered
on the roller-coaster ride
of the Popes’ and the Catholic
Church’s changing attitudes.
This continued until the
Napoleonic invasion and their
emancipation (save for a short
revanchement before the revolutions
of 1848). Italy had one
of the world’s first unconverted
Jewish heads of government in
1910, and Rome had a Jewish
mayor from 1907 to 1913. And
even in hindsight, Italian Jews
escaped the worse depredations
of the Holocaust until almost
before the Allies liberated the
country.
But the temporary escape of
Italian Jews from the gas chambers
was only a small mercy.
One of the most heart-rending
stories in the book is that of the
Jews of Rome. Gathered around
one of the finest synagogues in
Europe, on the banks of the
Tiber, close to famous Roman
ruins, the ghetto was not
allowed to expand while the city
grew around it, and by the 20 th
century housed over 5,000 people
in seven and a half acres
(around 3 hectares, or one
tenth the size of the Vatican
City). Says Stille, “While most
Jews in northern Italy were cosmopolitan,
highly assimilated
and far from religious Orthodoxy,
the Jews of the Rome
ghetto were barely literate,
deeply religious and powerfully
linked to the life and traditions
of their community.” Even
today, Romans talk about the
cruel trick played by the Nazis
in inviting the Jews in October
1943 to save their lives with a
ransom of 50 kilograms of gold.
Despite paying the ransom, the
Jews were deported, joining
7,500 of their coreligionist compatriots
in extermination, even
as the Allies fought their way up
the Italian peninsula.
To the end, the Roman Jews
believed in Italian exceptionalism.
In the words of one of them
quoted by Stille, they:
…felt the approach of terrible
events, and yet because their
own consciences were clear,
supported by that high sense of
civilization that comes from
having grown up in our beautiful
Italy, mother of morality and
law that from eternal Rome has
illuminated the whole world,
they refused to believe that the
thugs of Hitler would dare
repeat the incredible barbarities
they had committed in
Poland, Germany, Holland and
Belgium. Vain illusion!◆