Antisemitism in Italy? · Liberty Politics Discussion

Antisemitism in Italy?

During yesterday's open discussion, a member has said that the current situation in Italy with regard to antisemitism is the same as it was a century ago under Fascist rule. Let's try and clarify why the member has such a negative perception of today's Italy. First of all, let's summarize how Italy had been back then. While in the first sixteen years (1922 - 1938) of the Fascist regime there was no antisemitism in Italy, but 'only' antijudaism (I'll explain the difference later), in its last 5 years (1938 - 1943) we had laws forbidding Jewish children to study at school (except for only-Jewish schools, which were permitted) and Jewish adults to have a regular job and to employ non-Jewish people. While the Nazi persecution was, already then, threatening Jewish lives outside of Italy, in those five years Jewish lives in Italy were still protected, deportation (requested by Hitler and his gang) was generally boycotted by both the government and the common people and temporary-transitionary migration to Italy of Jews escaping to save their own lives was a common practice. As stated by historian Raul Hilberg and political philosopher Hannah Arendt, together with Denmark Italy was the country which best protected Jewish lives during that period. Of course, denying jobs and education was an expression of antisemitism: Italy was certainly an antisemitic country between the years 1938 - 1943, while in the last two years of war (1944-1945) Italy was occupied by Nazi and became hunting ground for Jewish lives, the hunt being carried on both by German Nazis and by those Fascists who didn't switch side and who 'radicalized', of course obeying to German orders. Many other former Fascists and common people boycotted and sabotaged the hunt. Let's move on, then, to the present: is Italy currently an antisemitic country? No, it isn't, at least if you make a careful distinction among antijudaism - the fact of feeling hatred and/or contempt for Jews - and antisemitism, which is antijudaism become political. There are political movements who are antisemitic, but they are quite marginal and stand at the two extremes (right and left) of the political spectrum. Government forces and parlamentary opposition forces are non antisemitic: the opposition (the letfist coalition) isn't actually antisemitic, because it doesn't have the power nor the political will to translate its own (quite clear) hatred for Israel into any actual policy. The ruling parties (a center-right coalition) aren't actually antisemitic too, because despite their clear antijudaism, which is strongly tied to their catholicism, one of their main political goals is to harshly exploit immigrants through the non-recognition of their equality in term of citizenship, and they use anti-Islamic fears (which, by the way, are often reasonable these days - but these parties would act the same even if those fears were never reasonable) in order to succeed in this specific political goal.

This said, antijudaism is quite common in both the Italian 'società civile' (the 'upper' part of any national community, taking care of law, education, art, economical policies, science, journalism and so on) and the wider 'comunità civile' (the rest of the national community). It has gotten worse recently, due to the fanaticism of the Pope (the one who recently died) and to the strongly catholic identity of the President of the Republic, Mattarella, who is widely respected and listened to here. We are not even close to Spain's current political antisemitism and Spain's general antijudaism, but Italian antijudaism has always been a big problem for us here and it will always be, as long as catholicism stays so influential and keeps being rooted inside Italian minds. But an antijudaic and catholic Italian would never use physical violence against a Jew in the street nor elsewhere. It's much more about humiliating the Jews verbally in a non-direct way: it's about making them feel inferior and ashamed without ever insulting them face-to-face, directly, but expressing idiotic opinions about Jews and Israelis in general. There have been cases of refusal to have Israelis in a b&b or in a restaurant or shop, but very marginal cases. The only direct threat to Jews here comes from radicalized Islamists, but so far they haven't been active in this sense.

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