Italian Fascism and the Jews, 1922 to 1945

It has long been regarded as a commonplace that a militant anti-Semitism had not been a characteristic feature of Italian Fascism, a fact which distinguished it markedly from German National Socialism. Many historians, especially scholars like Renzo De Felice, took this for a reason to put a stronger emphasis on the differences between the two ideologies rather than on their affinity, and they even questioned the scientific soundness of the term "fascism". According to this interpretation, the anti-Jewish policy of the fascist regime did not seem to be the result of its genuine ideological disposition, but a secondary consequence of Italy's alliance with National Socialist Germany. This article holds a different position. It argues that Italian Fascism was racist from the very beginning, and it was not free of anti-Semitic tendencies either. Those tendencies gained more and more influence from the mid-1930s onwards. During this process, it was not an imitation of Hitler and the Third Reich, but rather Italy's colonial war in Abyssinia, with its racist furor and the inner logic of Mussolini's project to create man anew after his fascist ideals, which worked as catalysts for a policy that culminated in the race laws of 1938. The latter were neither a pale imitation of the Nuremberg race laws of 1935, nor did they exist only on paper. On the contrary, the anti-Jewish policy of the regime was radicalized further until 1943, although it certainly never came close to the murderous dynamism of its German Counterpart. Yet the fascists of the republic of Salo became accomplices in the persecution and the killing of the Italian Jews by actively supporting the German bureaucracy of extermination. The essay argues that Italian fascism and German National Socialism had more in common than it had long been assumed. Therefore, it seems doubtful to take racism and anti-Semitism as major criteria in order to distinguish between the two phenomena.