Ebrei italiani di fronte al “razzismo”

The publication of the decalogue of the racist scientists in the daily newspaper “Il Giornale d’Italia”, on 15 July 1938, reveals a more complex and elaborate political project undertaken by Mussolini’s Fascist government. A design driven by a single interest: to create all the conditions for making Italians accept a war that Hitler wants to unleash at all costs. Even if this means sacrificing the past, the present and the future of tens of thousands of fellow Italian Jews, many of whom identified with Fascism and its ideals. Denouncing this some weeks ahead of the enactment of the racial laws of November 1938 – and almost two years before Italy’s entry into the war – is a young Italian born in Tunisia: Maurizio Valenzi. He entrusts his concerns as a Jew and an anti-fascist to a pamphlet signed with the pseudonym Andrea Mortara, published in the former French protectorate and smuggled into Italy. A lucid analysis that anticipated a tragedy which, a few years later, would drag the destinies of six million European Jews into the vortex of the Shoah