Category: Focus

ABSTRACT
Out of the 38.000 Italian Jews residents in Italy in 1938, more than 4,148 were deported. Of these, only 312 survivors returned. This paper deals with the Italian Holocaust survivors’ migration to Israel, and investigates the reason why only a very small percentage of those who returned from the Nazi camps migrated to Israel, compared to a much higher percentage of Italian Jews who were not deported and made aliyah. Were they “prisoners of hope”? Did they decide to reintegrate into the Italian political, social, and economic context hoping that their relationship with Italy could be the same as if nothing had happened? Or was it a question of “amnesia”? Was the lack of memory of the Fascist persecution a price they had to pay in order to succeed in their request of a full reintegration or was it due to the attitude of forgetting the past that Jews shared with the entire Italian society?

ABSTRACT
This paper enquires into the survival of the nineteenth-twentieth century anti-Jewish culture in Italy following the Shoah, in a specific cultural milieu, that of the «Enciclopedia Cattolica», published in twelve volumes from 1948 to 1954. While the more overt features of traditional anti-Semitism disappeared in Italy following 1945, avoiding its extrinsic characteristics, anti-Jewish stereotypes and images were practically untouched by a critical reappraisal, at least until the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, and were instead even proposed anew in theological, religious and cultural circles. This anti-Jewish ‘survivor’ will be investigated in the course of the paper by examining several entries contained in the «Enciclopedia» project.