Category: Focus

ABSTRACT
Across Psychoanalysis, Jewish Studies and History, rarely has a single essay raised a debate comparable to the one triggered by Freud’s last book Moses and Monotheism. The aim of this paper is to explore it once more from the perspective of the rhetoric of the historical discourse. In the first part we will make use of Michel de Certeau’s and Roland Barthes’ works on the writing of history in order to examine its relation to historiography. We will try to show how Freud undermined the very bases of the discipline questioning its scientific and more positivist character (rather than being questioned by it) and pointing toward trajectories that will be fully undertaken only at a later time. In the second part we will analyze the affinities and the echoes between Freud’s methodology and the historiographical revolution accomplished by the French School of the Annales in those same years, outlining a pattern of transformation of the discipline prefigured and explored, in their own way, by both Freud and the French historians.

 ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to contribute, through the combination of lexicometric and qualitative analyses, to the study of the unofficial relations of domination conveyed by different forms of interaction in the Nazi camps. By using Italian testimonies, this article will try to shed light on the hierarchical dynamics that developed in the camps, in order to comprehend the particular difficulties related to integration and survival. The testimonies of Italian Jews show indeed that there were many varying forms of stereotypes that arose within the concentration and extermination camps, some originating within the community of those imprisoned on racial grounds, others developing within other categories or groups of prisoners. In the first case, stereotypes are generally based on nationality, language and seniority of imprisonment.

ABSTRACT
This essay deals with the fate of Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy from the liberation of the Camp of Ferramonti di Tarsia, by the Allied Army in 1943, until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. It focuses on the creation of a complex network of agencies, organizations and individuals involved in assisting the Jewish DPs in Italy, in the framework of the post-war refugee crisis. The article discusses the approaches and ambitions of the rescuers (military authorities, UN agencies and representatives from the Yishuv) and the desires of the Jewish DPs themselves, who played an active role both in the administration of the refugee camps as well as in the political discourse regarding their resettlement in British Palestine. Through an analysis of hitherto unexplored archival sources, it will illustrate the development of new sense of belonging and of a renewed identity among the Jewish DPs.

ABSTRACT
The “[Holocaust] Remembrance Day” was established in Italy by a bill made into law in 2000, following a years-long debate. The law covers chiefly the Fascist and Nazi anti-Jewish persecution from 1938 to 1945, but also the deportation of political opponents and of Italian POWs, and likewise considers non-Jewish Italians who rescued Jews. The date chosen for the day of commemoration is the January 27. The historical events, the categories of victims and the date specified in the law’s final text are the result of a complex process of elaboration and carry a deep meaning. The law’s text contains words and concepts that relate to a democratic national civic memory.
The Italian law is part of a continental process. Compared to its French and German equivalents, it appears both poorer and richer. 
In the Italian civic calendar, the “[Holocaust] Remembrance Day” can be considered alongside other commemorations that mark historical occurrences, chiefly “Liberation Day,” established in 1946 and celebrated on April 25; also the “Memorial Day” established in 2004 for Italian victims in the border territory between Italy and Yugoslavia, which is celebrated on February 10.
In Italian society, the January 27 is a deeply-felt commemoration day; numerous events are organized every year for schools and for the citizenry. The activities for schools are expressly mentioned within the law and have raised the question of the relationship between history and memory (and the present).
Each topic is presented and analyzed through its own specific sources: newspaper articles, parliamentary debates, documents of organizations, legislative texts, popular information material, statistical data, personal involvement, etc.

ABSTRACT
This article explores attitudes toward death and bereavement in the Jewish agricultural settlements of Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) from the First Aliyah (1881) to the 1920s, based primarily on newspapers of the period. The sources indicate that whereas members of the First Aliyah viewed death as a failure of the Zionist act and strived to conceal it to the best of their ability, the pioneers of the Second Aliyah effected a revolution in this realm, articulating a perspective that viewed death in the name of the Zionist act with pride and veneration as an attribute of the “new Jew.” This positive attitude focused on the casualties of Jewish guarding who were killed during clashes with Arabs, but also went further. Overall, the Zionist pioneers perceived blood as a means of actualizing the relationship between the Jew and Eretz Israel and expressed a desire to saturate the Land with their blood. The height of this process was the well-known pre-death utterance of Yosef Trumpeldor – a defender of the Jewish settlements in the Upper Galilee in the 1920s – that “it is good to die for our homeland.” This positive attitude toward sacrifice remained a prominent attribute of Zionism for many years to come.

ABSTRACT
This article investigates how Fascists qualified as belonging to the “Jewish race” reacted to the proclamation of the “Laws for the Defence of the Race” and, in particular, how they tried to take advantage of the special legal treatment called “discrimination”, that allowed them to avoid some of the effects of the anti-Semitic legislation. In fact, together with its persecutory measures, the Royal Decree of November 17, 1938, granted some slight dispensations to “Jewish” Italian citizens who could prove to have special merits in the military, political or economic spheres. Drawing on a sample of Milanese Jews’ personal dossiers submitted to the General Directorate for Demography and Race in 1938-1939, this article analyses the self-portrayals strategically devised by those who declared themselves Fascists, in order to illustrate the ‘good Fascist’ reference profiles they crafted and, indirectly, the varying conceptions of Fascism and Nation which had been at the basis of their closeness to the regime.

ABSTRACT
In this article I examine the presence and influence among Italian Jews of Max Nordau’s image of the “muscle Jew” and more broadly of a virile imaginary, intertwined with Zionist and Italian nationalist ideas. I first document the relevance of an early phase of Italian muscular Judaism at the beginning of the twentieth century, at the time of the rise of Zionism in Italy. I then study the development, in the 1920s and 1930s, of a virile imagery among the two trends of Italian revisionist Zionism and of what we may call Italian Jewish Fascism. I end by asking whether there were not inherent contradictions, or at least relevant tensions, in the ideal of the muscle Jew, between radical nationalism and Jewish forms of virility, as developed after the First world war and in connection with the rise and stabilization of Fascism.

ABSTRACT
The present article links the empowerment, consolidation and radicalization of Italian Fascism between 1919 and 1938 to the personal trajectories of Fascist and Fascist-sympathizing Jews in Trieste. At the same time, it aims to illustrate the relevance of Trieste as a testing ground for Fascist racism since the 1920ies. Trieste’s ambivalence as a multiethnic city as well as a racist laboratory created a form of “border-Fascism” where a distinctive Anti-Slavism anticipated contents and methods of Italy’s 1938 anti-Semitic laws. Becoming part of Italy only in 1919/20, the city’s geographical and cultural isolation from the “motherland” created a special political environment that Mussolini described as exemplarily for his – at the time – still nascent movement. For this article five Jews from different social and cultural milieus in Trieste have been selected, they are: Pietro Jacchia, the founder of the Fascist movement in Trieste (1919), Enrico Paolo Salem, the city’s Podestà (1933-1938), Achille Levi-Bianchini (1937-1938) and Marco de Parente (1938-1939), two presidents of the local Jewish Community and, finally, Italo Zolli, Trieste´s Chief Rabbi (1919-1940). These figures reflect both interconnections and conflicts between Triestine Judaism and the development of Fascism on a national scale.

ABSTRACT
The relationship between Jews and Fascism was troubled, complex and, in some respects, paradoxical. This article tells the story of some of the protagonists of Fascist political and economic life: Guido Jung, Gino Olivetti, Ettore Ovazza, Guglielmo Reiss-Romoli and Oscar Sinigaglia. With this essay, I wish to offer a sample, albeit neither exhaustive nor complete, of the political history of some key individuals who entertained diverse relationships both with Fascism and with their religious identity. Whether they acknowledged their Jewish roots or had drifted apart from the community had little relevance when the racial persecutions began: they all ended up being classified as racially Jewish by a regime they themselves had helped to build.

ABSTRACT
Reflecting on the research process for Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational (HRNT), which explores and analyzes the significance of the European and global politics of the commemoration of the Holocaust and Nazi-era crimes in the late 1990s and 2000s, this article will consider the influence of the intellectual context of trauma theory for this book. It will offer a response to the increasing critique of Eurocentric trauma theory which developed during the period spent researching the Stockholm International Forum (SIF 2000) and the first decade of the Task Force for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF, now the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA). This article will discuss how a revised trauma theory, along the lines suggested by scholars such as Joshua Pederson, continues to offer important possibilities for European studies of the histories and memories of the Holocaust in singular and comparative terms.