The Consequences of Fascist Racism

“The persecution of Jews enacted in 1938 raped men, their identities, their consciences, their social relations, their affections.” For the first time in the history of united Italy, a portion of the state’s citizens were subject to specific discriminatory legislation that effectively excluded Jews, identified as “belonging to the Jewish race,” from the nation. The document Fascism and the Problems of Race became “the ideological and pseudo-scientific basis of Fascist Italy’s racist policy, overcoming, in intentions, prescientific anti-Semitic racism, based on a religious and ‘behavioral’ prejudice.”

As illustrated by Marcello Aprile, concerning the stereotypes of fascist racism, as much as “The Race Manifesto and the work of anthropologists (especially those at Sapienza)” attempt to bring fascist racism back to alleged biological motives, the anti-Semitism of the regime’s thumping propaganda is dictated by a mixture of the old stereotypes, partly stemming from the evergreen Christian anti-Judaism, and the new forms of propaganda, which primarily include the dissemination of fake news.

The two tendencies of fascist anti-Semitism are thus the “mystic-religious-complottery” and the “biological-racial”; they are freely mixed in anti-Semitic pamphlets and magazines, beginning with La difesa della razza.”