FASCISM AND THE JEWS: ITALY AND BRITAIN

• Part I - FASCISM AND THE JEWS: ITALY AND BRITAIN
  • Daniel Tilles & Salvatore Garau, Introduction
  • Professor Aristotle Kallis, Fascism and the Jews: From the Internationalisation of Fascism to a ‘Fascist Antisemitism’
    • The relationship between fascism, race and antisemitism has troubled historians ever since the end of the second world war. While National Socialist ideology and praxis were evidently dominated by an existential hatred of the Jews, discussion of antisemitism in the context of generic/comparative fascism studies reveals a wide variation amongst other fascist movements/regimes that has impeded a historiographical consensus on this matter. This essay examines how a particular, virulent form of (generic) ‘fascist antisemitism’ emerged and spread during the 1930s, under the radicalising influence and increasing kudos of the National Socialist regime, resulting in a de facto internationalisation of ‘fascism’ and a sense of a joint history-making mission against the perceived forces of ‘decadence’. However, the term ‘fascist antisemitism’ does not imply simple imitation of an otherwise imported or imposed (Nazi) model. Instead, long-term traditions and contemporary factors particular to each national setting played a critical role in shaping the relationship between fascism and antisemitism in each branch of the fascist ‘new order’.
• Part II - THE EVOLUTION OF FASCIST ANTISEMITISM
  • Salvatore Garau, Between ‘Spirit’ and ‘Science’: The Emergence of Italian Fascist Antisemitism through the 1920s and 1930s
    • This study challenges the belief that Italian Fascist antisemitism appeared only in 1938, as an imitation of German racialism, instead revealing and analysing the far earlier emergence of antisemitism within specific sectors of Italian Fascism from the early 1920s and demonstrating its derivation from native traditions of Catholic and nationalist anti-Jewish thought. It then outlines the combination of internal and external factors that caused antisemitism to spread from certain internal strands to the rest of Italian Fascism in the 1930s. Finally, it examines more closely the dispute that arose within Fascism between those who advocated a biological form of racism, and those who instead accorded it a cultural or ‘spiritual’ basis.
  • Dr Matthew Feldman, Make It Crude: Ezra Pound’s Antisemitic Propaganda for the BUF and PNF
    • It is certainly not an established convention to speak of ‘the British Holocaust novel’. Indeed, many would see such a label as a contradiction in terms. Within the last two decades, however, a surprising number of British novels have dealt with the Holocaust. This article reads a fairly wide selection of such novels, arguing that they represent attempts to overcome a deeply entrenched tension in the British discourse of remembrance: the tension between a definitive national tradition of continually re-presenting the Second World War on the one hand, and the firmly established exemption of Britain from involvement in the Holocaust on the other. Analysing different fictional strategies for translating the Holocaust into British ‘memory culture’, the essay traces a development that leads from gestures of substitution to gestures of investigation, that is, from a literary practice of de-realisation and counter-historical spatial extension of the Holocaust towards literary endeavours of discovering traces of the Holocaust even in the Britain of today.
  • Dr Graham Macklin, A Fascist ‘Jihad’: Captain Robert Gordon-Canning, British Fascist Antisemitism and Islam.
    • Little exists in the literature on British fascism to suggest the pivotal importance of Palestine to British antisemites and fascists during the interwar period. This lacuna is especially surprising given that Britain was the Mandatory power in Palestine from 1920 until 1948. This study explores the interaction between British fascists and Palestinian Arabs during the interwar period and the immediate aftermath of the Second World War through the activities and views of Captain Robert Cecil Gordon-Canning (1888-1967), one of the leading luminaries of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). The study will examine the physical and ideological connections of British fascism outside of its European context, a focus that has dominated previous studies on the trans-national rather than trans-continental, in order to offer some provisional insights into the relationship between leading British and Islamist extremists prior to the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948.
  • Janet Dack, Conduct Unbecoming? Attitudes Towards Jews In The British Fascist And Mainstream Tory Press, 1925-1939
    • The study examines the employment of antisemitism in the press of three interwar fascist organisations in Britain – the British Fascists, the Imperial Fascist League, and the British Union of Fascists – demonstrating its differing use by the three movements and its evolution over time. Furthermore, comparison with the mainstream press demonstrates that, except for one issue, the antisemitism of fascist publications does not represent a reflection of the views and attitudes expressed in mainstream media, and in many cases goes so far beyond what was socially acceptable. However, attitudes to refugees in the fascist press and the popular mainstream press do exhibit clear similarities.
• Part III - JEWISH RESPONSES TO FASCIST ANTISEMITISM
  • Dr Ilaria Pavan, An Unexpected Betrayal? The Italian Jewish Community Facing Fascist Persecution.
    • In the memoirs of Jewish victims, Italian Fascism’s antisemitic turn has typically been described as an unexpected and sudden betrayal by Mussolini’s government, a ‘bolt from the blue’ that struck the well integrated Italian Jewish community without any forewarning. This study describes the plight of Italian Jews and the choices they faced during the first phase of the persecution (1938-1943). Furthermore, by demonstrating that the antisemitic campaign was, in fact, the final and most radical step in an increasing racialisation of the regime’s stance over the 1930s, it tackles the question of whether, in earlier years, there had been subtle signs, or even clear warnings, that should have made the racial laws if not foreseeable, at least ideologically conceivable to the Italian Jewish community.
  • Dr Elena Mazzini, Facing 1938: How the Italian Jewish Community Reacted to the Antisemitic Laws
    • Drawing on a representative sample of the Italian Jewish press, this study explores a wide range of contemporaneous reactions to the Italian Fascist regime’s antisemitic turn of 1938. It demonstrates not only the practical difficulties presented to Italian Jews of all persuasions, who had been collectively reduced to the status of non-citizens, but also the questions that were raised over their Italian and Jewish identities, and the relationship between the two. While for some, the solution lay in returning to and embracing their Jewishness, such a path remained troublesome for many within what had become a well integrated and heterogeneous community.
  • Dr Nigel Copsey & Daniel Tilles, Uniting a Divided Community? Re-appraising Jewish Responses to British Fascist Antisemitism, 1932-39
    • Traditionally, work on Anglo-Jewish responses to British fascism has concentrated on its ‘working-class’, activist manifestations, particularly in east London over the period 1935-7, when Jews were prominently involved in confronting the British Union of Fascists. Such a focus has neglected other forms of Jewish activity, and this study examines two such aspects – early responses in the period up to 1935, and the defence work of the Board of Deputies of British Jews – drawing attention to the varying forms that Jewish opposition to domestic fascism took, as well as the different motivations that lay behind them. Furthermore, it challenges the perception that the communal leadership was unsympathetic to Jews who directly faced fascist antisemitism and ineffective in protecting them from it. Finally, it contests the belief that the debate over communal defence caused divisions within Anglo-Jewry, demonstrating instead that, while it certainly highlighted existing fissures, reflected in the varied initial responses to British fascism, the fascist threat eventually helped bring about greater unity and played a significant role in wider shifts in communal identity and power.