Anti-racist myth scotched

Damage inflicted on Italy's universities by a cynical scramble for academic jobs vacated by Jewish academics, expelled under Mussolini's "Race Laws" in 1938, is still evident today, according to recent research In L'Universita dalle Leggi Razziali alla Resistenza, published by the Padua University press, historians Roberto Finzi and Angelo Ventura suggest that while many Italian academics theoretically disapproved of the laws that barred "non-Aryans" from university posts, in practice only one refused to take their job. There was neither individual nor group protests.

The historians, who teach at Trieste and Padua respectively, drew on archives in the universities of Bologna and Padua. They traced appointments and careers from before 1938 to the end of the second world war. They calculate that about 300 Jewish academics were sacked from permanent posts, while many more in non-permanent jobs simply did not have their contracts renewed. "Hundreds or thousands of potentially brilliant young graduates, who would have shaped the universities that we have in Italy today, were prevented from even beginning a university career," adds Dr Ventura, The 1938 "race laws" excluded "non-Aryans" from jobs in public administration, schools and the armed forces. They also barred them from practising as doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects, and having commercial and business licences.

The laws also ordered the expulsion of "non-Aryan" children from state schools and forbade "non-Aryans" from having "Aryan" servants. After the war it became the accepted truth that fascism was an evil imposed by force by a dictatorial regime on an unwilling population, and that the introduction of the "race laws" provoked widespread opposition to the regime. Italy's universities were held to have been outraged, indignant and horrified at the purge of Jewish academics.

The book effectively demolishes that myth as a postwar effort to whitewash any guilt still clinging to the academic establishment of the new, democratic Italy.

Dr Finzi underlines that the exiled academics who tried to return to their careers in Italy after the war did not get their posts back. Only a few had the offer of very minor jobs. "Most decided to remain abroad and continue their research there. Italy's universities thus lost people who would have had an important role in postwar renewal. At the same time, those non-Jewish academics who had taken advantage of the 1938 purges continued happily in their careers.

"Nothing leads us to believe that the 'race laws' dug a ditch of moral indignation. From nowhere was the voice of an offended conscience raised. Even those who had the authority and social standing to speak out without risk chose to keep silent," Dr Ventura said.

Not only did willing candidates rush to compete for the posts vacated by Jewish colleagues, but new posts were opened up in the new "racial disciplines", which dealt with such scientifically sound matters as proving the superiority of certain races over others and the means for defending the superior races from adulteration by the inferior ones. There is no record that the university system had the slightest difficulty in filling these new posts.

The authors say that the purge of Jews decimated academics in fields in which Italy had been particularly strong, such as mathematics and physics. One example was Enrico Fermi, who in 1938 won the Nobel Prize for physics. He was not Jewish, but was married to a Jew, and in 1938 left Italy for the United States, where he worked on the A-bomb.

The "race laws" also deprived Italy of the leaders of what was then known as "The Italian School" in mathematics, such as Volterra, Enriques, Castelnuovo and Fubini. As evidence of the long-term effects on Italian academia, the authors point out that in 1938 some 7 per cent of academics were Jewish while in 1965 the figure was only 2 per cent.