Fascist Italy and the "Other": Italianization, Antisemitism and Racial Persecution in the Triveneto Borderlands, 1918-1948

Abstract

Since the end of the Second World War, scholars have attempted to understand why Fascist Italy chose to adopt the racial laws in 1938. For sixteen years, Benito Mussolini rejected the existence of antisemitism in Italy, leading many to assert that the antisemitic program was a foreign import. The rise of Nazi Germany, expansion of Fascist Italy's colonial empire, and the desire to create the new fascist man are generally believed to be the main factors that pushed Italian fascism towards a racial program. Yet these factors do not fully explain the radical shift in Fascist Italy's approach to its Jewish minority. This dissertation argues that the turn towards official racism should also take into consideration the development of fascism's other long-standing minority program. Beginning in 1923, the Fascist government instituted policies to "Italianize" the Germanic and Slavic ethno-linguistic minority communities of South Tyrol (Venezia Tridentina) and the Adriatic (Venezia Giulia), known as the allogeni. To "make Italians" of the allogeni the Fascist government stripped them of their linguistic, cultural and political rights, and attempted to absorb them into the national community. However, by the end of the 1920s, Fascist officials began to question whether the assimilation of these ethno-linguistic Others was sufficient or even desirable. I argue that the failures of Italianization led to the delegitimization of assimilation - the foundation upon which Jewish inclusion had been built. The decline of assimilation was an important precursor to the rise of fascism's racial program. This dissertation posits that the borderland Italianization program and racial laws were different phases of the Fascist "redemptive struggle," aimed at redeeming the Italian people and nation through their unification in both being and spirit. The borderland Italianization programs also established some of the methods and procedures that would be adopted for the implementation of the racial laws.