The Italian executioners: revisiting the role of Italians in the Holocaust

L'aritcolo esamina il ruolo degli italiani nella Shoah (1943-45). Forze di polizia, burocrazia locale e statale, volontari del partito fascista parteciparono a diverso titolo all'arresto, deportazione e depredazione degli ebrei italiani. Le responsabilità italiane si configurano come la partecipazione a un genocidio.The article revisits the role of Italians in the Holocaust in the light of recent historiography and by applying the category of genocide to the hunting, arrest and deportations of the Jews in Italy in 1943-45, under the German occupation and during the Republic of Salo established by Mussolini. Special attention is given to the ideological context of radical antisemitism, initiated by the introduction of the fascist racial law of 1938 and exacerbated by the Italian civil war, as well as to the role of a variety of ordinary actors, from policemen to volunteers of the fascist party, from bureaucrats to informants

Histoire et Lumières

Forum sul volume di Zeev Sternhell, Histoire et lumières : changer le monde par la raison : entretiens avec Nicolas Weill, Albin Michel, Paris 201

Representation of Jews and Anti-Jewish Bias in 19th-Century French Public Discourse: Distant and Close Reading

We explore through the lens of distant reading the evolution of discourse on Jews in France during the XIX century. We analyze a large textual corpus including heterogeneous sources—literary works, periodicals, songs, essays, historical narratives—to trace how Jews are associated to different semantic domains, and how such associations shift over time. Our analysis deals with three key aspects of such changes: the overall transformation of embedding spaces, the trajectories of word associations, and the comparative projection of different religious groups over different, historically relevant semantic dimensions or streams of discourse. This allows to show changes in the association between words and semantic domains (referring e.g. to economic and moral behaviors), the evolution of stereotypes, and the dynamics of bias over a long time span characterized by major historical transformations

Umberto Eco, Narratives of Conspiracy and the Anti-Semite Among Us

http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/discussion.php?id=3

Evaluating Multilingual Sentence Representation Models in a Real Case Scenario

In this paper, we present an evaluation of sentence representation models on the paraphrase detection task. The evaluation is designed to simulate a real-world problem of plagiarism and is based on one of the most important cases of forgery in modern history: the so-called {``}Protocols of the Elders of Zion{''}. The sentence pairs for the evaluation are taken from the infamous forged text {``}Protocols of the Elders of Zion{''} (Protocols) by unknown authors; and by {``}Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu{''} by Maurice Joly. Scholars have demonstrated that the first text plagiarizes from the second, indicating all the forged parts on qualitative grounds. Following this evidence, we organized the rephrased texts and asked native speakers to quantify the level of similarity between each pair. We used this material to evaluate sentence representation models in two languages: English and French, and on three tasks: similarity correlation, paraphrase identification, and paraphrase retrieval. Our evaluation aims at encouraging the development of benchmarks based on real-world problems, as a means to prevent problems connected to AI hypes, and to use NLP technologies for social good. Through our evaluation, we are able to confirm that the infamous Protocols are actually a plagiarized text but, as we will show, we encounter several problems connected with the convoluted nature of the task, that is very different from the one reported in standard benchmarks of paraphrase detection and sentence similarity. Code and data available at https://github.com/roccotrip/protocols

Representation of Jews and Anti-Jewish Bias in 19th-Century French Public Discourse: Distant and Close Reading

We explore through the lens of distant reading the evolution of discourse on Jews in France during the XIX century. We analyze a large textual corpus including heterogeneous sources-literary works, periodicals, songs, essays, historical narratives-to trace how Jews are associated to different semantic domains, and how such associations shift over time. Our analysis deals with three key aspects of such changes: the overall transformation of embedding spaces, the trajectories of word associations, and the comparative projection of different religious groups over different, historically relevant semantic dimensions or streams of discourse. This allows to show changes in the association between words and semantic domains (referring e.g. to economic and moral behaviors), the evolution of stereotypes, and the dynamics of bias over a long time span characterized by major historical transformations. We suggest that the analysis of large textual corpora can be fruitfully used in a dialogue with more traditional close reading approaches-by pointing to opportunities of in-depth analyses that mobilize more qualitative approaches and a detailed inspection of the sources that distant reading inevitably tends to aggregate. We offer a short example of such a dialogue between different approaches in our discussion of the Second Empire transformations, where we mobilize the historian's tools to start disentangling the complex interactions between changes in French society, the nature of sources, and representations of Jews. While our example is limited in scope, we foresee large potential payoffs in the cooperative interaction between distant and close reading

“A Nostalgia for Totality”: Cesare Cases Between Antisemitism, the Jewish Question and Israel

The chapter examines the attitude of the Marxist literay critic Cesare Cases (1920-2005) towards his Jewish origins, anti-Jewish persecution during Fascism and the Middle Eastern questio

Diventare antisemiti: conversione e antisemitismo cattolico nella Francia dell'Ottocento

L’articolo analizza la relazione tra conversione al cattolicesimo e nascita dell’antisemitismo cattolico nella Francia dell’Ottocento. Esamina in particolare la vicende dei fratelli Joseph (1836-1915) e Augustin Lémann (1836-1909), ebrei convertiti, divenuti sacerdoti cattolici e zelanti antisemiti, autori di pamphlet e opere storiche sulla Francia di ispirazione antiebraica, e di Edouard Drumont, capofila dell’antisemitismo francese, tornato al cattolicesimo delle origini, e autore dell’opera di grande influenza, La France juive (1886). Nelle opere di questi autori si registra il passaggio dall’antigiudaismo all’antisemitismo cattolico e il loro intreccio