A book review of Simon Levis Sullam\u27s The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy

Klein, Shira

English

Chapman University Digital Commons

Chapman University Chapman University Digital Commons History Faculty Articles and Research History 6-3-2019 Review of Levis Sullam, Simon, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy Shira Klein Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_articles  Part of the Cultural History Commons, European History Commons, History of Religion Commons, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Other History Commons, Political History Commons, Public History Commons, and the Social History Commons Review of Levis Sullam, Simon, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy Comments This review was originally posted on H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews in June 2019. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. H-Judaic    Citation: H-Net Reviews. Klein on Levis Sullam, 'The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy'. H-Judaic. 06-03-2019.https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/reviews/4178546/klein-levis-sullam-italian-executioners-genocide-jews-italyLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.1Klein on Levis Sullam, 'The Italian Executioners: TheGenocide of the Jews of Italy'Review published on Monday, June 3, 2019Simon Levis  Sullam.  The Italian  Executioners:  The  Genocide  of  the  Jews  of  Italy.  Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2018. 208 pp. $26.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-17905-6.Reviewed by Shira Klein (Chapman University) Published on H-Judaic (June, 2019) Commissionedby Barbara Krawcowicz (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54172The book Italian Executioners  draws attention to Italy’s culpability in hunting down Jews duringWorld War II. Simon Levis Sullam, professor of history at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, traces thetwo crucial years in the genocide of the Jews of Italy, 1943 to 1945. He demonstrates that during thistime, Mussolini’s Republic of Salo’ carried out a relentless and efficient manhunt, delivering Jews tothe Germans and seizing their property. With this argument, Levis Sullam dissipates a prevalentmyth, the idea that Italians mostly saved Jews and bore no responsibility for their suffering andmurder. Although Germans held the military power in the Republic of Salo’, the Italians remainedindependent in their control over the police, who carried out the roundups of the Jews.This book comprises nine short chapters that trace Italians’ role in persecuting Jews in the peninsula.Chapter 1 examines the context of anti-Semitism in Italy, focusing on vocal anti-Semitic ideologuessuch as Giovani Preziosi, director of Italy’s General Inspectorate of Race, who wrote in 1943, “Thefirst task to be tackled is … the total elimination of the Jews” (p. 16). Chapters 2 and 3 survey thecomplicity of police, civil authorities, and ordinary Italians acting as informers, without which theextermination of Italian Jews would not have reached the scale it did. Rounding up Jews involved theentire gamut of Italian authorities, including low- and mid-level officials. In Rome, for example, alocal police commissioner personally searched for a six-year old child, Emma Calo’, who had beenhidden by the concierge of her building after her parents’ arrest. He hunted her down tirelessly andfinally arrested her, tearing her away from the concierge’s skirts. She died in Auschwitz two monthslater (p. 30). Instances abounded of civilians informing on Jews. One woman in Livorno turned twoJewish acquaintances over to the police, explaining that she was helping the “campaign against theJews who are ruining the world” (p. 66). Chapter 4 traces the seizure of Jewish property. Italianauthorities confiscated anything and everything owned by Jews, from villas to cars, from grand pianosto socks. EGELI, the agency charged with seizing and selling the property, was supposed to allocatethe revenues to assisting the poor. In fact, Levis Sullam shows, many objects were not sold at all;more often, they ended up in the homes of Fascist Party officials or policemen. Chapters 5 through 8examine cases of Jews being deported from, respectively, Venice, Florence, the Italian-Swiss border,and Brescia. In all these places, Italian arrests and betrayals led to Jews’ incarceration and laterdeportation to Auschwitz.Chapter 9 reveals an especially fascinating, and hardly studied, phenomenon in wartime Italy, that ofJews who informed on their coreligionists. Take the story of Mauro Grini, a Jewish man from TriesteH-Judaic    Citation: H-Net Reviews. Klein on Levis Sullam, 'The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy'. H-Judaic. 06-03-2019.https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/reviews/4178546/klein-levis-sullam-italian-executioners-genocide-jews-italyLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.2who left for Venice in 1944. Settling in a hotel near the train station, Grini took it upon himself tohunt down Jews from his home city who had fled south to where they hoped nobody would recognizethem.  Grini  methodically  searched Venetian hotels,  cross-checking guest  registers  with  lists  hereceived from the police. He lurked in back alleys and walked up and down train carriages, betrayingfellow Jews to the Italian authorities, who delivered them to the Germans. He did the same in Trieste,Brescia, and Milan, where he was said to catch an average of two Jews a day and to earn seventhousand lire for every Jew he helped arrest (p. 120). The reader is left wondering about motives.Why did Grini turn against his brethren? For financial gain? Because he believed it would save him?(It  didn’t;  he was most  likely killed at  San Sabba,  by the Germans).  Levis  Sullam suggests noexplanations,  perhaps  because  the  sources  don’t  reveal  them.  Still,  reconstructing  Grini’sstory—which Levis Sullam does with the help of police records and court proceedings—sheds light ona painful, and therefore barely studied, chapter of World War II.Although  Italians  played  a  key  role  in  perpetrating  the  Holocaust,  Levis  Sullam shows  in  hisconclusion  that  they  later  cultivated  a  culture  of  amnesia  and  denial.  In  the  postwar  years,government officials publicized exaggerated claims about Italy’s saving of Jews and downplayed theircountry’s responsibility in sending Jews to their death. In the postwar period, perpetrators servedminimal prison sentences for their crimes against Jews, and sometimes none at all. Often, officialsinvolved in hunting down Jews went on to enjoy sparkling careers. In one astonishing case, the verysame person who had supervised the seizure of Jewish property in Venice, Mario Cortellini, not onlywalked free after the war; he also headed the postwar office in charge of returning that property toJewish survivors (p. 141). These acquittals helped bolster the belief that Italians had done no wrong,that  it  had  been  only  the  Germans  who  had  persecuted  Jews  in  World  War  II.  Levis  Sullamdemonstrates  that  even  today,  in  public  commemorations  of  the  Holocaust,  Italians  rarelyacknowledge the role their ancestors played as, to use the book’s title, “Italian executioners.”While it makes worthy points, the book’s weakness is its lack of original research; most chapterssynthesize the works of other scholars, rather than uncover new archival material (chapter 6, forexample, relies entirely on one study, Marta Baiardi’s “Persecuzioni antiebraiche a Firenze,” in EnzoCollotti’s  2007  anthology  Ebrei  in  Toscana  tra  occupazione  tedesca  e  RSI).  Levis  Sullam’scontribution is therefore a limited one. As he himself acknowledges, scholars before him have alreadychallenged the “Myth of the Good Italian.” Historians like Michele Sarfatti (The Jews in Mussolini'sItaly: From Equality to Persecution, 2007) and Liliana Picciotto (various essays) revealed the gravityof Italy’s persecutory measures, and scholars like Guri Schwarz (After Mussolini: Jewish Life andJewish Memories in Post-Fascist Italy, 2012) and Rebecca Clifford (Commemorating the Holocaust:The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy, 2013) traced the history of Italy’s self-acquittal.Thus, Levis Sullam’s book ends up echoing recent scholarship rather than substantially expanding it.Despite  its  shortcomings,  however,  this  is  an  important  work.  This  may  be  the  first  time  anAnglophone  readership  is  exposed  to  such  brutal  examples  of  Italian  anti-Semitism  as  thetransmission in late November 1943 by Radio Roma asking that “the Jews be burnt, one by one, andtheir  ashes  scattered  in  the  wind”  (p.  60).  Moreover,  where  Sullam  does  conduct  originalresearch—namely, in his work on arrests in Venice (chapter 5) and in his recounting of Jewishinformers  (chapter  9)—the reader  will  find  meaty  scholarship.  Finally,  the  book  is  wonderfullyreadable, written in an accessible style. The shortness of its chapters makes it easy reading, as doesLevis Sullam’s knack of condensing elaborate data into concise text. Therefore, it will be an excellentH-Judaic    Citation: H-Net Reviews. Klein on Levis Sullam, 'The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy'. H-Judaic. 06-03-2019.https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/reviews/4178546/klein-levis-sullam-italian-executioners-genocide-jews-italyLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.3book to assign to students (although it will best be paired with a survey text providing some basicfacts on how World War II unfolded in Italy). This is a significant accomplishment, since the field ofItalian Jewish studies has few engaging texts in English. Citation: Shira Klein. Review of Levis Sullam, Simon, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of theJ e w s  o f  I t a l y .  H - J u d a i c ,  H - N e t  R e v i e w s .  J u n e ,  2 0 1 9 .  U R L :http:/ /www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54172This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0United States License.

Review of Levis Sullam, Simon, \u3cem\u3eThe Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy\u3c/em\u3e

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Review of Levis Sullam, Simon, \u3cem\u3eThe Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy\u3c/em\u3e

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