Excerpt

With the acceptance of race-based discrimination the entire front of Italian culture has collapsed. Vittorio Foa, letter, November 20, 1938¹

This essay will focus on one specific aspect in the attitude of intellectuals toward anti-Semitism in Italy: not the “theoretical” aspect (by which I mean their ideological support or their propaganda contributions to the anti-Jewish campaign, although those too were significant), but the practical one, i.e., their individual and collective behavior in the face of the bureaucratic process through which the anti-Jewish legislation was applied in the field of high culture.

As recent research has shown,…