Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

May 5, 2025

Italian Fascism’s Complicated Relationship with Italy’s Jews

Many Jews embraced Mussolini—and then he turned on them.

At some point in the 1920s, Jews were heavily overrepresented in the ranks of the both the fascist and the Communist parties. Yet—as Communists in the USSR and the eastern bloc would do later on—the fascists turned sharply against the Jews in the 1930s. The story would end when Benito Mussolini agreed to hand Italian Jews, stripped of their rights and driven back into ghettos, to his ally Adolf Hitler to be murdered in death camps. Alex Winston dives into this complicated story:

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