Michele Sarfatti. Seminar on the Race Law (1938-2018).

Seminar. An introduction to the study of Mussolini’s Racial Laws presented by one of the leading scholars in the field. Organized by Centro Primo Levi with Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò. NYU Departments of Italian and History. Introduced by Ruth Ben Ghiat and David Forgacs.

Sessions will be held on October 22, 24 and 26.

Registration is required: Molly Engelmann (molly@primolevicenter.org). Attendance is free. Please specify date, name and affiliation. These sessions are not open to the general public. Students and faculty from all member institutions of the Inter-university Consortium as well as independent scholars are welcome to participate.

Michele Sarfatti (Historian. Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan and member of the Italian delegation of IHRA). 

October 22 at 6:30 pm: The Anti-Jewish Legislation of Fascist Italy 1938-1943 

Context and background – Fascism. The Jews in Italy. Antecedents and Mussolini’s decision. Italian autonomy in the European context. The relation to the law against the populations of the colonies. The question of the Italian citizenship. The racial and biological paradigm.

October 24 at 6:30 pm:  The content of the law.

The goals of the law. Foreign Jews: expulsion and internment. The project of the expulsion of Italian Jews. Places of the persecution: school, culture, professions. The internment of “dangerous” Italian Jews. The question of violence. Reactions in Society.

October 26 at 2:00 pm.  The persecution of the Jews in Italy (1943-1945).  

The armistice of September 8th, 1943. The German occupation. The Italian social Republic. The German arrests. The Italian arrests. Internment camps in Italy. Massacres and deportations to Auschwitz. Statistics. Underground life and survival. Reactions in society.

Michele Sarfatti is the author of seminal works on the Jews and the anti-Semitic persecution in Modern Italy. His groundbreaking study, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: from Equality to Persecution, Madison 2006, drastically changed the way in which historians consider the Mussolini’s Racial Laws and the persecution of the Jews in Italy.

Dr. Sarfatti has been Coordinator of the activities (1982-2002) and Director (2002-2016) of the Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea CDEC, Milan. He is one of the founding editors of the e-journal Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. He has been a member of “Commissione Governativa di indagine sui beni degli ebrei in Italia nel periodo delle persecuzioni 1938–1945” (“Commissione Anselmi”), 1998-2001; and of “Commissione Governativa per il recupero del patrimonio bibliografico della comunità ebraica di Roma, razziato nel 1943”, 2003–2008. He is member of Scientific Committees of Fondazione Museo nazionale dell’Ebraismo italiano e della Shoah, Ferrara, and of Fondazione Museo della Shoah, Roma. See also www.michelesarfatti.it.

This seminar is part of a series of programs held on the eightieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Racial Laws.

A collaboration of Centro Primo Levi with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and Department of Italian, The New School for Social Research, Eugene Lang College and the Columbia Seminar for Modern Italian Studies.