Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Antisemitism, Italian Style: The Italian Royal Academy, 1938-1943

  Paul Arpaia, a writer in residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study and Associate Professor of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Fellow at the American Academy of Rome (FAAR08), examines reactions among members of the Italian Royal Academy to private and state-sponsored anti-Semitism through the fall of Mussolini.
     The promulgation of the Racial Laws in 1938 marked a first attempt at state-sponsored anti-Semitism in unified Italy. Studies on Fascism
have emphasized fundamental differences between Italian and German forms of state-sponsored anti-Semitism and between German and Italian reactions to Jewish persecution.  This talk will focus, instead, squarely on Italy, and will analyze how anti-Semitism intersected the lives of Italians engaged in high culture through the prism of the Royal Italian Academy, Fascism’s preeminent institution of high culture.  By drawing on letters and diaries in private hands, published sources from The New York Public Library and the extensive archive of the Italian Royal Academy, now a part of the public record at the Accademia dei Lincei, it considers what they reveal about anti-Semitism among Italian elites and what lessons can be drawn today from them for cultural life in Italy and the United States.
     This research is part of a book project entitled “Luigi Federzoni, Standard-Bearer of Italianità from Liberal Italy to Post-Fascism.”

For other lectures from the Wertheim Study, click here.