Suchergebnisse

Questo libro ricostruisce i rapporti fra la sinistra italiana e gli ebrei, dal 1892, quando nacque il Partito socialista, alla crisi della cosiddetta prima Repubblica, esattamente cento anni dopo. I protagonisti del volume sono le donne e gli uomini che, in nome del socialismo di matrice marxista, aderirono ad alcune delle più importanti organizzazioni di massa del Novecento. Nel lungo periodo preso in esame, essere socialisti significò molte cose diverse, e del resto un'ideologia e i soggetti che la esprimono non sono mai legati da un rapporto di corrispondenza univoca: la prima è un complesso di miti e di valori, capaci di orientare l'azione politica, e non una filosofia sistematica o un precetto che preveda un comportamento; a sua volta, ogni movimento politico presenta sempre un grado di discordanza o di incoerenza fra gli scopi prefissati e i risultati ottenuti. Il libro si interroga sul rapporto intercorso fra la sinistra di tradizione marxista e una minoranza religiosa bimillenaria, chiedendosi chi siano stati e chi siano gli ebrei per i socialisti: sono oppressi, e quindi insieme a tutti gli sfruttati del mondo partecipano alla lotta per l'avvento di una nuova civiltà, oppure ostacolano la realizzazione del socialismo perché rivendicano la loro identità in nome di una religione? Si tratta di una questione a cui i più importanti teorici del socialismo, a cominciare da Karl Marx, hanno dedicato la loro attenzione. Furono loro, all'inizio del XIX secolo, i primi a chiedersi se gli ebrei fossero un popolo, una classe o una nazione e dove si collocassero rispetto al progetto universale di liberazione dell'umanità promosso dal movimento operaio. E furono loro a parlare per primi dell'esistenza una questione ebraica

In the aftermath of the Second World War, socialists and communists shared a theoretical viewpoint deriving from Marxism and the bipolar line that emerged from the Cold War. In that time, they took a position of harsh criticism against the United States, against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and against the Christian Democrat government that in Italy led the inclusion of the country in the Western bloc. The two parties of Marxist tradition failed to elaborate a statement or a historiographical reflection on anti-Semitism, as demonstrated by two authoritative sources: the party press and the contribution of intellectuals who in that first decade of republican Italy had had a role and visibility of great importance. In both cases, the interpretation of anti-Semitism was crushed onto that of anti-fascism: concerned with presenting themselves to the public and the world, as the protagonists of the anti-fascist struggle and the rebirth of democracy, socialists and communists, and above all the latter, did not deal with the reasons for, causes, or the outcomes of the persecution of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s or the anti-Semitic demonstrations in the USSR of the 1950s. In some cases, the theme fell under the ax of silence, in others it was presented in an ambiguous way, as one of the many forms of Nazi-fascist violence. In this way, talking about concentration camps meant dealing with places of detention for the persecuted, without dwelling on the fact that the reason for the persecution and the Shoah was racial rather than political. This difficulty in analyzing anti-Semitism, in recognizing its specificity, without including it in the great container of anti-fascism, was expressed in the same years in which left-wing intellectuals and politicians spoke about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The author inquires into the relationship between the Italian Left and the Jews, in light of the main contributions on the issue. Unlike the US and the rest of Europe, the topic has been studied in Italy only since the 1990s. In fact, from Marx until recent times, several left-wing intellectuals and politicians denied specificity to the problem in the name of proletarian internationalism and the labor movement tradition, believing it would be solved within the broader project to change society, the latter concerning the oppressed worldwide regardless of their cultural, religious, linguistic and national identity. After having analyzed the historiographical debate from the post-war era to present times, the author argues that the most conclusive way to study the issue is the method employed by George Mosse in 1971: i.e. to reconstruct the political and cultural relationship that the left-wing political family, in its different expressions, entertained with the Jews, in order to acquire knowledge of both their histories and focus on one of the most significant issues of the 20th century, namely the relationship between the most relevant revolutionary political project of contemporary age and the most ancient minority of the world.

This article contributes to the current debate on political religions presenting a case study: fascist educational policy from 1922 to 1943. The article is organized into four different parts: after a discussion of the major and most recent approaches to the concept of political religion, the second part examines some aspects of the educational policies of the 1920s; and in the third the main educational policies of the 1930s and the early 1940s, Giovanni Gentile's role and Giuseppe Bottai's contribution. Believing that fascism's scholastic policies were determined by a political religion, based on the stated identity of politics and culture, the last part proposes an approach to the study of political religions and, more broadly, of the culture of totalitarian regimes.

This article reconstructs an important aspect of fascist ideology: the critiques directed by the main political and cultural groupings among Italian fascists against Giovanni Gentile, from 1922 until his death in 1944. This article seeks to make a significant contribution to the debate on the part played by Gentile during the fascist regime, demonstrating the way in which, and the extent to which, fascism, as realized, represented a form of totalitarianism quite different from the one he had conceived in his theory.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface to the English-Language Edition -- Introduction -- 1. The Historiographical Debate from 1945 to Today -- 2. Cultural Politics in the 1920s -- 3. Intellectuals and Artists in the 1920s -- 4. The Ideology of the Totalitarian State -- 5. Cultural Politics in the 1930s -- 6. Intellectuals and Artists in the 1930s -- 7. Cultural Politics and Intellectuals in the 1940s -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index.