The racial laws and the Jewish community of Rome 1938-1945

The years between 1938 and 1943 witnessed the approval of a massive, detailed set of laws discriminating against the Jews.
While there were indeed moments of anti- Semitism in Italy after unification - fed primarily by some Catholic groups - the leitmotifs so dear to anti-Jewish propaganda only began to appear widely in the Italian press with the rise of Fascism. In 1933, Telesio Interlandi, writing for Il Tevere and Roberto Farinacci for Il regime fascista, triggered a furious press campaign against the Jews. The campaign quickly spread to the other Fascist papers.
This precious, new publication from the State Archives of Rome, prepared in collaboration with the Historical Archives of the Jewish Community of Rome, calls our attention, after a long period of silence - if not repression - to one of the darkest periods of our history. For the Jews, it was also the beginning of the deportations, the Shoah, the tragic epilogue generated by the 1938 racial laws.