ITALY: Selected Jews

At sessions of the Fascist Grand Council, members are encouraged, even forced, to criticize the policies of the Government.

After that the Dictator, who has silently digested the views of Fascist best minds, gets up and makes a declaration, telling his Grand Council and every Italian what is going to be what. Last week this process took five hours. When the locked doors of the Grand Council finally opened at 2:30 a. m., it was to disclose new and still more selective decrees in Italian Fascism’s already highly selective policy of antiSemitism. There shall be no discrimination, decreed the Grand Council, against Italian Jews of the following seven categories:

1) Families of men who lost their lives in the four wars fought by Italy in the present century—namely, the World, Libyan, Ethiopian and Spanish.

2) Families of men who volunteered for service in any of these four wars.

3) Families of men who received the Military Cross in any of these four wars.

4) Families of men who lost their lives for the Fascist cause.

5) Families of men who were mutilated, invalided or wounded for the Fascist cause.

6) Families of men who were members of the Fascist party in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922 and in the second semester of 1924, and families of Fiume Legionnaires.

7) Families of persons who, in the opinion of a commission to be appointed, have deserved well of the nation or of the Fascist regime.

Mrs. Mussolini, who has the often Jewish name of Rachel, is not a Jewess, but even if she were the fact that Mr. Mussolini fought in the World War would thus entitle her and his children to exemption under the new decree. Similarly, since the Fascist Party was founded as an organization of World War veterans, nearly every Jewish “old comrade” of the Dictator is now exempt from antiSemitism, as are several high Jewish officers in the Italian fighting forces, together with every Italian Jew who was sufficiently pro-Fascist to join the Party as late as two years after the March on Rome, or to volunteer right up to a few days ago to fight in Spain.*

The selective principle is a novelty in Mussolini antiSemitism, but the Fascist Grand Council went on to issue decrees revealing something different, namely that 11 Duce—quite apart from Jewish questions—wishes to fire Italians with the concept of the “Italian race.” Reason: He believes Italians can never be successful Empire builders unless they feel as superior as the most superior Briton feels.

Pompously the Grand Council decreed last week that henceforth no Italian, male or female, may marry a non-Italian unless the Italian Ministry of Interior is willing to make an exception and issue a special permit for such mixed marriage. Further, the Grand Council, well knowing that Italian males have been prone to “go native” with Ethiopian females, issued a veiled but stern decree for punishment of “anyone who performs any act that might injure the prestige of the Italian people in territories of the Empire.” Finally, the Grand Council, taking cognizance of the fact that Britain has for years been extremely reluctant to admit more Jews to Palestine, because of the bloody resistance of the Arabs (see p. 22), made a tentative gesture. “Dependent upon the attitude toward Fascism assumed by Jews in the World as a whole.” the Grand Council announced that it “does not exclude the possibility of conceding controlled immigration of Jews into some zones of Ethiopia, even deflecting such emigrations from Palestine.” To stimulate those Jews in Italy who are not exempt from the anti-Semitic decrees to apply for emigration permits to go to Ethiopia, the Grand Council further decreed that such Jews: 1) may not own or manage Italian concerns with 100 or more employes; 2) may not own more than 124 acres of land in Italy; 3) may not enlist in Italy’s armed forces in peace or wartime; 4) may not enroll in the Fascist Party.

“World Hebrewism,” charged the Grand Council, “has been the inspirer of antiFascism in all fields. . . . Hebrewism abroad . . has been in some periods . . . unanimously hostile to Fascism.”

Promptly, U. S. Ambassador William Phillips, in a formal note to Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, protested against any discrimination against the 200 U. S. Jews now resident in Italy. Listing the liberties of commerce and worship enjoyed by Italians in the U. S., the note “believed” that “upon further consideration” the Italian Government would not apply these restrictions to U. S. subjects.

* In Germany, on the contrary, belated discovery that a Nazi, even of the Old Guard, is partly of Jewish blood unleashes anti-Semitic decrees against him, and Germany has seen numberless pathetic cases of Jews professing themselves ardently pro-Nazi in vain efforts to save themselves. Before Adolf Hitler came to power his Brown Shirts regularly took up so-called “voluntary contributions” from Jews who hoped that as contributors they would be spared after the Party took over Germany.