The emancipation of Italy's Jews coincided with the end of the patchwork of kingdoms and duchies that divided the peninsula and the founding of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. It would be completed with the seizure of Rome by the Italian army in 1870, and with it the end of the last ghetto in Italy. In Italy's Jews from Emancipation to Fascism, Shira Klein offers a stimulating perspective on the evolution of Jewish life in Italy from the time of that emancipation to the post–World War II years.

Two central themes stand out in Klein's analysis: the question of assimilation and the myth of Italian benevolence. On this first question, Klein takes issue with what she refers to as the “conventional wisdom” that Italy's Jews have assimilated or abandoned their Jewish identity entirely. She writes, “I show the contrary: Jewish culture and religion flourished after emancipation.” She adds that following the “hiatus” marked by the antisemitic racial laws and then the German occupation (1938–45), “Jewish culture thrived once more” (2).

Klein certainly shows how deep Italian Jews’ feeling of devotion was to the new nation-state that had granted them equality and how this feeling led many of them to support Mussolini and the Fascist regime until the 1938 racial laws. At times she paints with a rather broad brush, as in stating that like non-Jewish Italians, Italy's Jews viewed Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia as “a glorious step forward for the country” and “condoned their country's racism and brutality toward Africa” (12). Perhaps most Jews did—although this has not been demonstrated—but certainly not all.

While arguing that Jewish religion flourished following emancipation, Klein admits that in these decades ever fewer Jews attended synagogue with any regularity. They took pride in constructing large, fancy new synagogues even as they became less likely to step through their doors. Inside the synagogues, Orthodoxy reigned, as the Reform Movement that swept parts of central Europe made no headway. In this context, the distance between the increasingly secular Jews of Italy and their places of worship grew. Moreover, by the early 1930s, about a third of Jewish men and over a quarter of Jewish women were already marrying non-Jews.

In Klein's telling, following the trauma of the Holocaust, Italian Jewish culture again “blossomed” (182). Yet she acknowledges that emigration, including to Israel, by many of the more committed Jews; conversion from Judaism; and the deaths in the concentration camps had “all taken their toll,” leading to a reduction by one-third of the prewar Jewish population. Klein does not devote much attention to conversion, although thousands of Italian Jews converted following the imposition of the racial laws in the hope of evading persecution. What happened to these former Jews we do not know.

If Judaism in postwar Italy has not suffered more than it has, it is because of a relatively large influx of Jewish immigrants fleeing from Libya, Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere. These relatively recent immigrants and their progeny now make up perhaps a third of Italy's Jews, though Klein does not address this subject.

The author is on much surer ground in her second theme: the myth of italiani, brava gente, the essential goodness of the Italian people. The book's major contribution is in demonstrating the role paradoxically played by Italian Jews in the creation and maintenance of that myth. Klein states her thesis early on: “I argue that Jews, despite having been among the very victims of Italian racism, are central to the durability of that myth. Italian Jews described Italy in flattering terms from the start of the racial laws, and continued to do so after the war was over” (6). Italians’ ability to develop a collective memory in which they were not on Hitler's side but on the Allied side in the war is remarkable, and along with it the deceptive claim that Italians had little to do with the seizure of Italy's Jews and their murder.

In this brava gente interpretation of Italian history—tied in part to the myth of the Resistanza—Italians began to turn against Mussolini when he unexpectedly announced his antisemitic campaign. Klein rightly disputes this and points out that from 1938 to 1943—that is before the German occupation—the government “expelled Jews from Italian society, slandered them in the media, and slashed their rights” while ordinary Italians played their own eager role. “They penned and read anti-Jewish propaganda, shunned their neighbors, and betrayed them to the police for evading restrictions” (108). When the Germans arrived in 1943, they had no need to pass new antisemitic legislation, as that work had already been done for them by the Italians. In order to round up Italy's Jews for deportation, the Germans had to rely on Italians to help identify who the Jews were, and indeed, as Klein points out, Italian police forces carried out many of the arrests. After the war, virtually no Italians were brought to justice for their role in the persecution and murder of the country's Jews. Indeed, following the war, the head of the Fascist racial court, set up to enforce the antisemitic laws, became the chief justice of Italy's highest court.

Klein offers a convincing analysis of how and why Italian Jews participated in this falsification of history. In short, they were eager to share in the construction of the comforting idea that most Italians sympathized with them and only Mussolini and his henchmen were responsible for Jewish persecution. Fortunately, as Klein notes, in recent years this situation has been changing, as scholars of Italian Jewish history have begun to document what actually transpired in those years.

Quite a few errors have crept into the early chapter dealing with Italy's nineteenth-century history. For instance, the Congress of Vienna did not return Italy's borders “almost exactly to what they had been before the French occupation” (22), rather, the thousand-year-old Venetian republic was gobbled up by Austria; Klein writes that Victor Emmanuel II in 1860 annexed “the Sicilian kingdom,” (24) but there was no such kingdom; the collapse of the Roman Republic in 1849 was brought about in good part by the Austrians, and rather little by the Spanish and Neapolitan troops whom Klein mentions instead (47).

Yet, these errors are minor. Although this reviewer has doubts about the author's rosy view of Italian Jewish history, the reading of Italy's Jews from Emancipation to Fascism offers many rewards. Ambitious in its temporal scope, and unusual in the work of a young scholar in Jewish history in offering unpleasant truths about the past, it should help provoke much-needed historical work on Jewish capacity for self-deception.