Nina Valbousquet

This article examines the Catholic responses to the Fascist Racial Laws in a transatlantic and comparative perspective. It looks specifically at two foremost publications of the Jesuit press in Rome and New York: Civiltà Cattolica and America, respectively. The comparative approach helps to comprehend the variety of factors behind editorial choices: readership, political context, Vatican directions, censorship, and silence. Jesuits on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted the anti-Semitic turn of the Fascist regime as an imitation of Nazi Germany and with the persistent hope that Italian policies would be milder and more ‘civilized’. The shaping of the myth of the ‘good Italian’ was an early process in which Church voices, including the Pope himself, took a significant part. This article argues that despite contextual differences, both Jesuit publications demonstrated a transnational pattern of Catholic relation to the Jews: endorsing Pius XI’s statements, they spoke out against racism but did not extend their condemnations to a full rejection of anti-Semitism in its religious and secular components. The disapproval of Italy’s Racial Laws was not a defense of the Jews of Italy.

Public lecture, Nina Valbousquet, “‘Un-American” and ‘Un-Christian’? Global Antisemitism and Jewish-Catholic Relations in the United States 1936-1945”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9L2nUoPz8s&feature=youtu.be
March 28, 6 pm, Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus McMahon Hall 109, NYC

Historical and memorial awareness of the genocide: Jules Isaac and Jesus and Israel, survivors of the Shoah (1940-1948)
Published in 1948, Jesus and Israel is Jules Isaac’s first book devoted to the Christian roots of antisemitism. Often interpreted through the retrospective prism of Jewish-Christian dialogue and the Second Vatican Council, this article rather links the book to its starting point: the Shoah. A work of history, Jesus and Israel is also the work of a survivor and a witness to persecution. Isaac’s scientific and commemorative approach is an early example of a link between historical consciousness and memory of the Shoah. Punctuated with analogies to Auschwitz, the book provoked a debate about the persistence of antisemitism in France, proving that the immediate post-war period was far from being a silent one in regard to genocide.

In this essay, I argue that despite the Vatican’s condemnation of Nazi racism as an anti-Christian ideology, some Catholic sectors in Fascist Italy were not impervious to anti-semitic and racial prejudices. Looking at the discussion on race and anti-semitism in the propaganda of clerical Fascism and its simultaneous echo in Church discourses, this research delves deeper into the formation of a specific Catholic trend of racial anti-semitism that excluded Jews from a religiously and ethnically homogeneous definition of the Italian nation. A significant part of the propagandists of clerical Fascism attempted to define a racial and anti-semitic narrative that could be suitable for both Fascist racism and Italian Catholic culture. I examine the Catholic appropriation of racial anti-semitism on a broad spectrum of positions, ranging from Catholics who only flirted with racialist rhetoric to those who dismissed the transformative value of conversion because of alleged racial barriers. Challenging the traditional distinction between Christian anti-Judaism and modern anti-semitism, the examples under examination demonstrate the entanglement of religious and racial arguments in the shaping of a ‘Jewish race’ that was considered foreign to the italianità celebrated by the regime.

Drawing upon the entangled biographies of two intellectuals, this article delves deeper into the circulations of a Latin anti-Semitic culture between Italian Fascism and the French right wing. The article sheds light on a Latin type of antisemitism, shaped in a French-Italian political and intellectual context, by uncovering two figures of intermediaries: the couple formed by Paolo Orano and Camille Mallarmé, as they evolved from revolutionary syndicalism to nationalistic interventionism during WWI and until they supported the Fascist totalitarian project. A professor and Fascist deputy, Orano is noteworthy for his 1937 Gli Ebrei in Italia, one of the first pamphlets anticipating the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Fascist regime, while his wife promoted this campaign as the correspondent for the French right wing weekly Je Suis Partout. Claiming to be distinct from Nazi antisemitism, Latin antisemitism relied upon an anti-German hostility and a political instrumentalization of the Catholic tradition. Furthermore, it is emblematic of the inherent tensions between transnational Fascism and French and Italian nationalisms.
À partir de la biographie croisée de deux intellectuels, cet article approfondit l’étude des circulations d’une culture antisémite et latine entre fascisme italien et extrême droite française. L’article met ainsi en lumière un antisémitisme latin, formé dans un cadre de référence intellectuel et politique franco-italien, en exhumant deux figures de médiateurs : le couple formé par Paolo Orano et Camille Mallarmé, du syndicalisme révolutionnaire au nationalisme interventionniste de la Grande Guerre jusqu’au soutien au projet totalitaire fasciste. Professeur et député fasciste, Orano se distingue en publiant en 1937 Les Juifs en Italie, l’un des premiers pamphlets annonçant la propagande antisémite du régime fasciste, alors que sa femme relaie la campagne en tant que correspondante pour l’hebdomadaire français d’extrême droite Je Suis Partout. Avec une volonté de distinction vis-à-vis de l’antisémitisme nazi, cet antisémitisme latin repose sur une hostilité anti-allemande et sur une instrumentalisation politique de la tradition catholique. Il est en outre révélateur des tensions inhérentes entre fascisme transnational et nationalismes français et italien.

Materia Giudaica, Rivista dell’Associazione italiana per lo studio del giudaismo. Strategie e normative per la conversione degli ebrei dal medioevo all’età contemporanea. Atti del convegno internazionale Ravenna 30 settembre - 2 ottobre 2013,  vol. XIX/1-2, 2014, p. 319-328.
Abstract : Conversion in Anti-Semitic Discourse during the Interwar Period: Uses and Transformations of Catholic Prejudices.
This paper presents the issue of the conversion of the Jews as perceived by some Catholic anti-Semitic circles active during the interwar period. I draw these examples from archival researches conducted about Catholic anti-Semitism for my current PhD dissertation “ The Circulation and Use of Anti-Semitism during the Interwar Period: The Case of Intransigent Catholic Networks (1917 – 1943)”. By studying the Catholic network led by the Roman prelate Umberto Benigni, the Roman Entente of Social Defense, this research reveals that transnational networks and circulations played a key role in the transformation and renewal of traditional Catholic prejudices. This paper focuses on the Catholic appropriation of new models of anti-Semitic propaganda and analyses its influence on attitudes towards conversion. In fact, within this international network of intransigent Catholics, religious prejudices appeared to be mixed with secularized anti-Semitic themes and combined with a racial-biological language. Together, these discourses, denied the efficacy of conversion, the traditional Catholic solution to the “Jewish problem”. By calling conversion into question, these cases of racial ecclesiastic discourse blur the usual limits between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. As a result, the study of the diffusion of anti-Semitic tendencies provides an ideal case for examining the debates around conversion and anti-Semitism that divided the interwar Catholic hierarchy and world.

This paper discusses the concepts of Jewish internationalism, solidarity, and diplomacy in a transatlantic perspective. It sheds light on a Jewish transcontinental diplomacy that tried to respond to the global diffusion of antisemitism between the two world wars. Assessing the impact of the fight against antisemitism in the forging of diaspora politics and identities, this research delves deeper into the case of American Jewish organizations (especially of the American Jewish Committee) and their relations with Jewish organizations in Europe, with the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the Board of Deputies of British Jewish, the Jewish communities in Italy, and with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among other collaborations. For this seminar, I will focus specifically on the American Jewish Committee's attempts to connect this Jewish diplomacy with other transnational networks of religious diplomacy, most notably with the Catholic Church (the Vatican as well as networks of German, Polish, and French Catholic émigrés). This paper traces the trajectories, actors, and strategies of a Jewish diplomacy that shaped a specific self-representation of Jewish diaspora while negotiating with Catholic authorities and intellectuals.

Center for Jewish History Seminar, May 18, 11 am, Magda Teter and Lila Corwin Berman to respond.
This seminar focuses on American Jewish responses to Catholic antisemitism on both the domestic and international levels. Notably, the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) national initiatives and transnational diplomacy aimed to raise awareness of antisemitism among Catholics. The AJC’s repeated attempts to elicit an official Vatican statement denouncing antisemitism, from World War I to the aftermath of the Holocaust, offer an example of the relations between American Jewish organizations and Catholic representatives in North America and Europe. The seminar will identify and discuss key moments of Jewish-Catholic interactions regarding antisemitism, specifically the diffusion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the beginning of the 1920s, the antisemitic campaign of Father Coughlin, the Catholic reactions to antisemitic laws in Fascist Italy and in Vichy France, and the revision of the Christian roots of antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust

Presentation at the Columbia Seminar in Modern Italian Studies, on February 3, 2016, from 6:15 to 8 pm.
Respondent: Natalia Indrimi, Primo Levi Center
Italian Academy, Columbia University, 1161 Amsterdam Ave, 5th Floor, NYC
modernitalianseminar@gmail.com