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Capitalism & Modern Anti-Semitism michele battini SOCIALISM

OF FOOLS

C6901.indb i 1/27/16 10:26 AM C6901.indb ii 1/27/16 10:26 AM SOCIALISM

OF FOOLS

CAPITALISM AND MODERN ANTI-SEMITISM

MICHELE BATTINI

TRANSLATED BY NOOR MAZHAR AND ISABELLA VERGNANO

columbia university press New York

C6901.indb iii 1/27/16 10:26 AM columbia university press Publishers Since 1893 new york chichester, west sussex cup.columbia.edu

Originally published as Il socialismo degli imbecilli. Propaganda, falsificazione, persecuzione degli ebrei by Michele Battini. © 2010 Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino. Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Battini, M. (Michele), author. [Socialismo degli imbecilli. English] Socialism of fools : capitalism and modern anti-Semitism / Michele Battini ; translated by Noor Mazhar and Isabella Vergnano. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-17038-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 978-0-231-54132-9 (e-book : alk. paper) 1. —Europe—History—19th century. 2. Antisemitism—Europe—History— 20th century. 3. —Relations—Christianity. 4. Christianity and other — Judaism. 5. Christianity and antisemitism—History—19th century. 6. Christianity and antisemitism—History—20th century. 7. Capitalism—Europe—History—19th century. 8. Capitalism—Europe—History—20th century. 9. —Persecutions—History— 19th century. 10. Jews—Persecutions—History—20th century. I. Title. ds146.e85b3813 2015 305.892'404—dc23

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C6901.indb iv 1/27/16 10:26 AM CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1. “Is the Palestine Capitalist Here?” 13

2. European “National Socialism” and Its Propaganda 75

3. Th e Dark Core of Italian : and the Path of Paolo Orano 111

4. An Interpretation of Anti-Jewish Anticapitalism 145

5. Th e Shoah, Social Anti-Semitism, and Its Aft ermath 181

Notes 215 Index 305

C6901.indb v 1/27/16 10:26 AM C6901.indb vi 1/27/16 10:26 AM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

first and revised version of chapters 1 and 2 had Abeen discussed at the seminar of the Italian Academy of Columbia University of New York, where I was Alexander Bodini Re- search Associate Fellow in and in the autumn of 2008, and later published in Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Th eory 16, no. 4 (December 2009): 615–634. Chapter 3 develops a hypothesis I discussed at the Université de Grenoble II, in May 2007, on the occasion of the international symposium Antisémitisme national et in- ternationalisation de la question antisémite. Italie fasciste et de Vichy, in the framework of a research project funded by the Fondation pour la Mé- moire de la Shoah of . Chapter 4 originates from some refl ections I de- veloped, at the invitation of Gianni Sofri, in January 2006, on the occasion of the “Giorno della memoria” (Day of remembrance) held by the City Council of Bologna. Chapter 5 takes up some ideas discussed at the conference Storia, verità, diritto (History, truth, the law) organized by the Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea (Italian for the study of contem- porary history) and by the Giunta Centrale per gli Studi Storici (Central com- mittee for historical studies) of the Università di Roma–La Sapienza, in April 2008. Th e manuscript is fi nally the result of a dialogue with Carlo Ginzburg, which took place on the occasion of the seminar held by the Department of History of the Università di Pisa, in April 2008, Il paradigma indiziario (quasi) trent’anni dopo (Th e circumstantial paradigm [almost] thirty years later).

C6901.indb vii 1/27/16 10:26 AM viii acknowledgments

I record my sincere thanks to Carlo Ginzburg, Ira Katznelson, Nadia Urbinati, Stathis Gourgouris, Andrew Arato, Federico Finchelstein, Neni Panourgia, Andreas Kalyvas, Marie-Anne Matard, Gilles Pécout, Fabio , Stefano Levi Della Torre, David Bidussa, and Guri Schwarz; the conversations I had with them on specifi c topics at diff erent stages of the composition of the book were illuminating and precious.

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OF FOOLS

C6901.indb ix 1/27/16 10:26 AM C6901.indb x 1/27/16 10:26 AM INTRODUCTION

his book focuses on a break that constituted a T change of fundamental importance in the history of European : the morphological transformation of the millenarian anti-Jewish Christian , shaped between the fourth and fi ft h centu- ries, into a new anti-Semitism that grew from hostility to the legal emancipa- tion of the Jews in the late eighteenth century. Emancipation was won in 1791 for the fi rst time, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citi- zen in revolutionary France. Aft er a few years, the anti-Semitic propaganda opposed emancipation by launching a frontal attack against the rights of citi- zenship and those who were considered responsible for it: the thinkers of the Enlightenment, above all, the writers of the German Aufk lärung and the Jew- ish German Haskalah , together with their interlocutors, the and chrétiens éclairés , on the other side of the Rhine. Th e constitutional state and political emancipation eliminated the discrimination that for centuries had guaranteed the segregation of the Jewish communities from Christian socie- ties of Europe. It also removed the control over the banking, commercial, and fi nancial activities of the Jews that the monarchies had exploited to sustain their courts. So with the advent of the market society, the old stereotype of Jewish was transformed into an attack on what economists and soci- ologists later called “capitalism.” Th e anti-Semites identifi ed the capitalists with the Jewish fi nanciers and therefore made the latter the scapegoats for the crises of the modern industrial economy, caused, according to them, by fi nancial speculation, that is, usury.

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My hypothesis is that this anti-Semitic anticapitalist literature arose in the context of the intransigent Catholic reaction against the in political rights, the free market, and secularization. For instance, in 1806 Viscount began the propaganda campaign against the Jews of the French Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, which soon led to grave limitations on the legal equality and citizenship rights of the Jews. Th is was the new para- digm that arose in those years: the old enemies of Christianity had become equal to all other citizens and in fact constituted a hostile power within the national Christian community; thanks to the democratic guarantees they had obtained, the Jews could now with impunity conspire to use their economic power to conquer political power. As a consequence, the fi ght against “Jew- ish” capitalism should have been directed against its main protectors, namely, liberal institutions and the constitutional state. Th is paradigm spread in the early decades of the ninetheenth century via intransigent Catholic texts and among the antiliberal “social” economists and the authors of the ’s social doctrine; then a Fourierist writer, Alphonse Toussenel, appropriated it around 1845. With the work of Pierre-Joseph Prou- dhon, the paradigm circulated widely among the socialist associations of skilled and unskilled craft smen and workers. Proudhon, an economist, was fully aware of the Christian social doctrine’s hostility to free market. In the last decades of the century, this paradigm reappeared anew in the texts of the Catholic and nationalist writer Édouard Drumont, in the proclamations of the Christian Social propagandists of the Habsburg Empire, and in the litera- ture of the anti-Semitic German leagues and of some socialists of Lombardy and Veneto, Italy. Th e Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a late expression of this history. In the syndicalist and nationalist texts, and in particular in those of the Italian Paolo Orano (and also those of Maurice Barrès), the new anti- Semitic paradigm reappeared in its fi nal version, the one that fueled the press campaign preceding the anti-Jewish legislation in Central Europe and Italy between 1933 and 1938. Th e foregoing is a summary of this book. In studying the relevant texts and documents, the main diffi culty was maintaining a detached stance in order to avoid errors of anachronism, such as interpreting the words of the authors and protagonists according to their meaning today. Th e risk of anachronism is highest in the case of the word “usury,” which played a decisive role in the rep- resentation of the Jews as enemies of society. Th is interpretative precaution led me to single out the texts, documents, and sources that contributed to the def- inition of the comprehensive ideology as “anti-Jewish and anticapitalist” (and

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not simply “anti-Semitic”). I do not use the term “anti-Jewish anticapitalist paradigm” as a general concept but as the result of detailed and philological analysis of texts and the consequent attempt to arrive at a generalization and interpretation. Th e only way to deal with the great quantity of texts, docu- ments, and sources of anti-Jewish literature and propaganda (sources oft en published but later forgotten) is a fi rsthand analysis of a limited series of them, identifi ed by my specifi c question. For example, the text Bonald wrote in 1806 is where I began my reconstruction. Taking it as a starting point, I initiated a journey that enabled me to connect this text with the other documents I analyzed: a journey from west to east (and vice versa) and then from Northern to Southern Europe and a journey in time, from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. I took the specifi c details of Bonald’s text as connecting points (Ansatzpunkte ), that is, “the specifi c points—as Au- erbach argued—that can provide the seeds for a detailed research program provided with a generalizing potential.” 1 Bonald’s text constitutes the circum- scribed concrete point of departure for identifying a specifi c variant in the larger steam of anti-Semitism. What I am presenting here, in other words, is an anti-Jewish paradigm constructed on arguments of hostility toward the new market economy and the expression of the reaction by a part of society to the market itself, by the identifi cation of the power of the market with fi - nance (and fi nance with the Jews). It is not to attain this generaliz- ing potential through a monographic approach or focusing on the oeuvre of a single author, which can instead be used only as a starting point, a case study with a centrifugal radiation force. What seems to me important to underline is that that old anti-Jewish and anticapitalist paradigm was widespread, from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to World War II, both in scholarly material and as propaganda literature, in the texts of important politicians, theologians, and academics and in the articles of popular journalists, agita- tors, and propagandists. Th e paradigm had a wide circulation moving “down- ward” and simultaneously “upward” in the social and cultural scale, crossing very diff erent ideological fi elds, such as intransigent Catholic literature, reac- tionary politics against the Enlightenment, socialist and revolutionary syn- dicalist movements, and nationalist fascist parties. Th is wide circulation can be explained in some cases by contacts and meetings among the authors and therefore by the reception of some texts in certain political circles and social movements. In other cases these contacts are impossible to verify, yet, also in these cases, the degree of conceptual and morphological correspondence be- tween the texts is absolutely evident, as is the presence of identical rhetorical

C6901.indb 3 1/27/16 10:26 AM 4 introduction

structures and analogous arguments that mark the anti-Jewish, anticapitalist paradigm. In other words, the same structures are present in documents from diff erent ideological fi elds and political . But using general concepts (for example, “social racism” or “left -wing anti- Semitism”) in order to classify the sources and defi ne the rhetorical structures would not by itself lead to rigorous conclusions. Adorno and Horkheimer ar- gued that while there was no longer any need for economic domination, the Jews had been marked out as the absolute object of domination “pure and simple”; for this , according to them, no economic or social interpreta- tion of the hatred toward the Jews would be possible. Anti-Semitism is an at- titude of hatred toward the process of assimilation and the mimetic behavior of the Jews and therefore a manifestation of the deep roots of that hatred in our civilization, which still remain obscure. 2 I think that Adorno and Hork- heimer were right about this last point but not the fi rst one because some manifestations of anti-Semitism (for example, within the nineteenth-century European working-class movement) can sometimes also be explained in eco- nomic terms, as has been done by Silberner, Lichtheim, and Rojahn (the same type of explanation has recently been proposed by Pierre Birnbaum in rela- tion to the anti-Semitism of French shopkeepers, craft smen, and peasants). 3 Th ese interpreters link anti-Semitism with the economic hardship of some particular social groups facing the fl uctuations of the market economy. Yet they propose concepts that are too general, such as “socialist anti-Semitism” or “social anti-Semitism,” by which they cannot explain, for instance, why anti-Semitism began declining among European socialists precisely aft er the aff aire Dreyfus , even if the economic crises certainly did not disappear and the offi cial position of the Socialist International toward did not change much. 4 Th e explanations for the explosions of social hatred toward the Jews that link these explosions with economic crises are sometimes useful but never suffi cient. Th e main protagonists of the European anti-Semitic move- ments belonged to the new nationalist and “revolutionary” right-wing parties and movements, which have been studied by Zeev Sternhell, 5 but these move- ments oft en used the arguments of the socialists Toussenel and Proudhon, taken up again at the end of the nineteenth century by certain leading fi gures of the working-class and socialist movement: in this case, the Right used the rhetoric of the Left . Th e followers of the “revolutionary right” were certainly proud to be anti-Enlightenment, but the hostility toward the Enlightenment was in those years common among very diff erent ideological “families.” 6 Th e counter-Enlightenment continued (in fact, it has expanded) even aft er the

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World War II, in particular in the fi nal decades of the twentieth century: I am thinking of the texts of the neoliberal economists who opposed excessive legislation on the part of the state and the construction of complex legal sys- tems; it is not pure chance that these authors have been accused of represent- ing today the new intransigent Right. 7 Albert O. Hirschman, for instance, has shown that between 1789 and 1989 the reaction against the rights of citizen- ship, then universal suff rage, and fi nally the state has persistently used the same rhetoric and the same arguments.8 Nor do these interpretative con- tributions help us to resolve our problem, namely explaining the of anti-Jewish anticapitalism and the hostility to political emancipation based on the myth of an economic conspiracy. George L. Mosse wrote rightly that this myth arose within nineteenth-century “neo-Christian” conceptions (but he does not tell us precisely when and where it arose), 9 but scholars oft en have described in much more general terms a certain “anti-Semitism” of the Euro- pean anticapitalist left -wing groups without explaining it.10 Finally, in recent years, anti-Semitism has been defi ned as a “discursive practice” 11 or a rheto- ric that has always used the same categories, the same tropes and images, the same arguments,12 which could have been used by diff erent actors—authors, groups, and movements that might belong just as easily to right- or left -wing European groups. “Right-wing” and “left -wing” groupings are categories that arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the French parliamentary political debate; they had nothing to do with social-class divisions or with the social position of the Jews.13 As Marcel Gauchet wrote, “Right” and “Left ” have belonged to the parlance of the protagonists of parliamentary history since the nineteenth century and therefore cannot be used as interpretative categories and transferred into scientifi c . In my view, they have no historical signifi cance, and it would make no sense to talk about an anti-Semitism of the “Left ” as if it constituted a single and unique historical subject, always identical to itself since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is highly inaccurate to use the same category (“the Left ”) for defi ning very diff erent political entities, such as, for instance, the 1830 republicans, the socialists of the Second Interna- tional,14 and the communist parties of the second half of the twentieth century (some of them very critical of the state of ). 15 I can now return to the problem of the interpretative defi nition. I remem- ber Pierre Vidal-Naquet with aff ection. On various occasions I listened to his lectures; I have read his texts and had an unforgettable meeting with him. Vidal-Naquet was the fi rst scholar to use the formula “anti-Jewish anticap- italism” in order to describe the manifestations of hatred toward the Jews,

C6901.indb 5 1/27/16 10:26 AM 6 introduction

identifi ed with modern fi nance. 16 I think the formula is correct. It enables us to resolve the problem of the gap between the resilience of words and their shift ing meanings in the course of time. 17 Only the use of rigorous termi- nology can help a historian tackle the intrinsic weakness of historiography. Th e crucial problem facing a comparative history of the hatred toward the Jews is therefore not only underlining all the diff erences among the manifes- tations of that hatred but also proposing words and defi nitions that are dif- ferent from the actors’ words and categories. Th e historian’s point of view is that of a scholar who examines , cultures, or in a compara- tive perspective; since the input comes from the present time, anachronism is inevitably the main problem. Historians try to achieve a reconstruction of a given society or a culture of the past or the specifi c language of an age, and their task is to remove any historical arbitrariness in interpreting texts. 18 Th is self-vigilance is paramount in order to understand the meaning that the word “usury” had in the nineteenth-century documents that I use in this book: it no longer designated the traditional activities of lending, but acquired (as early as the third decade of the nineteenth century) the meaning of bank- ing activities and fi nancial speculation. I have tried to establish the connec- tions between, and the transformations of, the language Bonald used in 1806 (the accusation against the new Jewish usury, “la nouvelle usure juive”); that of Toussenel in 1845 (the identifi cation of the Jew as a banker and a merchant “juif comme banquier et marchand”); and that of the authors who defi ne themselves as “anti-Semitic” in the last two decades of the nineteenth cen- tury. I maintain that Bonald’s 1806 text, while still using the language of the anti-Judaic Christian tradition (and, therefore, the word “usury”), launches a novel attack, one against legal emancipation, which, as the accusation went, would have enabled the Jews to play a very dangerous social function in a context of new political freedoms. Bonald’s 1806 text contains already the bases for the identifi cation of the Jews with bankers, merchants, and capital- ists because it concocts already the nucleus of a new “anti-Jewish anticapital- ism.” Hence, the category “anti-Jewish anticapitalism” is based on the analysis of the language of those texts, their period, and their context, but it does not reproduce that language. I have to provide an analogous consideration of the word “anti-Semite.” Th e actors of the movements hostile to the Jews probably began to defi ne themselves as anti-Semites aft er the publication of an 1879 book by the Ger- man journalist Wilhelm Marr, which I will analyze in chapter 1. Th e populist Maurice Barrès, the socialist August Chirac, the Catholic nationalist Edouard

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Drumont, and the revolutionary syndicalist Paolo Orano, diff erent as they were, defi ned themselves as anti-Semites, but their self-defi nition cannot be endorsed by a historian without some critical specifi cation. Th e risk of using the word “anti-Semite” as it appears in documents and texts that are associ- ated with hostility and hatred toward the Jews consists in echoing a term used in the sources that may conceal many diff erent meanings. In this book, I have thus tried to propose a precise meaning of this kind of hatred. Carlo Ginz- burg has observed that the linguist and anthropologist Kenneth Pike defi ned the perspective and language of the social actors studied in their context as an “emic” (from “phonemic”) terminology: “anti-Semitism” belongs to this perspective because it is a term by which the protagonists defi ned themselves. On the other hand, the defi nition of “anti-Jewish anticapitalism” is not in the sources but belongs to a rigorous analytical language; it belongs to the per- spective that Pike defi ned as “etic” (from “phonetic”). Th e latter is the only perspective that enables us to escape the language of the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries and the self-defi nitions of the protagonists; it allows us to reconsider on diff erent bases the long and sinuous history of the cultures that led to Auschwitz. 19 Historical interpretation places itself on the level of sci- entifi c language, detached from that of its sources, but it cannot confi ne itself completely to linguistic investigation. It has also to consider the specifi c cul- ture of the protagonists. Historiography is based on a dialectic between the language of the observer (the scholar) and the perspective of the observed (the actors). Hence, the study of people in their own time cannot disregard the emic level, which has to be included in the interpretation. A method- ological clarifi cation can help explain the title of this book, which undoubt- edly mirrors the language of the protagonists, in this case the enemies of the anti-Semites: the formula, which at the end of the nineteenth century defi ned anti-Semitism as the “socialism of imbeciles” (or rather “of the imbecile”) was actually used by a leading German socialist, August Bebel, when he was in- terviewed in 1894 by Hermann Bahr: “der Sozialismus der dummen Kerls.” Bebel had probably taken it from Ferdinand Kronewetter, an Austrian mem- ber of the parliament who opposed, as a democratic position, the Christian- Social anti-Semite Karl Lueger, Adolf Hitler’s political mentor. 20 Th e “social- ism of the imbecile” appears to be only one of the diverse social (that is to say, cultural) reactions against the catastrophic impact of the birth of the market economy: the reaction that identifi ed the cause of that catastrophe with the emancipation of the European Jews. As noted, that reaction aimed at guaranteeing the permanence of the ancien régime. Th e French

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texts that presented this reaction were also important sources for the fabrica- tion of a false document about the anti-Jewish conspiracy, Th e Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Russian journalists and secret agents. Regarding this text, Michel Bounan has formulated the hypothesis that the Protocols were “the forgery of a revolutionary tumult.” Th is presupposes precisely the defi nition, proposed by Bebel, of anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools,” but, at the same time, “it goes much further” as Ginzburg writes. For Bounan, the forgery of a revolutionary project conceals a real conspiracy, namely, the plan of the modern powers to control the whole of social life and political institutions by manipulating even the opposition to power, by neutralizing the role of the controlling institutions of the state administration, by mak- ing politics opaque, by reducing the eff ect of every expression of public opin- ion.21 Th e French prehistory of the Protocols and the genealogy of the “social- ism of the imbecile” enable us to really “go further,” but in a diff erent sense from the one understood by Bounan. In a study like mine, which strives to remain as detached as possible from the emic perspective, or the mental ho- rizon of the protagonists of those times, the philological methodology is cen- tral. Th is methodology is not concerned with literary writings but especially and mainly with economic and political writings from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and historiography remains the most important guide to containing the temptation of introducing “hypostatized, abstract concepts.”22 Th e choice of Bebel’s phrase in the title of this book means that, despite the urgency of looking for a scientifi c interpretation, my essay deals with contin- gent, historical truths at their basic level. In the history of the cultural roots of the persecution of the European Jews, the issue of the historical truth has much broader implications than in any other historical topic. Th e history of the “socialism of the imbecile” (or “of the imbeciles”) did not end at Auschwitz. It did not end in 1945; the manifesta- tions of the anti-Semites have continued in Europe in the following decades and have even intensifi ed in the last twenty years. Th e mechanisms of falsifi - cation also did not stop in aft er the 1930s, the time of the greatest success of Th e Protocols of the Elders of Zion; they continue today to act through the ma- nipulation of memory and the denial of historical truth. Historiographical negationism—the denial of established historical fact—is the new anti- Semitic literature of the post-Auschwitz historical period. Th is new model of falsifi cation can only be defeated by historiography, namely, the search for the truth: by revealing the history of the persecution and integrating it in the his- of totalitarian Europe.23 For this reason, it is absolutely necessary to start

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from an awareness of what anti-Jewish propaganda, the falsifi cation of docu- ments, the denial of rights, and the persecution and extermination of the European Jews have meant: the collapse of ethics within European civiliza- tion. At the moment when principles collapsed within the old European civi- lization, ethical codes and norms, which had been considered indestructible, could be altered “without too many problems,” as Hannah Arendt wrote. 24 It is crucial to realize that the collapse of the morality of the old world of “civi- lized” Europe has continued aft er 1945: the mechanisms and procedures of falsifi cation wreak irreparable harm even today. Historiographically ground- less, negationism represents a terrible threat not only for the most important twentieth-century historiographic and legal achievements (i.e., ’s verdicts) but also for moral truth: as the “paradigm of extreme injustice,” the genocide of the Jewish people represents a moral truth threatened directly by negationism and indirectly (and thus more insidiously) by neo-skeptical cul- ture. 25 Old anti-Jewish propaganda and newly fabricated false documents that deny the persecution of the European Jews are diff erent forms of the same deception. Th e texts of nineteenth-century literature and anti-Semitic propaganda that off ered a false representation of the Jews provides the mate- rials for a forgery that claims to prove an event that had never occurred: the Jewish conspiracy. But the myth that that false document succeeded in creat- ing was not unreal: despite being a product of falsifi cation, the myth func- tioned like a real event that produced historical eff ects that were just as real. In March 1943, Alexandre Koyré wrote that the creators of totalitarian propa- ganda, from the time of the fi rst publication of Mein Kampf, always an- nounced their program of publicly, knowing that public opinion would never take seriously their persecutory and destructive declarations. Koyré’s hypothesis seems to me to be enlightening in the case of the propaganda and the falsifi cations of the anti-Semites. Anti-Semitic propaganda states a fact that never happened and falsifi es the evidence that would demolish it, yet it tells the truth about its own persecutory intentions because its authors were certain that they were able to deceive public opinion and even those who did not believe it: non servatur fi des infi delibus . Th erefore, the lie about the Jewish conspiracy concealed a real “conspiracy in broad daylight,” wrote Koyré, hatched by the anti-Semitic and totalitarian movements, an authentic plot which had to gain “the trust of the masses” that, for this reason, could not hide: “Th e conspiracy in broad daylight, if it was not a secret society, was nev- ertheless a society with a secret.”26 In such a society, distinguishing between the truth and falsehood, thus holding the power of judgment and decision

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making, was exclusively reserved to a very restricted elite, at the level of both social movements and the political regime. Th e propaganda of the anti- Semitic movements and the totalitarian regimes was, in this sense, “conspira- cies in broad daylight” knowingly based on falsifi cation. Th e elite knew both the art of the eff ective lie (in order to manipulate the psychology of the masses) and the art of revealing the truth of their plan of persecution. Con- temporary negationists do the same things and invent even more new myths with the aim of demolishing the acquisition of historical knowledge by strata- gems and rhetorical devices that are not unlike those of the propagandists and forgers who preceded them: reductivism, relativization, manipulation, interpolation, negation. Reductivism and manipulation and denying the truth of proven and confi rmed facts, were characteristic of prewar anti-Jewish propaganda and falsifi cation; now they are practiced by those who deny the truth of the persecution and extermination. At the same time, negationist rhetoric has inherited from anti-Semitic propaganda the same mania of ex- plaining everything: for Hitler’s national socialism onward, the contrast be- tween Christian Aryan Europe and Judaism represented the fulcrum of the history of the world and constituted the justifi cation “for the function of sal- vation” of the Nazis’ mission; for the negationist ideologues and the aberrant heirs of the ideological drift s of anti-Jewish anticapitalism, all the social sys- tems of the twentieth century have been variants of a single imperialist plot. 27 Th e concentration camp was the instrument used by the Nazis to exercise their power, but according to the negationists, it was not qualitatively diff er- ent from other forms of imperialist exploitation. In order to support this the- sis, the negationists falsify and eliminate the facts that would make their claim a lie; they even overturn the relationship between and unreality. Th eir procedure does not consist therefore in fabricating false evidence or false documents but rather stating the reality of what has never happened (or in declaring that what really happened is not true). Hence, to the nega- tionists, history is never real. On the one hand, they state something that has never been historically true, namely, that the Nazi system was only a variant of imperialism; on the other hand, the assertion that Auschwitz constitutes a “lie” enables them to overturn a historically proven truth into a phantom.28 Propaganda, falsifi cation, and negation all have in common the violation of the method of rigorous verifi cation of the facts. Essentially, they eliminate the very notion of reality. Th ey abolish logical verifi cation or evidence as the means by which a thesis is verifi ed. But the starting point to arrive at a histori- cal truth must remain the reality of the facts, weighed up with defi nite evi-

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dence: propaganda and falsifi cation, which ignore or distort the reality of verifi ed facts, are typical procedures of the violation of the principle of reality and, therefore, of the possibility of pursuing the truth. 29 —however one defi nes it—also cannot ignore the rational procedures of ascertaining the facts through evidence: therefore, it also presupposes correct procedures. Th e justness of the procedures constitutes the precondition for just decisions (for example, in a trial), and the procedures have to be in harmony with the spirit that informs the highest principles of the judicial system. Indeed, the aim of a criminal lawsuit, like that of historiographical research, consists in the ideal of the search for the truth. Th e procedures and rules that the law defi nes are correctly applied to the case in question only when they are found to be fully appropriate to the case, the law is correctly interpreted, and, fi nally, the facts are verifi ed: the category of truth, understood as a statement corresponding with the fully verifi ed facts, is therefore immanent in the correct procedural application and in the concept of justice as in the concept of history.30 To and write historical truth also means to continue to render justice. Th e infor- mation-technology revolution has made possible the globalization of com- munications but has also increased the risks of confusion between reality and unreality. Th e deniers of historical reality, who try to eliminate the diff erence between the truth and lies, want to ensure the retrospective victory of those who were defeated militarily and politically in 1945: the anti-Semites. Today, the strategy is not that of repressing or stifl ing the truth as in the despotic re- gimes wiped out in 1945, but of making it unrecognizable and indistinguish- able from falsehood. In the negation of the principle of reality, “Hitler sur- vives, and no one can say with certainty whether he is dead or he saved himself.”31

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“IS THE PALESTINE CAPITALIST HERE?”

n the morning of August 1, 1944, at about ten o’clock, O a squad of German soldiers commanded by an officer broke into the large house of Giuseppe Pardo Roques, in Pisa. Th e elderly Pardo had been a businessman, a notable citizen, and the president of the Jewish community of Pisa. Searching for the presumed reserves of money and the valuables of the Jews of the city and for what the fascists of the neighbor- hood described as “Pardo’s gold,” the German soldiers looted the house and killed all those who were present, Jews and non-Jews. In the semideserted city, bombed and divided into two occupation zones by the German Wehrmacht and the American army along the front line de- fi ned by the River Arno, Giuseppe Pardo Roques, who had been a generous benefactor of the whole city and universally respected (even by the Republi- can Fascist authorities) was massacred, together with about ten unfortunate people: his collaborators, his guests (fl eeing Jews), and Christian friends. Th ere were few people in that quarter of the city, once bustling with men and women in activities and , to mourn the incident: the Jews, rich or poor, had left everything to escape ; the others had been driven toward the countryside and the Pisan hills by Allied bombs and the grip of famine. Th e few surviving inhabitants were terrifi ed. Up to the mid-1930s, however, the presence of Jews in the entrepreneurial, commercial, administrative, and academic elite of the city had been substan- tial in relation to the small community. Th is also explains why, until there was free political discussion and a possible development of industrial disputes, there had been sporadic eruptions of social anti-Semitism and even some anti-employer demonstrations in the labor movement. 1

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On that August 1 morning, the German soldiers were probably looking for “the treasure of Pardo Roques.”2 While the silent and hidden inhabitants of the street watched the arrival of the soldiers, the offi cer who asked “is the Palestine capitalist here?” was told by a tutor, a Republican Fascist, pointing at Pardo’s house, “Th e Jews are there.” Th e episode of the massacre in which Pardo Roques died is not so diff erent from thousands of others that occurred throughout Europe: it is anything but “an isolated case.” However, a valuable clue can be gleaned from the offi cer’s question: he defi ned Pardo Roques as a “capitalist,” in accordance with Na- tional Socialist and (as we will see) Republican Fascist propaganda. Does this mean that the rounding up and the robbery were planned as an act of req- uisitioning and expropriation? It seems certain, in any case, that the Fascist Republicans who were cooperating with the German soldiers belonged to the lower classes and that some of them were suspected of harboring a personal resentment also based on social envy.

EMANCIPATION AND USURY: “SUR LES JUIFS” BY LOUIS DE BONALD (1806)

A tragedy from among the many that accompanied the extermination of Eu- ropean Jews sets us on a journey that will be long and anything but linear. Th e European fascists of the period between the two World Wars wanted to “unite the nation” and also represent the true socialism: it would have been “every- one’s socialism” and not of a single class, the socialism of the nation, National Socialism. In its name, for example, the Nazis had created, through a decree of the minister of agriculture, Darré, small inalienable farms, in order to con- solidate the class of the farmers; nevertheless, such policies never went so far as to make serious inroads in the power of the social elites and the employ- ers: they attempted rather to control them, subjecting them to the strategic indications of the Economic General Council. In their turn, German workers were forced to join the Labour Front organized by Dr. Ley, but the integration of the working class did not succeed completely, bringing to the surface labor tensions and confl icts between 1938 and 1939, which perhaps infl uenced the preparations for the war. 3 Regarding the professed socialism of the fascists throughout Europe, the French Jewish historian Élie Halévy formulated, while the events were un- folding, a judgment that we can today consider defi nitive. He observed that, on the part of the National Socialists,

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there was no demand, as there was instead from the socialists, for the sup- pression of profi t inasmuch as it was a principle of the capitalist economy, but only for the suppression of , considered a way of exploiting farmers, workers, and craft smen (but also industrialists) by the capital- ist banking system. It was only against this particular form of capitalism that National Socialist propaganda was unleashed since there were many Jewish bank directors, while the lower middle class, ruined by the crisis, felt crushed, on the one hand, by the Jewish bankers and, on the other hand, by the proletarian socialists and communists, many of whose lead- ers were Jewish. Th e chronic anti-Semitism of the German lower middle class thus became one of the articles of the Hitlerian creed.4

Halévy insists on a paradoxical aspect of the European crisis that had begun with the Great War: its repercussions had the social tensions that had emerged in the cycle of events following the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the big working-class strikes in Western Europe in 1905–1906 and 1910– 1911, even if the attempted in Hungary, , northern Ger- many, and northern Italy in the immediate postwar period had been defeated. In Soviet “socialist anarchy” had been disciplined with the mili- tary system of the wartime economy, imposed from 1918 to 1921, and then reinforced with integral planning, in 1928. In Central Europe, instead, it was precisely fascism, a direct imitation of the Russian methods of , that opposed “socialist anarchy.” But fascism thus found itself induced to set up under the name of “corporativism” a sort of counter-socialism that we are more inclined to take seriously than is generally the case among antifas- cists. In fact, corporativism consists of an increasing nationalization of the economy with the collaboration of particular elements of the working class. Hence, the internal contradiction that affl icts society can be defi ned as fol- lows: the conservative parties demand the infi nite strengthening of the state but the reduction of its economic functions; the socialist parties demand instead the unlimited extension of the state’s economic functions and at the same time the weakening of its authority. Th rough a social and ideological compromise, the solution would be “national socialism.” 5 As early as the last decades of the nineteenth century, some important Ger- man anti-Semitic organizations, such as the Agrarian Party, the Anti-Semitic League, and the Evangelical Christian Social Party, like the Austrian , had been set up to defend the of farmers and the middle class by proposing a protectionist economic policy and a paternalistic social

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policy, passed off as authentic socialism or, as the Bismarckian propagandists claimed, Reichsozialismus . But this type of anticapitalism oft en expressed it- self as anti-Semitism. Th e culture of the right-wing European parties consti- tuted the next stage of an old war against the rights of man and the citizen, of the hostility, resistance, and opposition that, throughout the nineteenth century, had shown themselves to be against the emancipation of the Jews aft er the and the granting of civil and political rights in various European states. Th e hatred toward the Jews had increased like the tumoral growth of the political war against the Enlightenment and the prin- ciples of citizenship, but it was reinforced by the strong popular resentment against the supposed social power of the Jewish elites, in any case identifi ed with capitalism and the classes that had benefi ted from the introduction of the free market. Th e investigation of the economic and social dimension of the opposi- tion to forces us, in my view, to modify considerably the most lucid interpretation of modern anti-Semitism, that proposed by Han- nah Arendt. Jaspers’s student placed anti-Semitism among the determining components of the totalitarian movement, together with the “continental” forms of imperialist policies and the nationalisms that had developed in Cen- tral and Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, when the pan- Germans and the pan-Slavists unleashed furious campaigns of aggression against the Jews, accusing them “of having infi ltrated the European nations with the aim of gaining control of them.”6 My hypothesis is that, fi rst of all, the genesis of modern political and social anti-Semitism should be antedated. Its fi rst manifestations occurred as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century and should be viewed in the context of the revolt against the politi- cal Enlightenment and the rights of citizenship, as Arendt also proposes. Th e full import of this hypothesis would, however, be lost if one were to omit an analysis of the economic and social content of the heated debate about eman- cipation, that is, the attack against the role acquired in modern society by the Jewish elites (and by the Jews in general), seen as “exploiters of the nation” by the sections of the population most traumatized by the eff ects of the commer- cial society and the industrial take-off . It is also necessary to rethink the link between the genesis of political anti-Semitism and the anti-Jewish Christian tradition. According to Arnaldo Momigliano,

Whatever may be written about the age that ends with Fascists and Na- zis cooperating in sending millions of Jews to concentration camps (my

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mother and my father were also among the victims), there is a judgment that should be repeated: this terrifying massacre would never have hap- pened if in Italy, France, and (not to mention other countries) if many people had not been indiff erent (an indiff erence that had built up over the centuries) to the destiny of their Jewish compatriots.7

Th e destruction of the European Jews irreparably severed that European civi- lization that Momigliano considered the historical result of the trilingual col- legium made up of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin intellectual products formed in the Hellenistic Age. 8 Th erefore, the Shoah has to be considered the tragic outcome, even though not “necessary,” of course, and not preestablished, not only of modern po- litical anti-Semitism, but also of a much longer anti-Jewish tradition, which can be traced back to at least the fourth century AD, when Christianity had already defi ned itself as Verus Israel (the true Israel) and had transformed it- self into the new religious “ideology” of the Roman Empire. Th en, for the fi rst time, the enemy of the church was represented as the old Chosen People,9 and all the suff erings infl icted on the “perfi dious” Jews because they were unbe- lievers in the true —the Diaspora and the second and defi nitive destruc- tion of the Temple of —became perfectly explicable and justifi ed, as Eusebius of Caesarea wrote, because of the old “crime committed against Christ.”10 Christianity had become the church exclusively of the Gentiles and had presented itself as a community incompatible with “the .” Hence, the accusation against the Jews was formulated that would be repeat- edly proposed through the centuries: that of being—as John Chrysostom wrote—“greedy people, traffi ckers, merchants, and traitors of the poor, who live in , the dens of thieves.”11 Chrysostom, Jerome, Ambrose, and other church fathers of the fourth century thus repeated the intransigent con- demnation already defi ned in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 23:20–21), according to which usury, taken to mean a loan with interest, would only be considered legitimate if exercised toward strangers, toward those, that is, who did not belong to the People of Israel: “You will not lend on interest to your brother, neither money, nor food, nor anything that could earn interest. You can lend on interest to a foreigner, but not to your brother, so that the Lord thy God may bless you in whatever you do, in the country to which you are going and which you will occupy.” 12 Th omas Aquinas solemnly confi rmed that usury always and in any case is a sin because everyone is obliged to recognize, in any person, Jew or Gentile, his own brother.13 And in 1199, on this theological premise, Pope Innocent III,

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while prohibiting, under pain of , the persecution of the Jews, abuses against their , and their forced baptism, reasserted that “Jewish perfi dy” constituted the confi rmation of the truth of the Christian faith and condemned the activities of money lending and banking practiced by the Jews.14 Nevertheless, starting from the tenth century, these activities began to be developed above all in German and Italian cities, in which the fi nancial and credit resources managed by the Jewish bankers had become necessary for fi nancing commercial transactions. 15 Th is commitment to banking and lending activities had been, as is well known, the eff ect of legal restrictions: a ban on owning land, for example, had been imposed on the Jews at the end of the (in Italy in the sixteenth century). But the separation from landed property and real estate had already happened many centuries earlier, when (again in the fourth century) the Jews had been pro- hibited from having Christian servants. Th e money-lending activities were nevertheless partially tolerated at least until the end of the fi ft eenth century, when the Franciscans launched their new violent campaign. Th ey urged Pope Leo X to legalize pawnbroking, and the attack on usury and money lending was also reproposed by the most radical reformed preachers (at fi rst also by Martin Luther).16 Th e accusation of ritual murder was thoroughly defi ned and formulated for the fi rst time perhaps by Th omas of Monmouth, a monk of Norwich Ca- thedral, between 1147 and 1150 (most probably independently of its Greek and Latin precedents); however, it crystallized into a paradigm aft er the episode of the child Simone of Trento (1475). It came to be used above all in the big campaign to establish pawnbroking and the closure of the Jewish loan banks. Th e propaganda of Andrea da Faenza, Giacomo della Marca, Alberto da Sar- teano, and, above all, Bernardino da Feltre would have succeeded in eff ecting the expulsion of the Jews from quite a few Italian cities (including Perugia, where in fact a of Jewish bankers was put on trial for attempted ritual murder).17 Th e link between usury and ritual murder was corroborated in the same period in the Iberian peninsula, in the episode of the expulsion of the Jews of Zaragoza and other places. Aft er a long period of decline throughout Europe, it reappeared more than three centuries later, especially in the Russian Em- pire and in Central Europe, where it was spurred on by the tragic trial of the Jews of Damascus in 1840. Th is age of the new anti-Jewish literature began with the publication of Das Judentum und die Kritik, by Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany, in 1841, and contin-

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ued at least until 1869, the year in which Gougenot des Mousseaux’s pam- phlet, Le juif, le judaisme et la judaïsation des peoples chrétiens —also well re- ceived by Pius IX—was published. Finally, it returned with the successful Der Jude , by August Rohling, and, above all, in the campaign launched by La Civiltà Cattolica in the summer of 1881. Th e latter can be considered a real nihil obstat of the to the Catholic hierarchies’ plan to exploit the new political and social anti-Semitism that had appeared in various states. 18 What was the relationship between the anti-Jewish Christian tradition, tied to the controversy about usury, and modern social anti-Semitism, born from the rift which occurred aft er 1789?

Th e analyses that link anti-Semitism to objective and circumstantial causes, such as an economic crisis, unemployment, and psychological and material uncertainties, certainly grasp the context in which the phenom- enon appears, but they conceal a dimension and a way of functioning of anti-Semitism that follows diff erent rhythms and registers: certainly, they conceal the fact that anti-Semitism is a tradition—it is handed down like a tradition—it has the fl uctuating but persistent course of a tradition, that is, an anthropological-cultural factor that characterized Christian and post-Christian Europe. One of its areas of persuasion and development is to be found precisely in the widespread need for tradition, refounding, and roots in the face of change and diff erent infl uences.19

In this passage, Stefano Levi della Torre puts forward a hypothesis that de- serves to be discussed and taken up again. According to della Torre, anti- Semitism is an ancient tradition that has been revived, through the ages, in diff erent forms. In fact, the particular character of the anti-Jewish tradition can be defi ned if one bears in mind precisely its centuries-old dimension and its constant features. Among these, the controversy about usury and lucrative money lending was one of the most important and, at the same time, an argu- ment that, aft er the emancipation of the eighteenth century, was profoundly modifi ed. My hypothesis is that the traditional proscription against usury, be- cause of the defi nitive crisis of the ancien régime, generated the language of modern anti-Jewish anticapitalism, prepared for and fueled by the economic transformation of the nineteenth century and by the establishment of the self-regulated market, in which it renewed itself. Th e reaction to the market would have generated a widespread need for cultural roots to counter the un- certainty caused by the rapid change, and this background would explain why

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the intransigent Catholic reaction to the rights of man and to economic indi- vidualism was the seedbed of modern political and social anti-Semitism. In the early nineteenth century, aft er the French Revolution and the po- litical emancipation of the Jews, the political defense of tradition was crucial in the language of the counter-Enlightenment and in intransigent Catholic thought throughout Europe. Some seminal examples are the works of , Louis de Bonald, René de Chateaubriand, Félicité de Lamennais, Donoso Cortés, Ludwig von Haller, Father Taparelli d’Azeglio, and Father Ventura, just to cite some of the most famous writers.20 In these cases, the ap- ostolic Roman Catholic religion was depicted and theorized as the only true religion—because it was the only one that could guarantee the stability of the social order on the basis of revelation and tradition, that is, of the church’s teaching accumulated over the centuries, starting from the teachings of the fathers of the church. Religion is true because its authority has been demonstrated, but only the body of the church knows and preserves it as true religion. Tradition hands down the teaching that hierarchy is indispensable to the order of the church and of society, but it can, instead, be put at risk by the individual’s claim to have free access to the book, therefore the revealed truth. In other words, the so-called rights of man and of the citizen, based on the supposed intellectual and moral equality among men, would, in short, be the ultimate evil of three centuries of religious dissent and of the tragic division that occurred within the Christian church since the sixteenth century. Th e revolution of the rights of man and of the citizen would not be anything other than the fi nal act of the Protestant and of the individual’s claim to read and freely interpret the sacred text. But the heresy of modern man presupposes the obstinacy of the ancients, that is, the refusal of the Jews—as a stubborn people—to recognize the Son of God. Th erefore, the apologia of the free market dates back to the old “Jewish craving for profi t.” I will try to show how this same pattern passed from the social apologetics of the Catholic religion to diff erent spheres of nineteenth- century culture, also penetrating antidemocratic and antiliberal socialism and permitting Alphonse Toussenel, a follower of Fourier, to conclude that behind Protestants there is always the power of the Jews (“derrière les protes- tants il y a toujours la puissance juive”).21 Th e transmission of the same line of reasoning from Catholic apologetics to socialist circles proves that at least part of the culture of the socialist working-class movement of the nineteenth century was permeated by the cultural reaction to the Enlightenment and

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to what Hirschman has defi ned as the rhetoric of reaction to the rights of citizenship. 22 Th e role played by the Church of Rome and by the Catholic ecclesiasti- cal press in the cultural war against civil and political rights and constitu- tional freedoms was offi cially sanctioned by the formal condemnation of the modern errors produced by the Enlightenment, codifi ed with the Syllabus in 1864 and by the First Vatican Council in 1870. By publicly and offi cially claiming such a role, the church revealed its political ambition of dominating and guiding all the positions rejecting the capitalist economic order and the constitutional state, in order to direct them to the Christian reconquest of European society. Th e decision of the to take up the theo- logical and political leadership of all the movements opposed to reason and constitutional freedoms can explain why the fundamental protagonists of the nineteenth- century anti-Jewish movements were the , trade unions, and Catholic associations. At the same time, the attraction exercised in some socialist circles by the Catholic social economy and by the church’s social doctrine could also be traced back (though not exclusively) to the transmis- sion of the arguments of the anti-Jewish tradition against usury. When, to- ward the end of the century, the nationalists tried to wrest the leadership of the anti-Semitic movements from the Catholics, the stereotypes of the Chris- tian anti-Jewish tradition underwent a further transformation. Hence, the Jews were accused—in the nationalist press—of constituting a foreign “na- tion” that had infi ltrated the European nations, but invisibly because it was formed by emancipated and integrated individuals who were apparently similar to Christians. Indiff erent to the Christian law of brotherhood, they were more powerful because of their riches. From the end of the eighteenth century, the arguments of the tradition against usury therefore underwent a radical change in the controversy against emancipation; then, in subsequent decades, they passed into the sphere of non-Marxist socialism, some corpo- rative fringes of trade unionism, and fi nally the realm of the nationalists.23 So in anti-Jewish Catholic propaganda, emancipation was presented as the political instrument by means of which the Jews had fi nally succeeded in dis- guising their speculative activities at the expense of the Christian nation, and, since the acquisition of civil rights, it became the paradigm of modern politi- cal democracy, transforming the hostility toward the economic consequences of emancipation into hatred for democratic principles and institutions. From the time of the fi rst law of emancipation, promulgated in France in 1791, anti-Jewish rhetoric therefore identifi ed the freedoms won by the Jews

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with the advent of the liberal and constitutional state, attributing to them the full responsibility for the consequences and degenerative processes of mod- ern democracy: secularization, selfi sh individualism, political disorder, and unregulated competition in the free market. In fact, the Jews were considered truly responsible for the advent of the democracy imposed by the Revolution and were thought to have plotted to disrupt the unity of Christians, to de- stroy the societas christiana, to dissolve the link between absolute monarchi- cal power and the authority of the Church of Rome. 24 Even though they were integrated in the demos through the laws of civil and political equality, the Jews had remained foreigners because of their stubborn refusal to recognize the true religion and give up their own perverse . Th e unrecognizableness of the Jewish “diff erence” had already constituted a serious problem for the doctrinarians of theology and law in the preced- ing centuries. Th is debate can be traced back to the fi ft eenth century, at the time of the forced conversion of the Jews of the Iberian peninsula. Soon aft er the expulsion of the nonconverted Jews from Spain, in 1492, the problem had arisen of ensuring that no converted Jew or his descendants could attain im- portant positions or even carry out some functions in the institution of the Inquisition. With the aim of “recognizing” the ancient Jews, a solution was found and was codifi ed in subsequent decades in the statutes de limpieza de sangre , which, for the fi rst time, had defi ned and classifi ed who was Jewish on the basis of descent and of “qualities,” or characteristics, that the theologians considered immutable. Th eologians and jurists, such as Escobar del Corro e Marquardo de Susannis, had indeed defi ned the Jews a generatio , which was characterized by pravorum morum ratio and in which all the macula of deicide would have been transmitted from father to son, through qualitates sanguinis .25 Centuries later, when anti-Semitism came to power in Germany in 1933, Leo Spitzer wrote an essay fundamental to an understanding of the anti- Jewish tradition. Starting from the correlation between a religious diff erence and an ethnic diff erence established in those seventeenth-century Spanish documents, he traced the etymology of the words “ rasse ,” “race ,” and “ razza ” back to the term “generatio ” used by theologians in the statutes of limpieza de sangre .26 In the same period, Victor Klemperer, who had been expelled from the Academy of Dresden as an artfremde Jew and was forced to go into hiding in his own country in order to avoid certain death, began studying Nazi pro- paganda and discovered that the “language of the Th ird Reich” represented a total regression to the rhetoric of the intolerance of the seventeenth century.27

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So, my question is: was there an analogous semantic mechanism at work in the arguments against usury? At various times theologians had written that the sin of usury, like the guilt of deicide, would have been transmitted like a macula and inherited. Once again, there had been the attempt to correlate re- ligious diff erence with a diff erence in blood. Th e sense of any distinction be- tween religious and racial intolerance had therefore already been lost before Count Gobineau formulated it in the most arrogant way: “All peoples immu- tably conserve character and ideas: the Jews, the Persians, the Copts, and in some way also the Armenians: races that the system itself characterizes with the mark of avidity and baseness.”28 And signifi cantly, among the permanent characteristics of the “Jewish nature,” Gobineau had included that avidity re- vealed precisely by the sin of usury, that is by a lucrative loan. But the new feeling of hatred toward the Jews that was taking shape aft er the emancipation cannot be considered the explosion of hostility toward a dif- ferent and recognizable “race”: it was rather the expression of a new hatred to- ward their own fellow citizens, who were supposed acting against their fellow men in the same way they had already threatened Christianity in the past, in the ages when they had carried out the function of collectors for the sov- ereign and money lenders to the state. Th e stubborn persistence of the Jews in refusing the gospel and the claim of still being the Chosen People therefore represented the defi nitive proof of an insurmountable extraneousness, and the latter constituted, in turn, the indispensable prerequisite for a conspir- acy aiming at conquering economic power. So the imaginary economic plot hatched to gain control of the European States would have become, in the nineteenth century, the plausible explanation for the cyclical crises, fi nancial crashes, and bank failures, until the Protocols of the Elders of Zion claimed to provide the fi nal proof of the Jewish conspiracy. Th is false document of the alleged meeting that would have been held during the fi rst Zionist Con- gress in Basle in 1897, to organize the economic and fi nancial conquest of the world, was the false text of a bogus plot. 29 But it was also the obvious indica- tion of another political plot that was actually true: the conspiracy of the most aggressive anti-Semitism that had projected, on to the supposed Jewish fi nan- cial imperialism, its own designs of expansion and dominion. 30 In clashing with emancipation and the constitutional State, anti-Semitism became indebted to the anti-Jewish Christian tradition. Not by chance, the term “anti-Semitism” began to spread in European political parlance aft er the publication, in 1879, of the political propaganda text written by the German (previously democratic) journalist Wilhelm Marr. Precisely in the attempt to

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fi nd a way of defi ning the Jews that was not solely based on religion, Marr insisted on their parasitic social function. 31 At the beginning of the century, the Napoleonic conquests had extended to Europe the regulations of the Civil Code but, in the age of the Restoration, the laws of emancipation and the egalitarian regulations had been revoked. Legal emancipation was defi nitively attained only in the second half of the nine- teenth century in various European states: in the Habsburg Empire in 1867, in Prussia in 1869, in the unifi ed Reich in 1870. In Italy, in 1848, civil equality had been ratifi ed in the Kingdom of Sardinia, in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and in other states, but it was revoked aft er the defeat of the liberal movements and fi nally restored only aft er Italian national unifi cation.32 Nevertheless, emancipation did not aff ect the majority of European Jews, confi ned in the settlement district of the Russian Empire, between , Lithuania, Bye- lorussia, and Ukraine, where the cruelest forms of exclusion and discrimina- tion persisted and were in fact aggravated by the periodic manifestations of intolerance fomented by the Orthodox clergy and the tsarist police, as hap- pened aft er the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. In Central Europe the reaction against emancipation also grew more in- tense in the last part of the nineteenth century. In the region of Lower , the socialist Karl Lueger succeeded in gaining the support of the Christian Socialist political movement, thanks to which he was elected burgomaster of , in 1897, by exploiting the discontent provoked by the economic hard- ships of large social strata struck by the depression that had begun twenty years earlier and had culminated in the crash of the Vienna Stock Exchange. Th e repercussions of that event had extended as far as Berlin and all over the German Reich, where farmers’ associations and the industrialists’ confedera- tion had reacted to the economic crisis by supporting pan-German nationalist movements, which were fi ghting to revise the already limited constitutional system in a neo-absolutist direction.33 Th e recurring anti-Jewish campaigns, promoted by the Anti-Semitic League, the Christian-Social Party, the Social Party of the Reich, the German Popular Association, the Anti-Semitic Asso- ciation, and the Conservative Party, were supported by a broad social align- ment and oft en also by academics: for instance, Paul de Lagarde, an eminent scholar of Eastern , turned the University of Göttingen into a center for the dissemination of anti-Jewish publications, thereby exerting a profound infl uence on German teachers. Between 1873 and 1890, more than 500 works of anti-Jewish literature and propaganda were printed.34

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Nevertheless, the most conspicuous anti-Jewish movement developed in a totally diff erent institutional context, the French Republic, founded on the secular school and universal suff rage, between the end of the nineteenth cen- tury and the Great War. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the eff ects of the economic depression also made themselves felt in France, where the political consequences of widespread corruption, like those that emerged in the so-called Wilson scandal, also exploded. Th is led to the res- ignation of a president of the republic, Jules Grévy, and, above all, discred- ited the democratic institutions and parliament. Also in France, the collapse of a major Catholic bank, the Union Générale, resulted in a propaganda campaign against the alleged excessive power of Jewish fi nance (which was supposed to have caused the collapse). Th e denunciation of the alleged Jew- ish “conspiracy” created a climate—hostile to the parliamentary system—in which plans developed for the constitutional revision of an authoritarian sys- tem, culminating in General Boulanger’s venture between 1888 and 1889. Th e pamphlets of the Ligue Antisémitique of Morès and Guérin enjoyed an enor- mous success at that time, and many disturbances and riots against the Jews broke out again in the early 1890s in Montpellier, Tours, Toulouse, Angers, Lille, Grenoble, and Marseille. A broader anti-Jewish front formed because of the Dreyfus Aff air. Th e offi - cer accused of spying for Germany became the symbol of treachery, betrayal, and the Jewish conspiracy behind the back of the nation: Captain Dreyfus was depicted as “the Jew,” that is, the foreigner who had betrayed the country that had taken him in and had placed its trust in him. He therefore came to sym- bolize the failure of legal emancipation and, on the contrary, provided new evidence of the old truth and validity of the traditional Christian prejudice. In the alleged conspiracy in favor of the Reich, Catholic newspapers—such as La Croix , La Bonne Presse , Le Pèlerin , Les Études, and others—found confi r- mation of the for their old hostility to emancipation, therefore to the principles of democratic citizenship and the Republic. 35 Together with the congregations, orders, and secondary associations of the church, the clerical newspapers led the anti-Dreyfus front, made up of Catholics, conservatives, nationalists, and anti-Semitic socialists, claiming the primacy of the church in rejecting “modern errors.” Th e theological primacy in the long battle against the Enlightenment would have legitimized, in their view, the Catholic am- bition of relaunching the commitment to the Christianization of European society and controlling the new movements opposed to democracy, of which

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anti-Semitism was a decisive component, and thus the anti-Jewish contro- versy became the defi ning characteristic of the Christian parties that were forming at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twen- tieth, and took on a determining role in the confl ict between the church and the secular state. Th e fi nal consequence was that of defi nitively transforming the Jews into the symbol of secularization, the radical rights of , and modern moral decadence. Th e phenomenon of the assimilation of the Jewish bourgeoisie and the si- multaneous increase of the fl ow of immigration of Eastern Jews transformed the Jewish communities of Western Europe—especially those of Germany, France, and the Habsburg Empire—into scapegoats for the social malaise. However, the conditions for the success of anti-Semitic propaganda among large segments of the population of those countries were “prepared for” by tradition—the familiarity that believers had with the patterns of thought, ar- guments, and stereotypes that centuries of Christian anti-Jewish preaching had deposited in the collective memory. In the controversy and the anti-Jewish political battle there even arose a cli- mate of “rivalry” between the Catholic parties and the Protestant movements. In 1881, for example, the periodical La Civiltà Cattolica did not criticize the campaign of anti-Semitic agitation promoted in Germany by a court preacher in Berlin, the evangelical pastor Stöcker, but, on the contrary, the periodical hoped that Catholics would be able to win control of that movement by virtue of the primacy exercised by the Church of Rome in the centuries-old polemic against the Jews. In fact, the church had been the fi rst to denounce the exten- sion of rights of citizenship to the Jews, arguing that this would destroy the rules that for centuries had separated the Jews from Christian society and “prevented them from doing any harm.” 36 Unfortunately, according to the pe- riodical, this had actually happened, confi rming that the reasons for the sepa- ration between Christians and Jews had not changed through the centuries and that it was, therefore, necessary to change the procedures and the degree of intensity but not the principle of the separation—as the Jesuits and the As- sumptionists maintained. Th is could translate into legal discrimination going as far as totally preventing Jews from participating in society. As the Assump- tionist Fathers stated in their own newspaper, La Croix , on November 6, 1894: “To admit the Jews in Christian society is like declaring that the deicide, of which they carry the perpetual curse, is no longer of concern to our genera- tion. But if we are Christians, they remain cursed.”37

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It should be borne in mind that organs like La Croix , the Historisch- Politische Blätter , and La Civiltà Cattolica were certainly not marginal publi- cations in the Catholic European press; on the contrary, they oft en dictated, to the ecclesiastical authorities, the approach to be adopted. Moreover, even the Apostolic Nuncio in Vienna, Cardinal Serafi no Vannutelli, recognized the necessity of vigorously supporting the popular reaction to the domination of the free-market economy by the Jewish elites; in introducing the discussion of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Aff airs on the situation in Austria and on the Christian Social movement, Cardinal Vannutelli (who was also the patron of the French Assumptionists) recognized that in Vienna, “over many decades, the Jews and with them the German Liberal Party were dominant. Everything is in their hands: wealth, capital, large factories, news- papers and representation in the town hall, in the provincial diet and the Par- liament of the Empire.”38 Th erefore the church could not do otherwise than raise “the economic issue” and the “oppression of capitalism to the detriment of the people and small industry” because, in any case, the scandal represented by Jewish domi- nation required entering the social fi eld and mobilizing the peoples oppressed by the new usura vorax , as it had been denounced in Rerum Novarum . We therefore have to ask ourselves what happened in the nineteenth century to the image of the Jew as a usurer. What happened to that stereo- type constructed over the centuries by the traditional intransigent polemic against lending at interest and trade, when legal emancipation and secular- ization were intertwined with the “artifi cial” imposition of the free and self- regulating market—to use the term adopted by Karl Polanyi—that is, with the political decision to build self-regulated free markets? I will concentrate essentially on the French society of the last decades of the eighteenth century. In France the free market in wheat was introduced simultaneously with the phenomenon that called “agrarian in- dividualism,” when the attack on “ vaine pâture ” (pasturage) and the private appropriation of common lands increased and deepened the confl ict between the of the landowners, the laboureur owners and the agricultural workers paid by the day: the journaliers .39 As well as the revolts and fl our wars ( les guerres des farines ) against the repeated attempts, between 1763 and 1775, to liberalize the price of grains, there were also the attempts to restore the old forms of consumer protection of the lower classes through the taxation populaire . Th is was done in the name of a “fair price,” defi ned according to

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the codes of the moral economy of the working classes. In the same period, the protests of magistrates (rémontrances des parléments) against the liberal- ization decrees were strengthened and legitimized by the fi erce campaign of intransigent theologians “against the monstrous hydra which the church had already struck several times with its lightning.” 40 Minister Turgot was the au- thor of the market-liberalization decrees, and in line with his fi rm adherence to physiocratic doctrines, he found himself deployed on the opposite side to the intransigent front in the new controversy over Deuteronomy, against the repeated statements about the irreconcilability of the church, trade, and lending at interest. Th is clash among the Catholic hierarchy, the new middle classes, and physiocratic culture did not, however, prevent a number of im- portant religious authorities from speaking in favor of “liberal” options, as did the Abbé Baudeau, the editor of Les Nouvelles Éphémérides. He embraced, with conviction, those physiocratic theses that could also easily be accused of being an apologia for the interests of the “bourgeoisie” devoted exclusively to profi t (“an aim” that, in the controversy, oft en had no possibility of being distinguished from “usury” and “robbery”). In fact, these formulas can be traced back to seventeenth- and eighteenth- century traditional moralistic literature, in which the so-called bourgeois had been identifi ed with the usurer who lends money and goods for the sole pur- pose of gaining an unlawful interest, higher than the margin warranted by the value of the goods and the money invested. Th e very metaphor of the “monstrous hydra”—with a thousand heads, always regenerating themselves, and gaping jaws to devour the fl esh of Christians—used for centuries against the “vile practice of Jewish moneylenders,” favored and encouraged the iden- tifi cation of the new “bourgeois” usurers with the Jews.41 I will conclude that the emancipation of 1791 created what Pierre Vidal- Naquet defi ned as “the juridical, linguistic, and national chasm,” which would have divided the Jews of Western Europe from those of Central and Eastern Europe,42 and furthermore that emancipation also made the categories of the polemic against usury relevant as additional reasons for attacking the rights of citizenship granted to the Jews. At the same time, the continued existence of the community structures of the Jewish “nation” were seen as clashing with the aspiration of Jewish citizens to integrate in the new nation they were liv- ing in.43 Th e phenomena of the rejection of juridical equality and, therefore, also the proposals of immediately applying some restrictions to the new laws of emancipation, can be considered, in the fi rst place, the consequence of the

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clash between the church and a legislation that it regarded as the most evil result of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, the hostility to the functions exer- cised by the Jews in economic enterprises was still being fueled by this tradi- tional anti-Jewish heritage.44 And if the nationalization of Jewish minorities created the new Jewish consciousness it also increased the uncompromising reaction against it.45 Th e link between Jewish emancipation and the economic exploitation of the “Christian nation” by Jewish bankers and moneylenders, laid down in the texts of the propagandists of the Catholic counter-Enlightenment, also provided the determining contribution to the formation of a new anti-Jewish paradigm. From the eighteenth century, the end of the discrimination, ap- plied until then to religious minorities, had diff erent eff ects in the various Eu- ropean states. Th e change in the condition of Jews took place in diff erent ways over a very long period and, in some cases, as in many German states, eman- cipation came aft er a period of social and cultural integration favored—as Mosse has written—by the identifi cation of the Jewish elites with the ideal of the Bildung .46 Th erefore, in a long-term perspective, emancipation emerged as a contra- dictory phenomenon and varied by time and method since the achievement of legal equality eliminated discrimination but also some “privileges” enjoyed by Jews in the ancien régime. For example, there were communities that had gained and commerce in some major port cities in Europe and en- joyed great prestige among the courts of the German principalities, duchies, and small kingdoms. 47 Furthermore, legal equality did not always eliminate the old forms of discrimination or pressure from the church for conversion and the practice of forced baptism. On the Jewish side, it sometimes fueled, as a reaction to disappointment, a feeling of nostalgia for the status quo ante: in the Jewish consciousness, there was sometimes the risk of a clash between the old and the new identities, as happened to those who wanted to reconcile love of country and loyalty to Judaism as the fi rst and irreplaceable ethical monotheism. 48 Having identifi ed emancipation as the last result of the Enlightenment and its translation in the principle of universal citizenship, the new anti-Semitism could not but draw sustenance from the rhetoric of the reaction against po- litical universalism and religious, moral, and economic individualism. Th is fusion of the counter-Enlightenment and hatred of the Jews explains why the counter-Enlightenment arguments against the rights of citizenship oft en echoed the old theses of the anti-Protestant reaction to the Reformation, and

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the same reaction also continued to fuel the postrevolutionary controversies against the decrees of the abolition of the guilds, the corporations, and regu- latory market protection. 49 Th us were laid the premises of a vicious circula- tion of arguments and rhetorical devices between the anti-Jewish counter- Enlightenment and the antiliberal moral economy. Louis de Bonald, for example, one of the most eminent theoreticians of the anti-universalistic and anti-Enlightenment reaction, was also the author of one of the fi rst texts of the explicit dispute against the social role of Jewish merchants and, more generally, the social position of Jews aft er emancipa- tion. Bonald was the author, during his years abroad as an “émigré” escap- ing from the Revolution (but also aft er participation in the Revolution in its early stage), of one of the fi rst treatises of the neo-absolutist political reaction, Th éorie du pouvoir politique et réligieux. It was written in 1796 to challenge the foundations of revolutionary constitutionalism and update the basic theologi- cal-political ideas of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in a violently anti-Rousseauian key. Bonald also published, on his return to France, one of the most violent anti-Jewish articles of the postrevolutionary period: “Sur les juifs.” Th is is, to my knowledge, the fi rst text in which the argument against democracy and the equality of rights is intertwined with an explicit anti-Jewish anticapital- ism, which would be inherited by social Catholic writers and by some social- ist polemicists.50 From a political-theory point of view, Bonald was certainly not an origi- nal author. In fact, his anti-individualistic monarchical and communitarain tendencies seem to be, fundamentally, a revival of the old absolutist theses of some well-known authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Bossuet, Filmer, and Ramsay. His most important feature is not therefore his political neo-absolutism but the reformulation of what Marc Bloch defi ned, in La société féodale , as the offi cial ideology of the ancien régime. 51 In every society, wrote Bonald, there are some constant and regular re- curring “functions” that serve to regulate social relations. Th ey include the function of command (which he defi nes as pouvoir ); the function of the transmission of political orders and moral values (a function carried out by a government or ecclesiastical ministre ); and, fi nally, the function of the person who obeys and works (the subject, the sujet ): every institution, from the fam- ily to the state, appears to be governed by such social functions. 52 Th e Th éorie du pouvoir politique et réligieux therefore reproduces the apologia of the three orders of the and the functional tripartite model of the offi cial ideology of the ancien régime. Th is had been redefi ned in the sev-

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enteenth century by the jurist Charles Loyseau in a work entitled Traité des ordres et de simples dignitez .53 Rousseau was Bonald’s bête noire because, with his democratic utopia, the Genevan writer had criticized the idea that legitimate sovereign power was based on the archetype of paternal authority, defi ning it a thesis that favored a “single part” of society,54 and tracing it back to the pro-absolutist authors, from whom Bonald had drawn inspiration: Filmer and Ramsay. Responding, in turn, to Rousseau, Bonald argued that the only sovereign power was pre- cisely that of the “shepherd” father, based on the “necessary relations arising from the nature of things.” In fact, from the correspondence between paternal and political power Bonald deduced that the principle on which society is founded is not a contract agreed upon by individuals but the traditional prin- ciple of command. Rousseau had attacked Ramsay, Bossuet, and Filmer, but Bonald defended their doctrines of the natural and paternal origin of sover- eign power, in particular the thesis expounded by Filmer in Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings and reproposed by Ramsay, in 1719, in Essai philoso- phique sur le gouvernement civil .55 Bossuet had probably started his most important political work—Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte —before the publication of Filmer’s book, but he advocated the same thesis, namely, that the sovereign power of the king is the only natural power because it is of patriarchal origin and is the only one that can avoid the establishment of political equality. Pater- nal authority has therefore always provided the fi rst idea of command and authority.56 But in the early nineteenth century, Bonald was not the only one to re- turn to Bossuet: as Françoise Mélonio has noted, in those years Bossuet “was everywhere,”57 and, for the counter-revolutionary writers, above all those who wanted to restore “natural politics” and remove any possibility of realizing in- dividual autonomy, controversialist, anti-Protestant literature constituted an extraordinary reserve of arguments against rights and universalism. Victor Cousin also returned to Bossuet and Fénelon, defi ning them as the “philoso- phers of Supreme Reason” and of the hierarchy of skills, as well as Blaise Pas- cal, who in the seventieth century had explained how to distinguish between the realm of the sciences, in which it is legitimate to apply the method based on raisonnement , and the political sphere in which, instead, one has to respect the principle of authority.58 Th us, the Pauline principle of the omnis potestas a Deo was, once again, utilized by the Catholic writers of the counter-Enlightenment. Determined

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to fi ght against the new democracy, they could not but exclude any role of the people and asserted that “monarchical power had been directly conferred upon each king” through the courant d’amour that God sends to men. Th ey re- garded religion as the supreme good of nations and ( bien des na- tions et de la société civile), which sanctifi es government as the power which is holy, inviolable, and ordered by God ( saint, inviolable, ordonné par Dieu ) and guarantees the continuity of tradition and the solidity of power. 59 Already pro- posed by Bossuet and then by Claude Fleury, in the Histoire ecclésiastique ,60 the paradigm of paternal power and religious unity was modifi ed at the be- ginning of the nineteenth century by these intransigent Catholic writers, for whom the enemies of Christianity were the atheistic , the Jews, and the revolutionaries. If the enemy had changed his appearance, the de- fenders of the faith nevertheless had to be able to recognize him and fi ght him in the name of the unité de la société religieuse , a condition of the unité de la société politique .61 Seeking the fundamental laws that regulate the existence of societies meant recognizing the signs of the action of Providence in history because laws are the “necessary relations that derive from the nature of the divine being and from the nature of man.” 62 Th e family is therefore the model of the natural society founded on the relationship among people animated by the and true love, and a society based on the family includes the property and fi nancial resources that are necessary for the maintenance and preservation of its members. Th is is in keeping with the necessary relations among social beings, therefore in keeping with the “will of social beings and society, in accordance with the divine one.”63 But in society, the “general will” is “embodied” in the monarch, just as within the family it is embodied in the father: so the monarch appears to be the father of society, whose laws therefore are necessary bonds for human beings organized in families and societies (“sont rapports nécessaires qui dérivent de la nature des êtres constitués en famille et en société”); public re- ligion, exclusive power, and social functions together form the constitution de la société civile, produced by a political tradition that dates back to the synthe- sis of Roman law, Christian Revelation, and the Germanic tradition.64 For centuries, this balance ensured the stability of the ancien régime, but, it collapsed when the individual (the particulier ) appropriated the sovereignty conferred on him by the Constituent Assembly and when private interests and economic individualism prevailed over the criteria of public welfare and public virtue. 65 Th ese were the errors of Mandeville, Smith, and also Rous- seau. On this basis, the ferocious criticism of political universalism and the

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attack on the free-market economy are undoubtedly the premises of Bonald’s contribution to the birth of the so-called Jewish question. “Sur les juifs” is a text that, to my knowledge, has hitherto been ignored by scholars of modern anti-Semitism even if it is, in fact, fi rst of all, a severe indictment of the philosophes . Th ey are accused (apart from ) of al- ways having favored the Jews and of having fashioned the intellectual weap- ons with which the jurists of the Constituent Assembly have promoted Jew- ish emancipation. Th e Jews, however—continues Bonald—have not, despite their emancipation, become authentic French citizens and sincere members of the national community. Th ey have, instead, remained stubbornly faithful to their own law, as is demonstrated by the unjustifi able practice of usury, in order to pursue their own exclusive interest in observance of this ancient law and to cause the fi nancial ruin of the peasantry, divide the rural and patriar- chal family, and disrupt the traditional society. Bonald’s accusations reveal a total ideological opposition to the creation of a constitutional state, but, nev- ertheless, they also bring to light real hardship because, in 1806, thousands of small landowners in his home region, , risked losing their plots of land precisely because of the “exorbitant interest” that they had to pay to the “lenders” that, obviously were not mainly Jews. And the situation of the - ers, aggravated by the poor harvests of the following period, would have led to the enactment of ’s “infamous decree” containing the annulment of all debts. 66 For many reasons, “Sur les juifs” is a paradigmatic document of anti- Jewish anticapitalism and of a traditionalist defense of rural society from the free market, which was taken up again and reformulated throughout the cen- tury: as late as 1871, for example, the Catholic economist and, at the same time, Saint-Simonian sociologist Frédéric Le Play strengthened the attack on universal suff rage, political universalism, and democracy, with the ideal evo- cation of a social hierarchy based on families, corporations, and communities that derived from Bonald’s pamphlets. As an apologist of the social economy, , and communities Bonald was therefore antithetical to ’s Defence of Usury but also from those positions that, within the Catholic world, were available to meet the needs of the modern economy (a case in point being the anony- mous author of Letters on Usury and Interest , published in 1774, which envi- sioned the possibility of reconciling the “commercial spirit” with the princi- ples of Catholicism).67 Intransigent in the fi eld of business ethics, Bonald also took up the defense of those traditional values inspired by old standards of

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popular consumer protection that had animated the fl our wars (guerres de fa- rines) and popular taxation ( taxations populaires), but his main objective was, however, to ask the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to convene a national gath- ering of Jewish leaders and persuade them to disavow usurious practices.68 Th e opening of “Sur les juifs” is peremptory. Th e fault of the philosophes is, above all, their indiff erence, going as far as contempt, toward the Christian tradition, which has led them to mock the church’s old suspicion of the Jews: “For some time now, the Jews have enjoyed the benevolence of the philoso- phes and the attention of . In these two emotions, there is a com- bination of , indiff erence to any religion, and perhaps also a little of the old hatred toward Christianity.”69 Bonald also identifi ed a more serious fault. Th e Enlightenment thinkers had even dared to propose “utility” ( utilité ) as the way of defi ning rational political decisions and had replaced the pri- macy of public ethics with private morality, going so far as to make individual welfare and selfi shness the aim of government. Th e utilitarian philosophers had come to believe “that it would be much more important to improve the legal status of Jews, rather than altering their morality in order to improve them” and the precept of conversion had succumbed to the criterion of legal emancipation on the basis of the calculation of the economic utility proposed by in the Wealth of the Nations , the new bible of the philosophie économiste :

Th e Constituent Assembly, breaking all the barriers that religion and politics had raised between the Jews and Christians, also called upon the former to enjoy the benefi ts of the new Constitution, which the Assembly believed in good faith to grant to France, declaring them active citizens of the State: a title which, contemplated by the newly enacted Declaration of the Rights of Man, would be regarded as the highest degree of happiness, and honor to which a human being could aspire! Until then, the Jews in France had only enjoyed general privileges that governments guarantee to the people who enjoy free profession of faith and that were compatible with the customs and religion of a people always at open war with the religion and customs of other peoples. 70

Th e passage bears witness to a feeling of nostalgia for the condition of separa- tion and discrimination, hypocritically concealed by the reference to the priv- ilege ( faculté ) in which the Jewish “nation” had lived until emancipation, but in it there is no reference to any documentary evidence that the Jews—an ob-

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stinate people in their self-presumption, as well as being “stubborn people”— would have decided centuries earlier to go to war against other peoples. According to Bonald, by granting Jews political participation, guaran- teeing them military service, and giving them administrative positions, the Constituent Assembly had committed “the enormous mistake of knowingly putting laws in confl ict with religion and customs,” but, sooner or later, the government would have to change its mind, as would “the friends of the blacks” who regretted “the haste with which they called for freedom for a people who had always been alien.”71 Th e comparison is signifi cant. Th e Jews, by their “nature,” are a nation destined to remain alien to other peoples. Th is “foreignness” appears—this seems the sense of the reference to the noirs —to be an objective fact, permanent and “physical,” and for this reason analogous to the racial diff erence with the blacks. But, at the same time, the natural and permanent diff erence of the Jews cannot be detected by a physical diversity but only by their practices and rituals, a culture that testifi es to their enduring ancient hostility toward Christians. Th ere is dramatic evidence of the foreignness and hostility of the Jews not only in Alsace but in the entire country, even if in that region—insists Bonald—a true social catastrophe was looming over nearly three-quarters of the population, threatened by the size of its debt. Here the moneylenders had become the “high and mighty lords of Alsace, a region in which they col- lect the and seigneurial privileges, and certainly, then, if in the language of the Enlightenment philosophers, the term ‘feudal’ is synonymous with oppressive and odious, I know of nothing more feudal for a province than eleven million mortgages owed to the usurers.” 72 Th ere is a key word in the text that deserves to be underlined: the provoca- tive defi nition of Jewish commercial and fi nancial activities as “feudal.” Th is appears to be an important discovery since the invention of the defi nition of Judaism as a “new ” is commonly attributed instead to a text pub- lished thirty-nine years later by a follower of Fourier, the socialist Alphonse Toussenel: Les juifs, rois de l’époque. Histoire de la féodalité fi nancière . Here, instead, we have evidence that Louis de Bonald used the term “ féodalité ” as early as 1806 to defi ne the position and social function of the Jews.

If the Jews were able to disperse throughout the national territory while remaining united among themselves like those who act for the same cause, they would surely have put their wealth to good use in order to ac- quire great infl uence in the elections and then they would have used that

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same infl uence to gain new riches. To date, more eager to get rich than to gain power, they have only partially realized their plot, only using their capital to acquire large companies.73

Bonald therefore envisages that the worst, namely, political domination by the Jews, is yet to come. Because of their economic power, they would gradu- ally acquire political infl uence, so far as to subdue the Christian nation and thus become the ruling elite: a danger that explains, even if it does not justify, the exasperated reaction by the people, sometimes leading to real massacres, as happened in Algiers. Bonald therefore endorses all the new discriminatory measures adopted in Europe in the early nineteenth century: for example, those taken in Bavaria to prevent more than one marriage for every Jewish family by imposing high on marriage ceremonies. Indeed, the gravity of the situation would justify more drastic measures. Th e solution to the Jewish question would never come through only legis- lative, political steps, and, in fact, new measures would be necessary, such as the imposition of identifying marks on the clothes of the enemy who had be- come “invisible” because of emancipation. Th e identifi cation mark ( la marque distinctive ) would be fully justifi ed by the need to identify those responsible for behavior hostile to the bien public . Th e return to the past almost sounds like a premonition of Hitler’s decrees. Th e defeat of the antisocial Jewish activities could only be achieved through the elimination of a “nation” of individuals who, like “a state within a state will, through their rational and systematic conduct, eventually turn the Christians into their slaves.”74 Th erefore it would be necessary to counter not only the legal philosophy of emancipation and political universalism but also the error of those enlightened Catholics who, like the Abbé Grégoire, had deluded themselves that the ensuring of citizenship rights to Jews would overcome their obstinate separation, so far as to integrate them in Christian Europe.

Th ose who, instead, recognize that the reason for the degradation of the Jewish people and the hostility it has for all other peoples lies in their religion, are well aware that its vices and misfortunes are the deserved punishment for a great crime, the carrying out of an anathema. Th ey also think that the correction of those moral vices must precede any possible change of legal status: which means, to put it clearly, that the Jews cannot

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and will never be—no matter what is said—citizens under Christianity, unless they become Christians.75

TOUSSENEL, PROUDHON, DRUMONT, AND THE CAPITALIST JUIVERIE (1845–1886)

Bonald’s article is not just a document of the counter-off ensive against the emancipation of the Napoleonic era, unleashed a few years aft er the attain- ment of legal equality, but concludes a longer path.76 Th is is demonstrated by the allusion to the precedent set by the protest pamphlets and petitions ( remontrances ) against the royal edict promulgated in 1787 in favor of the emancipation of non-Catholic French subjects; this referred, in eff ect, to the Protestants, who were a legal minority since the revocation of the .77 Th at measure had off ered—according to Bonald—the legal premise of the subsequent regulations in favor of the Jews. Hence, the meaning of his allu- sion to the role played by Chrétien-Guillaume de Malesherbes in the prepara- tion of the edict of 1787 is evident: in fact, two years later, Malesherbes was ap- pointed president of the Constituent Assembly that would have enacted the statute for the emancipation of Jews.78 Once again, it was Malesherbes who convinced the Abbé Grégoire to vote in favor of emancipation, suggesting that the inclusion of the Jews in a legal measure that concerned the general reform of the état civil would favor their conversion. Th erefore, eliminating every re- sidual trace of their diversity would have canceled the tendency to antisocial practices, such as usury, and emancipation, abolishing every professional dis- crimination, would have removed every practice of money lending. 79 Aft er the edict of 1787, in many regions—for example in the South of France, Lorraine, and Alsace—the Jews had also begun to enroll in the regis- ters reserved for non-Catholic subjects, asking for the application of the rule apparently intended only for Protestants. In Nîmes, for example, the Jewish workers in the tailor shops claimed the right to enroll in the register of the corporative association of tailors, and the local authorities, despite the nega- tive opinion of the local state offi cials, consented to the request. Th e parlia- ment of Metz was the fi rst magistracy in France to register the edict, despite the violent opposition of Catholics led by the Abbé François-Martin Th ié- baud: one of its members, Louis Roederer, was also able to introduce the dis- cussion of emancipation in the Constituent Assembly, to which he had been

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elected as a delegate, and it was here that Prince Victor de Broglie, in the de- bate, proposed the abolition of Jewish communal institutions. 80 Despite the harsh reactions of the Catholic notables, Lorraine, Alsace, and the Midi were thus the fi rst regions in which the Jews attained the full civil equality that, it was hoped, would foster their “regeneration.” 81 Bonald’s text can be considered the outcome of the ten-year Alsatian episode, which had begun in the last years of the ancien régime, but, above all, one of the fi rst manifestations of the reaction to emancipation as the traditional arguments, useful in discriminating against the Jews with the aim of converting them, gradually gave way to the controversy about political universalism. In fact, Bonald, in his critique of universalism and the utilitarian conception of poli- tics, was the fi rst to propose a new representation of the Jewish enemy as the exploiter of emancipation, but, at the same time, he added to that image the old hostility toward usury. Th us the new hatred was directed at a parasitic social caste, now favored by emancipation: a caste that, only a few years later in the path outlined by Bonald, would in fact be defi ned as “Jewish fi nancial feudalism.” In other words, according to Bonald, the Jews had benefi ted from emancipation in order to become part of the state, but they had not aban- doned their antisocial tendencies and in fact would have used their economic strength to conquer the state. Aft er “Sur les juifs,” Bonald wrote other socially controversial texts against and the incipient and in defense of the agrarian economy, the traditional social structure, and political control of the market and fi nancial activities. Among these texts, mention should be made of “Sur l’économie politique,” “Sur le prêts à interêt,” and De la famille agricole (the latter was published in 1826).82 Th ey were extremely popular pamphlets in the 1830s and 1840s and had a tremendous eff ect on Catholic social writers: Ozanam, De Gérando, Lamennais, Villeneuve-Bargemont, and many others. But they also found a considerable audience among the socialists and—as we shall soon see—above all, among the socialist Fourierists and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Th e Saint-Simonians also took up some of the arguments of Bo- nald’s anti-individualistic and anticapitalist polemic without, however, accept- ing its anti-Jewish implications: it was mainly Toussenel, among the socialist Fourierists, who expanded the criticism of the market economy to include an anticapitalism targeted exclusively at the French and European Jewish elite. Th e historical phenomenon of the onset of a robust anticapitalist attitude, directed exclusively against Jewish fi nanciers and entrepreneurs, primar- ily undermines the common historical representation of a unifi ed socialist

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political family. It therefore has important consequences for the study of the genealogical links between the Enlightenment and socialism because it re- veals that, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, various socialist as- sociations had developed plans and utopias that were very diff erent in their economic proposals and political language, oft en clashing with one another: so, the heirs of the rights of citizenship won in 1789 were opposed to the nos- talgia for a corporatist and hierarchical society, which characterized other sectors of socialism such as Catholic writers, social Christians, and conser- vatives, while some anti-Enlightenment socialists shared the latter’s hostility toward Jewish emancipation. As Élie Halévy showed, as early as 1908, socialism was beset by an inter- nal contradiction, being at the same time a project for the completion of the revolution of the rights of citizenship in winning the right to work and also a reaction against economic individualism and the political system that would guarantee its implementation: some authoritarian and socialist organizations, through Comte, Carlyle, and Rodbertus, “had reassessed the doctrine of the Vicomte de Bonald.” 83 But the considerable potential of Halévy’s heuristic intuition has never been properly exploited, particularly by the historiography of the labor and socialist movements of the second half of the twentieth century, and this con- sideration also applies to the problem of interest here, anti-Jewish anticapital- ism. Even Georges Haupt, the historian who contributed the most, together with Edward P. Th ompson, to restoring scientifi c autonomy to research on the movements and cultures of the labor movement as expressions of the mo- rality and real-life experiences of workers, and not just of the organizational structures, the elites, and their programs, was unable to deal with that issue.84 Not even his sensitivity as an exiled Romanian Jew who had escaped the Ho- locaust and as a dissident socialist who had fl ed from the Stalinist totalitarian system, therefore as a socialist able to look at the socialist tradition through a process of “estrangement,”85 allowed Haupt to address the problem of the relationship between the catastrophic outcome of the experience of the in- ternational socialist movement and the catastrophe of the European Jewish diaspora. Th e earliest Saint-Simonian socialism, even though it was authoritarian, antipolitical, and hierarchical, was not at all anti-Semitic. Its last message was if anything modeled precisely on Judeo-Christian messianism, and the gloss of Le nouveau Christianisme seems very clearly to have this meaning, 86 and the same remark applies to all the variants of the so-called Saint-Simonian

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religion, like the rationalist and Judeo-Christian synthesis of Jules Lecheva- lier, the romantic vision of Prosper Enfantin, or the mystical exaltation of Emile Barrault. 87 Th e contrast between the -Semitic position of the Saint-Simonians and the violent anti-Jewish hatred of Fourier therefore appears very striking. George Lichtheim, in an essay of 1968, focused primarily on Fourier, Leroux, and Proudhon. Th ese authors, in the 1830s and the 1840s, set in motion an anticapitalist reaction directed mainly against banks and fi nance capital but also based on hatred of the Jews as the “ruin and leprosy of the body politic.” Consequently, these writers also attacked the decision made in 1791 to grant the rights of citizenship to the Jews.88 Lichteim, however, did not examine an important clue: the closeness of these themes to the contemporary social po- lemic of the neotraditionalist approach formulated by Honoré de Balzac, who was opposed to the conquest of a determining role by Jewish bankers in the new oligarchy that would, according to him, have controlled the economic policy of the monarchy of July aft er 1830.89 Th e course followed by Leroux was actually more complex. Leroux was responsible for the transformation, in 1830, of the liberal periodical Le Globe into a socialist Saint-Simonian publication, and of other publishing enter- prises, such as the Encyclopédie Nouvelle and the Revue Sociale : it was pre- cisely in the latter that he decided to publish, in January 1846, a long essay, en- titled Les juifs, rois de l’époque (the title was the same as the work by Toussenel that had appeared the year before). Th e text was an attempt to deepen the striking contrast between the ethical monotheistic Jewish religion, founded on the principle of the unity and universality of humanity, and the so-called economic nationalism, or particularism, of the Jews, “a nation of merchants and usurers” and the inventors of the banking system. (However, Leroux was also a serious scholar of Judaism and and—as a scholar— was oft en in confl ict with because he was hostile to the cultural hierarchy of the races drawn up by the historian of religions). 90 In this company, Proudhon is a special case. A prisoner of a genuine men- tal chaos and the confusion of ideas of the self-taught man, he wavered among a moral approach to social issues, antifeminine prejudices, and racial stereotypes (typical of those revealed around the cause of American blacks at the time of the American Civil War). Th is also led him to accept the stereo- type of the parasitic economic conduct of the Jews, “entirely negative, entirely usurious.”91

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Proudhon gives us the opportunity to examine the formation of the primi- tive nucleus of a popular artisan, laborer, and peasant anticapitalism that developed in French socialist literature at the time of the Orléanist monar- chy: it was a nucleus based on the exclusive identifi cation of economic power with fi nancial capital as the driving force of the transformation of the na- tional economy, still predominantly rural and with cottage industries, into a modern industrial economy exposed to commercial crises and undercon- sumption, as well as the exclusive representation of that fi nancial capital as a “Jewish bank.” In fact, it was the Protestant upper class, supported by the presence of Guizot in the government, which played a dominant role in Louis Philippe’s economic policy. But in what remains his most perceptive study of anti-Semitism in social- ist literature, Lichteim correctly identifi es the fi rst nucleus of this representa- tion—before Proudhon—in the fi rst edition of Alphonse Toussenel’s pamphlet Les juifs, rois de l’époque , published in 1845 by the Librairie Phalanstérienne, with the approval of the Fourierist weekly publications La Phalange and La Démocratie Pacifi que . What Lichteim did not understand (and the hypothesis I am suggesting) is that Toussenel’s text, a real milestone of anti-Semitic so- cialism, was highly indebted to the social apologetics of the Catholic religion and—perhaps—Bonald’s text, written thirty-nine years earlier because “Sur les juifs” is the fi rst text—to my knowledge—in which the ancient polemic against usury was redefi ned and placed in a modern setting to make it the ba- sis of a criticism of the self-regulating market and legal emancipation. It is interesting, at this point, to consider Emma Cantimori Mezza monti’s observation while commenting on the fi rst paragraph (“ social- ism and feudal socialism”) of section 3 (“Socialist and Communist Litera- ture”) of the Communist Manifesto . She recalls that, as a genuine subgenre of “reactionary socialism,” Marx precisely indicated the literature critical of the electoral reforms enacted in Great Britain between 1832 and 1835 (which permitted the new agricultural and urban middle classes to gain political dominance in the House of Commons) and the texts of the Catholic reac- tion to the French constitutional-monarchy governments whose fi rst prime ministers had been two important bankers, Laffi tte and Périer. Th e criticism by the Catholics had been expressed, Cantimori writes, “from the point of view of the landed aristocracy, nostalgic for the past.”92 But she identi- fi ed the doctrinarians of reactionary and medieval socialism, above all, in , mentioned as the author of the novel Sybil; or, Th e Two

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Nations ; Th omas Carlyle; as well as Heinrich Heine in Deutschland. Ein Win- termärchen , published in 1844.93 For the subsequent years, she also cited the supporter of Napoleon III’s Caesarism, Auguste Romieu, Count Solaro della Margarita, “a reactionary minister of Carlo Alberto,” and the important eco- nomic theoretician Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont. Th e latter had already been mentioned by Marx in Misère de la philosophie as an authentic source of “providentialistic economy” in the style of Proudhon. 94 Th is may constitute a true connecting point among Proudhon, Villeneuve-Bargemont, and Louis de Bonald. Indeed, Bargemont’s Économie politique chrétienne leads one back to the essay Sur la mendicité , by Louis de Bonald, a true paradigm of what (aft er the 1872 edition of the Manifesto ) was defi ned by Marx as “sacred” or “Christian” socialism, and a text written within the same propaganda cam- paign unleashed against the Jews. Th e polemics on the liberal political economy and the construction of a social community economy constituted, in short, the background of the at- tack on the alleged economic role of the Jews. Th e signifi cance of this attack, however, cannot simply be explained by the reaction to economic crises such as those suff ered by Alsatian farmers between 1806 and 1808 if, as I suppose, it provided a paradigm for Toussenel’s polemic. Toussenel’s Les juifs, rois de l’époque, which was also harshly polemi- cal against liberal policies, was initially challenged by other members of the École Societaire and followers of Fourier, but this did not prevent the author from continuing to work with the Démocratie Pacifi que, Victor Considerant’s newspaper. Toussenel remained a socialist and a member of the Fourierist group. He sided with Louis Blanc in February 1848 and supported the work- ers’ demands at the Labour Commission at the Palais du Luxemburg in June.95 His membership in the socialist working-class movement cannot therefore be doubted, but his representation of the social crisis was no diff erent from that off ered by the intransigent traditionalist Catholics and the social economists hostile to the self-regulating market. With an analysis perfectly identical to that of Louis de Bonald, Toussenel in fact indicts individualistic economic ethics, attributes its authorship to the Protestants, and highlights its alleged Jewish roots: “Derrière les Protestants, il ya toujours la puissance juive.”96 Furthermore, Toussenel also repeats de Bonald’s indictment of the philos- ophes . Th e Enlightenment thinkers are guilty of having started “the campaign in favour of the Jews” and of having adopted a utilitarian view of politics. Toussenel even goes so far as to hazard an off ensive defi nition of the utilitar- ian “economics” of Bentham, Hutcheson, and Smith as an apologia for the

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nouvelle usure . In the fi rst part of the book, he also presents the supposed evidence of the “conspiracy” that would have prompted the Orléanist govern- ment to take the measures that had created the conditions for the establish- ment of authentic Jewish monopolies in the banking system, the press, and the strategic sector of rail transport. Unable to raise the monetary resources necessary to complete the construction of the railways, the government, in exchange for the advance of capital needed to fi nance the enterprise, would have granted a sole agency for the railway network of the north to the Roth- schild group: namely, the management of, and the guarantee of profi ts from, the operation of the network. Th e fi nancial mechanism behind the conces- sion following the advance of capital would have represented—according to Toussenel—the subtle system through which “the Jews” had begun to take possession of national resources and to constitute a fi nancial feudalism. In other words, they would have been in a position of absolute privilege in the country’s economy and of strategic control of the communications system, and, from those positions, the Jews would also have easily taken over control of the police force and military power. 97 Th e identifi cation of capitalism with the Jewish elite can also be found in some passages of Fourier’s main work, Le nouveau monde industriel et socié- taire, but Toussenel’s text goes further and can be considered the fi rst pro- posal of a socialized economy based on the expropriation of wealth and the redistribution of the capital of Jewish families. Toussenel, in fact, does not propose the abolition of capitalist ownership of the means of production and other forms of , but he anticipates the idea of anti-Jewish dis- criminatory legislation on a proportional basis. Th is foreshadows those rules of separation and discrimination that would be advanced from the end of the nineteenth century by the most radical and extremist anti-Semites, such as the socialist deputy and racist Georges Vacher de Lapouge in 1896.98 Édouard Drumont considered Toussenel his “inspired precursor.”99 In the document of the “socialist” Toussenel we can also fi nd the stereo- types of the anti-Jewish Christian tradition: for example, the accusation that the Jews were the people responsible for “deicide.” But traces of this ac- cusation still do not diminish the centrality of the economic and social mes- sage or the attack on the operations conducted by James de Rothschild, which were considered the last links of a chain of fi nancial sabotage of the national economy. In that fatal sequence, an important place was occupied by the al- leged conspiracy of the Jewish suppliers of the Grande Armée, which had caused irreparable damage to the Russian expedition of Emperor Napoleon

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Bonaparte: an explanation, in terms of conspiracy and sabotage, that antici- pated the one that would be adopted by the German Right to explain the col- lapse of the home front in World War I. Following the overthrow of imperial-national power in 1814, the Jewish fi nancial feudalism ( féodalité fi nancière) would have started its ascent to the powers of the country, ensuring the control and ownership of the most im- portant companies, the monopoly of naval and land transport, and the bank- ing “privilege,” thanks to the support of liberal and Saint-Simonian propa- ganda. Toussenel branded the liberals and Saint-Simonian “fellow” socialists as the valets des juifs and of banking capitalism, while the juiverie (“Jewry”) was by then identifi ed with the elites of fi nancial capitalism. 100 Projecting on to the juif (singular in the text) the ancient ghost of the traffi cking and money-lending usurer, Toussenel in fact makes it the symbol of every eco- nomic enemy of the national community and of the workers and, even more explicitly—in another text entitled L’esprit des bêtes, published in 1859—of the allegory of human and animal “rapacity.” 101 Against the juiverie, namely the “rapacity of the capitalists,” it is necessary to reconsider and overturn the pol- icy that had led to emancipation and retrieve Bonapartism as a model of the new industrial despotism. All the legislation through which citizenship and equal rights had been granted had to be demolished. Th e return of the fi gures of the anti-Jewish tradition certainly cannot be considered an exclusive aspect of the French reaction to economic individu- alism. In March 1848, in the capital of the Habsburg Empire in revolt, liberal writers and democratic student groups that had demanded a constitution were attacked by the corporative associations of artisans and workers, more worried about issues of employment, livelihood, the rental costs of accom- modation, and premises for their business activities than political freedoms. Hence the Gesellschaft der Volks, the Demokratische Verein, and other as- sociations of artisans, manual workers, porters, and employees at the river port unleashed a violent campaign against the liberals, students, capitalist en- terprises, and all those thought to favor the constitution and the free market. At the same time, they ascribed to the Jews the hidden direction of the demo- cratic movement for reforms and the constitution. Pamphlets, poems, broadsheets, and workers’ songs echoed the old argu- ments against usury, accusing the Jews of wanting to introduce the factory system in the territories of the empire and exacerbating collective passions.102 For example, in Bratislava and in the small Hungarian town of Raab, violent anti-Semitic agitations ended in actual pogroms. Th e sources also indicate

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the presence of the symbols and fi gures of traditional prejudice, adapted to a new situation marked by already modern social contrasts but represented in the traditional form, as consequences of the dichotomy between the two na- tions, “the Christian and German nation of work” and the “Jewish nation” of usurers, moneylenders, and bankers. Th is image affi rms the widespread the reception of the texts of the earliest anti-Semitic German propagandists, such as Wieder die Juden , written at the beginning of the century by the Prussian chancellor Grattenauer and popular in German-speaking countries.103 Th e problem of the presence of anti-Semitic attitudes in the popular asso- ciations became more serious in the late nineteenth century. Th e social con- sequences of the international economic depression, which had begun in the mid 1870s, and the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange and then that of Berlin in 1873, brought about the conditions for the intensifi cation of anti- Semitic propaganda and concentrated attacks on the families of the most im- portant Jewish fi nanciers, Lasker, Guttmann, Goldschmidt, and Rothschild. Bolstered by this rising tide, the Viennese Social Christians increased their support and brought about the victory of the representative of Lower Austria, the deputy Karl Lueger, in the elections for mayor of Vienna. Th e artisans of the capital (among whom anti-Semitic tendencies had radically manifested as early as 1848) played a crucial role in the attainment of Lueger’s fi rst success in 1895 and then—having overcome the emperor’s opposition to confi rming his appointment—defi nitively in 1897. Lueger then governed the capital until his death.104 In the territories of the empire, from the 1890s onward, the reaction to the free market and the liberal system, which had begun about three decades earlier with a full guarantee of the balance among the diff erent nationalities and the hegemony of the cultured German bourgeoisie, became violent. Fur- thermore, the cosmopolitan political ideals, shared (albeit on diff erent fronts) by the liberal ruling class and the socialist and democratic opposition, were at- tacked and weakened by the new antirationalist policy, promoted by the pan- Germanic movement, the Social Christians, and the Czech nationalists. Th e fi rst anti-Semitic German electoral platform was presented by a pan- German nationalist leader, Georg von Schönerer, at the elections of 1879, in which he stood for the Verein der Deutschen Volkspartei and was elected. In 1881 Schönerer presented a second manifesto “for national ” and protection from the exploitation “of the most valid forces of the people to the advantage of the Jews.” 105 Th at manifesto was endorsed by the anti-Semitic Society for the Defence of Manual Workers of Vienna, in the name of the “war against the Jew, the bloodthirsty vampire . . . who bangs on the windows

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of the houses inhabited by German farmers and craft smen.”106 Before Karl Lueger, it was perhaps Schönerer who chose to represent social categories such as the artisans and the shopkeepers hostile to the department stores and their Jewish owners, or the small consumers opposed to the immigra- tion of Russian Jews driven out by the fi erce pogroms. Leading a campaign for the nationalization of the the Nord Bahn railways, built years earlier with the support of the Österreichische Creditanstalt, which belonged to the Roth- schilds, 107 Schönerer adopted the same language as Toussenel, which was both anticapitalist and anti-Jewish. Th us, slowly, social anti-Semitism became the single most important pan-Germanic policy since it permitted a better representation of the enemy of the German nation: the Jews, an antinational and cosmopolitan people par excellence.108 Social anti-Semitism became the binding link between pan-Germanism, which the old national democratic Grand Germany ( grossdeutsch) ideal had also adopted, and the new populism of the Social Christian movement of Karl Lueger, into which the old ideology of the Austrian Catholic political Right had fl owed. Karl Lueger, well before Hitler, was in fact the fi rst anti-Semitic leader capable of organizing a genuine mass movement, which fi rst captured the metropolis and then organized itself into a party to spread anti-Jewish anti- capitalism in the country, too. Th is was possible because he had grown up in the democratic school of the supporters of universal suff rage but had also become an opponent of and the free market, in line with small taxpayers and the lower classes: in fact, as early as 1885 he presented himself as a democrat, a socialist, and a social representative of small taxpayers. For the same reason, he was enthusiastically supported by the Anti-Semitic Re- formist Union, which endorsed his bill restricting the immigration of Jews and made anti-Semitism the platform that allowed Austrian Catholics to leave anachronistic and transform themselves into a modern mass movement of anti-Semitic, antiliberal, and anticapitalist workers. Lue- ger was rightly called the new wizard of mass politics, and it was to him that the French anti-Semites looked when the Dreyfus case revealed that the crisis of the liberal system aff ected not only the Habsburg Empire but also the Re- public.109 Th eodor Herzl, who at the time was the Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse , declared himself horrifi ed by the astounding convergence of Lueger, Schönerer, and Drumont.110 Other abundant and substantial instances of social anti-Semitism are documented in numerous other regions of central Europe in these last years of the nineteenth century. In the province of Mantua, Italy, both the depres-

C6901.indb 46 1/27/16 10:26 AM “is the palestine capitalist here?” 47

sion in the production of wheat and maize and the collapse of agricultural prices in the latter part of the century appear to have provided the most favor- able context for the formation of a widespread anticapitalist anti-Semitism among farmers and in the leagues of socialist laborers of the Po Valley. In Mantua, the accumulation of tensions and confl icts between farmers, small- holders, and laborers, on the one hand, and owners, directors of large com- panies, bankers, and tax collectors, on the other hand (categories and social functions in which the fi nancial and business Jewish elite of the city played a prominent role), sparked the explosion of social hostility against the Jew- ish population. Th is is documented by some sources of the socialist move- ment studied by Maurizio Bertolotti, such as the newspaper La Favilla and the writings of Luigi Colli, a prominent socialist leader who had also been a volunteer in Garibaldi’s campaigns. For the third time in the century, in the city of Mantua, “Jewish capitalists” were attacked as usurers, and accusations were repeated that had already been made during the 1842 riots and in the protests against the abolition of the Jewish prohibitions in 1848.111 All this does not call into question the most important and historically decisive fact, namely, that the position of Italian and European socialism be- came, precisely in those years, substantially favorable to legal and political equality. However, this may help to explain how, in the context of the crisis of European liberal systems and the radicalization of social confl icts at the end of the nineteenth century and in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century), there were the most intense manifestations of anti-Jewish anticapitalism. (Be- tween 1904 and 1908, in Italy, the project of the revolutionary syndicalists to change the strategy of the Socialist Party and to hold general strikes failed.) In the Italian context, it cannot simply be dismissed as just being a case of absorbing the French anti-Semitism that arose from the dialogue between socialist revolutionary syndicalists and anti-Semitic nationalists, or from the imitation of the Viennese Christian Social movement. 112 Let us return to Alphonse Toussenel’s book. Aft er having tried to reconcile with Bossuet, the Encyclopédie with Fourier, Bonald’s attack against Jewish emancipation with the socialist criticism of “monopolies,” Toussenel ends his book with a series of political appeals addressed to ministers, the clergy, the king, the people, and, fi nally, les socialistes . 113 All these appeals— except perhaps those to the clergy—remained unheeded. It was only in 1886 that a populist writer who had converted to Catholicism, Édouard Drumont, rescued Toussenel’s text from the oblivion into which it had fallen and paid a glowing posthumous tribute to his declaration of war on the Jews. Despite

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the unexpected tribute to the forgotten socialist Fourierist, his book, La France juive , was, however, applauded above all by the conservatives, the cler- ics, and the Assumptionist Fathers, who defi ned it as the work of “un frère d’armes.”114 Drumont had returned to the religion of his fathers around 1880, enlight- ened—so it seems—by spiritual conversations with the Jesuit father Stanislas du Lac de Fugères. Like Toussenel, he nevertheless also continued to address his own message “to the socialists, [who] are now beginning to understand where the immense fortunes that never return to the workers are hidden.”115 In fact, for his own newspaper La Libre Parole, he availed himself above all of collaborators from Blanquist and pro-Bonaparte socialist circles, such as Jean Drault, Pascal, and Gaston Papillard, whose contributions accentuated the newspaper’s authoritarian, antiparliamentary, and Caesaristic vocation. “Bonapartism” thus became, for the anti-Semites, the ideal solution for the crisis of parliamentarianism. In the pages of La France juive—as was to be expected—there is a preva- lence of sources from the Christian anti-Jewish tradition and anti-Jewish and anti-Masonic modern Catholic literature. However, there is also (apart from quotations from the texts of Father Nicolas Deschamps and Gougenot des Mousseaux) an abundance of references to the words of Ernest Renan.116 Nevertheless, this art of combining heterogeneous infl uences does not allow the author to propose a clear and consistent representation of the “grande invasion juive de la Bourse,” but it does justify the urgency of the mea- sures of the expropriation of Jewish fi nancial feudalism, already invoked by Toussenel. Th e meaning of the text was clearly grasped by the press of the time. Fran- cis Magnard, editor of Le Figaro , considered the proposal of confi scating all Jewish property “from banks to opticians’ shops,” for the exclusive benefi t of the worker-owned cooperatives, as “the germ of a Catholic Socialism” that sought to “rouse the unfortunate against the rich,” the Jews, and Republi- can politicians, “exactly as the Republicans incited the same unfortunates against the Catholic clergy and the budget expenditure in favor of religious cults.”117 Of course, La France juive was received and reviewed with enthusi- asm not only by the Catholic press but also the papers of socialist groups and Bonapartists: aft er all, a few years earlier, during the campaign conducted by General Boulanger for an antiparliamentary review of the constitutional laws of the Th ird Republic, Drumont had declared his support for the plan for an authoritarian state proposed by the general, in the name of the ideals of cor-

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poratist Catholics but also “of the socialism of Fourier, Cabet, Pecqueur and Leroux.”118 With regard to some recurring themes, the book could be likened to the propaganda of the anti-Semitic Viennese Social Christians. Nevertheless, the work represents a complete cross-section of the diff erent categories of the anti-Jewish anticapitalism elaborated by Toussenel and of the Catholic anti-Judaism and reactionary anticapitalism (the polemic against “the Jewish gold”) that had already appeared in the pages of Le juif, le judaïsme et la judaï- sation des peuples chrétiens , by the Catholic writer Gougenot des Mousseaux, who was an admirer of Louis de Bonald. It is also interesting to note that the plan to promote forms of workers’ social participation in company manage- ment, to fi nance production and consumer cooperatives with the funds con- fi scated from Jewish families, and to develop a corporative economy also re- ceived some appreciation from Benoît Malon, the editor of Revue Socialiste .119 Various other socialist groups, such as the Blanquists, and Jules Guesde, the great authority of the Parti Ouvrier Français, discussed his ideas seriously. Guesde remained immune to his charm, but there is no doubt that the recep- tion of Drumont’s projects was extensive, even if no one reached the point of basing his strategy explicitly on anti-Jewish anticapitalism. Anti-Semitism could, if anything, be exploited to break into some social classes—shopkeep- ers, small landowners, peasants—refractory to socialist propaganda, but it could not turn into a strategic focus of the labor movement. Th e intention to contest the hegemony of the Catholic press over anti- Jewish social movements probably carried a of weight in the socialists’ deci- sion to hold talks with Drumont. It was, in particular, the Revue Socialiste that, on the basis of an autonomous political decision, off ered a platform for discus- sion and exchange of views to the diff erent anti-Semitic socialist groupings. In fact, a few months before the publication of La France juive , the periodical had already included an article by Auguste Chirac, a leading exponent of the Blan- quists known for his authoritarian and Caesaristic tendencies, who shortly thereaft er would support General Boulanger. Chirac’s text, entitled “Les rois de la République. Histoire des juiveries,” was an extensive summary of a book he had published two years earlier with the same title, and it carried numerous references to Toussenel, proving the existence of a common background that could be traced back to the documents of the Catholic social economy, the writings of Bonald, and the texts of Toussenel (and Proudhon, too). Th ere is philological evidence that also constitutes a new connecting point: like Toussenel and Drumont, Chirac uses the term “juiverie ,” w it h

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which he attacks “the Jewish moneylenders and their despicable practices of usury,”120 including in the category all those who unlawfully take an unfair rate of profi t. In fact, according to Chirac, all the “capitalists” can—as such— be defi ned Jews without actually being Jewish because the whole history of oppression and exploitation of labor has only been a centuries-long sequence of theft s and robberies, practiced by the diff erent juiveries to the detriment “of the whole society.” 121 Usury, thievery, social parasitism, and capitalist ex- ploitation are all “Jewish practices.” Th e juiveries of the Jews were followed by those of Christians, heretics, Protestants, and “democratic and republican capitalists.” If any person of the Jewish faith may be correctly defi ned as “is- raélite ,” “juif ” instead denotes—for Chirac—every individual who actually plays an antisocial and parasitic role, “typical of the Jew,” to the detriment of the community. All capitalists can therefore be legitimately defi ned as “juifs ” and treated accordingly: discriminated against, persecuted. Th e process of generalization and abstraction transforms the juifs, as real men, into a sym- bol of exploitation: le juif , and usury at the same time becomes the fi gure of speech of all the types of exploitation. Drumont’s work is the last link in the chain that leads from the anti-Jewish tradition to the formulation of modern anti-Semitism, in which the social question is ideologically simplifi ed, reduced, and falsifi ed as the “Jewish ques- tion.” At the same time the book unwittingly paved the way for the richest col- lection of arguments, fi gures of speech, and rhetorical patterns that, shortly thereaft er, would be reused for the falsifi cation of the most deadly document of modern anti-Jewish propaganda, Th e Protocols of the Elders of Zion .122 Apart from Norman Cohn’s pioneering and still unsurpassed study of this apocryphal work, now we can read Pierre-André Taguieff ’s investigation of its background, production, and translations and Cesare De Michelis’s analy- sis of the internal elements of the text and of its various versions.123 But De Michelis diff ers with the views of Cohn and Taguieff : while they believed that the Protocols were written in France between 1894 and 1899, De Michelis maintains that the fake was produced in Russia in 1902 or 1903. 124 Let us consider this point, which is also important for our line of analysis of the French social and socialist anti-Jewish literature. Taguieff challenges the assumption that the Protocols (which, in its various editions, is subdivided into various chapters, theses, minutes, or protocols, ranging from 22 to 27) de- rives from an 1897 French archetype, translated into Russian in 1901 by agents of the tsarist secret service, the Ochrana, and sent to France by Pëtr Ivanovič Račkovskij.125 Th e Protocols was, in fact, fi rst published in 1903 in install-

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ments, in a newspaper of the extreme Right in St. Petersburg; the newspaper’s editor was the anti-Semitic journalist Paul A. Kruševan. It then appeared in the expanded version of 1905, anonymously and with the title Th e Root of Our Troubles. Finally, there was a third, smaller edition with the title Ancient and Modern Protocols of the Meetings of the Elders of Zion , published in Moscow in the same year (this version would derive from a text parallel to the two pre- vious ones). Also in 1905 it was published in the editorial offi ce run by Sergej Nilus (which, from 1918 onward, would disseminate the text throughout the world), as well as being edited by Kruševan’ s friend Georgij V. Butmi. De Michelis, however, does not believe the evidence of an 1897 version, which would have been read by Th eodor Herzl, nor that there was a French manuscript owned by Nilus. 126 He hypothesizes, instead, that, in 1902 the Protocols “were still under preparation . . . as a ‘genuine forgery’ (a fake at- tributed to the ancient King Solomon and ‘his wise men’) that would really have been drawn up by mysterious Jews.” 127 Regarding the key point of the origin of the fake, he nevertheless laments the fact that the state of the re- search has remained pretty much where Henri Rollin had left it in 1939. But the latter—at variance with the views of De Michelis—hypothesized deriva- tion from a manuscript written in French in Paris by the foreign section of the tsarist secret police.128 Furthermore, in contradiction of the hypothesis he had supported about the Russian origin, De Michelis lists some French texts that could have constituted a “backdrop” to the Protocols . In the fi rst place, “the novel Biarritz (1868–1876) by H. Goedsche (1815–1878), part of which was immediately translated into Russian: the scene in the Jewish Cemetery in Prague was extrapolated from it, revised, presented as a ‘document’ with the title ‘Th e ’s Speech’ and, as such, also published as an appendix to Butmi.” In conclusion and in contradiction of his own hypothesis of its being produced in Russia, De Michelis admits (with Rollin) that the novel Biarritz or the text of Osman Bey (Frederic Millinger’s pseudonym) might have been the outlines that the mysterious author could have used to adapt the real sub- text of the Protocols : the Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et , written by Maurice Joly.129 Th is last statement introduces a further contradiction in De Michelis’s hy- pothesis. Carlo Ginzburg observed that

the supposed Russian origin is hard to reconcile with the strict depen- dence of the Protocols on Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers : a forgotten text, and hard to fi nd. De Michelis argues that the Dialogue aux enfers was not at

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all a virtually unknown work but, in support of this statement, he can only cite a Spanish translation, which appeared aft er thirty years of si- lence in Buenos Aires, in 1898.130

(Joly’s book, published anonymously in Brussels, was reprinted with the au- thor’s name only in 1868.) To sum up, De Michelis considers Joly’s book a “subtext” of the Protocols , the former being used to reconstruct the textual transmission of the latter, but, nevertheless, he supposes, in vague terms, that the allegedly Russian authors of the fake had had important links with France. Th e alleged Russian counterfeiters would naturally be the two anti-Semitic journalists and writers Kruševan and Butmi. However, both had frequent con- tact with the French and would have conceived the fake as a reaction to the Zionist Congress of 1901, the pogroms of 1903, and the revolutionary events of 1905. At this point, Nilus would have been involved, “perhaps to divert attention.” 131 In short: the birth of the fake was deliberately shrouded in a fog that allowed its fi rst postwar translators (it was no coincidence that they were all Catholic clergymen) to recognize the doctrinal patterns of the Christian anti-Jewish tradition and then to vouch for the “veracity” of the text, leaving aside its authenticity.132 De Michelis accepts the “substantial pro-Catholic in- clination of the text” and its “dependence” on the French, European Catholic, and intransigent literature, in reaction to the Revolution of 1789 and, there- fore, on the traditional polemic against the Protestant Reformation and the recurring conspiracies of the “enemies of the nation”—the Jews—but also the Huguenots and Masons, all followers of the Enlightenment philosophy. 133 Regarding the question of the French prehistory of the Protocols , I add only that Carlo Ginzburg has made two crucial contributions. Th e fi rst concerns the nature of the political message of the subtext of the Protocols. Th e sec- ond is the role of Édouard Drumont both in the fusion of anti-Jewish Catholic concepts with those of socialist anti-Semitism and in the relationship between the Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu and the Protocols . Th e discovery that Joly’s text was a decisive source for the authors of the fake has long obscured the originality of thought of the author, who paid for his originality by being convicted of seditious insults against Napoleon III. Joly drew inspiration from the tradition of the literary genre of the “dialogue of the dead,” revisited through Charles Nodier and Fontenelle;134 he also for- mally opposed law (Montesquieu) to force (Machiavelli), which he consid- ered perfectly represented by the Caesaristic system. In addition, he repro- posed the apologia of the and the constitutional state,

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but at the same time he also admitted that in a France shaken by the two revolutions of 1848, and prosperity could be restored by a policy of strong centralization, hierarchical administration, and antiliberal legislation: in other words, by a new kind of despotism, constructed and decreed by the coup d’état of December 2, 1852. Following in the footsteps of Troplong and Romier, but more pessimistic than Tocqueville, Joly hypothesized the need for a new model of despotism, capable of neutralizing the division of powers, parliamentarianism and political freedoms, without being forced to repeal them.135 Aft er dispassionately analyzing the despotism produced by Louis Napo- leon’s coup d’état—paradoxically sanctioned and approved by universal suf- frage—therefore also recognizing its objective strength and eff ectiveness, Joly’s imaginary Machiavelli develops the author’s ideas, concealing their real source, the thought of Joseph de Maistre. Meanwhile, through the words of Montesquieu, he defi nes Caesarism as an amalgam of authoritarian control and legitimacy, able to manipulate public opinion while granting freedom of the press and elections: the Caesaristic system could bestow such gener- ous concessions because the real power lay elsewhere, outside the sphere of democratic control.

A year before the Dialogue in the Underworld , Joly published a book en- titled Le barreau de Paris. Études politiques et littéraires : a series of gen- eral refl ections mixed with portraits, oft en satirical in tone, of lawyers. . . . In a note in Le barreau de Paris, Joly referred scornfully to the “folly of constitutions and their inability to build anything.” Soon aft erwards he praised De Maistre . . . and quoted, approvingly, a series of passages from the Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines . . . which retraced the already quoted passage from the Considérations sur la France , including the reference to Machiavelli’s Discorsi .136

In 1921, a Times journalist, Robert Graves, demonstrated that the Protocols were simply a fake produced using the works of Joly, Hermann Goedsche, and other authors. Th en, in 1939, Henri Rollin reconstructed the background of the apocryphal work, showing that, since 1871, Joly had been writing for an extreme right-wing newspaper, La Liberté , to which Édouard Drumont also off ered articles. And Drumont had praised Joly in La France juive and then in his last work, of 1891. 137 One can presume that, in exile in Brussels since 1894 in order to evade French justice, Drumont had probably had the opportunity

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of rereading the Dialogue aux enfers , which had been published in Brussels, and could well have thought of using this work in drawing up his authori- tarian and anti-Semitic political program in the critical years of the Dreyfus Aff air. 138 Grégoire Kauff mann, biographer of Édouard Drumont, concludes his massive biography with an unequivocal judgment: “In the fi nal analysis, his attitude remained that of a counter-revolutionary indebted to the writings of Veuillot, Blanc de Saint-Bonnet and the doctrines of social Catholicism before the Ralliement .”139 Fundamentalist Catholicism, neo-Caesarism, and social anti-Semitism were therefore, according to Kauff mann, the constant ingredients of Drumont’s propaganda. His very tardy acceptance of the re- publican system, dating only from the early years of the twentieth century, can in eff ect be categorized as a very obvious maneuver of political opportun- ism, decided upon aft er the defeat of his last anti-Semitic off ensive, unleashed with the operation “Monument Henry,” in defense of one of the falsifi ers of the alleged evidence of the guilt of Captain Dreyfus. In August 1898, Colonel Henry had indeed confessed to having fabricated the document read to the National Assembly by Minister of War Cavai- gnac, on July 7, supporting the evidence of the charges brought against Al- fred Dreyfus. Th e falsifi er, having been arrested and sent to the fortress of Mont-Valérien, had been found dead the following day, having either com- mitted suicide or been the victim of an arranged “suicide.” Th e incrimination of Henry had turned the tide in favor of those seeking a review of the trial that had led to the captain’s conviction, to such an extent as to make Drumont himself accept its inevitability. However, in order to react to the humiliating blow, Drumont had unscrupulously dismissed any principle of legal certainty, maintaining that Henry had courageously created a “patriotic fake” with the praiseworthy intention of supporting his superiors, committed to defend- ing the national interest. Henry’s “apocryphal document, was in fact only a copy or representation of the truth, because it was a synthesis of authentic passages.” 140 In those same weeks, Drumont’s newspaper, La Libre Parole , unleashed a fi erce press campaign against the judges of the Court of Cassation who seemed favorably inclined to acceding to the request for a review of the Drey- fus trial. For the umpteenth time, Drumont took up the leadership of the ex- treme wing of the anti-Dreyfus front in which Brunetière’s Ligue de la Patrie and Déroulède’s had begun—on the contrary—to insist on the distinction between a fi rm belief in Dreyfus’s guilt and the anti-Semitic

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battle. Drumont’s eff orts resulted in fund raising for Henry’s widow for the le- gal action against the colonel’s “slanderers,”141 and in this battle, his last, Dru- mont used some arguments that are worth examining. In order to prove defi nitively the guilt of Dreyfus, Drumont defi ned the fabrication by Colonel Henry, as an apocryphal document that, in any case, stated the truth through the “synthesis of authentic passages.” In this regard, Rollin points out that, from 1894 to 1898, Drumont had repeatedly threat- ened to resurrect some anti-Napoleonic pamphlets that had appeared during the Second Empire: he had also written a text inspired by Joly’s Dialogues . 142 Ginzburg—following in the footsteps of Rollin—insists: “All this does not prove that Drumont turned to the Dialogue aux enfers as a potentially anti- Semitic text, presenting an invented text as if it were a document, nor does it prove that Drumont forwarded Joly’s text to whoever, in Russia, made up the Protocols. But the Drumont trail deserves a detailed examination.” 143 Th e al- lusion to the “synthesis of authentic passages” could, in any case, be adopted as a defi nition of the procedure of falsifi cation of the Protocols . Drumont was a mediocre writer who dabbled more or less skillfully with the categories and fi gures of speech of Catholic anti-Judaism and anti- Semitism. His own fl ight to Brussels was dictated by the urgency of evading the legal consequences of some of his imprudent and speciously subversive articles, which constituted a danger for him aft er the assassination of Presi- dent of the Republic Sadi Carnot. Nevertheless, until 1897, his relations with some socialist leaders remained good, above all with those militants who were more in favor of the alliance with the left -wing radicals in an antimoder- ate perspective. Drumont was a supporter of the radical government led by Léon Bourgeois and was therefore on good terms with Millerand, Viviani, and Rouanet but also with those militants convinced that anti-Semitic propa- ganda was an excellent way to familiarize the artisans, traders, shopkeepers, and small landowners with anticapitalist themes. In La Libre Parole, Drumont applauded, several times, the socialists’ strong opposition to the subsequent Méline government. He also criticized the alignment of some Catholics with the Republic, going so far as to advocate a common front (led by Viviani, who, moreover, in 1897 did a great deal to nominate Drumont for Algiers, during the general election) made up of anti-Semites, radicals, socialists, and Catholics against Jewish fi nanciers.144 But the trail of the relationship between Drumont and the authors of the Protocols is also worth investigating in another direction. One cannot help be- ing struck by the symmetry of his defi nition of the fake published by Colonel

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Henry as an “apocryphal work” but “a synthesis of authentic passages” and the sophisticated defense of the “truthfulness” of the Protocols , well beyond their “authenticity,” proposed by postwar Catholic commentators: Mgr Jouin, Mons. Benigni, Preziosi, up to Evola. 145 Drumont, like Jouin or Benigni, did not defi ne a text falsely attributed to an age or to an author as being “apocry- phal” but took this term to mean a hidden or secret text. Moreover, the lines of thought and the chain of texts stratifi ed in the works of Drumont are the same as those used in the preparation of the Protocols . Th e former is that neo-Machiavellian and pro-Bonapartist line of thought embodied by de Maistre, represented and used by Joly: namely, de Mais- tre who commented on the note in Discorsi sulla prima Deca di Tito Livio (book 1, chapter 9): therefore, the author of the Considérations sur la France , published anonymously in 1796 in Lausanne, at the same time as the unfi n- ished Étude sur la souverainité, where (in chapter 6, “On Divine Infl uence in Political Constitutions”) de Maistre wrote that no constitution is the result of a decision and the rights of peoples have never been written down:

At least, the written constitutional acts and fundamental laws are never anything but ratifi cations of earlier rights, of which nothing can be said except that they exist. . . . Any assembly of men cannot therefore consti- tute a nation; such a feat even exceeds, in folly, the most absurd and the most bizarre inventions which could be produced by all the Bedlams in the world.146

De Maistre concluded his tirade against humanism and constitutional law by commenting ironically on Montesquieu and presenting a political vision based on natural diff erences among men, determined by their blood: “Now there is no ‘the’ man in the world. In my life I’ve seen the French, the Italians, the Russians, etc.; I also know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Per- sian, but as for ‘the’ man, I declare that I have never met one, if he exists he is unknown to me.” 147 Structures and institutions are not invented but “germinate” from histori- cal conditions or are granted by the monarch on the basis of use, , and ancient customs that make them necessary. In fact, it is impossible to determine the historical origin of the “primitive basis” from which “constitu- tions” arise, and human reason, reduced to its own forces, is unable to cre- ate any political or religious communities. Th erefore, the true nature of sov- ereignty is that of an absolute power, unique, inviolable, and despotic, that

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tolerates no limitations, even if it can admit political liberties and freedom of the press, provided they are not recognized as “rights” of a higher order than sovereignty. Drumont was, therefore, in his works, in complete harmony with de Maistre, Toussenel’s preface to Les juifs, rois de l’époque, and Joly’s Dialogue . 148 But the heart of Maurice Joly’s political refl ections appears, instead, to be in tune with a famous judgment of Tocqueville: that, since the French Revo- lution, it would have been impossible for the aristocratic social system to re- turn and remain in place, but this would also have applied to the advent of a stable democracy. Instead, turmoil, uncertainty, and crisis (the revolution that never ends) would have been permanent. 149 In other words, the crisis of the ancien régime seems never-ending and is summed up in an eternal oscil- lation between wild anarchy, on the brink of civil war, and limitless power (in Hobbesian terms: between Behemoth and Leviathan).150 Th e core of this refl ection is not in fact the link between revolution and the ancien régime, but the inevitable Caesaristic outcome (Leviathan) of the permanent crisis of the social and political order (Behemoth). Th e anarchist revolution seems des- tined to end up naturally in the greatest centralization there has ever been.151 According to Tocqueville, there is an inexorable march toward centraliza- tion and “democratic” political despotism. Th is runs parallel to the structural changes of the market economy, the great economic transformation that swept away the ancien régime and the economy integrated in the social bonds ( liens sociaux ). It also imposed the self-regulating market through political divisions. In other words, despotic centralization prevents regression to the protected, aristocratic, corporative society of the ancien régime. However, it also blocks the political mechanisms of liberal democracy and allows only the economic-social ones, namely the democratic leveling of material conditions and moral conformity. Th erefore, all forms of despotism, from absolute mon- archy to postrevolutionary Caesarism—again according to Tocqueville—pave the way for a new political model with real social eff ects, for a new autocracy that also invades the economic sphere and becomes an essential regulator of social structures, for an invasive pan-political model that builds its own insti- tutional authoritarian procedures and imposes a social hierarchy while also dictating the requirements of moral conformity. Th is is the same model of power envisaged, in the same period, by Au- guste Comte and Honoré de Balzac. Th e former, in opposing moral anar- chy, designed a model of social unity based on the balance between spiritual and industrial power within an authoritarian but not infl exible, system.152

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Balzac had drawn the most drastic conclusions from his own analysis of the economy and social confl ict in nineteenth-century rural France, a confl ict between yield, usury, speculating, on the one hand, and property, produc- tion and consumption, on the other hand. 153 “If the welfare of the masses is the very foundation of politics, absolutism, or rather most of the available power—however one wants to defi ne it—is the best way to achieve this great social purpose.” Th is is how, in Le curé du village, Abbé Bonnet expresses his hopes for the advent of a man of Providence, “a Caesar, whether he is called Mario, Silla or Louis Napoleon.” 154 Th e second line of analysis that concerns the work of Drumont and the Protocols leads back to the starting point of our journey. I am referring to the transmission of anticapitalist, anti-Jewish concepts from Bonald to Gougenot des Mousseaux and from Toussenel to Drumont and Chirac: hence, the whole nineteenth-century secular context of French politics and the civil confl ict that, from 1789, separated France into two divided nations. Th e French pre- history of the Protocols is immersed in this context.155 From this line descends a populist mythology and the polemic against the upper class: two hundred families (les gros : les deux cents familles), dominated by an imaginary handful of cosmopolitan Jews, exploited the bon peuple de France and all its social classes since the fall of the ancien régime. Th is negative myth left traces in a multitude of documents, libelous booklets, and pamphlets of many nineteenth-century parties, from the Bonapartists to the radicals, from the socialists to the Catholics, but also in the Popular Front. 156 Th e conspiratorial representation of the Revolution had been strongly inter- twined with the literature that considers the Jewish plot responsible for the eruption of 1789, from Barruel to Bonald, from Maurras to Drumont, up to the French translator of the Protocols, Mgr Jouin; 157 through this literature, the French reception of the Protocols became a part of the traditional denun- ciation of the Jewish Enlightenment, of Masonic conspiracy, and of the nega- tive mythology of the deux cents familles and the mur d’argent . 158 Th us, in the late nineteenth century, the myth of the collaboration among Masons, Protestants, and Jews went on circulating in the literature on fi - nancial scandals, political corruption, profi teering, and opportunism, and Drumont projected this picture onto an international scale, echoing the lit- erature of the Viennese social Christians and the German anti-Semites. Aft er his death, Jacques Ploncard d’Assac and relaunched the news- paper La Libre Parole and in the 1930s took up his arguments in order to sup- port the anti-Jewish campaign unleashed by Maurras against Léon Blum.159

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HANNAH ARENDT’S INTERPRETATION OF EMANCIPATION AND SOCIAL ANTI-SEMITISM

Only the tragedy of Captain Alfred Dreyfus forced the European socialist la- bor movement to consider seriously the devastating consequences of anti- Jewish hostility, to change its position on democracy, to abandon any idea of politically exploiting anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, it must be stressed that, just a few years earlier, during the 1891 Congress of the Socialist International held in Brussels, the motion presented by the Jewish, Lithuanian American militant Abe Cahan regarding the Jewish question, had been rejected. Th at strategic defeat was perhaps attributable to the reservations and uncertainties expressed by one of the most important leaders of the International, Victor Adler, who wanted to maintain a position of equidistant from Cahan’s motion and the anti-Semitic attitudes of the French socialists close to Auguste Chi- rac, and in particular two of them, Albert Reynard, the author of some racist texts, and the Franco-Macedonian Paul Agyriàdes. Th e Brussels Congress occurred just two years aft er the establishment of the Second International. It showed the persistent strength of the social anti-Jewish prejudice among its members and the timidity of the leaders of the European labor movement in opposing it: there was also therefore a vast anti-Jewish, anticapitalist cultural background in large sections of the In- ternational; at the same time, the most prominent theoreticians of German, Austrian, and Russian Polish Marxist socialism, who were also in the best condition to observe the phenomenon, revealed themselves unable to address and defi ne the complex social and class composition of European Jews. Many of them were totally unaware of the strength of the Christian anti-Jewish his- torical tradition, even among factory workers. Socialists ignored, above all, the fact that the socioeconomic conditions of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe were diff erent from those of the Jews in Western and Southern Europe.160 Th e diff erence in the legal conditions and the complexity of the social stratifi cation of the Jewish population remained an enigma for socialist culture, which was locked in an evolutionary repre- sentation of the contradictions of the market economy that would ultimately lead to the collapse of the capitalist system and the advent of socialism: there- fore, to the social emancipation of the Jews and the solution of the Jewish question. In this socialist vision, the elimination of the discriminatory and persecu- tory legacy of the ancien régime still dominant in Eastern and Central Europe,

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and the solution of the Jewish question, therefore also the overcoming of the “Jewish way of achieving emancipation through the power of money,” would come automatically from the triumph of socialism. Th e anti-Jewish mani- festations of hostility in the working class and the socialist movement were therefore ignored or willfully misconstrued as expressions of a class rebellion against “the Jewish capitalists.” Th e scandal of the Dreyfus Aff air constituted, as has been said, a watershed, but it failed to eff ect a complete change in these positions. In the face of such blindness, one could well ask whether it was the result of ignorance or even, in the case of the Jewish leaders of the Socialist Inter- national, a symptom of Jewish self-hatred (Jüdische Selbsthass ).161 But the hy- pothesis that even in Marx’s thought a theoretical anti-Semitism found ex- pression does not, however, appear valid: if it is true that, in those years, there was an anti-Jewish anti-capitalism, above all among non-Marxist socialists, Marx and the culture of the socialist Marxist labor movement strongly fa- vored emancipation while remaining confi ned to an Enlightenment interpre- tation of . 162 Th is meant envisaging the overcoming of discrim- ination through emancipation and assimilation. Judaism—like any legacy of tradition, any religion, any alienation of self-awareness—would disappear with the integration of the Jewish nation in the European ones and, especially, with the establishment of an egalitarian society and the abolition of the ex- ploitation of man by man. Th e exponents of the “Jewish Enlightenment”—the Haskalah—had at one time cultivated the illusion that legal emancipation and the liberal state would the “Jewish people” to eliminate any backwardness and to eff ect their as- similation in society, and the socialists shared the same view. In this respect, for Mendelssohn as for Kautsky, the fate of the Jewish nation was to disappear in the process of the brotherhood of all nations. Th e socialists of the Second International were fi rmly convinced that the abolition of capitalism and the Jewish trade “monopoly” would represent the ultimate form of assimilation and would also eliminate the roots of anti-Jewish anti-capitalism and anti- Semitism. 163 Th e Marxist socialism of the Second International took up the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm and tried to reconcile it with the liberal model of assimilation, representing it as the inevitable outcome of the march of history: Jewish emancipation should have translated itself into the “libera- tion of society from Judaism.” But that utopia collided with reality in Eastern European societies because in Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, and Russia (in the area of residence imposed

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upon the Jews in the tsarist empire), any possibility of assimilation was de- nied by the persistence of the discrimination imposed by the absolutist tradi- tion. Th us, in the context of the aspirations for autonomy expressed by all the nationalities settled in the territories of the Russian Empire and the Central and Eastern European empires, even among the Jews of the area of residence and the Jewish working class, there began to develop a political plan aiming at claiming national self-determination as a condition of social emancipation. Since his intervention against Bruno Bauer (who had denied the right to emancipation to subjects he considered inferior to the Christians), Marx had proposed a strategy of legal assimilation and social liberation, and this was, as Bernard Lazare and Martin Buber would have recognized, 164 totally at vari- ance with the ferocious social hostility of Proudhon and Toussenel toward the Jewish banker (the moneylender).165 Regarding Marx’s position, George L. Mosse has noted that “Marx, in short, departed signifi cantly from the conclu- sions of the French socialists, who wanted to expel or annihilate the Jews,” and has observed that “the German Ideology , the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the controversial pages of Capital are the work of a man shaking his fi st against the establishment and, in the manner of an an- cient Jewish prophet, speaking on behalf of the elect, proclaiming the death of the accursed system.”166 Berlin explains that if the interpretation of Marx as an anti-Semite is groundless, just as unconvincing is the opposite view of those, such as Karl Löwith, 167 who propose a structural homology between Jewish messianism and historical materialism: in fact, the link between theology and romanti- cism appears more typical of Marxist writers such as Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin than Marx himself, a “non-Jewish Jew.”168 In his opinion, in the German states, France, and the United States, the Jewish question took on diff erent forms: it was “theological” (the confl ict be- tween the community and the denominational states) in Germany but consti- tutional in France and culturally pluralistic in the United States. And human liberation from the subjection to religion remained an unresolved issue ev- erywhere because the democratic revolution and the constitutional state had left open the split between public and private faith: this was the limit that also remained inherent in legal emancipation, which had failed to diminish the substance and traditional structure of Judaism. Legal emancipation could not be a complete and authentic “human eman- cipation” because the liberal state would not have eliminated the alienation represented by the existence of religion as a social phenomenon, as, for

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example, in the case of the split between the private and public man. More specifi cally, the meaning of modern Judaism now had to be found not in its religious essence but in the activities of the Jews, in the that, for cen- turies, they had been obliged to undertake—because of the bans preventing them from entering other professions—as well as the economic practices that, thanks to the development of capitalism, had lost their “Jewish” specifi city and had become Christian. Th e “chimerical nationality” of the Jews had dis- solved in the world of capital, which was at one and the same time the essence of Judaism and an essential feature of modern society. Hence, the overcoming of capitalist social relations would also be identifi ed with the emancipation of the Jews from “substantial” Judaism and from their social, commercial, and fi nancial activities.169 So, on the one hand, Marx reduced the Jewish question to the fi gure of the geldmensch Jew in a capitalism identifi ed only with free trade; on the other hand, while appreciating legal equality, he ignored the overwhelming dimen- sion of the Jewish question, the oppression and persecution still dominant in Eastern Europe, a region in which the prevailing condition of the Jew was not that of the merchant.170 Th e same basic anticapitalist approach in favor of emancipation and as- similation was shared by the leaders of German and Habsburg Social Dem- ocrats, Franz Mehring, Victor Adler, , and Otto Bauer, even if, however, they were more inclined to see popular anti-Semitism as including the expression of a primitive form of anticapitalism, but—paradoxically—in its Eastern Europe context, also as the mass base of the absolutist regime’s self-defense. Even the Jewish Social Democratic leaders in Russia (such as Pavel Axelrod, Fyodor Ilych Dan, Lev Grigorievic Deutsch, Julius Martov) and Poland (such as Leo Jogiches, Adolf Warski, and Rosa Luxemburg) did not diverge too much from this representation. Victor Adler was the fi rst leader of the Social Democrats to initiate, in 1887, a real debate on anti-Semitism. In his interpretative framework, emancipa- tion was considered the outcome of the fi nal, or at least partial, victory of the bourgeoisie in the western and central regions of the continent. In other words, the victory of the self-regulating market and “free competition” of the economic forces, which would have rendered discrimination against the Jews anachronistic and would also have had to produce the integration in modern capitalism of a people specialized in trade “by and tradition.”171 According to Adler, anti-Semitism therefore arose from an ignorance of the dynamics of modern commercial society, a willful ignorance, widespread

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among the artisans, merchants, and peasants of Central and Eastern Europe. Adler gave the example of the Austrian middle classes, less competitive than the Jewish middle class, numerous in the capital of the Habsburg Empire. Surprisingly, however, this strong social hostility against the Jews did not lead him to consider the urgency of defending their rights as equal citizens or protecting the Jewish proletariat. Even though he recognized that the Jew- ish working class was “materially and spiritually poorer” than the German or Austro-Hungarian proletariats (as was claimed by the Bund of the area of Jewish settlement of the Russian Empire), Adler concluded that the proletar- ians of the Habsburg Empire would have to fi ght against every kind of exploi- tation, both “Christian” and “Jewish,” without concerning themselves with the confl ict between the middle classes. His position explains why, at the Brussels Congress four years later, Adler presented a motion that rejected both anti- and pro-Semitism as being tanta- mount to the same thing. Abe Cahan’s motion was far more forthright both in condemning anti-Semitism, discrimination, and persecution in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, and in criticizing the restrictions in the United States on accepting Jewish refugees from Europe.172 Adler’s position, repro- posed by Franz Mehring in the Neue Zeit in “Anti- und Philosemitisches,” and then in the report submitted by Bebel at the German Social Democratic Congress of Cologne in 1893, was fi nally codifi ed in 1907 by Otto Bauer in his essay on the question of nationalities. And, despite the brilliant insight of Éduard Bernstein, who had suggested a link between the reaction of threat- ened privileged groups and anti-Semitism, 173 this emancipationist paradigm remained unchanged even when anti-Jewish movements grew dramatically during the crisis years at the end of the century. At the same time, hostility toward alleged “Jewish capitalism” even infi l- trated the political rallies of a part of European socialism, increasingly in- fl uenced by Boulanger’s neo-Bonapartism, worried about competition from Lueger’s Social Christians, charmed by the formulas of Drumont’s propa- ganda.174 Th e concept of nation as a “community of destiny” nevertheless enabled the Austrian socialists to propose, to the various nationalities, the solution of legal autonomy and to deal with all the centrifugal tendencies that were tearing apart the Habsburg Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. As for the Ostjuden , according to Bauer, they had by then ceased to be a nation and religious community, having become a social community specializing in small business and trades. For this reason, asking for their national autonomy

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was clearly an anachronism because their destiny would be assimilation and social emancipation from the market. 175 From another point of view the judgments of Leo Jogiches and Rosa Lux- emburg were also infl uenced by the situation that had split the Polish social- ist movement, since 1892, into two bitterly hostile camps: while the Polish Social-Democratic movement of Luxemburg and Jogiches, with its Marxist and internationalist orientation, was being formed, the majority of Polish so- cialists had instead adhered to nationalist positions. Th eir objective, there- fore, already proclaimed in Paris in 1892 and confi rmed in the founding con- gress of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in Vilna in 1893, was to create a Polish state independent from the Russian Empire. And as citizens of the future Pol- ish state, the Jews of the North Western Settlement Zone should therefore have formed a “common front” with the Polish revolutionaries (Lithuania had been part of the kingdom of Poland until 1772–75). On the contrary, the reaction of the Jewish socialists to the political strategy of Józef Piłsudski was the strengthening of demands for autonomy.176 Th e condition of the socialists of various tendencies in other regions of the Russian Empire was even more complex. Th e inclination of the Russian pop- ulists to interpret the pogroms as an expression of peasant rebellion (an inter- pretation that had prevailed in the movement in 1881 and 1882) was probably abandoned by Narodnaia Volia as early as 1886. Shortly thereaft er, the oppo- site view, that the pogroms had, on the contrary, played into the hands of the tsarist regime became a judgment shared by various groups: these included the liberal opposition forces gathered around the magazine Osvobozhdenie , the populist movement organized by the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1902, and the new Marxist Social-Democracy Party with its proletarian ori- entation. Within the latter, in 1903, Plechanov condemned the “nationalistic psychological eff ects” of pogroms and began a determined fi ght against anti- Semitism. One of the responses to political persecution in the settlement area was the Jewish emigrationist ideology, divided between an emigration movement to the United States, supported by American Jewish laborism, and a movement for founding colonies in Palestine, supported by Lev Pinsker (even if he had been skeptical about the possibility of returning to Palestine.) 177 By 1904, Herzl had died, and the crisis of the structures of the empire was worsening. Th is is not surprising when one bears in mind the process of dem- ocratic political revolution, peasant and worker social insurrection, and the nationalities seeking autonomy. Th is scenario laid the foundations for a new

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policy of Jewish liberation while, at the same time, Marxist passed from small intellectual circles in exile, torn among the positions of Axelrod, Plechanov, and Zasulič, to being a real, albeit smaller, political party, the Socialist Revolutionaries. Among those involved in establishing social de- mocracy, apart from many socialist Jewish leaders with an internationalist orientation, there was also the General Jewish Labour Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (the Bund), which had the specifi c objective of transform- ing the Jewish proletariat into a revolutionary force. While social democracy in the Russian Empire therefore arose as an in- ternationalist party, aiming at the federation of all the nationalities, the con- solidation of the Jewish socialist movement among the proletariat and the accentuation of its democratic tendencies paved the way for a program for Jewish national autonomy. Th us, even where the dominant tendency in the socialist parties permitted the autonomy of its Jewish section, the socialist in- ternationalist tendency prevailed among the Jews. However, where the strat- egy remained tied to the concept of assimilation, autonomist or nationalist movements came into being. Th erefore, until the founding of the Bund, the Jewish social democratic revolutionaries were operating simultaneously both in the Russian and Jewish movements.178 Th e founding of the Russian Social must be considered the result of the joint action of the socialist committee of Kiev and the Bund. Th e event represented the true integration of the Jewish revolutionary move- ment (which nevertheless remained autonomous) in a political structure with an international but not centralized vocation. Th us, there was a balance between the principle of legal emancipation (the proletariat had an interest in getting rid of the discrimination imposed on the Jews) and the practical need for a specifi c and autonomous organization of the Jewish proletariat. What actually happened was that, in 1903, the clash between the “Bundist” autonomism and the strategy of the most dynamic and dominant group of the Russian social democrats, the Iskra organization, came to a head. In fact, not even the healing of the rift between the Bundists and the social demo- crats, three years later, eliminated the roots of a confl ict deeply rooted in the political, economic, and social Russian scenario between the end of the nine- teenth century and the 1905 revolution. It was only during the latter that the Bolshevik conception of the so-called Jewish question was formed.179 Th is also explains the continuity between the pro-assimilation positions of Lenin, Martov, and Trotsky and the subsequent policy of the People’s Commissariat for nationalities, managed by Stalin. 180

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Th e credit for the fi rst refl ection on the contradictions of the Enlighten- ment and socialist policy on the Jewish question goes to Hannah Arendt. In the fi rst of her studies on Judaism, written in 1932, when she was only twenty- six, Arendt attributed the birth of the Jewish question precisely to emancipa- tion. Attained in the early nineteenth century in some German states, in the wake of the Bonapartist occupation, and preceded by the battle of the Enlight- enment, it was the conquest of rights by a people segregated for centuries, “as if one were living in a land which was not one’s own.” 181 But emancipation had caused a terrifying reaction. Arendt’s criticism was directed not only against Prussian legislation and its French antecedents; in her criticism of emancipation, she also included the pro-assimilationist positions of the socialists. Th is was because even their idea of emancipation did not aim at preserving the identity of the Jewish peo- ple, nor therefore permitting its integration in the constitutional state, but it merely transformed into positive regulations the principles of Enlightenment ethics, namely recognizing the Jews “as human beings equal to other human beings.” Th e Jews would have been guaranteed the same rights enjoyed by non-Jews as members of humanity, therefore enlightened by universal rea- son. Since the time of Moses Mendelssohn’s assimilation and Christian Wil- helm von Dohm’s study (Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden , 1781), there continually appeared, in the debate on emancipation, the same argu- ments that found their classic formulation in Lessing: “For Lessing, reason, which all humans share in common, is the foundation of humanity.”182 Th e ideal of tolerance—insisted Arendt—cannot however be justifi ed on the basis of reason, understood as “a purely formal quality.” Lessing had ar- gued that the search for truth by rational means ( Sapere aude!) was more im- portant than the truth that can fi nally be reached through reason. Enlighten- ment philosophy could not keep its promise because it ignored the fact that religious faith was a form of the same search. In the of reason, it was not essential to arrive at a truth, presenting it as a dogma or an objective the- sis, but—so Arendt argued—to search for the truth: the history of humanity searching for the truth is more important than the content of the truth.183 Th e Enlightenment philosophers, instead, had been under the illusion that the Jews could remain tied to the religion of their fathers only in so far as the content of the Old Testament did not clash with the dictates of reason. Th e Jews would have remained faithful only to the convictions they had in com- mon with all those who were searching for the truth: Christians, atheists, Muslims . . . everyone would have back to being “human beings among

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other human beings” while emancipation and the attainment of rights would have started a process of total assimilation. So emancipation produced the perverse eff ect of isolating every individual compelled to think only of his own interest and produced equality, but it eliminated identities and diff er- ences based on history. 184 Th us, Arendt was reproposing a criticism of emancipation that had al- ready been proposed by Herder, who had attacked the Enlightenment in the name of a diff erent ideal “ethical and aesthetic of Humanität .” 185 Th is was also a fi ght against the legal model of emancipation in the name of the right of Jews to restore their past history. It is only history that can construct self- awareness. Th erefore only the self-representation of their historical destiny would have off ered the Jews a solid basis to reconstruct a consciousness of their past, hence of Jewish civilization. Only the historical understanding of Jewish civilization would have allowed the Jews to free themselves of it and would have permitted emancipation to be achieved through an authentic ed- ucation ( Bildung). An emancipation based on the legal abstraction of equal- ity, on the cancellation of Jewish identity and its history, would merely have caused an immense void of consciousness. Only through an understanding of their own exceptional history would the Jews, a historic people, become aware of not being God’s chosen people and free themselves of the weight of the past, accepting their own history and going beyond their own tradition:

With this discovery of the irrevocability of all that has happened, Herder became one of the fi rst great interpreters of history. It was through him that in Germany the history of the Jews fi rst became visible as a history defi ned essentially by their possession of the Old Testament. Th is re- sulted in a change in the response to the Jewish question, by both Jews themselves and the larger world. Th is change was also infl uenced by new defi nitions that Herder provided for two concepts so crucial in this con- text: formation and tolerance.186

So it was the Enlightenment conception of legal equality that had given rise to the Jewish question. Herder had not sought an abstract equality of the Jewish people in relation to all other peoples, but he had, on the contrary, empha- sized their extraneousness and the identity of their religion, which was not meant to be “tolerated” but rather understood, and this could be achieved by focusing on the recognition of its history, producing tolerance. Th e Jew- ish question would be resolved not through a forced elimination of religious

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diff erence but through its historical recognition and the political decision to overcome the past, starting a new course. “Herder understands the history of the Jews in the same way that they interpret it, as the history of God’s Chosen People.”187 One year aft er the publication of the text, Arendt was arrested in Berlin and accused of conspiring with a Zionist organization. However, there was no contradiction between this political choice and her theoretical positions. Th e failure of emancipation and the victory of anti-Semitism in 1933 had had cata- strophic consequences for the rights of Jews, and so Arendt chose to collabo- rate with the Zionist groups of Youth Aliyah because they seemed the only ones capable of actively and promptly confronting the mortal dangers which threatened German Jews. 188 Th is did not mean that she shared the political objective of a nation-state—far from it. Arendt never stated that actively sup- porting yshuv (settling) in Palestine constituted a legitimization of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, and her husband, Heinrich Blücher, a Marxist and activ- ist in the Spartacus Bund and the German Communist Party, had a decidedly anti-Zionist orientation. 189 Th e freedom of a people marginalized and oppressed for two millennia was a challenge to the very possibility of thinking about human freedom. Th is could only have been attained by binding the Jewish fate to that of the eman- cipation of humanity. Arendt felt that it was only the working class that could fi ght for the freedom of all humanity (and this seemed particularly true in Germany). Unlike Blücher, though, Arendt did not identify freedom with the social revolution. Instead, she focused exclusively on the contradictions of the Enlightenment’s legal-political perspective and its legacy in the commu- nist and socialist strategies. In her view, the position of the Jews in Western Europe, even aft er emancipation, was still ambiguous. Th ey had the status of latecomers, or parvenus, who were striving to achieve success and recogni- tion in the gentile world. However, they could not escape the consequences of their Jewish roots and therefore be truly accepted in European society. In other words, they remained the true pariahs of European society and were considered “the lowest human beings.” During the hundred and fi ft y years in which they have lived among the Western peoples, and not only near them— she writes in Th e Origins of Totalitarianism—the Jews have always had to pay for any social success with political paucity, or for political success with social contempt.190 Th e Jews had been barely tolerated in the societies of the ancien régime and had always been isolated among the gentiles. Th en they had become the

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parvenus of bourgeois society, and the hostility toward the Jews appeared to be the direct consequence of their identifi cation with the alleged exploiters of the national community, fi rst, as tax collectors and moneylenders, then, as entrepreneurs or bankers. Emancipation, the most important watershed in Jewish history aft er the Diaspora, would, in fact, have caused a covert resent- ment against the bourgeoisie that had wanted emancipation and therefore also against the Jews, “parasites” identifi ed with the bourgeoisie.

Th at the status of the Jews of Europe has been not only that of an op- pressed people, but also of what has called “pariah people” is a fact most clearly appreciated by those who had had practical experience of just how ambiguous is the freedom which emancipation has ensured, and how treacherous the promise of equality which assimilation has held out. In their position as social outcasts such men refl ect the political sta- tus of an entire people. It is not therefore surprising that, out of their per- sonal experience, Jewish poets, writers and artists should have been able to evolve the concept of pariah as a human type. 191

Bernard Lazare, for instance, deliberately wanted to be a pariah. At the time of the Dreyfus Aff air, he recognized the nature of assimilation, describ- ing it as a “doctrine bâtarde ” as it would also be defi ned by Franz Kafk a in Th e Castle , which presents the Jewish protagonist as the one who does not belong to the village and the people, nor to the castle rulers. 192 Th e “new” persecution that the reaction to emancipation had produced should not be considered the return of a presumed “eternal anti-Semitism”; it was rather the result of the history of the confl ict between Jews and “gentiles” aft er emancipation, the ef- fect of the failure of emancipation. But it was also the result of the inability of Jews to understand the transformation occurring in European politics. 193 For Jews, the loss of the world (worldlessness) had resulted in the inability to understand the real world of the exercise of power and politics. In the Diaspora, the discrimination against the Jews by dominant Chris- tianity had been for centuries the only means by which Jews were allowed to preserve themselves as a religion, a civilization, and a people. However, by making dissociation the basis of their survival, they had come to consider their existence always and only as an existence separate from the rest of the world, as the split between their mission and the inability to defi ne the re- sources for political action consistent with it. Th e result of this rupture was the inability to know and understand the conditions of the new political reality

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produced by emancipation and the opportunities it off ered, as well as the new threats that it was producing. From that point onward, the Jewish body politic was dead and the people withdrew from the public stage of history.194 Th e Jews lost their “awareness of the world” and, at the same time, they were increasingly integrated in the trade and fi nancial mechanisms of the market economy, fi rst, as court Jews, then, as international bankers in nineteenth-century Europe. Even if devoid of any political awareness, they transformed themselves into economic powers (“authorities,” writes Arendt) and were only concerned with preserving their positions of prestige (but subordinated to power) at the cost of ignoring the conditions of their poorer coreligionists. “Special” interlocutors of the modern state and apparently powerful in economic terms, they were safeguarded, as before emancipation, only by political protection, and the paradoxical result of the new legal posi- tion was that any class that came into confl ict with the state as such became anti-Semitic precisely because the only group that seemed to represent the state were the Jews. 195 If, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Jews had found them- selves in the middle of the confl ict between the aristocratic classes and the centralizing monarchies, at the end of the nineteenth century they were, in- stead, involved in the clash between “the imperialist bourgeoisies” and the nation-state without, however, understanding the nature of the confl ict nor having a political force on their side. Politically short-sighted, during the nineteenth century the Jews also lost a great deal of economic power. 196 Hence, paradoxically, they became the sym- bol of the capitalist society and the principle of trade and, therefore, the tar- gets of the hatred directed at capitalism (while, in fact, they were losing inter- est in the fi nancial activities that had led them to positions of prestige).197 At the height of the fi rst major economic depression, the Dreyfus Aff air was the fi rst symptom of the catastrophe of the Enlightenment emancipation because it revealed how deeply hatred towards the Jews had grown in European soci- ety and in the homeland of democracy and of universal rights. Arendt admitted that Zionism had been the most important political initiative developed by European Jews in response to the new persecutions. Nevertheless, the fundamental mistake of Zionism had been to assume the eternal nature of anti-Semitism in an eternal world of nations, thus separat- ing Jewish history from that of Europe and the rest of humanity and even ignoring the role of European Jewry in the formation of nation-states. 198 In other words, the Zionists were unable to understand the social and political

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nature of anti-Semitism and were only able to respond by organizing the exo- dus from Europe, not daring to organize the Jews on the basis of a political movement in Europe. Th e only Jewish thinker equal to the task of providing a correct political response to anti-Semitism had been not Th eodor Herzl but Bernard Lazare. Th ough he joined the Zionist cause, he soon left it and pro- posed the freedom struggle of the Jews as part of a process of national and social liberation of all the oppressed European peoples. 199 Lazare sought a synthesis of the moral self-awareness of the Jewish people and socialist an- ticapitalism, in order to also attack the social roots of anti-Semitism. 200 Th e Diaspora, not the nation-state, was Israel’s “mission,” and the Jews therefore had a to participate in the social liberation of all peoples and all the poor, as Sabbatai Zevi had dreamed. Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, Dorothea Schlegel, and the Meyer sis- ters were women who were able to emancipate themselves from both Judaism and the oppressed, minority condition of women. Th ey were able to do so thanks to their intellectual originality, by opposing prejudice and the social insult, going so far as to achieve personal success through an “autonomous encounter with the world.”201 Th eir self-emancipation showed not only that assimilation and legal emancipation had completely failed but also that the real “problem of assimilation had started only aft er the Enlightenment,” when “specifi cally modern anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism directed against as- similated Jews and which is as old as their emancipation itself, had always reproached the Jews with being the bearers of the Enlightenment.” Th e crux of the matter was, once again, the relationship among the Jews, the Enlighten- ment, and bourgeois society: “Today in Germany it seems Jewish assimilation must declare its bankruptcy. Th e general social antisemitism and its offi cial legitimation aff ects in the fi rst instance assimilated Jews, who can no longer protect themselves through baptism or by emphasizing their diff erences from Eastern Judaism.”202 Hannah Arendt added that the activities of the Jewish fi nanciers had anticipated the direction of European society’s economic de- velopment, and when money had become the new world power “the Jewish spirit had transformed itself into the practical stimulus of the Christian na- tions” while the commerce, banking, and fi nancial activities of the Jews be- gan to be eliminated by the capitalist economy. So Arendt pointed out the vast diff erence between the arguments of the anti-Semitic anticapitalists, like Tous senel and Proudhon, and Marx’s vision, critical of emancipation in the light of a true and social emancipation. Like Herder, Marx had understood the limits of legal emancipation as a form of “political” illusion.203

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Recently, an undated and unpublished work of extraordinary importance, called Antisemitism , has been found in the Arendt archive in New York. In this text, Arendt notes that the traditional argument against usury constituted the core of the attack on emancipation and assimilation, based on aristocratic values and the religious hostile to the market economy and the constitutional state; in Germany, the reaction against emancipation devel- oped especially aft er 1812, when the absolute Prussian monarchy lost the sup- port of the aristocracy without obtaining the support of the bourgeoisie.204 In fact, the aristocracy was challenging the power of the monarchy while the bourgeoisie demanded the constitutional freedoms to ensure the success of its economic interests. Th e aristocracy and the bourgeoisie had not been able to reconcile their demands. In France, the same movement started from 1806 and Bonald’s polemic pamphlets. Th e contempt of the junkers towards any status not based on the heredi- tary privilege was, therefore, also directed at the bourgeoisie and merchants at ease both in their homeland and in any other nation. Th is prevented an alliance between the two classes and aristocratic criticism of the liberal bour- geoisie. Th e latter was accused of causing the disintegration of the traditional society of the ancien régime because of its activities, and this, in turn, forced the middle classes to react by diverting social disapproval toward the Jews, projecting on to the Jews the negative image of commerce depicted by the aristocratic representations of the world.205 Th e contradiction between the aristocratic attack against the bourgeois and fi nancial classes and the develop- ment of bourgeois hatred for its own activities, would have been defi nitively resolved with the projection of this hatred onto the Jews, who would never have thought they would be considered the representatives of the “disruptive bourgeoisie.” Th e false equation between profi t and usury, and therefore the correlation of the “bourgeoisie” with the Jews, became the tropes of the anti- capitalist anti-Semitic reaction of social anti-Semitism. Paradoxically, however, this was happening when the practice of lending at interest had virtually disappeared or survived only in a few areas untouched by the modern transformation of credit, such as Hesse and Alsace, of which Louis de Bonald himself had written. Furthermore, the status of creditors of the monarchy, once enjoyed by major fi nanciers like the Rothschilds, had been superseded. Th e former tax collectors had become investment bankers, and the ancient representations of usury served perfectly for the falsifying propaganda against the new business practices.206

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Th e traditional theological polemic against usury should therefore be con- sidered—Arendt concludes—the source of all anti-Semitic arguments:

What is amazing is the total correlation between the description of the na- scent commercial capitalism, of the banks and the entrepreneurs, and the features of anti-Semitism. . . . Th e origins of German anti-Semitism, the defamation of the bourgeoisie by the aristocracy, continued to strongly determine the history of modern Jewry. Th e more closely anti-Semitic argumentation was linked with old feudalism. . . . Th is shows that all the anti-Semitic arguments were of feudal origin. 207

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EUROPEAN “NATIONAL SOCIALISM”

AND ITS PROPAGANDA

NATURAL POLITICS

Let us go back to Bonald’s pamphlet “Sur les juifs.” Alexandre Koyré has pro- vided the most incisive judgment on the nature of Bonald’s and his criticism of Jewish emancipation:

One fi nds de Bonald’s ideas with a modern coating or disguise in , Taine, Maurras and in so many others: they are the same ideas Catholic literature has always given us. . . . What, instead, Louis de Bonald could not have foreseen is the fact that, a hundred years aft er his death, the representatives—or rather the would-be representatives—of demo- cratic thought would have proclaimed the inexistence, or almost, of the individual and the primacy of the social sphere; they would have sought in society’s forms and traditions the source of our morality and the cat- egories of our thought; they would have subjected “the abstract atomism and fl at individualism” of offi cial democracy to a virulent criticism. 1

Robert Nisbet for instance has confi rmed and shown the reception of many traditionalist categories and, in particular, the thought of Louis de Bonald, in fi n-de-siècle and, especially, in the sociological school of Émile Durkheim, in which the role of the economic doctrine of Saint-Simon was decisive. Th e latter had, in fact, been defi ned by Durkheim as “the founder of socialism,” 2 and we know that, under the infl uence of his own young sec- retary, Auguste Comte, Saint-Simon appreciated the organic social theory of Bonald and other intransigent Catholic writers. During those same years, traces of Bonald’s neo-Christian controversy against economic individualism

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and constitutional principles are also evident in the Marquis de La Tour du Pin’s articles in the newspaper L’Association Catholique and in the writings of the corporatists of the 1880s and 1890s:

Th e growth of the proletariat, the break-up of families, the disaff ection of workers toward the entrepreneurs, the instability of relationships, the decline of professional ability, the uncertainty of the exploitation of re- sources, the evidence of economic decline aft er there had already been a moral decline; the most pernicious phenomena of social disintegration appear in diff erent forms, but reveal an identical cause: the breakdown of the liens sociaux .3

What is absolutely striking is that the corporatist project of the Catholic La Tour du Pin was perfectly in line with Durkheim’s refl ections on the need to introduce the corporations into the republic. Th ey would have been insti- tutions of “professional morality,” certainly not unlike that of the Viennese Catholic Social Christians. But the latter were also the vanguard of social anti-Semitism in the Habsburg Empire. In a letter dated July 1, 1895, Monsignor Agliardi tried to exonerate the Viennese movement of the charge of racial anti-Semitism, but he was thus revealing the deep structure of the beliefs of the church hierarchy: “Th ey are [anti-Semites] not in the sense of racial anti-Semitism, as in Germany, but of economic anti-Semitism. Th is is more than legitimate, because it is against usury.”4 Legitimized by positions like this, common in the higher ranks of the church, anti-Semitism became an organic part of Catholic European move- ments and, as such, fully recognized and appreciated. As early as the late 1860s, the Catholic controversy had become more viru- lent. Aft er the , the uncompromising rejection of “commu- nism,” opposed by the church’s social doctrine, became stronger, but the main battle front was the inexorable process of secularization, the establishment of the constitutional state, and the expansion of liberal governments. How- ever, these things were present not only in Protestant countries (with the start of the Bismarckian Kultur Kampf in the late 1870s) but also in Catholic ones, including Belgium, France (with the repercussions of “anti-Catholic” school laws and “persecutions”), and also Italy, where the “revolution” had ended with the sacrilegious military strike at the heart of Christianity. Far from re- sisting the rise of modern anti-Semitic doctrines, Catholic diplomats, writers, priests, and journalists helped promulgate many anti-Semitic libels about the

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Jews, and even the supreme authority in the church gave them the sacred im- primatur of the Vatican. In 1898, for instance, L’Osservatore Romano , the Vati- can’s daily newspaper (founded in 1861) complained, in a generic reference, about the Jew, who had abandoned “himself recklessly and heedlessly to the innate passion of his race, which is essentially usurious and pushy.” 5 Liberalism was, therefore, the engine of “modern civilization” and Free- masonry the political party of the liberal revolution, materialism, and the self-regulating market. On the whole, appeared to the Jesuits of La Civiltà Cattolica defi nitely “Jewish . . . whence it follows that, as every Mason is essentially liberal and therefore in some way Jewish and certainly anti-Christian,” that sect was undoubtedly organizing the “anti-Christian war of the Masonic community, but which could be called Jewish.” 6 In fact, the fathers had no diffi culty in abandoning the circumspection shown in Monsi- gnor Agliardi’s letter, nor in adding to the accusation of “anti-Christian war” the new racial frameworks proposed by anthropology and physiology; in considering race and religion together, “it is therefore established that Juda- ism always remains a foreign and hostile force in the countries where it has taken root: furthermore, it tends to overwhelm the inhabitants and dominate them through its fi nancial power and usurious banks.”7 Th e powerful reaction to the collapse of the alliance between throne and altar certainly did not stop with the French and European Restoration of the ancien régime monarchies, and neo-Christian thought in the fi rst half of the century indeed renewed its attacks against the “stubborn Jewish nation,” ac- cusing it of “particularism.” But no one would have imagined that the texts of Catholic writers or the pages of David F. Strauss, Ernest Renan, or Karl von Hase could antedate the “Germanic Christ” of Houston Stewart Cham- berlain; it was primarily Protestant writers and German nationalists, such as Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn, who rejected the possibility of inte- grating the Jews in the Christian nation. 8 In Catholic areas—from Austria to Poland—Catholic political movements turned to their rural origins and the traditionalist economy of the countryside areas to counter the church’s loss of infl uence in the cities; the Jews were thus transformed into the popular sym- bol of capitalist modernization, urban robbery, and the unregulated market. Also in France, the Catholic agricultural laborers and peasant unions, jeal- ous of local autonomies and led by the owners, were markedly denomina- tional, antistate, and anti-Semitic. Th eir propaganda was directed against the capitalists as “fat cats” (gros ) and the Jews as “big noses” (gros nez ), and in fact, in the documents of Henri de Gailhard-Bancel, the founder of agricultural

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unions, the accusations of usury against merchants and bankers, the “drink- ers of Christian blood,” were more and more frequent. 9 It was not pure chance that , the future commissioner for the Jewish issue in Vichy, de- clared himself an admirer of the Union Centrale des Syndicats Agricoles and its leader.10 Th e agricultural unions, with their initiatives for the safeguarding of the countryside, local autonomy, and the traditional economy, therefore constituted the most robust social background of the new anti-Semitism em- bodied by Édouard Drumont, then by . But the rejection of the modern economy, the antimodern and antiurban traditionalist culture, and in particular hostility toward fi nancial capitalism were also common to many socialist supporters of a social economy of small producers. For the same reason, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was elected the maître-à- penser of the anti-Semitic nationalists and syndicalists who, in 1912, would have initiated the collaborative experiment of the “Cercle Proudhon.” 11 As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, his vision of society as a continuous process for reconciling modern economic development and the traditional peasant world, his proposal to establish the Banque du Peuple as a fi nancial support for associations of mutuality and cooperation, his propa- ganda against the stock exchange and the “féodalité industrielle et fi nancière ” had also been shared by Catholic circles, as well as organizations of peasants, artisans, laborers, merchants, and members of the middle classes who were hostile to big business, the centralized state, and politics. His idea of justice had points of contact with that of many Catholic writers because it consti- tuted a moral idea of solidarity in social relations and at the same time the principle of “equilibrium in the universe.” 12 Proudhon’s anti-clerical positions did not prevent the socialist thinker from Besançon from considering Christianity the most important form of social movement since the beginning of what Proudhon termed the “mes- sianic age: the long transition of more than nineteen centuries initiated by Kabbalists, Essenes and evangelists . . . , the more or less mystical statement of the conditions of a radical reform of social relations, as well as the union of all peoples in a single faith.” 13 Th e Nazarene was not therefore a “Samaritan, or a Pharisee, or a Jew” because, on the contrary he fought against “Jewish particularism and every paganism” in order to eff ect a moral reform of cus- toms based on the principles of égalité parmi les hommes et de l’immortalité de l’âme . Th e man of Galilee was “a socialist.” 14 For a follower of Proudhon, the Italian revolutionary syndicalist Paolo Orano, the Nazarene remained instead “a Jewish rabbi, a foreigner in the Roman Empire.”

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But the socialism of certainly could not be Jewish. Like the Saint- Simonians before him, Proudhon preached the application of the Chris- tian law of brotherhood and turned it into a “law of social justice” and, in contrast with “the despotic tendencies of ,” at the same time he made it the premise of the mutual aid system, which would have represented “the application of justice to the political economy.” 15 Despite being hostile to ultramontane traditionalists and eclectic neo-spiritualists like Cousin, he did not hesitate to share his generation’s general admiration for Bossuet. As Françoise Mélonio has written, in the early nineteenth century “Bossuet was everywhere.”16 Th e problem that arises in reconstructing the genealogy of anti-Jewish anti capitalism is whether the anti-Semites’ decision to raise Proudhon to the level of “master” really corresponds with his thought. Th ere is no doubt that Drumont, in the famous interview with the daily newspaper Le Figaro , to mark the publication of La fi n d’un monde , used Proudhon’s formula “prop- erty is theft .” Just as it is certain that the anti-Semitic nationalists and revo- lutionary syndicalists of the Cercle Proudhon used the prestige of his name, which was still high among the workers’ organizations even at the end of the nineteenth century.17 Th ere is, however, an explicit attitude of hostility to- ward the Jews in a page of the Carnets , which was written as a reaction to Marx’s attack on the Philosophie de la Misère and can be dated to the time when Proudhon was planning to write two articles for Le Peuple as a response that was never published. Th e notes are nevertheless unequivocal:

Jews. Write an article against that race, which poisons everything while spreading everywhere without ever integrating itself with any people. Demand their expulsion from France, except for those who are married to French women; abolish synagogues, do not admit them to any employ- ment, pursue fi nally the abolition of their religion. It’s not pure chance that Christians have defi ned them as deicides.18

I do not know of public positions of this tone by Proudhon, and it therefore remains an open question as to how his undoubted hostility to the Jews was received by militant socialists and others. Drumont, for example, in his “tes- tament” attacked the Jews using Proudhon’s formula, adding it to the accusa- tions that were circulating widely in the pages of La Croix , but it is diffi cult to distinguish these traces from the crystallization of other categories, for ex- ample, from the implicit reference to the passages from the chapter “In the

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Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” in Hermann Goedsche’s novel Biarritz (1868), which Drumont had translated in the July 1881 issue of Le Contemporaine with the title “Le Discours du Rabbin.” And it is signifi cant that Le testament d’un antisémite, published by Drumont in 1891, has been considered the work of a “Proudhonian” and a “socialist.” 19 Th e most plausible hypothesis is that the nationalists of Action Française attributed to Proudhon the ideas and categories that had in fact been devel- oped by Drumont. Th ey integrated, for example, the old paradigm of the Jew- ish conspiracy in a new explicitly corporatist and anti-parliamentary political platform that remained unchanged until World War II; over time, both the espionage episode in which Captain Dreyfus had been involved and the sud- den defeat suff ered by the Republic in June 1940 would have been interpreted in terms of a Jewish conspiracy. But in 1914, the decision of the German So- cial Democrats (and their Jewish leaders) to support the “aggression of the Reich against France” had also been attributed to the Jewish conspiracy by journalists and pamphleteers who were members of Action Française. Th e same applied to the agreements in 1919 among President Wilson of the United States, the German Jewish industrialist Walther Rathenau, and “the agent of the Anglo-German juiverie, Aristide Briand,” which led to a peace agreement designed to block the heaviest French war-reparation claims. Th is may well explain why the two French translators of Th e Protocols , Mons. Jouin and Ur- bain Gohier, strongly approved of the organization led by Charles Maurras. Cardinal Billot himself, in 1922, went so far as to declare that “against liberal- ism and democracy, there was nothing better than Maurras.”20 Th e funda- mental thesis of Th e Protocols was therefore familiar to French and Central European public opinion long before the translation of the famous fake. Social anti-Semitism became more closely tied to anti-parliamentary cor- poratism in the decade before the Great War. In this operation, there were, most probably, some Catholic writers close to Action Française or committed activists in the monarchist organization who played a decisive role. Let us return therefore to the texts of La Tour du Pin. Th e corporations that La Tour du Pin had in mind should have been called “corporate assets” and become genuine owners’ corporations, exactly like those which, half a century later, the Italian fascist economist Ugo Spirito would have hoped to see. But anti-parliamentary corporatism was not only the foundation for an alternative to democratic parliamentary representation, it was also a platform shared by Catholic anti-Semites, who saw in the con-

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stitutional state the institutional system that had permitted the success of the Jewish and Masonic conspiracy.21 Charles Périn, one of the most important economists of the Christian So- cial school of the 1880s and 1890s, also promoted a campaign in favor of tar- iff s, protection of the domestic market, and state intervention in support of “social .” Th rough his campaign he contributed to the adoption of the Méline General , in 1892, but in his writings in support of “state inter- vention in economic matters,” Périn also argued that corporatism would have helped to build an institutional system capable of countering the eff ects of the individualistic conception of the democratic society: 22

Th e Revolution has banned the corporation. It is therefore necessary to restore and rebuild the corporation under current conditions, according to the law of charity, which can only be a law of freedom . . . ; to include in the same association and union of corporations, according to the bond of charity, the employers and workers of big business. . . . Harmel’s Christian corporation; the Société de Saint-Joseph defender of Christian labor (in which Father Ludovic had taken such good care of the owners’ interests, concerning himself fi rst and foremost with the workers’ interests); the Cercles Catholiques des Ouvriers; employers’ associations . . . ; profes- sional associations, bringing together workers in arts and craft s: all these works . . . show us the way forward. . . . Among the diff erent forms the association can take in the workers’ life, the corporation is the most com- prehensive, the most powerful, and the one that best represents a man in all his industrial activities. . . . Th e corporation of the Christian era was indeed a brotherhood formed under the protection of a saint, and gathered around the altar, where they celebrated the Christian sacrifi ce: it gave the worker, through faith and charity, the nourishment of spiritual life which served to console him. . . . Today, however, the hierarchical order should be reconstructed in both private and public relations, which means organizing the corporation. 23

Th e text shows that almost a century aft er the shock provoked by the estab- lishment of the modern political rights of citizenship the reaction was still very strong. Corporatism was conceived as a system of social integration and control of the market. But it was also perceived as the reversal, awaited for a century, of individualism, as the cancellation of the Enlightenment and the

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rights of citizenship that had guaranteed the emancipation of the Jews, as an antipolitical alternative to democratic parliamentary representation. Corpo- ratism would fi nally build the new spiritual power, which Bonald, de Maistre, and Comte had striven to construct.

It therefore remains certain that, in any kind of professional activity, there is a corresponding right specifi c to that profession . . . : the corpo- rative regime is a system of representation of both rights and interests, through public expression (public expression is here taken to mean the expression of the representation, devolved to one of the state bodies—an advisory or deliberative body—especially assigned this function . . . ). In the parliamentary system, the representation of opinions is through uni- versal suff rage . . . ; today a man is worth as much as another man, every- one brings an innate right to absolute sovereignty, and may delegate it to whomsoever he wishes, to exercise it in his name and under an indefi nite mandate; in the professional system instead, what needs to be sought in the common interest is competence. . . . Between the idea of election and that of representation there really is an abyss.24

Th e political organization that, from the beginning of the twentieth cen- tury, supported with greater determination the corporative alternative to democracy, even going so far as to propose a parliament of the corporative councils of agriculture, industry, and commerce, was therefore Action Fran- çaise, a nationalist and Catholic group that declared that it followed the old teachings of Bonald and Comte. And, in fact, it proposed that the corpora- tions should be new state institutions under public law. Th is is exactly what, a few years later, would have been put forward by the jurists and theoreti- cians of the Italian Nationalist Association, Alfredo Rocco and Luigi Feder- zoni who joined the Fascist Party aft er World War I. Th e corporations would have restored, together with the provinces and communities, the liens sociaux of the old monarchical system. It was with these that Maurras, Pujo, Rocco, Federzoni, and other nationalist leaders thought of replacing democracy with the authoritarian state “organized within and externally strong, as it had in fact been under the ancien régime.” 25 Th e fi rst important political work published by Charles Maurras was L’idée de décentralisation , which he published in 1898 (a year before the founding of Action Française) and dedicated to Auguste Comte, Ernest Renan, Frédéric Le Play, and Hyppolite Taine. Th e title page read: “à la doctrine de nos maî-

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tres” and recognized the author’s debt to the positivist and Saint-Simonian school.26 Th e decentralization of the state, the reestablishment of the regions, and the optimization of the local and provincial cultural autonomies were defi ned by Maurras as the key points of a strategy of moral reconstruction of Euro- pean society, which was seen as being in a state of crisis because of democracy and the phenomena of “anomie” caused by industrialization. But the social alternative to the market was made up of the corporation, and in this Maur- ras was surprisingly in tune with the ideas of Emile Durkheim and the jurists closest to his views (the theoreticians of “social law,” Léon Duguit, Raoul de la Grasserie, and Charles Benoist).27 At that time, they were also developing projects of regional decentraliza- tion and reform of the representative chamber in accordance with the cri- teria of the professional representation of interests.28 Without calling into question universal suff rage, Benoist, for example, states that he agrees with the criticism, made by Action Française, of representation based on politi- cal individualism; aft er the World War I he joined the nationalist movement, maintaining that the basis of the dialogue between members of Durkheim’s sociological school and the nationalists of Action Française lay in their com- mon devotion to the teachings of Auguste Comte. 29 We can explain this unexpected convergence by remembering that, in the “restless and disturbed” late nineteenth century, the reaction against the En- lightenment and rationalism was developing also from within positivist phi- losophy.30 And Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé and Gabriel Tarde, for instance, confronted by the outcomes of what they defi ned “scientistic dogmatism” and what seemed to them the symptoms of the breakdown of social cohesion, caused by moral relativism, called for “an action program for the family, so- ciety, education and the homeland.” 31 Th e anti-Semites Maurras and Daudet followed the same line. Th is is a confi rmation that the obsession with decadence was widespread and also fed on anxiety about the physical degeneration of the population, the consequences of diseases and “vices” such as nicotine addiction and syphilis, and “hereditary genetic defects.” But diseases and social ills were considered the biological eff ects of the moral corruption that was ravaging modern ur- ban society.32 Th is moral corruption was identifi ed with mass democracy, un- bridled competition, economic individualism, and the Jewish spirit. Th e “decadence” that haunted Maurras was, for instance, embodied above all in democracy, and the Dreyfus Aff air became for him the symbol of the

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war between the droits de l’homme and the principles of authority, truth, and national unity. 33 In the name of “French truth,”34 Le Baron de Montesquiou, Louis Dimier, , Frédéric Amouretti, , , Charles Maurras, and Gabriel Syveton considered themselves the representatives of national unity and

of a new Boulangism, more aware, however, of its principles. . . . If the party of the traitor Dreyfus took as an emblem of its destructive enter- prise the fl ag of the “Droits de l’Homme,” Action Française replied with the merciless criticism of such rights. . . . Th e strength on which we counted made us despise electoral action and, in general, legal means. Th ese, in our eyes, represented the impotence, the slowness, and a prac- tical tribute to the principles of the adversary. Th e coup de main was to replace the legal means: we thought of it as a surprise blow, the felicitous outcome of street agitation, the eff ect of a (from a high level) military and civil complicity. 35

So the anti-Semites of Action Française did not therefore exclude the “revolu- tionary” paths, namely the coup d’état. At the same time, Louis Dimier managed to get an audience with Pope Pius X in order to convince him to oppose by every means the decision of a moderate French Catholic party, Action Libérale, to accept the democratic system; Dimier, instead, wanted to convince the pontiff to support the posi- tions of the Assumptionist Fathers and the Congregation of the Sacred Heart in their struggle against the theses of the modernists Alfred Loisy, Paul Lejay, and Joseph Turnel.36 However, the anti-Semites were not as interested in theo- logical confrontation as they were in the political stakes: “authority and dis- cipline, rather than searching for an ultimate truth, which seemed much less interesting.”37 For the militants of Action Française, the modernist phenom- enon did not represent a heresy, but rather the danger of the justifi cation and legitimation of Catholic adherence to democratic politics and constitutional pluralism. 38 So, thanks to the support of many conservative newspapers— including Le Soleil , Le Gaulois , La Libre Parole , L’Autorité and Le Temps —the anti-Semites could reach a much wider cross-section of public opinion than from the lecture halls of Parisian universities or the pages of traditionalist literary periodicals. 39 Maurras proclaimed himself a “follower aware of the doctrine of Saint- Simon [and] a mathematical , born in the South, who, through

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mathematics, had found evidence that, in reality, the individual is not a social unit, but that instead, the fi rst social unit is the family.” 40 But he declared that he was also a “physicist philosopher . . . who in his own discoveries only avails himself of the evidence of the empirical sciences. Th e fi rst of these philoso- phers does not believe either in God or the devil. Th e other . . . is a devout Christian.” 41 Socialism and Christian nationalism, theology, and science—he continued—could serve to combat the “truly mortal evil infl icted upon us, since 1789, by democratic leveling and conformism born from centraliza- tion” and to build a new form of despotism or a restoration of the monarchy, which should not, however, mean a return to absolutist centralism. 42 Rather, it should be the opportunity to construct a modern authoritarian system of corporations and autonomous regions, able to consolidate the country’s so- cial and moral cohesion.

Th e fi rst article of “Action Française” states: what needs to be done is to reconstitute France as a society, to restore the idea of the homeland and renew the chain of our traditions, prolonging them and adapting them to the circumstances of our age. Th at is to say, to make republican France a state which would be well organized internally and strong externally, as it had been under the ancien régime. 43

Maurras aimed at a modern tyranny that relied on the political synthesis “of two pure truths, the socialist and the Catholic traditionalist.”44 I stress the signifi cance of the use of the attribute “socialist” in this context. At the time of the Vichy regime, in recapitulating his political journey, Maurras would yet again return to the original sin, the disruption of 1789:

On the whole, the Revolution had destroyed many things, but what it had built in their place? Had it not perhaps actually prevented any construc- tion? By asking ourselves these questions, we turned once again to the masters who had already confronted, more or less, the same problem. Th ere was, therefore, no reason to despair about the possible of the spirit over the disorder of ideas and the anarchy of beings: the genius and the reason of France had never resigned themselves and continued to of the discipline that was missing. . . . Would a thought of Bonald and a thesis of de Maistre attract fewer listeners or readers than one of Béranger’s songs or a sentence of Chateaubriand? Th e diffi culty, however, increased even further with Auguste Comte . . . and the austere search

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of Le Play. . . . According to the , or the Declaration of the Rights of Man , revolutionary politics is based upon the maxim men are born free and equal before the law, but neither the mathematics profes- sor Auguste Comte nor the Vicomte de Bonald, a landowner, a deputy and academician, nor the engineer Frédéric Le Play had ever admitted that anything good could come from what had begun as freedom and equality. None of them had allowed their followers to believe it, and all of them, instead, had countered those principles with the opposite value, which for them represented the fi rst article in the science of society. In other words, they had considered, of fundamental importance, the neces- sity that derived from the essence of things and not the will of men; au- thority, not freedom ; hierarchy , not equality ; the family , not the individual . Even before the rights of man comes his duty to comply with his own condition in life.45

For Maurras, in the end, Vichy represented the possibility and the great his- toric opportunity of permanently closing the disastrous cycle that had begun over a hundred and fi ft y years earlier, with the irruption into politics of natu- ral law and the rights of citizenship. Maurras declared he was always in tune with the proposed reconstitution of the corporations advanced by the Catho- lics Charles Périn and René de La Tour du Pin, and he therefore enthusias- tically supported the federalist projects of the antidemocratic traditionalists Frédéric Mistral and Joaquin Balaguer. He even managed to arouse interest in his corporatist ideas in some rep- resentatives of the labor movement: at the end of the nineteenth century, a dialogue between trade unionists near to the revolutionary syndicalists and corporatist nationalists had taken place in the pages of the newspaper La Cocarde, founded by Caroline Rémy de Gurbhard (known as Séverine) and Gabriel Mermeix. Th e anarchist Ferdinand Pelloutier, the socialist Benoît Malon, the monarchist Charles Maurras, and the nationalist Maurice Barrès had discussed how to counter the centralizing bureaucracy of the state and the policy of integrating the trade unions pursued by the republican govern- ments, and they had concluded that a goal common to revolutionary syndi- calists and Catholic nationalists was the defense of local communities, French traditions, and autonomy. Th e agreement, however, lasted only for a short time. 46 It was Barrès who, from the time of his fi rst book, Culte du moi , had em- phasized the value of local tradition and the cultural heritages: in the novel

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Un homme libre , he had outlined his thesis on the “ of Lorraine” and had made it the premise of his adherence to political action of the decentralizing federalists, thus contributing to an original synthesis of the federalist and na- tionalist programs. “Th e cosmopolitan intellectuals,” wrote Maurras,

had even tried to take over federalism, and some nationalists had identi- fi ed federalism with separatism (whereas it was the exact opposite) and therefore they had fought against it. Th e interventions of Barrès made us understand that the Federalist Party actually identifi ed itself with the na- tional one . . . and with territorial patriotism. Th e ideal France, cherished by certain orators, thus fi nally transformed itself into the idea of the real France, made up of families, communes and provinces.47

According to Maurras, Maurice Barrès had laid the foundations of the new nationalist politics, extolling “the sense of the earth, of blood and of its dead.”48 Barrès, together with Paul Adam (the author of Le mystère des foules), exalted “the mystique of old, Christian and rural France,” and, as a “Boulangist” deputy of the “socialist and revisionist” Committee of Nancy, he had fought since 1889 for an antidemocratic revision of the constitutional laws to strengthen the executive power and for a program of corporate social measures.49 So, in the character of Professor Paul Bouteiller, the protagonist of the novel Les déracinés , Barrès had portrayed the republican philosopher Paul Renouvier, whom Maurras mocked as “steeped in Enlightenment dog- matism,” stigmatizing his “abstract and democratic morality” that turned the young into people totally uprooted from their community of origin. 50 Many Catholic, nationalist, and socialist journalists—including Jean- Camille Dumonteil, Gauthier de Clagny, Marius Martin, Antide Boyer— lined up alongside Barrès in the fi ght against the Jews, immigration, and foreign labor.51 And his watchwords found a large receptive audience, even among socialist leaders. Barrès had in fact emphasized the need to abandon the “vision of socialism tied to the rights of man” and to inaugurate a new strategy of national socialism. 52 If socialism aimed at the social reappro- priation of the wealth produced by the nation, it had to show the way to an economy once again “under the control of the French race,” and this would mean taking the “public wealth” away from the most important Jewish banks, and from the syndicat anonyme of “Jewish capitalists” who had taken, accord- ing to him, “total control of French labor and savings.” 53 And even before the explosion of Boulanger’s popularity among the socialists, the failure of the

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Union Générale Bank, founded with Catholic capital, had already triggered a violent reaction against the “maneuvers of Jewish fi nance,” which were al- legedly responsible for that collapse. 54 Th us, as early as the beginning of the 1880s, anti-Jewish anticapitalism was able to accommodate the widespread social unrest among the small traders in diffi culty because of the processes of concentration in the retail sector, the farmers and wine growers aff ected by the crisis. Th is favored the most subversive groups, such as Paul Déroulède’s Ligue des Patriotes and the anti-Semitic groups of Édouard Drumont, Jules Guérin, and Marquis de Morès. In a letter of April 1890, the socialist leader Paul Lafargue had explained to that the popular movement had grown through the sup- port for General Boulanger’s political plan for an authoritarian revision of the republican parliamentary system and was a more complex phenomenon than a simple chauvinisme, solely concerned with regaining Alsace and Lorraine, lost in the war of 1870. Lafargue also felt that much greater importance should be given to the aspects of the revolt induced by the crisis of small traders and the suff ering of the working classes in diffi culty because of the long depressive cycle that had started in 1873. 55 Large sections of the people had felt well-represented by Boulanger because of the exasperation at their economic suff ering and, between 1887 and 1889, the representatives of these social classes looked favorably on the new alliance between the socialists (in particular the followers of Auguste Blanqui such as Henri Rochefort, Ernest Granger, or Ernst Roche) and the “Boulangists.” Th e jaunes trade unions and the Ligue des Patriotes also represented a political reference, and its leader, Paul Déroulède, had in fact defi ned a platform for cooperation between capital and labor in the name of the tariff protection of national interests and the defense of “national labor” from competition from immigrant foreign manpower. In fact, Déroulède’s political platform was not too diff erent from the plans of Naquet’s “bien-être populaire” and the plans for workers’ credit developed by Barrès. Certainly, these platforms revealed an inadequate understanding of mod- ern fi nancial and industrial mechanisms, but, anyway, they could speak to the gut feelings of the pétits , in need of scapegoats and simple explanations for the economic depression that unceasingly affl icted them. Moreover, the explana- tion of the crisis in terms of a Jewish conspiracy against the national economy and national resources could be an eff ective representation of the enemy: tax relief, banks providing credit for small businesses, tariff protectionism, agrarian and industrial corporatism, the exclusion of foreigners from public expenditure, and anti-Semitic policies were, at the same time, the more eas-

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ily understandable points of anti-Jewish propaganda and a national-socialist platform purged of internationalism, , and the Enlighten- ment but not hostile to the private ownership of the means of production. 56 So, the “revision of republican values,” with which, from the end of the 1870s, Jules Lemaitre, Paul Bourget, and Paul Déroulède concurred was trans- formed, with Barrès and Drumont, into blunt and violent antiparliamentari- anism; as early as December 1887, Déroulède’s Ligue was able to prevent the election of Jules Ferry as president of the Republic by besieging Parliament with its demonstrators. 57 In 1898, the Ligue was the most important electoral organization of all the anti-Dreyfus deputies, as well as the reference point of the most hard-line military commanders—General George-Gabriel de Pel- lieux and Hervé—against the upholders of Dreyfus’s innocence. Th is new social anti-Semitism was shared by socialists in Boulanger’s movement—Barrès, Henri Rochefort, Ernest Granger, Ernest Roche, Fran- cis Laur—and provided the general with a popular and proletarian base: as Drumont wrote, “Th e truth is that at no time and in no country has the Jew- ish question ever been a religious issue, but always and everywhere an eco- nomic and social question.” 58 Moreover, the leader of the anti-Semitic action squads—Antoine-Amedée Morès—added that “the necessary social revolu- tion” would be triggered “by the alliance between the workers’ trade union organization and the anti-Semitic movement.” 59 Th is also explains why the anti-Semitic platforms of the 1890s, aft er the outbreak of the Dreyfus Aff air, had strong anticapitalist economic and social connotations and were expres- sions of a “socialism” that actually aimed at integrating the proletariat in the national economic community. In other words, the anti-Semitic platforms were expressions of a national socialism popularized by numerous news- papers such as Drumont’s La Libre Parole , Guérin’s L’Ant i j u i f , Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant , Barrès’s Le Courrier de l’Est , and Emmanuel Gallian’s L’Ant i - Youtre . Th ey also expressed the positions of traditional anti-Judaism, focus- ing on the “immense secret society dedicated to usury”—thus wrote Abbot Chabauty as late as 1882—and tried to restore the social popular and plebe- ian dimension of the message of Bonald, Toussenel, and Proudhon.60 And Be noît Malon (who claimed to be a follower of Proudhon but, in 1886, had appreciated some of the famous pages of La France juive ) had admitted that, within socialism, Albert Regnard’s anti-Semitic hatred was a legitimate point of view. 61 During the Boulangist period, Morès had been the head of the Anti- Semitic League, but the general’s defeat, in 1889, also led to a crisis for the organization and Morès’s role when Drumont began to use a political style

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much more in tune with the socialist parlance. So Drumont’s newspaper, La Libre Parole, replaced Morès’s Ligue as the anti-Semites’ reference point, but in 1897, Guérin reorganized Morès’s old association merging it with the Ligue des Patriotes, and then Déroulède’s group was responsible for the most vio- lent demonstrations and the pogroms that erupted in February 1898 in many French cities: Dieppe, Nancy, Luneville, , , and Marseilles. Th is new dynamism, founded on violent action, would have led the younger anti- Semites under the leadership of Guerin and Déroulède, relegating Drumont to a less prestigious position, and revealed the new tendency of anti-Jewish anticapitalism to explode into violent action. Th e Catholic “bonne presse” also did not refrain from guaranteeing its support for various bills aimed at dis- criminating against the Jews in public administration.62 A few years later, at the beginning of the century, the protagonists of the new anti-Semitism became the most dynamic leaders of Action Française. State corporatism constituted the new form of this anti-Jewish national so- cialism, and one of the most intelligent exponents of Action Française, George Valois, presented some corporative collaboration projects between employers and trade unions at the annual conferences of Action Française with the support of the economist Firmin Bacconnier (the founder of the pe- riodical L’Accord Social) and of Charles Maurras. Th is change of perspective, in relation to the populist anti-Semitism of the 1880s, emerged more strongly toward the end of the Dreyfus case, in the face of the disappointment caused by the left -wing coalition government when the anti-Semitic nationalists in fact sought an alliance with the “anti-democratic socialists,” 63 in the name of their common hostility to the republic and to the policies of the radical and social democratic bloc des gauches . Th e prototype of the corporative dictator- ship then became the model of a new anti-Jewish system.64 Louis de Bonald, Auguste Comte and remained the guid- ing stars of the corporative thinking of Action Française throughout the 1930s:

In short, we French employers and French workers lose or gain together: and every war between employers’ confederations and trade unions must fi nd its necessary limit in the awareness that there is a common fate, which depends on the national common denominator. . . . If we have to fi ght among ourselves, let’s at least not do so to the point where the strug- gle risks becoming mortal: it is vital, instead, to suspend the hostilities and help each other and unite. We must add, to the horizontal organiza- tions of owners, technicians, clerks and laborers, comparable to the lines

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of terrestrial latitude, the vertical organizations, in order to communicate with one another, organize regular contact and exchanges of opinion nec- essary for the nature and purpose of our industrial activities: merged in a longitudinal social scale, able to overcome and cut through the thick layers of mutual hostility and the ignorance of the common labors of the country’s economy. Our internal divisions would lead to the total ruin of the “French House,” but instead, it is necessary to unite its converging forces. . . . A superior organism of this type will certainly become, easily or with diffi culty, a fraternal organism. Th e unity of the trade unions will remain close and direct, but it will be fl anked by another union, equally long- lasting, comparable to those territorial unions that, in the body and soul of the same country, unite the leaders and those who are led. Th is will be the Corporation . . . and, with trade union assets and corpo- rative wealth, there will also emerge the wealth of the family, with the aim of giving security and durability to a consolidated order. Th us, the proletariat will disappear, and the worker will cease to wander in an alien environment, becoming a citizen and a bourgeois of the city: a workers’ bourgeoisie that must and can continue the development of the old peas- ant bourgeoisie . . . and incorporate the worker in society, in accordance with the wish formulated by Auguste Comte. 65

A socialism that would refuse the corporatist strategy would be destined to remain a prisoner of the “democratic defi nition of equality,” incapable there- fore of off ering a solution to the problem of national brotherhood while, as Maurras wrote in 1937,

the corporation, instead, does not infringe the essential principle of a logical and honest socialism, but only that of democratic politics. . . . What is, in eff ect, fascism? A socialism freed from democracy and a trade unionism free from the obstacles to which the class struggle in Italy had subjected labor. A methodical and felicitous determination to clasp in a single “bundle” all the human factors of national production . . . , to merge trade unions in corporations, . . . and to incorporate the proletariat in the state’s hereditary and traditional activities. 66

Maurras always remained steadfastly tied to his plan of building a cor- porative system dominated and guided by the “spiritual power” invoked by Comte.

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Catholicism . . . will regain all the honors that are its due . . . and certainly the current mediocre regime will come to an end, but it is equally evident that the most complete freedom will have to reign over France: instead of hindering scientifi c and philosophical research, the State should support it and help it . . . Aft er all, on the solid ground of organizing and direct- ing society there cannot be a confl ict between the men of religion and the men of science. Catholic politics excludes the revolutionary ideology, which is the horror of the positivists, as does positivist politics, whose sympathies and affi nities with Catholicism are obvious. 67

Maurras did not use the romantic myth of the “great living organism,” as Barrès had done, to counter the heirs of the Enlightenment and ; instead, he turned to the positive lesson of Comte’s science: society, family, and corporation are, according to him, “data of nature,” but the meaning he gives to “nature” is strongly infl uenced by his Catholic and Saint-Simonian legacies. So he was, therefore, reproposing the conception of history of the traditionalist Catholics but in the context of a purely positivist methodology according to which even political choices had to be made “not on the basis of tastes and passions” or metaphysical abstractions, but by following the sci- entifi c method. Th is would be done in order to replace democratic politics, which presupposes the “reason” of the philosophes , with the paradigm of “nat- ural politics,” based on Bonald’s formula: raisonnement et histoire . Th e same essential skills “needed to deal with chemistry” are necessary to govern public aff airs: therefore, science must become the holder of the spiritual power once exercised by the church. In the ideal dialogue with Comte, Maurras took up the thesis advanced by Ernest Renan in L’Avenir de la science : democracy “must yield to science the task of organizing humanity.”68 Comte’s “Plan de travaux scientifi ques néces- saires pour réorganiser la société” (1822; published in 1824 together with the Catéchisme des industriels with the signature of Saint-Simon), 69 remained for Maurras the paradigm of modern knowledge because, for him, Comte had taught that only science could defi ne the proper balance between progress and order.70 Th is balance could overcome the confl ict between the heirs of the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment,71 and the era of spiritual disorder would then end.72 In fact, since the draft ing of “Dictateur ou Roi” (1899), the fundamental reference point for Maurras had been precisely the Cours de philosophie positive .73 Certainly—admitted Maurras—the most elaborate model of political theory governed by the experimental science of society had been proposed

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by Hippolyte Taine, who can indeed be considered a follower of Auguste Comte’s thought because the latter’s teachings had inspired his hypothesis of experimental politics.74 Th rough these pages—according to Gustave Le Bon and Paul Bourget—Taine had empirically demonstrated that French society needed a new Caesarism. 75 “In the name of reason and nature, and in ac- cordance with the ancient laws of the Universe, all hope for the of order and for the duration of a threatened civilization lies in the vessel of the counter-revolution.”76 Th us Maurras meant that the uniqueness of command is imposed by the order of nature. 77 Th e so-called natural politics identifi es nature (or the struc- ture of society) with the historical tradition, therefore with moral standards, provincial autonomy, community exemptions, corporations, and “authority.” Th e last of these, for centuries, had guaranteed obedience: 78 “Th e order of natural distinctions is therefore inherent in a well-built society,” and “there is no social good that cannot be gathered in the almost limitless fi eld of hu- man diff erences of descent and blood.”79 “Natural” politics expresses both the order of nature and the historical tradition, and both “the raising of off spring in animal communities and in the human family” and the “hereditary ties of blood” are elements of “natural” politics.80 In that same period, in Italy, Scipio Sighele also observed that “there is a return to studying every human action as a product of society instead of the person, and there is a tendency to follow that wave of sociological or socialist reaction that is going to break against an egocentric illusion that has perhaps lasted too long.” 81 Th e identifi cation between “sociology” and “socialism” that can be found in Sighele’s text reveals the value ascribed to the way in which both clashed with “individualism” as a principle of democracy and the mar- ket economy. So “natural politics” cannot but acknowledge the social and moral function of the “protective inequalities that exist in nature” (as in the condition of the child with respect to its parents); hence these inequalities inevitably require a hierarchical order “to ensure social stability and respect for diff erences.”82 “Natural politics” can only be a realistic politics that knows how much human history is constantly at risk of involutions and losses. Aft er World War I, from this heterogeneous rhetoric of what Zeev Stern- hell has defi ned the “revolutionary Right,” the fascists inherited the desire for a regime of national cohesion, within which the social question would fi nally be resolved thanks to a new national socialism, a synthesis of trade unionism, corporatism, and the new political activism. Maurras, aft er all, had stressed the authoritarian and technocratic nature of his own corporative concept,

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and the same tendency had emerged in the Italian nationalist ideologists of corporatism.83 Th e juxtaposition of and comparison between French doctrines and Ital- ian political developments are enlightening. In the 1920s and 1930s, some juridical corporatists, like Colamarino, remained distant from the theses of the supporters of integral corporatism, such as Volpicelli and Spirito, 84 but Mussolini, for his part, always denied any genealogical relationship between fascist corporatism and the culture of Action Française, even if he acknowl- edged his debt to other French sources such as Georges Sorel, Ernest Renan, and Balzac.85 However, acknowledging his intellectual link with Balzac im- plied revealing other debts, politically very clear, with de Maistre, therefore also with Maurras. And the analysis of a important text such as Dottrina del fascismo also reveals Mussolini’s interpretation of a specifi c text (written by Ernest Renan), which would be absolutely analogous with the one which had been proposed by Charles Maurras himself in his time. In fact, in the Dialogues philosphiques, Renan had written:

Th e goal of humanity is to produce great men: great works are in fact re- alized by science and certainly not by democracy. . . . Th e essential thing, in other words, is to produce not educated masses but great geniuses and a public capable of appreciating them. If the ignorance of the masses is a prerequisite for such a result, so much the worse.86

In taking up this passage from Renan in a work of 1913, Maurras anticipated Mussolini: “It remains to be said that Renan has outlined a rigorous criticism of the Revolution and of democracy. Even if we had wanted to disregard it, we could not have done so, since quite a few of us have arrived at the counter- Revolution through his critique. Renan has been a master, an initiator and a guide.” 87 And Mussolini, perhaps unwittingly, draws upon this text of Maur- ras, in the following:

Reason, science—stated Renan, who had some pre-fascist insights in one of his Philosophical Meditations—are the products of humanity, but to want reason directly for the people and through the people is a pipedream. It is not in fact necessary, for the existence of reason, that the whole world should know it. In any case, if such an initiation were to take place, it would not come about through low democracy, which seems perforce to lead to the extinction of every specialistic culture and of the highest dis-

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cipline. Th e principle that society exists solely for the well-being and free- dom of the individuals of which it is composed cannot be in conformity with the plans of nature: the plans in which, instead, it is only the species that is taken into consideration and the individual seems sacrifi ced. It is strongly to be feared that the last word of democracy, so understood (I hasten to add that it can also be understood diff erently), could be a social state in which the only preoccupation of the degenerate masses would be to enjoy the vile pleasures of the vulgar man. Up to this point Renan. Fas- cism rejects democracy’s absurd conventional lie about political egalitari- anism, its habit of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of happiness and indefi nite progress, but, if democracy can be understood diff erently, namely, if democracy means not marginalizing the people, then fascism could be defi ned—by the present writer—as an “organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy.”88

But Mussolini could not admit that the French nationalist writers, and especially the monarchy’s apologist Maurras, had preceded him in revising Renan’s antipolitical and antidemocratic plan and, instead, he attributed the genesis of the conception of fascist “democracy” and of the corporative econ- omy “to the fi rst day of Piazza San Sepolcro” and to the “claims of national syndicalism” deriving from D’Annunzio’s subversive action in Fiume. How- ever, he did not refer to the revolutionary syndicalist Alceste De Ambris, nor to Carnaro’s charter, in which the Saint-Simonian legacy seems evident, but he concluded that

in the great river of fascism you will fi nd currents deriving from Sorel, Péguy, Lagardelle of the “Mouvement Socialiste,” and from the cohort of the Italian revolutionary syndicalists who, from 1904 to 1914, introduced a note of novelty in the environment of Italian socialism, already emas- culated and anaesthetized by Giolitti’s fornication with Olivetti’s Pagine Libere, Orano’s La Lupa, Enrico Leone’s Divenire Sociale .89

Acknowledging his debt to Paolo Orano meant explicitly recognizing that the latter had preceded him in adhering to a revolutionary version of social- ism and, then, in the transformation of syndicalism into national socialism; in fact, Orano had even anticipated the dialogue between Sorel and Maurras and had made revolutionary syndicalism the ideological platform of his own anti-Jewish anticapitalism.

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It is not mere chance that, in the passage that I quoted (which, as will be seen, was preceded by some pages written by Orano), Mussolini should pay homage to the value of the Christian tradition. At the same time, he was con- tinuing to deny any assimilation between the fascist corporative revolution and the Catholic and intransigent doctrine of the restoration of the ancien régime and, in other words, the idea of a regression “of the world to what it had been prior to 1789, which is indicated as the year of the beginning of the demo-liberal century. One does not go backward; the fascist doctrine has not elected de Maistre as its prophet.”90 Mussolini did not intend to concede that Bonald, Lamennais, or de Maistre had been the fi rst real opponents of democracy and the values of the Enlightenment and, as such, could be con- sidered the precursors of fascism.91

TECHNOCRACY AND THE SOCIALISM OF THE WHOLE NATION

Th e case of Georges Valois (pseudonym of Georges Gressent) is an interest- ing path to follow in order to try and unravel the complicated and tortuous relationship between Bonald’s anti-Semitism, the anti-Enlightenment politi- cal theology of the end of the eighteenth century, and the corporatism of the anti-Semitic revolutionary syndicalists and national socialists. Valois was an important leader of Action Française who in 1912 promoted the Cercle Proudhon, the group that brought together revolutionary syndi- calists and nationalists. Th en, with Philippe Barrès (Maurice Barrès’s son) and the high-ranking offi cer Jacques Artuys (who represented the anciens combattents ) he founded, in 1925, the fi rst French fascist party, Le , whose ideology was strongly technocratic and corporatist. 92 But corporatism, technocracy, and the “government of technical experts” were not exclusive to Valois’s movement. Th ey also characterized other post- war anti-parliamentary groups, 93 such as Les , Solidarité Française, and Les Croix de Feu,94 the party of Colonel François de la Rocque, and other movements outside France. De la Rocque, a “hero” of the Great War and of the counter-insurgency in Morocco, loved to say, “One can be a socialist without ceasing to be a nationalist, and one can continue to be a nationalist without abandoning the search for social progress: the mark of the resurrection is in fact the combination of the ardent forces of the Left and the revived forces of the Right.” 95 Clearly, technocratic and corporative conceptions characterized even more decisively the programs of Marcel Déat, who came to be surrounded by

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a heterogeneous collection of “nonconformist” periodicals and circles, such as Jean Luchaire’s Notre Temps and Émile Roche and Pierre Dominique’s La République , Jeune République , and X-Crise . 96 Th e same technocratic approach would also be favored by quite a few leaders of the État National, in 1940, who would have included Denis Bichelonne; Jean Berthelot; Robert Gibrat; the former leader of the Confédération Générale du Travail, René Belin; and the radical Gaston Bergery: these politicians and trade union leaders played an important part in draft ing the Charte du travail, a corporative constitution characterized, above all, by the traditional concepts of the Action Française, to which Pétain felt closer.97 Many diff erent corporative and neo-technocratic plans of “national social- ism” enjoyed a widespread circulation starting from the 1920s, and this was mainly caused by the management of the war-time economy, which had cre- ated an extremely favorable climate for projects tending to “extol the producer as the new sovereign, at the expense of the citizen.” 98 Georges Davy, a sociolo- gist of the Durkheim school, for example, stated that all the had failed and, for this reason, “Saint-Simon’s prophecy about the catastrophe of individualistic democracy” had come true. Th e latter could no longer ensure social stability in an industrial society. It was only the producers and techni- cians who had the necessary ability to govern a modern economy and mod- ern institutions by means of what Davy defi ned as the industrial state and Valois the technical state. Th is had nothing to do with direct democracy and workers’ self-government since the abilities referred to by Davy and Valois were those of the entrepreneurs, the scientists, the new elites of an industrial and corporative state that certainly did not take into account social participa- tion: the “producer,” the technician, became the ideal fi gure, the “psychologi- cal type of the person having capital, intelligence, and technical competence,” and was considered the only social fi gure capable of taking on the responsi- bility for economic planning, regulating work, and the distribution of credit, as well as directing capital “toward socially useful aims.” 99 Th e issues of planning and state intervention aimed at saving the fi nancial and industrial sectors, which were in crisis, naturally became more relevant aft er the Great Depression. From 1931, the eff ects of the international fi nancial shock were felt in France and, consequently, in all the political and economic circles the positions favorable to the “economic plan” proliferated. “Socialism,” “planning,” “the corporative system” became the vague but popular formulae of the alternative to capitalism and Soviet communism. Th ere was also talk of socialism having to challenge fascism in the competition with parliamentary democracy and the self-regulating market. Th e sociologists and economists

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gathered around the periodicals La Critique Sociale and Plans (, Arnaud Dandieu, Jules Romains, Alfred Fabre-Luce, Ferdinand Gros, and Marcel Déat) were fascinated by American social engineering and the ideas about economic planning developed by the Belgian socialist Henri de Man. Quite a few of them were, however, attracted by Italian corporatism. 100 Émile Durkheim’s successor as head of the École Sociologique, Marcel Mauss, who always remained a socialist, was an activist in the SFIO and edi- tor of the weekly newspaper La Vie Socialiste run by Renaudel. But he also admired the young neo-socialists who favored technocracy and a planned economy, and he remained in contact with them even aft er their expulsion from the Socialist Party in 1930. Th e so-called neo-socialists were led by Marcel Déat, a brilliant professor of philosophy, a former pupil of Alain at the Henri IV High School in Paris, and later a student at the École Normale Supérieure. He had published some studies in the journal Année Sociologique , edited by Mauss, and had worked for the Centre de Documentation Sociale under Célestin Bouglé. During the World War I he had lived through what Ernst von Salomon defi ned as “the experience of the trench community,” and, later he had collaborated with the socialist minister of the armement, Albert Th omas, in the Union Sacrée government. Th ese diff erent experiences had made him “understand that so- cialism had to be able to regenerate the whole nation.” A direct knowledge of the management of a war-time economy, in particular, had led him to adopt dirigiste, corporatist, and technocratic positions in terms of economic policy, and his fi rst book, Notions de sociologie, was obviously inspired by Durkheim. Subsequently, in Perspectives socialistes (1930), he proposed his own political plan to reunite, in an economic community, “the interests of all the produc- tive social forces of the nation struck by the crisis of capitalism.” In the copy that Déat gave to Mauss, the dedication bears witness to the devotion to their common master: “Marx and Durkheim are for me absolutely close.”101 “Nourished with the philosophical thought of masters such as Durkheim, Brunschwig, and Marcel Mauss, and their sociology based on the idea of na- tional solidarity,” Déat stated he was convinced that “socialism, in the fi nal analysis, is simply this progressive and complete reintegration of the indi- vidual in a society where he breathes—in a certain sense—the same air as in the family community. And—let’s admit it—with something of that intense warmth which the sociologists discovered in the primitive clan.”102 Mauss did not dislike the identifi cation of the forms of life in primitive societies with the corporative, trade union, and socialist economic structures

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that could have carried out analogous functions in modern societies (Déat defi ned them as “social groups corresponding with the clan”). But Mauss was also disconcerted when Déat, in 1942, associated the “intense warmth of the primitive clan” with the hierarchical and community society organized by the Vichy regime:

We are on the threshold of community life. . . . Heroism is not only cour- age on the battlefi eld but also devotion to the common interest, the feel- ing that the individual is not complete unless he is integrated in a group and that he is nothing unless he is willing to devote himself to society and to sacrifi ce himself for it. . . . I would not hesitate to say that there is here something religious, in the deepest and most noble sense of the term: true religion is—perhaps—the feeling of community warmth.103

Nevertheless, Mauss’s bewilderment did not appear to be fully justifi ed. In fact, the neo-socialist Déat, having ended up in the court of Pétain, could have claimed consistency with his origins because, he had maintained since 1925 that socialism could rebuild an “integrated nation”—as Durkheim had taught—thanks to the “powers of moral cohesion” represented by the corpo- rations of workers and entrepreneurs. 104 It was precisely because of his intel- lectual consistency with Durkheim’s sociological thought that Déat enjoyed high regard in university and intellectual circles. In 1926, as a Socialist Repub- lican Alliance deputy for the constituency of , he had championed the unity of the “reformist” parties and support for the Republican government. Because of this he had been enthusiastically supported by the small elite of the Fédération des Étudiants Socialistes, among whom , Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Georges Lefranc stood out. 105 Déat had already developed the idea of a “national and social anticapital- ism” based on the unity of the interests of the middle classes and the proletar- iat in his 1930 study, Perspectives socialistes. He claimed that the working-class movement had reached its maximum capacity for expansion and political in- fl uence but that it nevertheless remained far from attaining the social major- ity and becoming the ruling class. Th e middle classes had therefore become decisive in order to overturn the balance of forces. Th e 1929 crisis, although it reduced the purchasing power of the middle classes, had not produced the systemic catastrophe so long awaited by the orthodox Marxists. Déat claimed that one could not expect that social- ism would be an automatic outcome of the Depression; instead, it would be

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necessary to build the new social antagonism by reuniting the interests of the middle classes, the workers, and the landowners, by strategically com- bining diff erent “socialist perspectives” that could pave the way for a social and national transformation. Déat’s socialist and national strategy called for more attention to be paid to the small- and medium-sized landowners, and his review of the categories interested in a national-socialist alliance included artisans, traders, offi cials, and savers. His conception of socialism seems to be explicitly the same as that of Saint-Simon, enhanced by Émile Durkheim in his lectures on socialism delivered at the University of Bordeaux at the end of the previous century and published by Mauss only two years earlier: so- cialism would result from the “coordination of all or certain economic func- tions, from among those which were currently diff use, and of the responsible management centers of society.”106 Th e workers’ socialism therefore had to become a national socialism, and plan for a totally nationalized society. Th is would have been realized through the alliance of all the anticapitalist social classes and the control of the “capitalist economy” by “public powers”:

While waiting for the international world to organize itself, anticapital- ism will naturally continue to develop within the context of the nation. Why should anticapitalism be insensitive and, so to speak, alien to a his- torical and geographical environment in which it has evolved and which is its own? . . . A nation in fact is not only a territory, but rather the totality of its representations and collective values; that is the past and the fu- ture that the term “nation” suggests. If instead capitalism grabs the na- tion, there is the risk that it will be violently rejected by the proletariat. . . . Today anticapitalism considers the nation like a promised inheritance, within which it will be able to attain victory and in which it will be able to realize its constructive aim.107

In 1930 Déat broke with the socialist and labor movement. So it may ap- pear paradoxical that only four years later the French Communist Party and the SFIO, shaken by the collapse of the Weimar Republic, should have de- cided to engender an antifascist front and a broad coalition of “national and anticapitalist forces,” based on an economic strategy that aimed at centralized coordination and the organization of the market, through rules negotiated by the entrepreneurial associations, the trade unions, and the government. By adopting this strategy they had, in a way, acknowledged the feasibility of Déat’s positions.

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Converging along the lines indicated by Henri de Man, 108 the neo-socialist proposal represented a symptom of unease in the new generations of activ- ists, obsessed by the problem of which economy would be necessary aft er the catastrophe of 1929. For this reason, above all, the neo-socialists were deter- mined to make socialism “un îlot d’ordre et un pole d’autorité,” by taking over the fascist plan. “If we don’t do it, others will. . . . We believe that there isn’t only one direction for going toward socialism, and today, thanks to the facts themselves, we realize that ours is not the only way, but that there can be an- other one: the fascist way.”109 Fascism—a “new, unexpected” adversary—had “stolen the socialist programme,” 110 but it had had the merit of breaking the traditional pattern of the clash between capitalism and the labor movement: fascism represented a challenge that the socialists had to know how to face. And in discussing the neo-socialist theses presented at the Socialist Congress of Paris, Mussolini himself recognized in them the “sign of the infl uence that the fascist revolution now exercises on its adversaries.” 111 Seven months later, on February 6, 1934, the nationalist, monarchist, and fascist leagues marched on the National Assembly, the French parliament. Déat considered that subversive fascist demonstration a “healthy national revolt of the honest people” against political corruption and fi nancial scandals, and he proposed that the trade unions of the CGT should ally themselves with these movements and also the groups “of the third force” and the right-wing parties, in order to off er a new social platform for the mass intolerance toward parlia- mentary corruption. Th us, he began making contact with Jean Luchaire, an au- thoritative member of the periodical Notre Temps ; with Roche and Dominique, of the group La République; with the exponents of the Christian group Jeune République; with the young radicals of J. Kaiser; and with some trade unionists of the Confédération Générale du Travail, including Lefranc and Belin. 112

In fact, over the past year the problem has not changed at all: it is a ques- tion of preventing the two opposing blocks, the traditional Right and the Popular Front, from reducing the political options of the French people to a clash between these two blocks; it is a matter of denouncing the im- potence and the evil eff ects of the negative positions, protecting . . . un- selfi sh energies and good will. It is a question of gathering the majority of the country around the Plan.113

Th e enthusiasm for a planned economic policy, corporatism, and social engineering therefore arose from the massive demand, throughout Europe,

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for new economic skills in the wake of the Great Depression, which had be- gun in 1929. Th ere was a diff usion of diff erent technocratic, plan-based, and neo-corporative approaches, above all in socialist and social democratic circles, but also in those of the -wing groups, in Europe as in the United States. In the meantime, new research institutes were being set up for the application of social engineering to labor relations and the management of industrial disputes. 114 Th is technocratic culture oft en became intertwined with political irra- tionalism and anti-parliamentarianism, engendering original visions of the new urban, technical, industrial society: Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Th or stein Veblen, for instance, extolled social engineering, the increase in accumulated wealth, and the idée d’une technique nationale, which would have ensured modernization by transferring the power of decision making to the new vanguard of producers and eliminating the interference of the old politics. 115 Even Mussolini had launched the watchword “of the national economy of the producers” and of the disciplined collaboration between the classes as early as 1918, when he declared that it was necessary to allow “the bourgeoisie to carry out its historical function and stimulate an intense collaboration be- tween the workers and industrial entrepreneurs.”116 However, in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, throughout Europe, the theore- ticians of social engineering and the leading technocrats took up again the trade union and technocratic proposal and emphasized the role of the entre- preneurial and technical elites or the results of the planned war-time econ- omy, devised by Walter Rathenau and his collaborator, the engineer Wichard von Moellendorf. In the Weimar Republic, the theories of this planned econ- omy had won over important leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, such as Rudolf Wissel, but also the publisher of the liberal Vossische Zeitung , Georg Bernhard. Von Moellendorf, in Conservative Socialism , rejected the inclusion of workers’ councils in republican institutions, proposing instead a “community of national work”; “socialism” no longer meant, according to Moellendorf, economic democracy or the redistribution of wealth according to need, but productivity, corporative cooperation among the classes, and the planning of macroeconomic decisions. 117 And, naturally, the Italian theoreti- cians of corporatism appreciated both the German experience and socialist revisionist theses.118 Th e Italian corporations were, in fact, only bureaucratic “trappings,” but Marcel Déat and the neo-socialists were fascinated by them.119 Between 1936

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and 1937, they planned, together with the Comité du Plan, a model of “French corporatism” inspired by the Italian experience. Th ose involved in the proj- ect included the Union Nationale des Combattants (UNC) and some leaders of the Socialist Party (SFIO), the CGT, and the Fédération Corporative. One of the leading neo-socialist exponents, Marquet, became minister of public works in the Doumergue government, set up soon aft er the experience of the Popular Front: he actually adopted a “plan of public works” to combat unem- ployment, inspired by the Plan du Travail of the Belgian Parti Ouvrier and by De Man’s theses. In order to help him, Déat organized, together with Henri Clerc and Édouard Chaux, the Journées du Plan, which were held at the Mai- son de la Chimie: 120

Planisme certainly arose within socialism . . . and, immediately aft erward, it tried to broaden the traditional front of the working class, asking for the help and support of the middle classes, with the aim of establishing a much broader anticapitalist front than the class-based alignment; then, as the crisis went on and worsened, it became necessary to bring together all the real producers. . . . In changing its nature, however, democracy generates a new type of state while socialism can prove to be, in some cases, absolutely incompatible with the classical politics of democracy: it is, in brief, undeniable that the very notion of the state has consequently been modifi ed. . . . In conclusion, it is a question of reestablishing a sover- eign state able to take decisions. 121

In 1938, authoritarian corporatism and planning appeared to be the way to oppose fascism by using its own instruments. According to Déat, since fas- cism “had stolen the socialists’ program,” it only remained for the socialists to adopt, quickly, some of its techniques of government. Dumbfounded, his old professor, Célestin Bouglé, retorted that this would have meant “relinquish- ing many freedoms which are still dear to us.” Two years later, Déat identifi ed those technocratic and corporative solu- tions in the policies adopted in the État National and joined the Vichy regime in the name of Comte, Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl: “Th e ideas of Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl have been perfectly confi rmed by totalitarianism. Th e soci- ologists, if there are still any around, should never forget it.” 122 Consistent focus on his own technocratic and corporative plan of a mod- ern state also characterized Georges Valois’s political experience. Since the early years in the militia with Maurras, the technocratic state was also at the

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heart of his economic and political platform, as it was both at the time of his adherence to fascism and aft er he had broken with it.123 Valois, then, went the opposite way of Déat even though his economic and political culture was in many aspects the same, essentially a technocratic and corporative approach. In fact, it was not mere chance that Valois was the publisher of Perspectives socialistes , the essay that gave Déat the reputation of being the spokesman of technocracy. Th e economic situation necessitated, according to Valois, “in- creasing production, but with a million and a half fewer producers” because of the scale of the human losses suff ered by the French in the confl ict: it would therefore have been necessary to set in motion “an extraordinary systematiza- tion of labor” and “the organization of collective corporative services.” What is more striking is that in his texts, the names of the theoreticians of the sci- entifi c organization of labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henri Fayol, were juxtaposed with those of La Tour du Pin, Sorel, and Saint-Simon.124 Th e formula “new economy” undoubtedly alluded to Walter Rathenau. As early as 1919, Valois had proposed the setting up of a Conseil National Économique, the institute that would be realized in the mid-1920s by the Herriot government, with the agreement of Marcel Déat. Th en, aft er having launched the Confédération de l’Intelligence et de la Production Française, which, in 1923, became the Union des Corporations de France, he defi ned fascism as the only political option that would permit the construction of the technical state. Technocratic corporatism represented a social system of “re- ciprocal obligations” that was based on “corporatively organized trade union- ism,” in which the entrepreneurs “would have unceasingly worked for higher productivity” while the workers “would have cooperated unceasingly with the entrepreneurs in order to perfect the machinery and work methods.” Using the old Saint-Simonian rhetoric, Valois concluded: “Fascism wants to off er the country an economic ruling class made up of bankers, industrialists, mer- chants, technicians, workers, and peasants, which will renew the economy . . . and will give France and Europe airlines, new roads, and motorways.” 125 Only two years later, Valois abandoned fascism, but not his strategy of the building of a new technical state: in L’homme contre l’argent, for example, he reasserted the continuity of his own plan of technocratic socialism with the youthful start of his political career in Action Française. 126 Aft er the col- lapse of the ancien régime, he wrote,

for the fi rst time the spirit of invention had entered political government and, in all the states, the new classes attained the directing of commerce

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and the country’s economy: classes that were not military, juridical, or theocratic; classes that were partly technicians and whose members were able to take control not only of the functions of labor organization but also of the general functions of command. 127

Th erefore, Saint-Simon’s social message and his polemical attitude toward theocratic-military systems were still relevant. In fact, the organic age of the industrial society prophesied by the Saint-Simonians, of the new technical state, “the great technical offi ce, where technicians will develop plans for the rational optimization of intelligence and natural resources,” was still of topical interest. Th e planning of all activities would have been put into force exactly according to the Saint-Simonian conceptual pattern:

Once, management functions were linked with property. Today they are dissociated . . . and property is being transformed. Th is is what happens in the big economies, in which the proliferation of corporations extends this dissociation to an ever-greater part of production. Here the com- pany managers and technicians are not necessarily shareholders: in other words, a system comes into being in which the shareholders (that is, of the companies), have no technical rights on the property, which exists beyond their control, it grows and dies without them, while the boards of directors . . . use the technical results in order to make fi nancial decisions and conduct fi nancial operations.

Th e fundamental distinction therefore is between the shareholders and “the class of technicians who run the companies . . . , namely the large organiz- ing class of tomorrow’s world . . . made up of bourgeois and proletarian elements.”128 Redefi ning the social confl ict in such terms, Valois was presenting the technical state as an alternative to the American and Soviet models. It would be governed by a Trade Union Assembly of technocrats, charged with the planning and national organization of production and trade, and by a Pro- ducers Assembly, organized on a corporative basis.

It was thought, between 1922 and 1926, that the fascist state could be the European version of a strategy for the technical state: set up by a man who had been molded by socialism and, above all, by the thought of Marx and Sorel, it was thought that he would have integrated trade unionism

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within the state, in order to realize the rational organization of produc- tion. However, this hope has to be abandoned because the fascist state has liquidated workers’ trade unionism in favor of a corporatism dominated by employers’ organizations. 129

Fascism had betrayed the technocratic, trade union, and corporative plan in order to side with companies. Other pro-fascist writers, like Jean-Pierre Maxence, , and Th ierry Maulnier had also studied under Maurras, but they did not follow Valois’s antifascist evolution, and remained antidemocratic and, mainly, anti- Semitic:

We clearly see the weakness of a world without a credo, a world in which, as a credo, the socialists and the liberals only have profi t and productivity. Ford echoes Stalin, and the American example is taken up by the Soviet one, producing, strengthening, and increasing a concentration of materi- alism that leads to barbarism, with which, instead, it is necessary to make a break.130

Anti-Semitic writers, including Robert Brasillach, Maurice Bardèche, and Maurice Blanchot, joined Jeune Droite, and Maxence and Maulnier set up the Revue Française , whose collaborators also included the members of another neo-Saint-Simonian movement, : Robert Aron, Arnaud Dan- dieu, Daniel-Rops, René Dupuis, Jean Jardin, Alexandre Marc:

Th e material crisis also reveals what has been its real cause: above all a moral crisis and an error in the concept of man! It is in fact the order of the world—a spiritual order—that is at stake, but what is above all threat- ening Europe is the contempt it displays for the powers of the soul. Eu- rope will, instead, only fi nd salvation in a collective, converging eff ort to safeguard the spirit of man and the cultural tradition. 131

Louis de Bonald would have been well pleased to discover that, even aft er a century and a half, he still had faithful and unwavering followers.

Being antidemocratic, we denounce the absurdity of a regime based on numbers, whose nature excludes any freedom of spirit and any choice of opinion. . . . Being anticapitalists, we see the immense poverty of mod-

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ern man and the failure of capitalism. Being spiritual, we perceive in the universality of the present crisis the need for an essential remedy: giving back to man his real and authentic destiny, which is only spiritual. 132

Th e umpteenth periodical of the young, spiritual, antidemocratic, and an- ticapitalist Right, XX e siècle did not, however, hesitate to endorse the tech- nocratic and neo-corporative approach of the young neo-Saint-Simonians of Ordre Nouveau: founded in 1933 by Alexandre Marc-Lipiansky (a Russian Jew converted to Catholicism and a contributor to Esprit ), it was in fact di- rected by Arnaud Dandieu and Robert Aron who, two years earlier, had pub- lished two pamphlets that had been resoundingly hailed as the incunabula of the new ideology: Décadence de la nation française and Le cancer améric- ain .133 And it was as representatives of Ordre Nouveau that, in 1935, Robert Aron, Chemilly, and Dupuis participated in the Italo-French conference on corporatism, organized by the fascist Cultural Institute of Rome. Many other French corporatists also participated in that conference, including André Ul- mann, Louis-Émile Galey, and Emmanuel Mounier, for the periodical Esprit ; Georges Roditi and Paul Marion, for L’Homme Nouveau, the periodical of the neo-socialists; Pierre Frédéric, for the periodical Europe Nouvelle ; Jean de Fabrègues, for the Revue du XXe siècle ; Pierre Gimon for the organization Les Jeunesses Patriotes; Georges Viance for the Fédération Nationale Catholique; and Jean Lamaire for the Centre Polytechnique d’Informations Économiques . And the presence of high-ranking Italian politicians—Giuseppe Bottai, Ed- mondo Rossoni, Luigi Razza, Ugo Spirito, Ettore D’Andrea, Giovanni Attilio Fanelli—testifi ed to the importance which the Italian fascist hierarchy also attributed to that meeting. 134 A few months earlier, from his prison cell, had noted that the “technocratic fashion, inspired by so-called Americanism” seemed to show that, in Europe, some deep transformations were actually taking place: corporatist policies, the creation of new institutions of technical intervention in the economy, and Taylorist rationalization. But nevertheless in Italy “the corporative approach did not originate from the demands of an upheaval of the industrial technical conditions nor from those of a new economic pol- icy, but rather from the demands of an economic police, needs exacerbated by the crisis of 1929, and still extant.” 135 In other words, Italian corporatism did not have the dignity of a new economic policy but limited itself to an anti- working-class choice. In recent years, Charles Maier has shown that “technocratic-corporative” Americanism and its reception in Europe “did

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not coincide at all with the traditional alignment along the left -right axis” but crossed diff erent political parties and groups, characterized by a strong cul- tural syncretism and ranging from technocratic tendencies, modernism, and .136 Th ese groups could be said to include corporat- ists such as Ugo Spirito, the social engineers gathered at the Amsterdam Con- gress in 1931 organized by World Social Economic Planning, Henri de Man, Marcel Déat, George Valois, and the German revolutionary conservatives. Th e German radical conservative writer Moeller van den Bruck declared that modern technology could not lose its relationship with tradition and that “German socialism” had to link up with the corporative tradition, that is, with the “socialism of the ultramontane church,” with the “socialism of the Prussian state,” and, especially, with the socialism that, according to Spengler, identifi ed itself with “private enterprise endowed with the Germanic passion for power.”137 As Hans Freyer wrote, socialism had to be a “technical and pro- ductive rationality” at the service of military power and of the need to “clear the fi eld of the heterogeneous interference of industrial society.”138 Th e last moderns had to appear on the battlefi eld as “antiliberal” in politics and “Bol- sheviks” in economics. 139 I do not know of anti-Semitic writings by Georges Valois, but Marcel Déat’s initiation in the politics of persecution was explicit when he wanted to establish a party, the Rassemblement National Populaire, in order to organize a mass and “totalitarian” base for the Vichy regime (even though he contin- ued to criticize the État National until 1943 for its institutional weakness and its traditionalist tendencies). His program imperiously announced “the de- fense of the French ethnic community, against non-assimilable or deleterious racial elements, by means of measures of physiological, economic, and politi- cal protection.” And the break with his comrade and former fellow socialist, Charles Spinasse, was caused by the latter’s unwillingness to face the problem of a truly totalitarian policy and its persecutory implications for the Jews. Th e basis of his anti-Semitism was not therefore racial or religious but completely social and anticapitalist (even if, as late as 1937, Déat had spoken out, together with other Parisian political and religious fi gures, against the anti-Jewish measures in Germany). He accused the Jews of being guilty of “an international solidarity” and therefore of being involved in a conspiracy that, among other things, had led to France’s defeat. And certainly Léon Blum was one of the main organizers of this conspiracy. Vichy’s anti-Semitic policy should not, therefore, have followed racial but economic criteria and should

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have protected “French” labor with the aim of ensuring “the defense of the na- tion” against the Jewish conspiracy.140 With these words, at the end of his journey, Déat had clearly come to ac- cept the so-called Drumont paradigm. Th is constitutes a further and very obvious confi rmation that the author of La France Juive was once again em- bodying the emblem of anti-Jewish propaganda: in 1930 Henry Coston had revived the newspaper founded in 1892, La Libre Parole ; in 1931, Georges Ber- nanos had dedicated La grande peur des bien-pensants to Drumont; in 1935, Jean Drault had likened him to Hitler; in 1938, Maurras and Daudet—for the same reason—had hailed Drumont as the prophet who had foretold the Jewish conquest of the world, by means of both fi nance and of the Bolshevik conquest.141

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THE DARK CORE OF ITALIAN CIVILIZATION

FASCISM AND THE PATH OF PAOLO ORANO

THE SUPERSTITION OF SCIENCE, AND SUBVERSION

In 1892, the organizer of the fi rst French anti-Jewish action squads, the Mar- quis de Morès, had announced that “the next revolution would be social” and that it would be fought against the Jews.1 A few years later, one of the found- ers of Action Française, Henri Vaugeois, added: “Th e two passions that face the country, the plebiscitary one and the anti-Semitic, are certainly the only revolutionary forces that nationalism can use to counter the parliamentary system that consigns us to the foreigner.”2 By then, democracy had been de- fi nitively downgraded to an instrument of the conspiracy hatched by foreign- ers, the Jews. Th e culmination of this process was—as has been seen—a fi rst clumsy draft of a socialist-nationalist synthesis, attempted by the disciples of Maurras and Sorel in the name of Proudhon, with the experience of the foun- dation, near the Great War, of the association named aft er him, “le Cercle Proudhon.” Th is nationalist and—at the same time—revolutionary associa- tion was acclaimed in some quarters in Europe, and especially in Italy, among the nationalist and revolutionary syndicalists who had left the Socialist Party in 1908 and had espoused imperialistic nationalist ambitions as early as the time of the war against the Ottoman Empire for the conquest of the Dodeca- nese Islands and Libya.3 Th e implications of the history of these revolutionary national syndical- ists for the development of Italian pre-fascist anti-Semitism have never been exhaustively investigated. Th is is why I suggest, through the study of the bi- ography and works of Paolo Orano, an interpretation of the course of Eu- ropean anti-Jewish anticapitalism and its culmination in fascism; that is, in the political myth of “Italian civilization,” based on “Latin civilization” and

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“Christianity.” Mussolini admitted on several occasions the importance of French culture, and in particular of the works of Balzac and Renan, for the development of his views, and he repeated this in 1932, in his interview with Emil Ludwig and even included in the canon of fascism the names of Georges Sorel, Charles Péguy, Hubert Lagardelle, and their counterparts in Italy: the revolutionary syndicalists Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Paolo Orano, and Enrico Leone, whom Mussolini recalls in La dottrina del fascismo (Th e doctrine of fascism). In the case of Orano, the historian is confronted by a very personal rep- resentation of fascism and its categories, such as totalitarianism and its po- litical religion. Th is representation is deeply marked by its revolutionary syndicalist and nationalist origins. In fact, from the end of the nineteenth century—precisely from 1898—Paolo Orano developed an idea of “Roman and Christian Latinity”—as opposed to Germanic Europe and the Judaic Orient—which constituted the platform on which he would construct his own representation of Roman fascist totalitarianism, but the anti-Semitic im- plications of his views would, however, develop only later, in the years when he distanced himself from the Socialist Party and transformed his syndicalist revolutionary anticapitalism into an anti-Jewish anticapitalism. It was also in those years that his links with French culture (particularly important in the case of Gabriel Tarde’s social psychology) was reinforced through the media- tion of his wife, Camille Mallarmé, with whom he waged a frenetic battle to set up a Franco-Italian entente for military intervention in the World War I. And Camille would also have been at his side in the anti-Semitic press cam- paign of the 1930s, writing articles on the same subjects in the French news- paper Je Suis Partout . In his study on Th e Protocols of the Elders of Zion , De Michelis observes that when this false document appeared, it “did not have an impact outside Russia, let alone Italy.” In those years the code of an anti-Semitism very simi- lar to the message of the Protocols , was being formed: “Some ideas spread by the Protocols had therefore also circulated in the Italy of Umberto I and the belle époque, both in the Catholic camp (Il Mulo ) and the nationalist one (La Lupa ).”4 With regard to the latter instance, De Michelis is alluding to Orano’s contact with Russian exiles,5 hence, to a hypothetical indirect knowledge of Th e Protocols . Th is knowledge might be real, but, in my opinion, it is not nec- essary in order to explain the source of the anti-Semitism of this left -wing socialist and revolutionary leader. His familiarity with foreign syndicalistic and nationalist culture, therefore with the French cultural prehistory of Th e

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Protocols , would suffi ce to clarify the origin of his approach: Orano knew the works of a lot of French anti-Jewish propagandists such as Édouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, and those of the Cercle Proudhon. So Orano began the anti-Jewish campaign in Italy, which paved the way for the passing of the fascist racial laws more than twenty years later. Gli ebrei in Italia was published by the Casa Editrice Pinciana of Rome in May 1937 and reprinted as early as December of the same year, following the success of the fi rst edition. 6 Th is pamphlet marked the opening of the press campaign against and caused an immediate and very widespread stir. It was reviewed in the most prestigious national newspapers, from the Corriere della Sera to the Tribuna . Th en—having been offi cially sanctioned by the approval of Il Popolo d’Italia —it was relaunched by innumerable local newspapers and the broadsheets of the regime’s organizations. 7 More than one historian (in- cluding Renzo De Felice, Antonio Spinosa, and Meir Michaelis) has hypothe- sized that the text was commissioned by Mussolini, but a notation in Giorgio Pini’s diary would seem to refute this interpretation: this record could be of some importance, because Giorgio Pini had been editor-in-chief of Musso- lini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia from 1936 to 1943 (when publication of the newspaper ceased) and during all those years Pini took notes, in his diary, of all his meetings and talks with Mussolini. From whatever source the original impetus for the publication of Orano’s pamphlet may have come, it excellently performed the function of a fi nal bal- lon d’essai .8 Paolo Orano was the perfect man to test the response of journal- ists, leaders, and activists to the possible launch of an anti-Jewish campaign: Gramsci observed in his Quaderni , written in 1932, it is always necessary to bear “in mind that Paolo Orano . . . has oft en spoken ‘unoffi cially’ ” on be- half of the regime. 9 Nevertheless, from several quarters there is a continuing tendency to consider Orano’s 1937 operation as being, to a certain extent, in- adequate because his formulation of the “Jewish question” would have been unsuitable and unproductive for the census, the legislation, and the persecu- tion. 10 In fact, his perspective would soon have been superseded by one based on biological racism, much more suitable for determining who could be clas- sifi ed as Jewish and therefore segregated, discriminated against, persecuted. On July 14, 1938, the well-known manifesto of the Italian scientists, “Il fas- cismo e i problemi della razza,” appeared in Il Giornale d’Italia. And from that moment, the dominant paradigm, but not the only one, of anti-Jewish propaganda became the racial anti-Semitism formulated by Guido Landra, Sergio Sergi, and the other Italian scientists, demographers, biologists, and

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physicians on the basis of a biological, anthropological, and demographic framework inspired by the nineteenth-century French writer . It was such a paradigm that mainly shaped the political language and the actions of the institutions, starting with the Direzione Generale De- mografi a e Razza (Headquarters of the demographics and race institute). Th e nationalist and Catholic authors also followed suit. Mussolini, however, perhaps “with superfi ciality and fatuousness” (as Renzo De Felice writes) or perhaps intentionally, permitted this language to be superseded by other rhetorics. 11 Th ese included Nicola Pende’s language of “eugenics” but also the spiritualistic taxonomy of and the na- tionalistic and traditionalist publications promoted by the Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura (National Fascist Cultural Institute), like the writings of the classical scholar Pietro de Francisci and Giacomo Acerbo. Th ese two writ- ers—in particular—immediately appeared to be more in tune with the anti- Jewish Christian and Latin tradition and more acceptable to ecclesiastical and Catholic circles. On the one hand, the biological paradigm was certainly use- ful for passing the persecutory legislation but, on the other hand, it appeared to be less in line with the most deeply rooted national cultural traditions. Af- ter all, it was Giacomo Acerbi who emerged as the reference point for all the anti-Jewish ideologists not characterized by biological racism. 12 Th e result was confusing and uncertain fascist propaganda, in terms of both political language and regulations. In this context of uncertainty, the tra- ditionally well established anti-Semitic broadsheets also regained attention and credit: they included Interlandi’s Il Tevere and Giovanni Preziosi’s Vita Italiana. In that period, the Preziosi-Farinacci alliance (the alliance between this old anti-Semitic journalist and Roberto Farinacci, a socialist militant who had become the leader of the violent fascist squads in Cremona and the Secretary of the PNF in 1925) became—as Arnaldo Momigliano noted in a letter written to Federico Chabod aft er the war—one of the vehicles of the “at- tempted and progressive Nazifi cation of fascist ideology.”13 An anti-Semitic nouvelle vague, which claimed to be antibourgeois and more revolutionary, then seemed to be on a collision course with Orano’s anti-Jewish views. In fact, it even gave some groups of extremist and consequently racist university students the opportunity of accusing Orano (an authentic pioneer of national anti-Semitism) of showing indulgence and “pietism toward certain Jewish professors” expelled from the university. Th ese groups of students went so far as to challenge Orano’s inauguration speech for the academic year at the University of Perugia, of which he was . 14

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In such a context, it is not at all surprising that the Babel of fascist ideologi- cal anti-Semitic propaganda appeared, to Guido Ludovico Luzzatto—a so- cialist Jewish leader who had fl ed to Paris—a very ideological confusion and a typical “Italian carnival.” Having emigrated to avoid arrest, Luzzatto made, in June 1939, a fi rst assessment of the persecutory policy aft er the promulgation of the racial laws, stigmatizing it as “the farce, the tragedy, and the operetta” of a “prehistoric regime as bizarre and accommodating as it is brutal.”15 Contrary to the opinion of some scholars, Orano’s book published in 1937 is, in my view, an important text because it has to be considered evidence of the fi rmly established stratifi cation, in the regime’s propaganda, of the dif- ferent anti-Jewish Italian parlance. In other words, it is evidence of what— adapting the title of a text of that period by the nationalist historian Gioac- chino Volpe—we could defi ne as “the variety of Italian anti-Semitism.” But Orano’s text can also be considered the culmination of his political and intellectual journey, which is extremely enlightening as regards Mussolini’s own cultural path and, therefore, also for his attitude to the so-called Jewish question. 16 In that journey, the legacy of anti-Jewish anticapitalism or, rather, of a real anti-Semitic “socialism” played a role of primary importance. Th e text, therefore, should be assessed from a completely diff erent perspective than the prevailing one in current studies, in which it is only considered on the basis of its possible inadequacy in relation to anti-Jewish legislation. I take as my starting point an incisive judgment expressed by one of the most important scholars of the Italian novecento , Delio Cantimori. In the preface to Renzo de Felice’s Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (1961), Cantimori states that “the prejudices common to Mussolini’s generation and to the slightly earlier ones” refl ected, in large measure, the stereotypes “of Italian culture” between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cantimori naturally recalled the Coppola case in the context of the nationalism of the early twentieth century and cited the presence of themes of the anti-Jewish Catholic tradition in the religious press and in the attitudes of the ecclesiasti- cal hierarchy. Finally, he referred to the controversial attitudes of some liberal conservatives, but he concentrated above all on the manifestations of hatred from “republican, socialist, revolutionary, and nihilistic” circles, which had “developed in the campaigns against Freemasonry, democratism, and some Jewish circles.”17 An investigation of the texts from revolutionary syndicalist, republi- can, socialist, but also nationalist Italian anti-Jewish anticapitalist literature can, therefore, help us to understand which ideological mechanisms and

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rhetorical solutions contributed to the development of fascist anti-Semitism. And, in this perspective, Orano’s last work, Gli ebrei in Italia , can also un- doubtedly be considered the outcome of an ideological position that had de- veloped from socialist and revolutionary syndicalist positions, as well as from the more modern type of anti-Jewish anticapitalism. Th is anticapitalism had signifi cantly changed and had become a kind of corporatism well before the Great War, with the acceptance of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and of the legacy of imperial Rome as the political hierarchical models of “Italian civi- lization.” Th e 1937 anti-Jewish paradigm therefore, paradoxically, documents the acceptance, by an old revolutionary socialist (who had become a nation- alist), of the theses of traditionalist Catholics hostile to Jewish emancipation and, more precisely, of the prejudice that had been started as early as the end of the eighteenth century by Louis de Bonald against usury and against the conspiracy that had produced the French Revolution. Th is is the proof of the ways in which the old “intransigent Christian pattern” came to be renewed within the framework of an ideology constructed on the myth of Roman civi- lization and Catholic . But this “return” to the anti-Jewish tradition also reveals the ultimate his- torical signifi cance of the revolutionary syndicalist path: in fact, with the fu- turists and the veterans, the former socialist revolutionary syndicalists formed the three original nuclei of the 1919 national-revolutionary fascist movement, which barely two years later, in 1921, would have abandoned any claims to subversiveness to yield, in a disciplined way, to Mussolini’s reactionary strat- egy. Orano was one of the most eminent revolutionary syndicalists, and more than fi ft een years later, he was raised to the highest levels of the hierarchy and hailed as a member of the regime’s intellectual aristocracy: shortly aft erward, he would also be appointed a Senator of the Kingdom, a gratifying path for someone who, in his youth, had had to make do with the meager salary of a high school teacher or a journalist of the socialist newspaper Avanti! and of innumerable other socialist broadsheets.18 Orano certainly did not come from plebeian origins: his mother, Maria Berti, had been a ministerial offi cial, and a maternal uncle, Domenico Berti, had been a university professor, a parliamentary deputy for two terms and minister of education. He studied at university (but the anti-Semitism of his maturity was not, as has been written, the result of his education in the positivist school of sociology), in Naples with Antonio Labriola, and aft er in Rome with Giuseppe Sergi, the head, together with Luigi Pigorini, of the Ro- man Institute of Physical Anthropology. Being interested in the problem of

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Sardinian delinquency, he had been asked by Alfredo Niceforo to accompany him to the island, and Orano’s fi rst two works derived from this experience: Psicologia della Sardegna (Th e psychology of Sardinia) and Il rinnovamento della Sardegna (Th e renewal of Sardinia), which were published, respectively, in 1896 and 1897. Th ese texts gave rise to the fi rst of the many doctrinal and journalistic clashes that accompanied his literary life: on this occasion, with Guglielmo Ferrero, regarding the Latin-Germanic racial rivalry, and with Et- tore Pais, about Sardinian history under Roman rule.19 Orano had, therefore, had a positivist grounding in anthropology, but Giuseppe Bottai (one of the most intelligent fascist leaders and minister of education), in an incisive portrait drawn in the last year of Orano’s life, un- derlined how “his thinking was infl uenced mainly by the French element, represented in his family by his wife, Camille Mallarmé, a descendant of the poet, related to many politicians of the Republic. Certainly his whole educa- tional development has been French.”20 Th e “French culture” to which Bottai was referring was that of the end of the nineteenth century, when France provided an exemplary anticipation of the crisis of Enlightenment values and antidemocratic tendencies that would inevitably also concern other countries: the “culture of fi n de siècle crisis” produced a real rejection of parliamentarianism but was also immediately ready to decree a rejection of the classic response to the crisis of democ- racy: Caesarism (including its version beyond the Rhine, that of Bismarck). In any case, Orano was fascinated by the criticism of the Enlightenment, of eighteenth-century rationalism and the “naive” faith in Reason as the basis of the rights of citizenship.21 Th e French “element” in Orano’s ideology, of which Bottai writes, was therefore a kind of frenetic anti-Enlightenment, marked by the search for an antipolitical alternative to democracy: La démocratie serait-elle césarienne ou libérale? .22 Without daring to answer this question, Orano remained obsessed by the danger of the break-up of society “under the impact of the masses,” and—like all the theoreticians of decadence and crisis—he was convinced of the excessive power of the Jewish fi nancial feudality. Like other writers he was terrifi ed that mass society would prevent the “bourgeoisie” from exercising its role as the ruling class and saw the democratic mass society, the rights of citi- zenship, universal suff rage and parliamentarianism as the terrible forces that would disrupt civilization. 23 In order to combat them it would be necessary to activate all the possible responses in favor of social cohesion: in other words, reorganizing intermediate bodies, exercising scientifi c knowledge capable of

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understanding society, and using the Catholic Church’s age-old wisdom. In this way, the path of the socialist Freemason and sociologist Orano encoun- tered that of the Catholic anti-Enlightenment tradition. In Italy, the stimulus for a dialogue between sociology and the new forms of spirituality came from important periodicals like Nuova Antologia and au- thors such as Angelo Mosso, Felice Tocco, and Decio Cortesi. Some initiatives in this direction had already come from discussions started by Pasquale Tu- riello and Cesare Lombroso. At the end of the nineteenth century, the European societies found them- selves incapable of organizing their economic development and their in- creasingly complex internal structure, and in Italy, neither the institutions nor the traditional systems seemed able to restrain the strong processes of transformation. Italian sociology, therefore, followed an antiscientifi c and irrationalistic approach, and rigorous empirical investigation and respect for positive data were replaced by moralistic or pseudopsychological cat- egories such as “decadence,” “regressive evolution,” “crisis of civilization,” and “interracial war.” Studies, articles, and pamphlets dealing with social pathologies, delinquency, and criminal behavior proliferated, extolling a new cult of the collective: “Today the individual disappears—in politics, in the face of that collective body that is the party or the nation—in science, in the face of that collective body that is the species.” 24 Th e “reforming breath” fueled by the myth of progress—wrote Giustino Fortunato—had been cancelled “by a deep crisis, such as could not be remem- bered, [which] disturbs and dissolves both the social order and the science that refl ects it.”25 Th e “breakdown of the old convictions,” already denounced by Gaetano Mosca, opened the way to the bitter realization that the original defects of the new Italian state had not been eliminated at all nor cured, start- ing from the backwardness of southern society and the “barbarity” of those underdeveloped peoples who fostered the proliferation of “evil associations” and criminal powers.26 In addition to the southern problem, there were the new questions of the second industrial revolution, the disordered growth of the cities, and class confl icts. Orano’s interest in the southern lower classes and his abstruse thoughts about their “inferiority” were therefore fueled by this literature and an erro- neous interpretation of Lombroso (whom he praised in a medallion of 1914), and above all by the views of Sergi. 27 Orano, however, always wavered be- tween biological determinism and a partial acceptance of cultural psycho- logical conditioning, without ever deciding in favor of the primacy of “physi-

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cal characteristics” or of customs and languages. 28 Sergi, in fact, had opted for genetic determinism, which, according to him, explained the “degenera- tion [of the southern peoples], namely the fact that individuals and their de- scendants who, not having perished in the struggle for existence, survive in inferior conditions and are hardly adapted to face all the phenomena of the subsequent struggle.”29 Orano completely accepted these views of Sergi and saw in the biologi- cal and social backwardness of the Sardinian lower classes the reason for the worst characteristics of the island race: “a bandit people because of the ban- ditry of their soul, a barbaric people because of its restrained vigor, its exclu- sive slowness of gestures, its thirst for mordancy, for the atrocious, rancid, hostile.” So that “by means of a hundred diff erent observations a folk psy- chologist can detect the enormous range of high and low degrees of biological characteristics and of instinctive behavior in Sardinia, compared to those of any other country.”30 Nevertheless, the pathological state of the social organ- ism did not exclude the usefulness of interventions: those suggested by Orano were not very diff erent from those indicated in Pais’s report to the Cham- ber of Deputies, 31 but Orano had argued against this report, thus indicating a theoretical uncertainty that became explicit precisely in the “parallel dispute” with Guglielmo Ferrero. In his representation of the “Latin race,” Orano wrote that the latter, in past centuries, had not prevented, indeed, had permitted “an enormous develop- ment in poetry, politics, science, and morality.” And, in no way embarrassed by his theoretical somersaults, in order to defend “Italianness” and “Latinity,” he quickly adapted his point of view to blame Italian political decadence on the “Spanish and German tyrannies” from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In other words, he blamed history and the lack of political indepen- dence in Italian history: 32 “We are what our history has made us, a people of the greatest vitality, who can give through its genius and its work everything that the rest of the world cannot give and cannot conceive of.”33 Orano always swung between these two types of explanations, the bio- logical and the historical and cultural, but he was always good at hiding his own confusion behind peremptory exclamations. In a page of his Quaderni del carcere , Gramsci notes that “these opinions which had already been wide- spread for some time . . . were consolidated and formulated by the positiv- ist sociologists (Niceforo, Ferri, Orano), taking on the prestige of ‘scientifi c truths’ in a period of the superstition of science.”34 However, it was only a question of “inane sociology” and of “stupidity and platitudes embellished

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with preciosity, which, through Enrico Ferri, had in their time also infected the Socialist Party.” For such writers “if the south is backward, it is not the fault of the capitalist system or of any other historical cause, but of nature, which has made the southerners lazy, useless, criminals and barbarians.” A few years earlier, in Alcuni temi della questione meridionale, Gramsci had ad- mitted that “in this way the Socialist Party gave its approval to all the ‘south- ern’ literature of the cabal of writers of the so-called Positivist School, such as Ferri, Sergi, Niceforo, Orano, and their followers.” 35 It had been the socialist leader Enrico Ferri who had enabled Orano to work for the Rivista di Sociologia and Tribuna and then to join the Roman editorial staff of Avanti!. But in 1902, Orano also joined the extreme Left , tak- ing sides against his political mentor, Ferri, and working with Enrico Leone, Giovanni Nava, and Michele Bianchi on the newspaper Gioventù Socialista , the organ of the Federazione Giovanile. He placed himself under the protec- tion of the revolutionary syndicalist leader Alceste De Ambris and, in sub- sequent years, he wrote many articles for other revolutionary and left -wing broadsheets: Lotta Proletaria , L’Energia , Il Divenire Sociale . His anti-Jewish prejudice is not, however, to be regarded as the result of his bizarre late positivist ideological make-up. In his political interventions against the reformist or “centrist” leaders such as Filippo Turati or Ferri, Orano instead repeated the themes and antidemocratic arguments that had already emerged in the critical assessment of his experience with Italian Free- masonry: at that time he had criticized the “idleness of the sect,” the base corporative interests of the democratic-Freemason block, and also the “work of the Israelite activists.”36 And in his disputes with Turati’s political inactiv- ity and Ferri’s empty words, he had been able to present an equally empty mythology of a general strike. However, the theoretical characteristics of his proposal did not coincide exactly with those of the revolutionary syndicalism of French direct action, which had made the grève générale the linchpin of its antipolitical, autonomist, and decidedly revolutionary strategy. 37 French revolutionary syndicalism opposed the integration of the labor movement in the Republic, taking up Proudhon’s theory of the breakaway of the proletariat from society’s rules and institutions. It therefore clashed di- rectly with politics and, more specifi cally, with the proletariat’s political par- ty.38 In Italy, instead, the dialogue between Giovanni Giolitti and some sectors of the labor movement never completely stifl ed the capacity to fi ght of the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano, Italian Socialist Party), which was sometimes fa- vored, sometimes restrained by the political instability of broad swathes of

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the population and of the lower classes. Th e structure of the party and of Ital- ian socialist organizations was much more composite and fl exible, therefore favorable to the alternation between diff erent political leaderships. Th e Italian labor movement was much more socially and geographically diversifi ed than the French trade-union context, and the pluralism of the Italian trade fed- erations, associations, and union leadership always off ered a political space within the Socialist Party. Th us the PSI became a powerful agent of the politi- cal socialization of the lower classes. 39 Until their expulsion, the revolutionary syndicalists tried to present an ef- fective alternative strategy and fought to attain the leadership of the party.40 In Italy, many characteristics on which French revolutionary syndicalism had built its own identity belonged, if anything, to Turati’s opposing reformist side, such as organizational federalism and the propensity for the autonomy of territorial organizations. Th e ascent of the revolutionary syndicalists was favored by the jamming of the virtuous economic mechanism in the fi rst months of Giolitti’s experi- ment of government; the workers’ defeats followed in 1902 and 1903. Taking into consideration this crisis, the revolutionary leader Arturo Labriola, in 1904, joined the Anti-Protectionist League founded by the eminent liberal economists Luigi Einaudi, Edoardo Giretti, and Antonio De Viti De Marco. Labriola theorized the need for a convergence with the orthodox economists committed to a “separation between the economy and the state” and to stem- ming the state’s “interventionism” in the social sphere that was the strength of Giolitti’s policy. Having fi rst emerged in Neapolitan socialism and rooted in the south, Labriola’s revolutionary component successively attained control of the socialist movement and the Milanese Trade Union Headquarters, the Turinese industrial center, the manual areas of Mantua and Ferrara, and the newspaper L’Avanguardia Socialista . But the revival of Giolitti’s experiment in government paved the way for the fi nal marginalization of the revolutionary leaders. Th ey reacted by cre- ating new Trade Union Headquarters, from Milan to Piombino, separating from the general unions, and trying to infi ltrate the leadership of the General Labor Confederation. Th e defeat of their strategy was sealed above all in the rural areas of the Po Valley, where they were overtaken by the landowners’ initiative and by the proposals of joint participation put forward by the land- owners. Th e latter, in the end, managed to blunt the militancy of the laborers’ associations and to separate them from the other categories of bound labor, small landowners, and sharecroppers.41 Th is happened precisely where the

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laborers’ trade unions had aimed at organizing, around their headquarters, truly united territorial communities in order to oppose the control of nego- tiations for public-works contracts. In the Po Valley, in Parma, Ferrara, and the nearby provinces, the laborers’ trade unions were defeated, and, in 1907, aft er a series of struggles, the political reaction became irreversible. In this period, Orano was frenetically active as a public speaker. Aft er hav- ing shown himself to be increasingly hostile to a cautious approach toward the reformists, he also accused his comrade Arturo Labriola of paying too much attention to party dialectics and drew closer to the antipolitical posi- tions of Angelo Olivetti and the periodical Pagine Libere . 42 His enormous journalistic production never succeeded, however, in achieving any origi- nality and was primarily characterized by his obsessive dispute with Giolitti, Turati, and Ferri and their policy of “integrating” the labor movement in the system. Orano spent a long time traveling in the rural areas of the north but also operated in some urban enclaves in the south, always unscrupulously us- ing both the neoliberal arguments against and the revision of ortho- doxy updated by Sorel. Th is was done to revitalize the “subversive” strategy. When, fi nally, aft er the Socialist Congress of Ferrara in 1907, the revolution- ary syndicalists led by Arturo Labriola left the party to create an autonomous antipolitical movement around newspapers such as Lotta di classe , Avanguar- dia Socialista , and Demolizione , Orano followed them and worked on these publications. 43 His torrential production of sociological and political writings also came to include a new fi eld of investigation, religion. His most famous texts, in this context, such as Cristo e Quirino , Critica Nuova , Italia Cattolica, and Il problema del Cristianesimo , were fi nally collected in his most extensive and best-known work in this fi eld: Cristo e Quirino. Il problema del Cristianesimo , published in 1908, soon aft er he had left the Socialist Party. It was at this stage that Orano coupled the categories of “Latinity” and “Christianity.” Th e birth of the Christian church was interpreted, together with the development of Roman law, as a historical process totally indepen- dent of the history of Judaism and at variance with Eastern messianiasm. In fact, “the soil in which history was made” had been that of the Roman Em- pire, that is “the prevalence of the world that was already Latin, and [that] was made by means of force and resistance . . . : that marvelous society that then created the law, the result of the slow and precise, deep and systematic devel- opment of conquest.”44

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Cristo e Quirino was reprinted uninterruptedly until 1928, and, the follow- ing year, the fi nal edition was publicly praised by Mussolini in his famous speech to the Chamber of the Fasces on the occasion of the signing of the Lateran Pacts. Th is work takes on an even more crucial importance, for us, as it is indispensable in order to understand the development of Orano’s anti- Semitism: in fact, the thesis of Cristo e Quirino would be updated and taken up again in the 1937 pamphlet, Gli ebrei in Italia , and it therefore constitutes a decisive connecting point between the syndicalist phase and the regime’s anti-Semitism. With an air of daring, Orano stated that he had abandoned “the worn-out tools of philology and history,” distancing himself both from the “rationalism of Renan” and the “entire German historical school of Christianity, from Da- vid Strauss to Harnack.” He then declared that he urgently wanted to satisfy “a need for a conclusion induced by a sociological transformation,” that is, the great transformation of modern society into a mass society that needs modern totalitarian institutions. Th is would be necessary to liquidate the old historicist thesis of Christianity as an expression of “the land of Palestine” and “the ideas and feelings of a distant rabbi, [who had been] condemned to the gallows, as an anarchist, by the Latin state.” 45 His conclusion was clear: Chris- tianity was the result of the encounter among “the Catholic religion, Roman law, and a hierarchical construction.” Formulated by a revolutionary syndi- calist, it was undoubtedly an original thesis. Judeo-Christian religiosity had always been a form of Eastern spirituality, “enclosed in a personal horizon.” Th e West had managed to turn the words of the gospel into a message essentially addressed to the “gentiles,” with Paul of Tarsus, and to make Christianity the religion of the whole of mankind, that is, the state religion of the Roman Empire. “Europe accepts Christianity, but does not conform to it. Th e West, in other words, adulterates Christianity to produce its resulting form, which is the Church, Catholicism, and the pope,” in order to raise Roman law to a model of society “severe, rigid, based on force and hierarchy.” Th e synthesis of Latinity and Christianity was therefore necessarily destined to lead to the political form of empire, the “monarchist- Caesaristic stage” that had expressed the “trends and needs of the masses” of the most mature historical period of the ancient world. 46 Th e Roman Empire had fallen, but only because the fusion of Catholicism and Caesarism had not been perfect. Aft er many centuries, however, Christianity had once again succeeded in off ering Europe, during the Middle Ages, a new theological

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and political model of a “caste, political and legal”: Medieval Christian- ity represented Europe’s authentic identity and a political model that was in no way spent. On the contrary, it was more vital than ever and more useful than ever in opposing the fragile representative-democratic institutions: that model—maintained Orano—that had renewed itself in the “real, positive, and social currents” and in the “mass spirit” of the “trade union and national community.”47 Th is passage exhaustively documents how, as early as 1908, Orano’s syn- dicalist language had been clearly contaminated by the arguments and the rhetorical models of the intransigent Catholic reaction to the Enlightenment, to political universalism, and to parliamentarianism refashioned by the na- tionalists, particularly by the theoreticians of Action Française. It reveals the transition from late positivist culture and revolutionary syndicalism to a so- cial and hierarchical nationalism based on the ideology of Latinity.

ANTI-JEWISH ANTICAPITALISM AND LA LUPA

His adherence to a trade-union national program became explicit with Orano’s declaration in favor of military intervention against the Ottoman Empire, in 1911. Aft er the Great War, Orano joined the Italian Labor Union and in 1919 was elected to the Chamber of Deputies representing the Vet- erans’ Sardinian Party; the following year, he enthusiastically hailed the Fiume enterprise and the trade-union and corporatist constitution draft ed by D’Annunzio and De Ambris, the Charter of Quarnaro. 48 Th e most original expression of his thought was in his articles in the revo- lutionary syndicalist weekly newspaper La Lupa , which he set up in October 1910, but these texts are also the most comprehensive evidence of his decid- edly anti-Jewish approach, his economic and social anti-Semitism, the violent development of his consistent polemic against the reformists of the Social- ist Party, and the block between “Giolittian” capitalism and Turati’s socialist movement, embodied by the prime minister, “the Jew” Luigi Luzzatti. 49 As a reference point for the banking and industrial interests clustered around Giovanni Giolitti through the network of Masonic connections, the “Jew Luzzatti” would have favored the links between “Masonic-democratic capitalism” and the socialist cooperatives. And so he would have corrupted, thanks to the Socialist leader, also a Jew, Claudio Treves, the leadership of the trade-union movement. Freemasonry, liberal democracy, and reformist socialism appeared to be a consistent corporative alliance of interests domi-

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nated by Jews, who had reduced the Socialist Party to a “bourgeois party, on the margins of politics” and dominated by the “activities of the bank, which is called the cooperative movement.” Th is had been possible thanks to the “aid, measures, and provisions of anti-ecclesiastical and Talmudic liberalism.” Luzzatti, Treves, and the mayor of Rome, “the Jew Ernesto Nathan,” were thus repeatedly attacked and accused of constituting the leadership of “a kind of Jewish imperialism.”50 Th e signifi cance of the controversy is evident. Anti-Semitism was not the eff ect of Orano’s nationalist choice; it was, if anything, the cause of his seeking out and producing an alliance with the nationalists. Th is alliance was consid- ered necessary precisely in order to reopen the paths of the anticapitalist rev- olution in the new conditions of war among nations. So the strategy for 1910 and 1911 paved the way for the turning point of May 1915. A merciless analysis of the facts shows how the “political system in Italy, like the administrative one, is in the process of being completely conquered by a slow, enveloping Jewish operation. . . . We are talking about Latin Judaism, which has been to- tally infecting, through and clandestine obstacles, a dense network of Masonic lodges, sections of free thinkers, popular blocks.” 51 Aft er having praised “anti-Semitic France” and the “alliance made in France between Sorelians and neo-monarchists,” Orano indicated, for the socialist movement, a new alternative strategy, according to which, “it would be nec- essary to abandon the old, ambiguous, infl exible concept of democracy, . . . which has amalgamated and mixed up orders, instincts, and values.” It would also be necessary to fi ght all the reformists. Th ese would include the Liberals and radicals in Great Britain, the Republican “opportunists” in France, and the demo-liberal block in Italy, dominated by Giolitti and Freemasonry and “in which the Jewish element prevails.”52 If the Jews were leading this demo- cratic-liberal-reformist block, cemented by the anticlerical ideology, the only solution would be to counter it with the grouping of Catholics, nationalists, and revolutionary syndicalists in order to sweep away Luzzatti and Giolitti, breathe new life into productive and anti-plutocratic revolutionary socialism, and remove the Jews from power. In no way embarrassed by his youthful membership in Freemasonry, Orano concluded:

One must be unjust, not serene, and partisan not to admit that the Jew- ish element in Freemasonry is dominant, like the one which, inclined in- stinctively to oppose, to wipe out not only the political Church, but the

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Church as a religious institution . . . Freemasonry is not only Jewish sym- bols; [it] has resolutely and in many ways prepared a whole program to take possession of Italy, in which it plans to eliminate the least sign and spirit and form of Catholicism. Th is blocking anticlericalism is the pro- fane, and currently victorious, fl ag of this war plan . . . of Israel—Luigi Luzzatti, Ernesto Nathan and Claudio Treves. 53

Th e anti-Jewish and anticapitalist polemic soon fused with the fi ght against “Giolittian democracy” and the anticapitalist commitment found clear ex- pression in a warmongering approach. In fact, “the class of the producers wants to arrive at its own war” to “assert its own existence” and take on the “dignity of a conqueror” 54—he would write shortly aft erward—because the war would fi nally have led to the defeat of those “socialists who have inher- ited from Jewish thought . . . the concept of the episodic nature of war and the provisional character of armed confl ict.” 55 Th e pro-war campaign would have led to the triumph of the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism and na- tional socialism, as had happened in France, where the ideas of the “industri- ous antidemocratic Parisian atelier”—made up of “Sorel, Péguy, Maurras, and Daudet”—had taken shape. It was also in that atelier that “Catholicism, syn- dicalism, monarchy, intellectual revolution were the sharp shining points,” all turned “against the Republic and its Jewish nucleus, comfortably growing in the French state.”56 Orano thus explicitly recognized that he was in tune with French anti-Jewish anticapitalism, declaring that “the West is the ground in which history was made and where all the associations of facts and ideas have been possible; aft er all, the East is nothing other than a big dazzling display of useless movement”: Th e East, therefore Judaism.57 “I have noticed that the Jewish and Masonic infl uence scatters and extinguishes in Italy the very char- acteristics of the Latin spirit that I, a revolutionary syndicalist, feel, bolster, and preserve in myself,” wrote Orano on November 13, 1910.58 In order to avoid the drift ing of “an Italy without a destiny of economic and political revolution,” revolutionary syndicalism should have developed a new strategy, “the policy of national interest” against “the Italy of Israel.” It should also have accepted the necessity of military expenditure in order to enter world economic competition—wrote his collaborator Massimo Fovel— and even support the electoral victory of a conservative Catholic, to defeat the “Jewish Trimurti” of Luzzatti, Nathan, and Treves, Giolitti’s allies. Finally, revolutionary syndicalism should have fought to “ensure the antitheses, guar- antee competition, preserve—by increasing them—the arguments in favor of

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social life and enforce a subordination that Judaism and socialism consider absurd.”59 From October 1910 to October 1911, in the few months La Lupa ex- isted, Orano nevertheless had the time to reveal his ambition of representing the interests of the “mavericks of any political party . . . fortifi ed by an experi- ence that has not exhausted or disillusioned us, but that spurs us on to ask the majority . . . for a more willing, more alert, and more resolute energy.” 60 But what could bring together, even unite, those whom Orano had called “the mavericks” not only of socialism but of all the parties? Th e bond pro- posed among these heterodox people remained antiparliamentarianism, even though in a totally renewed form (compared to the old antiparliamen- tary tradition from the times of political opportunism or trasformismo): now, instead, it was a real “movement,” complex and much more radical than the obsolete nostalgia of traditional conservatism for the Monarchical Statute be- cause it was strengthened by a larger social base:

Freemasonry attains the fusion of the so-called popular or democratic or progressive or anticlerical forces. To reach this objective, it has activated an operation that has become very vast and has an infallible secret in It- aly, it is the bait that trawls in depth and always successfully, particularly in the republican organization: the fi ght against the Church. Th is is a for- mula on which they can all agree. But all of them, united by the formula and the operation which brings them all together, neglect, forget, and end up putting to one side their original raison d’être: to create the republic or protect the lot of the proletariat. . . . And the Jewish element is the predominant one in Freemasonry, like the one that tends instinctively to oppose, to eliminate not only the political Church but the Church as a re- ligious institution—she who falsifi ed the text of the gospels and of the Bi- ble and prepared herself for the triumph, which was instead Israel’s due.61

Th e rejection of the “Giolittian method” of forming governing majorities and of parliamentary mediation, which had previously been perceived as a typical perversion of the democratic political system and of the principle of suff rage, had now become a rejection of modern democracy, of universal suff rage. In 1913 there would have been the fi rst universal suff rage elections, and “mass democracy” would undoubtedly have brought about the fi nal degeneration of the parliamentary system and of politics. Th e nationalist writer Giovanni Papini was the fi rst to shout against the new universal (male) suff rage, from the pages of Lacerba : “Don’t let’s give a

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damn about politics!” 62 And thus the class of anti-Giolittian “intellectuals” paved the way for an antipolitical revolt that, once the foundations of the state had been weakened, aft er 1919, would sweep away the system. But the admiration for the “criticism of customs, of the ways of seeing things, of points of view,” and for the “very incisive truths, ahead of their times” revealed by Papini was also shared by some young socialists: for ex- ample, Antonio Gramsci, even though he had always described Papini as a political adversary. Th is proves that from 1910 to 1914, the socialist Left and the antipolitical Right were, at times, willing to share the same battleground for the presumed “moralization” of the country against corrupt democracy: namely, democracy understood as political alignment but also as a constitu- tional system. Th us, the criticism of political democracy revealed itself both in the low opinion of the Giolittian political class and in the rejection of the very idea of political and parliamentary representation. Th at rejection was carried out through a pincer movement by the Right and the Left , unaware of its long-term eff ect. Th e ambiguity of the common reference to Sorel’s thought permitted the socialist Left to defi ne itself as rev- olutionary while the were adopting the same language as the revolutionaries. Th us both sides appeared united in their intransigent denial of political mediation, institutional procedures, and political rights of citizen- ship, in the name of another image of representation, totally social, funda- mental and antipolitical but raised to an ideal of “new life and vibrant faith,” opposed to “the inanities of petty politicians” and “party maneuvers.” Th e tri- umph of the myth of “fundamental democracy” guaranteed the posthumous revenge of Bonald and the opponents of the Enlightenment. Orano’s heterodox revolutionary syndicalist ideology was, therefore, al- ready immersed in a completely nationalist culture when it rose up, ready to protest against a docile diplomacy and quick to demand much greater expen- diture on rearmament, in the name “of an idea and its denial, because hatred is a form of love.”63 Th is protest was made in the name of the nation but also of trade unions, which were similar forms, in their view, and was synony- mous with the defense of the nation and also of the nation’s working class. 64 Th e tutelary deities of the “new alliance,” who were oft en invoked—and ap- propriately, it should be noted—were D’Annunzio, Giosuè Carducci, and Rud yard Kipling: 65 their celebrated philosophy of violence was tailor-made to be used “like repeated hammer blows” against “the bourgeoisie, pacifi sts, and misers,” in short, against the Jews. Th is was the case for Arturo Labriola, but Orano was even more explicit. He asserted that Freemasonry has

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in many ways prepared a whole program to take possession of political Italy from which it plans to eliminate the slightest sign and spirit and form of Catholicism. Obstructive anticlericalism is the profane and cur- rently victorious fl ag of this plan of war. A truly very beautiful, admirable thing, if in order to attain, eff ectively and quickly, this formidable goal, this Italy of Israel, of Luigi Luzzati, of Ernesto Nathan, of Claudio Treves, had not had recourse to the emasculation of the opposing forces, of pride, of principles, of will. In writing these words that will displease many, I am absolutely not making a declaration of anti-Semitism. . . . But I see that the Jewish and Masonic infl uence disperses and extinguishes in Italy the very characteristics of the Latin spirit, which I, a revolutionary syndical- ist, feel, nourish, preserve in myself.

Th us Orano railed against a

democratic popular Italy, totally fused and mixed up in a calcination of anticlericalism. . . . An Italy prey to demagogy, the infl uence of Giolitti, of Luzzatti, a weak Italy in which the principle of the class struggle becomes the refrain of the homily, amid the incense burnt in honor of the saints in the workshop, an Italy that is approaching the sunset and is forgetful of itself, that is not concerned about its future, an Italy without a destiny of economic and political revolution, a country of rabbits, of dogs with- out tails, without ears and without teeth, an Italy mother of ideas, lacking ideals.66

Th e Jewish conspiracy uses the political weapon of the democratic elec- toral alliance, the so-called democratic and anticlerical block, and Luzzatti is described and attacked as the “ephemeral antipope of the pontiff .”67 Th e in- ternational trade fair in Rome, held on the occasion of the fi ft ieth anniversary of Italian unity, also became an opportunity to renew the campaign against Luzzatti and the municipal administration of the mayor, Ernesto Nathan. Th e latter was considered unworthy to preside over the exhibition, which was sup- posed to celebrate the unity of the state, the Roman spirit, and the redemption of the Homo latinus. On this subject, Orano had already written that

the domination of the world, which was Latin, is achieved by means of force and resistance. All the Italics have an exceptional capacity to re- sist. Th e race that can resist better is the race that prevails. And it was

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the Latin race, that obscure, primitive association of astute aggressors, in which the spirit of possessiveness—which in the higher animals is al- ready marked—achieved a high degree; that marvelous small society that later produced the law, a slow and precise, deep and systematic develop- ment of conquest and dominance.68

It therefore appeared paradoxical that, in that solemn moment, there should be, at the head of the Capitoline government, a Jew, elected to represent anti- clerical democracy and Freemasonry.

Between secular ambition and the premeditating clerical silence, both fi xedly looking at the charming pavilions of the fi ft ieth-anniversary exhi- bition in Rome, the bloc has found a way of settling itself peacefully again for the current year. . . . With a bit of Ernesto Nathan’s robust, patient, and tyrannical temper, with a bit of the present diminution of the Roman clerics’ political vigor and the indiff erent and irresponsible compliance of my fellow townsmen, the most daring and the oldest dream of Italian Freemasonry in Rome is on its way to being realized. Anticlerical democ- racy is celebrating, having on its side the monarchy, the diplomatic corps, all the offi cial world, in the city of the powers of the state, the synthetic anniversary and the block of national anniversaries, including the Breach of Porta Pia, whose signifi cance the current happily powerful, or rather very powerful mayor recently reemphasized, repeating words which have caused His Holiness Pius X to complain, as usual, before the world. . . . Whence the Catholic Church sees its religious authority increasingly re- duced due to its nonopposition, inevitably or on account of the weakness that comes from ignorance, to those political skills that, in the name of other principles and very diff erent dogmas, succeed in attracting large crowds of visitors and foreigners.69

Th e Jew and freemason Ernesto Nathan was branded as the author of “bloc” politics and the tool of the conspiracy aiming at the total economic domination and political control of the country:

Italian Freemasonry cannot but be very grateful to him. Under his aus- pices, the town hall and the province have been conquered by the Lodge, and Rome has had to experience the stern lesson that comes from the aff ront of not seeing Roman citizens administering the budget. . . . Th e

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provincials have conquered the city and it is governed by an internation- alist inspired by Mazzinian , a man with English educa- tion, character, accent, an example and . . . embodiment of the Masonic ideal [typical of that] race from which he originates, lacking even the for- mal and aesthetic sensitivity regarding the signifi cance, the historical and psychological value of the Italian people’s Catholicism. 70

Once again, in the review of D’Annunzio’s play Il martirio di San Sebas- tiano, Orano obsessively repeated that “Catholicism, the Church, the heroic myths of sacrifi ce, of martyrdom . . . the divine element in were all due to the Latins,” while “Jewish wisdom is nothing, it is vanity, it is falsehood.” 71 Th us, in the ensuing months, the anti-Semitic articles increased in the pages of La Lupa , and Paolo Mantica unleashed his anger against the abnormal presence of Jews in the professions (in particular in medicine). While Libero Tancredi even linked the case of Francisco Ferrer to the conspiracy of the “great Masonic Orient made up of Jewish fi nanciers.”72 Orano published his clearest analysis of “Jewish capitalist power”:

“Ritual” Jewish murders have been carried out for centuries in Rus- sia while European public opinion remains unmoved, or rather, totally unconcerned! Georges Sorel has recently said that the time has come to break the silence. And, if I am not mistaken, he was asking us Italians to take a little interest in this matter . . . Sorel is wrong on one point. He does not take into account that the Italian “free thinker” is such only in- asmuch as he is, I would say, antireligious in a specifi c way, and I mean against the Catholic Apostolic Roman Church. In Italy people are free to declare themselves “atheists,” in order to be considered “open-minded” and at the forefront of social and scientifi c progress, even if through sin- ister and secret ways they frequent, and not always disinterestedly, Isra- elite synagogues. . . . And there is more. In Italy, money, oft en manipu- lated by loan-sharking, is becoming predominantly Jewish; public aff airs, even if under a Jesuitical guise, are oft en handled by Jews; the universities are infested, at the expense of free and lively intelligence, by Jewish ele- ments. . . . And would it then be possible to stir our national conscience against those—as has been shown in Russia—who systematically before the Jewish Easter sacrifi ced, by completely draining the blood and tortur- ing atrociously, poor young victims, guilty only of not being Jewish. And what do the Italian Jewish intellectuals have to say about this?73

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Despite the obvious subordination of Italian writers to Jewish Freemasonry, “Luzzatti’s logic [which] is actually demagogic . . . , namely the moving word of a Palestinian with Talmudic lips,”74 had still not managed to ensure the complete success of the Masonic and Jewish conspiracy, the plan worked out by the new “fi nancial feudality.” By using the same old formula invented by Bonald and Toussenel, Orano revealed, in this text, his debt to the anti-Jewish and anticapitalist tradition: “Israel and pacifi st and impotent socialism . . . inherit their intransigence from the perennial Jewish controversy . . . because [they are] Israelite ideolo- gies, namely against war, the fatherland, history.” By then, “Jewish” socialism had become a timid parasite of capitalism because

it was hostile to the latter, but in fact it was living inside it. . . . In that socialist proletariat the dignity of the conqueror was absent: wanting to attain one’s goal without fi ghting one’s own war, a great war, is absurd and ridiculous. . . . It is necessary instead that the Italian proletariat should make its presence felt in this war, which will determine every authority and will establish a diff erent power struggle in the world.75

Only the war could defeat the “Jewish plan” and the liberal-democratic Ma- sonic bloc. Th e last articles published in La Lupa can be considered typical examples of the warmongering aim not only of the revolutionary syndicalist revolt but also of the entire anti-Giolittian reaction, including a wide range of writers and journalists poisoned by an antipolitical and nationalist culture that was the off spring of the anti-Enlightenment tradition and of the neo- romantic prewar “Sturm und Drang.”76 Mussolini, aft er all, did not hesitate to attack Treves and Modigliani inas- much as they were Jews. In 1919, he repeated his attack in Il Popolo d’Italia , in- dicating “Jewish money” and international fi nance—just as Orano had done in La Lupa—as the causes of the cancer of democracy, the Bolshevik success, and the mutilation of Italy’s victory at the Versailles Peace Conference. Once again, however, Orano had preceded him and, in March 1918, had resumed his anti-Jewish campaign, publishing a vehement article “Israele italiana e la guerra.” 77

AN UNOFFICIAL SPOKESMAN OF THE REGIME

More than ten years later, in 1932, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of what, in the regime’s parlance, had become the “Fascist Revolution,” the

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man whom Gramsci had defi ned as “the opportunist who infests Italy with his farces of ideas” was confi rmed as one of the regime’s maître à penser .78 In La dottrina del fascismo, a small book, in large measure written by Giovanni Gentile, destined to become the offi cial text of Italian totalitarianism, Mus- solini acclaimed Paolo Orano in these terms:

In the great river of Fascism, you will fi nd the currents which stem from Sorel, Lagardelle of the “Mouvement Socialiste,” and from the cohort of Italian revolutionary syndicalists who, between 1904 and 1914, brought a note of novelty to the Italian socialist context—already emasculated and chloroformized by the Giolittian fornication, with Olivetti’s Pagine Li- bere, Orano’s La Lupa, Enrico Leone’s Il Divenire Sociale .79

On many occasions and in the crucial years for the construction of the totalitarian system, Mussolini turned again to Orano’s suggestions, at least at fundamental moments. Th e fi rst was the one that has just been referred to, the draft ing of La dottrina del fascismo and the offi cial codifi cation of the re- gime’s ideology, with the fundamental support of Giovanni Gentile:

Fascism was not nourished by a doctrine worked out previously, at a writing table: it arose from a need for action and it was action; it was not a party, but, in the fi rst two years, an anti-party and a movement. . . . Above all, Fascism . . . does not believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace. It therefore rejects pacifi sm, which conceals renouncing the strug- gle and cowardice—in the face of sacrifi ce.80

In more general terms, whenever he tried to ascribe, to fascism, the legacy of national syndicalism and the hierarchical political message of Roman and Catholic civilization, Mussolini seized the opportunity of relying on the writ- ings of the old revolutionary syndicalist Paolo Orano. In fact, Cristo e Quirino is a work that Mussolini made use of throughout his career, from the time of the editorship of Avanti! until the decisive intervention of 1929 on the oc- casion of the presentation and discussion of the Concordat and the Lateran Pacts.81 Th e crucial moment of Orano’s return to being the regime’s unoffi cial spokesman was, however, the launching of the anti-Jewish campaign. His pamphlet, Gli ebrei in Italia was published in 1937 and used by Il Duce to sound out the reactions of the various sectors of society at the beginning of the persecution. In the text, there is an explicit, though obvious, diminutio

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of the patriotism and of role of Italian Jews in the events of the national Ri- sorgimento. Orano in fact declares that the Jews were never true patriots because they had had a “material” interest in national unifi cation: this was because they well knew that the unitary and liberal state would have put an end to the humiliations and discrimination they had suff ered in the old states of the ancien régime. 82 Referring to Jewish patriots such as Daniel Manin, Gustavo Modena, and Isacco Pesaro Maurogonato, he admits that these Jews showed love for their fatherland Italy but immediately points out that “things have . . . changed over the last forty or fi ft y years.”83 Th is enables him to misinterpret and falsify the sense of Bernard Lazare’s reply to the French anti-Semitic nationalist and Catholic leader Édouard Drumont, in order to fi nd in it a confi rmation of the thesis of the impossibil- ity of assimilating the Jews in any national community.84 Since the Jews have always constituted a separate nation, divided, dispersed, and impossible to assimilate, their extraneousness to the Italian nation reproduced the situation that had already occurred for the Diaspora Jews in imperial Rome, to which “Greeks, Gauls, Asiatics, Germans brought their rites and beliefs and had no diffi culty in bowing before the Palatine Mars. . . . It was very diff erent for the Jews . . . : their adoration of Yahweh instead excluded every other, and they refused the oath to the Eagles. . . . As their religious faith was mixed with the observance of certain social laws . . . , they devoted themselves to proselytiz- ing” by using persuasion and “sometimes violence, but always great wealth.”85 Nevertheless, the fascist revolution had completed the redemption of the Italians begun with the national Risorgimento and consecrated at Vittorio Veneto. Th erefore fascism had inevitably brought to light the incompatibility between Jewish particularism and the new ethical, totalitarian state, exactly as had already happened in ancient Rome, “that Rome, republican and im- perial, [which] was in fact established in a totalitarian way like our Fascist Rome.” Th e fascists, the Romans of modern times, are in fact “Catholics, or in any case, Italians who are totalitarian and, for these reasons, also in favor of the Concordat.” Th e fascists are, in totalitarian Italy, therefore, exactly what the ancient Romans represented in imperial Rome: in other words, members of a “vast and disciplinary, authoritarian, hierarchical organic structure,” left as a legacy to Latin civilization “by Paul of Tarsus and by the Empire” and in which Christian spirituality “had freed itself of every Jewish residue,” in order to become the “religion of the peoples.”86 According to Paolo Orano, the only modern political thinker who understood the nature of this Christian and imperial tradition was . 87

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Orano’s operation therefore appears ambiguous and perfi diously two-faced because, on the one hand, he includes his anticapitalist anti-Jewish paradigm in the anti-Jewish Catholic tradition and, on the other hand, he tries to show that fascism is the natural heir of the Catholic political message.88 In his pre- vious study, Il Fascismo , published barely two years earlier, he had, however, concluded: “In Fascism every issue with the Church subsides and disappears because in Fascism there is a developing religiosity. Th erefore the new fact, the overriding event, is Fascism, wanted, believed, and lived like a religion.”89 If in its own time even “the socialist movement did not reject an attack against the Jews, because they were rich and usurers,” it had, however, been the Catholics who had more decidedly fought the legal emancipation of the Jews. A further confi rmation of the interpenetration between anti-Jewish anti capitalism and the polemical Catholic tradition against Jewish emancipa- tion is to be found in the passage in which Orano was not afraid to quote, to his own advantage, a page from the study Th e Jews by the British anti-Semitic writer Hilaire Belloc. Translated in 1934 with the imprimatur of the Curia of Milan, Belloc had in fact attacked as false:

1) the claim that the Jew was a citizen like any other, diff erent only in his attachment to a particular religion; 2) the other claim, that this religion was one of the many religions, more or less of a single type; 3) the claim that a man could be Jewish and, at the same time, a citizen of the same mould as any other: this triple claim had always been desperately main- tained despite its monstrous falseness.90

Where Judaism had been integrated and “protected within the nation,” thanks to legal emancipation, it had hatched the plot against this same nation by tak- ing advantage of its own economic force to exploit the national community. Th en, aft er the World War I, it had not hesitated to ally itself even “with the enterprise of Bolshevism, which aims at subverting Latin civilization, the Ro- man State, the Church, the fatherland and the social order,” as had also hap- pened, aft er some years, in Republican Spain and in France governed by Léon Blum. (Th e same thesis had already been put forward the year before in an- other anti-Semitic text, written by another fascist leader, Alfredo Romanini: the violent pamphlet Ebrei, cristianesimo e fascismo ,91 which provoked—as had happened in the case of Orano’s text—the continuing protests of the [fascist] leaders of the Committee of Italian Jews).92 According to Orano

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and Romanini (and with a lot of inconsistency), aft er 1917 the Jewish con- spiracy could have counted on international fi nance, the Soviet regime, and the Balfour Declaration: the last was obvious proof of the Anglo-American imperialist support for the establishment of the Jewish state; therefore, anti- fascism, socialism, and “the declared Zionism [that] today is in full swing in our country” constitute the diff erent faces of the self-same “Jewish enterprise of subversion.”93 Before the founding of the state of Israel, Orano’s pamphlet has been one of the fi rst documents in which the anti-Jewish and anticapitalist paradigm appears strongly linked to the radical polemic against the national Zionist ideal (as an imperialist program). So Orano’s attack also had a crucially im- portant diplomatic aspect. Th e alleged support of Italian Jews for Zionism was imbued with the suspicion of their deliberately wanting to compromise Italy’s strategic position in the Mediterranean and her policy of seeking a presence in Arab countries. Th is presumed Jewish approach would all have been to Great Britain’s advantage, and, thus, the accusation of belonging to an inexorably and unavoidably diff erent nation became more insidious. And, de- spite conversion, assimilation, or legal emancipation, there was the progres- sive insinuation of the suspicion of betrayal and connivance in a presumed international conspiracy, fueled by Orano and other propagandists, such as Gino Sottochiesa, who readily intervened.94 Aft er the publication of Orano’s book, Mussolini, who had even met, on several occasions, the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, and had tried to exploit the Zionist movement in an anti-British way, changed his attitude to an anti- Zionist and anti-Semitic one. Th e publication of Orano’s book was followed by a favorable review in Il Popolo d’Italia, unleashing a wide-ranging discussion about the “place” of the Jews in Italian history and society. Mussolini felt authorized to concern himself directly with the issue, but, nevertheless, those responsible for pro- paganda remained for a long time without any precise instructions from the minister of popular culture. Th e propaganda machinery, national and local, remained without a defi nitive command and without a model to which to conform the political practice of forgery and manipulation. 95 Th us it was Mussolini’s diplomatic journey to Germany, at the end of Sep- tember 1937, that probably accelerated his decision to mark a turning point in the totalitarian mobilization, without there being, however, any indication of German pressure for an Italian alignment with the Nazi persecution. It was only in November 1937 that the secretary of the Italian embassy in Ber-

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lin, Marquis Tassoni, received the brief of drawing up a report on German anti-Semitic legislation for the Foreign Ministry. But, as late as June 1938, Ambassador Attolico declared that he suspected the anti-Jewish violence in those weeks in the Reich only constituted a diversion, used by the local Nazi Gauleiter to distract people’s attention from economic problems. 96 Anyway, the fascist ambition of molding the “new man,” in view of the imminent mili- tary mobilization of Germany and Italy, soon became a matter of urgency: in fact, it was necessary to implement the “anthropological revolution” of which the Ethiopian enterprise and the birth of state anti-Semitism would have been the linchpins. State anti-Semitism, in particular, fi t in with the political will of designating an internal enemy whose presence could unite the nation cemented by Italian civilization and the Catholic tradition. A new platform was urgently needed, but the new “manifesto” ordered by Mussolini and based on biological categories by Guido Landra, although use- ful for defi ning the racial type of the “Jew,” did not correspond with the im- ages, fi gures, and stereotypes that the national, Catholic, and syndicalist anti- Jewish tradition had deposited in the nation’s memory. Shortly aft erward, and not by chance, the ephemeral power gained by Landra and the young racist “anthropologists” in the Ministry of Popular Culture, was challenged by the Demorazza (the Head Offi ce of Demography and Race) of the Ministry of the Interior. So, aft er a few months, in February 1939, Landra was replaced by Sabato Visco,97 who was put in charge of the Offi ce of Race because he was a well-known professor of physiology, a member of the National Research Council, and director of numerous institutes but, certainly, not a theoretician of an infl exible biological determinism. On the contrary, Visco advocated an anti-Semitism that could be defi ned as “cultural” or “spiritual,” in line with the approach of Minister Bottai, Acerbo, and, above all, the national Catholic tradition. According to their vision, the new man had to be “molded” above all by the totalitarian educational institutions and, therefore, by the national education system, based on the idea of Latin (and Catholic) civilization with which the fascist paradigm of hierarchy had by then completely complied.98 Propaganda—more generally the regime’s communication—obviously also complied with the biological point of view, even if it continued to insist, above all, on the national, cultural, and religious tradition and, therefore, the nonassimilation of Italian Jews “in the country in which they live and pros- per, and of which they have the citizenship.” 99 Th e 1938 laws against the Jews had had an immediate precedent. Th e fi rst fascist racist legislation, promulgated between 1936 and 1937 aft er the

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conquest in East Africa, discriminated against the colonized peoples. In the combination of colonial racism and anti-Semitism the regime therefore took up again the old nineteenth-century paradigm: colonialism found in the rac- ist doctrines the justifi cation for invading other lands to be “civilized” and Christianized. But the anti-Jewish anticapitalist paradigm, on the contrary, always played on the fear of being, in turn, invaded: invaded by an internal (the Jews), which was seen as constituting an aggressive and anomalous parasite that corrupted national and religious unity. Precisely in the period in which modern nationalisms demanded linguis- tic and institutional homogeneity, the emancipated Jews had come out of the physical and legal ghettoes and spread throughout society. So nineteenth- century anti-Semitism was a reaction to this internal “invasion,” and drew its stereotypes from Christian anti-Judaism, which had settled in the mentality of Catholics, and the social reaction to Jewish emancipation (as a paradigm of every social emancipation) was a kind of new anticapitalist reaction, which fed on the Christian social criticism of the free market. But in the mid-1930s, Italian fascism also had evident “imperial” geopolitical objectives and needed the support of Nazi Germany in the colonial competition with France and England. Th erefore, the Jews fl eeing from persecution in German lands (the Nuremberg anti-Semitic laws date from 1935) represented, for the regime, an embarrassing obstacle to the alliance with Hitler’s Germany. Hence, fascist persecution stemmed from these foreign Jews before it became an organic anti-Semitic state doctrine. In this new context, La difesa della razza (Th e defense of the race, the re- gime’s offi cial racist periodical) revealed in the word “ difesa ” (defense) the fundamental nature of fascist social anti-Semitism: the self-pity of the vic- tim who declares that he is threatened and therefore needs to defend himself from someone who was attacking him, polluting purity, invading the land and blood, contaminating traditions and customs. Jewish economic power wanted to dominate by infi ltrating the vital ganglia of the institutions, and the self-pitying character of anti-Jewish anti-capitalism transformed the ag- gressors into victims and the victims into aggressors. Th us, one of the aspects that distinguishes this kind of anti-Semitism from other forms of xenophobia and racism was the fi gment of the imagination that the Jews were a group of occult and extraordinary power: they were inferior, like everyone else who did not belong to the nation, but also capable of rising up and dominating society. But why did the Jews become, in the fascist representation, such a pow- erful enemy? From the theological point of view—of course—because they

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would have created a religion and a God and then sacrifi ced him; from the social point of view, because their emancipation and their consequent “social interference” had benefi ted from the liberal revolution against the church and traditional society: this demonstrated that it had been the Jews who had pro- moted the revolutions; that is, it demonstrated their alleged power to subvert the social order. Th erefore, fascism took up once again certain anticapitalist attitudes in a new right-wing version, as well as the program of the Risorgi- mento: having made Italy, it was a question of making the Italians. In forming the national fascist state, the local, linguistic, ethnic communities were dis- solved, or at least they yielded to a state centralization, within the image of an extended and common homeland that contains and subordinates them. But the fascist version of the idea of nation sought a new social cohesion by re- producing on a vast scale the logic of the ethnic group: the unity of language, historical narration, religion, and, in consequence, intolerance, going as far as persecution, of diversity (seen as deviance and a threat to society). So that anti-Semitism fi nally became a narcissistic instigation of the “most beloved sons of the homeland,” who have to consider themselves as having superior blood compared to the others. Point 6 of the Racial Manifesto, published on July 26, 1938, states:

Th ere is by now a pure “Italian race.” Th is statement is not based on the mixing up of the biological concept of race with the historical-linguistic concept of a people and nation, but on the purest blood ties that unite the Italians of today with the generations that for millennia have populated Italy. Th is ancient purity of blood is the greatest claim to nobility of the Italian Nation.

Th e text began with the phrase “Th ere is by now a pure ‘Italian race’ ” but it continued by evoking the “purest blood ties” that have existed “ for millen- nia”: but the by now was inconsistent with the idea of a history of millennia because, if the purity had lasted for millennia, it was not possible that the Ital- ians had “in the end, fi nally” attained it. To conclude: the fascist anti-Jewish campaign could fi nd consensus in the population only in the measure in which it refl ected the feelings of hostility and indiff erence that tradition had sedimented in the nation’s collective psy- chology. And this tradition was revived, at that time, also in the offi cial edi- tions of Vita e Pensiero , in the publications of the Catholic University of Milan, in a wealth of Episcopal and leafl ets (but also vulgarized in the medio- cre novels of Maria Magda Sala, Lino Cappuccio, and Mario Appelius).

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Th e high priest of this genre, in fact its initiator in the period immediately aft er the Great War and in the national literature, was the novelist Giovanni Papini, who converted to Catholicism aft er the frenzy of the prewar Sturm und Drang of antipolitical intransigence and the avant-gardism of the peri- odical Lacerba . His conversion to the church, fi rst documented in Storia di Cristo , published in 1921, and then in the Dizionario del l’ omo salvatico , led, a few years later, to his ravings against “the ideology of gold” and “the Jewish monopoly of fi nance.” 100 His conversion also led him to adopt the dross of die-hard Catholic literature, therefore the paradigm of the conspiracy. 101 Th e plot, or “the plan of the Elders of Zion” was a recurring theme in his writings as in those of another writer, Sala.102 In a very short time, Giovanni Preziosi’s translation of the Protocols went through six reprints (others appeared anonymously between 1937 and 1939). Monsignor Giovanni Cazzani, Roberto Farinacci, Alfredo De Donno, Gino Sottochiesa, Mario Lolli, and Alfredo Romanini tried to popularize the mes- sage of the Protocols and to adapt it to the tradition of the condemnation of usury.103

Jesus is the shepherd; the fl ock of which He speaks was Israel, the Chosen People, a large proportion of which did not want to recognize, as the Mes- siah, its great son; we Christians are the other sheep. Well then, I hold the fi rm conviction that the impetus for the formation of a single fl ock and a single shepherd will come from the national movements and in the front line there will be Fascism, with its fundamental ideals of love of family, fatherland, religion, spirit of sacrifi ce, love of work, corporative brother- hood. Our ancient Latin fathers, pure descendants of Aryan ancestors , like the Germans, Celts, Greeks, and Slav, practiced, to the highest degree, these virtues.104

In Sottochiesa’s text, instead, the Jews’ national irreducibility, in terms of blood, was explicitly defi ned in the traditional form of the indelible macula :

Th e Jew will never cease to be a Jew, nationally speaking. If in terms of religion there can be apostasy, it is never possible with regard to race and nation, since no human creature is able to reject his own origin and his psychological-physical constitution, renouncing his own blood. Religion is above all feeling, and therefore subject to change. Race is blood, fl esh, congenital intimacy. 105

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And even the very success of Zionism in the 1930s—though barely noticeable, despite the increasing persecution throughout Europe—far from being per- ceived by the fascists as a reaction to ancient discrimination and new violence, was subject to a contrived interpretation as the confi rmation of such “congen- ital intimacy,” and this occurred on such a scale as to arouse perplexity, even among the orthodox apologists of the traditional strategy of conversion, such as Padre Mario Barbera.106 In a context of racist propaganda of a biological kind, the apologists of the conversion of the Jews to the Christian religion and the “social” anti-Semites risked appearing antiquated, tied to outdated expla- nations and solutions, while Orano could boast of being consistent (even in the incongruity of his own thought). But even his “social” anti-Semitism, his anti-Jewish anticapitalism, had to translate itself into a precise policy of dis- crimination and a purge of the various state administrations, the banking and fi nancial system, and the universities. 107 It is very useful to recall here the irony of an antifascist conspirator, Vitto- rio Foa, who was arrested in 1935 and in 1936 sentenced to fi ft een years’ deten- tion. He referred to Orano’s “consistency in his inconsistency,” but his irony, nevertheless, had to pause in the face of another bitter observation: “Once it had been put” the question, “what did it mean to be Jewish, this same ques- tion turned out to be impossible to cancel.” 108 Foa also observed that the roots of this hatred were deeply buried in the prejudice of a presumed diff erence in Jewish blood, which was, in any case, irreducible.109 Th is rendered the representation of an eternal “enemy,” who had always been involved in a conspiracy, plausible, and this intentionally fal- sifi ed representation was believed to such an extent as to “become the Bible of a mass movement,” as Hannah Arendt observed. So it was necessary to off er a new “explanation as to how this had been possible, and not demonstrat- ing for the hundredth time what everyone already knew, namely that it was a fake.” 110 And in Italy, the regime’s anti-Semitism did not indiscriminately adopt every form of anti-Jewish propaganda, as has been maintained, but it exploited the concept of national identity in order justify the defense of the Italian race from an alleged conspiracy, both economic and political. Any semblance of maintaining the linking of the regime’s persecution to the presumed correct “proportion” between the population and the Jewish minority was abandoned with the exacerbation of the anti-Jewish measures in 1939 and 1940. Th ese measures led to the expulsion of foreign Jews from Italy and the generalized persecution of Italian Jews; those aff ected included school teachers and pupils; offi cials in local government, in state-controlled

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bodies, in national works; and the directors and employees of banks and in- surance companies. Finally, all the Jews were deprived of their property and of important rights ranging from the safeguarding of their civil rights to the freedom to testify. With these laws the fascist regime retraced the path that had been followed by the liberal state aft er national unity had been attained in 1860. Th e anti- Jewish legislation from 1938 to 1940, but even the 1929 Concordat and the new 1930 civil code, constituted a regression to the 1837 Sardinian-Piedmontese penal code and fi nally to the discrimination of the states of the ancien ré- gime. In 1942 the new civil code included all the racial legislation in article 1 of book 1, which defi ned the limits of a person’s legal rights on the basis of their “belonging to particular races.” And fi nally, the following year, article 7 of the Verona Charter of the Italian Social Republic revoked the citizenship of Italian Jews. It also included the total confi scation of their goods, defi nitively linking the biological paradigm of the “Scientists’ Manifesto” (“Manifesto de- gli scienziati”) of July 14, 1938, with the representation of the Jew as a social enemy. Th e propaganda and the persecution based on the well-established thesis of the Jewish, capitalist (and Bolshevik) international conspiracy against the national state fi nally resulted in the policy of expropriation and total confi scation, 111 even if the Italian Social Republic also attenuated the old semblance of economic socialization in a purely technocratic rhetoric (ap- preciated by the entrepreneurs). However, it did not fail to ensure, by means of its own police force, the arrest of almost half the Italian Jews sent to the camps.112 A comparative study of the policies of social and economic persecution in fascist states is yet to be carried out, but the framework in which such a study should be placed remains the unsurpassed research by Timothy W. Mason on the crisis in the economy of the Reich as the driving force of Nazi social imperialism. I only recall that the capitalist German economy was subject to the “pri- macy of politics,” which excluded, from the start, entrepreneurs and eco- nomic forces from the decision-making process. Th ere was consequently the dominance of the fi rms and the state-owned companies through the policy of job orders and four-year plans: from 1936, in particular, the private fi rms not linked with rearmament production began to decline and the fi nancial lob- bies were marginalized while, in the meantime, the Nazi authorities decided to ignore the demands of the entrepreneurs for the limiting and reduction of salaries, thus giving the working class a certain infl uence.

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Th is had important political eff ects: the reconstruction of the economy was weakened by these decisions and further exacerbated by rearmament, which destroyed many margins of accumulation and drastically reduced the range of political options. Th e decisions made in September 1939 would therefore have been in some way required by the need to avoid economic collapse and to speed up the acquisition of new resources. 113 At that time, between the at- tack on the Sudetenland and the invasion of Poland, the exacerbation of the Nuremberg laws led to the radical expropriation of the Jews. Analogous observations could be made regarding the French situation in the Vichy years. In the État National, the second Laval government com- pletely eliminated any semblance of corporatism. Apart from the ideological superstructure, which recalled the rural myths of Maurice Barrès and Lucien Romier, the Vichy government was unable to translate the protectionist and traditionalist propaganda about defending small landowners into a real cor- poration paysanne. Instead, the bureaucratic and technical solutions and the requirements of war prevailed, and a single Ministry of Agriculture and Pro- curement was set up in order to have a rational administration of resources. Despite the appointment of a former leader of the Confédération Générale du Travail, René Belin, to the Ministry of Industry, the measures in the Charte du Travail of October 1941 envisaged the abolition of the trade unions but were limited to the creation of comités d’organisation to register the factories and carry out the planning of resources, thus favoring exclusive control by com- pany representatives. So French “socialisme national” engendered a regime that was more con- servative than fascist but that was perfectly capable of persecuting its own Jewish citizens economically by confi scating their real estate and goods.114 Th e second Statute on the Jews, issued in June 1941, intensifi ed their exclu- sion from administrative posts, state employment, and schools and drasti- cally limited their access to the professions. Finally, it reexamined both the criteria of citizenship and the expropriation (or Aryanization) of companies, oft en rivaling the occupying Nazi authorities. Th us, throughout Europe, anti-Jewish anticapitalism and “national” so- cialism revealed the true nature of their social policy.

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AN INTERPRETATION OF

ANTI-JEWISH ANTICAPITALISM

MARC BLOCH’S DILEMMA

In one of his most recent studies, Saul Friedländer reproposed the controver- sial question of the relationship between Marc Bloch’s Jewish identity and his belonging to the French nation, which he proudly proclaimed to his death.1 Of the will written by the resistance fi ghter Narbonne (the name Bloch chose for his role as an underground activist) in Clermont Ferrand, on March 18, 1941, Friedländer off ers an interpretation which does not—in my opinion— fully convey some of the meaning, both evident and hidden, of the text. For example, he overlooks a passage that sheds vivid light on Bloch’s real thought.

I have not asked that at my grave Jewish prayers should be repeated, even though their intonation accompanied, to their fi nal rest, so many of my ancestors and my own father. Th roughout my life, to the best of my ability, I have aimed at a total sincerity of expression and spirit. . . . Like someone so much greater than me, I would wish that on my tomb, as the only inscription, there should be carved these simple words: Dilexit veritatem . It was for this reason that in this hour of fi nal leave-taking, when every man has the duty of reassessing himself, I could not accept that in my name the ardor of an orthodoxy whose creed I do not accept should be invoked. But it would be even more loathsome for me if there were someone who, in this act of honesty, were to see something akin to a cowardly denial.2

Such words are not easily misunderstood. Bloch decidedly rejects a religious orthodoxy in which he has never believed but does not deny, and in fact even

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proclaims, his own identity, by birth, as a French Jew. Aft er this passage, there follows the sentence also quoted by Saul Friedländer: “I therefore declare, if necessary in the face of death, that I was born Jewish; that I have never thought of denying it, nor have I ever had reason to be tempted to do so.” But Friedländer omits the subsequent sentence: “In a world assailed by the most atrocious barbarities, doesn’t the generous tradition of the Jewish prophets, which Christianity, in its purest form, took up and spread, perhaps remain one of the best reasons for living, believing, fi ghting?” Was Bloch’s question purely rhetorical? It expresses a conviction that is open to more than one interpretation. Th e sentence is not unambiguous; it refers to a current presence of the prophetic tradition that, as Bloch knew perfectly well, had fueled Jewish and Christian messianism. But it could also refer to the modern utopias of social justice, the political thought of democ- racy and socialism, which were also fueled by that tradition. Anyway, the text ends with another passage that is, instead, quoted by Friedländer, in which Bloch correlates his belonging to Judaism as well as his bearing witness to the relevance of his ethical aspirations with his profession of loyalty to the French Republic and state, and the rational substance of the world’s fi rst ethical and monotheistic religion is stated in these terms: “Alien to any formality as to any presumed racial solidarity, throughout my life I have felt fi rst of all and simply French. Tied to my fatherland by a very long family tradition, fully nourished by its spiritual heritage, I have loved it very much and served it with all my strength. Never has my being Jewish seemed an obstacle to these feelings.”3 His military service, as an offi cer in two world wars, is mentioned with sobriety but also with pride, together with his memories of his work as a uni- versity teacher in the public system of national education built by the new France, which arose from the attainment of the rights of citizenship. Friedlän- der states that Bloch accepted his Jewish origin “without seeing it as anything more than a bureaucratic question” and that the persecution to which he was subjected, in the years of the Vichy regime, not only hurt him deeply but brought to the surface a Judaism that, until then, had lain dormant, without however calling into question his loyalty to his country. Th e observation can be accepted to a certain extent, but not Friedländer’s barely convincing con- clusion about Bloch’s diffi culty in resolving the dilemma between his French nationality and a Judaism “which appeared to him to be irreconcilable with his French character.”4 I think, instead, that the sentence with which Bloch proclaims his right to live all his diff erent identities decidedly disproves the dilemma referred to by

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Friedländer. Nor does Bloch’s genuine universalist vocation seem to be dis- avowed by his plea, to the Union Générale des Israélites de France, which can be seen as a political act aiming at avoiding the expression of positions that would permit the Vichy authorities to set Frenchmen, French Jews, and non-French Jews against one another. Friedländer nevertheless concludes that Bloch, while rejecting the category of “race,” accepted a sort of religion of the fatherland based on the mythical essence of the nation, and this would explain, according to Friedländer, not only Bloch’s positive view of some na- tionalist scholars like Georges Dumézil (a question to which I shall return) but also the hope that his French identity could free him “from the stigmati- zation of a perceived, but not accepted, diff erence: [his] Judaism.”5 But what appears paradoxical is that Friedländer juxtaposes Marc Bloch’s dilemma with Ernst Kantorowicz’s romantic nationalism and the latter’s in- dulgence toward the mythical conception of “race.” Kantorowicz was also Jewish and suff ered directly the Nazi persecution that, obviously, shattered his romantic and nationalist illusions, but the terms in which Friedländer proposes this juxtaposing of Bloch and Kantorowicz are not convincing. Nev- ertheless, they can off er a valuable starting point from which to go beyond Friedländer’s hypothesis and reassess the crucial question of the heritage of romantic cultures in European nationalism and anti-Semitism. Kantororwicz wrote an excellent work on Frederick II in 1927, when he was completely in tune with the ideas of Stefan George’s literary and esoteric circle and was very interested in the fi gures of German national-romantic mysti- cism.6 At the end of the 1920s, the problem that obsessed these circles was the “crisis of the Western spirit” and the looming “general barbarism.” 7 Stefan George, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Kantorowicz extolled the com- munities of the traditional European elites in contrast with the “enlarged democracy that now gradually threatens to become the greatest danger for spiritual freedom.” 8 Kultur , science, and philosophy were threatened by de- mocracy, but instead of mass democracy, Kantorowicz, like Curtius, Ortega y Gasset, and Huizinga, favored the ideal of a European civilization of elites. (However, in his last work, Huizinga—in contrast with Kantorowicz—fero- ciously attacked antidemocratic policy, nationalism, and anti-Semitism). 9 Stefan George, together with Arnold Toynbee—with his concept of the vital curves designed by the history of cultures—inspired Ernst Robert Cur- tius’s work on the origin of European literature in the Latin Middle Ages and the integration of the Germanic world in the Greco-Roman tradition and in the fourth-century church:

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Th e literature of “modern” Europe is so closely tied to that of Mediter- ranean Europe as if the Rhein received the waters of the Tiber. Th e last great poet of Franco-Rhenish origin, Stefan George, felt ties, on account of elective affi nities, with both Roman Germany and the Frankish king- dom of Lothair, from which his family descended. In six obscure Rhenish Sprüche , he projects the history of that reign, almost in a dream, toward the future: that reign will shake the domination of the East and the West, of Germany and France. . . . Goethe expressed his predilection for the Ro- man world; he said that he has certainly lived another life under Hadrian. He is instinctively attracted by what is Roman; the profound intelligence, the order in everything, everything attracts him. . . . I present these state- ments because they reveal that Germany already included in the Empire feels tied to Rome not on sentimental grounds, but because of a substan- tial participation. With an awareness of this tie, Goethe and George have made history relevant. And that is how we understand Europe.10

Th e Europe of Curtius, Th omas Mann, Johan Huizinga, Ortega y Gasset, and Benedetto Croce was presented as the heritage of a Roman-Germanic and Roman civilization on which had been graft ed medieval Christianity, the cit- ies, and the modern guilds; from this civilization had sprung the world of science, commerce, and the natural order of the spontaneous harmonizing of interests. However, that civilization had been threatened by the incursion of civil and political rights, laws, and regulations, and the reaction against po- litical citizenship and democracy had converted itself into an elitist political conception—as Victor Klemperer wrote—indulgent toward authoritarian- ism: Stefan George, for instance, in the name of the “principle of the pioneer who follows the road,” had maintained the necessity of governing the mass society through Caesarism.11 Th e parallel between Marc Bloch and Ernst Kantorowicz proposed by Friedländer does not therefore appear convincing because of these deep dif- ferences in their cultural and political views. In fact, Bloch traces the “strange defeat” back to the weakness of a republi- can democracy undermined by an indolent administration, “breathless poli- tics,” the old opposition of the right-wing parties to republican values, and the rift between democracy and the army since the Dreyfus aff air. French and European culture had undergone an irreversible, antidemocratic, oligarchic, irrationalistic shift :

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Regarding the French, it has been said until now that they had sober and logical minds. Nevertheless, in order that there can be, aft er the new de- feat, the moral and intellectual reform of this people—according to the words of Renan—it will fi rst of all be necessary to teach them once again the old axiom of classical logic: A is A, B is B, therefore A is not B. . . . It will therefore be necessary that this people returns to the school of real freedom of thought.12

Th e meaning is clear: the intellectual causes of the defeat of 1940 were not to be sought—according to Bloch—only in military terms because democracy had been beaten much before then and the moral and intellectual crisis was at the root of the “most terrible collapse in our history.” 13 In fact, democracy had been beaten because no one wanted to lay down his life to defend it and even the republican army had remained a body separated from the republi- can institutions. 14

It was June 1940, the exact day, if I well remember, that the Germans en- tered Paris. In the Norman garden in which our General Staff , without any troops, was immersed in idleness, we were mulling over the causes of the disaster. “Should we therefore believe that history has deceived us?” murmured one of us. 15

Bloch defi ned L’étrange défaite a “Platonic study.” Th e adjective perhaps refers to a choice of rationality and, in this sense, his attack against political irra- tionalism had a precedent in the study published in 1927 by Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs . It therefore seems signifi cant that the latter, in republish- ing this text in 1946, should have taken up Bloch’s lesson: anti-Semitism and Jewish identity were also the crucial points in Benda’s refl ection. Benda had been mentioned in one of Bloch’s letters to Febvre, written in 1935. Th e writer was recognized by Bloch as an authority of the Nouvelle Re- vue Française, and in an earlier letter, of 1934, Febvre had compared his friend and collaborator Bloch with Benda, also referring to the attacks against him by the anti-Semitic nationalists. 16 For the same anti-Semites, Benda, “a pale disciple of Kant, Comte, Renouvier,” was only “a representative of intellectual and metaphysical Judaism.”17 It had been a bitter dispute on both sides. In fact, Benda had ac- cused Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès, Georges Sorel, and the other anti-

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democratic writers of being “philosophers of irrational emotion,” leading fi g- ures of “cultural Boulangism,” and irrationalist and intolerant nationalists. 18 (It is noteworthy that the publisher of Benda’s text was Daniel Halévy, who, even though he had been a militant Dreyfusard, had subsequently moved closer to Action Française). 19 According to Benda, the modern clerics had betrayed their true function as searchers aft er the truth by becoming the apologists “of the passions of the race and the nation,” and they had also become the propagandists of the “gen- eral hatred” that moved the “fi ery and solid masses” of henchmen welded to- gether in “leagues, associations, and political groups.”

All the most highly regarded moralists in Europe—Bourget, Barrès, Maurras, Péguy, D’Annunzio, Kipling, and the vast majority of German thinkers—have glorifi ed men’s propensity to see themselves as members of a nation and a race (to the extent by which they diff erentiate them- selves) and, at the same time, they have made them feel ashamed of any aspiration . . . general and transcendent.20

Th us, Georges Sorel and Charles Péguy were also classifi ed by Benda as “sol- diers of thought,” 21 and, for the same reason, in his Quaderni del carcere , Gramsci juxtaposes Benda’s philosophy with that of Croce: “In a more or- ganic and concise form, his conception of the intellectual can be compared with that expressed by Julien Benda in his book La trahison des clercs .”22 But in 1946, the year of the fi rst edition of L’étrange défaite , Benda repub- lished La trahison des clercs, adding a new preface in which he indirectly but clearly quoted Bloch’s passage about the crisis of classical logic:

Dialectical materialism claims that reality remains the same while chang- ing (inasmuch as it is the negation of every reality identical to itself even for a very short time), and wants to be in contradiction and therefore, whatever one may say, it results in a antirational philosophy. Th e thesis is formulated with all the desired precision in this statement of Plechanov, a sort of manifesto of the dogma: “To the degree in which some given com- binations remain as they are, we must evaluate them in accordance with the formula ‘yes’ is ‘yes’ and ‘no’ is ‘no’ (A is A; B is B); but, when they change and cease to be such, we must turn to the logic of contradiction. We have to say ‘yes and no,’ they exist and they do not exist.”23

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So Benda—as Bloch had already done—contrasted the dialectics that mixes up opposites and the irrationalism that had transferred itself to socialist thought, reconsidering the “old axiom” of classical logic as a measure of men- tal health and an indispensable prerequisite to the of clear thinking. In fact, Gramsci considered the literary critic a “critic of the philosophy of praxis,”24 a key formula by which Gramsci defi ned Marxism. Th ere is, however, a diff erence: in L’étrange défaite Bloch also fi ercely criti- cizes the theoretical dogmatism and political obtuseness of the communists and socialists but, at the same time, highlights their separation from Marx. 25 Benda instead turns to a diff erent model of criticism, analogous—as Gramsci had discerned—to that of Benedetto Croce (and, one might add, to that of Adolfo Omodeo). 26 And, for this reason, it is worth considering in greater detail Gramsci’s juxtaposing of Benda and Croce, whose extraordinary essay Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono , provides the evidence of both a resolute intellectual opposition to fascism and Gentile’s idealism, and the detachment from his own previously held views. In 1913, in fact, Croce had woven an apologia for Bismarck, the Second Reich, and the “German rebirth,” and, furthermore, in 1920 he had espoused the thesis of the opposition between Kultur and En- lightenment democratic Zivilisation , formulated by Th omas Mann in Be- trachtungen eines Unpolitischen .27 And, in order to better understand this change in Croce’s position, it is also important to recall that he had started this revision of his political views aft er the Matteotti crisis, with the publi- cation of the stand taken by professors, writers, and journalists against the policy of the fascist regime. Th en the Storia d’Italia and the study Cultura germanica in Italia nell’età del Risorgimento, published in 1928 and 1929, re- spectively, marked, also in theoretical and historiographic terms, a water- shed. 28 And the same was true for the Storia d’Europa: in order to present this book to Th omas Mann, Croce used the same formula, an “examination of conscience,” which Bloch would have used for L’étrange défaite :

You will see the underlying theme of this history. I also have to say that, in the course of it, there are interpretations of Prussian, Bismarckian, Treitschkian, nationalist history, etc. which are certainly not favorable, and that many of the criticisms are criticisms directed at myself, at my former ideas. And by now we have all made and are making our exami- nation of conscience. 29

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Croce here reveals himself to be perfectly aware of the responsibility of Euro- pean cultures in having prepared the ground for illiberal regimes but, at the same time, he was also aware of the need to preserve the fundamental identity of a European civilization inspired by “liberal” values. He could not, however, soft en his criticism of the Enlightenment and democracy, and he defi ned the age of the Restoration “the richest in developments” for nineteenth- and twentieth- century European history. Precisely in those years the national bourgeois had shown themselves capable of attaining power by using diplomacy, relying on the constitutional monarchies, and formulating the model of a new state. Th ey had been able to do this without resorting to revolutionary terror and without liquidating the old ruling classes as had happened since 1792 in France. Th e new liberal elites had known how to reduce the old to “castes” devoid of economic and political functions, and from Vincenzo Cuoco’s study of the defeat of the Neapolitan Revolution and Croce’s apologia for the age of the Res- toration, Gramsci himself gleaned the paradigm of the “passive revolution.” 30 Intransigent Catholicism and socialism of Jacobin origin were, instead, considered the ideologies at the root of the authoritarian regimes of the twen- tieth century. And, like Croce, Omodeo maintained that there was cross- contamination between these two ideological camps:

Th is is not the moment to follow this development in all its particulars: it is, however, important to state how, apart from the process of incitement of the masses by the reactionaries, there was a spontaneous transition of ideas and attitudes from the extreme Left . . . . [In the opposite direction] the ideas of the traditionalism of Bonald and Lamennais renewed them- selves in the myths of socialism, in both its utopian and Marxist forms. . . . And, with the increasing temporal distance from the great French revo- lutionary experience and the appeal of the ancien régime, they became more and more obstinate, going so far as to want to attempt ordered hu- man life without freedom, under very diff erent fl ags.31

But Omodeo’s observation seems to have a more self-critical and radical meaning. Th e same meaning was expressed by Alexandre Koyré, in those years, through an analogous view: it was necessary to go back to the intran- sigent reaction to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in order to explain the development of modern (and I can add: anti-Semitism, too). Th e main accusation was leveled at Louis de Bonald, who, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, had committed himself

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to combating the Enlightenment, the new constitutional state, and the legal emancipation of the Jews. So Koyré’s opinion seems to me a strong confi rma- tion of my interpretation, and the question of the genealogy of illiberalism, authoritarianism, and anti-Semitism remains a crucial point. Federico Chabod was more reluctant to indict romantic culture. For him, it was in the watershed of 1870 that one should identify the genesis of the “myth of force” and of the aggressive nationalism of the end of the century, which decreed the death “of the ideal of the small free countries in the free European harmony . . . dear to the Enlightenment and romanticism, Montes- quieu, Rousseau, Adam Müller.”32 In so writing, Chabod did not renounce the tradition of Croce and Omo- deo, who shared the conception of European civilization of Curtius, Kantoro- wicz, and Mann. But his conception was not free of nationalist and romantic contagion: it was for this reason that Arnaldo Momigliano criticized Chabod when, in writing a commemoration of Carlo Antoni, he revealed “the unease of Italian antifascist intellectuals for their grounding in a romantic and na- tionalist culture.”33 On the contrary, Chabod tried to preserve not only Croce but all romantic moderate and democratic culture from the suspicion of hav- ing incubated the mental categories and rhetorical formulas of fascist author- itarianism.34 But Momigliano replied:

Th e fact is that around 1935 we were all still committed to studying and continuing to consider the problems of romanticism (German, above all, I could have added: but this qualifi cation is obvious from the context and is not indispensable). . . . Around 1945 Italian culture was, instead, committed to restoring Enlightenment values. You yourself in your study about Europe, De Ruggiero in Ritorno alla Ragione , poor Colorni in his last years, Abbagnano, D’Entrèves in Diritto di Natura , Banfi , Cantimori, Venturi, Bobbio, and at times even Omodeo: only to mention some com- mon friends, many alas have passed away. Unease is a vague defi nition. Perhaps you did not feel uneasy, psychologically: I felt it and I feel it now. Others have, like me, felt it: and De Ruggiero said so. In reading books like H. Blome, Der Rassengedanke in der Deutschen Romantik 1943, there was really little to laugh about, as you well know. I simply wanted to say: Romanticism with its ambiguities and contradictions becomes a problem and, I would insist, unease. 4) Th e decade of the Nazifi cation of Italy . German pressure to perme- ate Fascism with Nazi ideas began in 1933 or perhaps even earlier. I’m not

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sure. Already at the time of the arrest of Ginzburg and his companions, their Jewish origin was stressed. Th e rise of Interlandi Tevere , Preziosi Vita Italiana , the Preziosi-Farinacci alliance, Evola’s departure from the “lunatic fringe,” if I remember correctly, are events which happened prior to 1938.35

I think that Momigliano was absolutely right about the autonomous and au- tochthonous genealogy of Italian anti-Semitism before the Nazifi cation of Italy, and his observation about various authors’ unease in the interwar years is also justifi ed. Once again, in 1925, Th omas Mann had attacked democratic Zivilisation , namely, the French Revolution, as the “beginning of disinte- gration,” which had undermined “the epic idea” of the family and the com- munity. 36 And Curtius, in 1932, noted the “growing detachment” of French writers from the ideology of rights, the ideal of freedom, and the principle of Enlightenment civilization and also their return to their “ancestral origins which symbolize a centuries-old heritage and a sacred tradition.” 37 Curtius cited Maurras but failed to mention the commitment of Maurras and his companions to false propaganda and the persecution of the Jews. My comment on Curtius perhaps facilitates the resolution of the question posed by Friedländer about Bloch by going back to another of Momigliano’s texts. Here Momigliano demonstrated that one of the fi rst studies by the his- torian of Indo-European cultures Georges Dumézil reveals evident traces of his sympathy for the ideas of Charles Maurras, Pierre Gaxotte, and anti- Semitic culture. And Carlo Ginzburg subsequently showed that Bloch also recognized Dumézil’s capacity for investigating the relationship between Hit- ler’s Germany and “the most ancient Indo-European past.”38 Momigliano and Ginzburg reveal that Bloch remained at a safe distance from the views of Cur- tius, George, Kantorowicz, and Barrès, and resolutely indicted the tradition of the intellectual right-wing parties dating back to the age of the counter- Enlightenment and to the birth of anti-Jewish propaganda. I believe another document can also strengthen my interpretation: a text written by Jules Isaac, who off ered one of the most incisive studies of the genesis of anti-Semitism.39 Before World War II, Isaac had been inspector general of education and president of the jury d’agrégation, but, in 1942, he was forced to live in hiding. So he devoted himself to studying the crisis of Athenian democracy in the fi ft h century: in his reconstruction, democracy, weakened internally since the time of the Peloponnesian War by the subver- sive action of the oligarchs, collapsed at the news of Alcibiades’ defeat in Sic-

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ily, in 413 BC.40 For Maurras, who had fought in favor of the reestablishment of an oligarchic system, “the strange defeat” of the democratic fatherland was a “divine surprise.” Th e diff erence was that the defeat of 1940 started the re- turn to a new old Europe, in which the persecution of the rights of the Jews could actually be carried out.

AN INTERPRETATION: EMANCIPATION, ASSIMILATION, AND THE BIRTH OF SOCIAL ANTI-SEMITISM

Friedländer’s response is perhaps not convincing because his question was not relevant to the text. In fact, in Bloch’s work there is no trace of a con- fl ict of conscience between his proud and patriotic loyalty to his republican citizenship and his Jewish identity, which—according to Friedländer—Bloch would have perceived but not fully accepted. In fact, in the “examination of conscience of a Frenchman”—the wonderful last section of the Étrange défaite— the prevalent question concerns a diff erent problem: the causes of the collapse of the democratic republic in 1940. In Bloch’s view, these causes were not only or mainly military but could be traced back to the Republic’s institutional weakness, the delay in economic and technological innovation, and the serious diplomatic mistakes made by Clemenceau at the Versailles Peace Conference, whose eff ects had been ag- gravated by the 1929 fi nancial crisis. Furthermore, these causes also included the rift that had split France since 1789 and, therefore, the hostility of many intellectuals, scientists, and academics toward republican democracy, which they considered the heir of the Revolution. Th is conclusion by Marc Bloch leads again to my starting point: the text of Louis de Bonald. Th is hostility dated from the time of the intransigents’ war against the Enlightenment and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but it had always and continuously renewed itself with the Restoration of 1815, the Assembly of Versailles, and, above all, the Dreyfus aff air: critical periods of clashes between the two Frances that Bloch diff erentiates and analyzes in detail, going so far as to identify what he defi nes as the “tradition” of the counter-Enlightenment, antirepublican, and antidemocratic right-wing cur- rents. And in these movements, hatred against the Jews had always been a crucial issue. Bloch’s “examination of conscience” is in tune with Momigliano’s opinion about the responsibilities of the Italian intellectuals. I am referring, again, to Momigliano’s correspondence with Chabod, which I have examined. In these

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letters, Momigliano states that, as late as the mid-1930s, his generation still appeared to be committed to perpetuating romantic (and nationalist) values, and that it was only in 1945 (that is, aft er the war waged by the antifascist Re- sistance) that everyone fi nally decided to “restore Enlightenment values.” Th e analogy between the positions of Bloch and Momigliano is absolutely evident and also echoes George L. Mosse’s refl ection about the cultural origins of the Th ird Reich. 41 It seems to me that the common denominator of the analyses by the three scholars is undoubtedly their criticism of romanticism or of the counter-Enlightenment,42 that is, of the long process of formation of culture, which had a determining eff ect in defi ning the structure of anti-Semitic ide- ologies: what I would like to stress is that the convergence between Bloch and Momigliano appears enlightening and extremely important in order to draw some conclusions about the nature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-Jewish anticapitalism, taking as a starting point the document published by Bonald in 1806. Now we have to rapidly reconsider the results of my philological study of each of the documents, their historical contextualization, and the consider- ations I have undertaken, with the aim of hypothesizing a conclusion. In this regard, let us read once again the judgment formulated by Hannah Arendt in 1933:

Today in Germany it seems Jewish assimilation must declare its bank- ruptcy. Th e general social antisemitism and its offi cial legitimation af- fects in the fi rst instance assimilated Jews, who can no longer protect themselves through baptism or by emphasizing their diff erences from Eastern Jews. . . . Specifi cally modern antisemitism, the antisemitism di- rected against assimilated Jews and which is as old as their assimilation itself, this form of antisemitism has always reproached the Jews with be- ing the bearers of the Enlightenment. Th at basically was the charge of Grattenauer’s vulgar polemic of 1802 as well as Brentano’s consummately witty satire. . . . Assimilation always meant assimilation to the Enlight- enment. Th e Enlightenment promised the Jews emancipation and above all provided them with arguments for demanding equal , hence almost all of them became Enlightenment advocates. But the prob- lem of Jewish assimilation begins only aft er the Enlightenment.43

Arendt’s study is still one of the sharpest analyses of the social nature of anti- Semitism, which has been at the center of my research. Here Arendt clearly

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states that the victory of Nazism constitutes the legitimization of almost a cen- tury and a half of social anti-Semitism and that modern social anti- Semitism is not the same as the ancient anti-Jewish tradition or the old discrimination, which could be avoided through baptism and forced conversion (even if this result was not always guaranteed, and here Arendt’s opinion has to be cor- rected in the light, above all, of the history of the persecution of converted Jews in Spain and Portugal). I have to stress that, in Arendt’s text, modern anti-Semitism is defi ned as social and specifi cally directed against the assimilated and emancipated Jews of Western Europe and consequently against the Enlightenment as the cul- ture of the universal equality of rights: “assimilation always meant assimila- tion to the Enlightenment.” My research confi rms, I believe, Arendt’s inci- sive conclusion in the historical contexts of France, north-central Italy, and nineteenth-century Central Europe, even if I establish a closer link with the great economic transformation and the industrial revolution in continental Europe in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century. It is not by chance that I use the same formula (“Great Transformation”) proposed by Karl Polanyi; I agree with his general thesis about the destructive character of the political imposition by liberal governments of the self-regulating market and hence the disastrous social consequences of the change of money, work, and the hu- man being into goods. Th ere is a relationship between the birth of the free- market society and anti-Jewish anticapitalism precisely because the Enlight- enment was the apologia for the open society and considered technical and industrial civilization the fundamental stage in humanity’s progress. Th ere is also a close link between the establishment of the free-market society and the Enlightenment, and this link explains the social nature of the new anti- Semitism aft er the legal assimilation of the Jews. In the case of Arendt’s Ger- many, Mosse’s study—of the process of assimilation and emancipation of the Jews in Germany, from the period of the Enlightenment up to the end of the Weimar Republic, and of the interiorization of the categories of German cul- ture (starting from the central one of “ Bildung”) by the Jewish minority— represents an excellent confi rmation of this hypothesis.44 Aft er the pioneering works by Hannah Arendt and George L. Mosse, in the last two decades research about emancipation and assimilation (or Jewish integration) in Europe has increased enormously thanks to studies by many scholars, including the masterpieces by David Sorkin, Jonathan Frankel, Ste- ven J. Zipperstein, and Amos Funkestein. But sometimes the Shoah has cast a distorting shadow, and this has been well expressed by David Sorkin:

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In the rise of Nazism, and the Establishment of the State of Israel, history appears to have delivered a negative verdict on emanci- pation and assimilation. Th ere has been a strong temptation not only to make both pejoratives, but to confl ate them, so that emancipation has no possible outcome other than self-destruction or destruction by others.45

Th e substantially negative historical judgments of the experience of assimila- tion have not, however, stifl ed the development of studies that concentrate on the social dialectic between the European national states and their Jew- ish minorities and, consequently, on the cultural confl icts within the diff er- ent Jewish minorities imbued with the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and the equality of rights. In Europe, the diff erent “Jewish nations” (which in the society of the ancien régime had constituted separate corporations, subject to restrictions and discrimination but nevertheless having rights or “privileges”) sometimes accepted the ideal of emancipation but in other cases opposed the reform and transformation of their autonomous community institutions and political structures into mere religious institutions. 46 In this case, the Jews defended their religious traditions and even their separateness, which rep- resented the condition of their protection by the authorities. (In fact, in an- cien régime society had displayed a certain degree of openness toward Jewish communities and corporations precisely because of their separateness from the Christian society). So the interpretation of anti-Semitism becomes more complex. Histori- ans gather and take into account all the new relevant material, sources, and perspectives about these and are also obliged to render the mass of material into a coherent object of thought and judgment: this is why studies on anti-Semitism seem to swing back and forth with steady regularity, now rendering justice to new sources, now trying to restore a coherent interpreta- tion. It seems that, sometimes, every advance in research that adds new com- plications to our understanding can potentially threaten our clarity about what happened, and, in any case, many new documents, therefore many new facts, make the complete picture of the events of that historical period more complex.47 But they cannot exempt the historian from proposing a rational interpretation. I therefore have to ask myself the crucial question as to whether the acqui- sition of new knowledge, based on new documents, forces me to modify my interpretation of anti-Semitism as a reaction against assimilation and the free market economy, and therefore against the Enlightenment: from this social

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point of view, the history of anti-Jewish anticapitalism and therefore of the “socialism of the imbecile,” as I have presented it, appears to be a process of social (that is cultural) events that involve structures deeply rooted in Euro- pean culture and reveal the Jewish support for legal emancipation but also opposition to the Enlightenment enterprise of assimilation. In other words, Arendt was perfectly right in considering Nazi social anti- Semitism as the conclusion of the historical journey that began with the En- lightenment and its battle for emancipation, the “regeneration” (régénération ) and the “improvement” (verbesserung ) of the moral customs of the Jews in the mid-1700s. All the protagonists of the events of the emancipation of 1791— Honoré de Mirabeau, Clermont-Tonnerre, Henri Grégoire, Malesherbes— had been struck by the reception of the clash, in Germany, among the leading fi gures of the Aufk lärung and the Haskalah and the anti-Jewish opposition. Following the publication of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s fi rst drama, Die Juden, in 1749, the solution of tolerance based on the “deistic” acknowledg- ment of the existence of a common foundation to all religions had the posi- tive consequence of rehabilitating the traditional representation of the Jews but also of provoking bitter and virulent reactions in defense of the existing law, that is, the “privilegium de non tolerandis Judaeis.” 48 Lessing’s aesthetic and religious ideas had an enormous infl uence on the German Aufk lärung . But Johan David Michaelis, the greatest Old Testament scholar, absolutely rejected his thesis, holding that among the Jews there defi nitively could not be “an even generic form of honesty, all the more so because almost all the people have to live by commerce, a trade that off ers, compared to others, greater opportunities and temptations for deceit.” 49 Mi- chaelis made this drastic judgment in 1754. Th e European Orientalist was a convinced supporter of the thesis that the Talmudic tradition had had drasti- cally negative consequences on the morality of European Jews: it had made estranged them from the Christian West (this thesis was also held by the con- vert from Judaism Johan Andreas Eisenmenger).50 But the pamphlet that had started the debate in the German states (and above all in Prussia) about Jewish emancipation had been triggered by con- tingent motives that take us back to the problem I examined at the beginning of this study: the polemic against “usury” (that is, the Alsatian Jews and their practices of money lending). In 1780, at the request of the Jewish representa- tive of that region, Herz Cerfb err, the Protestant writer Christian Wilhelm Dohm collaborated with Mendelssohn in draft ing a memorial defending the Alsatian Jews, who were threatened by popular hatred aroused by the success

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of a pamphlet by the nobleman François-Joseph-Antoine Hell that accused them of usury. Hell had gone so far as to write about an alleged Jewish plot at the expense of French Christians.51 Dohm was a Protestant writer who had already clashed with Voltaire,52 but his collaboration with Mendelssohn was not successful. So in 1781 (the following year) he resumed his action in favor of the Jews by publishing his most famous text, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden. Using Enlight- enment principles and physiocratique political economics, Dohm proposed the abolition of all the legal restrictions that prevented the Jews from hav- ing access to productive agricultural and industrial activities and state ad- ministration. Th e national character of the Jews, according to Dohm, should be considered only the result of their suff erings,53 and their “naturalization” would modify it much more deeply than had been achieved in England by the 1753 Jew Act. Dohm’s proposals, as had those of Mendelssohn, provoked hard rejections, all hinging on the thesis that the Jewish people could not change its nature, that of a people who lived by means of commercial deceit and dis- loyalty. 54 Nevertheless, these reactions cannot be considered manifestations of the new social anti-Semitism; as Funkestein has explained perfectly, it was only aft er the turning point of emancipation, therefore of the French Revolu- tion, that the new anti-Jewish anticapitalism expressed the need to recognize and distinguish, once again, the Jews as a diff erent social body aft er they had become invisible with emancipation: “Th e Jews ought to be made recogniz- able again: their emancipation was a partial or total mistake because—want it or not, they are not capable of true assimilation.” 55 In Jewish German culture (and therefore above all in the work of Men- delssohn, which certainly constituted its highest expression) the process of reform had instead been conceived as a process revolving around state in- stitutions as guarantors of a choice of integration within separation. 56 And even in Dohm’s proposal, however, it was not clear whether verbesserung (im- provement) had to be the result of the acceptance by the institutions or of the Jews’ decision to change themselves and their moral customs. Even among the Germans favorable to emancipation many prejudices remained, and there was a lack of precise political indications on the part of the enlightened Ger- man reformers. thought that the solution could not be political but lay in the renewal of relationships between the diff erent Bible religions, which would have eliminated the diff erences between Christians and Jews, thereby also enabling the latter to make a positive contribution to the state. But even Herder had to recognize that it was precisely the historical

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events that the Jews had experienced that had made this people “a diff use re- public of deceivers,” and that it would therefore have been necessary to eradi- cate the laws of the state that made it impossible to improve and change the character of the Jews. With this aim in view, it was also necessary to reform the Mosaic law, which had always mixed up the moral-religious and political spheres. 57 It was not like this in France: the protagonists of the legal battle for emanci- pation, which began in September 1791, in the last days of the Constituent As- sembly—Honoré de Mirabeau, Clermont-Tonnerre, Grégoire, and Malesher- bes, the author of the decree of emancipation of Protestant subjects passed in 1787—had all been strongly aff ected by the echoes of the debate beyond the Rhine, but they trusted in the instruments of state: legislation and the law.58 Also in 1787, Honoré de Mirabeau had published his study Sur Mendelssohn et la réforme politique des juifs, and he continued to play, together with Brissot, an extraordinarily important role of mediation with the Aufk lärung , as well as propagating the views of Haskalah and of enlightened and reforming Jewish culture.59 Th anks to them, the texts of Lessing and Dohm (the latter’s work was translated into French in 1783 by Jean de Bornouilli) became famous in the kingdom of France. 60 And in fact the works of Mendelssohn, Dohm, Les- sing, and Mirabeau were used by Grégoire in the work that gave impetus to the political action that led to emancipation, the Essai sur la régénération phy- sique, morale et politique des juifs , with which the abbot won the prize in the competition organized in 1788 by the Académie Royale des Sciences et des Arts of the city of Metz. 61 However, Grégoire’s texts revealed all the contradictions of the Aufk lärung and of the Jewish Enlightenment Haskalah , just like those of the chrétiens éclairés, both Protestant and Catholic, who shared, with the Enlightenment scientists, biologists and doctors, the conviction that the social and political improvement (verbesserung ) of the customs (moeurs ) of the Jews would also produce their moral redemption and therefore la bonheur et l’utilité générale ; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen laid down the legal con- ditions in order to draft the new droit de cité also for the Jews, and these legal conditions would have produced their régénération morale, permitting them to be assimilated in Christian society.62 Th e Jewish nation had to be reformed before individual Jews could be- come citizens, and the political reform certainly envisaged emancipation but also new restrictions. If the Jews were an avid people, it was because of the discrimination that had forced them, almost exclusively, to engage in

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commerce. But commerce (here Grégoire is alluding to Voltaire), which “tends to eliminate national characters and homologate them[,] has left al- most intact the national character of the Jewish people . . . ; this kind of work, since it makes possible the circulation of money among them [the Jews], gives them the chance to practice usury and alter the value of money.” Commerce puts the Jews in contact with many citizens, giving them a “new means to conspire with concealed maneuvers and exercise mendacious practices thus expanding more and more their malignant infl uence.” Grégoire admitted that the proliferation of usurious practices had occurred above all in Alsace to the detriment of Christian peasants, who were reduced to a state of beggary. It was therefore necessary to force the Jews, by law, to “faire les échanges à prix comptant,” as well as “to prohibit them to do those kinds of job, as for in- stance administering hotels . . . , that facilitate dangerous manipulations. . . . We should expel them from functions such tax collectors, sheriff s’ tax, cash- ers, customs offi cials, procurators and other functions that make it easier to practice concussion, ill-gotten gains, . Th is is because we should never forget the character of the people we want to correct.”63 Th e Catholic religion explains how the philosophe chrétien Grégoire and the reactionary and counter-Enlightenment ideologist Bonald could share the same negative opinion about “Jewish commerce.” In fact, Grégoire even approvingly quoted the anti-Jewish text used by Bonald, L’a ff aire present des juifs d’Alsace, published in 1779 by Jean-François Hell.64 In 1763, aft er the end of the Seven Years’ War, texts about the controver- sies on legal emancipation and assimilation spread across Europe, but aft er the revolutionary emancipation, in 1791, the documents and the controver- sies spread from the new revolutionary France to the rest of Europe. In 1799, David Friedländer, a student of Moses Mendelssohn, sent (initially anony- mously) to the Lutheran pastor of Berlin Wilhelm Teller a compro- mise proposal between the religions heirs of the Bible in the name of “natural religion”; Friedländer asked for the emancipation of the Jews in exchange for their acceptance of baptism, without any obligation, on their part, of respect- ing Christian rites that could be in contrast with the natural religion.65 But the Swiss Catholic Jean-André De Luc immediately grasped the opportunity to once again attack the Aufk lärung and defend the traditionalist position of the political function of religion in the Prussian state. 66 And in 1806, on various occasions, Grégoire also mentioned De Luc’s texts, without obviously taking into consideration the political proposals antithetical to his own, but sharing the drastic negative judgment on Friedländer’s proposal.67

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Th ree years earlier, in 1803, Carl Grattenauer had unleashed his violent anti-Jewish campaign, taking up De Luc’s accusations against Friedländer. 68 In short, between 1803 and 1806, the production of printed works (pamphlets, treatises, newspapers) about the condition of European Jews had become a permanent feature of the new public opinion, above all aft er the peace of Lune ville (February 1801) between the French and German states. In the texts of southern German writers (many of whom were Francophiles), the model of legal emancipation based upon Enlightenment criteria became the central question. Consequently, the economic function of the Jews in the commercial balance of imports and of the German states (increased by the ban on Jews investing in real estate) became a crucial issue. And the issue of the economic function of the Jews also soon concerned the discussion about the “commercial” and “usurious” nature of Jewish morality. So Grattenauer was the mainstay of the attack against the Francophiles C. J. Kleïber and C. Grund, fi rst, with an anonymous review of a book written by the jurist Christian Lud- wig Paalzow, then, with a pamphlet against the fi nancial power ( Geldmacht) of the “Jewish sect,” entitled Erklärung an das Publikum über meine Schrift : wie- der die Juden (Explanation to the readers about my essay “Against the Jews”).69 Th e aristocracy of money (geld aristokratie) as capable of damaging the na- tional economy was also the subject of a work by Friedrich Buchholz, an au- thor, on the other hand, who accepted the idea of the improvement of the con- dition of the Jews but not of their immediate legal emancipation (that, on the contrary, would have produced a “money despotism” [ Gelddespotismus ]).70 But diff erent attitudes in the German states identifi ed in the Jewish “monop- oly” of commerce an archaic obstacle to the free market that continued to cause artifi cial price increases of goods, and many thought that the abolition of discrimination, of the “tax on the person” ( ), and of their privileges would, in any case, have favored productivity and the market. 71 As I have repeated in the course of this chapter, aft er 1791, legal emancipa- tion decidedly modifi ed the social context, in France and, aft er the Napole- onic occupation, throughout the French Empire, and in 1806 the prospect of the convocation of a general assembly of the representatives of the Jewish communities of the empire and of a possible further openness toward them created the conditions for the new intransigent Catholic reaction and off en- sive. Th e lawyer Louis Poujol and Viscount Louis de Bonald seemed to be taking up again the old theses of François Hell, but in fact they invented a new anti-Semitism as an anti-Jewish anticapitalist paradigm explicitly directed against the consequences of legal emancipation.

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Although Bonald’s article did not have many readers in the German states, it was oft en linked with the issue of German Jews,72 and it received fi rm re- plies from Grégoire and a prominent Jew from Bordeaux, Moses Peixotto. Th ey were both convinced supporters of the unity of the human species and thought that emancipation would eliminate, in one or two generations, the moral diff erences between the diff erent cultures.73 But Bonald’s article had a decisive eff ect on Napoleon Bonaparte: the assembly of prominent fi gures of the empire took place in the presence of two government commissioners and Portalis, an old adversary of Mirabeau; two months later, on March 17, 1808, two imperial decrees reorganized the Jewish religion on the basis of the model of the Protestant consistories, and, fi nally, a third decree, making an exception to the Code Civil and the general law on commerce of March 13, 1807, curtailed loans with interest, permitting the Jews to off er them only aft er the issuing of a license by the prefect of their place of residence (and in ac- cordance with the view expressed by the synagogue). So Bonald had obtained an important result: the legal necessity that the Jews, unlike any other French citizen, had to get a special authorization in order to trade and or off er loans, aft er having shown that they were not involved in usury. For the fi rst time, since 1791, the equality of citizens before the law had been questioned. Th e new citizenship had in fact been based, in the fi rst place, on residence ( ius soli), descent from French parents (even if birth had occurred abroad), the exercise of a profession or ownership of property within the frontiers of the state, and, fi nally, the declaration of loyalty to the constitutional princi- ples, the serment civique. On this legal basis, discrimination, diff erences, and the privileges of the community had been abrogated:

Th e National Assembly, aft er having considered the necessary conditions of citizenship for becoming electors as defi ned by the Constitution, and [aft er having considered] that every men enjoying this condition, having made a civic ought and committed himself to the obligations imposed by the con- stitution, [declares that these men] have the right to all privileges that the constitution guarantees; [the National Assembly] will revoke all the excep- tions and the reservations included in previous norms pertaining to the Jews who have made an ought. Th is ought will be considered as a renuncia- tion to all the exceptions and privileges previously held in their favor.

In 1808, in fact, those very rights automatically granted on the basis of the ser- ment civique were partially revoked in the case of the Jews, who would have

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been able to exercise the profession of merchants only on the basis of an au- thorization from the prefect and a certifi cation (issued by the municipal ad- ministration) attesting with certainty that this merchant was not involved in usury. And, if in Europe Bonald’s text, probably, did not enjoy a widespread reception, many of his other pamphlets about social economics, hostile to the free market in safeguarding the peasant families, were read and appreciated by many intransigent Catholic and Protestant writers—Frédéric Ozanam, Padre Taparelli d’Azeglio, Félicité di Lamennais, Ludwig von Haller, Donoso Cortés, and Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont—and they were still being quoted by Frédéric Le Play at the end of the Second Empire. Naturally, the appreciation that Bonald had expressed for some of Voltaire’s writings against the Jews had been purely manipulative. Th e real meaning of Voltaire’s anti-Jewish controversy was, above all, his radical criticism of every form of revealed religion, fanaticism, and intolerance: all incomprehensible phenomena from the point of view of public national ethics, which Voltaire had based on scientifi c principles, Newton’s physics, and Locke’s universal- ism.74 If, therefore, the old interpretations of Voltaire’s thought proposed by and Arthur Hertzberg (or the spread of anti-Jewish prejudices among quite a few philosophes as a key to the cultural genealogy of modern anti-Semitism) are unacceptable, it remains true that the Enlightenment proj- ect of a political doctrine of universal equality and the universality of rights proved to be partial and incomplete precisely because the Jewish minority remained an unresolved problem. 75 Th e texts of the philosophes have to be in- terpreted in their historical context, 76 but the presence of anti-Jewish stereo- types, for example, in the utopian literature of the Enlightenment, in any case makes their interpretation an arduous task. I will try to show this through another document. In 1770, Louis-Sébastien Mercier published a utopian novel: L’an 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais . 77 Mercier’s book depicted Paris in the distant future, trans- formed by progress in science, economic conditions, and city planning, and in contrast he presented Versailles abandoned and in ruins, inhabited by the old King Louis XIV by then decrepit, a bankrupt sovereign contrite about his errors. Th e work was republished in 1786, considerably enlarged, and in 1799 an identical edition was published, in which Mercier easily claimed the role of prophet of the Revolution.78 Among the chapters added in 1786, chapter 79 dealt with the Jews. Mercier imagined that in 2440 there would be the wonderful triumph of the natural and rational religion of the Être Suprême, that is, the establishment

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of universal brotherhood and tolerance of all religions, but his Enlightenment and utopian universalism retained many marked instances of intolerant and discriminatory Christian universalism.79 Mercier tried to take a stand in re- lation to the German debate and to the French discussion of the mid-1780s, distancing himself from theses of the assimilationists: the main obstacle to assimilation was—according to him—precisely commercial activity. Th e particular ability of the Jews in internal and international trade, therefore in usury and fi nancial speculation, had turned them into a cosmopolitan com- munity, which made them resist integration in the nation, in the fraternité nationale, while instead “the spirit of Christianity orders, I think, to hold all men as brothers, regardless their government and their religions.”80 Mercier described the relationship between commerce and Jewish non- involvement in the nation: “We owe to the Jews the invention of the bill of exchange that protects commerce against every violence and saves it in all parts of the globe. Aft er this invention the wealthy and the merchant have no longer a fatherland; they transport their fortune wherever they think con- venient; and the cosmopolitan person, who has all the means to increase his wealth, does no longer produce generous or patriotic ideas.”81 Precisely for this reason Mercier had envisaged the persistence in 2440 of discrimination, necessary to counteract the excessive power of the Jews and even their plan to control the state: “Th e Jews, who submit indiff erently under any monarch, hold in their hands all the wealth of the nation in many states and cities.” 82 Aft er all Grégoire himself had wondered whether the “future will perhaps justify the negative predictions by M. Mercier.”83

ANTICAPITALIST ANTI-JEWISH LITERATURE

But in none of the texts in German, French, or Italian published before eman- cipation did the controversy against Jewish trade, usury, and the cosmopoli- tanism assume the nature of the new anti-Jewish anticapitalism because this modern controversy could only have arisen aft er legal emancipation, even if the preconditions were present in the clash with the Enlightenment and in the assimilation of the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s. Bonald’s text was, of course, in debt to the typical ideas of the controversies of the preceding decades, but it was the fi rst to attack the decrees of emanci- pation of 1791. Th e attack led to the convocation of the assembly of the promi- nent Jews of the French Empire and the kingdom of Italy and to the limita-

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tions of the freedom of the Jews decreed in 1808: for this reason it can be con- sidered the starting point of a new paradigm. In some cases, the reception of Bonald’s text by other authors has been documented and the relationship has been philologically ascertainable; in other cases, instead, I have had to confi ne myself to establishing a correspon- dence in content and form, a morphological connection, as I have not been able to prove a direct relationship between the authors or the direct reception of the text. But, precisely for this reason, in these cases, the homology be- tween the contents is even more surprising. I did not confi ne my research to a monographic approach on the work of a single author, and I have also tried to avoid too many general concepts or the recurring temptation to consider anti-Judaism (barely distinguished from anti-Semitism) as an ultra-millenarian or a timeless tradition. I have defi ned the common code of the texts in order to characterize this specifi c type of anti-Semitic literature: specifi c words and specifi c details have served as starting and connecting points ( Ansatzpunkte, in Auerbach’s language) be- tween diff erent authors’ texts and between the political parlance of diff erent movements: those specifi c points have—I hope—provided the seeds for my path through nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and its generaliz- ing potential seems to me absolutely important in order to defi ne this variant (anti-Jewish anticapitalism) in the larger anti-Semitic literature. Th e connec- tion between Bonald’s texts and the literature of what defi ned as reactionary or feudal socialism is shown: namely, I believe that I have proved that from Bonald’s text and from intransigent propaganda it is possible to fol- low a path through neo-Christian or socialist texts that leads to the paradigm of anti-Jewish anticapitalist literature of the nineteenth-century populist movements and fascism. Th ere is, in fact, a code common to all the anticapitalist texts directed against the Jews: “In the end, all that is left of bourgeois traits is that they are ‘Jewish.’ In the end, only Jews are crassly materialistic, unpatriotic, revo- lutionary, destructive, speculative and deceitful, living only for the moment and lacking any historical ties to the nation. . . . All antisemitic arguments are feudal in origin.” 84 And the code common to the anti-Semitic socialist associations and to the theologians of the feudal-military order was protec- tion from the modern free-market economy: to obtain this protection, some socialists upheld intolerant ideas, as George Duchêne, a student of Proudhon did, approving of a pogrom that had occurred in imperial Russia in 1869 and

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describing it as a reaction by “honest people” against the Jews, “parasites, usu- rers, and exploiters of the people.” Using these terms, Duchêne was simply continuing the lesson of Bonald and of his master Proudhon, whose students posthumously published, in 1883, Césarisme et Christianisme. In that text Jew- ish economic morality was once again defi ned as “entirely negative, entirely usurious,”85 and the free market and the industrial society were considered specifi c products of Jewish culture. Th ere is no doubt that Proudhon’s work constituted a crucial connection among Bonald, intransigent Catholic litera- ture, and “feudal socialism” (using Marx’s incisive defi nition). Edmund Silberner, in his pioneering research, understood the historical importance of Proudhon’s views, but he did not pursue the implications of Proudhon’s texts or, consequently, their genealogy from the social eco- nomics of Villeneuve-Bargemont and Bonald, though it is highly probable that exactly through Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lammenais and Villeneuve- Bargemont, Proudhon came to know of Bonald’s 1806 text against the Jews. Late-nineteenth-century syndicalists and nationalists always associated Proudhon and working-class mutualism with the defense of the peasant family by Bo nald, Lamennais, and Joseph Marie De Gerando, as Proudhon’s anti-capitalism was in good measure the same as that of the apologists of the traditional agricultural society. Another book by Proudhon, Confessions d’un révolutionnaire, was like a refl ection on the tragedy of the 1848 republic and “the examination of con- science” of a socialist who had been more critical of the left ist republicans like Ledru-Rollin or Marrast, and of the socialists themselves, than of the old liberal monarch Louis Philippe: for Proudhon, the real revolution consisted in the abolition of state, government, property, and parties, while instead Saint-Simon, Fourier, and the working-class representatives on the Commis- sion du were “all partisans of the organization of economy by the state, by the capital, by any kind of authority . . . instead of teaching people self-organization.” Proudhon was a socialist who criticized the modern bour- geoisie as a class “pour sois” and “ chez soi ,” only capable of interpreting the principle of laissez-faire as “liberté de tous les aff aires” and, therefore, “ de tous les crimes.” But in these views, Proudhon expressed himself as a traditionalist, as Bonald’s companion. Nor did he have any diffi cult in taking up Toussenel’s criticisms:

Th e basic principle of the liberal government of the , founded for and by the middle class, was property and capital; it was

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bank-cracy . Th is is what M. Toussenel, the most witty among the socialist writers, has understood and expressed in the title of his curious book, Les juifs, rois de l’époque .86

So there is documentary evidence of numerous traces of Bonald’s categories and of Catholic social economics, but the echo of the reception of Toussenel’s text is striking. Apart from Proudhon’s works, there is also important evidence in Pierre Leroux’s texts and in those of the members of other socialist families, starting from the 1846 work L’organisation de la liberté by Th éodore Dézamy: in the same year, Leroux published in La revue sociale a long text focusing on the social confl ict between the universalism of rights, common to liberals and so- cialists, and the “selfi shness” and “particularism” of the Jews, the people that embody the “nation of merchants and usurers.”87 Balzac had instead followed the opposite path, transferring his infatuation for the “socialist” Saint-Simon to De Maistre (whom he considered the inven- tor of the Caesarist , which he liked immensely), and to remorse- less criticism of the world of commerce: Le curé du village is, as has been seen, his story based on the confl ict between the honest society of rural families and Jewish capitalist usury.88 Here we fi nd ourselves in front of another connecting point: through the texts of Proudhon, Dézamy, Leroux, and Toussenel we have certainly entered the realm of socialist literature, and we also have the possibility of a further generalization concerning the working-class and European socialist move- ment and its many diff erent and contrasting cultures and practices. Th e ex- istence of a fi rst rift in the history of the socialist movement probably dates from the origins of socialist literature, between the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, and it was probably the result of diverging choices with regard to the new market and industrial society. In contrast with the uto- pian tradition based on the myth of the state of nature and the common own- ership of the land, modern socialism was instead a culture produced by the consequences of the Great Transformation and of the industrial revolution. Th erefore, the working-class socialist movement advocated coordination be- tween the industrial economy and state institutions through legislation and the action of new social bodies, trade associations, and trade unions. It has been well explained by one of greatest historians of European socialism, Élie Halévy, that precisely because of this, socialist literature, from the beginning, had an internal contradiction between platforms and programs in tune with

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the principles defi ned by the universalism of rights, established with the 1789 Revolution, and those social practices and doctrines that extolled the role of the state and trade-union structures, oft en assimilated with the old corpora- tions of the ancien régime: from the beginning there were liberal forms of “so- cialism” that were opposed to the hierarchical, organizing, statist “socialism.” Saint-Simon was the inventor of this second form because he wanted an organic socialist society like the society of the ancien régime state corpora- tions but governed by the technocracy of the bankers, scientists, and entre- preneurs. And in my studies I have deciphered all the infl uences also exer- cised by the Catholic and Christian counter-Enlightenment on the work of Saint-Simon and of his young secretary, Auguste Comte.89 But despite this, the Saint-Simonians were attacked by the other decidedly anti-Semitic social- ists, who accused them of being the valets des juifs, the servants of the Jews, the new rois de l’époque . In fact, Leroux’s text used this phrase for its title, as did the two-volume work Les juifs, rois de l’époque, by Alphonse Toussenel, published the preced- ing year by La Libraire Phalansterienne (the publisher of the Fourierists). Toussenel indicted individualistic economic ethics, which he regarded as de- riving from cosmopolitan fi nance with alleged Jewish roots (“Behind the Prot- estants there is always Jewish power”),90 and his manifesto, addressed “aux ministres, aux socialistes, aux prêtres, aux peuples, au roi,” concealed a nucleus of solidly socialist reactionary thought. However, it should be borne in mind that Fourier, in 1808 (the year of the Napoleonic decree), had stated that

all evils are due to the reforms craft ed by the philosophes of the eighteenth century; their most negative outcome was the Jewish emancipation. Th is is the origin of all the social malaise. . . . Th e settlement of a thief or a Jew it is an enough condition for disorganizing the entire body of the mer- chants of large cities and drives to even most honest people to commit crimes.91

As I proved, Toussenel’s text, like Proudhon’s, was a milestone of anti- Jewish anticapitalism. Although it formally looks back to Fourier, it also ap- pears to derive from the traditionalist paradigm because it repeats Bonald’s accusation against the philosophes , the men of the Enlightenment, the econo- mists, all guilty of having begun the campaign in favor of the Jews and of having adopted a utilitarian conception of politics. Hutcheson, Smith, and Bentham were the theoreticians of the “ nouvelle usure .”

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Toussenel’s text was republished by Davin, a publisher from Nantes, the following year, and in the preface there was a revealing new reference to the laws about commercial licenses passed in 1808 and to Bonapart’s decree against Jewish merchants: “From 1808, when all the people were thinking only about waging war, a man of genius announced, names and described fi nancial feudality while speaking about the unknown dangers coming from the permit to sell and buy.” 92 Th e economic decadence, which is traced back to the crisis of agricultural society and to large-scale commerce, was triggered by the speculation of Anglo-Dutch Jews in league with the internal Jewish fi nancial elites, and Jewish antinational capitalism exploited the measures of the Revolution (the confi scation of large aristocratic estates, the sale of the church’s assets). Th e criticism of the modern society born from the revolu- tion of rights is undertaken from the point of view of tradition but also of the workers: “Th e Englishmen, the Hollanders, the citizens of learn how to read the words of God from the same book of the Jews, and consider the laws of equality and the rights of the workers with the same despite as the Jews.” 93 It is easy to understand that the rhetorical approach of the socialist Fourierist Toussenel made full use of the arguments of the intransigent reac- tion and of anti-Jewish anticapitalism: the Enlightenment and the universal- ism of rights were the last heirs of the spirit of free enterprise triggered by the Calvinist and Huguenot ethic, but the Protestants were as hostile to social justice and to the workers’ needs as they were to those of the old aristocracy. For this reason, Toussenel wrote that they are the perfect heirs of Judaism: Protestants and Jews, thanks to emancipation aft er 1787 and 1791, have con- trolled public opinion in order to favor traffi cking and rigging the market, blocked every defense of royalty and of the people, put the producer and the consumer at their mercy so that in France the Jew reigns and governs (“le juif régne et gouverne en France ”). And Toussenel adds, “I guard the reader that this word is rendered in its popular meaning: Jew as banker or merchant: Jew is any reader of the Bible.” And the Bible is the book that assures “that God conceded to the servants of his law the monopoly of the exploitation of the earth”—in the art of profi ting the English, the Dutch, the Genevans, and the Jews used the same help as “religious fanaticism.” 94 In order to wage the political battle against the “Protestant” elites and their eminent personality in the 1830s, François Guizot, Toussenel did not hesitate to use the rhetoric of anti-Protestant and anti-Jewish Catholic intransigence: “History will tell one day whether the famous principle of Reformation, the

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right to free exam, was accepted as an idea of progress as generally is said or instead it represents a means to substitute the infallibility of the individual to the infallibility of the pope, who is the personifi cation of the church and the of Christ.”95 It is from De Maistre that Toussenel derived the image of the “chain of errors of the moderns”:

Protestants of all confessions, your presumed religious and spiritual revo- lution of 1520 is only and simply an insurrection of merchant people, of nations of traffi ckers, who go back to the Bible because they feel uneasy with the morals of the Gospel

On the contrary, Bossuet is described as the grand penseur who renewed the classical (Tacitus) and Christian (Augustine, Chrysostom, etc.) anti-Jewish tradition.

Th e Bible is the catechism and the code of the slanders. . . . Th e Jews are never victims if not for the time when they become persecutors. . . . Th e state that concedes imprudently to them citizenship creates its future masters . . . ; France is already a slave of the Jews.96

Once again, the controversial targets of anti-Jewish anticapitalism are as- similation, emancipation, and the Enlightenment: the capital error had been emancipation, which introduced in the French nation a foreign body, the Jew- ish nation: “nations of usurers and unproductive Patriarchs, not civilized . . . do not recognize any sovereign and think possible all tricks when they have to manipulate those who don’t believe in their God.”97 A fi nancial plot would have induced the Orléanist government to take those legal measures that had created the conditions for the constitution of real Jewish monopolies in the banking system, the press, and the strategic sector of railway transport: being unable to raise the necessary resources to complete the construction of the rail network in the north, the government, following the advance of the necessary capital to fi nance the enterprise, had in fact granted as an exclusive concession to the Rothschild group the man- agement of the rail network, guaranteeing it the resulting profi ts; this fi nan- cial mechanism represented—according to Toussenel—the insidious system through which “the Jews” had begun to conquer positions of absolute privi- lege in the country’s economy through the strategic control of the communi-

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cations system. From those positions, the Jews would also easily gain control of military power.98 Toussenel’s text can therefore be considered the fi rst coherent proposal for a socialized economy based on the expropriation of “Jewish capital.” In fact, Toussenel did not propose the abolition of capitalist ownership of the means of production, or of other forms of private property, but he anticipated the idea of legislative measures in the economic fi eld exclusively directed at the expropriation of the wealth of the big Jewish banks, as well as laws of a dis- criminatory type “on a proportional basis.” All this prefi gured the economic measures and the discrimination that would be reproposed, at the end of the nineteenth century, by the most extremist French anti-Semites, Georges Vacher de Lapouge,99 and later by the German Nazis and the Hungarian, Austrian, and Romanian nationalists and the Italian fascists. For this reason, Édouard Drumont considered Bonald, Toussenel, and Proudhon his “bril- liant precursors.” In 1886, Les juifs, rois de l’époque was reprinted with a preface by Gabriel de Gonet and many quotations of Drumont’s praise for the work.100 For Bo- nald, Toussenel, Proudhon, and Drumont, the Jewish féodalité fi nancière had reached the positions of power in the country, and by the end of the nine- teenth century, the juiverie was identifi ed with the elites of fi nancial capital- ism. Th is identifi cation made possible the projection on to the juif (in the singular) of the old image of usurer and traffi cker, the symbol of the enemy within the national community of workers. I have found important connecting points among the texts of 1806, 1830, and 1845, but the repetition of inevitably similar formulae could also be ex- plained by the persistence of the same mechanism in the economic crises of 1787–1789, 1830, and 1845–1848: poor wheat harvests and the depression in the fundamental industrial sector of textiles. But in 1845–48, the explosion of the fi nancial crisis also overwhelmed the metallurgical industry, and the measures passed in 1841 to reunify private and public local credit with the aim of fi nancing the construction of the railway network came to nothing. Th ose projects also included “the laws regarding the mechanism of repaying private investments by conceding management rights to the private fi nancial back- ers,” with whom Toussenel had taken issue. It is important to stress that the socialist-republican and conservative press felt that the crisis was caused by the parliamentary maneuvers that favored “ of credit” to the speculators, 101 even if everyone naturally wanted

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to indicate a diff erent guilty party (in 1847, for Ledru-Rollin, for example, it was an undefi ned “aristocracy of money, the feudality of fi nance, the caste of the contractors,” who had acted in favor of “foreign capitalists,”102 while Tous- senel simply identifi ed them with the Jews). But we also fi nd the same para- digm in other regions of Catholic Europe and during the Viennese revolution of March, when the associations of factory workers, porters, and dock work- ers, like the “Gesellschaft der Volks” and the “Demokratische Verein,” accused the liberal constitutionalists and the students of wanting the legal emancipa- tion of the Jews with the sole aim of fi nancing the introduction of the factory system.103 Also in the region of Mantua, under Habsburg rule, where rich Jews rented farms in the rice-producing zone and were entrepreneurs in the silk industry of Sabbioneta and Bozzolo, between 1842 and 1848 the peasants’ social confl ict was marked by anti-Semitism. In 1848, the peasants blocked the appointment of Jewish offi cers in the National Guard and the election of Jews to the municipal assembly, and in 1880, at the height of the agricultural depression, even the socialist papers L’Aff arista alla Berlina and La Scintilla once again attacked both the owners who were the peasants’ creditors and the renters, labeling them Jewish “usurers.” Th is again constitutes new evidence that the word “usury” had acquired an absolutely diff erent meaning (from the traditional one) in the language of anti-Jewish anticapitalism.104 In more general terms, in Central Europe, where legal emancipation came more slowly (1867 in the Habsburg Empire, 1869 in Prussia, etc.), there were recurring violent campaigns against “foreign fi nance,” above all in the second half of the 1870s, aft er the crash of the Vienna and Berlin stock exchanges, attributed to Jewish speculation. Karl Lueger, for instance, who had been elected bürgermeister of Vienna in 1895 but was confi rmed in 1897, basically reproposed Toussenel’s old project: the nationalization of the eastern railway network (at that time on concession to the Rothschilds) and the expropria- tion of the wealth of the Jews.105 And the Catholic Church saw in organized social anti-Semitism the opportunity for giving a mass base to its own at- tack against secularized society. In 1895, Cardinal Serafi no Vannutelli, who in 1880 had been the apostolic nuncio in Vienna, wrote that if “everything is in their hands (of the Jews): wealth, capital, banks, large factories, news- papers . . . , the parliament of the empire, this yoke can be removed” only by strong propaganda focusing “on the opposition of Jewish capitalism that harms the poor and small fi rms.”106 Journals such as La Civiltà Cattolica , the Historisch- Politische Blätter , and La Croix never stopped claiming the pri- macy of the church of Rome in the controversy against Jewish money and

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power: in 1885, the French Catholic press, through Le Pélérin , Les Études , and La Bonne Presse, warmly greeted Drumont’s book, La France juive, as “a seed of Catholic socialism” directed “against Jewish and republican capital.”107 Th is “socialism” could be described as Catholic not only because Drumont had returned to the church in 1880, aft er his meeting with Father Stanis- las du Lac de Fugères, but rather because La France juive had many textual and subtextual echoes of Bonald, Villeneuve-Bargemont, and Gougenot des Mousseaux (and Toussenel, of course). Nevertheless, many of the varied and picturesque French socialist political families appreciated it precisely because anti-Semitism, in their view, could be a means of spreading anticapitalism in the sectors of society in which the working-class movement, between 1880 and 1890, was having serious diffi culties in making inroads: according to that tragic misunderstanding, small shopkeepers, merchants, offi ce workers, craft smen, and savers would have become socialists by learning to hate the “rich Jewish usurers.” Despite criticizing its clerical spirit, Benoît Malon, Jules Guesde, and Auguste Chirac (the author of the famous Les rois de la Répu- blique) always remained sincere admirers of Drumont.108 Apart from being another path to follow in order to investigate the rela- tionship between French anti-Semitic literature and Th e Protocols of the El- ders of Zion , Drumont’s work constitutes—as has been seen—the fi nal link between anti-Jewish anticapitalism and the fascist social anti-Semitism of the 1900s. Th is is confi rmed by the case of Paolo Orano, in Italy, and that of the journalists of the French periodical Je suis partout, among whom stood out Orano’s wife, Camille Mallarmé: as late as 1938, the arguments of social anti- Semitic propaganda used to initiate the persecution were presented accord- ing to the rules of the traditionalist, Latin, and Catholic-nationalist rhetoric. Th is is the reason why I think that the young Hannah Arendt was right in writing that the arguments and words of the new social anti-Semitism were “feudal.”109 Th e convergence of the arguments against emancipation of the anti- Semitic socialists with the much more consolidated approach of the neo- feudal, traditionalist and later nationalist Christian social propaganda cannot be interpreted as a purely rhetorical solution. Th e decision to use a rhetorical approach consolidated by Christian tradition against usury reveals the inten- tion of making anti-Semitic propaganda more acceptable to the collective psychology of the popular classes, at least until the end of nineteenth cen- tury. It seems to me that the anti-Semitism of the socialist authors should be interpreted rather as the expression of an ambiguity present in the new

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nineteenth-century working-class movement. Th e expression of anti-Jewish anticapitalism has to be placed and therefore explained in the context of a free-market society that did not succeed in functioning and was character- ized until the mid-nineteenth century (but also later) by strong forces that were acting to restore the social institutions of the bodies and judiciary of the ancien régime, but that could at the same time well accept the military diplomatic order of the Holy Alliance and the national administrative state. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that the agricultural social classes, the aristocracy, and the church throughout the 1800s represented the persistence of the ancien régime and fought for the extirpation of all the laws and institu- tions produced by the advent of the new liberal constitutions and trade liber- alization: the new laws of sovereignty and citizenship and the legal emancipa- tion of religious minorities and the assimilation of the Jews were undoubtedly considered among the laws and institutions to be demolished. Also the working-class associations were oft en opposed to the regulations and laws that only seemed to protect the inequalities produced by the free market. Before the middle and the working classes attempted a fragile social and political alliance (for example, to obtain greater or universal suff rage or the establishment of the republic as in the chartist movement in Great Britain or in the republican one in France), the crises resulting from the introduction of the free market and the industrial revolution oft en produced convergence between the land-owning class (and the aristocracy) and the craft smen’s as- sociations: one of the expressions of these convergences between the old agri- cultural class and the new working class was anti-Jewish anticapitalism. But in the long history of the Great Transformation of Europe into a tech- nological civilization and an industrial society based on the free market, class interests alone cannot off er a satisfactory explanation for anti-Jewish anti- capitalism, a social and therefore long-lasting cultural phenomenon. Classes and social groups that participated in the general movement to safeguard the workers expelled from agriculture, the craft smen ousted from their own work- shops, the young men and the women confi ned to the factories, did not do it only because of their economic interests, and oft en, in fact, the measures to be obtained revealed that in only a few cases were the interests of a single social group at stake. Such measures, that is, did not respond to particular interests but to the need for safeguarding human work, health, the security of elderly workers: these were necessities that the free market was unable to tackle, such as issues like job security, the stabilization of territorial economies, and the

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defense of cultural autonomies. But, up to the end of the century, the need for social protection, safeguards, and security could be presented not only by working-class associations but also by prominent people, the authorities of a region, or the churches, by religious confraternities, while, instead, the supporters of the liberal economy fought against the workers’ right to form associations in the name of the “freedom of work” and even denied the need to protect the whole of society from the consequences of the market. Th e recurring threat of the collapse of the market economy, above all aft er the beginning of the 1843–1856 depression, strengthened the ideology of the return to some kind of ancien régime and also the need to establish some form of cooperative community: in this context, the birth of cultural syncre- tism was not surprising. And the anticapitalism of the craft smen and the sala- ried workers and anti-Semitism so could get mixed up. Th e case I have proposed in these pages is based on a hypothesis of gen- eralization starting from the study of some texts. Th e concrete details I have identifi ed in these texts and the analysis of their language, as well as their historical contexts, have provided a generalization that is based on the points of contact among those texts and the diff erent contexts. I have proved the ex- istence of historical relationships among authors, texts, and cultures, but, in some cases, I have established only morphological correspondences among texts and arguments far removed in time and space. My approach could be considered reminiscent of Albert O. Hirschman’s brilliant text Th e Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (1991), where Hirschman tried to respond immediately to the neoconservative tri- umphalism in the United States, the United Kingdom, and , through a deep analysis of the logic of the conservative discourse against civil citizenship, democracy, and the from the end of the eighteenth century. However, he did not deal with the rhetoric of anti-Semitism.110 Th is was done by Zeev Sternhell, in his classic study, La droite révolution- naire. Les origins françaises du fascisme. 1885–1914 , which he later developed in Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste . 111 But Sternhell never investigated the deep roots of the cultural phenomenon of the new right-wing currents and he has not therefore traced social anti-Semitism back to the original event, the anti-universalist reaction of 1790–1808: in fact, he never cited Bonald’s text, nor has he investigated the birth, in those years, of social anti-Semitism as a reaction to the Enlightenment and emancipation. Sternhell’s chronological choices prevented him from understanding, in my view, the real genealogy

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of what I defi ne as anti-Jewish anticapitalist literature, just as they led him to misunderstand the very nature of the counter-Enlightenment in its relation- ship with fascism.112 On the other hand, Giovanni Miccoli is an expert in the study of anti- Semitism, but he has chosen to concentrate on the same historical period as Sternhell and on the problem of the anti-Semitic political controversy of the nascent Catholic parties and of the Roman Catholic press supported (but not always) by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Miccoli’s thesis is that there is a ge- nealogical relationship between the church’s millenarian anti-Judaic tradition and the new anti-Semitism of the Catholic political parties of the end of the nineteenth century, who saw the fi ght against Jewish power and hegemony over the modern world as a means of challenging the liberal European po- litical order that arose aft er 1789 with the end of the relations between the monarchies of the ancien régime and the church. Th anks to the political use of this old religious tradition of accusations against the Jews, the church and Catholics became the main political actors in the struggle against “modern errors,” and, above all, drawing upon the historical memory of the anti-Jewish stereotypes, they succeeded in obtaining a wide popular consensus for anti- Semitic programs. 113 I think instead that only a correct defi nition in time and space, of the his- torical genealogy of anti-Jewish anticapitalist propaganda against legal eman- cipation permits one to understand its real nature and the diff erence from the old anti-Judaism (and its theological, legal, and social connotations). Chris- tian anti-Judaism was based, aft er the fourth century, on the dogmatic op- position to Talmudic Judaism and, aft er the Middle Ages, on legal discrimi- nation. As has been well explained,114 the dogmatic-theological, legal, and social connotations of the anti-Judaic tradition make it an absolutely diff erent phenomenon from the one that formed at the end of the eighteenth century. If the historian who investigates modern anti-Semitism loses sight of these crucially important diff erences, he could easily take seriously the pseudohis- torical “excursus” in the speeches of Maurras, Hitler, and Paolo Orano, as real echoes of Meister Eckhart, Luther, or Bossuet. So, I agree with Delio Cantimori, who incisively observed that the Geistes- geschichte proposed in the texts of anti-Semitic propaganda cannot be taken seriously. 115 And his best student, Adriano Prosperi, has noted that in the le- gal and theological literature, which was rife between the fi ft eenth and six- teenth centuries throughout the period of the expulsions and the building of the ghettoes, the issue of the natural diff erence (that is, of blood) between

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Jews and Christians had widespread but ambiguous developments. It would therefore be a serious mistake to consider, for example, the question of the “ puritas sanguinis ” (which was laid down by the Spanish sixteenth-century statutes of “ limpieza de sangre”) as the real genealogical source of the Nurem- berg Laws. On the part of the Iberian or Roman Inquisitors, the hunt for “relapsi ” converts or apostate Christians confi rms, on the contrary, that by the Catho- lic authorities as by Luther, the Jews were considered only the followers of a religion that had not recognized Jesus of Nazareth and who refused baptism; the Augustinian anti-Judaic tradition had therefore justifi ed the historical persistence of this refusal as a providential testimony to the truth of the Old Testament against pagans and heretics: the Jews would convert to Christian- ity in the fi nal phase of time and should not therefore be mistreated or killed but simply discriminated against and segregated in order to push them to en- ter the church. Nor had the new and radical Franciscan and Dominican anti- Judaism—also fueled by the controversy against loans and usury—brought into question these dogmatic approaches. 116 So the claim by Julius Streicher, the publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer , of justifying himself by recalling Luther’s hatred toward the Jews, was groundless, even if German nationalist and anti-Semitic propaganda al- ways tried to appropriate the fi gure of the great reformer.117 In the context of Europe based on the Christian and therefore intrinsically anti-Judaic tradition, tolerance toward the Jews had included the conditions of separateness from, and discrimination against them but also their depen- dence upon the highest sovereign authorities, temporal and spiritual. So the communities of the Diaspora, until modern times, always inclined towards vertical alliances that, while they included discrimination (and the ban on owning land, having servants, or holding public offi ce etc.) guaranteed them (in exchange for special taxes) a wide range of privileges in terms of auton- omy. What Yerushalmi has defi ned as “the royal alliance” negotiated between Jewish “diplomats” and the Christian religious or secular authorities had, for centuries, been based on mutual interests. Emancipation shattered all this, together with the idea of a separate Jew- ish body (or nation).118 Emancipation constituted an unprecedented oppor- tunity, but it also produced traumatic grief and profound changes, such as the end of the autonomy of the communities and new Jewish identity crises over greater assimilation within the European cultures and nation-states, as well as the emergence of a full-blown anti-Semitism. Th is arose in the intellectual

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circles of the intransigent and neo-feudal reaction to the choc at the revo- lutionary transformation of the nature of the public powers of the ancien régime, and it identifi ed the European Jews with the new society based on the universalism of rights. During the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie, the middle class, and many other social classes appropriated it, with the aim of diverting the social hatred of the defenders of the ancien régime against themselves. But the class-based opposition of the workers’ associations to the modern economy exploited anti-Jewish and anticapitalist rhetoric. Th e reception of the anti-modern literary tradition made anti-Jewish anti- capitalism endemic among intellectuals, aristocracy, particular social strata of salaried workers, craft smen, and small traders, who tended to identify the Jews with free-market society. Between 1790 and 1930, every class or social stratum that had found itself in confl ict with the market society and with the state that had imposed its economic rules had been urged to accept the paradigm of anti-Jewish anti- capitalism because the Jews were the only social group that seemed to have benefi ted from the market society and to represent the state that had imposed emancipation.119

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THE SHOAH, SOCIAL ANTI-SEMITISM,

AND ITS AFTERMATH

WHAT WAS ANTI-JEWISH ANTICAPITALISM?

One of the most distinguished and anguished scholars of the last century, De- lio Cantimori, dedicated his life to the whole of the Reformation and heretics. He taught us the dangers of anachronism and of slipping into “metahistory,” as happened to the Harvard historian Peter Viereck.1 I believe that the path I have followed through the pages of the varied literature of anti-Jewish propa- ganda, all sharing the same social stereotypes, is also a way of reconstructing on new bases the long history that led, without any teleological predestina- tion, to Auschwitz: in this case, the link between the past and the future seems to resemble the slow processes of hereditary biology, in which a new type of life can be the unforeseeable result of the combination of the elements of the long preceding history. 2 I do not believe, therefore, that it can be maintained that the Shoah was the consequence of “modernity” and that the notion of modernity cannot be used in such a generic and abstract way, alluding to “Enlightenment social engineering.” 3 But it is also true that the emancipation legislation—the off spring of the Enlightenment—while demolishing the old dividing barriers between the circumcised and the baptized produced a new type of reaction to what was perceived as a new threat: a social , cultural reac- tion, namely. 4 Th ere are two ways of eliminating the Shoah from history: one is simply denying that it ever happened, as the reductionists and negationists do; the other is regarding it with reverence and terror as if it were something numi- nous beyond human reason. Th erefore, there is a great deal at stake as regards historical truth: if we do not see the Shoah as something that belongs to our history and that has deep roots in the heart of Christian Europe, we condemn

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ourselves to forgoing historical knowledge. It is certainly not by chance if, in recent times, the notion of reality has encountered serious diffi culties with the reduction of history to a subjective narration or a novel. Whence has arisen the putting aside of a historical perspective, with the result that the sense of the future has become blurred and the present is experienced as “postmodern”—an age of survivors, disoriented among the ruins of what was the modern world? Hence every serious attempt to tackle the genesis of anti-Semitism has to go through the task of placing it once again in real history: this task has devel- oped in two stages. In the fi rst, there were the accounts of the survivors, that “need to tell others” that Primo Levi felt as an “immediate and violent im- pulse.” Th e testimony of the survivors and the research commitment of his- torians such as Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer, and many others have erected such a mass of information as to render indefensible every form of negation- ism and every private attempt to escape from the burden that weighs on the conscience of humanity. Th e second stage is the investigation of the deep roots of the Shoah in European history and culture, a task that still lies ahead. I believe that this book could be a step in that direction because the recon- struction of the links between the anti-Judaic tradition of Christian Europe and modern anti-Jewish anticapitalism has to be tied to a vigorous defense of the principle of reality as the foundation of historical knowledge. What August Bebel, in 1893, stigmatized as the “socialism of the imbecile” was the mask, taken up by anti-Semitism as anticapitalism, an ideology that, aft er having for a long time fueled the intellectual and political scene with the myth of the Jewish-Protestant-Masonic plot, was oft en accepted in the popu- lar and proletarian base of the socialist parties, subsequently channeling itself in Hitler’s “national socialism” and in the nationalist and corporatist ideology of fascism. Along this course, the river had swelled and into it had fl owed the millenarian tradition of Christian polemic against usury and of Christian anti-Judaism spread by the Catholic Church at war with religious, moral, and economic individualism, the off spring of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Th e advent of the market and economic individualism was interpreted as a result of the emancipation of the Jews: the social uncertainty created by the tumultuous change in society sparked a need for roots and protective corpo- rations and, in this situation, the old Christian polemic against usury could be reproposed as an attack against the Jew as the devastating force of fi nance, guilty of social disintegration and poverty. Th us, the plot to eliminate the Jews

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took shape: a real plot masked and announced with the fabrication of a false plot, that of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , which had to mark the stages of the approach of genocide. And if the fi rst soil of incubation of the myth of the Jewish and Masonic plot had been post-Revolutionary France, we have sub- sequently found it again in many Protestant or Catholic states in which there had been the advance of the constitutional state and liberal governments: in Italy, for instance, the “sacrilegious” attack against papal Rome unleashed the attack of the Jesuits of La Civiltà Cattolica against the Jewish-Masonic “anti- Christian war.” Th ese threads also converged in anti-Jewish anticapitalism, which we fi nd especially in Italy and summarized in the political and intel- lectual paths of Paolo Orano and Mussolini: so the new alliance between fas- cism and the church happened in the light of the transformation of the Jewish Jesus into a Roman Christ, and the propaganda of the regime and the church created those feelings of hostility and indiff erence in which the 1938 racial laws emerged. But in recognizing the Holocaust’s deep cultural and social roots, we have to take into account the causes that brought to the surface, in our time and especially in Europe, anti-Semitic temptations spreading in political and re- ligious parlance. Th e enemy has not stopped winning—as Walter Benjamin has written—and while he continues to win not even the dead will be safe. It is because of this that I believe that it appears urgent to defend, through the study of history, the principle of reality. Against the strategy of disinforma- tion and propaganda that led to Auschwitz, it is only history that reaffi rms, through the facts, that principle of reality that can reconcile us with the idea of truth. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European Jews such as Bernard Lazare and Raff aele Ottolenghi replied to Drumont and Paolo Orano by try- ing to take their arguments seriously in order to dismantle their theses piece by piece and demonstrate their falsehood. Vidal Naquet did the same, with regard to the negationists of the Shoah, tracing their works back to a falsifi ca- tion typical of our times: the current cultural tendency to consider as non- existent authentic and consolidated realities. He has also revealed the method of falsifying the facts. Th e nineteenth-century propagandists ably mixed facts with false stereo- types in a purely ideological approach. Th e authors or author of the Protocols followed, instead, the typical procedures of the “art of falsifi cation,”5 using texts, or parts of true texts taken from the works of others, to include them in a text fabricated ex novo and totally false, with the aim of pursuing a political

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objective, which was attained with complete success. For many decades the false text was taken to be true. Th e history of anti-Jewish propaganda and the history of the falsifi cation also have a meaning of their own, whose logic has been enlightened by the memories of the deportees and the historical studies of the persecution. From the intense nineteenth-century campaigns to the Dreyfus aff air, from the ra- cial legislation to the , that logic shows itself to be that of pro- gressive radicalization based on the falsifi cation of the facts. 6 But reduction, falsifi cation, and denial of established and proven facts are procedures that belong also to the approach of the negationists and falsifi - ers of the Hitlerian massacre, and in their approach, there still persists an as- pect of the nineteenth-century anti-Jewish rhetoric. Negationist rhetoric has inherited, for example, from anti-Semitic Nazi “socialism” a false criticism of social relations, the mania of explaining everything, and an all-absorbing theoretical ambition. According to the negationists, all the twentieth-century systems are variants of the capitalist domination, and the Nazi concentration- camp system is not considered an abyss that separated the Th ird Reich from other systems but only a form of imperialist domination, qualitatively no dif- ferent from the logic of any capitalist domination: the extreme exploitation of the labor force. As I wrote, Hannah Arendt has traced the birth of the modern anti-Jewish hatred back to the aristocratic and clerical reaction against legal emancipa- tion and the new bourgeoisie, an advocate of the emancipation and new citi- zenship, and hence to the clergy’s political plan to defl ect the aristocratic re- action on to the Jews. 7 I suppose now that the negationists have provided a caricature of Arendt’s interpretation, stating that the German lower middle class, condemned by the inexorable progress of the concentration of capital, unloaded the social pressure on to the Jews: in the end, the camps were only a system of rational and industrial exploitation, as well as of elimination of the useless labor force. Th e Shoah is thus reduced in negationist rhetoric to a dependent variable of the exploitation, scaled down to ridiculous numbers because considered impossible on the scale of a real, industrially organized genocide.8 Th erefore, the genocide could not have happened and the gas chambers never existed: the Nazis simply decided upon the forced emigra- tion of the Jews to occupied Eastern Europe and the victims were “only” a few tens of thousands, caused by the inevitable suff erings of the deportation (they were therefore far fewer than the number of victims of the terror against the peasants unleashed by Stalin and the Soviet Union).

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And even the old thesis of the Jewish plot has been reused in order to ex- plain the responsibility for the outbreak of the World War II. Jewish accounts are considered lies; the sources and the documents before the liberation of Auschwitz are considered unreliable; the fi rsthand diaries and documents re- garding Nazi methods are regularly fi led as false; fi nally, the extermination is considered impossible for “technical” reasons. Th e corollary is evident: the negationist lie reveals the intention of damaging, or rather denying , the valid- ity of all the evidence accumulated since the Nuremberg Trials and overturn- ing those verdicts. Th e problem naturally directly concerns the “evidence” of the extermi- nation of the Jews, today disputed by the negationists. We all know that the genocide of the Jews did not capture the attention of the legal and historical worlds at Nuremberg, but only at Jerusalem, in 1961, when the Eichmann trial was being held. It stimulated the publication of eye-witness accounts, doc- uments, and historical studies and encouraged everyone, both outside and within Israel, to refl ect on the persecution, the extermination, and their own decisions with regard to both. Th is trial brought out a new awareness of the signifi cance of the catastrophe and indelibly marked the culture of the sec- ond half of the twentieth century. Th e merit must go to the study by Hannah Arendt published in 1963: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil .9 Th e book triggered heated disputes among the “reporters” who were pres- ent, ranging from the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to Telford Taylor, the main prosecutor at Nuremberg, from Martha Gellhorn to Elie Wiesel, and also provoked an exchange of ferocious accusations between the Jewish au- thorities of Israel and the author, of which there is an echo in the correspon- dence between Arendt and Gersholm Scholem. 10 Above all, it gave rise to the controversy about the relationship between anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, as well as the Jewish question aft er the Holocaust.11 But the interpretative key of the “banality” of the protagonist of the Ho- locaust was in no way an invention of Arendt. Moshe Pearlman stigmatized Eichmann as “Mister Average Man,” and Martha Gellhorn explained his de- meanor at the trial as the result of the dried-up mind of “an organization man who carried out the work he had chosen.” But Arendt had the merit of off er- ing a systematic interpretation of that ordinariness, perfectly consistent with her own interpretation of totalitarianism.12 David Cesarani, Eichmann’s biographer, maintains in a recent study that “the attitude of the accused” was part of a deliberate defensive strategy to avoid

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any manifestation of his criminal tendency, as well as to counter the intention of the Israeli authorities, especially David Ben-Gurion, and of the chief Israeli appeal court prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, who wanted to maintain the thesis that Eichmann had acted as a “satanic personality . . . up to his neck in an abyss of abomination.”13 Nevertheless, Arendt stated that Eichmann had been an administrator in the bureaucracy of the extermination and simply a cog in the machine who had acted without an ideological motivation or hatred toward the Jews. He had only obeyed an automatic mechanism governed by regulations and practices that embodied the inhumanity of the Nazi project. Eichmann would have been a man like so many others, neither depraved nor sadistic, but terribly normal. Arendt’s thesis was confi rmed by the monumental research of Franz Neu- mann’s most important student, Raul Hilberg, whose study of the destruction of the European Jews emphasizes the progressive autonomy of the bureau- cracy of the extermination from the state, from the party, and from the other Nazi organizations. David Cesarani, nevertheless, insists that Arendt forced her sources to adapt them to her own theories about totalitarianism and to make Eichmann the epitome of the totalitarian man: for Cesarani, on the contrary, the key to understanding Eichmann is in the ideas that “possessed the man,” the society in which such ideas circulated freely, and, fi nally, the political system that adopted them as a creed and implemented them during the war. What is now important for me is that the diverse theses of Arendt and Cesarani coincide, nevertheless, on a crucial point: the genocide was made possible by the interiorization, by the persecutors, of the persecutory para- digm, and then by a system of persecution based on wanting to demonstrate the “inhumanity” of the Jews. Th anks to both these premises, the bureaucrat of anti-Semitism “became a common element” in a society in which “men equipped with modern technologies and hidden in the recesses of the bu- reaucratic structures, but at a safe distance from their targets, can unleash terrible devastation on humanity.”14 And what is even more important is that both Cesarani and Hannah Arendt obstinately defended the principle of the burden of proof and evi- dence with regard to Eichmann’s individual responsibilities. Th eir convic- tion that Eichmann constituted the model of the totalitarian offi cial went in exactly the opposite direction of the judges’ legal strategies, but also against those who aimed at mixing up, without eliminating them, individual respon-

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sibilities with the collective guilt: “Guilt and innocence before the law are two objective entities, and even if eighty million Germans had behaved like Eich- mann, he could not have been excused because of this.” 15 Until the sixteenth century it was not infrequent for a Jewish synagogue to be represented as a blindfolded woman. Th e blindfold alluded to the blind- ness that clouded the minds of the Jews, obdurate in their unbelief, and that symbol was oft en contrasted with the image of the Christian church, as a woman whose glance was free and illuminated by the grace of God. Aft er 1493, the image of the blindfolded woman was replaced by the humanistic and Christian symbol of an impartial and public justice. 16 Eichmann would never have imagined that precisely the Jewish synagogue would have embod- ied, against him, the image of blindfolded justice. And Un Eichmann de pa- pier is the title of Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s fi nest study, about the relationship between Eichmann’s anti-Semitism and that of the negationists.17 Th e text initiated a long battle against authors motivated by the desire to destroy an awareness of the truth of the extermination of the European Jews and of the diff erence between a fascist camp and any other concentration camp: the negationists, who used the distortion of eye-witness accounts and documents and made an inaccurate and faulty historical comparison (Hitler’s concentration camps were, for example, likened to the American camps orga- nized by the Roosevelt administration for the internment of citizens of Japa- nese extraction). Th e negationists also relativized those slaughters that they could not deny, in the context of the massacres of the civilian populations in all the theaters of war, and they insinuated that the project for the “fi nal solu- tion” had only been a plan of expelling the Jews to the East. Th e negationists declared the nonexistence of reality. 18 If the anti-Semites who were convinced of the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus had had to eliminate confi rmed evidence and proof, the deniers of the Shoah maintained the nonexistence of the reality of the extermination, with ground- less arguments that, in themselves, did not deserve to be discussed. But the attack against historiography, nevertheless, cannot be underestimated.19 By declaring false all the evidence of the facts that deny the aprioristic thesis they want to maintain, the reductionists and negationists propose yet again the problem of falsifi cation: the negationists produce falsehood in the form of the affi rmation of what never happened or in the declaration of the unreality of what actually happened. At the same, it is not surprising if the ne- gationists’ interpretations seem and are completely inconsistent because any

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interpretation, as far as they are concerned, is only good if it serves to demon- strate that the “lie of Auschwitz” was the last plot of the Jews who, through it, control public opinion.20 Th e scientifi c duty of confi rming with verifi ed evidence that the indica- tions concerning the past are authentic holds true for the historian because proof is the rational nucleus of historical interpretation, as it is for the judge’s verdict. Th e negationist, instead, overturns the burden and duty of providing proof: it is up to the “Jewish liars” to demonstrate that the Shoah really hap- pened. So, the thesis “of the nonexistence of Auschwitz” implies the denial not only of that truth but also of the possibility of arriving at any historical truth about the past. Th e persecution and the extermination of the Jews cannot be explained only as the fi nal development of the deportation, in the context of the war on the eastern front because that would risk dissolving the links be- tween the genocide and the long history of anti-Jewish prejudice and hatred.

THE LANGUAGES OF MEMORY

Th e persecution of European Jews, invoked since the time of the legal eman- cipation and justifi ed by propaganda based on false documents, was not lim- ited to the denial of rights; it wrecked lives. But this catastrophe would not have been possible without the defeat of logic, which, as Victor Klemperer tried to demonstrate, would not have been possible without also disfi guring language: “Nazism, in its aspiration to attain totality, technicalizes and orga- nizes everything,” since the regime aims at “depriving each person of his in- dividuality and anaesthetizing his personality, to make him one of the herd without thought or will . . . to make him an atom of a rotating mass.”21 Th e new language is the weapon of tyranny and no longer the mother tongue spo- ken before the catastrophe, even if its words and terms could seem the same. As Arendt wrote: “It is not the which has gone mad . . . try- ing to survive therefore means, above all, preserving it” from Nazi corrup- tion, to make it the core of memory. 22 Th e challenge became terrible for Paul Antschel. Born in Czernowitz in 1920, in Bucovina, which had been annexed to aft er the end of the Great War, he was educated in Yiddish and German: the Jew Antschel chose “to come to terms” with Auschwitz by composing verses about the Shoah in his own mother tongue, the same of his assassinated mother (we know him as the poet Paul Celan, an anagram of Ancel). 23 “Todesfuge” is his most famous poem. Begun in 1945, in Czernowitz, it was completed in Bucharest, in the

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period between the deportation and assassination of his parents in the camp of Michajlovka, in Ukraine, and the massacre of the Jews of Bucovina. “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland”—death is a master from Germany in Celan’s “death fugue,” as in the musical tradition of Schubert, Wagner, and Mahler. And “der Tod” was accompanied by the small Jewish orchestras of the concentration camps. 24 Th eodor Adorno maintained the impossibility of composing poetry af- ter Auschwitz, but Celan opposed this and created “Todesfuge” that poem of lament in the infi nite silence. So Celan refused for years any invitation to meet Adorno. Instead, he met Heidegger, because he was deeply infl uenced by Heidegger’s refl ection (so much that he described his own research on lan- guage as “the Heidegger phase”). 25 But he was also convinced that Heidegger’s “philosophy of war,” that “existing in order to die” resolved in the mass call to arms and collective mobilization, was in any case antithetical to his idea of cultural reparation for the destiny of the victims. Primo Levi also criticized Adorno’s contradiction because Adorno had condemned poetry through the written word, but Levi also retorted that the only possible poetry about Auschwitz was precisely that of Celan.26 For me, as for Hannah Arendt, the destruction of European Jews is indis- solubly linked with the whole of European history. Only by recognizing that the European Jews were selected as the object of a ferocious project of the purging of humanity could the extermination be defi ned as a crime against the whole of humanity: only in this way would the terrifying experience of the Jews, inasmuch as they were Jews, have become the catastrophe of the whole of humanity. It was in fact not by chance that the Jews had been the fi rst victims of the factories of death: their tragically exceptional destiny had to shed light on the history of all peoples. Understanding that the extermination of six million European Jews was really a crime against the whole of humanity, even if perpetrated against the body of the Jewish people, we can understand how the choice of those vic- tims had been the ultimate eff ect of a long European and Christian tradition of hatred.27 Th e centuries-old Christian anti-Jewish tradition had prepared the ground for propaganda, falsifi cation, and persecution, and the false con- spiracy had produced a real persecution. In the light of such an outcome, the problem of the relationship between the anti-Jewish tradition and the perse- cution may be reconsidered only in the context of the history of the European cultures. Th e concoction of the false Protocols was the result of this propa- ganda, which aimed at dehumanizing the Jews and in which the enemy had

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been represented as a “nonperson” long before the concentration camp really reduced him to such a condition.28 Th e fi rst written accounts of the Shoah appeared soon aft er the war, while in Vienna, in 1948, Paul Celan was publishing “Todesfuge” and in Paris, in 1947, Robert Antelme published L ’espèce humaine. Many publishers, however, were discouraging authors, and the Shoah was subject to oblivion, if not cen- sorship, until the Eichmann trial which reactivated the imperative of remem- bering.29 So it began what Annette Wieviorka called “the era of the witness.”30 And in the following years the research of sources and documents and “the age of paper” provided undeniable evidence.31 It was for this reason that Primo Levi always favored a materialistic, “cold” analysis of the Shoah and described its mechanisms as a slow and gradual accumulation of procedures, regulations, and practices aiming at the progres- sive elimination of the identity of the victims and the annulment of their hu- man nature.32 Th e enormous massacre was not “an exclusively Jewish pre- rogative,” but, nevertheless, the obliteration of the victim’s humanity, and the destruction of his “person,” proved to be a “tragic, uniquely Jewish privilege.” Th e case of a child detained in Auschwitz, Hurbinek—whom Levi defi ned as the “child of death”—is exemplary: Hurbinek was a “nothing,” devoid of speech, “which no one had bothered to teach him” and Hurbinek—concluded Levi—could only have been a Jewish child. 33 For years aft er World War II, the Shoah was an unbearable event for Eu- ropean culture: it was also trivialized or reduced by remembrance to a suc- cession of horrors, with the consequence, therefore, that the imperative to remember could give rise to unforeseen risks.34 But Primo Levi understood this early on and, therefore, decided to recount those characteristics of the Nazi massacre that defi ne it as a general catastro- phe for the whole of humanity and, at the same time, a “unique” phenom- enon: in other words, the mass deportations, the aim of genocide, the reintro- duction of a slave economy, the obliteration of a person’s human dimension. He opposed a memory in which persecution and the Shoah would be incor- porated and mixed up in an indistinct amalgam and succeeded in countering the postwar repression of memory. And he contextualized the Shoah in the long cultural . At the end of the 1940s, European society, traumatized by the war, had an extreme need to reconstruct a shared memory, in order to avoid any further confl ict, dangerous for social and moral cohesion. 35 Th us, in the period im- mediately aft er the Holocaust, the Shoah underwent an oblivion that can only in part be explained by the enormity of the tragedy.

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When in the 1960s and 1970s, the gathering of eye-witness accounts and the development of a specialized historiography slowly began to fi ll the mem- ory gap, there was, at times, the risk of an opposite reaction: the Shoah could become an exceptional phenomenon (above all, in the interpretations that aimed at reducing it to Hitler’s intention), and this “intention” did not even lack interpretations of the theological kind. 36 Mainly in the years following the Lebanon war, many events contributed to changing the “image of the Jews” from what it was aft er the World War II: the decades-old confl ict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs resulted in the victims of the Shoah being considered responsible for the mas- sacre of another people, of a new “genocide.” Th is comparison—not to men- tion the equivalence—is, of course, ignoble, but we have to understand that it is a widespread perception. Th us, if not since 1967, at least since 1982—the year of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon—the memory of the Shoah has en- countered ever greater diffi culties. Th e victim, in the anthropology of sacri- fi ce, must always convey an image of innocence.37 Even if the state of Israel is not innocent, the European, American, and Israeli Jews must defend themselves because the Diaspora is coupled with, or rather imposed on, the Jewish state: for decades, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has provoked much more than a legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies; it has provoked the delegitimization of Israel as a state. Moreover, the identifi cation of ever broader sectors of the Diaspora with Israel has triggered a new anti-Semitism, which cannot be traced back to the anti-Jewish Chris- tian tradition or to racial anti-Semitism. Th e Diaspora Jews are now depicted as the emissaries, the accomplices, the representatives of the state of Israel, which would constitute a military and intelligence outpost of the “American Empire.” In the “antiglobal” attitude, which has taken the place of the old anti- capitalism, there are oft en ideological residues of European anti-Jewish anti- capitalism, unearthed above all in Central and Eastern Europe or reemerging in the language of Islamist extremist groups.38 Th e consequences of this new populism have been disastrous: in the realm of memory, the suff erings of the Palestinians—also a European legacy, and in particular of the British Mandate in Palestine aft er World War I—have been infl ated to make them equivalent to the Shoah, and the latter has been “down- graded” to make it comparable with the Israeli repression of the Palestinian Arabs.39 Aberrations and distortions of memory cannot easily be countered since, oft en, turning to the facts and the evidence is not suffi cient. Deconstructions and decontextualizations are the result of a political and cultural confl ict

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about questions of identity, against which the weapon of criticism can do little. So the propaganda based on the alleged denunciation of “globalization” in fact reduces the memory of the Shoah to an invention of the state of Israel and to the blackmail of the descendants of the survivors. Th e former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could thus attribute the “falsehood of the Shoah” to the old Jewish plan to “control the world,” and, in doing so, he is drawing, knowingly or otherwise, from the old “self-pitying” paradigm of the forgers of the Protocols . 40 Th is collapse has to be seen in the context of the great European upheaval that began in 1989. Since then, Europe has lost any residual cultural centrality. European integration, for example, is necessary to counteract the economic regression of Europe, but it poses—with the progressive enlargements of the union—the problem of reconciling the national states with the new continen- tal political dimension. An unexpected return of the presumed ethnic, local, regional, and national identities has brought to light, once again, the issue of minorities.41 In the context of the new national rivalries and hostilities, Europe, which has seen half of its “most European and least nationalist” citi- zens, the Jews, exterminated, has to face new populism and the rise of a new social anti-Semitism. Again, the problem of remembering the causes of this tragedy and demonstrating that Europe is coming to terms with its own past can only come about through the preservation of the memory of its Jews,42 but the nature of the relationship among the public memory of World War II, the history of the anti-Nazi resistance, and the memory of the anti-Jewish persecution has changed. In the history of the Italian republic, for example, the 1990s were a wa- tershed: the collapse of the political system of the Italian parties and of the republican political cultures forced us to reconsider the history of the Italian Jews in a much longer time span (from the age of the Risorgimento emanci- pation to the events of fascist and postfascist Italy) and in a new perspective. We are, by now, able to discard the conventional thesis of the “patriotism” of the Jewish minority and to state that its participation in the national cause and in the Risorgimento wars, then its integration in liberal Italy, did not fol- low uniform paths: and this was not only due to geohistorical factors in the diff erent regions of the country. It should particularly be borne in mind that the integration in the new unitary state was not exempt from rejection on the part of local elites and the Catholic Church and that there were also crises within the Jewish communities themselves. Th e Risorgimento canon, based on the romantic idea of the nation and, therefore, on the concepts of honor

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and blood ties, was defi nitively marred in the crisis of the end of the nine- teenth century (perhaps as early as 1870) and was subsequently incorporated in the rhetoric of the fascist regime. Th is resulted in the collapse of the tra- ditional representation of the fatherland. 43 In conclusion, between 1943 and 1945 the Italian persecution—in willing collaboration with the Nazis—of their Jewish compatriots, shattered the Risorgimento illusions about emancipation, bringing to light the antiliberal cultures and their anti-Jewish stereotypes. 44 Th e complex sequence of institutional and cultural paths that led Italian Jewry to integrate in state institutions and to express its approval of the re- gime should be reevaluated in less positive terms, even if, on the other hand, one should not underestimate the signifi cance of the most committed antifas- cist conspiracies, in Florence in 1922 through 1924 and Turin in 1934 and 1935, in which, above all, Jewish students, Jewish intellectuals, and Jewish profes- sionals played leading roles. Here, however, it is necessary to point out that neither the participation of young Jews in antifascism nor the confl uence of the various forms of Italian anti-Semitism in the persecution perpetrated by the regime induced Italian Jews to give up the consoling and deceptive cul- tural representation arrived at through the Risorgimento and emancipation. “Rediscovering an identity” aft er the Shoah constituted for Italian Jews the uncertain destination of a diffi cult path, marked not only by the memory of the unexpected persecution and the trauma of the Shoah but also by the new reality of the birth of the state of Israel in 1948. 45 Aft er 1948, almost like an automatic reaction, Jews developed a self- exonerating interpretation of what had happened to the Jewish communities under fascism; and from this approach there originated an interpretation ac- cepted by the Jews and many Italian antifascists: Fascist anti-Semitism had been a “parenthesis.” Th is implicit, background confl ict between Jewish rec- ollection and national public memory was not an exclusively Italian charac- teristic, at least in the two decades aft er the war: it was assuaged or repressed by a harmonious representation according to which Italian Jews participated in the self-exonerating drive that involved the vast majority of Italians, politi- cal parties, and national institutions and a large section of the national cul- ture. Th e responsibility for the depriving of rights, persecution and the loss of lives of the Jews was consequently exclusively attributed to the Nazis, thereby avoiding any investigation of the responsibility of the Italian regime and of the whole Italian people, too. Auschwitz has become the paradigm of the persecution, but this oft en ex- cludes the history of the deep roots of anti-Semitism in European cultures:

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without taking into account the roots and identity of European (and Italian) Jews, there was an attempt to consider all the persecuted as belonging to a single category, without explaining the dynamics of their persecution and its connection with the anti-Jewish Christian tradition and its legacies.46 From 1945, there was a new self-representation that helped to integrate the Shoah in the postfascist public memory, but only much later, the memory of the trauma became the only discernible sign of the Jewish identity. In the face of a historic crisis of Judaism and the loss of signifi cant common values, what remained transformed itself into “a kind of abstract awareness of being Jew- ish.” Moreover, by then, the Jews were unable to live in contact with the living sources of tradition, which was forced to use the memory of the persecution in order to react against its crisis of emptiness.47 In fact, it would not be too far from the truth to state that, for example, there developed—between the recollection of European Jews and the national memories—deep links, albeit elusory, starting from the common and unsuccessful attempt to reestablish themselves on the foundations of the wounds of the war and the repression of the most painful issues. At the beginning both resorted to the of the re- cent past to forget the more remote legacy, and the inevitable results of these selective memories were self-exoneration and a parenthetic interpretation of anti-Semitism. 48 Claudio Pavone has written that the Italian resistance was also “an at- tempt to come to terms with the past,”49 but the history of the relationship between the “patriotic-resistance” memory and the Jewish memory demol- ishes the most widespread account of the chronological history of the resis- tance. Th e latter account would have us include in a single glance the transi- tion from the regime’s crisis, in July 1943, to the signing of the peace treaty in 1949: from this perspective, one must also reconsider the ways in which soci- ety and the national institutions have reworked the national public memory and that of Italian Jews, and thus arrive at a diff erent evaluation of political acts, commemorative styles, and interpretative paradigms. Th e moment to which we should return is the fall of the regime, the work of a fraction of the leading group of fascism, and the beginning of a cata- strophic crisis for the unitary state. Many years ago, the writer Salvatore Satta insisted that “No one, who has not lived through the terrible experience of the war, can imagine the increasingly frantic way, with the passing of the days and years, in which the Italians wanted defeat” and the “confusion gener- ated by that confl icting feeling.”50 Satta’s words gave the lie to the political statement with which the fi rst antifascist government, headed by Bonomi,

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the government of the Kingdom of the South co-belligerent with the Allies against Germany, had intended to attribute the responsibility for the war of aggression solely to the leading group of the regime. (On the other hand, a part of that group had brought about Mussolini’s arrest on July 25, 1943.) Th e political statement of Bonomi’s government resorted to the self-exonerating lie that “the vast majority of the country, as early as 1940, had been opposed to the fascist domination.”51 Th is is precisely the point: what was the real foundation of the civil and moral religion of antifascism, and therefore also of its role in the national memory and in that of Italian Jews? In discussing this problem, it can be help- ful to compare the sources of the Jewish memory with the documents of the patriotic and resistance memory. In this regard, Piero Calamandrei’s Diario is an extraordinary source that fully restores the link between the new political morality and the Christian faith that, under the impact of the tragedy, Cala- madrei shared with some of the outstanding Italian intellectuals of the time: the philosopher Benedetto Croce, the critic Luigi Russo, and the writer Piero Pancrazi. Absolutely essential, in order to reconstitute the country’s memory and conscience, was—according to them—the building of a new faith shared by the nation, therefore of a new “creed” and of a “religion of anti-Fascism” (which, however, everyone understood diff erently). From 1944, Calamandrei was the high priest of this new secular religion. Adept at a rhetoric totally based on the Risorgimento precept, he always hoped for the “necessity of a heroic Christianity, with martyrs and suff ering,” which would have satisfi ed the widespread demand for meaning and dramaturgy. 52 But that new Christianity (antifascism) missed the opportunity: in fact, the various plans to build the new civil religion, with its rituals, mythographies, and monuments failed to materialize. Th e same fate befell the aim of estab- lishing a “hegemony” of the new political culture, based on the shared mem- ory of an affl icted country. It was a cultural and political defeat also certainly provoked by the crisis of the coalitions and governments of national unity, and then by the restoration established by the Cold War. Th us, every party, every religious denomination, and, at times, every local or regional commu- nity developed and cultivated diff erent memories. Many decades later, the collapse of the political system and of the republican parties reawakened in the old and new antirepublican parties of the Right (also obviously opposed to antifascism) the long-awaited possibility of canceling the whole republican political era and the antifascist legacy; this would, of course, also have ap- plied to antifascism, the intolerable Resistance, participatory democracy, and,

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fi nally, the workers’ dream of becoming the ruling class. From the mid-1990s, the new and old right-wing parties took up once again, in tune with the argu- ments of the defeated fascists in 1945, the need for a new national memory, based on forgetting the antitotalitarian opposition. Th e new Right tried to take advantage of the fragility of the old antifascist memories and of the omis- sions of the Jewish one. But the “sins of memory” certainly did not begin at the end of the twen- tieth century. As early as 1946, the mechanisms of purging justice, the miss- ing trial against those in command of the German occupation system, and avoiding the prosecution of Italian war criminals had contributed to stabi- lizing the Italian political set-up: these events also stabilized the frameworks of national memory, which was partial and selective, morally, politically, and geographically. Undoubtedly, herein lie the roots of the fragility of republi- can antifascism aft er the end of the resistance.53 Similar conclusions could also be provided for many other European countries, where the past became another country, as Toni Judt wrote. Nevertheless, in Italy, the cultural defeat had deep roots. Other documents and sources can help us to understand it better. In the Archivio dell’Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia and its Pietro Malvezzi Collection, the letters of members of the re- sistance condemned to death are illuminating. Th ese letters oft en contain the codifi ed formulae of the acceptance of death as a “Christian duty.” Regardless of social class or political affi liation of the partisans who were about to die, the forms of farewell to relatives, in these letters, are in harmony with those of the soldiers of World War I and, even further back in time, with the imagery of the Risorgimento martyrs. One of the best known sources, in this context, is the Confortatorio di Mantova, dedicated, in 1868, by Mons. Luigi Martini, to the “martyrs” of Belfi ore, whose texts demonstrate the conspirators’ willing adhesion to the creed and Mazzinian catechism but also to the Catholic tra- dition: hence, those wills conform to the canon of the devout precept of the relationship between those who are about to die and those destined to gather their words. I have dealt with this subject in greater detail elsewhere, and I will here confi ne myself only to highlighting, in those documents, the striking religious dimension of the resistance fi ghters’ moral choice. 54 While it was certainly not irreconcilable with a communist or socialist (not to mention Christian Democrat) political faith, it reveals, albeit with the benefi t of hindsight, a glar-

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ing contrast with the postwar antifascist civil religion proposed between 1945 and 1947, at the time of the governments of national unity. Th e weak powers and institutions that tried to direct the transition from fascism to democracy were not capable of providing an overall framework for the commemorations and the cult of the dead, or of reconnecting republican political language with the prefascist democratic fascism to postfascism: the monarchy, the CLN (the Committee for National Liberation), the army, the parties, the bureaucracy and the Catholic Church clashed. However, one has to consider whether these fundamental political causes were solely responsible for the polysemy of the diff erent forms of parlance, the fragility of the new political community that had emerged from the trauma of the war, and the inconsistent policies toward the war veterans and the Partisans, or whether, instead, such a phenomenon did not reveal the permanence of deeply rooted traditions, to which the diff er- ent memories of the relatives of the victims of civilian massacres, the religious communities, and the survivors of Allied bombing raids could be linked.55 Perhaps I’m insisting too much on the mirrorlike fragility of the memories of the non-Jewish Italians and of the Italian Jews. I am doing it in order to react, as a non-Jew, to the extreme solitude in which the memory of the Shoah is faced in Italy and Europe. I do this, aware that the structural symmetries be- tween the memories do not make the present cultural and political isolation of the Jewish memory in any way less serious, a refl ection of a widespread prejudice among non-Jews. 56 Progressively, Auschwitz has become the only “cradle of the new Jewish consciousness of the new Jewish nation,” 57 and the dichotomy between memories of the war and the Jewish memory has become one of the many diffi culties of our modern cultural condition. In the mean- time, the rebirth of the logic of identities and the search for an impossible shared memory of the heirs of fascism and its victims feed on the common- place of the “duty to remember.” 58 But a more important and further diffi culty seems to be the deep contra- diction between memory and history. On this issue, a clash between dramatic alternatives, regarding the relationship between memory and historiography, has placed the historians Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer on opposite sides. Th e former considered the persistence of a “mournful” memory as the main obstacle to the historicization; the latter, on the contrary, feared the pos- sible reduction of historiographic rationalization to normalization, hence the concern that the ritualization of mourning could exhaust the compassion and sympathy, which also represent important resources for historical research. 59

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Th e study of the persecution of the Jews should not be based solely on erudi- tion, and it does not only depend upon limpid rationality. On the contrary, it thrives on that “rage of memory.” It is not true—wrote Friedländer—that passion and memory hinder his- toriographic investigation nor, even less so, that they clash with enlightened aspirations for change. Although these are dimensions that, with diffi culty, can escape the impact of the cultural industry and the television democracy, which today govern all the cultural processes, they are indispensable for re- search. And Vidal-Naquet observed that if historiography is unable to explain the transformations of memory it falls to a wretched level. 60 Th is means that historiography must take up the challenge posed by memory but not permit it to become frozen in a normalized or monumental history, crystallizing the passion that is at the origin of research. I would like to explain myself with the example of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, planned by Daniel Libeskind, which splendidly represents the over- coming of the dichotomy between memory and history: here the continuity of Jewish German history stops where that line is broken by the discontinu- ity of the persecution, symbolized by the abyss of the Shoah.61 And the same requirement, it seems to me, is expressed when Roberto della Rocca warns historiography not to dissipate the “salt of memory.”62

THE SHOAH, INSIDE AND OUTSIDE HISTORY

Regarding the Shoah—in Hebrew: extermination or obliteration—today we know almost everything: the industrial organization, technologies, political dimension, and bureaucratic administration and even its strategic irrational- ity with respect to the Nazis’ own objective of winning the war.63 We know a great deal about the victims: the terrible ordeal of the men, from forced labor to execution, the fate of the women, the abyss that immediately swallowed up the old, the sick, the children. Dalia Hofer, Lenore Weitzman, and Anna Bravo have taught us that the way to annihilation was also marked by gen- der diff erences and events that specifi cally struck men inasmuch as they were men and women inasmuch as they were women. And Raul Hilberg’s fundamental contribution to our knowledge of the bureaucratic, administrative, and technical machinery of the Shoah was fol- lowed by those of Philippe Burrin, Christopher Browning, and Martin Bros- zat, who, in more recent years, have made decisive discoveries. 64 In 1992, the minutes of the Berlin Conference of Wansee, organized on January 20, 1942,

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by Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich’s Security Headquarters and of the Sipo-, on behalf of Göring and Himmler (and drawn up by the head of the “Emigration and Evacuation” section of that headquarters, Adolf Eichmann) were published by Kurt Pätzold and Erika Schwarz.65 Th ese Eich- mann’s minutes, and the text of the authorization (dated July 31, 1941, signed by Göring and addressed to Heydrich), in order to prepare a “global solution to the Jewish question,” provide defi nitive proof that the Security Headquar- ters had set the political objectives of, fi rst, reserving exclusively for itself the liquidation of German Jews and those of occupied Europe; second, coordi- nating all the institutions of the Th ird Reich involved in the “global solution”; third, planning the elimination of the eleven million European Jews. Th us, between the end of the summer of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, the anti- Jewish Nazi policies that had started with the Nuremberg laws ended in the Shoah, through the progressive radicalization of the persecution. And this also shows that anti-Semitism and the loss of the rights of the Jews had been the unavoidable premise of their persecution. Hitler’s project had, from the outset, aimed at defi nitively resolving the “Jewish question.” In the extermination, however, there was no implicit teleol- ogy, and the fi nal decision was probably “arrived at piecemeal,” in accordance with procedures typical of a system of “organized disorder.” Franz Neumann named this system “Behemoth” (the biblical antagonist of Leviathan), refer- ring to Nazi leaders, party organizations, broad sections of the army, leaders of industry, bureaucrats, policemen, and willingly active citizens or ordinary railway workers. 66 Th e interpretation of the organization of the machinery of concentration and extermination, proposed by Raul Hilberg, Ian Kershaw, Martin Broszat, and Hans Mommsen (and, implicitly, by Neumann), has been defi ned, by scholars, as “functionalist” or “structuralist,” even if it does not in any way exclude Hitler’s personal responsibility and criminal intent because this latter has been well documented by his biographers. Attention to the system, structure, and method rather than to the intention of extermi- nation does not exclude the presence of that intention, and it enables one to understand better the decisive aspect of the bureaucratic, administrative, and technical procedures with which the fi nal solution was put into eff ect. Th e failure to fi nd a formal order by Hitler dated 1941 or 1942 does not, in any way, constitute an insurmountable problem, as the negationsts claim.67 Up to 1938, the policy of intensifying persecution, all over occupied Europe, by the elimination of rights and expulsion from offi ces, fi rms, and schools (apart from the confi scation of property and other forms of harassment) had

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aimed at eff ecting forced emigration, but, from 1941, the consequences of the war on the Eastern Front triggered the radicalization of these measures and constituted the context of the deportation and the extermination. In the sec- ond half of that year, in fact, there was a profound change in the course of the war because of the failure of the blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. And this, together with the diffi culty of deporting and assembling all the Eastern Eu- ropean Jews and the impossibility of controlling the more than three million Polish Jews living in the territories of the governorate, prompted the Nazi au- thorities to begin the extermination. Th us, there followed the mass shootings that led to the large-scale massacres like Babi Yar, near Kiev; subsequently, the carbon monoxide gassing in specially equipped lorries, that took place only in the Baltic region; and fi nally, in the third phase, the bureaucratic and industrial organization of extermination that repeated the technical solutions already adopted in the “euthanasia project” in Germany. 68 Extermination, therefore, was also the consequence of the need to avoid actions that would be too disorganized and counterproductive for the direc- tion of the war, and, certainly, this escalation began with the deadlock in the war of aggression against the USSR. But the Shoah was, at the same time, the ultimate eff ect of the mechanism put in motion by propaganda, falsifi cation, and persecution (that is, by the legislative defi nition of the “Jew” and by the political decisions, taken by many European countries, well before 1939, and without any Nazi pressure, to discriminate against and persecute the Jews.)69 Th e war in Eastern Europe only precluded the possibility of ending perse- cution by the expulsion and deportation to the East, posing explosive prob- lems for the leaders of the Reich: the total elimination of the Russian Jews, the management of the ever more crowded labor and concentration camps, and the clearing of the Polish ghettos. From this point of view, the extermination was the result of a rational, administrative, and technical system and the con- sistent conclusion of propaganda, falsifi cation, and persecution. So the Shoah can be considered “modern” not only because it was orga- nized with modern techniques but also because “the Jew” had been defi ni- tively adapted to the image derived from the forgeries of propaganda and of the anti-Jewish anticapitalist literature: the camp was a technical, modern way of translating into concrete terms the old hatred fueled by anti-Semitism, or anti-Jewish anti-capitalism, as an ideological war against modern freedoms, emancipation, and the alleged fi nancial conspiracy against the national and Christian communities. 70 My conclusion proposes, again, the problem of the place of the extermina- tion of the Jews in modern history and of the “uniqueness” of the Shoah, fi rst

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of all, in relation to the process embodied by the propaganda used to elimi- nate every characteristic of humanity from the people concentrated in the camps, and to the cultural tradition that prepared it. (At the same time, this uniqueness does not exclude the comparison between the Shoah and other genocides, nor does it exclude the attempt to construct a typology of the con- centration camps, like that proposed by Andrzej Kamiński). 71 Th e specifi city, or rather the uniqueness, of the Nazi extermination lies in the fact that, for the fi rst time, someone tried to establish who had and who did not have the right to live, bending science and technology to the plan of eliminating a part of humankind. 72 Nor did the end of the war interrupt the massacres. In Poland they con- tinued even aft er the Nazis had been driven out, as in Kielce, on July 4, 1946, a year aft er the end of the war: it was not only a terrifying repetition of the popular uprisings in the Russian Empire in the early 1900s, but also a reac- tion by Polish society against the intolerable denunciation of its complicity with the Nazis (as in the case of the massacre of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941). Th e survivors, simply by their presence, represented an unbearable, indelible indictment. 73 Primo Levi wrote: “One cannot understand and one should not under- stand, because to understand almost means to justify.”74 Th e scandal of the apparent “gratuitousness” of the Shoah within the history of the Nazi plan for Lebensraum and the political-military elimination of Bol she vism leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the extermination was a “disinterested ser- vice” the Nazis wanted to off er to humanity in a sort of metaphysical mission, which on various occasions was detrimental to their military strategy. Levi’s statement explains why the historical context of the Shoah does not cover all its aspects. If it is necessary to understand what happened, under- standing the sources of the past may not be suffi cient for historical knowl- edge. Th at is why, shortly before his death in an American hospital, Arnaldo Momigliano pointed out that the extermination of the Jews had been the work of “fascists and Nazis collaborating in sending millions of Jews to the death camps,” that “had only been possible thanks to the indiff erence” that derived from centuries of hostility on the part of Christians toward their “Jewish compatriots.”75 Momigliano’s lesson has been of decisive importance for me. Nineteenth- century emancipation certainly changed the old legal framework of the an- cien régime. Th e new anti-Jewish propaganda promoted in Western and Central Europe by the Catholic and Protestant churches against emancipa- tion constituted the religious platform of their fi ght against the secularized

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state, and in the new anti-Jewish anticapitalism there was the reemergence of these old themes, fi gures, and stereotypes of the anti-Jewish Christian tradition. And the fi nal geography and history of European anti-Jewish legislation in the twentieth century amply demonstrates the large-scale di- mension of the new anti-Semitism and its deep roots in nineteenth-century culture. Even if the Nazi racist mythologies were condemned by Pius XI, the pontifi cal and episcopal pronouncements explicitly avoided including anti- Semitism, as such, in the condemnation: moreover, Rome never responded to the demands for a condemnation of the persecutions made, in August 1942, by the Greek Catholic metropolitan of Lvov, Andrzej Szeptycki, and even earlier by the bishop of Berlin, Konrad von Preysing.76 Th e majority of the national Polish church did not want to acknowledge that the 1941 pogrom at Jedwabne had been perpetrated by “neighbors” without the instigation of the Nazi authorities.77 And it is known that in Ukraine, for example, the per- secutions were eff ected with the active collaboration of the population and oft en of the clergy of the Uniate Church. In his masterpiece, Life and Fate , never published in the Soviet Union and only published posthumously, Vasilij Grossman imagines that Anna Se- merova, the mother of the protagonist Viktor Strum, on the threshold of be- ing executed, writes a letter to her son in which she recounts how she had had to leave her home; undertake the long journey toward the “Middle Ages, of the ghetto”; then be deported to the death camp: the march of the Jews, bur- dened with heavy clothing despite the summer, took place between two rows of Ukrainians, “in shirtsleeves,” who watched with pitiless curiosity, rarely moved, oft en indiff erent.78 Th is indiff erence, wrote Momigliano, cannot be understood without delv- ing into the hostile tradition. And Marrou added that our comprehension of the documents of the past uses the same cognitive process as the one em- ployed by our understanding of the behavior of others and ourselves in the present.79 Th erefore, understanding those who were indiff erent in the past is a good premise for understanding our possible current inertia. Th is may be the reason why Tzvetan Todorov says, “I am not interested in the past as such, but in the lesson which I think I can draw from it and which concerns us, today. But what is this lesson? Events by themselves never re- veal their meaning and facts are never transparent. In order to teach us some- thing, they need to be interpreted.”80 One of Todorov’s heroes is Marek Edel- man who was a very young stretcher bearer in the hospital during

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the Nazi occupation. With a few other people Edelman organized the ghetto uprising, in 1943. All the Jewish rebels had were about ten pistols, a few kilos of explosives, and some hand grenades, but this handful of Jewish insurgents were a match for the Nazis for twenty days, even if few of them managed to escape the massacre. Edelman succeeded in doing so and also participated in the general revolt in the capital the following year, fi ghting the Germans once again and watching out for the Polish chauvinists while the Red Army played a waiting game on the other bank of the Vistula. Aft er the war he became a doctor. On several occasions, he was harshly persecuted by the Polish com- munist regime, also for having protested against the expulsion of the students who were protagonists of the March 1968 revolt, in which the government saw yet another Jewish Zionist conspiracy. In the following years, he was also attacked for having supported the workers of Danzig and sided with KOR and Solidarnosc. In the mid-1990s, in Sarajevo, besieged by Serb militias and transformed into a new ghetto, Edelman saw a repetition of the scandal of the solitude of the Warsaw Jews and of the failure to provide assistance. Aft er all, even the Allies decided not to bomb Auschwitz. 81 Edelman posed the problem of whether it is possible to reinterpret the drama of World War II in the light of the tragic experiences of the end of the twentieth century, like Bosnia and Kosovo. Th ese shed new light on the most vexed issue: whether, between 1942 and 1945, it was possible to do more to limit or stop the exter- mination of Jews. A scholar has to understand that if it is necessary to know in order to act, knowing implies that there is a willingness to act. It is unbelievable that there was no knowledge of the Nazi deportations and massacres since there is documentary evidence of the detailed information regarding the Shoah that reached the Allies. Certainly, it was diffi cult to believe the news of the Shoah, but if sometimes the incredulity was sincere, more oft en, it was culpable iner- tia. 82 Th e point is that aft er Auschwitz, the unwillingness to admit the horror and shake off the laziness and inertia recurred.

SHOAH AND ZAKHOR

Th e decision of the United Nations to proceed with the establishment of the state of Israel and of a state for the Palestinian Arabs was dictated by the need to fi nd refuge for the “seventh million,” 83 the Jews who had escaped the de- struction of six million of their European brethren. Th e seventh million had been reduced to the condition of displaced persons, and the transformation

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of the old Jewish colonial and farming settlements, established since the 1920s in Palestine under a British mandate, into a new Jewish state can be consid- ered a direct consequence of the Shoah. Nor did the memory of the persecution and of the extermination imme- diately become, aft er May 1948, part of the collective identity of the new Jew- ish state; the commemoration transformed itself into memory over a much longer period of time. It would be years before it became a public narration that could be integrated in the public identity of the state of Israel. It has been maintained that, since the immediate postwar years, the formation of an Is- raeli identity has oft en clashed with the other Jewish identities, above all with that of the Diaspora. Th e parallel critical destiny of the diff erent identities can nevertheless be perceived. If any Jew can be challenged regarding the “place”—the territory, the sta- tus, the income, the community—that he has, with great diffi culty, conquered for himself in the world, in exactly the same way, the political community of Israel has been always challenged regarding its “place,” that is, its right to be considered a sovereign state. Israel is in fact the only state whose existence is continually called into question, exactly as has happened to the Jews for cen- turies. For this reason, being morally blackmailed by the Shoah is decisive, even in the realm of historical refl ection. Th ere was a strong continuity in the political culture and in the Jewish rul- ing class of Israel from the 1930s until the 1970s, in particular between the elite of the Histadrut—the Federation of Jewish Workers of Palestine and the Socialist Party Mapai—and the earliest ruling class of the state of Israel. Th e fi rst phase of Zionist socialism can be considered the historic enterprise of a political group that was totally European and an expression of European political cultures. Th e Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and German Zionist so- cialists established in Palestine were committed to a political project that was a synthesis of the principles of social justice, the rights of the workers, and national sovereignty; these Zionist socialist leaders and militants wanted a plan to reconcile the universalist ethic of justice with the one of national sov- ereignty, and they also represented an intellectual product of the Central and Eastern European Diaspora, which interpreted the spirit of the Exodus as a way out of the exile with the conquest of a “promised land.”84 But nor did the promised land necessarily ever have to be represented by a given territory. Other Jews viewed the “promised land” diff erently way, and labor Zionism was only one of European Judaism’s many political responses (in particular among the Jews living in the settlement zone of the Russian

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Empire) to the violent policies of discrimination, confi nement, and persecu- tion practiced by the tsarist regime, but it was also a response to the crisis of legal emancipation and to the anti-Semitic movements in Western Europe. Socialist Zionism represented one of those responses to anti-Jewish anticapi- talism as the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe also cherished the demo- cratic utopia of involving “the Chosen People” in the general and universal revolutionary emancipation of the proletarians, poor, and persecuted of all nations. And, of course, other important kinds of revolutionary socialism became popular among Jewish intellectuals, students, and workers, mainly in the peculiar form of the socialist program of the Bund, which aimed at realizing the autonomy of the Jewish proletariat within the overall revolution- ary movement: paradigmatic, in this regard, were the alternating political op- tions in the Bund at least from 1898 onward, when this party (the organiza- tion of the revolutionary Jews of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania) contributed decisively to the establishment of Russian social democracy. In 1903, the clash with the Iskra group forced the Bund to break away from the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. 85 Th e position of the leader of the socialist Zionists of the Histadrut and of the Israeli Labour Party, Ben-Gurion, should be located along the line that goes from Moses Hess, who was a communist and at the same time a Zion- ist, to Nachman Syrkin.86 Th e exodus toward the Promised Land represented, for them, the Jewish version of the redemption of all nations (including Italy, whose Risorgimento foreshadowed, according to Hess, the destiny of the Jewish people): if the Jewish fatherland embodied social justice, in harmony with the principles of the fi rst ethical and monotheistic religion, it should be organized on the basis of a socialist economy, of collective ownership of the land by the trade unions and the cooperatives, of the institutions of a state founded on the workers’ federation of producers and the self-defense organizations. 87 It has to be admitted that the Labor Zionist activists of Histadrut and the Mapai-Mapam alliance, who guided the Yshuv until 1948 and then the state of Israel until 1977, were not able to produce a constitutional text, a system of formal guarantees, or a consistently universalist welfare state system consis- tent with their socialist ideas. Nevertheless, their culture cannot be equated with those forms of community nationalism that arose in Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, founded on community traditional- ism: socialist Zionism was diff erent from the kind of nationalism codifi ed in the texts of Barrès, Herder, and Gordon, based on the defi nition of fatherland

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as a community of blood, family and corporation. And it was also diff erent from right-wing Zionist culture as interpreted by Jabotinsky.88 But, in any case, the labor Zionists of Yshuv suff ered a double defeat. Th e Zionist option failed as a general alternative to the Diaspora, did not succeed in convincing European Jews to emigrate, and was defeated in its policy of fi nancial agreements with the Th ird Reich, in favor of the emigration of Ger- man Jews, as well as, subsequently, Romanian, Slovak, and Hungarian Jews.89 Gershom Scholem wrote,

Undoubtedly . . . other two developments are no less signifi cant, even though there isn’t time today to do them justice. I am referring to the Shoah which we have witnessed, and to the creation of the State of Is- rael. Th e signifi cance of these two developments for the history of Juda- ism cannot be over-estimated: in fact we will never again be able to look at Jewish history and the conditions of the life of the Jewish community in the same way. Th e Shoah has defi nitively and irrevocably cancelled a vision of things which had been possible until that moment; since then it has only been possible to consider Judaism as the continuation of a so- cial totality, which certainly fought, receiving inspiration from important ideas but never being completely dominated or led by them. However, at the same time, the Shoah has cut the branch on which we were sit- ting: the great reserve of force, the developing generation, the hope of an enthusiastic youth which would have been energized by the idea of an inclusive image of Judaism and which was beginning to come into view . . . that generation died in Auschwitz and places of that kind. It would be futile to harbour illusions in this regard. We have suff ered a loss of blood which has incalculable consequences for our spiritual and scientifi c creativity.90

Th e Zionist socialists of Yshuv reacted to that watershed in Jewish history, that incalculable loss, that insurmountable trauma, by criticizing the choice of the Diaspora and attacking the alleged acquiescence of the European Jews to the Hitlerian new order. Th ey uncritically extolled the heroic rebellions in the ghettoes but also economically capitalized Europe’s debt (above all in the negotiations with the new German Federal Republic of about compensation). Th ey built the new of the Jewish state, defi n- ing it as a new redemption, a social liberation, and a political “Risorgimento,” but they wavered between a secular policy regarding memory and conspicu-

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ous doses of oblivion. 91 As late as 1943, Ben Zion Dinur could have written that the galut , exile, not the Shoah, represented the supreme catastrophe. 92 By the wars of 1967 and 1973, when the veil of repression of the memory was fi nally rent and the memory of the Shoah began to be transformed into a new post-Zionist political religion, the new generations born in the territo- ries were being subjected to a process of “re-Judaization.” 93 Th e Israeli Army became the great protagonist of the commemorations and the presence of the military and of Israeli government authorities became more and more frequent also in European commemorations while, on a completely diff erent front, the scaling down of the Shoah to a “sacred” dimension favored a paral- lel process of “victimization.”94 What I wish to stress is that, in the various paths of Italian, Jewish Italian, European, and Israeli memories, one therefore fi nds enlightening analogies: the parallel repressions in the fi rst ten or fi ft een postwar years, the confl ict between loyalty to the fatherland and internationally based ideologies, and the contradiction between national memory and diff erent memories (as that of the Diaspora). At the same time, the fragile civil antifascist religion revolv- ing around the fi gure of the partisan fi ghter can be juxtaposed with that of the Zionist myth of the new Jewish citizen, producer, and fi ghter, just as, once again, the people’s cult of all the dead, both military and civilian, through war, bombings, or reprisals, can be juxtaposed with Israeli victimization, the cult of collective pain. For this reason, Stefano Levi Della Torre has contrasted two models of Jew- ish memory, whose archetypes—he argues—go back to two diff erent destinies of ancient Israel. He writes that the tribes of the kingdom of Israel, “physically tied to the earth,” could not survive and disappeared once the link with the fatherland had gone because of the exile imposed on them by the Assyrians in 722 BC. Instead, the tribes of the kingdom of Judah, also expelled from their kingdom and dispersed in the Babylonian exile, about two centuries later, did not grasp the opportunity, granted them by Cyrus, of returning to Palestine. Th us, they managed to survive, despite living far from their own land, thanks to their loyalty to the faith of their fathers. 95 Della Torre means that in Judaism, side by side with the territorial link and with the national code, there has always coexisted a purely cultural and reli- gious model so that adherence to the Torah and the memory of the Shoah can be constrained to either code, the national and territorial one or the religious and cultural one. Nevertheless the two models continue to clash, and both expect complete and full acceptance.

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If the Shoah has become and represents only a function of a presumed identity centered on territory, namely the state of Israel, its memory will, nat- urally, be exposed to many risks: fi rst of all, for example, to the risk of the possibility of canceling the historical relationship among the European crisis, Nazi totalitarianism, and the Shoah. Th e risk would be also to involve the memory of the Shoah in the controversy against Israeli government policies since the foundation of the state, and another danger would be to distort the historic destiny of the Jewish people and make it clash with that of the Arabs of Palestine. Th e predominance of the ethnic code, the need for sovereignty, and the political necessities of the Jewish state in contrast with the universalist paradigm of the monotheistic ethical culture and its Enlightenment secular- ization, could trap the memory of the Shoah in a nationalist representation. It was for this reason that, in the immediate postwar years, Martin Buber fought so that the Yshuv could “realize itself” (as he wrote in 1947) on a supra- national basis.96 Th is would include the Arab nationalities because his ideal of a fatherland was not at variance with the Diaspora. On the contrary, the establishment of a diff erent model of Zionism has resulted in the destiny of many Palestinian Arabs becoming similar to that of the Diaspora Jews: “de- partures, arrivals, farewells, exile, nostalgia, a sense of belonging, experience of travelling.” 97 Buber thought that less of an obsession with territory and the deritualization of the religious dimension could have brought the Shoah back to the history of Europe and could also have encouraged the dialogue be- tween the “new” Israeli Jews and their Arab fellows.

SOCIAL ANTI-SEMITISM AND ITS AFTERMATH

Th e European society that came into being between the end of the 1700s and the mid-1800s and the “Great Transformation” (the imposition of the free market and the continuous industrial revolutions), crashed between 1929 and 1939. Th e constitutional state, the rights of citizenship, and the freedom of the European Jews were destroyed almost everywhere between 1933 and 1945. Th e diff erent forms of fascism were also a way of defending the free market from the convulsions of society. Th e historical context of the age that began in 1945 (what Tony Judt defi ned as a sole and long Postwar ) was, at least until the last two decades of the twen- tieth century, very diff erent.98 Some lessons were learned from the catastro- phe, and democracy and new procedures to regulate international criminal law and international trade were established, putting some order in the fi nan-

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cial system and protecting society from the market with the policies of the welfare state. From the tragedy of the destruction of the European Jews there arose the state of Israel, whose history represents a part of European history, while the new Diaspora has been above all concentrated in the United States. Th e paradigm of the cultural war against legal emancipation and the rights of freedom of the Jews has not disappeared, neither in the East nor in the West, as it is proved by the oscillating fortunes of the French Front National in the last three decades, the reemergence of Catholic nationalists in postcommunist Poland, the attainment of power by the Jobbik Party in Hungary in 2012, and many other examples. Undoubtedly, openly declared anti-Semitism has been, in the last two or three decades, a new social and cultural phenomenon, which is much more evident and widespread than it has been in the long postwar period, the welfare state era, and the new order based on the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. Certainly, the racial phenomenology of anti-Semitism has diminished to the scale of a nocturnal cult practiced by neo-Nazi sects (sometimes by some biologists and sociolo- gists), and the new anti-Semitic code can only be deciphered by observing the phenomenon in its new context, in which there exists a component of nation- alist tradition (sometimes neo-fascist but also diff erent, as in the case of the North Italian League or Haider’s liberal movement in Austria), as well as so- cial and economic elements: those can oft en be traced back to the anti-Jewish anticapitalism originating in the nineteenth century, which I have analyzed in this study. Th ere are quite a few points of contact between these two components, but they are also intertwined with a third, which is much more recent. It does not derive from the legitimate criticism of the policies of Israeli governments toward the Arab populations of Palestine (in the last two decades not only ferociously unjust policies but also basically suicidal for Israel). Th is third component feeds on the hostility toward the state of Israel, inasmuch as it is a political community, a state that should be eliminated, because it is a political manifestation of the Jewish presence. In the propaganda disseminated among the Arab communities of Europe and oft en also in Islamic areas, Israel is in fact presented as an illegitimate colonial power and a Middle Eastern outpost of American capitalism (an extraordinary paradox: suffi ce it to bear in mind that the Soviet Union was the fi rst country to recognize the Jewish state in 1948). 99 So Israel and the United States are coupled in one symbolic repre- sentation, as colonial and capitalist powers, like the European Jews had been represented as powerful fi nancial elites for two centuries.

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It was clear as early as 1946 that the whole matter had not ended at Ausch- witz. Th e 1,600 Polish Jews of the village of Jedwabne (from the Polish word for “silk”) who were massacred in 1941, aft er the arrival of the Nazis, were craft smen with socialist and communist sympathies and some of them, to- gether with their fellow Polish villagers, had celebrated the arrival of their Soviet “comrades” in 1939. Th ey were not killed because of this, nor were they killed by the Nazis. Th ey were horrendously massacred by bands of their fel- low villagers, with the consent of the mayor and with the active participa- tion of the whole neighboring population in order to rob them. In 1946, when more than three million Polish Jews had already been exterminated in the camps, the pogroms by the Poles against their Jewish compatriots—who had survived and were returning to their villages—restarted in Raeszów in June 1945, in Kielce in July, and in Krakow in August. It was not a question of the mere continuation of prewar or war-time behavior but rather of a reaction at the return of the survivors by a part of Polish society, the same one that had supported the Nazi campaign of persecution and deportation. Th e Shoah had ended a few months earlier and, in the context of the sei- zure of power by the communists, the Poles once again attacked the Jews. Th ey would wait for the trains bringing home the Jews from the concentra- tion camps and would rob them. Th ey also robbed the Poles who had hidden and protected the Jews, convinced that these fellow Poles had become rich thanks to their generous help. Th ey refused to give back the houses of the Jews, which they had appropriated; they suspected the Jews of being Soviet agents. 100 Th e old-new anti-Semitism made itself felt in society and was even used by the Polish Communist Party against political dissent, especially in the case of the expulsion of the militants of the student movement in 1968, who were accused of Trotskyism and Zionism. Aft er the Six-Day War of 1967 between Israel and the Arab League, the fact that many militants of the stu- dent movement and the new heretics were “Jews” constituted the real basis for accusing the dissidents of Zionism. Similar phenomena had occurred in the Soviet Union and in other “popular democracies” aft er the 1956 Suez War, and even earlier, on the occasion of the Slansky trial in Hungary. So this was not something new, but it involved thousands of people in Poland, a state that had been subjected to a Nazi military occupation aimed at constructing a slave economy (the lebensraum of the Th ird Reich) and had been the place of the implementation of the extermination of the Jews of the whole of Europe. On the other hand, in Western Europe, the Protestant and Lutheran churches were quicker in eliminating the dogmatic anti-Judaic tradition, but

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the Catholic Church waited until 1965 and the publication of the encyclical Nostra Aetate in order to overcome its intransigent approach: it was only in 1982 that the Polish pope John Paul II visited the Rome synagogue. But 1982 was a crucial year because social anti-Semitic propaganda had reappeared of- ten in the texts that described the state of Israel as a part of capitalist power and Western imperialism: capitalism had imposed itself through the fi nance of the Jews of the whole world. Th is new anti-Jewish anticapitalism and anti-Semitism was especially strong in France; in a Parisian synagogue, a bomb killed four people. 101 But in Berlin, a Jewish child was killed in a restaurant, and there were other victims in Vienna, Antwerp, and again in Paris, in 1981 and 1982. Finally, in Rome, in October 1982 another child was killed. Th e 1982 war in Lebanon and the iner- tia of Tshal in the face of the massacres of Palestinians by Christian Maronite forces permitted a representation of the “enemy” (Israel and the Jews) as the embodiment of the worst aspect of Western capitalist society: in France and in Italy, for example, there were propaganda texts in which the massacres of Sabra and Shatila were described as “Jewish massacres.” 102 Th e category of “hatred” does not permit the deciphering of anti-Semitism nor its logical defi nition. Hatred of the Jews did not, in fact, manifest itself in relation to, and in proportion with, the Jewish religious diff erence, but rather with regard to a new and unforeseen “similarity.” Th e Jew has been perceived as being similar to the Christian, in fact the “Christian’s elder brother,” but the Jewish brother has always been a competitor of the Christian, therefore a dangerous rival. And the Jewish threat in the Christian societies of the ancien régime in Europe was not only that of the clash between the two opposing interpretations of the truth and of the Bible; it was the threat of the separate- ness of privilege, that is, of the power of money allied to the power of the sovereigns. It was like this until the beginning of the free-market economy, when in the manifestations of anti-Jewish anticapitalism, aft er the advent of market society and the introduction of legal emancipation, there appeared new reac- tions against the rights of citizenship introduced by the constitutional revolu- tion and by the declaration of 1789. Th ese political events had made the Jews equal in everything and therefore impossible to identify because they would have been able to act, protected by anonymity. Th e malaise of the civiliza- tion that had arisen from the industrial revolutions easily directed itself at the enemy represented by the Jewish, by the capitalists, and the antinational capitalists.

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In the age of the rivalry between the European imperial powers, the Jewish Diaspora could be represented as an internal enemy that had infi ltrated the national society and had been made invisible by legal equality: paradoxically, it was the nationalists, the populists, and the communitarians who projected on to the Jews their own imperialist designs of control and domination. Since the second half of the nineteenth century and still today, the anti-Semites imagine themselves to be the victims of Jewish imperialism and of the con- spiracy of an “informal” Jewish power spread throughout the world. Today, however, this power—rather than the informal, widespread global power that was the European Jewish Diaspora—is the biggest new Diaspora community, the Jews of the United States. Th e great diff erence is this: Today world Jewish power also has a guiding state, Israel, and this new factor has modifi ed the political morphology of the anti-Jewish anti- capitalism. Th e universalism of rights and the 1791 emancipation were considered the ef- fect of the conspiracy and hence the political character of Judaism— political because Jewish fi nancial power would have translated itself into a means of gaining political domination—and anti-Jewish anticapitalism managed to at- tain important results only aft er World War I, through the persecution laws in almost the whole of Europe. Today, the conquest of Jewish national self- determination in 1948 has modifi ed the political morphology of anti-Jewish anticapitalism, and, thus, oft en the political criticism of the policies of Israeli governments has transformed into an attack against Israel as a political en- tity, and consequently against all the “power” of Judaism, now represented as diff erent political entities: the Israeli state and the capitalist United States. “Judaism” is power because Israel is an actual political power and because the American Diaspora is a fi nancial power. Th is is the new political morphology of the old anti-Jewish anticapitalism, though there are, nevertheless, impor- tant diff erences to be noted. For the Islamists, the condemnation of “Zionist” prevarications regarding the Palestinians is intertwined with an antimodern reaction; at the same time, in the “anticapitalist” components of many xeno- phobic Western movements, community and self-pitying ideology prevail. In some “anti global” demonstrations, fi nally, the Jewish state continues to be seen as the military outpost of the great power of imperialism. Th e modifi cations that have occurred in the representations and rhetoric therefore are not easy to decipher because they also refl ect the need for po- litical opposition against current Jewish self-representations. Th is has hap- pened in Europe and the West, as well as against the public memory of the state of Israel. And it could be said that the image of Israel (and consequently,

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that of “diasporic” Judaism) is placed at the intersection of the memory and the heredity of the Shoah and the heredity and responsibilities of European colonialism. Israel and current Judaism are symbolically represented as the heirs of the victims of the extermination of the European Jews and of their legal and so- cial persecution, prepared by decades of propaganda against emancipation and assimilation. But Israel’s prevarications against the Arab populations of Palestine (not “justifi ed” by the legitimate need to defend itself from the wars of aggression of the Arab states or from the terrorism of more recent years) also permit the propagandists to present all Jews as the modern representa- tives of the colonial powers. 103 And in the new morphology of anti-Jewish anticapitalism, the attribution to world Judaism (Israel included) of being a colonial and imperial power reacts against and conceals the representation of the Jews as victims of ancient European history, which led to Auschwitz. Actual historical reality, with its many facets, is thus reduced to a purely sym- bolic reality or to the sole reality of language of propaganda. What I have tried to do here has been to dissolve the claims of language to build the whole reality and to bring back into the light of day reality and its language.

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Except where otherwise noted, all translations into English are my own.

INTRODUCTION 1. Carlo Ginzburg, “Our Words and Th eirs:A Refl ection on the Historian’s Craft , Today,” in Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Th eory, Method, and Evidence , ed. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 114. Ginzburg refers to the text by Erich Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburstag , ed. Walter Muschg and Emil Staiger (Bern: Francke, 1952), 39–50; Engl. trans. by and Marie Said, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” Centennial Review 13 (1969): 1–17. 2. Th eodor W. Adorno and , Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 168. See Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catas- trophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 187. 3. I am referring to the following texts by Edmund Silberner: “Charles Fourier on the Jewish Question,” Jewish Social Studies 8 (1946): 245–66; “Th e Attitude of the Fourierist School Towards the Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 9 (1947): 339–62; “Proudhon’s Judeophobia,” Historia Judaica, 15–16 (1953–54): 61–80; “Anti-Jewish Trends in French Revolutionary Syndicalism,” Jewish Social Studies 15 (1953): 195– 202; and the text edited by Jürgen Rojahn as “Contribution on Anti-Semitism,” International Review of Social History 30 (1985): part 3, 266–443. Th e most sig- nifi cant studies that appeared at the end of the 1960s are Eric Cahm, “Socialism

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and the Nationalist Movement in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Aff air,” in vol. 1 of Socialism and Nationalism, ed. Eric Cahn and Vladimir Claude Fisera (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1978), 48–64; George Lichtheim, “Socialism and the Jews,” Dissent 15 (1968): 314–42; Victor M. Glasberg, “Intent and Consequences: Th e Jewish Question in the French Socialist Movement of the Late XIX Century,” Jewish Social Studies 36 (1974): 61–71. Pierre Birnbaum’s work is Le peuple et les gros. Histoire d’un mythe (Paris: Grasset, 1979). 4. Cf. Nancy L. Green, “Th e Dreyfus Aff air and Ruling Class Cohesion,” Science and Society 43 (1979): 29–50. Georges Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism, 1871–1914: Essays, trans. Peter Fawcett, intro. Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1986), remains indispensable. From the beginning of the 1890s, began a review of the orthodox positions of German So- cial Democracy—such as those exposed in Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm in Seinem Grundsätzlichen Teil Erlaütert (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1892), Engl., Th e Class Struggle , trans. William E. Bohn (: H. Kerr and Cooperative, 1920)—in particular with the publication of a formidable article against the economists of the historical school, more than against Kautsky: “Der Neuste Vernichter des So- zialismus,” Die Neue Zeit 11, no. 1 (1893): 539ff . On this work, see Iring Fetscher, “Bernstein e la sfi da all’ortodossia,” in Storia del Marxismo, vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 236ff . 5. Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire en France 1885–1914. Les origines fran- çaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978), in particular the chapter “L’antisémitisme de gauche,” 186ff .; but above all Zeev Sternhell, Les Anti-Lumières. Du XVIII e siécle à la guerre froide (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 555–80; Engl. Th e Anti-Enlightenment Tradi- tion, trans. David Maisel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010). 6. I have expressed these observations on Zeev Sternhell’s last essay in “ Within Modernity,” European Journal of Sociology 48, no. 3 (2007): 458–63, coau- thored with Nadia Urbinati. 7. On the controversies about legal constructivism, see Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty , vol. 2 of Th e Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1976), 31–100; but also Ludwig von Mises, Erinnerungen , intro. Margit von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1978), 91ff . I agree with the theses of Perry Anderson, “Th e Intransigent Right at the End of the Century,” Th e London Review of Books 14, no. 18, September 24, 1992. 8. Albert O. Hirschman, Th e Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass.: Th e Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 13–15 and 170ff .

C6901.indb 216 1/27/16 10:26 AM introduction 217

9. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig Inc., 1978), 140. 10. Cf. Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Antisemitismo a sinistra (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), 100–101; and Maurizio Molinari, La sinistra e gli ebrei in Italia (Milan: Corbaccio, 1995). Th e repertoire of research in Mario Toscano, ed., Ebraismo sionismo e an- tisemitismo nella stampa socialista italiana. Dalla fi ne dell’Ottocento agli anni Ses- santa (Venice: Marsilio and Fondazione Modigliani, 2007), 167ff ., is very useful. Finally, see Pierre-André Taguieff , La judéophobie des modernes (Paris: Éditions , 2008). 11. Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, introduction to Contestazione a Varsavia (Milan: Bompi- ani, 1969), 5–30. 12. Th is seems to me to be the main limit of the essay by Simon Levis Sullam, L’a r c h i - vio antiebraico. Il linguaggio dell’antisemitismo moderno (Rome: Laterza, 2008), 11 and 89ff . Sullam declares his adherence to the methodological principles of Fou- cault and Derrida, on the one hand, and Austin and Skinner, on the other hand. 13. I refer the reader to the most incisive study on the subject: Marcel Gauchet, La Droite et la Gauche (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 14. Marc Crapez, L’antisémitisme de gauche au XIXème siècle (Paris: Berg Interna- tional, 2002), 132ff .; Michel Dreyfus, L’antisémitisme à gauche. Histoire d’un para- doxe de 1830 à nos jours (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), 8–16. Cf. Esther Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs de France (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 164. Cf. Dreyfus, L’antisémitisme à gauche , 155ff ., but I refer the reader above all to Marc Crapez, La gauche ré- actionnaire. Mythes de la plèbe et de la race dans le sillage des Lumières (Paris: Berg International, 1997), 35ff . Cf. also Antoine Leca, “Les thèmes idéologiques de l’antisémitisme chez les socialistes français 1845–1890,” Revue de la recherche juridique. Droit Prospectif 20, n.3 (1995): 1,002ff . Th ere is a lack of a refl ection on the phenomenon in a recent attempt at an overall review: Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996). 15. For the history of the positions within Italian socialism, see Alessandra Tarquini, “Il partito socialista tra guerra fredda e questione ebraica ,” in Ebraismo , ed. To- scano, 174ff .; and Giammarco Santese, “Il partito comunista italiano e la ques- tione palestinese 1945–1956,” Mondo Contemporaneo 2 (2007): 63–104; but also Luca Riccardi, Il problema Israele. Diplomazia italiana e PCI di fronte allo Stato ebraico 1948–1973 (Milan: Guerini, 2006). See Auguste Bebel, Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus (1893), trans. to Italian in Il marxismo e la questione ebraica , ed. Massimo Massara (Milan: Edizioni del Calendario, 1962), 262ff . Also see Hans J. Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie: zur Ideologie der

C6901.indb 217 1/27/16 10:26 AM 218 introduction

Partei vor dem 1. Weltkrieg (Hanover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1969); Eduard Bernstein, “Das Schlagwort und der Antisemitismus,” Die Neue Zeit 11, no. 2 (1893): 233ff . 16. I have adopted the defi nition from Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Prisme juif et prisme marxiste,” preface to Enzo Traverso, Les marxistes et la question juive. Histoire d’un débat 1843–1943 (Paris: Kimé, 1977), 9–21. 17. Marc Bloch, “Apologie pour l’histoire, ou métier d’historien,” in Cahiers des An- nales (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949): 41ff .; Engl., Th e Historian’s Craft , intro. Jo- seph R. Strayer, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books 1953). 18. Ginzburg, “Our Words and Th eirs,” 108. 19. Ibid., 107–13. Also see Kenneth L. Pike, Language in Relation to a Unifi ed Th eory of the Structure of Human Behavior (Th e Hague: Mouton, 1967), 37ff . 20. August Bebel, interview by Hermann Bahr, in Der Antisemitismus. Ein Interna- tionales Interview (Berlin: Fischer, 1894); reprint, Hermann Greive (Königstein: Taunus, 1979), 24ff . Cf. Edmund Silberner, Sozialisten zur Judenfrage. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sozialismus von Anfang des 19 Jahrunderts bis 1914 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1962), 206; Peter Pulzer, Th e Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 262; Mario Kessler, Antisemitismus, Zionismus und Sozialismus (Mainz: Decaton, 1993), 98. Robert Wistrich cites the source of Ferdinand Kronewetter (“Die Li- beralen und das Allgemeine Wahlrecht,” Arbeiter Zeitung , October 31, 1890) in “Socialism and Anti-Semitism in Austria Before 1914,” Jewish Social Studies 3–4 (1975): 327. 21. See Michel Bounan, “L’État retors,” introduction to Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Paris: Allia, 1991), xvii–xviii; also see Carlo Ginzburg, Il fi lo e le tracce. Vero, falso, fi nto (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006), 202, in Engl., Th reads and Traces: True, False, Fictive (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 2012). 22. Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” 45. 23. See Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Fi- nal Solution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Friedlän- der, L’eredità di Auschwitz. Come ricordare? (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), x. Similarly, see David Bidussa, Dopo l’ultimo testimone (Turin: Einaudi, 2009), 7–9; Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les juifs, la mémoire et le présent (1981; Paris: La Découverte, 1991), 418; Saul Friedländer, Aggressore e vittima. Per una storia integrata dell ’Olocausto (Rome: Laterza, 2009), 80–81, originally published as Den Holocaust beschreiben (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007); and Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1,

C6901.indb 218 1/27/16 10:26 AM introduction 219

Th e Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 , vol. 2, Th e Years of Extermination (New York: Harper and Collins, 1997–2007). 24. Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” in Th e Listener (London: BBC, 1964), reprt., in Th e Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2013). 25. Th e “paradigm of extreme injustice” is the defi nition proposed in Federico Stella, La giustizia e le ingiustizie (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006), 27. On the diffi culty of implementing the universality of human rights, see Michael Ignatieff , Human Rights and Idolatry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 135ff . 26. Alexandre Koyré, Réfl exions sur le mensonge (1943; Paris: Allia, 1998), in Italian: Sulla menzogna politica , trans. Claudio Traditi (Turin: Lindau, 2010), 32–33. Th is essay was fi rst published in Renaissance: Revue Trimestrelle de l’École des Hautes Études 1, no. 1 (January–March 1943), and translated into English with the tile “Th e Political Function of Th e Modern Life” in Contemporary Jewish Records (Review of the American Jewish Committee) 8, no. 3 (June 1945): 290ff . 27. Pierre-André Taguieff , La nouvelle judéophobie (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2002), 20–21, states that the most recent metamorphoses of Judeophobia respond to a demand for meaning from the orphans of the myth of the Revolution. 28. One of the fi rst replies to the negationists’ “theses” was that of Nadine Fresco, “Les redresseurs des morts. Chambres à gaz: la bonne nouvelle. Comment on révise l’histoire,” Les Temps Modernes 407 (June 1980): 2150–211. Th e commit- ment shown by Fresco and Vidal-Naquet was also taken up in Deborah Esther Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: Th e Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Penguin, 1994). A deeper analysis of the negationists’ rhetorical strat- egies was later undertaken in Valentina Pisanty, L’irritante questione delle cam- ere a gas. Logica del negazionismo (Milan: Bompiani, 1998), 85–130, which con- fi rmed how they combine the claim of demonstrating the many alleged errors committed by the supporters of the reality of the extermination, the falsifi cation of the sources (the “fabrication at the writing table”), the erroneous attribution of the eye- witness accounts, the non-truthfulness of the accounts, and their mis- taken interpretation. A typical example is the method followed by Mattogno and Roques in the case of the so-called Gerstein Report: see Carlo Mattogno, Il rap- porto Gerstein. Anatomia di un falso (Parma: La Sfi nge, 1985); and Henri Roques, “De l’aff aire Gerstein à l’aff aire Roques,” conférence d’H. Roques à la 8eme con- férence annuelle révisionniste, Institute for Historical Review, Los Angeles Oc- tober 9–11, 1987, Annex V, in H. Roques, Les confessions de Kurt Gerstein. Étude comparative des diff erentes versions, thèse soutenue à l’Université de Nantes le 15

C6901.indb 219 1/27/16 10:26 AM 220 introduction

Juin 1985 (https://archive.org/steam/Les confessions de Kurt Geinstein/ROQJ_ djvu.txt). English: “Th e Confessions of Kurt Geistein,” trans. Ronald Percival, In- stitute for Historical Review (1989). 29. I refer the reader to , De intellectus emendatione (Turin: La Stampa, 1942), regarding which see Filippo Mignini, “Per la datazione e l’inter- pretazione del Tractatus de intellectus emendatione di Spinoza,” La Cultura 17, nos. 1–2 (1979): 87–160. I refer the reader above all to Carlo Ginzburg, “Unus testis. Lo sterminio degli ebrei e il principio di realtà,” Quaderni Storici 80 (1992): 529–48, reprt., in Ginzburg, Il fi lo e le tracce , 203ff .; but also to Vidal-Naquet, Les juifs, la mémoire, le présent . 30. Franco Cordero, Procedura penale (Milan: Giuff ré, 2003), 565ff . 31. Th eodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Refl ections on a Damaged Life , trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 120–23.

1. “IS THE PALESTINE CAPITALIST HERE?” 1. Regarding the entrepreneurs, see Mirella Scardozzi, “Da merciai ‘con fagotto’ a industriali del cotone: gli ebrei di Pisa tra Otto e Novecento,” in Michele Luz- zati, Gli ebrei di Pisa (secoli IX-XX). Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Pisa 3–4 ottobre 1994 (Pisa: Pacini, 1998), 163ff . Clara Sereni, Il gioco dei regni (Florence: Giunti, 1993), 113ff ., recounts the story of the most important Pisan textile manu- facturer, the Jew Pellegrino Pontecorvo. Concerning the presence of anti-Semitic overtones in the anti-employer demonstrations of the Trade Union Headquar- ters (Camera del Lavoro), between 1911 and 1920, see Bruno di Porto in Il tempo e l’idea 5 (February 1997): 36ff .; and concerning the history of the Trade Union Headquarters (and its anarchical and republican tradition), see Umberto Sereni, “Nel segno del Liberato Mondo: vicende, culture, uomini e donne del movimento operaio a Pisa tra Otto e Novecento,” in La Camera del Lavoro di Pisa 1896–1980. Storia di un caso, ed. Gigliola Dinucci (Pisa: ETS, 2006), 83–200. 2. “Above all when there is the disruption and collapse of the established order . . . the tales of hidden gold are boundless. At one of those times, in the last month of the German occupation, Pardo and his guests were massacred. Th e wealth which had for so long protected him fi nally proved fatal” (Carla Forti, Il caso Pardo Roques. Un eccidio del 1944 tra memoria e oblio [Turin: Einaudi, 1998], 81). See also Silvano Arieti, Th e Parnas (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 10ff . 3. An excellent study of the relations between the Nazis and the heads of industry is Henry A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Also of fundamental importance are Timothy W. Mason,

C6901.indb 220 1/27/16 10:26 AM 1. “is the palestine capitalist here?” 221

“Der Primat der Politik. Politik und Wirtschaft im Nationalsozialismus,” Das Ar- gument 8 (1966): 473–94; and Mason, “Primat der Industrie? Eine Erwiderung,” Das Argument 10 (1968): 199ff . Th e most updated study is Timothy W. Mason, Social Policy in the Th ird Reich: Th e Working Class and the National Community , trans. John Broadwin, ed. Jane Caplan (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1993), a revised edition and translation of Sozial politik im Dritten Reich. Arbeiter Klasse und Volksgemeinschaft (Opladen: Westdeutschen Verlag, 1977). 4. Élie Halévy, Histoire du socialisme européen (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 279. For an excellent review of the literature on the relationship between the capitalist economy and Nazism, see Dick Gearey, “Th e Industrial Élite and the Nazis in the Weimar Republic,” in Th e Nazi Machtergreifung , ed. Peter D. Stachura (London: MacMillan, 1983), 85–100. Highly questionable instead is David Abraham, Th e Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981) (cf. also Turner, German Big Business , 91ff .). Finally, see Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Ökonomie und Klassenstruktur des deutschen Faschismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 110ff ., as well as Richard J. Overy, Th e Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932–1938 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1982), 58ff . 5. Élie Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies. Études sur le socialisme et la guerre (Paris: Gal- limard, 1938), 213–15. 6. See Hannah Arendt, Die verborgene Tradition. Acht Essays (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 108–26; and Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951). Giovanni Miccoli also places the birth of political anti- Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century, above all emphasizing its Catho- lic roots: see Miccoli, “Antiebraismo, antisemitismo: un nesso fl uttuante,” in Les racines chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme politique. Fin XIX–XX siécles, ed. Catherine Brice and Giovanni Miccoli (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 5ff .; also see Miccoli, “Santa Sede, questione ebraica e antisemitismo tra Otto e Novecento,” in Dall’emancipazione a oggi , book 2 of Gli ebrei in Italia , ed. Corrado Vivanti, vol. 11 of Storia d’Italia, Annali (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). Finally, see also Giacomo Martina, Il problema ebraico nella storia della Chiesa (Rome: Pontifi cia Univer- sità Gregoriana, 1996); and Renato Moro, La Chiesa e lo sterminio degli ebrei (Bo- logna: Il Mulino, 2002). 7. Arnaldo Momigliano, Pagine ebraiche (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 15. 8. Arnaldo Momigliano, Saggezza straniera (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), 167. 9. See Jules Isaac, Genèse de l’antisémitisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1956), 56–125; Georges Cottier, introduction to Radici dell’anti-giudaismo in ambiente cristiano: Colloquio intra-ecclesiale. Atti del simposio teologico-storico , Città del Vaticano,

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30 Ottobre–1 Novembre 1997 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), 7; Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: Étude sur les relations entre Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’Empire Romain (135–425) (Paris: De Boccard, 1964); as well as Schalom Ben Chorin, Fratello Gesù (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1985), 28. 10. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica, II, 6, 8. Regarding Eusebius, see Lorenzo Perrone, Eusebio di Cesarea: fi lologia, storia e apologetica per un cris- tianesimo trionfante, in vol. 1 of Storia della letteratura cristiana antica greca e latina , ed. Claudio Moreschini and Enrico Norelli (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1985), 583–605; see also Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, vol. 1, ed. Peter Richardson and David Granskou (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), 181ff . 11. John Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos Orationes VIII, in Jacques-Paul Migne, Pa- trologia Graeca, vol. 48, coll. 843–942. On Chrysostom’s text, see Robert I. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 106–23; as well as Adele Monaci Castagno, “Ridefi nire il confi ne. Ebrei, giudaizzanti, cristiani nell’ Adversus Iu- daeos di Giovanni Crisostomo,” Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 1, no. 14 (1997): 135– 52. Finally, see Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 12. On Deuteronomy 23:19–21, see Benjamin Nelson, Th e Idea of Usury from Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949), 83ff . Th e quotation from Jerome is in Commenti in Ezechielem 6, no. 8 (Migne, Patrologia latina, vol. 25, col. 176). Undoubtedly very useful is Umberto Santarelli, Sei lezioni sull’usura (Pisa: Servizio editoriale universitario, 1995), 21ff . 13. St. Th omas Aquinas, Summa Th eologica: Complete English Edition in Five Vol- umes, trans. Fathers of English Dominican Province (Westminster, Md.: Chris- tian , 1948), II-II q. 78 a. I ad 2. 14. Th e constitution “ licet perfi dia Iudaeorum ” is in Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, defi nitionum et declarationum de rebus fi dei et morum , bilingual version, ed. Peter Hünermann (Bologna: EDB, 2003), nn. 772–73. 15. Ariel Toaff , “ ‘Banchieri’ cristiani e ‘prestatori’ ebrei?,” in Dall’Alto Medioevo all’età dei ghetti, tome 1 of Gli ebrei in Italia , ed. Corrado Vivanti, vol. 11 of Storia d’Italia. Annali (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 123–52. 16. Robert Bonfi l, “Jewish Lenders in Italy during the Reinassance,” Pa’ amim 41 (1990): 58–64; and Bonfi l, “Lo spazio culturale degli ebrei d’Italia fra Rinasci- mento ed Età barocca,” in Gli ebrei in Italia , tome 1, 266–87; see also Diego Qua- glioni, Giacomo Todeschini, and Gian Maria Varanini, Credito e usura tra teolo- gia, diritto e amministrazione. Linguaggi a confronto (sec. XII–XVI) (Rome: École

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Française de Rome, 1988). Finally, see also Martin Luther, Werke. Kritische Ge- samtausgabe, vol. 14, (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883–1947), 654–56, regarding which see Adriano Prosperi, introduction to Martin Lutero, Degli ebrei e delle loro men- zogne (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), xxvi–xlix. 1 7 . A r i e l To a ff , Il vino e la carne: una comunità ebraica nel Medioevo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), 159–73; Ruggero Taradel, L’accusa del sangue. Storia politica di un mito antisemita (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2002), 110–11. Regarding Bernardino da Feltre, see Feria sexta post quartam domenicam. De Usura, vol. 1 of Sermoni del Beato Bernardino Tomitano da Feltre. Nella redazione di fra’ Bulgarino da Brescia , ed. Carlo Varischi (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1964), 423–30; as well as Renata Segre, “Bernardino da Feltre, i Monti di Pietà e i banchi ebraici,” Rivista Storica Italiana 90, no. 4 (1978): 147–75. 18. Giacomo Martina, “La Civiltà Cattolica e la questione ebraica,” La Civiltà Cat- tolica 2 (2000): 263–68; cf. Peter Pulzer, Th e Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 174ff . 19. Stefano Levi Della Torre, Mosaico (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1994), 92. 20. Giovanni Miccoli, Fra mito della cristianità e secolarizzazione: Studi sul rap- porto Chiesa-società nell’età contemporanea (Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1985), 21–111. 21. Alphonse Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque. Histoire de la féodalité fi nancière, réimprimée et précédée d’une Préface, d’une notice biographique sur l’auteur et ac- compagnée des notes hors texte de l’éditeur (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1886), xxxiv: this edition was printed following the success of Édouard Drumont, La France juive (1885), though the fi rst edition (1845) had been attacked and repudi- ated by many members of the editorial management of the Libraire Phalanstéri- enne, the Fourierist publishing house. 22. Albert O. Hirschman, Th e Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Th e Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 7–18. See also Les résistances à la Révolution. Colloque international (Rennes 17–21 Septembre 1985) , ed. Gerard Gengembre (Rennes: Université de Haute-Bretagne, 1986). 23. Halévy, Histoire du socialisme européen , 281. 24. Th is was the thesis upheld by in Abbé Barruel, Abrégé des Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (London: Le Boussonier, 1799), iii. 25. Escobar del Corro, Tractatus bipartitus de puritate et nobilitate probanda, secun- dum statuta S. Offi cii Inquisitionis, Regii Ordinum Senatus, Sanctae Ecclesiae To- letanae, collegiorum, aliarumque communitatum Hispaniae. Ad explicationem Re- giae Pragmaticae Sanctionis , § 20 incipit, “Y porque el odio,” a Domino nostro Rege Philippo IV latae Matriti 10 Februarii anno Domini 1623, auctore Joannes Escobar

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a Corro, I.U.D. Fidei causarum censore, Sumptibus Rochi Deville et L. Chalmette, Lugduni 1733 (1st ed. Turnoni 1637), 38, 70: quoted by Adriano Prosperi, “Tra natura e cultura. Dall’intolleranza religiosa alla discriminazione per sangue,” in Il razzismo e le sue storie , ed. Girolamo Imbruglia (Naples: Edizioni Scientifi che Italiane, 1992), 113ff . Cf. I grandi problemi della storiografi a civile e religiosa. Atti dell’XI convegno di studio dei professori di Storia della Chiesa. Roma 2–9 settembre 1997 , ed. Giacomo Martina and Ugo Dovere (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1999). 26. Leo Spitzer, “Ratio > race,” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 53 (1933): 355, rprnt., in Leo Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1948), 147–69. Spitzer’s thesis was refuted by Gianfranco Contini, “I più antichi esempi di razza,” Studi di Filologia Romanza 17 (1959): 319–27. 27. Victor Klemperer, LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii. La Langue du IIIe Reich, Carnets d’un philologue (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996); LTI (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1975), 57–58. 28. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, “Du mouvement intellectuel de l’Orient,” France et Europe , June 25, 1838, 87; regarding this work, see Janine Buenzod, La formation de la pensée de Gobineau et l’Essai sur l’inégalité des races (Paris: Nizet, 1967). Of crucial importance is Yosef H. Yerushalmi, “L’antisémitisme racial est-il apparu au XXe siécle? De la limpieza de sangre espagnole au nazisme: continuité et rup- tures,” Esprit 190 (March–April 1993): 5–35. 29. See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: Th e Myth of the Jewish World Con- spiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 58–60; as well as Pierre-André Taguieff , ed., Les protocoles des sages de Sion, 2 vols. (Paris: Berg International, 1992), 9–37. 30. Regarding the fabrication, see Cesare G. De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente. I Protocolli dei Savi di Sion: un apocrifo del XX secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), 13ff .; and Cesare G. De Michelis, La giudeofobia in Russia (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001). 31. Wilhelm Marr, Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (Bern: Cos- tenoble, 1879), regarding which, see Moshe Zimmermann, “Gabriel Riesser und Wilhelm Marr in Meinungsstreit,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Ge- schichte 61 (1975): 59–84. See also George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig Inc., 1978), 131ff . 32. Frederic Cople Jaher, Th e Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State Formation, and the Liberal Paradigm in America and France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); as well as Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznel- son, Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton, N.J.: Prince- ton University Press, 1995), 125ff .

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33. Th e crisis aff ected, above all, savers, small landowners, and merchants. See Mic- coli, “Antiebraismo, antisemitismo,” 18: here Miccoli quotes an anonymous text, “Die Alte Garde der gründsätzlichen Revolution,” Historisch-politische Blätter 70 (1872): 667–88, 858–72. 34. Miccoli, “Antiebraismo, antisemitismo,” 15. 35. Cf. Pierre Sorlin, “La Croix” et le juifs, 1880–1889: Contribution à l’histoire de l’antisémitisme contemporain (Paris: Grasset, 1967), 30ff .; as well as Janine Verdès- Leroux, Scandale fi nancier et antisémitisme catholique. Le Krach de l’Union Gé- nérale (Paris: Le Centurion, 1969), 14. One of the most important sources for the story of the Dreyfus crisis is Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’aff aire Dreyfus (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 66ff . 36. La Civiltà Cattolica 32 (1881): 108, but analogous arguments are also in Paul de Lagarde, Deutsche Schrift en (Göttingen, n.d.); regarding these aspects, the fol- lowing work remains of fundamental importance: Fritz R. Stern, Th e Failure of Illiberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 38ff . 37. Miccoli, “Antiebraismo, antisemitismo,” 19. 38. Cardinal Vannutelli’s article has been printed in the study by Egon Johannes Greipl, “Römische Kurie und Katholische Partei. Die Auseinandersetzung und die Christlichsozialen in Österreich im Jahre 1895,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 44 (1984): 284–343; also see Miccoli, “Santa Sede, questione ebraica e antisemitismo,” 1429–64. 39. Marc Bloch, “La lutte pour l’individualisme agraire dans la France du XVIII siè- cle,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 2 (1930): 329–83, 511–56. 40. Hyacinte de Gasquet, L’usure demasqué (1766), cited in Bernard Groethuysen, L’Église et la bourgeoisie, vol. 1 of Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), 279; with regard to Turgot’s text, see Mémoire sur le prêts d’argent, vol. 3 of Oeuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant, avec biographie et notes, par Gustave Schelle (Paris: Alcan, 1913–1923), 154–202. 41. Hyacinthe de Gasquet, L’usure démasquée (Avignon: Les Libraires associés, 1766), 420. Cf. also Ernst Troeltsch, Th e Social Teachings of the Christian Churches , trans. Olive Wyon, 2 vols. (London: Allen Unwin; New York: MacMillan, 1931), 2:142ff . 42. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Prisme juif et prisme marxiste,” preface to Enzo Traverso, Les marxistes et la question juive. Histoire d’un débat 1843–1943 (Paris: Kimé, 1977), 21n16. 43. Michael Graetz, Les juifs en France au XIXe siècle. De la Révolution française à l’Alliance israélite universelle (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 217ff . 44. See Cople Jaher, Th e Jews and the Nation , 28; as well as Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: Th e Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (New York: Schocken Books, 1978); and Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, Assimilation and

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Community: Th e Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Finally, see Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, “Fare gli ebrei italiani. Modelli di genere e integrazione nazionale,” in Famiglia e nazione nel lungo Ottocento italiano , ed. Ilaria Porciani (Rome: Viella, 2006), 217–42. 45. Th e hypothesis of “parallel nationalization” was put forward by Arnaldo Momi- gliano in his review of Cecil Roth, Gli ebrei a Venezia (1933), reprinted in Momi- gliano, Pagine ebraiche , 237; Mario Toscano comments on it in “Risorgimento ed ebrei: alcune rifl essioni sulla ‘nazionalizzazione parallela,’ ” Rassegna mensile di Israel 44 (1998): 59–86. I do not agree with the polemic Simon Levis Sullam, “Arnaldo Momigliano e la ‘nazionalizzazione parallela’. Autobiografi a, religione, storia,” Passato e Presente 70 (2007): 59–92, which emphasizes the infl uence on the young Momigliano of the political philosopher Gentile in order to explain what—according to him—was “the support which Momigliano gave, at least in a nationalist and patriotic sense, to fascism: a patriotism also present in the review of Roth” (81). For a diff erent view, see Riccardo Di Donato, “Materiali per una biografi a intellettuale di Arnaldo Momigliano,” part 1, “Libertà e pace nel mondo antico,” Athenaeum 83, no. 1 (1995): 213–44; and Carlo Dionisotti, “Momigliano e il contesto,” in Carlo Dionisotti, Ricordi della scuola italiana (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1998), 387ff . A severe criticism of every hagiographic repre- sentation of Italian emancipation was carried out in Paolo Luca Bernardini, “Th e Jews in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Towards a Reappraisal,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 1, no. 2 (1996): 295ff .; interesting indications are in David Bidussa, “Razzismo e antisemitismo in Italia. Ontologia e fenomenologia del ‘bravo ital- iano,’ ” Rassegna mensile di Israel 49 (1992): 1–36. 46. See George L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation Between ‘Bildung’ and Respectabil- ity,” in Th e Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War , ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 118ff . 47. David Sorkin, “Th e Port Jews: Notes Toward a Social Type,” Journal of Jewish Studies 50, no. 1 (1999): 7–97; also see Lois C. Dubin, Th e Port Jews of Habsburg : Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). Also see David Cesarani,ed., Port Jews: Jewish Commu- nities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950, ed. (London: Frank Cass, 2002); and David Cesarani and Gemma Romain, eds., Jews and Port Cities, 1590–1990 , ed. (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006). 48. See George L. Mosse, “German Jews and Liberalism in Retrospect,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 32 (1987): 271; and, as regards Italy, Alessandro Guetta, “Elia Benamozegh: Bibliografi a,” Rassegna mensile di Israel 53, nos. 1–2 (1987): 67–81.

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49. See Charles Taylor, , part 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 50. Alexandre Koyré, “Louis de Bonald,” in Études d’histoire de la pensée philoso- phique (Paris: Éditions des Annales ESC, 1949), 117. Bonald’s works are Louis de Bonald, Th éorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile, demontrée par le raisonnement et par l’histoire (1796), vols. 1–4 of Oeuvres du Vicomte de Bonald (Brussels: Éditions de la Société nationale pour la propagation des bons livres, 1845); and Louis de Bonald, “Sur les juifs” (February 1806), in Louis de Bonald, Mélanges littéraires, politiques et philosophiques (Brussels: Éditions de la Société Nationale pour la propagation des bons livres, 1849), 426–43. See, fi - nally, Louis de Bonald, “De la politique et de la morale,” in Mélanges littéraires, politiques et philosophiques , 116–28. Regarding these works, see Henri Moulinié , Louis de Bonald (Paris: Alcan, 1916), 81ff . 51. Cf. Marc Bloch, La société féodale (Paris: Gallimard, 1940) 290–315. 52. Louis de Bonald, “Essai analytique sur les lois naturelles de l’ordre social,” in vol. 2 of Oeuvres , 480; also “Pensées sur divers sujets,” in vol. 7 of Oeuvres (Paris: A. Le Clere, 1817–43), 273ff . 53. See Georges Duby, Les trois ordres ou l ’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 3. Duby points out that in 1024 Gérard de Cambrai had commissioned the composition of the Gesta episcoporum cameracensium (book 3, Monumenta Ger- maniae Historica SS,7), a work which can be considered the distant predecessor of Loyseau’s book. See Th eodor Schieff er, “Ein deutscher Bischof des 11 Jahrhun- derts: Gerhard von Cambrai (1012–1051),” Deutsches Archiv (1937); and Heinrich Sprömberg, “Gerhard I, Bischof von Cambrai (1012–1051),” in Mittelalter und demokratische Geschichtsschreibung (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1971). Another source of trifunctional ideology was—according to Duby—the poem Carmen ad Robertum Regem by Adalberon of Laon: see Robert T. Coolidge, “Adalberon, Bishop of Laon,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 2 (1965); and Claude Carozzi, “Le carmen ad Robertum Regem d’Adalberon de Laon. Edition, traduction et essai d’explication,” Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris IV, 1973. Ottavia Niccoli has taken up again these hypotheses in I sacerdoti, i guerrieri e i contadini. Storia di una immagine della società (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), xixff . Finally, it has to be pointed out that Duby was explicitly referring to Georges Dumézil’s fi rst text dealing with the ideology of the three functions: Mythe et dieux des Germains , published in Paris in 1939; on this subject, see Riccardo Di Donato, “Aspetti dell’opera di Georges Dumézil, una postilla,” Opus 4 (1985): 217–18. 54. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Contrat Social, book 4, chap. 2, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 3:290. On Rousseau’s criticism of the thesis of royal

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power deriving from paternal power, see Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (1950), rev. ed. (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1988), 215ff . 55. , Patriarcha , in Patriarcha and Other Essays , ed. Johann P. Som- merville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–86. Cf. André-Michel Ramsay, “Essai philosophique sur le gouvernement civil,” in Oeuvres complètes de Fénelon (Paris: Didot, 1852), book 3, chap. 4, 357ff .: the work was fi rst published in 1719, with the title Essai de politique, où l’on traite de la nécessité, de l’origine, des droits, des bornes et des diff érentes formes de la souveraineté, selon les principes de l’auteur de Télémaque (Th e Hague: H. Scheurleer 1719). Th e second revised and enlarged edition had a diff erent title, reproduced in the 1852 edition from which I quote: Essai philosophique sur le gouvernement civil, où l’on traite de la nécessité, de l ’origine, des droits, des bornes et des diff érentes formes de la souverainété, selon les principes de feu M. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (London, 1721). Robert Filmer lived from 1589 to 1653; André-Michel Ramsay from 1686 to 1743. 56. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Politique tirée des ses propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte. A Monseigneur le Dauphin. Ouvrage posthume de Messire Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (Paris: Pierre Cot, 1709), book 2, art. 1, prop. 3 and 7. Cf. Alfred Rébelliau, Bossuet (Paris: Hachette, 1900), 97; as well as Gustave Lanson, Bossuet. Extraits des oeuvres diverses, avec des notices et des notes. Texte revu sur les manuscrits et sur les éditions originales (Paris: Société française d’imprimerie, 1899), 183. 57. Françoise Mélonio, “La hiérarchie impossible. Comment se disculper d’être une aristocratie?,” in Il pensiero gerarchico in Europa. XVIII-XIX secolo, ed. Antonella Alimento and Cristina Cassina (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 288. 58. , “Préface sur le traité du vide,” in Oeuvres (Paris, 1902), 2:137. 59. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, “Histoire des variations des églises protestantes,” in Oeuvres complètes de Bossuet, é vêque de Meaux (Paris: Lefèvre, 1856), 8:321–30: here Bossuet is insisting on the inevitability of religious individualism degen- erating into indiff erence (cf. also the “Sermon prêché à la vêture d’une nouvelle catholique, le jour de sa purifi cation,” in Oeuvres complètes, 7:502–3). Th e text of Aubert de Versé, with which Bousset takes issue in the Histoire , is L’avocat des protestants (Paris, 1686); cf. Alfred Rébelliau, Bossuet historien du protestantisme (Paris: Hachette, 1891), 155–75. See also “Exposition de la doctrine catholique sur les matières de controverse” (1671), in Bossuet, Th éologie dogmatique, vol. 2, part 2 of Oeuvres complètes , 1099ff ., regarding which see the observations of Au- gustine M.-P. Ingold, Bossuet et le Jansénisme. Notes historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1897), 29ff .

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60. Claude Fleury, “Discours sur l’histoire ecclésiastique” (1689), in Oeuvres de l’Abbé Fleury (Paris: Desrez, 1847), 10:414ff . (regarding Fleury, see Louis Aimé-Martin, L’abbé Fleury. Sa vie et ses ouvrages, ibid., 1:xxiff .). Th e model of the work is the “Augustinian,” one of the Discours sur l’histoire universelle of Bossuet: see Georges Hardy, La De Civitate Dei source principale du Discours sur l’histoire universelle (Paris: Leroux, 1913), 17ff .; and Carlo Rostan, “Due concezioni di storia univer- sale. Orosio e Bossuet,” Nuova Rivista Storica 9 (1925): 213ff . 61. Louis de Bonald, “De l’unité religieuse en Europe,” in Oeuvres, 155. Bonald re- fers to the anti-Protestant polemic undertaken by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in “Conférence avec M. Claude, ministre de Charenton, sur la matière de l’Église” (1682), in Bossuet, Oeuvres complètes , 9ff .; regarding Jean Claude’s attitude, see La défense de la Réformation contre le livre intitulé “Préjugés légitimes contre les calvinistes” (Queuilly, 1673), regarding which see Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants (Paris: Vrin, 1951). Regarding Bonald and Lamennais’s interpretation of Bossuet, see Monsignor Martino Grabmann, Storia della teologia cattolica dalla fi ne dell’epoca patristica ai tempi nostri (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1939), part 2, chaps. 2–5. 62. Bonald, preface to Th éorie du pouvoir , 11–13. Cf. Raoul Manselli, “Il Medioevo come ‘christianitas’: una scoperta romantica,” in Concetto, storia, miti e immagini del Medioevo, ed. Vittore Branca (Venice: Marsilio, 1973), 63 passim ; see also Ber- nard Plongeron, Th éologie et politique au siècle des Lumières 1770–1820 (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 294 passim . 63. Bonald, Th éorie du pouvoir , 27. 64. Ibid., 38–43, 84. 65. Bonald, “De la politique et de la morale,” 116. 66. Paula E. Hyman, Th e Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradi- tion in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 131ff ., regarding which see Paula E. Hyman, Th e Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 66ff . 67. Jeremy Bentham, Defence of Usury, Showing the Impolicy of the Present Legal Re- straints on the Terms of Pecuniary Bargains: in a Series of Letters to a Friend to Which is Added a Letter to Adam Smith, Esq. LL.D, on the Discouragements Op- posed by the above Restraints to the Progress of Inventive Industry, in Jeremy Ben- tham, Works , ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: Tait, 1843), 3:1–29. 68. Robert Anchel, Napoléon et les juifs. Essai sur les rapports de l’État français et du culte israélite de 1806 à 1815 (Paris: Alcan, 1928), 201. An echo of the moral economy of the working class, apart from Bonald, is also in Gabriel Bonnot de

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Mably, “Du commerce des grains” (1775), in vol. 10 of Oeuvres de Mably (Paris: Desbrière, 1830), 263ff . Instead, close to the views of Turgot was Abbé Baudeau, “Éclaircissements demandés à M. N(ecker) au nom des propriétaires fonciers et des cultivateurs français,” Nouvelles Éphémérides 6 (1775): 35–169, 7: 89–183, 8:93–167; as well as Nicolas de Condorcet, Lettre d’un laboureur de Picardie à M. Necker, auteur prohibitif, à Paris (1776), in vol. 11 of Oeuvres de Condorcet (Paris: Didot 1841), 11–12, 15. 69. Bonald, “Sur les juifs,” 427. 70. Ibid., 428–29. 71. Ibid., 430. 72. Ibid., 437. 73. Ibid., 442. 74. Ibid., 438. 75. Ibid. 76. Zosa Szajkowski, “Protestants and Jews of France in the Fight for Emancipation: 1789–1791,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 25 (1956): 119–35; Dominique Bourel, “Les juifs et la Révolution française,” Archives des sciences sociales des religions 72 (1990): 205–11; Jacques Godechot, “La Révolu- tion française et les juifs,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution française 48, no. 1 (1976): 47–70. 77. A good number of these documents are studied in Arnaud Lods, Centenaire de l’Édit du 17 Novembre 1787. Les partisans et les adversaires de l’Édit de tolérance. Étude bibliographique et juridique 1750–1789 (Paris, n.d. [1887]). 78. Cf. Chrétien-Guillaume Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Second mémoire sur le mar- iage des protestants (Londron, 1787). 79. Catalogue des Livres de la Bibliothèque du feu Chrétien-Guillaume Lamoignon de Malesherbes (Paris, 1797): a lot of material on Jewish emancipation was collected by Malesherbes in preparation for the new law, but the text of the law has been lost. Regarding Abbé Grégoire, see Essai sur la régéneration physique, morale et politiques des juifs (Paris, 1789), republished in the series La Révolution française et l’émancipation des juifs, vol. 3 (Paris: Éditions des Histoires Sociales, 1968); on Malesherbes and Grégoire, see Moses Ginsburger, “Zwei unveröff entlichte Briefe von Abbé Gregoire,” in Festschrift zu Simon Dubnows siebzigstem Geburtstag (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), 201ff . 80. Cf. Zosa Szajkowski, “Th e Jewish Problem in Alsace, Metz, and Lorraine on the Eve of the Revolution of 1789,” Jewish Quarterly Review 44 (1954): 231–33; as well as Achille-Edmond Halphen, Recueil de lois, decrets, ordonnances, avis du Conseil

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d’État, arrêtés et réglements concernant les Israélites depuis la Révolution de 1789 (Paris: Wittersheim, 1851), 183–94. 81. Cf. Hyman, Th e Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace . On the enthusiasm of the Jews for the Revolution, see the episode of the translation, into Hebrew, of the “Marseillaise” in Metz, to celebrate the Republican victories of October 1792: Ronald Schechter, “Translating the Marseillaise : Biblical and the Emancipation of Jews in Revolutionary France,” Past and Present 143 (May 1994): 108–35. Finally, see Roland Marx, “La régéneration économique des juifs d’Alsace à l’époque révolutionnaire et napoléonienne,” Annales Historiques de la Révolu- tion française 48, no. 2 (1976): 105–20. 82. Bonald, “Sur l’économie politique,” in Bonald, Mélanges, 297ff ., and “Sur le prêts à interêt,” ibid., 286ff . However, the most important of his studies of economy and “sociology” is undoubtedly De la famille agricole, de la famille industrielle et du droit d’ aînesse, par le Vicomte de Bonald pair de France (Paris: Beaucé-Rusand, 1826), 3–20, which was commented on and developed in Frédéric Le Play, L’organisation de la famille selon le vrai modèle signalé par l’histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps (Paris: Tequi, 1871), xxff . On the criticism of the classical political economy from the Catholic point of view, see Donald K. Cohen, “Th e Vicomte de Bonald’s Critique of Industrialism,” Journal of Modern History 41, no. 4 (1969): 475–84. 83. Élie Halévy, La doctrine économique de Saint-Simon et des Saint-Simoniens (Paris: Éditions de La Revue du Mois, 1908), reprint, in Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies , 13. 84. Georges Haupt, “Why the History of the Working-Class Movement?,” New Ger- man Critique (Spring 1978): 24. Th is is the last study written by Haupt, shortly before his death, and it explicitly refers to Karl Korsch’s critical method, namely, applying the materialistic conception of history to historical materialism: see Karl Korsch, “Th e Present State of the Problem of Marxism and Philosophy,” in Marxism and Philosophy (London: NLB, 1970), 92ff . According to Anson Rabin- bach, Georges Haupt’s contribution belongs to the tradition of a “third current” of Marxist socialism, that of Rosa Luxemburg, the Communists of the Councils, the Frankfurt School, and the group of Budapest: “Georges Haupt: History and the Socialist Tradition,” Le Mouvement Social (April–June 1980): 79. 85. Th e term was used by Rabinbach (“Georges Haupt,” 80), who refers to Freud’s preface to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo (1930): see Sigmund Freud, preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo , trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), iiii–iv. 86. Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Le nouveau Christianisme (1825), in vol. 4 of his Oeuvres (Paris: Dentu, 1869), 117ff .

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87. Jules Lechevalier, Exposition du système social (Paris: Paulin Libraire 1832), 73ff . On these texts, see Jacob L. Talmon, Political Messianism: Th e Romantic Phase (New York: Praeger, 1960), 122–24. 88. See Publication des manuscrits de Charles Fourier (Paris: Dentu, 1851–58), 3:35ff . See the excellent study by George Lichtheim, “Socialism and the Jews,” Dissent (July–August 1968): 314-42. Also see Robert Wistrich, Socialism and Th e Jews: Th e Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary (Madison: Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Jack Jacobs, On Socialists and the Jewish Question Aft er Marx (New York: New York University Press, 1932). Frank Edward Manuel, Th e Prophets of Paris (New York: Harper, 1962), 204ff ., remembers how in the late works of Fourier there are attitudes favorable to Jewish emigration to Palestine and the establishment of Jewish colonies, on the model of the phalansteries. 89. Aft er a youthful fascination with Saint-Simon, Balzac would convert to the po- litical theology of de Maistre, reinterpreted in a Caesaristic key, and to the apolo- getics of the rural world; according to him, the peasants had been “ruined” by the usury and speculation of Jewish fi nance. See Ernst Robert Curtius, Balzac (1923), trans. Henri Jourdan (Paris: Grasset, 1933); 170ff .; also György Lukács, Balzac et le réalisme français (Paris: Maspero, 1973), 19–47. 90. Edmund Silberner, “Pierre Leroux’s Ideas on the Jewish People,” Jewish Social Studies 8 (1946), and 9 (1947): 337ff . 91. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Césarisme et Christianisme (de l’an 45 avant J.-C. à l’an 476 après) , précédé d’une preface par J.-A. Langlois (Paris: Marpon et Flam- marion, 1883), 1:133ff . Th e work was published posthumously, eighteen years aft er the author’s death, but as early as 1869 his student, Georges Duchêne, referred to the legacy of the master in order to defend the Russian pogroms, which had to be explained as a sound and just reaction of “honest people” against the “para- sites, usurers, and exploiters of the people” (Georges Duchêne, L’empire indus- triel [Paris: Librairie Central, 1869], 196). On the point at issue, see also Daniel Halévy, La vie de Proudhon 1809–1847 (Paris: Stock, 1948), which also refers to the reception accorded to the work of Toussenel, including in Proudhon’s Les confessions d’un révolutionnaire (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1849), in the text of Th éo- dore Dézamy, L’organisation de la liberté (Paris: Nellier, 1846). 92. Emma Cantimori Mezzomonti, historical-critical introduction to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto del Partito Comunista, translation of the critical edi- tion of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institut di Mosca (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), 161 (here in fact Cantimori was not taking into account Périer’s much more conservative position, compared to that of Laffi tte).

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93. On Disraeli’s novel, see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Lon- don: Chatto and Windus, 1961), iiiff . 94. Karl Marx, Th e Poverty of Philosophy in Th e Marx-Engels Reader , 2d. ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978). For the juxtaposing of Proudhon and Villeneuve-Bargemont, see also Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Historisch- kritische Gesammtausgabe (Frankfurt: Marx-Engels Archiv, 1927–32), 1:187–88. 95. Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque , xv–xxv. Th e scholars of the Fourierist uto- pia do not generally concern themselves with this text: see Arrigo Colombo and Laura Tundo, Fourier, la passione dell’utopia (Milan: Angeli, 1988), 35–61, 137ff . 96. Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque, xxxvii. 97. Ibid., 145–78. 98. I am referring to Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Les sélections sociales. Cours libre de science politique professé a l’Université de Montpellier (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1896). Lapouge writes: “What we are speaking of is a necessary segregation, and its end is eliminating some defects and faults in the human race. Training the masses about the ideas of biological inheritance, evolution, natural selection should be absolutely necessary” (468). He continues: “Th is aristocratic and so- cialist vision of social and political selection lays on everybody’s consent, and it has, as a direct consequence, the consent of each citizen. As far as I know, it is the fi rst time that the dreadful problem of the division of labor and labor manage- ment (which is very well solved in the animal societies) has been faced as regards human societies” (470). 99. Irène Tieder, “Alphonse Toussenel et l’antisémitisme fourieriste,” Tsafon 18 (1994): 42: “Drumont à repris l’éloge de Toussenel en Les héros et les pitres , voyant en lui un génial précurseur.” Regarding the judgement of historians, see Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire en France 1885–1914. Les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 177; Robert S. Wistrich, “Radical Antisemitism in France and Germany (1840–1880),” Modern Judaism 15 (1995): 109–35; Paul Bénichou, “Sur quelques sources françaises de l’antisémitisme moderne,” Commentaire 1 (1978): 67–79. 100. Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l ’époque , 111. 101. Ibid., xxv; Toussenel, L’esprit des bêtes , des oiseaux. Ornithologie pas- sionelle (Paris: Librairie Phalanstérienne, 1859), 3:87ff ., 3:240ff ., and 3:446ff . At- tention has been drawn to this work by both Tieder and Cristina Cassina, Parole vecchie, parole nuove. Ottocento francese e modernità politica (Rome: Carocci, 2007), 102ff . 102. An example of the anti-Jewish documents produced during the März is Adolf Buchheim, Judenpech , leafl et, March 23, 1848, in Sammlungen, Plakate, Flug-

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blätter, Archiv 1848, collection of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek of Vienna. Equally interesting is the condemnation by a silk manufacturer, Frank Kargl, of the introduction of the factory system in the typographical industry: Franz Kargl, “Wer hat die arbeitende Klasse zu ihrer jetzigen Entwürdigung ge- führt?” pamphlet, Wiener Stadtbibliothek. Regarding the polemic against Jewish emancipation in a working-class context, see Hans Müller, “Bittere Wahrheit für die Juden und ihre Verteidiger,” pamphlet, and anonymous, “Die grässliche Ju- denfolgerung in Pressburg,” pamphlet, both in Archiv 1848, Österreichische Na- tionalbibliothek. Cf. Heinrich Reschauer, Das Jahr 1848. Geschichte der Wiener Revolution , 2 vols. (Vienna: Waldheim, 1872); and John R. Rath, Th e Viennese Revolution of 1848 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957), 103. I would like to thank Giulia La Mattina for letting me know about these documents. 103. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Grattenauer, Wider die Juden : ein Wort der Warnung an alle unsere christliche Mitbürger (Berlin: Schmidt, 1803), 64ff . 104. Cf. Menachem Z. Rosensaft , “Jews and Antisemites in Austria at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (1976): 51–86; and Pulzer, Th e Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria . 105. Pulzer, Th e Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria , 152. 106. Th e complete text of the program is in Eduard Pichl, Georg Schönerer (Berlin: Oldenburg, 1938); but see also Carl E. Schorske, Vienna fi n de siècle (Milan: Bom- piani, 1981), 197ff . 107. Creditanstalt Bankverein, Ein Sahrendert Jahrhundert Creditanstalt Bankverein (Vienna: Creditanstalt Bankverein, 1957), 2–7. 108. Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism, chap. 11. 109 . Schorske, Vienna fi n de siècle , 157. On the alarm also aroused in Sigmund Freud by the rise to power of the Social Christians in Vienna and by the Dreyfus Aff air, see Ernest Jones, Th e Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books), 1:392–93. 110. Th eodor Herzl, Tagebücher (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1922–23), 1:110. 111. See Maurizio Bertolotti, “I contesti dell’ambiguità. Manifestazioni antisemitiche nel mondo socialista italiano dell’800,” in Antisemitismi a confronto: Francia e Italia. Ideologie e retoriche politiche , ed. Michele Battini and Marie-Anne Matard- Bonucci (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2010), 59–81. Some of Bertolotti’s obser- vations were already in the introduction to Ippolito Nievo, Drammi giovanili. Emanuele, Gli ultimi anni di Galileo Galilei (Venice: Marsilio, 2006), 9–80. 112. On the revolutionary syndicalist and nationalist anti-Semitism of the French Cercle Proudhon, see “Déclaration,” Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon 1 (1912): 2, quoted by Georges Navet, “Le Cercle Proudhon 1911–1914. Entre le syndical-

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isme révolutionnaire et l’Action Française,” Mil Neuf Cent 10 (1992): 53. On the themes of the dialogue between revolutionary syndicalists and nationalists, see Daniel Halévy, “Les nouveaix aspects du socialisme,” Pages libres , October 2, 1909, 372. 113. “Aux socialistes,” in Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque, 264–82 and xxxvi– xxxvii. 114. See Grégoire Kaufmann, Édouard Drumont (Paris: Perrin, 2008), 10, where a review published in La Croix, April 16, 1886, is quoted. Th e book by Édouard Drumont, La France juive , was published in Paris, in 1886, in 2 volumes. 115. G. Lelarge, “Une visite à M. Drumont,” L’Événement , April 22, 1886. 116. See Charles Chauliac, preface to the new edition of Gougenot des Mousseaux, Le juif, le judaïsme et la judaïsation des peuples chrétiens (Paris: F. Wattelier et Cie, 1886), xvi; see also Nicolas Deschamps, Les sociétés secrètes et la société, ou Philosophie de l’histoire contemporaine (Avignon: F. Seguin, 1874), 1:322ff ., about which see Émile Poulat and Jean-Pierre Laurant, L’antimaçonnisme catholique (Paris: Berg International, 1994), 138. Regarding Renan, see Édouard Drumont, “M. Renan et l’Anti Christ,” Le Bien Public, 1873, vii. 117. Francis Magnard, “Échos de Paris,” Le Figaro , April 19, 1886. 118. See Kaufmann, Édouard Drumont , 95, 110–15. Kaufmann also indicates a lot of evidence of Drumont’s reception of the conservative critique of the capital- ist economy made in Jean-Baptiste Capefi gue, Histoire des grandes opérations fi nancières , 4 vols. (Paris: Amyot, 1855–1860). Regarding the relations between Drumont and General Boulanger, see Bertrand Joly, Déroulède. L’inventeur du nationialisme français (Paris: Perrin, 1998), 227. 119. Drumont repaid the appreciation in his next book, La fi n d ’un monde. Étude psy- chologique et social (Paris: A. Savine, 1889), 122: “What a sympathetic and guy that Be Benoît Malon! He is a man of the people, just that kind of man com- ing from the old French tradition! [Quelle fi gure sympathique et bonne que celle de Benoît Malon! C’est l’homme du peuple tel qu’il est sorti de la vieille tradition française!”]. 120. Auguste Chirac, “Les Rois de la République. Histoire des juiveries,” Revue Socia- liste 2 (September 1885), reprinted in Auguste Chirac, Les rois de la République , 2 vols. (Paris: P. Arnould, 1883). Chirac returned to this subject in “L’agiotage de 1870 à 1884,” Revue Socialiste 4 (1886): 605ff . Malon commented on Chirac’s theses in “Les morales religieuses,” Revue Socialiste 3 (January–June 1886): 1–17. Stephen Wilson refers to these works in Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Aff air (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), chap. 11, “Socialist Anti-Semitism: A Kind of Socialism,”

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334ff . Finally, see articles published by Edmund Silberner, between 1946 and 1953, on the works of Fourier, Proudhon, and Toussenel and the revolutionary trade unionists in Jewish Social Studies , as well as, above all, Nancy L. Green, “Socialist Anti-Semitism: Defence of a Bourgeois Jew and Discovery of the Jewish Prole- tariat,” International Review of Social History 30, no. 1 (1985): 374–400 (special issue edited by Jürgen Rojahn, “Contributions on Anti-Semitism”). 121. Chirac, Les rois de la République, 489. 122. Th e best study of the production of this fake is Cohn, Warrant for Genocide , which retraces the operation to the background of the Dreyfus Aff air and to the anti-Semitic reaction to the Zionist Congress of Basle, 1897. 123. Pierre-André Taguieff , ed., Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion , vol. 1: Introduction à l’étude des Protocoles , vol. 2: Études et documents; see, in particular, Pierre Nora, “Le thème du complot et la défi nition de l’identité juive,” 2:459ff .; De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente . 124. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide , 77; Taguieff , ed.,Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion , 1:8; De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente , 276. 125. Taguieff , ed.,Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion , 1:7. 126. De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente , 32. 127. Ibid., 44. According to De Michelis, “a basic text of Slav Orthodox culture,” chap. 13 of the Vita Constantini , containing the prophecy of the coming of Christ 909 years aft er the so-called conspiracy of Solomon (instead of 929), would be the source of the passage in the Protocols about Solomon. See also Martin Noth, Sto- ria d’Israele (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1975), 277–78. 128. Henri Rollin , L’Apocalypse de notre temps. Les dessous de la propagande allemande d’après des documents inédites (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 235ff . 129. De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente , 50. De Michelis defi nes Maurice Joly’s book as the real subtext of the Protocols (240). Regarding Osman Bey, La con- quête du monde par les juifs (Basel: Krüsi, 1873), see Cohn, Warrant for Genocide , 184ff . 130. Carlo Ginzburg, “Rappresentare il nemico. Sulla preistoria francese dei Proto- colli,” in Ginzburg, Il fi lo e le tracce , 199. 131. De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente, 76. 132. I am referring to the translation by Mons. Umberto Benigni: “I documenti della conquista ebraica del mondo. Parte Prima. I protocolli dei saggi anziani di Sion,” Fede e Ragione, supplements to nos. 13–21 and 23–26 (1921); in the same year there appeared Giovanni Preziosi’s translation (for which he provided an intro- duction and edited the work): Sergyei Nilus, L’Internazionale ebraica. I “proto- colli” dei “savi anziani” di Sion (Rome: La Vita Italiana, 1921). See Ernest Jouin,

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Le péril judéo-maçonnique , vol. 1: Les Protocols des Sages de Sion ; vols. 2–3: La judéo-maçonnerie et l’Église catholique; vol. 4: Les Protocols de 1901 de G. Butmi (Paris: Émil Paul, 1920–22). 133. De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente , 240. 134. Regarding Joly’s biography, see Pierre Charles, “ Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion ” (1938), republished in Taguieff , ed., Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion, 2:9–37. With regard to Nodier, Ginzburg cites the Satyre Menippée de la vertu du Catholicon d ’Espagne (Paris: Delangle, 1824), which appeared during the religious wars and drew inspiration from Lucian of Samosata. For Bernard de Fontenelle, he cites Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683), new enlarged edition (London, 1711); of the Dialogue Ginzburg instead cites the version edited by Michel Bounan (Paris: Al- lia, 1993), and the epilogue, published separately in 1996: Maurice Joly, Le plé- biscite. Épilogue du Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Paris: Zanzibar, 1996). 135. Regarding this whole question, the following are of fundamental importance: In- nocenzo Cervelli, “Cesarismo: alcuni usi e signifi cati della parola (secolo nine- teenth),” Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico di Trento 32 (1996): 61–97; and Arnaldo Momigliano, “Per un riesame della storia dell’idea di cesarismo,” in Sui fondamenti della storia antica (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 378–89. 136. Ginzburg, “Rappresentare il nemico,” 193; and see also Hans Speier, “La vérité aux enfers: Maurice Joly et le despotisme moderne,” Commentaires 56 (1991–92): 671–90. See also F. Leclerq, aft erword to Joly, Le plébiscite, 107–8; and Werner Kaegi, “Jacob Burckhardt e gli inizi del cesarismo moderno,” Rivista Storica Ita- liana 76 (1964): 150–71. 137. Ginzburg, “Rappresentare il nemico,” 199; Drumont, La France juive , 2:410–11; and Édouard Drumont, Le testament d’un antisémite (Paris: Dentu, 1891), 285. 138. Ginzburg, “Rappresentare il nemico,” 201. 139. Grégoire Kauff mann, Édouard Drumont (Paris: Perrin 2008) 425. 140. Édouard Drumont, “La fi n d’un soldat,” La Libre Parole, September 3 and 9, 1898. Cf. Kauff mann, Édouard Drumont , 374. 141. Th e fund raising was the idea of the writer Marie-Anne de Bovet: see the ap- peal, signed by her, “Aux braves gens,” La Libre Parole , December 13, 1898. Re- garding the attitude of Ferdinand Brunetière, anti-Dreyfus but opposed to anti- Semitism, see Antoine Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière? Enquête sur un antidreyfusard et ses amis (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 35–49 (and regarding that of Paul Déroulède: Joly, Déroulède. L’inventeur du nationalisme français , 227ff .). 142. Rollin, L’Apocalypse de notre temps , 260, to which Ginzburg, “Rappresentare il nemico,” 200, refers.

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143. Ginzburg, “Rappresentare il nemico,” 201. 144. Cf. Édouard Drumont, “Les socialistes parlementaires,” La Libre Parole , August 5, 1896. Regarding this period of socialist politics and its relations with Drumont, see Charles Seignobos, L’évolution de la Troisième République (Paris: Hachette, 1921), 191. 145. Jouin, Le péril judéo-maçonnique , 1:190; and Preziosi, introduction to Nilus, L’Internazionale ebraica , 6. See also Julius Evola, preface to [Giovanni Preziosi], L’Internazionale ebraica, new ed. (1938), 13. 146. Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, in de Maistre, Oeuvres complètes (Lyon and Paris: Vitte et Perrussel, 1884–86), 1:38. 147. In fact here de Maistre contradicts what he had stated on page 2, in enunciating the thesis of his own anthropological pessimism: “Everything in the works of man is as abject as their author.” 148. Joseph de Maistre, “Étude sur la souveraineté,” in Oeuvres complètes , 1:358–422; Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque , xxv. 149. , “Sorrento, dicembre 1850: Napoleone,” in L’Antico Regime e la rivoluzione , trans. Anna Salmon Vivanti and Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), 559. L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution was originally published in 1856. 150. Regarding this point, see Luciano Cafagna, “Tocqueville dalla democrazia in America all’aristocrazia in Francia,” introduction to De Tocqueville, L’Ant i c o R e - gime, viii; as well as Onofrio Nicastro, introduction to Th omas Hobbes, Behe- moth (1668), It. trans., Behemoth (Rome: Laterza, 1979), v–lii. 151. Seymour Drescher, “Tocqueville’s Two Democracies,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1964): 201–16; but also Raymond Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), It. trans., Le tappe del pensiero sociologico (Milan: Mon- dadori, 1984), 214ff .; taken up by François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 129–48. 152. Auguste Comte, “Considérations sur le pouvoir spirituel” (1826), in Du pou- voir spirituel (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 278ff .; and “Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité” (1851–54), in Oeuvres (Paris: Anthropos, 1970), 4:346–76. On this point, see Bruno Karsenti, Politique de l’esprit Auguste Comte et la naissance de la science sociale (Paris: Hermann, 2006), 51ff . 153. Lukács, Balzac et le réalisme français , 20; in La Comédie humaine , Avant-Propos , vol. I.1 of Oeuvres complètes de Balzac (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1869), 13, Balzac actu- ally sides with Bossuet and Bonald. 154. Ernst Robert Curtius, Balzac (1923) (Bern: Franke, 1953), It. trans. Balzac (Milan: Garzanti, 1998), 220. For Le curé du village, see Balzac, Oeuvres complètes , 49ff .

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155. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide , 106. 156. See Birnbaum, Le peuple et les gros, 265. 157. Regarding this paradigm of the Revolution as a conspiracy, see Pierre Pierrard, Juifs et catholiques français (Paris: Fayard, 1970), chap. 5. I refer to Jouin, Le péril judéo-maçonnique: “Le péril judéo-maçonnique, voilà le noeud gordien de la situation désespérée du monde. Qui le tranchera d’un coup d’épée? Dieu seul” (1:29). See also Pierre Birnbaum, “Haines et préjugés,” in Histoire des droites en France, ed. Jean-François Sirinelli and Eric Vigne (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 268ff . 158. Th e comparison between the two lines of thought was developed by Pierre Nora, “1898. Le thème du complot et la défi nition de l’identité juive,” in Le rac- isme. Mythe et sciences , ed. Maurice Olender (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1981), 315. 159. Pierre Birnbaum, Un mythe politique: “La République juive.” De Léon Blum à Pierre Mendès France (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 315ff . 160. Traverso, Les marxistes et la question juive , 114, points out that one of the few exceptions to the general misunderstanding of the Jewish condition was that of the General Union of the Jewish Workers of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (the Bund) and its most brilliant intellectual, Vladimir Medem; see his extraordi- nary autobiography, Th e Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist (New York: Ktav, 1979). One of the best histories of the Bund is Abraham Menes, “Th e Jew- ish Socialist Movement in Russia and Poland,” in vol. 2 of Th e Jewish People Past and Present (New York: Jewish Encyclopedic Handbooks, 1955), 355–68. See also Henry J. Tobias, Th e Jewish Bund in Russia from Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972), 22–69; and Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871–1917 (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 236–79. Another aspect to be considered is that in “Marxist orthodoxy” there was no diff erence between the defi nition of nation and national minorities as proposed by Otto Bauer in La question des nationalités et la socialdémocratie , Fr. trans. (Paris: Serp, 1909), 388–89 and that of Stalin. Bauer defi ned the na- tion as a “community of destiny” produced by the combination of factors such as language, territory, and economic conditions and in Le Marxisme et la question nationale (1913), Stalin adopted the same defi nition but made it the premise of his criticism of “Jewish particularism,” also in its socialist version, that of the Bund. Cf. Joseph Stalin, Le marxisme et la question nationale (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1946): “Bauer se corrige à la fi n de son livre, affi rmant que la société capitaliste ne leur permet pas, aux juifs, de se conserver en tant que nation” (13). On this ques- tion, see Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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161. Vidal-Naquet, preface to Traverso, Les marxistes et la question juive, 21. Th ere are incisive observations on the relationship among socialism, utopia, and Jew- ish prophetism in Michael Löwy, Rédemption et utopie. Le judaïsme libertaire en Europe Centrale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 56–135. 162. Vidal-Naquet, preface to Traverso, Les marxistes et la question juive , 15. 163. Karl Kautsky, “Das Judentum,” Die Neue Zeit 8 (1890): 23ff . Regarding the text, see Jack Jacobs, “Marxism and Anti-Semitism: Kautsky’s Perspective,” Inter- national Review of Social History 30, no. 3 (1985): 400–430; and Edmund Sil- berner, Sozialisten zur Judenfrage. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sozialismus vom Anfgang des 19. Jahruhunderts bis 1914 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1962), 408–11. 164. Bernard Lazare, L’Antisémitisme. Son histoire et ses causes (1974) (Paris: Éditions de la Diff érence, 1982), 170; but also Martin Buber, Der utopische Sozialismus (Cologne: Hegner, 1967), 24; regarding both, see Isaiah Berlin, Trois essais sur la condition juive (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1973). 165. Karl Marx, “Th e Jewish Question,” in Th e Marx-Engels Reader , 26–47. Th e inter- pretation of Marx’s text as anti-Semitic was instead asserted by Edmund Silber- ner, “Was Marx an Anti-Semite?,” Historia Judaica 11, no. 1 (1949): 50ff ., and exag- gerated by other exegeses such as István Mészáros, Marx’s Th eory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 2; and Robert Misrahi, Marx et la question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 62ff . But Léon Poliakov also defi ned Marx as the initiator of a “Jewish anti-Semitism” in Histoire de l’antisémitisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1981), 2:227–37. 166. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution , 165; Isaiah Berlin, “Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, and the Search for Identity,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 22 (1968–1969), now in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1979). 167. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: Th e Th eological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 44; Franz Borkenau, Karl Marx (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1956), 35–36; and Buber, Der utopische Sozialis- mus , 24. 168. Th e defi nition is by Isaac Deutscher, Essais sur le problème juif (Paris: Payot, 1969); see also Shlomo Avineri, Th e Social and Political Th ought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 169. Marx, “Th e Jewish Question,” 39–43; see also Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Die Heilige Familie,” in Marx and Engels, Werke , w:116. See also David Niren- berg, Anti-Judaism: Th e Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013).

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170. I refer the reader to the perceptive observations of Shlomo Avineri, “Marx and Jewish Emancipation,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25, no. 3 (1964): 450ff .; see also Gershom Scholem, “Juifs et Allemands,” in Fidélité et utopie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1978). Regarding the prevalent social conditions of Central and Eastern European Jews, see Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 56–184. 171. Victor Adler, “Der Antisemitismus,” Gleichheit , May 7, 1887, reprint, Victor Adler, Aufsätze, Reden und Briefe (Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhand- lung, 1922–29), 8:346–48. Regarding Adler’s motion in Brussels, see Victor Adler, “Zum Brüsseler Kongreß,” Arbeiter Zeitung , August 28, 1891, reprint, Adler, Auf- sätze, Reden und Briefe, 7:65–66. On Adler and anti-Semitism, see Avram Barkai, “Th e Austrian Social Democrats and the Jews,” Wiener Library Bulletin 24, no. 1 (1970): 33–40. 172. Franz Mehring, “Anti- und Philosemitisches,” Neue Zeit 9, no. 2 (1891): 587ff .; cf. Robert S. Wistrich, “Anticapitalism or Antisemitism? Th e Case of Franz Meh- ring,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 22 (1977): 35–54. See August Bebel’s Sozial- demokratie und Antisemitismus (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1906), 282ff . 173. Bernstein, “Das Schlagwort und der Antisemitismus,” 233ff . 174. Édouard Drumont, La dernière bataille. Nouvelle étude psychologique et sociale (Paris: Dentu, 1890), xi–xii; see also Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire, 178. 175. Otto Bauer, Die Nazionalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, in Werkausgabe (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1979), 1:418–31. Also see Arduino Agnelli, Questione na- zionale e socialismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1969). 176. Regarding the Polish socialist parties and the diff erences between Luxemburg and Piłsudski, see Ulrich Haustein, Sozialismus und nationale Frage in Polen. Die Entwicklung der sozialistischen Bewegung in Kongress-Polen von 1875 bis 1900 un- ter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Polnischen Sozialistischen Partei (PPS) (Co- logne: Böhlau, 1969), 137–277; and John Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 1:63–111. 177. Georgij V. Plechanov, “Vremena meniautsia,” Iskra 39 (May 1903): 3, Eng. trans. in Th e Worker, June 21, 1963, cited in Frankel, Prophecy and Politics. 178. Regarding Jewish Labourism in the United States, see Morris U. Schappes, “Th e Political Origins of the United Hebrew Trades,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 5 (1977): 13–44. 179. See Allan Wildman, “Russian and Jewish Social Democracy,” in Revolution and Politics in Russia, ed. Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch, with Ladis D. Kristof (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 76ff .

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180. Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: Th e Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 102ff . 181. Hannah Arendt, “Aufk lärung und Judenfrage,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 4 (1932); Engl. trans.: “Th e Enlightenment and the Jewish Question,” in Hannah Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings , ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 11. 182. Ibid., 3. 183. Ibid., 42ff . 184. Ibid., 8–9, 11–12. 185. Of Johann Gottfried Herder’s works, Arendt cites “Auch eine Philosophie der Ge- schichtezurBildungder Menschheit” (1774) and, in particular, the “Erläuterungen zum Neuen Testament,” book 1, 3 (see Arendt, “Th e Enlightenment and the Jew- ish Question,” 13–15). 186. Arendt, “Th e Enlightenment and the Jewish Question,” 12. 187. Ibid., 12. I refer the reader to Stefano Levi Della Torre, “Essere fuori luogo,” in La terra di Israele ci interpella , ed. Jacqueline Des Rochettes et al. (Camaldoli: Edizioni Camaldoli, 1992), 15–58; as well as Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Ré- volte et mélancolie. Le romantisme à contre-courante de la modernité (Paris: Payot, 1992). 188. For the history of the Youth Aliya, see Recha Freier, Let the Children Come (Lon- don: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961). Arendt considered the analysis of the perse- cution, put forward by the Zionists, to be limited and anachronistic: see Central Offi ce of the Zionist Organisations, Resolutions of the Eighteenth Zionist Congress (London, 1934) (London: British Museum, 1935), 11ff .; and Arendt, “Zionism Re- considered,” Menorah Journal 33 (August 1945): 169. Arendt focused her criticism on Th eodor Herzl’s formulation of Zionism in Der Judenstaat. Versuch eine mo- dernen Lösung der Judenfrage (Leipzig: M. Breittenstein Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1896). For an overall historical reassessment of the various Zionist movements, see Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Confl ict, 1881– 2001 (New York: First Vintage, 2001); the radical criticism of Zionist ideology by Zeev Sternhell, Th e Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1998), chap. 3. See also David Ben-Gurion, Years of Challenge (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1963), 3–29; and David Vital, Th e Origins of Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 65. 189. Cf. Within Four Walls: Th e Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Hein- rich Blücher 1936–1968 (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 40–41. Hannah Arendt was never a communist, but in 1932 she stated that being Jewish had become, for her,

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a problem of an essentially “political” nature. Cf. Arendt, Essays in Understand- ing, 1930–1954 (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 6–8. 190. Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism, 76. See Ron H. Feldman, “Th e Jew as a Pariah: Th e Case of Hannah Arendt, 1906–1975,” in Hannah Arendt, Th e Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 13. Cf. fi nally Franz Neumann, Behemoth: Th e Structure and Practice of Na- tional Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 127. 191. Hannah Arendt, “Th e Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (February 1944): 9–122. Reprint, in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings ; I am quot- ing from 276. 192. Ibid., 283, 288–97. 193. Hannah Arendt, “Th e Eichmann Controversy: A Letter to Gershom Scholem,” Encounter (January 1964): 245ff ., reprint, in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings, 479. See also Raul Hilberg, Th e Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 29–51. 194. Arendt is referring to the period between the age of Sabbatei Zevi’s messianic movement and 1789: cf. Hannah Arendt, “Jewish History Revised,” Jewish Fron- tier (March 1948): 34–48; but on Sabbatei Zevi, see Gershom Scholem, Sabbatei Zevi: Th e Mystical Messiah (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973). Th ere is a noteworthy concurrence between Scholem and Arendt in considering Zevi the last great opportunity for the political mobilization of the Jewish people, before that off ered by Herzl. 195. Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism , 41. 196. Th e phenomenon is discussed by Arendt in “Stefan Zweig: Juden in der Welt von gersten,” in Sechs Essays (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1948), 112–27, reprint, in Arendt, Die verborgene Tradition , 74–87 (and also in “Th e Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradi- tion,” 112–21). 197. Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism , 73. 198. Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings , 363. 199. Arendt, “Th e Jew as Pariah,” in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings, 283. 200. Chartes Bernard Lazare (Alliance Israélite Universelle), carton 5, fi le “Sabbatei Zevi” (cited by Löwy, Rédemption et Utopie , 205ff .). On Lazare’s criticism of Herzl, see Robert S. Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky (London: Harrap, 1976), 148; and Hannah Arendt, “Herzl and Lazare: From the Dreyfus Aff air to France Today,” Jewish Social Studies 4 (July 1942): 195–240, reprint, in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings, 31. See also Bernard Lazare, Contre l’antisémitisme. Histoire d’une polémique (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1896), 11; Bernard Lazare, Antisémitisme et révolution (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1898), 81; and Bernard Lazare, “Le nationalisme juif,” Kadimah

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1 (1898). Th e most complete work on Bernard Lazare is Nelly Wilson, Bernard La- zare: Antisemitism and the Problem of Jewish Identity in Late Nineteenth- Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 201. See Hannah Arendt’s letter to Heinrich Blücher, July 7, 1936, in Within Four Walls ; Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: Th e Life of a Jewish Woman , 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 53ff .; the fi rst edition in German was Ra- hel Varnhagen: Lebengeschichte einer deutsche Jüdin aus der Romantik (Munich: Piper, 1959); Hannah Arendt, “Original Assimilation: An Epilogue to the One Hundredth Anniversary of Rahel Varnhagen’s Death” (1932) in Th e Jewish Writ- ings , 22–28. 202. Arendt, “Original Assimilation,” 22. 203. Marx, “Th e Jewish Question”; see Deutscher, Essais sur le problème juif , 43ff .; Abraham Léon, La conception materialiste de la question juive (Paris: EDI, 1980), 16ff .; Hannah Arendt, Th e Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). In Th e Origins of Totalitarianism , Arendt writes that “Zur Juden- frage” expresses perfectly “the confl ict between rich Jews and intellectual Jews” in the nineteenth century (141). 204. Hannah Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings , 46–124. 205. Ibid., 100–111. 206. Ibid., 102ff . 207. Ibid., 107–9.

2. EUROPEAN “NATIONAL SOCIALISM” AND ITS PROPAGANDA 1. Alexandre Koyré, “Louis de Bonald,” in Études d’histoire de la pensée philoso- phique (Paris: Éditions des Annales ESC, 1949), 117. 2. , Émile Durkheim (Englewood Cliff s, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), 24–26; Robert Nisbet, Th e Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966). 3. René de La Tour du Pin, “Du régime corporatif” (August 1883), now in René de La Tour du Pin, Vers un ordre social chrétien : Jalons de route 1882–1907 (Paris: La Bonne Presse, 1967), 22. La Tour du Pin attracted the attention of the young Italian Catholic politician Alcide De Gasperi: Un maestro del corporativismo cristiano. René de La Tour du Pin (1928), now in Alcide De Gasperi, I cattolici dall’opposizione al governo (Bari: Laterza, 1955), 137ff . 4. Th e letter is quoted by Giovanni Miccoli, “Antiebraismo, antisemitismo: un nesso fl uttuante,” in Les racines chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme politique. Fin XIX– XX siécles , ed. Catherine Brice and Giovanni Miccoli (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 13. Cf. also Miccoli, “Santa Sede, questione ebraica e antisemitismo tra Otto e Novecento,” in Dall’emancipazione a oggi, tome book 2 of Gli ebrei in

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Italia , ed. Corrado Vivanti, vol. 11 of Storia d’Italia, Annali (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 1369–574. 5. Kevin J. Madigan, “Getting Jews and the Vatican Wrong,” Th e New York Review of Books, November 21–December 4, 2013, 75, review of Justus G. Lawler, Were the Popes Against the Jews? Tracking the Myths, Confronting the Ideologies (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eardmans, 2013). Cf. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Les débuts du ca- tholicisme social en France, 1822–1870 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 40ff . 6. “Di un recente libro pro Iudaeis,” La Civiltà Cattolica 36, no. 9 (1885): 33, 39. Th e Pro Iudaeis , printed in Recoaro in 1883, was attributed to a lawyer, Corrado Guidi, perhaps a pseudonym—according to the writer of the periodical—of a “Jewish author.” “Th e proof” of the links between “Judaism” and Freemasonry was to be found in Heinrich Leberecht Albanus and Henri Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, Le juif, le judaïsme et la judaïsation des peuples chrétiens (Paris: Plon, 1869). In the next issue of the periodical there was an account of Prof. A. Neu- bahner’s lecture, delivered at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, on Jewish biological and anthropological characteristics: “Postilla sopra la razza ebraica,” La Civiltà Cattolica 36, no. 10 (1885): 60. On the role of Jews in Freema- sonry, see also: “Saggio critico sulla società massonica,” La Civiltà Cattolica 20, no. 7 (1869): 397ff ., and La Civiltà Cattolica 14, no. 8 (1863): 418ff . 7. “Della questione ebraica in Europa. Le cause,” La Civiltà Cattolica 41, no. 8 (1890): 21. Regarding the Jews as deicides, see “Del sinedrio deicida,” La Civiltà Cattolica 23, no. 1 (1877): 641ff . See also Annalisa Di Fant, “La polemica antiebraica nella stampa cattolica romana dopo la breccia di Porta Pia,” Mondo Contemporaneo 3, no. 1 (2007): 87–118. 8. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig Inc., 1978), 132. Referring to Karl von Hase, Das leben Iesu (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1835), 151–58, Mosse speaks of “infected Christi- anity.” See also Edward L. Schaub, “J. G. Fichte and Antisemitism,” Philosophical Review 49 (1940): 48ff ; On Paul de Lagarde, Deutsche Schrift en (Göttingen: Diet- erich, 1878), see Fritz R. Stern, Th e Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1961), 170ff . 9. I refer the reader once again to Verdès-Leroux, Scandale fi nancier et antisémi- tisme catholique. Le Krach de l’Union Générale (Paris: Le Centurion, 1969), 227ff . On the anti-Semitic agricultural unions, see Adrien Toussaint, L’union central des syndicats agricoles, ses idées directrices (Paris: Payot, 1920). 10. See the biography by Laurent Joly, Xavier Vallat. Du nationalisme chrétien à l’antisémitisme d ’État. 1891–1972 (Paris: Grasset, 2001), 49ff .

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11. Typical examples are the Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon 1 (January–February 1912): 41ff .; and Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon 3 (May–August 1912): 158–60. Cf. George Lichtheim, “Socialism and the Jews,” Dissent (July–August 1968): 320. 12. Georges Guy-Grand, La pensée de Proudhon (Paris: Bordas, 1947), 89ff ., but the point had already been underlined by Charles-Augustin de Sainte Beuve, in P.-J. Proudhon. Sa vie et sa correspondance (Paris: A. Costes, 1947), 24ff . 13. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Césarisme et Christianisme (de l’an 45 avant J.-C. à l’an 476 après) , précédé d’une preface par J.-A. Langlois (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1883), 1:5–6. 14. Ibid., 1:119. 15. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières 1864; Paris: Éditions M. Rivière, 1924), 124; but see also Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église (1858; Paris: Éditions M. Rivière, 1930), 2:149. 16. Mélonio, “La hiérarchie impossible. Comment se disculper d’être une aristo- cratie?,” in Il pensiero gerarchico in Europa. XVIII-XIX secolo , ed. Antonella Ali- mento and Cristina Cassina (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 283ff .; also see Henri de Lubac, Proudhon et le Christianisme (Paris: Seuil, 1947), 120. 17. Émile Berr, “La question juive. Une visite à M. Édouard Drumont,” Le Figaro , October 20, 1888 (cf. Grégoire Kaufmann, Édouard Drumont [Paris: Perrin, 2008], 498). 18. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Texte inédit et intégral établi sur les manuscrits auto- graphes: avec annotation et appareil critique de Pierre Haussmann , vol. 2, 1847– 1848 (Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivière, 1961): carnet 6, 337–38. Attention has been drawn to the carnets by Lichtheim, “Socialism and the Jews,” 315; and Zeev Stern- hell, La droite révolutionnaire en France 1885–1914. Les origines françaises du fas- cisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 187. Th e general strategic divergence between Marx and Proudhon emerges in a letter to Marx of the previous year: “We must not lay down revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because this supposed means would be an appeal to force and arbitrariness, in short a contradiction” (“À. M. Marx, Lettre de Lyon, 17 Mai 1846,” in Correspondance de P.-J. Proudhon [Paris: A. Lacroix et Compagnie Éditeurs, 1875], 2:198). 19. U. Lacauze, “Drumont socialiste,” Gil Blas , March 17, 1891. Th e defi nition was also used by A. Manouvrier, “Édouard Drumont socialiste,” La Revue du Syndicalisme Français (August 1909): 115ff . 20. Quoted by Pierre Pierrard, “Le court répit de la Grande Guerre,” in Pierre-André Taguieff , ed., Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion , 2 vols. (Paris: Berg International, 1992), 1:23.

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21. René de La Tour du Pin, “La représentation professionnelle,” L’Action Française (August 1908), reprint, in La Tour du Pin, Vers un ordre social chrétien, 308. La Civiltà Cattolica also openly supported the anti-Semitic movements in France. In vol. 40 (1889), the Th ird Republic was defi ned as “a country governed by an oligarchy which has emerged from an alliance among Jacobinism, Freemasonry, and Judaism. And from this perspective, the French government is very similar to the Italian one.” 22. Charles Périn, Les doctrines économiques depuis un siècle (Paris: Lecoff re, 1880), 199. 23. Ibid., 263. 24. La Tour du Pin, “La répresentation professionnelle,” 308. 25. Charles Maurras, Au signe du Flore (Paris: Grasset, 1931), 49; Maurice Pujo, Les (Paris: Flammarion, 1933), xvi. On both, see the incisive observa- tions in Eugene Weber, L’Action Française (Paris: Stock, 1966), 33ff . 26. Charles Maurras, L’idée de décentralisation (Paris: Revue encyclopédique, 1898), 9ff . 27. Th is consensus has been pointed out in Jean-Philippe Parrot, La représentation des interêts dans le mouvement des idées politiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), 50- 51. 28. I refer the reader to some of the most signifi cant projects of the period: Léon Du- guit, “Les élections des sénateurs,” Revue politique et parlementaire 4 (August– September 1895): 460ff ., reprint, in Léon Duguit, Le droit social (Paris: Alcan, 1908); Raoul de la Grasserie, “De la représentation professionnelle,” Revue poli- tique et parlementaire 4 (August–September 1895): 550ff .; Charles Benoist, “De l’organisation du suff rage universel,” Revue des Deux Mondes , August 15, 1895, 168ff . Th e discussion continued both during and aft er the war: see Ferdinand Larnaude, Les sciences juridiques et politiques (Paris: Alcan, 1915); and Milan P. Markovitch, La doctrine sociale de Duguit (Paris: Alcan, 1933). 29. Charles Benoist, La crise de l ’État moderne (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1896), 154- 55; Charles Benoist, La monarchie Française (Paris: Dunod, 1935), 2:240ff . Jean Brèthe de la Gressaye also ended up in the party of Maurras (see “La repré- sentation professionnelle et corporative,” Archives de Philosophie de Droit 3–4 [1939]: 68). 30. Ferdinand Brunetière, “Après une visite au Vatican,” Revue des Deux Mondes 65, no. 127 (January 1, 1895). the importance of this article has been pointed out in Luisa Mangoni, Una crisi di fi ne secolo. La cultura italiana e la Francia tra Otto e Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), 3- 5. On the Italian reactions to the article,

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see Enrico Morselli, La pretesa bancarotta della scienza, una risposta di Enrico Morselli (Palermo: Sandron, 1895); and Arturo Graf, “Contro la bancarotta della scienza,” L’illustrazione italiana , May 24, 1895 (see once again Mangoni, Una crisi di fi ne secolo ). See Paul Claudel’s letter of to André Gide, August 7, 1903, in Paul Claudel and André Gide, Correspondance 1899–1926 (Paris: Gallimard 1949). 31. Luisa Mangoni, Una crisi di fi ne secolo , 81ff ., recalls above all the work by Gabriel Tarde, “Foules et sectes au point du vue criminel,” Revue des Deux Mondes 63, no. 120 (November 15, 1893). 32. Typical examples are Charles Feré, Dégénérescence et criminalité. Essai physi- ologique (Paris: Alcan, 1888); and Arthur Lautrec, La fi n du monde prochainement (Lyon: Eff antin, 1901). On the obsession with “decadence,” see Eugen Weber, La Francia fi n de siècle (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 15–37; and Alfred E. Carter, Th e Idea of Decadence in French Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958); also very useful is Émilien Carassus, Le snobisme et les lettres françaises. De P. Bourget à M. Proust 1884–1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966). 33. On the role of the Dreyfus aff air in the birth of the new rationalism, see above all , Histoire de l’Aff aire Dreyfus (Paris: Fasquelle, 1903), 3:246. Th e fundamental text for the defi nition of the “values” of the anti-Dreyfus national- ists is Ferdinand Brunetière, Après le procès (Paris: Didier-Perrin, 1898), 73ff . A general reassessment is Les écrivains et l’Aff aire Dreyfus, Actes du colloque orga- nisé par l’Université d’Orléans et par le Centre Charles Péguy, le 29, 30, 31 Octobre 1981 (Paris: Seuil, 1983), about which see Michel Winock, “Les Aff aires Dreyfus,” Vingtième Siècle 4 (October 1984): 16ff . 34. Louis Dimier, Vingt ans d’Action Française et autres souvenirs (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1926), 47. 35. Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, La République ou le Roi. Correspondance inédite 1888–1923. Réunie et classée par Hélène et Nicole Maurras, commentée par , avec introduction et notes de G. Dupré (Paris: Plon, 1970), 206ff . 36. Giovanni Gentile also opposed Loisy (see Il modernismo e i rapporti tra religione e fi losofi a [Bari: Laterza, 1909]). Adolfo Omodeo instead praised the “balance” of the French Catholic historian in A. Loisy storico delle religioni (Bari: Laterza, 1936), 29–48. For a general reassessment,see Armando Carlini, “Gentile e il mo- dernismo,” in Studi gentiliani (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), 75ff . 37. Th e judgment is by Weber, L ’Action Française , 33. 38. Revue d’Action Française, July 1, 1899, as well as Louis Canet, Saint-siége, “action française” et “catholiques intégraux”: histoire critique (Paris: Librairie Universi- taire J. Gamber, 1928), 42–44. 39. See Pujo’s observation in Les camelots du Roi , 69ff .

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40. Maurras, Au signe du Flore , 18. 41. Ibid., 24. 42. Ibid., 46. 43. Ibid., 51. 44. Ibid., 126. 45. Charles Maurras, La contre-révolution spontanée. La recherche , la discussion , l’émeute (Paris: Éditions de l’Action Française, 1943), 42–43. Regarding these pages of Maurras, see Albert O. Hirschman, “Deux cent ans de rhétorique réac- tionnaire. Le cas de l’eff et pervers,” Annales ESC 1 (1989): 76. 46. See Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976), 7–15. 47. Maurras, L’idée de décentralisation, 16–17. 48. Maurice Barrès, Un homme libre (Paris: Perrin, 1888), 104–6. On the rhetoric of the earth, blood, and the dead, see Jean-Marie Domenach, “Barrésisme et révolu- tion conservatrice,” in Barrès: Une tradition dans la modernité . Actes du Collo- que de Mülhouse , Bâle et Friburg en Bresgau (10, 11, 12 avril 1989) (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1991), 139ff .; as well as Maurice Barrès. Actes du colloque or- ganisé par la Faculté des Lettres et de Sciences Humaines de l ’Université de Nancy 22–25 Octobre 1962 (Nancy, 1963). See fi nally Pierre de Boisdeff re, Maurice Bar- rès (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1962), 147ff . Less convincing is the parallel between Barrès and Proust proposed in G. Brèc, “Marcel Proust and Maurice Barrès,” Th e Romantic Review 1 (1949): 93–105, since Proust distanced himself unequivocably from nationalism; in this regard see Marcel Proust, Correspon- dance (Paris: Plon, 1970), 4:313. For the nationalist concept of politics, see Charles Maurras, “La politique,” L’Ac t i o n Française , May 7, 1908. “La Politique” was also the title of Maurras’s daily column from when, in March 1908, the weekly period- ical became the “daily newspaper of integral nationalism” (see Charles Maurras, De la politique naturelle au nationalisme intégral. Textes choisis [Paris: Vrin, 1972]. 49. Ernst Robert Curtius, Maurice Barrès und die geistigen Grundlagen des franzö- sischen Nationalismus (Hildesheim: Olms, 1962), 65. Barrès’ fi rst parliamentary mandate lasted from 1889 to 1893. In the subsequent elections (1893 and 1898) he failed to win reelection and only returned to parliament in 1906. See P. Bar- sal, “Barrès parlementaire,” in Maurice Barrès. Actes du colloque , 150ff . A typical example of his earliest political positions is the article “M. le général Boulanger et la nouvelle génération,” Revue Indépendante de Littérature et d’Art 7 (April 1888), about which see Patrick H. Hutton, “Popular Boulangism and the Advent of Mass Politics in France,” Journal of Contemporary History 1 (1976): 89ff . See also Maurice Barrès, “La lutte entre capitalistes et travailleurs,” Le Courrier de

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l’Est, September, 28, 1890, cited in Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationa- lisme français (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), 144. 50. Maurras, L’idée de décentralisation , 24. 51. Maurice Barrès, “Contre les étrangers. Études pour la protection des ouvriers français,” in Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: Émile-Paul, 1902), 431. 52. Maurice Barrès, “Programme de Nancy,” in Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme , 433ff . 53. Maurice Barrès, “L’opportunisme, parti des juifs,” La Courrier de l’Est, April 7, 1889, quoted in Sternhell, M Barrès, 233. 54. Cf. Marcel Arland, “Barrès,” in Essais et nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Galli- mard, 1952), 45–54. See also Verdès-Leroux, Scandale fi nancier , 88ff . 55. Friedrich Engels, and Paul Lafargue, and Laura Lafargue, Correspondance (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1956), 2:392. 56. Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire, 38–73. 57. Paul Déroulède, “Qui vive? France! Quand même,” in Notes et Discours 1883–1910 (Paris: Bloud, 1910), 165ff . 58. Édouard Drumont, La dernière bataille. Nouvelle étude psychologique et sociale (Paris: Dentu, 1890), xi–xii; later in “Lettre d’Édouard Drumont à Jules Guérin,” Bulletin offi ciel de la Ligue Antisémitique de France 1, January 1, 1898, 1. 59. Marquis de Morès, Rothschild, Ravachol et Compagnie (Paris: Rue du Mont- Th abor, 1892), 32. On Morès, see D. Jerome Tweton, Th e Marquis de Morès: Da- kota Capitalist, French Nationalist (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1972), 3–26. 60. Abbé Emmanuel-Augustin Chabauty, Les Juifs, nos maîtres! Documents et devé- loppements nouveaux sur la question juive (Paris: Société Générale de Libraire Catholique, 1882), ix–xi. 61. Benoît Malon, “La question juive,” Revue Socialiste 3 (1886). On Malon’s judg- ment, see “Correspondance,” Revue Socialiste 63 (March 1890): 349, replying to Gustave Rouanet, “La question juive et la question sociale,” Revue Socialiste 62 (February 1890): 232. Gustave Tridon’s work was Du molochisme juif. Études cri- tiques et philosophiques (Brussels: Maheu, 1884), 7–13. 62. Cf. Stephen Wilson, “Th e Antisemitic Riots of 1898 in France,” Th e Historical Journal 4 (1973): 806,; as well as Pierre Birnbaum, Le moment anti-Sémite (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 63. See Jean Rivain, “Les socialistes antidémocratiques,” L’Action Française (daily newspaper), March 15, 1907. I am referring to the vision of the authoritarian state developed in Georges Valois, La monarchie et la classe ouvrière (Paris: Éditions de l’Action Française, 1914), xxvff .; on this text by Valois, see Paul Mazgaj, Th e

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Action Française and the Revolutionary Syndicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 72ff .; as well as Allen R. Douglas, George Valois and the French Right (London: University Microfi lms International, 1986), 81ff . 64. For a comparison with the Italian culture of that period, see Silvio Lanaro, “La guerra multanime dei nazionalisti,” Meridiana 6 (1989): 151–53; as well as Silvio Lanaro, Nazione e lavoro. Saggio sulla cultura borghese in Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 1979). Th is theme has been taken up again recently in Eleonora Belloni, Ideologia dell’industrializzazione e borghesia imprenditoriale. Dal nazionalismo al fascismo 1907–1925 (Manduria: Lacaita, 2008). 65. Charles Maurras, Mes idées politiques , intro. Pierre Gaxotte (Paris: Éditions de l’Académie Française, 1937), 50–52. 66. Ibid., 59, 62–63. 67. Charles Maurras, Enquête sur la monarchie (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1924), 459. 68. Ernest Renan, L’avenir de la science, vol. 3 (1949) of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947–61), 756- 57. See also Auguste Comte, “Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité” (1851–54), in vol. 4 of his Oeuvres in Oeuvres (Paris: Anthropos, 1970), 4: xixff . On Maurras and Comte, see Pierre Arnaud, “Deux tentatives malheureuses et contraires de ‘politique positive’: Maurras et Alain,” Romantisme. Revue du XIXe siècle 21–22 (1978): 187ff . 69. In the end, Comte included the text in Discours sur l ’ensemble du positivisme , regarding which see the critical edition edited by Annie Petit: Auguste Comte, Discours sur l ’ensemble du positivisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 14ff . Petit notes that “positivism” is a term which does not appear in Comte’s writings before 1848, but recurs from the time of some letters written to in the years immediately aft erwards. Cf. Auguste Comte, Correspondance générale et confes- sions (Paris: Vrin, 1973–90), vol. 2, 22, 139, 147, 212. 70. See Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (Paris: Anthropos, 1969), 4:200. 71. Auguste Comte, “Plan des travaux scientifi ques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société,” in Écrits de jeunesse 1816–1828 , ed. Paulo E. de Berredo Carneiro and Pierre Arnaud (Paris: Mouton, 1970), 245–47. 72. In this regard, see the important conclusions in Regina Pozzi, “Tra Destra e Si- nistra, tra ordine e progresso. Rifl essioni sul pensiero politico di Comte,” Società e Storia 92 (2001): 369; see also Keith M. Baker, “Closing the French Revolution: Saint-Simon and Comte,” in vol. 3 of Th e French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Oxford: Per- gamon Press, 1989), 323ff .

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73. Both Auguste Comte’s Rapport sur la nature et le plan du gouvernement révolu- tionnaire de la République Française (1848) and his Cours de philosophie positive are quoted in Charles Maurras, “Dictateur ou Roi,” in Oeuvres Capitales (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), 86ff . 74. “To generate good words, platitudes, insignifi cant verses in an eight-year-old brain, what a triumph of worldly culture! It was the last act of a regime that, aft er having removed man from public aff airs and his own, from marriage, family, took him with all his faculties and feelings. . . . When the Revolution came, the rupture was even greater. Have a look at the harangues from the platform or in clubs, at the relationships and motivations of the laws, at the pamphlets: . . . in these texts the human creature is always seen as a mere automaton” (Hippolyte Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, part 1, L’ancien régime [Paris: Hachette, 1875], 10:214, 314, 49). See also Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Paris: Hachette, 1864), 1:xxiiiff . For a commentary, see Jean-Th omas Nordmann, “Taine et le positivisme,” Romantisme. Revue du XIXe siècle 21–22 (1978): 21ff .; and Re- gina Pozzi, Hippolyte Taine. Scienze umane e politica nell’Ottocento (Venice: Mar- silio, 1993), 61–73. 75. Hippolyte Taine, Sa vie et sa correspondance (Paris: Hachette, 1902–1907), 1:83ff ., 3:306; and Paul Bourget, H. Taine (1882), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Plon, 1899), 1:152. Émile Durkheim also laid claim to Taine’s legacy: see “L’empirisme rationa- liste de Taine et les sciences morales,” La Revue Blanche 113, no. 101 (1897), reprint, in Émile Durkheim, Textes (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), 1:174ff . Le Bon had written: “A Latin crowd, whether one regards it as revolutionary or conservative, will inevitably call for the intervention of the state to meet its needs: it is always centralizing and, more or less, Caesaristic” (Gustave Le Bon, La psychologie des foules [Paris: Alcan, 1895], 94). See also Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, “Hippolyte Taine” (1893), in Dévant le siècle (Paris: Colin, 1896), 296; and Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, “Après M. Renan,” Revue des Deux Mondes 62, no. 114 (November 15, 1892). 76. Charles Maurras, L’avénir de l’intelligence (Paris: Fontemoing, 1905), 99. 77. Maurras, Enquête sur la monarchie, 96. 78. Ibid., 85. 79. Maurras, Mes idées politiques, 70, 126. Maurras writes: “Th is unity [of France], however solid, spontaneous, and natural it may seem today, is in fact solely the work of our sovereigns: nature had been satisfi ed to make it possible, neither necessary nor inevitable, but our sovereigns created and shaped it, just as an art- ist confers his own personal imprint on the selected material” (103). 80. Ibid., 280, 281.

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81. Scipio Sighele, La delinquenza settaria (Milan: F.lli Treves, 1897), 40–41. Regard- ing this work, I refer the reader once again to Mangoni, Una crisi di fi ne secolo , 9. See also Tarde, “Foules et sectes au point de vue criminel”; Max Nordau, Degene- razione, 2 vols. (Milan: Dumolard, 1893–94); and Vogüé, “Après M. Renan.” 82. Maurras, Mes idées politiques, 137. See also Ferdinand Brunetière, “La moralité de la doctrine évolutive,” Revue des Deux Mondes 65, no. 129 (May 1, 1895). 83. Sorel’s writings were widely translated, for instance, in La Voce , Il Giornale d’Italia , and Il Resto del Carlino , and aroused the interest of Pareto, Racca, Prez- zolini, Corradini, Croce, and Missiroli. I refer the reader to some of the most signifi cant contributions of the period: Vittorio Racca, “G. Sorel e il socialismo,” La Riforma Sociale (1902): 920ff ., reprinted as a preface to Georges Sorel, Saggi di critica del marxismo (Milan: Sandron, 1903), anastatic reprint (Rome: Samonà and Savelli, 1970), xliiiff .; Giuseppe Prezzolini, “A chi giova la lotta di classe?,” Il Regno 18 (1909): 2–24; Benedetto Croce, introduction to Georges Sorel, Conside- razioni sulla violenza (Bari: Laterza, 1926), 38ff . On Croce and Sorel, see Emilio Agazzi, Il giovane Croce e il marxismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), 126–44, 149–53; En- rico Corradini, “Per coloro che risorgono,” Il Regno 1 (1903): 2. also reviewed “Considerazioni sulla violenza,” Il Popolo, June 25, 1909; cf. Ro- berto Vivarelli, introduction to Georges Sorel, Scritti politici (Turin: Utet, 1963), 47. On the synthesis of revolutionary syndicalism and nationalist corporatism, see Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire , 9ff .; and Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Paris: Fayard, 1989). For the de- bate on Sternhell’s texts, see Leonardo Rapone, “Fascismo: né destra, né sinistra?,” Studi Storici 3 (1974): 801–03; Philippe Burrin, “Le fascisme,” in Politique , vol. 1 of Histoire des Droites en France , ed. Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 612ff .; António Costa-Pinto, “Fascist Ideology Revisited: Zeev Sternhell and His Critics,” European History Quarterly 16 (1986): 477; Armin Mohler, “L’ideologia fascista oltre la destra e la sinistra,” Intervento 69 (March–April 1985): 80–82; Robert Wohl, “French Fascism, Both Right and Left : Refl ections on the Stern- hell Controversy,” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 93ff . Th e reply by René Rémond, Les droites en France (Paris: Aubier, 1982), 15–46, fi rst edition, La droite en France de la Première Restauration à la Vème République 1815–1968 (Paris: Au- bier, 1963), has been very useful, and the study by Michael Curtis, Th ree Against the Th ird Republic: Sorel, Barrès, Maurras (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), 102ff ., is still of fundamental importance. 84. A French observer of the corporative economy provided a lucid analysis of the diff erences within the world of corporatism: see Louis Rosenstock-Franck, L’économie corporative fasciste en doctrine et en fait. Ses origines historiques et

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son évolution (Paris: Gamber, 1934), 43ff . I also refer the reader to some funda- mental sources: Gino Arias, “Intervento,” in Ministero delle Corporazioni, Atti del Primo Convegno di Studi Sindacali e Corporativi—Roma 2 e 3 maggio 1930 (Rome: Edizioni del Diritto del Lavoro, 1930), 2:153ff ., 2:238ff .; Nino Massimo Fovel, “Struttura teorica del corporativismo come economia del produttore,” Nuovi problemi di politica, storia ed economia (April–June 1932): 151ff .; Giulio Colamarino, “Natura storica del corporativismo italiano,” Nuovi problemi di po- litica, storia ed economia (January–March 1932): 36ff .; Ugo Spirito, “Relazione,” in Ministero delle Corporazioni, Atti del Secondo Convegno di Studi Sindacali e Corporativi —Ferrara 5–8 maggio 1932 (Rome: Edizioni del Diritto del Lavoro, 1932), 1:179ff .; and Ugo Spirito, “Dentro e fuori,” Critica Fascista , July 1, 1932, later published in Ugo Spirito, Capitalismo e corporativismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1933). Th e positions close to Confi ndustria (the Confederation of Italian Industry), like those of De Stefani, Serpieri, Amoroso, and Giovanni Benini, were instead outside the strictly corporatist perspective. For a broader view of corporatist lit- erature, see Alfredo Gradilone, Bibliografi a sindacale corporativa (1923.I./1940- XVIII) (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista, 1942); and Carlo Vallauri, Le radici del corporativismo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1971). Ugo Spirito’s position has been closely studied: see Antimo Negri, Dal corporativismo comunista all’Umanesimo scientifi co. Itinerario teorico di Ugo Spirito (Manduria: Lacaita, 1966), 51ff .; Silvio Lanaro, “Appunti sul fascismo ‘di sinistra’. La dottrina corporativa di Ugo Spirito,” Belfagor (September 1971): 577ff .; Gianpasquale Santomassimo, “Ugo Spirito e il corporativismo,” Studi Storici (January–March 1973): 61ff .; Santomassimo, “La parabola del mito corporativo,” in Istituto Lombardo per la Storia del Movi- mento di Liberazione in Italia, Cultura e società negli anni del fascismo (Milan: Cordani, 1987), 418ff . 85. “Have you personally gained a lot from French culture?—A great deal. From Re- nan, for philosophical problems; from Sorel, for revolutionary syndicalism and other current questions; and then, above all, from the giant Balzac” (Emil Lud- wig, Colloqui con Mussolini [Milan: Mondadori, 1932], 153). 86. Ernest Renan, “Dialogues et fragments philosophiques,” in vol. 1 (1947) of Oeuvres Complètes , 610. On this text, see Claude Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959); and Regina Pozzi, “L’abiura di Ernest Renan,” in Gli intellettuali e il potere (Bari: De Donato, 1979), 191ff . 87. Charles Maurras, “L’Action Française et la religion catholique” (1913), in L’o e u v r e de Charles Maurras. La démocratie religieuse (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie nationale, 1921), 493ff .

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88. Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo, con una storia del movimento fascista di Gioacchino Volpe (Milan: Treves-Treccani-Tumminelli, Biblioteca della Enci- clopedia Italiana, 1933), part 2, 15; it is the entry “Dottrina del fascismo” (Doc- trine of fascism) in the Enciclopedia Italiana (Italian encyclopedia), the fi rst part drawn up by Giovanni Gentile and the second (la “Dottrina politica e sociale”) by Benito Mussolini; however, the text was only signed by Mussolini. According to Giovanni Giudice, Benito Mussolini (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 504, Mussolini also reworked Gentile’s text, but, according to Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce. Gli anni del consenso (1929–1936) (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 35, it was instead Mussolini who accepted Gentile’s approach. Th e infl uence of Renan’s texts on Mussolini’s works had already been noted in Henri Massoul, “M. Mussolini chez Renan,” Le Temps, March 22, 1933. Th e following year, Massoul, published one of the most popular French texts about the thought of the Italian leader: La leçon de Mus- solini: comme meurt une démocratie, comme nait une dictature (Paris: , 1934). See Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Segreteria particolare del Duce, Carteggio riservato (1922–43), fasc. 251/R, Enciclopedia Treccani , in De Felice, Mussolini il duce. Gli anni del consenso , 36ff . 89. Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo , 15. 90. Ibid., 17. 91. Isaiah Berlin maintains that de Maistre was the real inventor of fascism: see “Jo- seph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” Th e New York Review of Books , Sep- tember 27, 1990, October 11, 1990, October 25, 1990. 92. Regarding the plan for the “state of technical experts,” see the following works by Georges Valois: “Nationalisme et socialisme,” Le Nouveau Siècle, January 25, 26 and 27, 1926; and “Erreurs et vérités sur le Fascisme,” Le Nouveau Siècle, April 24, 1926. Th ese writings were summarized in Le Fascisme (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1927), and have been taken into consideration by Zeev Sternhell in Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, Th e Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995) and in “La terza via fascista,” Il Mulino 330 (July–August 1990): 517–37. At variance with Stern- hell’s interpretation is Jacques Juillard, “Sur un fascisme imaginaire. À propos d’un livre de Zeev Sternhell,” Annales ESC (July–August 1984): 849–61. Zeev Sternhell tackled the theme of Valois’s thought in “Anatomie d’un mouvement fasciste en France. Le Faisceau de Georges Valois,” Revue française de Science politique 1 (February 1976): 5 - 40, and in Neither Right Nor Left : Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). See fi nally Jean-Maurice Duval, Le Faisceau de Georges Valois (Paris: La Librairie

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Française, 1979); and Paul Mazgaj, Th e Action Française and the Revolutionary Syndicalism (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 93. On the relationship between the Faisceau and the French right-wing groups, see Rémond, Les droites en France , 48, 104–5; regarding the diff erence between the Faisceau and Pierre Taittinger’s group, see Robert Soucy, “Centrist Fascism: Pierre Taittinger and the Jeunesses Patriotes,” Journal of Contemporary History 2 (1981): 349ff . See also Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., Th e European Right (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965); and Arno J. Mayer, Dynamics of Coun- terrevolution in Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). Regarding this subject, I refer the reader to Douglas, George Valois and the French Right; and Robert Soucy, French Fascism: Th e First Wave, 1924–1933 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1986). 94. Soucy, French Fascism , 72ff . On the history of the Croix de Feu, see Philippe Ru- daux, Les Croix de Feu et le PSF (Paris: France-Empire, 1967), 41ff . Interesting but partisan is Édith de la Rocque and Gilles de la Rocque, La Rocque tel qu’il était (Paris: Fayard, 1962). Th e following are important: Philippe Machefer, “Le Parti Social Français en 1936–1937,” L’information historique (March–April 1972): 80ff .; and William D. Irvine, “Fascism in France and the Strange Case of the Croix de Feu,” Journal of Modern History (June 1991): 295. 95. Colonel de la Rocque, Service Public (Paris: Éditions Croix de Feu, 1934), 226. See also Pierre Creyssel, Le Parti Social Français devant les problèmes de l’heure. Rapports présentés au premier congrès national du PSF (Paris: Société d’Éditions et d’Abonnements, December 1936), 36–37. I refer the reader to the observations in Eugen Weber, “Nationalism, Socialism, and National Socialism in France,” French Historical Studies 2, no. 3 (Spring 1962): 273–307. 96. Regarding these publications, I refer the reader to the lucid observations of Burrin, “Le fascisme,” 612. See also Michel Winock, Histoire politique de la Re- vue Esprit (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 42–45, 107–9; as well as the refl ections of Raoul Girardet, “Note sur l’esprit d’un fascisme français 1934–1939,” Revue Française de Science Politique 5, no. 3 (July–September 1955): 530ff . Other important contribu- tions are in Robert Soucy, “Th e Nature of Fascism in France,” in International Fascism: New Th oughts and New Approaches , ed. George L. Mosse (London: Sage Publications, 1979), 243–72; and Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra, Les fascismes français 1923–1963 (Paris: Seuil, 1963). On the phenomenon of the so- called nonconformism, see Jean Touchard, L’esprit des années Trente. Une ten- tative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Seuil, 1969); but also Léon Émery, Étapes et rencontres. À travers les tumultes d’un siècle (Lyon: Les Cahiers Libres, 1976), 33.

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97. Of fundamental importance is Stanley Hoff mann, “Collaborationism in France During World War II,” Journal of Contemporary History 1 (1968): 374ff . Th e in- terpretation of Vichy as a “protective shield” against the Nazi occupation was maintained by Robert Aron, Histoire de Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1954), but it was de- molished by Robert O. Paxton, in : Old Guard and New Order (New York: Albert Knopf, 1972). See also Robert O. Paxton, Le fascisme en action (Paris: Seuil, 2004). Th e theses of Ernst Nolte, Th ree Faces of Fascism (London: Weiden- feld and Nicholson, 1965), 30ff ., are instead open to question. On the corporatist tendencies of the CGT in 1940, see Georges Lefranc, Les expériences syndicales en France de 1939 à 1950 (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1950), 37–40. On the attitude of Action Française to the Vichy experiment, see Charles Maurras, De la colère à la Justice, Réfl exions sur un désastre (Geneva: Èdition du Milieu de Monde, 1941), 74, 78–79; I also refer the reader to the documents in La France de Vichy. Archives inédites d’Angelo Tasca (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1996), esp. 43–102. 98. Georges Davy, “Le problème de l’industrialisation de l’État,” Revue de Métaphy- sique et de Morale 31, no. 4 (1924): 599. On the economic background that favored the fl ourishing of technocratic and corporative literature, see Alfred Sauvy, His- toire économique et sociale de la France entre les deux guerres (Paris: Fayard, 1965), 1:194ff .; and Jean-Marie Mayeur, La vie politique sous la Troisième République (Paris: Seuil, 1982). 99. See the program of Le Faisceau in Le Producteur 1 (June 1920): 21–44. 100. Cf. Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle. Khâgneux et Normaliens dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Fayard, 1988). 101. Th e dedication to Marcel Mauss, in the copy in the library of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, has been reproduced in Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 662. 102. Marcel Déat, Mémoires politiques (Paris: Denoël, 1989), 618, 672. 103. Marcel Déat, Jeunesse et Révolution (Paris: Jeunesses Nationales Populaires, 1942), l6–17. Th is is the text of a lecture given at the Jeunesses Nationales Pop- ulaires cadres school, in April of that year. See the comment on it in Jean- Paul Cointet, Marcel Déat. Du socialisme au national-socialisme (Paris: Per- rin, 1998), 19; as well as in Alain Bergougnoux, “Le néosocialisme de Marcel Déat. Réformisme traditionnel et esprit des Années Trente,” Revue historique ( October–December 1978): 371ff . See fi nally Stanley Grossmann, “L’évolution de Marcel Déat,” Revue d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale (January 1975): 197ff . 104. See Marcel Déat, Notions de sociologie (Paris: Alcan, 1925), 18–39; Déat, “Religion et régime social,” La Vie Socialiste, January 19, 1929, 3. On these positions of Déat,

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see also Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste. Doriot, Déat, Bergery (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 41. 105. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote: “I was the secretary of the Socialist Study Group of the fi ve Écoles Normales Supérieures, even though I was not a normaliste , and I was also secretary general of the Federation of Socialist Students. . . . Th ose to whom I was most attached are dead: Pierre Boivin, and then Georges Lefranc, with whom however I had lost touch. I also knew Marcel Déat well. . . . I knew him when I was working as the secretary of a socialist deputy, to earn some money in the years prior to the agrégation , the open competition for qualifi cation as a teacher. Th e deputy was called Georges Monnet. Th erefore I regularly went to the Chamber of Deputies when Marcel Déat was the secretary of the socialist group” (Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, De près et de loin [Paris: Odile Jacob, 1988], 17). See also Claude Lévi-Strauss, “French Sociology,” in Twentieth Century Sociology, ed. Georges Gurvitch and Wilbert E. Moore (New York: Phil- osophical Library, 1945). Th ese aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s political biography have also been dealt with by Denis Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Plon, 2003), 37–65. 106. Marcel Déat, Perspectives socialistes (Paris: Libraire Valois, 1930), 48–50, 167–96. In 1928 Marcel Mauss had published the notes Émile Durkheim had prepared for a course held at the University of Bordeaux in the academic year 1895–96: Le so- cialisme. Sa défi nition, ses débuts, la doctrine saint-simonienne . I am quoting from the Fayard edition, (Paris, 1970), 15. 107. Déat, Perspectives socialistes , 178–79. 108. “Modern socialism faces two vital tasks: going beyond Marxism and working on constructing a new doctrine that, taking into account the labor movement’s fundamental psychological tendencies, will prioritize the ideal of justice and re- store the link, currently broken, that unites socialism with the totality of demo- cratic and Christian traditions” ( Henri de Man et la crise doctrinale du socialisme [Paris: Librairie Universitaire Gamber, 1928], 157–58). On de Man, see also Peter Dodge, Beyond Marxism: Th e Faith and the Works of Henri de Man (Th e Hague: Nijhoff , 1966). 109. Montagnon, in Barthélémy Montagnon, , Max Bonnafous, and Marcel Dèat, Néosocialisme? Ordre, autorité, nation (Paris: Grasset, 1933), 30–34; I refer the reader to Léon Blum’s reply in SFIO , 30e Congrès national , Paris 14–17 juillet 1933 (Paris: Librairie Populaire, 1933), 369 (Blum accused Montagnon of wanting to transform the Socialist Party into a “social and national party of dictatorship”).

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110. Déat’s intervention in Montagnon, Marquet, Bonnafous and Dèat, Néosocia- lisme? , 76–80. 111. Benito Mussolini, “Fra due civiltà,” Il Popolo d’Italia, August 22, 1933, now in Ben- ito Mussolini, Opera Omnia , ed. Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1951–80), 36:43–45. Cf. Burrin, La dérive fasciste , 470. 112. Marcel Déat, “Fin des vieux partis,” Notre Temps , February 14, 1934; Marcel Déat, “Et maintenant, travaillons,” La Vie Socialiste, March 3, 1934, 13. Cf. again Burrin, La dérive fasciste , 471. 113. Marcel Déat, “En attendant les secousses,” Paris-Demain, April 20, 1935; cf. Burrin, La dérive fasciste, 473. See also Marcel Déat, “Pour un comité du Plan,” La Vie Socialiste, March 2, 1935, 3–5, as well as his prefaces to Comité du Plan, Le Plan Français. Doctrine et plan d ’action (Paris: Fasquelle, 1935), in particular iii-xi, and to Comité du Plan, Une nouvelle France. Ses principes et ses institutions (Paris: Fasquelle, 1936). 114. Cf. Paul Devinat, “Scientifi c Management in Europe,” Studies and Reports 17, Serie B (Geneva, 1926), partially reproduced in Société des Nations (Interna- tional Labour Offi ce), International Economic Conference , Genève , May 4th 1927 , Documentation: Scientifi c Management in Europe (Geneva, 1927), 7–8. Th e his- tory of this culture has been dealt with by Charles Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 15–35; Walter H. G. Armytage, A Social History of Engineering (Lon- don: Faber & Faber, 1964); and Samuel Haber, Effi ciency and Uplift : Scientifi c Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 115. See Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: Crès, 1924), 6ff ., and Urbanisme (Paris: Crès, 1929), 308ff . On Gropius, see Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Mod- ern Design (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), 31–179. For all these authors, the reprise of Saint-Simonianism, aft er the Great War, was an important stimulus: see Marc Bourbonnais, Le néo saint-simonisme dans la vie sociale d’aujourd’ hui (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1923). And, for the circulation of Saint-Simonian themes in those years, see Edward S. Mason, “Saint-Simonism and the Rational- ization of Industry,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (August 1931): 41ff . Finally, I refer the reader to Alfredo Salsano, “Americanismo, planismo e corporativismo in Francia,” in Alfredo Salsano, Ingegneri e politici (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), 95. 116. Benito Mussolini, “Il sindacalismo nazionale. Per rinascere!,” Il Popolo d’Italia , November 17, 1918, now in Mussolini, Opera Omnia, 12:11–14, regarding which see Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario 1883–1920 (Turin: Einaudi,

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1965), 405–06, 410. Th ere are also important observations in Roberto Vivarelli, Il dopoguerra in Italia e l’avvento del fascismo 1918–1922 (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1967), 1:234–35, 271–77. 117. Wichard von Moellendorf, Konservative Sozialismus (: Hanseatische Verlaganstalt, 1932), 34–36. It is interesting to compare the latter with an exegete of late Saint-Simonianism: Ernest Mercier, La production et le travail (Paris: Édi- tions de la SAPE, 1927), 10–16. Mercier had visited Germany and then the United States, in 1925, returning enthusiastic about the application of “scientifi c manage- ment”; see Richard F. Kuisel, Ernest Mercier: French Technocrat (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1967), 45–88. 118. Cf. Ugo Spirito, Il piano De Man e l’economia mista (Florence: Sansoni, 1935). On the relationship between Italian and French corporatists, see “Convegno italo-francese di studi corporativi,” ed. Michela Nacci and Albertina Vittoria, Di- mensioni 11, nos. 40–41 (September–December 1986); and Santomassimo, “Ugo Spirito e il corporativismo,” 61–113. 119. Rosenstock-Franck, L’économie corporative fasciste en doctrine et en fait . See also Rosenstock-Franck, Les étapes de l’économie fasciste italienne. Du corporati- visme à l’économie de guerre (Paris: Éditions du Centre Polytechnicien d’Études Économiques, 1939). Th ere is an Italian translation of excerpts from the two books: Louis Franck, Il corporativismo e l’economia dell’Italia fascista , trans. Nicola Tranfaglia (Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 1990), 3–199. See also Gianni To- niolo, L’economia dell’Italia fascista (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1980); and Gual- berto Gualerni, Industria e fascismo (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1976). 120. See the relevant allusions in Anne Heurgon, Paul Desjardins et les Décades de Pontigny (Paris: Mercure de France, 1964), 384. 121. Marcel Déat, “Organisation sociale et philosophique,” Bulletin de la Société Fran- çaise de Philosophie (March–April 1938): 45–46. 122. Marcel Déat, Journal de guerre (November 1939), quoted in Jean-Paul Cointet, “Marcel Déat et le parti unique. Été 1940,” Revue d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale (July 1973): 17. 123. See Alfredo Salsano, “Georges Valois e lo Stato Tecnico. Il corporativismo tec- nocratico tra fascismo e antifascismo,” Studi Storici 34, nos. 2–3 (April–Septem- ber 1993): 571–624. Among more recent studies, see Yves Guchet, Georges Valois. L’Action Française, le Faisceau, la République syndicale (Nanterre: Éditions Er- asme, 1990), 5ff .; and Allen Douglas, From Fascism to Libertarian Communism: Georges Valois Against the Th ird Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 147–69.

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124. Georges Valois, L’économie nouvelle, L’intelligence et la production (Paris: Nou- velle Librairie Nationale, 1919), new edition (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1924), 186; see also Georges Valois, La réforme économique et sociale (Paris: Nou- velle Libraire Nationale, 1918), 29ff . On the postwar period, see Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modem France: Renovation and Economic Manage- ment in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 82; but see also Gérard Brun, Technocrates et technocratie en France 1918–1945 (Paris: Albatros, 1985). 125. Le Nouveau Siècle , July 29, 1926 (table on the fi rst page). 126. Georges Valois, L’homme contre l’argent . Souvenirs de dix ans (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1928), 6, 24, 25, 77–89, 128, 134–50, 217, 328. See also Georges Valois, Un nouvel âge de l’humanité (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1929). 127. Valois, L’homme contre l’argent , 118. 128. Ibid., 119. An analogous consideration was made in those years in the United States in Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, Th e Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: MacMillan, 1932). 129. Valois, Un nouvel âge de l’humanité, 141; and Valois, “Appel aux techniciens,” 1, “Appel général,” Cahiers Bleus , April 20, 1929, 8. Finally, see André Fourgeaud (at the time, a lecturer in economics at the University of Toulouse), La rationalisa- tion. États Unis-Allemagne (Paris: Payot, 1929). 130. Jean-Pierre Maxence (the pseudonym of Pierre Godmé), Histoire de dix ans. 1927–1937 (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 91. For an interpretation of the atmosphere of the age, I refer the reader to Jean Touchard, “L’esprit des Années Trente,” in Ten- dances politiques dans la vie française depuis 1789 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1960), 89ff .; and, above all, to Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30. Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (1969; Paris: Seuil, 1987). 131. Jean-Pierre Maxence, “Le danger,” Revue française, March 22, 1931, 266. 132. “Manifeste du groupe XXe siècle (Mai 1934),” Revue du XXe Siècle 13 (July 1934): 59–60. See Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes, 489–90, as well as Nicolas Kessler, Histoire politique da la Jeune Droite. Une révolution conservatrice à la française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). 133. Cf. Christian Roy, Alexandre Marc et la Jeune Europe. L’Ordre Nouveau aux origi- nes du personnalisme (Nice: Presses d’Europe, 1998), 29ff . 134. Cf. “Convegno italo-francese di studi corporativi. Roma 1935,” as well as Gi- useppe Parlato, Il convegno italo-francese di studi corporativi (Roma 1935) (Rome: Fondazione Ugo Spirito, 1991); I refer the reader in particular to Georges Roditi,

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Écrits d’avant-guerre: “L’homme nouveau” et “Idées et people” 1934–1938 (Paris: Sorlot, 1941), 23. For Robert Aron, see Dictature de la liberté (Paris: Grasset, 1935), 175; analogous views are also in Georges Viance, Préface à une réforme de l’État (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1934), 12. 135. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, critical edition by Istituto Gramsci, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), vol. 3, Quaderno 22 (1934), 2156 (in English: Prison Notebooks , trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari [New York: Columbia University Press, 1992–]). 136. Maier, In Search of Stability, 28. Also of importance is H. T. Wilson, “Technocracy and Late Capitalist Society: Refl ections on the Problem of Rationality and Social Organization,” in Th e State , Class, and the Recession, ed. Stewart Clegg, Geoff Dow, and Paul Boreham (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 152–238, which can clearly be traced back to the theses of James Burnham, Th e Managerial Revolu- tion (New York: John Day Co., 1941). 137. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das Recht der Jungen Völker (Berlin: Schwarz, 1932), 62–67. Th e following works have been written about Moeller: Hans- Joachim Schwierskott, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und der revolutionäre Nationalismus in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1962); Denis Goeldel, Moeller van den Bruck (1876–1925). Un nationaliste contre la révolution. Contribution à l’étude de la “révolution conservatrice” et du conser- vatisme allemande au XX ème siècle (Frankfurt: Lang, 1984). On the relationship between this culture and National Socialism, see Hans Mommsen, Der National- sozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1991), 11–38; and of George L. Mosse, “Th e Corporate State and the in Weimar Germany,” Recueils de la Société 26 (1985): 213–22. I also refer the reader to the contribution by Louis Dupeux, “Révolution conservatrice et modernité,” Revue d’Allemagne 14 (1982): 2–34. 138. Hans Freyer, Revolution von Rechts (Jena: Diederichs, 1931), 67. On Freyer, see Klaus Fritzsche, Politische Romantik und Gegenrevolution. Fluchtwege aus der Krise der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft . Das Beispiel des Tat-Kreises (Frankfurt: Suhr- kamp, 1976). In Preussentum und Sozialismus (Munich: Beck, 1919), Spengler writes: “Let’s become men! We no longer need ideologies and speeches about civilization, the universal bourgeoisie and Germany’s spiritual mission: what we need is toughness, a bolder skepticism, and a class of socialist dominators [Her- rennaturen ]. Once again: socialism means power and even more power” (98). Regarding this text, see Th eodor W. Adorno, “Spengler nach dem Untergang,” in Th eodor W. Adorno, Prismen , vol. 10 of Gesammelte Schrift en (Frankfurt: Suhr- kamp, 1977), 69ff .; and on Spengler’s ties with the German industrial world, see

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Walter Struve, Oswald Spengler: Caesar and Croesus, in Oswald Spengler, Élites Against Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 232–73. Also of importance is Detlef Felken, Oswald Spengler. Konservativer Denker zwi- schen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Munich: Beck, 1988). 139. Th e reference, naturally, is to the fundamental text of Ernst Jünger, Der Arbei- ter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932), now in vol. 6 of Werke (Stuttgart: Klett, 1962); Italian. trans.: L’operaio. Dominio e forma , ed. Quirino Principe (Milan: Mondadori, 1984), 260–80. See Hans- Peter Schwarz, Der konservative Anarchist. Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers (Freiburg: Rombach, 1962). An excellent examination of Jünger’s thought is also in Joseph Peter Stern, Ernst Jünger: A Writer of our Time (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 50ff . 140. Marcel Déat, Le parti unique (1942; Paris: Aux Armes de France, 1943), 35, but see also Déat, Mémoires politiques , 618ff . 141. Pierre Birnbaum, “Le paradigme Drumont,” in Destins juifs. De la Révolution fran- çaise à Carpentras (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 105–19; Jean Drault, Drumont, la France juive et la Libre Parole (Paris: Société Française d’Éditions Littéraires et Techniques, 1935), 328ff . On Charles Maurras, see “La justice des choses. Le natio- nalisme antisémite. Drumont. Le vieux Paris,” L’Action française, June 9, 1937; on Léon Daudet: “Drumont prophète,” L’Action française , November 13, 1938. In or- der to contextualize these documents, I refer the reader to Ralph Schor, L’a nt i s é m i - tisme en France pendant les années trente, Prélude à Vichy (Brussels: Complexe, 1992). Valeria Galimi, L’antisemitismo in azione. Pratiche antiebraiche nella Francia degli anni trenta (Milan: Unicopli, 2006), 104ff ., is critical of Schor.

3. THE DARK CORE OF ITALIAN CIVILIZATION: FASCISM AND THE PATH OF PAOLO ORANO 1. Marquis de Morès, Rothschild, Ravachol et Compagnie (Paris: Rue du Mont- Th abor, 1892), 46. On Morés, see Steven S. Schwarzschild, “Th e Marquis de Morès: Th e Story of a Failure, 1858–1896,” Jewish Social Studies 22 (January 1960): 3–26; as well as Robert F. Byrnes, “Morès: Th e First National Socialist,” Th e Re- view of Politics 12 (July 1950): 341–82. 2. Henri Vaugeois, “Notes politiques. Nos trois proscrits,” L’Action Française , Janu- ary 15, 1900, 107. 3. Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 187ff . 4. Cesare G. De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente. I Protocolli dei Savi di Sion: un apocrifo del XX secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), 170.

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5. De Michelis (ibid., 225n128), without any explanation, cites an article published on March 3, 1908, in Il Giornale d’Italia: “Il falso Calvino a Roma.” 6. Paolo Orano, Gli ebrei in Italia (Rome: Pinciana, 1937), 86. Regarding the launch of the anti-Jewish campaign in Italy, in advance of the anti-Semitic legislation, see Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 112ff ., and Ansemo Calò, “Stampa e propaganda antisemita del regime fascista prima delle leggi razziali. 1936–1938,” in Israel. “Un decennio” 1974–1984 , ed. Francesco Del Canuto (Rome: Carucci, 1984), 156–57. Calò analyzes the reprint of December 1937, which was modifi ed and enlarged. Orano’s book was immediately reviewed in Israel 22, no. 27 (April 15, 1937). 7. Oreste Gregorio, “Gli ebrei in Italia,” Il Popolo d’Italia , May 25, 1937; for the re- views by Adone Nosari, Giuseppe Longo, Ugo Costa, cf. Renzo de Felice, Sto- ria degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1961), 249ff ; and Gabriele Rigano, “Alfredo de Donno. L’itinerario intellettuale repubblicano, da antifascista a propagandista antisemita,” Annali della Fondazione Ugo La Malfa 19 (2004): 75–138. 8. See Antonio Spinosa, “Le persecuzioni razziali in Italia. 1. Origini,” Il Ponte 8, no. 7 (July 1952): 975ff .; Michaelis, Mussolini e la questione ebraica (Rome: Edizione Comunità 1983), 121; Michele Sarfatti, “Gli ebrei negli anni del fascismo: vicende, identità, persecuzione,” in Gli ebrei in Italia , ed. Corrado Vivanti, vol. 11 of Storia d’Italia, Annali (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), book 2, 1674. Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Cen- sura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei (Turin: Zamorani, 1988), 44–47, cites a notation in the diary of Giorgio Pini, Filo diretto con Palazzo Venezia (Milan: FPE, 1967), 116, 127, which contradicts the hypotheses of Spinosa, Michaelis, and Sarfatti. 9. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, critical edition by Istituto Gramsci, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), vol. 3, Quaderno 22 (1934), 753 (in English: Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992–). Interlandi was also considered the regime’s unoffi cial spokesman. See Meir Michaelis, “Mussolini’s Unoffi cial Mouthpiece: Telesio Interlandi, Il Tevere , and the Evolution of Mussolini’s Anti- Semitism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 3, no. 3, (Autumn 1998): 217–40. 10. Th is judgment has also been repeated in the most recent research: Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, L’Italie fasciste et la persecution des juifs (Paris: Perrin, 2007), 104ff . 11. Renzo De Felice, Lo Stato totalitario 1936–1940 , vol. 2 of Mussolini il Duce (Tu- rin: Einaudi, 1981), 467ff .; but above all Renzo De Felice, “La legislazione razziale del fascismo,” in La legislazione antiebraica in Italia e in Europa , Atti del Con-

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vegno nel cinquantenario delle leggi razziali, Rome, October 17–18, 1988 (Rome: Edizioni della Camera dei Deputati, 1989), 11ff . Regarding the racial culture and eugenics, see Francesco Cassata, “La Difesa della Razza.” Politica, ideologia e im- magine del razzismo fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), 197ff .; as well as Claudia Mantovani, Rigenerare la stirpe. L’eugenetica in Italia dalle origini ottocentesche agli anni Trenta (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004), 119ff . 12. See, above all, Pietro De Francisci, Civiltà romana (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista), 143; and Giovanni Marro, Caratteri fi sici e spirituali della razza italiana (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista, 1939), 55ff . (De Francisci replaced Gentile as head of the institute in 1937, as a scholar of the ancient world; Marro, an anthropologist and psychiatrist, was the director of the Turin Anthro- pology Museum). Finally, see Giacomo Acerbo, I fondamenti della dottrina fas- cista della razza (Rome: Ministero della Cultura Popolare—Uffi cio Studi e Pro- paganda sulla Razza, 1940), 71–93. 13. Momigliano’s letter to Chabod, dated November 10, 1959, in Federico Chabod and Arnaldo Momigliano, Un carteggio del 1959 , ed. and intro. Gennaro Sasso, post- face by Riccardo Di Donato (Bologna: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici—Il Mulino, 2002), 111–12. See also Girolamo Imbruglia, “Nazione, Illuminismo, storicismo. Chabod e una polemica del 1959 con Arnaldo Momigliano,” in Giro- lamo Imbruglia, Illuminismo e storicismo nella storiografi a (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2003), 19–76. 14. Orano reacted to this attack by adopting a more extreme position and by pub- lishing Inchiesta sulla razza (Rome: Pinciana, 1939), an anthology of racial texts, from Aponte to Rosenberg. On the radicalization of the GUF, see Simone Du- ranti, Lo spirito gregario. I gruppi universitari fascisti fra politica e propaganda 1930–1940 (Rome: Donzelli, 2008). 15. Guido Lodovico Luzzatto, “Sei mesi di antisemitismo in Italia,” Il nuovo Avanti! , June 17, 1939, now in Guido Lodovico Luzzatto, Scritti politici. Ebraismo e anti- semitismo (Milan: Angeli, 1996), 95–97. 16. My reconstruction is diff erent from that of Giorgio Fabre, Mussolini razzista. Dal socialismo al fascismo: la formazione di un antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005), 82ff . 17. Delio Cantimori, preface to de Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani, xiii. 18. Francesco Germinario has described Orano’s career as one of the “longest in the twentieth century” (“Latinità, antimeridionalismo e antisemitismo negli scritti giovanili di Paolo Orano: 1895–1911,” in Nel nome della razza . Il razzismo nella storia d ’Italia , ed. Alberto Burgio, proceedings of the conference, Bologna, No- vember 13–15, 1999 [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999], 105).

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19. See Alfredo De Donno, Paolo Orano (Rome: Pinciana, 1935), 41ff .; but see also the autobiographical references in Paolo Orano, Verso una dottrina storica del gior- nalismo , Prolusione al corso di Storia del giornalismo, Facoltà Fascista di Scienza Politica, Regia Università di Torino (Rome: Tipografi a del “Lavoro d’Italia,” 1928);as well as in Paolo Orano, Mussolini da vicino (Rome: Istituto di organiz- zazione e consulenza bancaria, 1928). 20. Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935–1944 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1982), 323. Camille Mallarmé was Paolo Orano’s second wife; the fi rst was Gina Fantocchiani. 21. As has already been noted, the characteristics of the culture of crisis have been perfectly described in Luisa Mangoni, Una crisi di fi ne secolo. La cultura italiana e la Francia tra Otto e Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), 15ff . 22. Jacques Piou, “Les conservateurs et la démocratie,” Revue des Deux Mondes (June 1897). 23. Th is fear was expressed in Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, “Après M. Renan,” Revue des Deux Mondes 62, no. 114 (November 15, 1892); see also Gabriel Tarde, “Foules et sectes au point de vue criminal,” Revue des Deux Mondes 63, no. 120 (Novem- ber 15, 1893). 24. Scipio Sighele, La delinquenza settaria (Milan: F.lli Treves, 1897), 31ff ., 42. Th e archetype of this kind of literature was obviously Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo de- linquente (Milan: Hoepli, 1876), but Sighele’s work is the prime example of this category of literature from the end of the century. 25. Giustino Fortunato, L’ora presente , now in Giustino Fortunato, Il Mezzogiorno e lo stato italiano (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973), 300. 26. Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente , 374. Th e reference to Mosca concerns the study Intorno al parlamentarismo (1895), now in Gaetano Mosca, Ciò che la storia potrebbe insegnare (Milan: Giuff rè, 1958), 331. 27. Regarding Giuseppe Sergi and the Società Romana di Antropologia, see Sandra Puccini, “Evoluzionismo e positivismo nell’antropologia italiana 1869–1911,” in Pietro Clemente et al., L’antropologia italiana, un secolo di storia (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1985). Lombroso’s medallion is in Paolo Orano, I moderni (Milan: F.lli Treves, 1914), book 3, 111. Giuseppe Sergi wrote La Sardegna. Note e commenti di un antropologo (Turin: F.lli Bocca, 1970). 28. On the various forms of determinism in European thought, see Tzvetan Todo- rov, Nous et les autres. La réfl exion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 118–294. 29. Giuseppe Sergi, Le degenerazioni umane (Milan: Dumolard, 1889), 138. Similar attitudes are in Alfredo Niceforo, Italiani del nord e italiani del sud. La diff usione della cultura e la civiltà (Florence: Tip. Cooperativa, 1900).

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30. Paolo Orano, Psicologia della Sardegna (Rome: Casa Editrice Italiana, 1896), 9. 31. Paolo Orano, Il rinnovamento della Sardegna. A proposito della relazione Pais (Florence: Uffi cio delle Rassegne Nazionali, 1897). 32. Paolo Orano, “Il pessimismo nella sociologia,” Pensiero Moderno 5, nos. 3–4 (July–October 1897), on Guglielmo Ferrero, L’Europa giovane. Studi e viaggi nei paesi del Nord (Milan: F.lli Treves, 1897); but also Paolo Orano, “Difesa della la- tinità,” now in Paolo Orano, Lode del mio tempo 1825–1925 (Bologna: Casa Edi- trice Apollo, 1926), 88ff . 33. Orano, Psicologia della Sardegna , 9. 34. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere , vol. 1, Quaderno 1 (1929–30), 47, and Quaderno 3 (1930), 346. 35. Antonio Gramsci, “Alcuni temi della questione meridionale” (1926), now in An- tonio Gramsci, La questione meridionale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1969), 131ff . Al- fredo Niceforo had published, in 1897, La delinquenza in Sardegna and then in 1898 L’Italia barbara contemporanea, now both republished (Cagliari: Edizioni Della Torre, 1977); see Germinario, “Latinità, antimeridionalismo e antisemi- tismo negli scritti giovanili di Paolo Orano,” 105–15. 36. Paolo Orano, La massoneria dinanzi al socialismo (Florence: Lorenzo Cenni Edi- tore, 1905), 40. 37. On the international discussion regarding a general strike, see Giovanna Caval- lari, introduction to Georges Sorel, Scritti politici e fi losofi ci (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 7ff .; Salvatore Onufrio, Sorel e il marxismo (Urbino: Argalia, 1979), 231; Georges Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism, 1871–1914: Essays, trans. Peter Fawcett, intro. Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); but also Frederick F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: Th e Direct Action of Its Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). On the diff erence between Sorel’s theses and those of Italian revolutionary syndicalists, see Gian Biagio Fu- riozzi, Sorel e l’Italia (Messina: D’Anna, 1975); but also Marco Gervasoni, Georges Sorel, una biografi a intellettuale (Milan: Unicopli, 1997). 38. Jack J. Roth, “Th e Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo,” Th e Journal of Modern History 39, no. 1 (1967): 30ff . 39. Daniel L. Horowitz, Storia del movimento sindacale in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), 87; but see also the incisive observations made at the time by Roberto Mi- chels, Il proletariato e la borghesia nel movimento socialista italiano (Turin: F.lli Bocca, 1908), 34. 40. See Andreina De Clementi, Politica e società nel sindacalismo rivoluzionario 1900–1915 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1983), 76; but also Dora Marucco, Arturo Labriola e il sindacalismo rivoluzionario in Italia (Turin: Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 1970), 178.

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41. Cf. Alessandro Roveri, “Socialismo e sindacalismo nel Ferrarese 1870–1915,” Annali dell’Istituto Storico per l’Età Moderna e Contemporanea 15–16 (1963–64) (Rome: Istituto Storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1968), 303ff .; but above all Alessandro Roveri, Dal sindacalismo rivoluzionario al fascismo. Ca- pitalismo agrario e socialismo nel ferrarese, 1870–1920 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972). 42. Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Problemi del socialismo contemporaneo (Lugano: Edi- zioni Avanguardia, 1906), regarding which, see Alceo Riosa, Momenti e fi gure del sindacalismo prefascista (Milan: Unicopli, 1996), 42. 43. Th e historical studies on revolutionary syndicalism have restored the original profi le of that movement within the PSI, the General Labour Confederation, and Italian Marxism: see above all the Proceedings of the Conference “Il Sin- dacalismo rivoluzionario in Italia nel periodo della II Internazionale,” Piom- bino, June 28–30, 1974, Ricerche Storiche , (January–June 1975); Marucco, Arturo Labriola e il sindacalismo rivoluzionario in Italia , 89ff .; Roveri, Dal sindacalismo rivoluzionario al fascismo ; and, fi nally, Paolo Favilli, Capitalismo e classe ope- raia a Piombino 1861–1918 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974). But the most complete overview of the research and the phenomenon itself remains Alceo Riosa, Il sin- dacalismo rivoluzionario in Italia e la lotta politica nel Partito socialista nell’età giolittiana (Bari: De Donato, 1976), 37ff . As regards the history of the doctrine, the following are also important: Enzo Santarelli, La revisione del marxismo in Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964), 109ff .; Furiozzi, Sorel e l’Italia , 48ff .; and Leo Va- liani, Questioni di storia del socialismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 116–17, 162–63. 44. Th e fi rst two texts, from 1893 and 1900, were printed by the publishers Civelli and Lux, while Cristo e Quirino was published by Fratelli Bocca in 1899 (and had vari- ous reprints); in 1908 the studies were collected in Paolo Orano, Cristo e Quirino. Il problema del cristianesimo (Turin: F.lli Bocca, 1908) (I am quoting from this edition, p. 48). 45. Orano, Cristo e Quirino, xxi, xxv, 16, xxxi. 46. Ibid., 54, 76–80. 47. Ibid., 131ff ., 215, 260. 48. Renzo De Felice, Sindacalismo rivoluzionario e fi umanesimo nel carteggio De Ambris-D’Annunzio (1919–1922) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1966). 49. Despite the view of de Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani, 38–52, La Lupa came out on October 16, 1910. Paolo Orano appeared to be the editor, and his collaborators included Paolo Mantica, Arturo Labriola, Alberto Micheli, Édouard Berth, Nino Massimo Fovel, Alberto Niceforo, Mario Missiroli, Charles Péguy, and Georges Sorel. Published in Florence by the Casa Editrice Italiana, the newspaper contin-

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ued until October 1911. “ La Lupa is a weekly publication edited by someone who fi nds himself equidistant from all the points of the political spectrum, a weekly publication off ering independent criticism of the totality of Italian and foreign aff airs, a broadsheet of principles, without prejudice toward those having diff er- ent principles, as long as they are presented with frankness and sincerity. . . . At the time when there is the most urgent and clear need for a consolidation of op- posing views and aims, a vacuum, a grey uniformity of outlooks and intentions has appeared and prevails. Th us it has happened that the politics of insincerity has begun: names and defi nitions have been adopted by men lacking in the sim- plicity and pride in their convictions, which are the only things that can con- fer prestige and vigor to principles; thus it has happened that the parliamentary scene has presented spectacles in which the honest observer can no longer recog- nize men, parties, or programs. We are the mavericks of any political party, but we also want to live life to the full. . . . We will face every battle, aware that true human nobility is that idea, the greatest human quality is that of clear intentions, the most beautiful expression is that of the unrelenting battle that increases the combatants’ moral worth. We continue, we begin, fortifi ed by an experience that has not exhausted or disillusioned us but that spurs us on to ask, of the future, a quicker, more alert, more resolute energy” (“Avviso,” La Lupa , October 16, 1910, 1). 50. [Paolo Orano], “Socialismo in margine,” La Lupa , October 30, 1910 (the editor was responsible for the anonymous interventions and commentaries); and Nino Massimo Fovel, “Dai radicali di Alba all’alba dei radicali,” La Lupa , October 30, 1910. 51. [Paolo no] “Corsivo,” La Lupa, October 30, 1910. See also the “Nota Redazionale,” La Lupa, November 6, 1910: “We want to concern ourselves with what is alive in modern society and even more with what is most alive for us, because we are people who study, think, criticize, who have artistic, literary, philosophical tastes or rather passions, also about race and even religion. We do not want to be pris- oners of a single formula, . . . we want to carry out an act of will, force, beauty, but above all of sincerity, far from the half measures of a sect or a party, capable of thinking with our brains, the lovers of, and the believers in, an idea and its denial, because hatred is a form of love.” 52. Cf. Giovanni Diotallevi, “Il dibattito sul sindacalismo e il nazionalismo. L’evolu- zione di Giorgio Sorel,” La Lupa, November 6, 1910. 53. Paolo Orano, “Per la salvezza del principio,” La Lupa , November 13, 1910. See also Paolo Orano, “Giovanni Giolitti,” La Lupa , January 15, 1912 (in this article Orano hoped for an alliance among Catholics, conservatives, nationalists, and

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revolutionary syndicalists in order to attain “the defi nitive victory over Giovanni Giolitti”). Regarding Luzzatti, I refer the reader to Jules Destrée, Figures italiennes d’aujour d’hui (Brussels: Van Oeest, 1918), 55–64. See also this judgment on Luz- zatti, published in the article “Il gioco di Luzzatti,” La Lupa, February 26, 1911, 7: “Luzzatti knows that the Chamber is as aware as he is, that it only represents his plans, errands, statements and even his ideas, a demagogic expedient prompted by intentions that are totally devoid of any ideal that could be realized even in the smallest degree. Luzzatti’s logic is totally demagogic.” 54. Paolo Orano, Nel solco della Guerra (Milan: F.lli Treves, 1915), 109 (more gener- ally, 103–34). 55. Ibid., 104. 56. Ibid., 232ff . In 1912 in Siena, where he was a secondary school teacher, Orano had met Camille Mallarmé, granddaughter of Stéphane Mallarmé, at the time occupied writing her fi rst novel, Ressac (which was soon translated into Italian, in 1914, with the title Come si fa l’onda ). Formerly a friend of D’Annunzio, Ca- mille Mallarmé became in 1920 Orano’s second wife and in the 1930s worked for the anti-Semitic broadsheet Je Suis Partout . However, she was not responsible for leading Orano toward anti-Jewish politics, in spite of the views of Matard- Bonucci, L’Italie fasciste , 104ff .; Paolo Orano was already an anti-Semite before meeting Camille. Regarding Je Suis Partout, cf. Valeria Galimi, “Intellettuali e collaborazionismo. L’itinerario di Je suis partout tra Maurras e Hitler,” Passato e Presente 49 (2000): 69–95. 57. Unsigned article, without a title, La Lupa, October 30, 1910, 1. 58. Paolo Orano, “Per la salvezza del principio,” La Lupa , November 13, 1910. 59. Nino Massimo Fovel, “La nazione armata,” La Lupa , December 4, 1910; see also A. de Lollis, “La questione dell’italianità di Malta,” La Lupa, November 27, 1910. 60. “Avviso,” La Lupa, October 16, 1910. 61. Orano, “Per la salvezza del principio.” 62. Giovanni Papini, “Freghiamoci della politica!,” Lacerba 1, no. 19 (1913): 212–16. Th e best study of Papini is Norberto Bobbio, Profi lo ideologico del Novecento italiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 42–48. But it was Péguy who was considered, together with Sorel (from whom he was, however, quite diff erent), the master of political critique: see Leonardo Paggi, Antonio Gramsci e il moderno principe (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970), 124ff . (regarding the article by Antonio Gramsci, “Per la verità,” Corriere Universitario, February 5, 1913). 63. “La Direzione,” La Lupa , October 16, 1910; “Nota redazionale,” La Lupa , Novem- ber 6, 1910.

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64. See Arturo Labriola, “I due nazionalismi,” La Lupa, October 16, 1910;as well as Paolo Orano, “Verso Tripoli,” La Lupa, September 10, 1911;and Paolo Orano, “Dobbiamo avere Tripoli,” La Lupa, September 24, 1911. 65. Paolo Orano, “Il grande esemplare,” La Lupa , January 22, 1911; Orano, “Carducci in croce,” La Lupa, December 25, 1910; Luigi Goglia, “Un poeta e un fi losofo della violenza,” La Lupa, April 26, 1911. 66. Orano, “Per la salvezza del principio.” 67. Orano, “Giovanni Giolitti.” 68. Paolo Orano, Psicologia sociale (Bari: Laterza, 1901), 205. 69. Paolo Orano, “Nathan e il blocco,” La Lupa, March 5, 1911. 70. Ibid. 71. Paolo Orano, “L’imbonitore di sogni,” La Lupa, May 28, 1911. 72. Paolo Mantica, “Soddisfatti?,” La Lupa, July 2, 1911, and Libero Tancredi, “La ve- rità su Francesco Ferrer,” La Lupa , August 20, 1911. 73. A short article signed Y, La Lupa, July 16, 1911. Orano received a reply from the Roman Jewish lawyer Raff aele Ottolenghi: “L’omicidio rituale e le infi nite colpe del quattrino giudaico,” La Lupa , July 30, 1911. For an interpretation of Sorel’s anti-Semitic articles, see Shlomo Sand, “Sorel, les juifs, l’antisémitisme,” Cahiers Georges Sorel 2 (1984): 37–57. 74. Orano, “Il gioco di Luzzatti.” See lso Fovel, “Dai radicali di Alba all’alba dei radicali.” 75. Orano, Nel solco della guerra , 115, 133–34. 76. “Who does not feel that he is, even a little, the product of those movements, who does not still have a little of that passion? Aft er all, that cultural Sturm and Drang was a good thing and, furthermore, a reference point of diff erent forces which momentarily converged” (Palmiro Togliatti, L’Ordine Nuovo, May 15, 1919, now in Palmiro Togliatti, Opere [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974], 27). Emilio Gentile’s last study in this fi eld is La nostra sfi da alle stelle: futuristi in politica (Rome: Laterza, 2009), 17ff .; but see above all Luciano Cafagna, C’era una volta (Venice: Marsilio, 1994), 35ff .; and Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello Stato nuovo (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1982). 77. Cf. Paolo Orano, “Israele italiana e la guerra,” Il Giornale d’Italia , March 10, 1918; Benito Mussolini’s article was published in Il Popolo d’Italia, July 4, 1919, now in Benito Mussolini, Opera Scelta (Milan: Hoepli, 1939), 104. Paolo Orano (L. Razza) is also the likely author of the apologia of Proudhon, “Pier Giuseppe Proudhon e il comunismo,” which appeared in Pagine Libere, March 15, 1920, 56–58.

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78. [Antonio Gramsci], “Torino città di provincia,” Avanti!, August 17, 1918, now in Antonio Gramsci, Scritti giovanili (Turin: Einaudi, 1958), 298–300. 79. Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo, con una storia del movimento fascista di Gioacchino Volpe (Milan: Treves-Treccani-Tumminelli, Biblioteca della Enci- clopedia Italiana, 1933), 2. 80. Ibid., 9, 11. It is striking how Mussolini, in 1932, took up the key arguments from Paolo Orano’s writings from the period of 1902–1914. Mussolini acknowledges fascism’s syndicalistic and belligerent origins and correlates them with the anti- political agitation of the Giolittian period. And his style is reminiscent of Orano’s when he expresses his disdain for democracy as “a social condition in which a degenerate horde would only be concerned with delighting in the ignoble plea- sures of the vulgar man” (15). 81. Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, ed. Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1951–80), 4:144–45, 192, about which see De Felice, Lo Stato totalitario , 144. 82. Orano, Gli ebrei in Italia , 13–14, 24–25. 83. Ibid., 51ff . 84. Ibid., 73. Orano is referring to the text L’antisémitisme. Son histoire et ses causes , published by Bernard Lazare in 1894. On this question, see the incisive work Hannah Arendt, “Herzl and Lazare: From the Dreyfus Aff air to France To- day,” Jewish Social Studies 4 (July 1942): 195–240, reprint, in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). 85. Orano, Gli ebrei in Italia , 76. 86. Ibid., 84. 87. Ibid., 115. Orano even argued with fascist Jewish leaders, such as Ettore Ovazza and his newspaper La nostra bandiera, who had failed in their attempt to gain control of the Union of Jewish Communities, taking advantage of the measures of centralization and normalization passed by the regime; the opposition of the majority of Jewish communities to Ovazza was interpreted as proof of the unreli- ability of the Jews (cf. Pini, Filo diretto con Palazzo Venezia, 167). De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente , 224n84, mentions a copy of the book by Ettore Ovazza, Sionismo bifronte (1935) dedicated to Paolo Orano. During the war Ovazza died in a Nazi massacre: see Sarfatti, Gli ebrei in Italia , 1662. See above all Alexander Stille, Uno su mille. Cinque famiglie ebraiche durante il fascismo (Milan: Monda- dori, 1991). 88. Cantimori, preface to de Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani, xxvii. 89. Paolo Orano, Il fascismo (Rome: Pinciana, 1935), 142–43. 90. Hilaire Belloc, Gli ebrei (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1935), viii.

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91. Alfredo Romanini, Ebrei, Cristianesimo, Fascismo (Empoli: Arti grafi che dei Comuni, 1936), 16–19. On the traditionalist Catholic positions, see Monsignor Giovanni Cazzani, bishop of Cremona: Unità cristiana e giudaismo. Pastorale per la Quaresima 1939 (Cremona: Tipografi a Buona Stampa, 1939), 21; on Roberto Farinacci’s agreement with such views, see his lecture “La Chiesa e gli ebrei,” given by him on November 7, 1937, on the occasion of the annual inauguration of the National Fascist Cultural Institute (Rome: Tipografi a Tevere, 1938), 1–16. 92. Abramo Levi, Noi ebrei. In risposta a Paolo Orano (Rome: Pinciana, 1937), 42ff . 93. Orano, Gli ebrei in Italia , 123. 94. Gino Sottochiesa, Sotto la maschera d’Israele (Milan: La Prora, 1937), 55. Sotto- chiesa also declared that he wanted to formulate the Jewish question within the framework of “Latin justice and Catholic intransigence” (27). See Fabrizio Ra- sera, “Gino Sottochiesa,” Materiali di lavoro 1–4 (1988): 195; Renato Moro, “Pro- pagandisti cattolici del razzismo antisemita in Italia,” in Les racines chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme politique. Fin XIX–XX siécles , ed. Catherine Brice and Giovanni Miccoli (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 275; as well as Giovanni Mic- coli, “L’antisemitismo tra Otto e Novecento: continuità e mutamenti,” in L’a nt i - semitismo moderno e contemporaneo, ed. Umberto Fortis (Turin: Zamorani, 2004), 15ff . 95. See the results of the research on the Tuscan situation coordinated by Enzo Col- lotti, Razza e fascismo. La persecuzione contro gli ebrei in Toscana (1938–1944 ), vol. 1, part 2 of Stampa regionale e pubblicistica razzista di fronte alla questione ebraica (Florence: Regione Toscana and Carocci Editore, 1999), 225–433, with the studies on La Nazione of Florence, Il Telegrafo and Sentinella Fascista of Livorno, Il Bargello of Florence, and Il Ferruccio of Pistoia. 96. Th is thesis has been maintained, as is known, by De Felice, Lo Stato totalitario , and by Michaelis, Mussolini e la questione ebraica , 118. 97. Th e so-called manifesto of the racist scientists was published with the title “Il fascismo e i problemi della razza,” Il Giornale d’Italia , July 15, 1938, 1. Having fallen into disgrace, Landra was defended by Giovanni Preziosi, but Giuseppe Bottai and Giacomo Acerbo got their way; see Matard-Bonucci, L’Italie fasciste , 296. Regarding Acerbo’s position, see his I fondamenti della dottrina fascista della razza, 95–96 (but also De Francisci, Civiltà romana). On this point, see David Bidussa, “I caratteri ‘propri’ dell’antisemitismo italiano,” in La menzogna della razza, ed. Centro Furio Iesi (Bologna: Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, 1994), 113–24. 98. De Felice, Lo Stato totalitario , 279ff . See the letter in which Guido Landra re- capitulated his own undertaking aft er his removal: Landra to Benito Mussolini,

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September 27, 1940, in Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Segreteria particolare del Duce, Carteggio ordinario (1922–1943), b. 476, fasc. 183506, “Landra dr. Guido” (reproduced in Centro Furio Iesi, ed., La menzogna della razza, 367–68). 99. De Felice, Lo Stato totalitario , 141–43. 100. Giovanni Papini, Tutte le opere (Milan: Mondadori, 1958–66), 5:17ff ., 5:473ff . 101. Mario Isnenghi, Giovanni Papini (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976), 99. 102. Maria Magda Sala, Russia e Israel. Nelle spire della sacerdotessa di Israel (Como: Sbaraglio, 1932). 103. Cazzani, Unità cristiana e giudaismo; Farinacci, “La Chiesa e gli ebrei”; Mario Lolli, Ebrei, chiesa e fascismo (Tivoli: Mantero, 1938), 111–27; Romanini, Ebrei, Cristianesimo, Fascismo, 183. Cf. also Moro, “Propagandisti cattolici del razzismo antisemita,” 283–84. Abramo Levi was the pseudonym used by Alfredo De Donno, a journalist, friend, and biographer of Paolo Orano. In his obliging reply to Orano (Levi, Noi ebrei , 230–39), De Donno, while rejecting his thesis, gave it a laudatory newspaper review. See Michaelis, Mussolini e la questione ebraica , 423; and Matard-Bonucci, L’Italie fasciste , 101. 104. Romanini, Ebrei, Cristianesimo, Fascismo , 54. 105. Sottochiesa, Sotto la maschera d’Israele, 13–14. 106. Mario Barbera, “La questione giudaica ed il sionismo,” La Civiltà Cattolica 2 (1937): 671ff .; regarding this work, see Miccoli, “Santa Sede, questione ebraica e antisemitismo tra Otto e Novecento,” in Dall’emancipazione a oggi , book 2 of Gli ebrei in Italia , ed. Corrado Vivanti, vol. 11 of Storia d’Italia, Annali (Turin: Ei- naudi, 1997), 1561; as well as Ruggero Taradel and Barbara Raggi, La segregazione amichevole. La Civiltà Cattolica e la questione ebraica 1850–1945 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2000). 107. Regarding the persecution of academics, see Francesca Pelini and Ilaria Pavan, La doppia epurazione. L’Università di Pisa e le leggi razziali tra guerra e dopogu- erra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009); but also Roberto Finzi, L’Università italiana e le leggi antiebraiche , new enlarged edition (1983; Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2003). 108. Vittorio Foa, Passaggi (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 41: “Orano, aft er all, has always been well known for his consistency in his inconsistency. I certainly won’t buy his book, but I would like to read Lattes’s article; could you try and send it to me?” Th e reference is to the review of Orano’s book published by Dante Lattes, “Un libro su gli ebrei in Italia ,” Israel , April 15, 1937: see Vittorio Foa, Lettere della gio- vinezza. Dal carcere 1935–1943, ed. Federica Montevecchi (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), 222, 225–27, the letters of April 16 and 30, 1937. 109. Abraham B. Yehoshua, “La radice dell’antisemitismo,” in Abraham B. Yehoshua, Antisemitismo e sionismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), 14.

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110. Hannah Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951), 9; see also Hannah Arendt, “Th e Moral of History,” Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (January 1946), now in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings , 312–16. Th e thesis of the adoption and fusion, in the regime’s propaganda, of the most diverse ideologi- cal standpoints (liberal, Catholic, socialist, racial, and nationalist anti-Semitism) was maintained in Cassata, “La Difesa della Razza.” Politica, ideologia e immagine del razzismo fascista, 115. But in La Difesa della Razza itself, the paradigm of the conspiracy was emphasized on the eve of the war. See, for example Carlo Bar- duzzi, “Cattolici e Giudei in Francia,” La Difesa della Razza 2, no. 14 (May 20, 1939): 28. 111. Cf. Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 166. Re- garding legislation at the time of national unifi cation and the comparison with the laws in the states of the ancien régime, see Guido Fubini, La condizione giuridica dell’ebraismo italiano (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1998), 83–106; An- tonio Spinosa, “Le persecuzioni razziali in Italia,” Il Ponte 7 (1952), 8 (1952), 11 (1953) (in particular part 1, “Origini,” 975ff .); as well as Guido Fubini, “La legislazione razziale nell’Italia fascista. Normativa e giurisprudenza,” in La leg- islazione antiebraica in Italia ed in Europa, 17ff . On the expropriation of real estate, in the case of Turin, see Fabio Levi, “I sequestri e le confi sche dei beni immobiliari agli ebrei. Il contesto normativo e la realtà torinese,” in Le case e le cose. La persecuzione degli ebrei torinesi nelle carte dell’Egeli 1938–1945, ed. Fabio Levi (Turin: Quaderni dell’Archivio Storico, 1998), 17–110. An assessment of the historiography of the persecution has been made in Carlo De Maria, “Amministrare il razzismo: la persecuzione anti-ebraica in Italia,” Storia 14, no. 40 (2008): 181ff . See also Giovanni Belardelli, “L’antisemitismo nell’ideolo- gia fascista,” in L’intellettuale anti semita, ed. Roberto Chiarini (Venice: Marsi- lio, 2008). 112. Regarding the decrees of socialization of January 13, 1944, see Massimo Legnani, “Potere, società ed economia nel territorio della Repubblica Sociale Italiana,” Ita- lia Contemporanea 4 (1998): 25ff . 113. Cf. Timothy W. Mason, Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft . Dokumente und Materialen zur deutschen Arbeiterpolitik 1936–1939 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1975). Th e thesis about the link between internal crisis and war is in Timothy W. Mason, “Innere Krise und Angriff skrieg,” in Wirtschaft und Rüstung am Vorabend des Zweiten Weltkrieges , ed. Friedrich Forstmeier and Hans-Erich Volkmann (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1975), 155ff ., against which see Richard Overy, “Germany, ‘Domestic Crisis,’ and War in 1939,” Past and Present, 116 (1987): 138–68. Finally, see the last collection of studies by Timothy W. Mason: Nazism,

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Fascism, and the Working Class , ed. Jane Caplan (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1995). 114. Stanley Hoff mann, “Collaborationism in France During World War II,” Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (1968): 375–96, is still essential. Th e best study of Vichy’s administrative, economic, and social policies is by Robert O. Paxton, Vi- chy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York: Albert Knopf, 1972), chaps. 2 and 3. See also Jean-Pierre Azéma, La collaboration (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975).

4. AN INTERPRETATION OF ANTI-JEWISH ANTICAPITALISM 1. Saul Friedländer, “Ernst Kantorowicz und Marc Bloch im Angesicht des Holo- caust,” in Den Holocaust beschreiben. Auf dem weg zu einer integrierten geschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), 50ff . 2. Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaite. Témoignage écrit en 1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 164–65. 3. I refer the reader—with regard to the French historian’s patriotism—to Marc Bloch, Souvenirs de guerre 1914–1915 (Paris: A Colin, 1969), 3ff . His “Réfl exions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre,” Revue de Synthèse Histo- rique 33 (1921), was the subject of Carlo Ginzburg, “A proposito della raccolta dei saggi storici di Marc Bloch,” Studi Medievali 6, no. 1, third ser. (1965). Regarding Bloch the offi cer in 1939–40, see Girolamo Arnaldi, introduction to Marc Bloch, Apologia della storia o Mestiere di storico (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), vii–xxxiii; and Bronisław Geremek, “Marc Bloch. Historien et résistant,” Annales ESC 41 (1986): 1,091–1,105. 4. Friedländer, Den Holocaust beschreiben , 63–65, 68. 5. Ibid., 67–68, 72. 6. Ernst Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1927). On his romantic-nationalist culture, see Eckhart Grünewald, Ernst Kantorowicz und Stefan George. Beiträge zur Biographie des Historikers bis zum Jahre 1938 und zu seinem Jugendwerk, “Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite” (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982), 15ff .; as well as Alain Bourreau, Histoires d’un historien: Kantorowicz (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 74–105. 7. Ernst Robert Curtius, Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags An- stalt, 1932), 9. 8. Ernst Robert Curtius, Kritische Essays zur europäischen Literatur (Bern: Francke, 1950), 404. Cf. also “Briefe von Ernst Curtius an 1921–1922,” ed. Rolf Nagel, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 218 (1982): 10–12, regarding which see Roberto Antonelli, “Filologia e modernità,” introduc-

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tion to Ernst Robert Curtius, Letteratura europea e Medio Evo latino (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1992), xvi, originally published as Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1948). 9. Cf. Ernst Robert Curtius, Essai sur la France (Paris: Grasset, 1932), 81. An analo- gous statement is in José Ortega y Gasset, Th e revolt of the masses and the triumph of the new man, trans. Pedro Blas Gonzalez (New York: Agora, 2007). Delio Can- timori, “Nelle ombre del domani,” introduction to Johan Huizinga, In de schadu- wen van morgen (1935), It. trans., La crisi della civiltà (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), xxiv, observes that Huizinga’s diagnosis had many elements in common with Cur- tius’s criticism. In 1942 Huizinga wrote a new study, which was published post- humously, Geschonden Wereld: een beschouwing over de kansen op herstel van onze beschaving (Haarlem : H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1945); in this, his analysis of the concept of civilization ( Kultur , Beschaving , Zivilisation) led Huizinga to dif- ferent conclusions from those of Curtius (22ff .): “the loss of civilization in the last hundred years” could be traced back, according to Huizinga, to three phe- nomena: militarism (83ff .), “the abandoning of the democratic ideal” (89ff .), and the “decadence and the spiritual disorientation in public life,” of which “mod- ern anti-Semitism” and “hypernationalism” constituted the worst manifesta- tions (95ff ., 103–4). On the relationship between Huizinga and Burckhardt, see Jacob Burckhardts Vorlesung über die Geschichte des Revolutionszeitalters in den Nachschrift en seiner Zuhörer , ed. Ernst Ziegler (Basel: Schwabe, 1974), regarding which I refer the reader to Maurizio Ghelardi, “Jacob Burckhardt: ‘L’epoca della Rivoluzione,’ ” Studi Storici 38, no. 1 (1997): 5–15. 10. Curtius, Letteratura europea e Medio Evo latino , 18–19. 11. Stefan George and Friedrich Gundolf, Briefwechsel , ed. Robert Boehringer and Georg Peter Landmann (Munich: Küpper, 1962), 284–86. Th e criticism of the au- thoritarian attitudes of these literary circles was proposed by Victor Klemperer in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 139 (1919): 256–58 (cited by Antonelli, “Filologia e modernità,” xn9). Expelled from university and forced to live in hiding, the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer devoted himself to the painstaking study of the transformation of the language and communica- tion codes under the Th ird Reich. Th e relationship between the conceptions of Ernst Kantorowicz and Curtius has been tackled in Arthur R. Evans, On Four Modern Humanists: Hofmannsthal, Gundolf, Curtius, Kantorowicz (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 84–149, as well as in various studies pre- sented at the 1986 conference: Ernst Robert Curtius. Werk, Wirkung, Zukunft sper- spektiven: Heidelberger Symposium zum hundertsten Geburstag, 1986, ed. Walter Berschin and Arnold Rothe (Heidelberg: Winter, 1989).

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12. Bloch, L’étrange défaite, 137–39. Franc-Tireur published the book in 1946, with a preface by Georges Altman, containing a detailed account of the life of the resistance fi ghter Narbonne, while the second edition of 1957 included the Tes- tament drawn up by Bloch in 1941 and some articles written during the years in hiding. Th ere were various reviews of this second edition by: D. Th omson in International Aff airs 23 (1957): 413; Aldo Garosci in Rivista Storica Italiana , LXXI (1959): 163–69; G. Wright, in American Historical Review (1958–59): 487. Evira Gencarelli dealt with this work by Bloch in Quaderni del Movimento di Libera- zione in Italia (April–June 1971): 99–114. For more detailed information, see John C. Cairns, “Some Recent Historians and the ‘Strange Defeat’ of 1940,” Journal of Modern History 46 (1974): 60–85. 13. Marc Bloch, letter to Lucien Febvre, September 8, 1940, Archives Nationales, Paris, MI 318 I, quoted by Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 237. 14. Bloch, L’étrange défaite, 27–28. See also Lettres de Marc Bloch à Alice Bloch , in par- ticular the letters dated 31 August 1939 and 14 September 1939 in the Collection Étienne Bloch, Th e Hague, quoted in Fink, Marc Bloch , 207. In Bloch’s correspon- dence in 1939 and 1940 one already fi nds the themes that would be developed in L’étrange défaite : see, for example, the attack on Prime Minister Daladier aft er the occupation of Poland: Lettre de Marc Bloch à Étienne Bloch, 22 October 1939 (Collection Étienne Bloch, quoted in Fink, Marc Bloch, 208) and Lettre de Marc Bloch à Lucien Febvre, 15 October 1939 (Archives Nationales, MI 318 I, quoted in Fink, Marc Bloch, 211). Th e accusations against the army were also anticipated in the lettre de Marc Bloch à Ferdinand Lot, 3 November 1939 (Archive de l’Institut Charles Lot, quoted Fink, Marc Bloch, 213) and then taken up again in L’étrange défaite , 29–30, 126–38. Bloch’s judgment has been reproposed by William L. Shirer, Th e Collapse of the Th ird Republic: An Inquiry Into the Fall of France in 1940 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 312ff . 15. See G. Arnaldi, introduction to Bloch, Apologia della storia , xi: here, Arnaldi comments on those two passages from L’étrange défaite (21) and the Apologia (25), which Fink associates with a note in the testament (Fink, Marc Bloch, 205). Also of importance are the observations in François Bédarida, “Marc Bloch historien, soldat et père de famille,” in Marc Bloch à Étienne Bloch. Lettres de la “drôle de guerre ,” ed. François Bédarida and Denis Peschanski (Paris: Cahiers de l’Institut du Temps Présent, 1991), 24ff . 16. Both expressed some reservations about Benda’s method of working: “Aft er all, it is our fault, the fault of historians, if everyone ignores so radically the little we do—if someone like Valéry, or Benda, who in fact are not so ill-informed,

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have been able to come close to the work of someone like Pirenne, without any knowledge of it” (M. Bloch à L. Febvre, [mercredì] le 1er Mai [19]35), in Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, De Strasbourg à Paris 1934–1937 , vol. 2 of Cor- respondance, ed. Bertrand Müller (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 235. See also L. Febvre à M. Bloch, Lettre 191 (Paris Février 1934, avant le 16), in vol. 2 of Correspon- dance , 17. Febvre had reviewed a study by Julien Benda, Esquisse d’une histoire des Français dans leur volonté d’être une nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1932): see Lu- cien Febvre, “Entre l’histoire à thèse et l’histoire manuel. Deux esquisses récen- tes d’histoire de France: M. Benda, M. Seignobos,” Revue de Synthèse 5 (1933): 205–36. Benda is also mentioned in L. Febvre à M. Bloch, Lettre 155 [Loctudy, mardi] 12 Sept[embre] [19]33, in Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, La naissance des Annales 1928–1933 , vol. 1 of Correspondance , ed. Bertrand Müller (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 406. 17. Th e expression is from Édouard Berth, Les méfaits des intellectuels (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1926), 68. Regarding Benda, see also the journal (unpublished) of Daniel Halévy, for March 3, 1925, quoted by Judith Belpomme, “Julien Benda essayiste et publiciste,” PhD. diss., Université de Paris-Nanterre, 2000, 1:79. I also refer the reader to Sébastien Laurent, Daniel Halévy (Paris: Grasset, 2001), 344. Th ere are also interesting observations in Jean Paulhan and André Gide, Correspon- dance 1918–1951 , ed. Frédéric Grover and Pierret Schartenberg-Winter (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 92ff .; and in André Gide, Journal , ed. Éric Marty and Martine Sagaert, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1996–97), 1:635. 18. Julien Benda, “Une philosophie pathétique,” Cahiers de la Quinzaine 2 (1913). See also Julien Benda, Belphégor (Paris: Émile-Paul, 1918), 154–55; and, regarding Bel- phégor as a “demon of mawkishness,” see Albert Th ibaudet, Les princes lorrains (Paris: Grasset, 1924), 123. Finally, I refer the reader to Maurice Martin du Gard, Les mémorables (1935; Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 637ff . 19. See Laurent, Daniel Halévy , 344, as well as Laurence Brisset, La NRF de Paulhan (Paris: Gallimard, 2003): the episode is recounted in the letters between Paulhan and Gide, Correspondance , 72. 20. Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris: Grasset, 1927), 10–11, 65. Regarding this passage, see the observations of Antoine Compagnon, Les antimodernes: de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 311n4. According to Bobbio, the master of the irrationalists had been Bergson: “Th e success [of Bergson’s philosophy] depend[ed] on the fact that it laid down the primacy of the feminine over the masculine, of the musical over the plastic, of stuttering over speech, of the formless over the formed; and therefore it present[ed] itself as the philosophy of all the troubled, the grim, the in torment, associating the

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mystics (Péguy) with the extollers of violence (Sorel)” (Norberto Bobbio, “Julien Benda,” Il Ponte [August–September 1956]: 1,380). 21. Cf. Georges Sorel, Refl éxions sur la violence (1909; Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1921), 360ff .; and Charles Péguy, “Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie car- tésienne,” Nouvelle Revue Française (July 1919): 161–201. Regarding the “fascist legacy” of Charles Péguy, see also David Carrol, French Literary Fascism: Nation- alism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1945), 42–70. 22. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, critical edition by Istituto Gramsci, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), vol. 2, Quaderno 10 (1932–35), 1303 (in English: Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992–). Further on, in “Punti per un sag- gio su B. Croce. Croce e J. Benda” (1333–34), Gramsci comments on Benda’s arti- cle, “Comment un écrivain sert-il l’universel?,” published in Nouvelles Littéraires , November 2, 1929, and on Benedetto Croce’s study, Cultura e vita morale (Bari: Laterza, 1927). 23. Cf. Julien Benda, preface to the new edition of La trahison des clercs (Paris: Gras- set, 1946), 30. 24. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. 2, Quaderno 10, 1303. 25. Bloch, L’étrange défaite , 128ff . 26. Carlo Morandi, review of Adolfo Omodeo, La cultura francese nell’età della Re- staurazione (Milan: Mondadori, 1946), Belfagor (July 1947): 503, likened Omo- deo’s work to Croce in Storia d’Europa nel secolo XIX (published in Atti dell’Ac- cademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche della Società Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere e Arti di Napoli, 1931 and 1932, and then in a book in 1932); however, see also the version ed. and intro. Giuseppe Galasso (Milan: Adelphi, 1999), 450ff . Morandi also discussed Adolfo Omodeo’s studies collected in the book Un reazionario. Il conte J. De Maistre (Bari: Laterza, 1939), as well as those dealing with counter- revolutionary Catholicism, Cardinal Consalvi and Lammenais apologeta del cattolicesimo della Restaurazione , published by Einaudi with the title Aspetti del cattolicesimo della Restaurazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1946). Of importance, regar- ding Omodeo, are the studies by Aldo Garosci, “Adolfo Omodeo.” 1: “La storia e l’azione;” 2: “La guerra, l’antifascismo e la storia;” 3: “Guida morale e guida po- litica,” Rivista Storica Italiana (1965): 173–98, 639–85 and Rivista Storica Italiana (1966): 146–83. I also refer the reader to my work “Politiche e religioni moderne nel giudizio storico di A. Omodeo,” Critica Storica 4 (1989): 622ff .; and Giacomo De Marzi, Adolfo Omodeo. La storiografi a della Restaurazione francese (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1982). By De Marzi, see also Adolfo Omodeo. Itinerario di

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uno storico (Urbino: Quattroventi, 1988); as well as Salvo Mastellone, “Adolfo Omodeo e l’età della Restaurazione,” Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofi a dell’Università di Napoli 6, new ser. (1975–76): 243–58; the theses of De Marzi and Mastellone have also been discussed in Marcello Musté, Adolfo Omodeo. Storio- grafi a e pensiero politico (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 343ff . 27. See Benedetto Croce, Saggio sullo Hegel (Bari: Laterza, 1913), 47; and Croce, L’Italia dal 1914 al 1918. Pagine sulla Guerra (Bari: Laterza, 1919). Regarding these works, see Norberto Bobbio, “Benedetto Croce e il liberalismo,” in Norberto Bob- bio, Politica e cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1955), 227–36. Croce’s review of Th omas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin: Fischer, 1918) appeared in La Critica 18 (1920): 182–83. As early as his work “Th oughts in War,” Th omas Mann had codifi ed the contrast between Zivilisation and Kultur when he wrote that “civilization and culture not only are not the same thing, they are two contrasting things” (Mann, “Gedanken im Kriege,” Die Neue Rundschau [November (1914], now in Th omas Mann, Gesammelte Werke , integrated ed. [Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960–1974], 13:527–45. See also his last letter to his brother Heinrich before the outbreak of the war, dated September 18, 1914: Th omas Mann and Heinrich Mann, Briefwechsel 1900–1949, ed. Hans Wysling (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschen- buch, 1995), 172. In Betrachtungen, Mann states: “Among the unpublished works of Nietzsche an incredibly intuitive defi nition of the Master Singers has been found, it is this: ‘Master singers, the opposite of civilization, the German element in contrast with the French one’. Th is note is of incalculable value. In the fl ash of lightning of an ingenious criticism one can see the outline, for an instant, of the antithesis on which the labour of this book rests: it is the clash, so many times, out of cowardice, denied and challenged, the real, immortal clash between music and politics, between Germanness and civilization. Th is antagonism remains, on the part of the Germans, a fact reluctantly acknowledged, a state of mind, some- thing which belongs to the soul, which cannot be grasped by the intellect and therefore lacking an aggressive spirit. On the part of civilization, the antagonism is political hatred; and how could it be otherwise? Civilization is thoroughly political, it is politics itself, and its hatred can be, in fact it has to be only and immediately political. Th e political spirit, inasmuch as it is democratic Enlight- enment and human civilization is not German” (Th omas Mann, Refl ections of a Nonpolitical Man , trans. and intro. Walter D. Morris [New York: Frederick Un- gar, 1983], 48ff .). 28. See Croce’s letter dated June 1925 to Silvio Spaventa in Silvio Spaventa, Lettere politiche , ed. Giovanni Castellano (Bari: Laterza, 1926), 5–8, as well as Bene- detto Croce, Liberalismo (1925), now in Benedetto Croce, Cultura e vita morale.

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Intermezzi polemici (Bari: Laterza, 1955), 283–88. Cultura germanica in Italia nell’età del Risorgimento (1927) is now in Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1956 3), 254–66. Th e judgment, expressed in Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915 (Bari: Laterza, 1928), 117–88, about the importing, from Germany, of national- ist myths provoked Karl Vossler’s protest: cf. Vossler’s letter to Croce of May 10, 1928, in Carteggio Croce-Vossler 1899–1949 (Bari: Laterza, 1951), 309–10. 29. Ottavio Besomi and Hans Wysling, “La corrispondenza Croce-Mann,” Archivio storico ticinese 51 (1975): 33–48, regarding which, see Aldo Venturelli, “T. Mann e B. Croce. Un confronto tra due borghesie,” Studi Germanici 13 (1975): 333–53. 30. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere , vol. 2, Quaderno 10, 1361. See also Adolfo Omodeo, Recensione a P. Gobetti. Risorgimento senza eroi, now in Adolfo Omodeo, Difesa del Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1955), 436. Th ere is an analogous evaluation in Benedetto Croce, Etica e politica (Bari: Laterza, 1931), 347–52. I am referring in particular to: “Constant e Jellinek, intorno alla diff erenza tra la libertà degli an- tichi e quella dei moderni,” Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche della Società Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere e Arti di Napoli (1931): 241–47, 301–8. 31. Omodeo, La cultura francese nell’età della Restaurazione, 180–81. Th e criticism was also directed at the alleged authoritarian implications of Giuseppe Mazzini’s thought: see “La missione politica e religiosa di Giuseppe Mazzini,” in Giuseppe Mazzini, Scritti scelti, ed. Adolfo Omodeo (Milan: Mondadori, 1934), 5–16, as well as the review of Giuseppe Mazzini, Scritti editi e inediti, vol. 77 (Imola: Ga- leati, 1938), La Critica 36 (1938): 445–48; analogous ideas are in Guido de Rug- giero, Storia del liberalismo europeo (Bari: Laterza, 1925), 367–70. Th e position of Croce and Omodeo was criticized by Herbert A. L. Fisher, Th e Liberal Experi- ment , vol. 3 of A History of Europe (London: Edward Arnold, 1936). Th e interpre- tations of Werner Kaegi and Johan Huizinga were close to that of Croce: Kaegi, “Der Kleinstaat im europäischen Denken” (1938), in Werner Kaegi, Historische Meditationen (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1942), 249–314, took up Burckhardt’s view; Huizinga off ered an analogous judgement in “Wachstum und Formen des nationalen Bewusstseins im Europa,” in Johan Huizinga, Im bann des Geschichte (Basel: Akademische Verlagsanstalt Pantheon, 1942), 171ff . 32. Federico Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896 (Bari: Laterza, 1951), 103; in English trans.: Italian Foreign Policy: Th e Satecraft of the Founders , trans. William MacCuaig (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). Burckhardt’s view of the ideal of the “small state” had been assimilated by Chabod through Kaegi, “Der Kleinstaat im europäischen Denken”; see Gen- naro Sasso, Il guardiano della storiografi a. Profi lo di Federico Chabod e altri saggi (Naples: Guida, 1985), 117. I also refer the reader to Federico Chabod, L’idea di Europa. Prolusione al corso di Storia Moderna dell’Università di Roma, 22 gennaio

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1947 , in Federico Chabod, Idea di Europa e politica dell’equilibrio, ed. Luisa Azzo- lini (Bologna: Il Mulino and Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1995), 139–204. 33. Th e occasion was Momigliano’s obituary for Carlo Antoni for Rivista Storica Italiana : “Necrologio Carlo Antoni 1896–1959,” in Federico Chabod and Arnaldo Momigliano, Un carteggio del 1959 , ed. and intro. Gennaro Sasso, postface by Riccardo Di Donato (Bologna: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici—Il Mulino, 2002), 82. Momigliano’s defi nition is on page 89; see also Venturi’s letter to Mo- migliano of November 17, 1959 (140). 34. Chabod’s letter to Momigliano, November 5, 1959, Un carteggio del 1959 , 105. See also Federico Chabod, L’idea di nazione , ed. Armando Saitta and Ernesto Sestan (Bari: Laterza, 1962), 36ff ., regarding which see Stuart J. Woolf, Il nazionalismo in Europa (Milan: Unicopli, 1994), 7–43; and Sasso, Il guardiano della storiografi a , 30ff . Finally, the following are important: the notes by Luisa Azzolini in the in- troduction to Chabod, Idea di Europa e politica dell’equilibrio , xxiiiff .; Renzo De Felice, “Gli storici italiani nel periodo fascista,” in Federico Chabod e la “nuova storiografi a” italiana dal primo al secondo dopoguerra , ed. Brunello Vigezzi (Mi- lan: Jaca Book, 1983), 509–607. In his lectures at the , later col- lected in L’Italia contemporanea 1918–1948 (Turin: Einaudi, 1961), Chabod denied the existence of an anti-Jewish tradition and of racial persecution before 1938 and took for granted the opposition of public opinion guided by the Catholic Church (96–97). 35. Momigliano’s letter to Chabod, November 10, 1959, in Chabod and Momigliano, Un carteggio del 1959 , 110–11. Also see Imbruglia, “Nazione, Illuminismo, stori- cismo,” 19–76. 36. Th omas Mann, “Über die Ehe. Brief an den Grafen Hermann Keyserling” (1925), in Mann, Reden und Aufsätze, vol. 12 of Gesammelte Werke, 1,974. Th e judgment on the Enlightenment as the “beginning of disintegration” is also in “Gedanken im Kriege,” 528. 37. Curtius, Essai sur la France, 31, 49. 38. Th e reference is to Georges Dumézil, Mythes et dieux des Germains (Paris: Er- nest Leroux, 1939), about which see Arnaldo Momigliano, “Premesse per una discussione su Georges Dumézil,” Opus 2 (1983): 331. Cristiano Grottanelli, Ide- ologie, miti, massacri. Indoeuropei di Georges Dumézil (Palermo: Sellerio, 1993), 217, rejected Momigliano’s interpretation, taking up a criticism made in Luciano Canfora, Ideologie del classicismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 157–59. Momigliano’s study subsequently off ered Carlo Ginzburg the opportunity to intervene: “Mito- logia germanica e nazismo. Su un vecchio libro di Georges Dumézil,” Quaderni Storici 57, new ser. (December 1984): 857–82. Dumézil replied to both Momi- gliano and Ginzburg in one of his “Esquisses de mythologie,” included in L’oubli

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de l’homme et l’honneur des dieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 303ff .; Didier Eribon also sided with Dumézil: Faut-il brûler Dumézil? (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), but he had already published Georges Dumézil. Entretiens avec Didier Eribon (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). Carlo Ginzburg’s reply to Eribon was published in Le Monde des Débats (September 1993): 22, and it was followed, in the October issue, by a reply from Eribon. Momigliano resumed his criticism in “Georges Dumézil and the Trifunctional Approach to Roman Civilisation,” H & T 23 (1984): 312–30, also in Arnaldo Momigliano, Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1987), 135–59, It. trans. “Georges Dumézil e l’approccio trifunzionale alla civiltà romana,” in Arnaldo Momigliano, Saggi di storia della religione romana. Studi e lezioni 1983–1986 , ed. Riccardo di Donato (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1988), 45–66. Finally, Bruce Lincoln reviewed L’oubli de l’homme in the Times Literary Supplement , October, 3, 1986, 1,107–8, now in Bruce Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifi ce: Studies in Ideology and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 231–43. 39. Jules Isaac, Genèse de l’antisémitisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1956). On the life of Isaac, see André Kaspi, Jules Isaac, ou La passion de la vérité (Paris: Plon, 2002). 40. Jules Isaac, Les oligarques. Essai d’histoire partiale (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1946), 31–58. 41. George L. Mosse, Th e Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Th ird Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964). 42. Regarding the concept of the counter-Enlightenment, see Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London: Pimlico, 1997) . 43. Hannah Arendt, “Original Assimilation: An Epilogue to the One Hundredth An- niversary of Rahel Vernhagen’s Death,” (1933), in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings , ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 22–23. 44. I am, naturally, referring to George L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation Between ‘Bil- dung’ and Respectability,” in Th e Jewish Response to German Culture: From the En- lightenment to the Second World War , ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 45–65. For an examina- tion of the European literature dealing with emancipation, see Guri Schwarz, “A proposito di una vivace stagione storiografi ca. Letture della emancipazione ebra- ica negli ultimi venti anni,” Memoria e Ricerca 19 (May–August 2005): 159. 45. David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and Th eir Appli- cation to German-Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 35 (1990): 24–25. See also the notes in Jonathan Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth- Century Europe: Towards a New Historiography?,” in Jonathan Frankel and Ste- ven J. Zipperstein, Assimilation and Community: Th e Jews in Nineteenth-Century

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Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–37; Paolo Bernardini, “Th e Jews in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Towards a Reappraisal,” Journal of Mod- ern Italian Studies 2 (1999): 245ff .; and Stefano Caviglia, L’identità salvata. Gli ebrei di Roma fra fede e nazione 1870–1938 (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 197–210. 46. See Ulrich Wyrwa, Juden in der Toskana und in Preussen im vergleich: Aufk lärung und Emanzipation in Florenz, Livorno, Berlin und Königsberg (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); and Marina Caffi ero, “Gli ebrei in Italia dall’età dei Lumi agli anni della Rivoluzione,” in Dall’emancipazione a oggi , book 2 of Gli ebrei in Ita- lia , ed. Corrado Vivanti, vol. 11 of Storia d’Italia, Annali (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 1,091–1,332. 47. See Franziska Augstein’s refl ections in Hannah Arendt. Ihr Denken veränderte die Welt, ed. Martin Wiebel (Munich: Piper, 2013), xivff . 48. See Amos Funkestein, “Th e Political Th eory of Jewish Emancipation from Men- delssohn to Herzl,” in Deutsche Aufk lärung und Judenemanzipation, ed. Walter Grab (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1980), 13–28, regarding which see David Sor- kin, “Emancipation, Haskalah, and Reform: Th e Contribution of Amos Funke- stein,” Jewish Social Studies 6 (1999): 98–110. 49. Johan David Michaelis, review of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Die Juden,” in Göttingsche Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (1754): 620–622, 1,292–96. Th e bib- liography concerning Lessing’s contribution to the Jewish question is vast: see Franklin Kopitzsch, Lessing im Spannungsfeld von Toleranz und Intoleranz , in Deutsche Aufk lärung und Judenemanzipation, 29–90; Heinrich Detering, Chris- tian Wilhelm von Dohm und die idee der Toleranz , in Lessing und die Toleranz , ed. Peter Freimark, Franklin Kopitzsch, and Helga Slessarev (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1986), 174–185 (regarding Lessing’s link with Dohm’s work). 50. Regarding Eisenmenger’s work Entdektes Judentum (1700), see Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 13–22. 51. François Joseph Antoine de Hell, Observations d’un Alsacien sur l’aff aire présente des Juifs d’Alsace (Frankfurt, 1779). 52. Christian Wilhelm Dohm, “Probe einer kurzen Charakteristik einiger der be- rühmtesten Völker Asiens. 1: Die Hebräer,” Lippische Intelligenzblätter 41, Octo- ber 8, 1774, coll. 649–654. 53. Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung (Berlin: Nicolai, 1781), 109; Dohm, “Über das physiokratische System,” Deutsches Museum 11 (1778): 289–324. See Ilsegret Dambacher, Christian Wilhelm Dohm. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der preussisch aufgeklärten Beamtentums und seiner Reformbestre- bungen am Ausgabe des 18 Jahrunderts (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1974), 164–203.

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54. Friedrich Hartmann, Untersuchung ob die bürgerliche Freiheit den Juden zu ge- statten sie (Berlin: Hesse, 1783), 12–17. 55. Funkestein, “Th e Political Th eory of Jewish Emancipation,” 26. 56. As David Sorkin has written, “any study of the German Jewish culture is willy- nilly a study of Moses Mendelssohn” (Th e Transformation of German Jewry [Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 1987], 8). 57. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit” (1787), in Herder, Werke (Munich: Hauser, 2002), vol. 3, book 1, 449. 58. Chrétien-Guillaume de Malesherbes, Second mémoire sur le mariage des Pro- testants (London, 1787). See also Catalogue des Livres de la Bibliothèque de feu Chrétien-Guillaume Lamoignon des Malesherbes (Paris, 1797): Malesherbes col- lected a lot of material about Jewish emancipation in preparation of the new law, but its text has been lost. Of the works of the Grégoire, see “Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs” republished in the series La Révolution française et l’émancipation des juifs, vol. 3 (Paris: Éditions des His- toires Sociales, 1968); regarding Malesherbes and Grégoire, see Moses Ginsburger, “Zwei Unveröff entlichte Briefe des Abbé Grégoire,” in Festschrift zu Simon Dub- nows siebzigstem Geburtstag (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), 201ff .; Zosa Szaj- kowski, “Th e Jewish Problem in Alsace, Metz, and Lorraine on the Eve of the Re- volution of 1789,” Jewish Quarterly Review 44 (1954): 231–33; and Achille-Edmond Halphen, Recueil de lois, decrets, ordonnances, avis du Conseil d’État, arrêtés et ré- glements concernant les Israélites depuis la Révolution de 1789 (Paris: Wittersheim, 1851), 183–94. 59. Daniele Menozzi, Philosophes et chrétiens éclairés. Politica e religione nella col- laborazione di G. H. Mirabeau e A. A. Lamourette 1774–1794 (Brescia: Paideia, 1976), 64. 60. See Paolo Bernardini, La questione ebraica nel tardo Illuminismo tedesco. Studi intorno allo “Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden” di C. W. Dohm (1781) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1992); and Edoardo Tortarolo, “Ebraismo e Illumi- nismo tedesco,” in La questione ebraica dall’Illuminismo all’Impero 1780–1815 , ed. Paolo Alatri and Silvia Grassi (Naples: Esi, 1994), 125–40. Regarding the diff u- sion of Mendelssohn’s work, see Paul H. Meyer, “Le rayonnement de Moses Men- delssohn hors d’Allemagne,” Dix-huitième siècle 13 (1981): 63–78; and Jonathan I. Helfand, “Th e Symbiotic Relationship Between French and German Jewry in the Age of Emancipation,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 29 (1984): 331–50. Also see Simon Schwarfzuchs, “La Haskalah et le cercle de Metz à la veille de la Révolu- tion,” in Politique et religion dans le Judaïsme moderne, ed. Daniel Tollet (Paris: Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1987), 51–59. Regarding the mediation of Mira- beau and Brissot, see Leonore Loft , “Mirabeau and Brissot Review Christian Wil-

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helm von Dohm and the Jewish Question,” History of European Ideas 13 (1991): 605–22; Leonore Loft , “J.-P. Brissot and the Problem of Jewish Emancipation,” Studies on Voltaire 278 (1990): 465–475. Finally, see Fernanda Mazzanti Pepe, Il mondo nuovo di Brissot. Libertà e istituzioni tra antico regime e rivoluzione (Tu- rin: Einaudi, 1996), 146ff . 61. Henri Grégoire,Grégoire et l’émancipation des juifs, vol. 9 of Oeuvres de l’Abbé Gregoire (Paris: KTO Press and Éditions d’Histoire Sociale, 1977). Th e texts of the other two winners were also published: Claude-Antoine Th iéry, Dissertation sur cette question: “Est-il des moyens de rendre les juifs plus heureux et plus utiles en France?” (Paris, 1789); and Zalkind Horowitz, Apologie des juifs, en réponse à la question: “Est-il des moyens de rendre les juifs plus heureux et plus utiles en France?” (Paris, 1789), quoted in Sergio Luzzatto, “Il bacio di Grégoire. La ‘rige- nerazione’ degli ebrei nella Francia del 1789,” Studi Settecenteschi 17 (1997): 265– 86. See Henri Tribout de Morembert, “ ‘Est-il des moyens de rendre les juifs plus utiles et plus heureux?’ Considérations sur le concours de l’Académie Royale de Metz de 1787 et 1788,” Mémoires de l’Académie Royale de Metz 154 (1973): 179–265; and David Feuerwerker, L’émancipation des juifs en France de l’Ancien Régime à la fi n du Second Empire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 49–142. 62. Luzzatto, “Il bacio di Grégoire,” 281–83, referring to Abbé L *** , Observations sur l’état civil des juifs, adressées à l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris, 1790). See also Daniele Menozzi, “Philosophes” et chrétiens éclairés , 118ff . 63. Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs , 29, 72, 144–46. 64. Cf. Rita Hermon-Belot, “Th e Abbé Grégoire’s Program for the Jews: Social Reform and Spiritual Project,” in Th e Abbé Grégoire and his World , ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluver Academic Publishers, 2000), 16ff . 65. Cf. David Friedländer, Sendschreiben an Hochwürden. Herrn Oberconsisto- rialrath und Probst Teller zu Berlin (Berlin: Mylius, 1799), 18–39. See Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni- versity Press, 2002), 169–93. 66. Jean-André De Luc, Lettre aux auteurs juifs d’un mémoire adressé à M. Teller (Berlin, 1799), 85ff . 67. Henri Grégoire, Observations nouvelles sur les juifs et specialement sur ceux d’Allemagne (Paris: Gratiot, 1806), 13; Grégoire, “Histoire de la Th éophilantropie, depuis sa naissance jusqu’à son extinction,” in Henri Grégoire, Histoire des sectes religieuses (Paris: Potey, 1810), 55–171. 68. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Grattenauer, Wider die Juden : ein Wort der Warnung an alle unsere christliche Mitbürger (Berlin: Schmidt, 1803), 64. See Selma Stern- Täubler, “Der literarische Kampf um die Emanzipation in der Jahren 1816–1820

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und seine ideologischen und soziologischen Voraussetzungen,” Hebrew Union College Annual 23 (1950–1951): 171–96. 69. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Grattenauer, Erklärung an das Publikum über meine Schrift : wieder die Juden (Berlin: Schmidt, 1803). Th e book by Christian Ludwig Paalzow was entitled Tractatus historicus-politicus de civitate Judaeorum (Berlin: Schöne, 1803); German trans. Ueber das Bürgerrecht der Juden (Leipzig: Schmidt, 1804). 70. Friedrich Buchholz, Moses und Jesus, oder über das intellektuelle und moralische Verhältniss der Juden und Christen (Berlin: Unger, 1803), 187–201. 71. Quite a few texts favored a certain emancipation in the name of a new eco- nomic policy. See Franz Joseph Karl Scheppler, Ueber die aufh ebung des Juden- leibzolls . . . (Hanau: Scharneck, 1805), 94ff .; Johann August Schlettwein, “Bitte an die Grossen wegen der Juden zu verhütung trauriger Folgen in den Staaten,” Ephemeriden der Menscheit 4 (1776): 41–44; and Julius von Soden, Die National- ökonomie (Leipzig, 1805), 1:220–23. 72. Th e references to Bonald were rare. See, for example, Drögens Tama, “Geschicht- liche Darstellung des Zustandes der Juden in Frankreich in den letzen Zeiten,” in Gesammelte Actenstücke und öff entliche Verhandlungen über die Verbesserung der Juden in Frankreich, ed. Alexander Bran (Hamburg, 1807), 324ff . 73. Henri Grégoire, “Observations nouvelles sur les juifs, et specialement sur ceux d’Amsterdam et Francfort,” Revue Philosophique, littéraire et politique 15, May 21, 1807, 321–29, and ibid., 16, June 1, 1807, 385–94. 74. Th e text of the edict of the National Assembly is in Bernhard Blumenkrantz and Albert Soboul, Les juifs et la Révolution Française (Paris: Franco-Judaica, 1989), 10. Instead, the texts of Napoleon’s edict are collected in Organisation Civile et Religieuse des Israélites de France et du Royaume d’Italie décrétée par sa Majesté Impériale et Roi le 17 Mars 1808; suivie de la Collection des Actes de l’Assemblée des Israélites, de France et du Royaume d’Italie, convoquée à Paris en 1806; et de celle des Procès Verbaux et Décisions du Grand-Sanhédrin convoqué en 1807, lesquelles ont servi de base à cette Organisation (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1808). Th e text of the decree of March 17, 1808, states in articles 7 and 8, pages 13–14: “Art. 7. As for now, at the date of July 1, no Jew could practice commerce or transaction without receiving au authorization by the prefect of the department, which will be granted based on precise information and a certifi cate, fi rst by the Municipal Council (which certifi es that this Jew has not practiced usury or il- legal transaction) and second by the concistorum of the synagogue of the city of residence, which testifi es to his good behavior and honesty. Art. 8. Th is authori- zation will be renewed annually.”

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75. Harvey Chisick, “Ethics and History in Voltaire’s Attitude Towards the Jews,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 4 (2002): 577ff . Regarding the taking up again of Voltaire’s theses in Italy in Giovanni Battista Gherardo D’Arco, Dell’infl uenza del Ghetto nello Stato (Venice: Bettinelli, 1785), see Maurizio Bertolotti, “La di- sputa D’Arco-Frizzi e gli ebrei del mantovano occidentale,” in Benedetto Frizzi un illuminista ebreo nell’età dell’emancipazione , ed. Marida Brignani an Maurizio Bertolotti (Florence: Giuntina, 2009), 67–96. 76. Which is not done by Léon Poliakov, De Voltaire à Wagner, vol. 3 of Histoire de l’antisémitisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1955–1968), 91–189, nor by Arthur Hertz berg, Th e French Enlightenment and the Jews: Th e Origins of Modern Anti- Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); for a historiograph- ical summary of Voltaire’s alleged “anti-Semitism,” see Paolo Alatri, “Voltaire ‘an- tisemita’: storia di una polemica,” Incontri Meridionali 3 (1991): 7ff . 77. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, L’an 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais.(Amsterdam: Van Harrevelt, 1770). Th e modern editions are: Louis-Sébastien Mercier, L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante. Rêve s’il ne fut jamais, intro. and annot. Raymond Trousson (Bordeaux: Dunos, 1971); L’an 2440. Édition de 1770 avec des ex- traits des chapitres nouveaux publiés en 1786, intro. Alain Pons (Paris: Édi- tion France, 1977); L’an 2440. Rêve s’il ne fut jamais , intro. and annot. Chris- tophe Cave and Christine Marcandier-Colard (Paris: La Découverte, 1999). Finally, see also Sergio Luzzatto, “L’a n n o 2 4 4 0 , Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1770,” in La cultura del romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 653–58. 78. See “Discours Préliminaire,” in L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante. Rêve s’il ne fut jamais; suivi de l’Homme de Fer, songe. Par L.-S. Mercier, ex-Député à la Convention Nationale et au Corps Legislatif. Membre de l’Institut National de France. Nouvelle Édition imprimée sous les yeux de l’auteur. Avec fi gures, à Paris chez Lepetit Jeune et Gerard Libraires, X, book 1, 1–2. 79. Mercier, L’An 2 4 4 0 , ed. Cave and Marcandier-Colard, book 2, 240–83. 80. Ibid., 241. 81. Ibid., 201–06. 82. Ibid., 203. 83. Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs , 54. 84. Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings , 109. 85. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Césarisme et Christianisme (de l’an 45 avant J.-C. à l’an 476 après) , précédé d’une preface par J.-A. Langlois (Paris: Marpon et Flammar- ion, 1883), 1:133. Regarding Duchêne, see Georges Duchêne, L’empire industriel (Paris: Librairie Centrale, 1869), 196.

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86. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Les confessions d’un révolutionnaire pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution du février (Paris: Au Bureau du Journal La Voix du Peuple, 1849), 13. Cf. Daniel Halévy, La vie de Proudhon 1805–1844 (Paris: Stock, 1948). 87. Edmund Silberner, “Pierre Leroux’s Ideas on the Jewish People,” Jewish Social Studies 8 (1946) and 9 (1947): 337ff . See also Charles Fourier, Publications des manuscrits de Charles Fourier (Paris: Éditions Dentu, 1851–58), 3:35ff . Leroux was however appreciated by the Sephardic and Saint-Simonian banker Isaac Pereire and expressed his disagreement with the representation of the cultural hierarchy among the races proposed by Ernest Renan. I also refer the reader to the excel- lent study George Lichtheim, “Socialism and the Jews,” Dissent 15 (1968): 314–42. Frank E. Manuel, Th e Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), recalls how the fi nal views of Fourier also include a favorable view of Jewish emigration to Palestine and of the founding of Jewish colonies, on the model of the phalansteries. 88. Ernst Robert Curtius, Balzac (1923), trans. Henri Jourdan (Paris: Grasset, 1933), 175. 89. Élie Halévy, “L’ère des tyrannies,” lecture, November 23, 1936, Société française de Philosophie, in Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies. Études sur le socialisme et la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 213–15. See Michele Battini, Utopia e tirannide. Scavi nell’archivio Halévy (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2011), 36ff . 90. Alphonse Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque. Histoire de la féodalité fi nancière (Paris: Librairie de l’École Sociétaire, 1845), 4. 91. Charles Fourier, Th éories des quatres mouvements et des destinées générales (Leip- zig, 1808), 61, 235. 92. Alphonse Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque [ . . . ] (Nantes: Éditions Davin, 1846), 4. 93. Toussenel, introduction to Les juifs, rois de l’époque, Édition École Sociétaire, xxviii. 94. Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque, Édition Davin, 4, note 1. 95. Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque , Édition École Sociétaire, xxxi. 96. Ibid., xxxii, xxxvi, xxxiv. 97. Ibid., xxxvi. See Charles Fourier, Le nouveau monde industriel, ou invention du procédé d’industrie attrayante et naturelle distribuée en séries passionnées (Paris: Librairie Societaire, 1845), 421. 98. Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque. Histoire de la féodalité fi nancière, III édition, précedée d’une Préface d’une notice biographique sur l’auteur et accompagnée des notes hors texte de l’éditeur Gabriel de Gonet, 1846–1886 (Paris: Marpon et Flam- marion, 1886), 145–78.

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99. Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Les sélections sociales. Cours libre de science politique professé a l’Université de Montpellier (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1896), 470. 100. Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque , viii. See Irène Tieder, “Alphonse Toussenel et l’antisémitisme fourieriste,” Tsafon 18 (1994): 42. 101. Karl Polanyi, Th e Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944), 189ff . I have dealt with the subject of the convergence of views between the aris- tocratic classes and right-wing cultures, on the one hand, and the working-class movement, on the other hand, in L’Ordine della gerarchia. I contributi reazionari e progressisti alla crisi della democrazia, Francia 1789–1914 (Turin: Bollati Borin- ghieri, 1995), 415ff . 102. Ernest Labrousse, Comment nassent les révolutiones 1848, 1830, 1789 (Paris: PUT, 1948) 200ff . 103. Cf. Heinrich Reschauer, Das Jahr 1848. Geschichte der Wiener Revolution , 2 vols. (Vienna: Waldheim, 1872); and Reuben John Rath, Th e Viennese Revolution of 1848 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957), 103. (Müller took up K. W. Grat- tenauer’s paradigm, developed in Wider die Juden ). 104. Maurizio Bertolotti, introduction to Nievo, Drammi giovanili. Emanuele. Gli ul- timi anni di Galileo Galilei (Venice: Marsilio, 2006), 16ff ., and Bertolotti, I contesti dell’ambiguità , 57–78. 105. Peter Pulzer, Th e Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 154ff . 106. Serafi no Vannutelli’s letter is quoted by Egon Johannes Greipl, “Römische Kurie und Katholische Partei. Die Auseinandersetzung und die Christlichsozialen in Österreich im Jahre 1895,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 44 (1984): 284–343; cf. Giovanni Miccoli, “Antiebraismo, an- tisemitismo: un nesso fl uttuante,” in Les racines chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme politique. Fin XIX–XX siécles , ed. Catherine Brice and Giovanni Miccoli (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 3ff . 107. Grégoire Kauff mann, Édouard Drumont (Paris: Perrin, 2008), 57. 108. Auguste Chirac, Les rois de la République , 2 vols. (Paris: P. Arnould, 1883), 1:35ff . 109. Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings, 109. 110. Cf. Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher. Th e Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 631. 111. Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire en France 1885–1914. Les origines fran- çaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 215–44; and Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 129ff . 112. Zeev Sternhell, Les Anti-Lumières. Du XVIIIe siècle à la Guerre froide (Paris: Fa- yard, 2006), regarding which, see Michele Battini and Nadia Urbinati, “Divorce Within Modernity,” 464–68.

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113. Miccoli, “Antiebraismo, antisemitismo,” 3ff . 114. Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Defi nition of Anti-Semitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 35ff . 115. See Delio Cantimori, “La ‘Metapolitica,’ ” Aretusa 2 (October 1945), now in De- lio Cantimori, Studi di Storia (Turin: Einaudi, 1959), 727ff ., concerning Peter Vi- ereck, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941). 116. Adriano Prosperi, Inquisitori, ebrei, streghe, vol. 2 of Eresie e devozioni. La reli- gione italiana in età moderna (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2010), 111– 33, 139–49, 186ff ., 195ff ., 209ff . 117. Martin Stöhr, “Martin Luther und die Juden,” in Heinz Kremers et al., Die Juden und Martin Luther. Martin Luther und die Juden Geschichte, Wirkungsgeschichte, Herausforderung (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchen Verlag, 1985), 89–108. 118. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Servants of Kings and Not Servants of Servants”: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews (Atlanta: Tam Institute for Jewish Stud- ies, 2005), 39ff . Cf. also Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Transmettre l’histoire juive. En- tretiens avec Sylvie Anne Goldberg (Paris: Albin Michel, 2012), 83ff . 119. Hannah Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 137.

5. THE SHOAH, SOCIAL ANTI-SEMITISM, AND ITS AFTERMATH 1. Delio Cantimori, “La ‘Metapolitica,’ ” Aretusa 2 (October (1945), now in De- lio Cantimori, Studi di Storia (Turin: Einaudi, 1959), 727ff ., concerning Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (New York: Knopf, 1941). 2. Cf. Adriano Prosperi, Il seme dell’intolleranza. Ebrei, eretici, selvaggi: Granada 1492 (Rome: Laterza, 2011), 16. 3. Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity Racism Extermination,” in Th eories of Race and Racism, ed. Les Black and John Solomos (London: Routledge, 2009), 277–93. 4. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: Th e Iberian and the German Models (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1982). 5. Th e reference is to Luciano Canfora, “L’arte del falso,” part 1 of La storia falsa (Mi- lan: Rizzoli, 2008), 11ff ., 31. 6. Serge Klarsfeld, Le mémorial de la déportation des juifs de France (Paris: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1978). 7. Hannah Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 46ff . 8. Anonymous, Auschwitz, ou le Grand Alibi (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1970), 6–11; Serge Th ion, ed., Vérité historique ou vérité politique? (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980), 139ff .; Paul Rassinier, Le mensonge d’Ulysse (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1979);

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and Paul Rassinier, Ulysse trahi par les siens. Complément au Mensonge d’Ulysse (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980), 111–50. Finally, I refer the reader to Robert Fauris- son, “Le problème des chambers à gaz,” in Th ion, Vérité historique , 98–115. 9. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963); I am quoting from the second edition, of 1965, with an epi- logue dealing with the controversies resulting from the fi rst edition. See also Da- vid Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: Einemann, 2004). 10. “Eichmann in Jerusalem. Letters by H. Arendt and G. Scholem,” Encounter (Jan- uary 1964): 51–56 (see also Arendt, Ebraismo e modernità ). 11. Richard I. Cohen, “Breaking the Code: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusa- lem and the Public Polemic,” Michael 13 (1991): 79–81. See also Primo Levi, “Per Adolf Eichmann” (July 20, 1960), in Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 2:544; as well as Bruno Bettelheim, “Eichmann; Th e System; Th e Victims” (originally published in Th e New Republic , June 15, 1963), in Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1979). 12. Moshe Pearlman, Th e Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann (London: Weiden- feld and Nicolson, 1963); and Martha Gellhorn, “Eichmann and the Private Con- science,” Atlantic Monthly (February 1962): 52–59. 13. Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, 305. 14. Ibid., 18. 15. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalemm: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963), 277. 16. Th e reference is, naturally, to Adriano Prosperi, Giustizia bendata. Percorsi storici di un’immagine (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), 55. 17. Part of these refl ections was proposed by me in the seminar Storia, verità e diritto (History, truth, and the law), organized by the Central Committee of the jour- nal Studi Storici the Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea (the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History), held in Rome on April 4, 2008. Th e seminar proceedings were published in Contemporanea 12, no. 1 (January 2009): 105–56, ed. Emmanuel Bella and Raff aele Romanelli. Also: Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la mémoire (Paris: La Découverte, 1987), 4ff . 18. Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la mémoire, 17–18. 19. Ibid., 143. See also Pierre Vidal-Naquet, L’histoire est mon combat (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006). 20. See Robert Faurisson, Mémoire en défense. Contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifi er l’histoire (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980), 271; Th ies Christophersen, La mensonge d’Auschwitz (Paris: Fane, 1973). 21. Klemperer, LTI : Lingua Tertii Imperii. La Langue du IIIe Reich, Carnets d’un philologue (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), 123, 42. Of Klemperer’s other works, see

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also Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (Berlin: Aufb au, 1995). Regarding Klemperer, see Steven E. Ascheim, G. Scholem, H. Arendt, V. Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 91–125; and Esther Cohen Dabah, “Il potere silenzioso del nazismo: la lingua del Terzo Reich,” in Shoah. Percorsi della memoria, ed. Clemens-Carl Härle (Naples: Edizioni Cronopio, 2006), 74ff . 22. Hannah Arendt, Was Bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache , a conversation with Günter Gans broadcast by German Radio on October 28, 1964, now in Archivio Arendt 1930–1948, ed. Simona Forti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001), 48. 23. Enzo Traverso, Auschwitz e gli intellettuali. La Shoah nella cultura del dopoguerra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), 137–68. 24. Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” was published in Paul Celan, Der Sand aus den Urnen (Vienna: Sexl, 1948), It. trans.: Fuga dalla morte , in Paul Celan, Poesie , ed. Giu- seppe Bevilacqua (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 62. See Härle, ed., Shoah , 155–87; and Th eodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft ” (1949), in vol. 10 of Adorno, Gesammelte Schrift en (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 30. 25. On the relationship between Adorno and Celan, see Paul Celan, “Gespräch im Gebirg” (1959), in Paul Celan, Der Meridian und andere Prosa (Frankfurt: Suhr- kamp, 1988), 59. In 1960, however, they began corresponding: see Th eodor W. Adorno and Paul Celan, “Briefwechesel 1960–1968,” ed. Joachim Seng, in Frank- furter Adorno Blätter 8 (2003), regarding which see Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 610–14. On Celan and Heideg ger, see Traverso, Auschwitz e gli intellettuali , 154. 26. Primo Levi, “Dello scrivere oscuro” (1976), in Levi, Opere , 2:676–81. 27. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalemm , 268. 28. Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism , 391. Th e defi nition of the “Lager” or con- centration camp as a “concentration camp universe” goes back to David Rousset, Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1945), but as early as 1946, Eugen Kogon examined the concentration camp mechanism in Der SS-Staat. Das System der Deutschen Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlag- sanstalt, 1946). 29. Georges Bensoussan, Auschwitz en héritage ? D’un bon usage de la mémoire (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 1988), 136; Robert Antelme, L’espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Th e episode of the publication of Se questo è un uomo, is well known. See Ernesto Ferrero, introduction to Primo Levi: un’antologia della crit- ica, ed. Ernesto Ferrero (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), vii–viii; and Ernesto Ferrero, “Nota biografi ca e fortuna critica,” in Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), 192. About the issue of repression in general, see Adina Blady

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Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More (New York: Pantheon, 1990); and, regard- ing the publishing “censorship,” Donatella Chiapponi, La lingua dei lager nazisti (Rome: Carocci, 2004), 48. Also see Anna Foa, “Le stagioni del ricordo,” in Me- moria della Shoah. Dopo i testimoni , ed. Saul Meghnagi (Rome: Donzelli, 2007), 83–92. 30. Annette Wieviorka, L’ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998), 70; but also Annette Wieviorka, Le procès Eichmann (Brussels: Complexe, 1989). About the Eichmann trial, see also David Cesarani, Adolf Eichmann: His Time, Life, and Legacy (Lon- don: Vintage 2005); and, regarding the clash triggered, at the time, by Hannah Arendt’s study, Gary Smith, ed., Hannah Arendt Revisited. ‘Eichmann in Jerusa- lem’ und die Folgen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000). Finally, see the last study by Hanna Yablonka, Th e State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann (New York: Schocken, 2004). 31. See Hannah Arendt, “Th e History of a Great Crime: A Review of Bréviaire de la haine, le IIIe Reich et les juifs by L. Poliakov” (1952), in Arendt, Th e Jewish Writ- ings , 453–61. 32. Regarding the phenomenon of negationism, cf. Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Limor Yagil, Holocaust Denial in France: Analysis of a Unique Phenomenon (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1995). 33. Cf. Primo Levi, La tregua , in Levi, Opere , 1:205. Concerning the risk that com- paring the Shoah with other genocides could lead to a relativist approach, see Bernard Bruneteau, Le siècle des génocides (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004); and Yves Ternon, Le génocide des Arméniens: 1915–1917 (Paris: Seuil, 1977). Tzvetan Todo- rov, Les abus de la mémoire (Paris: Arléa, 1995), however, replies that it is only through a comparison that the true nature of the Shoah can be understood. 34. Th is risk has been clearly dealt with by Anna Rossi-Doria, Memoria e storia. Il caso della deportazione (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1998), 41–44; and Jean- Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes. Génocide, identité, reconnais- sance (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 9ff . 35. See Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide , 81; and Pieter Lagrou, “Victims of Geno- cide and National Memory: Belgium, France, and the Netherlands,” Past and Present 154 (February 1997): 189. 36. Cf. Tom Segev, Th e Seventh Million (New York: Owl Books, 1991), 3ff . As is well known, the reference to an “intentionalist” interpretation of the Shoah is to be found in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Th e War Against the Jews 1933–1945 (Harmond- sworth: Penguin, 1977), 17ff .; see also Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); as well as Yehuda Bauer, Th e Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle:

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University of Washington Press, 1978), 31ff .; Arthur A. Cohen, Th e Tremendum: A Th eological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1981). Th e absence of a plan, thought out far in advance, has been asserted by Arno J. Mayer in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken: Th e Final Solution in History (New York: Macmillan, 1961). A more sound approach to the thesis of a deliberate plan is that of Philippe Burrin, Hitler et les juifs. Genèse d’un genocide (Paris: Presses Univer- sitaires de France, 1989). 37. Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifi ce (1899), now in Les fonctions sociales du sacré , vol. 1 of Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 193ff ., regarding which see Adriano Prosperi, “Cristianesimo e religioni primitive nell’area di Robert Hertz,” in Robert Hertz, La preminenza della destra e altri saggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1994). 38. Regarding anti-Semitism in Islamic countries, see Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Confl ict and Prejudice (New York: Norton, 1986); and Gilles Kepel, À l’ouest de Allah (Paris: Seuil, 1994). For a survey of the broad- est spectrum of modern anti-Jewish attitudes, see Pierre-André Taguieff , Prê- cheurs de haine. Traversée de la judéophobie planétaire (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2004), 213ff . 39. Cf. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Confl ict, 1881– 2001 (New York: First Vintage, 2001), 837ff . 40. Ernst Nolte, Der Europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945. Nationalsozialismus und Bol- schewismus (Frankfurt: Verlag Ullstein; Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1987), main- tains that the fi nal solution of the Jewish question was a necessary imitation of the Soviet terror. 41. Regarding the collapse of the anti-fascist cultural code, see Salvatore Lupo, Par- tito e antipartito. Una storia politica della prima repubblica. 1946–1978 (Rome: Donzelli, 2004), 46ff . On the European Union’s ability to deal with the conse- quences of the new national tensions, see Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (London: Verso 2005), cited from the Italian transla- tion Spectrum (Rome: Dalai 2008), 90–193. 42. Th e description of the Jews as “the most European and the least nationalist of Eu- ropean citizens” is from Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Boston: Hough- ton Miffl in Harcourt, 2002), 225ff . see also Shmuel Trigano, “Gli ebrei come popolo alla prova della Shoah,” in Pardés. Pensare Auschwitz, ed. Shmuel Trigano (Milan: Edizioni Th àlassa De Paz, 1995), 205ff . 43. Alberto Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 3–55; regarding the text and the author’s subsequent reseach, see my “La carne, la morte, la nazione,” Passato e Presente 69

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(2006): 129–40. See also Federico Chabod and Arnaldo Momigliano, Un carteg- gio del 1959, ed. and intro. Gennaro Sasso, postface by Riccardo Di Donato (Bolo- gna: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici—Il Mulino, 2002), 131. 44. Salvatore Satta, De profundis (Padua: Cedam, 1948), new ed., intro. Remo Bodei (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2003), 7–36. Regarding the links among the Risorgimento tradi- tion, fascism, and antifascism, there is the unsurpassed study by Claudio Pavone, “Le idee della Resistenza. Antifascisti e fascisti di fronte alla tradizione del Risor- gimento,” Passato e Presente 7, (January–February 1959): 850–918, now in Claudio Pavone, Alle origini della Repubblica (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995), 3–69. 45. Guri Schwarz, Ritrovare se stessi. Gli ebrei nell’Italia post-fascista (Rome: Laterza, 2004), 174ff .; and Guri Schwarz, “A proposito di una vivace stagione storiografi ca. Letture dell’emancipazione ebraica negli ultimi vent’anni,” Memoria e Ricerca 19 (May–August 2005): 159–79. 46. Alberto Cavaglion has lucidly pointed out that, when speaking about the his- tory of propaganda and persecution (in an Italian context), there is an exclusive reference to 1938 and the racial laws, and that event is placed “on a pedestal of words, as if the history of the hatred against the Jews had begun and fi nished up there, on the monument of indignation” (Alberto Cavaglion, Ebrei senza saperlo [Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2002], 48–49). See also Integrazione e iden- tità. L’esperienza ebraica in Germania e in Italia dall’Illuminismo al Fascismo , ed. Mario Toscano (Milan: Angeli, 1998), 152–66. Regarding the particular problem of the sudden discovery of Zionism as a reply to the trauma of the persecution, see Giorgio Voghera, Quaderno d’Israele (1967; Pordenone: Studio Tesi, 1986); and David Bidussa, “La nostalgia del futuro,” introduction to Enzo Sereni and Emilio Sereni, Politica e Utopia. Lettere 1926–1943 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2000). 47. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “Lettera ad Asa Kasher,” in Yeshayahu Leibowitz, La fede ebraica (Florence: Giuntina, 2001), 107. I refer the reader once again to Shmuel Trigano, “La transparence opaque. La Shoa entre abus de mémoire et idéologie moderne,” Pouvoirs 97 (2001): 95ff .; regarding the idea of a substitute religion, see instead Adi Ofi r, “La nuova religione di Israele,” Il Mulino 1 (1989): 92–100. 48. See, for example, the eye-witness accounts collected in Una gioventù off esa. Ebrei genovesi ricordano , ed. Chiara Bricarelli (Florence: Giuntina, 1995), 43ff . 49. Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), 560; English translation, A Civil War: A His- tory of Italian Resistance , trans. Peter Levy and David Broder (London: Verso, 2013). 50. Satta, De profundis, 56.

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51. Th e statement by the Bonomi cabinet is in Governo Bonomi 18 Giugno 1944–12 Dicembre 1944 , vol. 3 of Verbali del Consiglio dei Ministri , ed. Aldo G. Ricci (Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1990), 3–11. On this point, see Mi- chele Battini, Peccati di memoria. La mancata Norimberga italiana (Rome: La- terza, 2003), 127; Eng. trans., Th e Missing Italian Nuremberg: Cultural Amnesia and Postwar Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 52. Piero Calamandrei, 1939–1941 , vol. 1 of Diario , ed. Giorgio Agosti (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982), 158 (May 7, 1940). On Calamandrei, see Norberto Bobbio, Maestri e compagni (Florence: Passigli, 1984); and Bobbio, Cinquant’anni non ba- stano. Scritti di Norberto Bobbio sulla rivista Il Ponte 1946–1997 (Siena: Fonda- zione Monte dei Paschi di Siena; Florence: Il Ponte, 2005); but also Luca Polese Remaggi, “Il Ponte” di Calamandrei 1945–1956 (Florence: Olschki, 2001). 53. Satta, De profundis , 123ff . 54. Michele Battini, “Le ultime lettere e lo stile del testamento morale,” Italia Con- temporanea 239–240 (June–September 2005): 304ff ., with reference to Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana (8 settembre 1943—25 aprile 1945) , ed. Piero Malvezzi and Giovanni Pirelli (Turin: Einaudi, 1952); and Mimmo Franzinelli, Ultime lettere di condannati a morte e di deportati della Resistenza 1943–1945 (Milan: Mondadori, 2005). 55. Regarding the issue of bombing raids, see Richard Overy, Th e Air War, 1939–1945 (New York: Stein and Day, 1981); and Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, Th e Strategic Air Off ensive Against Germany 1939–1945, 4 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Offi ce, 1961). Ronald Schaff er, Wings of Judgment: American Bomb- ing in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), poses the problem of the moral responsibility of the bombing raids, but the question has been taken up again by Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand (Munich: Ullstein List GmbH, 2002), in English: Jörg Friedrich, Th e Fire: Th e Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 , trans. Al- lison Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and Anthony C. Gray- ling, Among the Dead Cities (New York: Piggott, 2006). Th e work by Winfried George Sebald, Luft krieg und Literatur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2001), 11–48, remains unsurpassed. 56. An incisive observation has been made by Carlo Saletti, La voce dei sommersi (Venice: Marsilio, 1999), 59ff . 57. Tamara Deutscher, ed., L’ebreo non ebreo e altri saggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1969), 62. See David Bidussa, ed., Ebrei moderni. Identità e stereotipi culturali (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989), 18ff .; and Trigano, Pardés. Pensare Auschwitz , 15. 58. On these points, see Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire,” in La République , vol. 1 of Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92), xv–xxv; and Nora,

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“L’ère de la communication,” in Les France, vol. 3 of Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92), 1007ff . 59. Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “A Controversy About the Historicization of National Socialism,” New German Critique 44 (Spring–Summer 1988): 85ff . Th e subject has also been dealt with by Arno J. Mayer, “Memory and History: On the Poverty of Remembering and Forgetting the Judeocide,” Radical History Re- view 56 (Spring 1993): 16–18. (I would like to thank Anna Rossi-Doria for having called my attention to these two texts). 60. Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la mémoire, vii–xi. In 2006, during the centenary of the rehabilitation of Captain Dreyfus, Vidal-Nacquet gave his last lecture, “Mes aff aires Dreyfus,” stating: “Je serai dreyfusard au même titre que je serai histo- rien.” See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, La brisure et l’attente (1930–1955) , vol. 1 of Mémoires (Paris: Seuil, 2007), v. Th e most famous of Vidal-Naquet’s “Dreyfusard commit- ments” was L’a ff aire Audin , published with a preface by Laurent Schwartz in 1958: see the reissue with new texts, edited by Vidal-Naquet: L’a ff aire Audin (1957–1978) (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989), 7–8. In an unacceptable way, Leonardo Paggi also seeks to explain the transformations of memory in Il popolo dei morti. La repubblica italiana nata dalla guerra 1940–1946 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009), 7–81. 61. See “Th e Architectural Language of Daniel Libeskind,” in Stories of an Exhibition. Two Millennia of German Jewish History (Berlin: Stift ung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, 2001), 178. (Th e axis of continuity, which leads from the entrance of the museum to the spacious area of the permanent exhibition, constitutes the trunk from which spring the broken branches of the Diaspora and the Shoah). 62. See Roberto della Rocca, “La memoria nella tradizione ebraica,” in Memoria della Shoah , 47–58. 63. See the excellent historiographical review by Konrad Kwiet, “Zur historiographi- schen Behandlung der Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 27 (1980): 149–92; and Otto D. Kulka, “Major Trends and Tenden- cies in German Historiography on National Socialism and the Jewish Question 1924–1984,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 30 (1985): 212–42. Finally, see Saul Friedländer, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical Study of Nazi Policies Toward the Jews and an Essay in Interpretation,” Studies 16 (1984): 1–50; but also Michael R. Marrus, “Th e History of the Holo- caust: A Survey of Recent Literature,” Journal of Modern History 59 (1987): 114– 60, later in Michael R. Marrus, Th e Holocaust in History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988). Last, but not least, see the signifi cant work by Hans Mommsen, “Die Realisierung des Utopischen. Die Endlösung der Judenfrage im Dritten Reich,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 381–420.

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64. See Burrin, Hitler et les juifs , chaps. 4 and 5. Of Martin Broszat see “Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus,” Merkur 39 (1985): 373–85; for Christopher R. Browning, see Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London: Harper Collins, 1992), 142ff . Raul Hilberg’s great work is Th e Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967). See also Hans Mommsen, Totalitarismus und Faschismus: Eine wissen- schaft liche und politische Begriff skontroverse (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1980), 69ff . For a comprehensive reassessment see Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, the Final Solution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), passim , and Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 65. Kurt Pätzold and Erika Schwarz, Tagesordnung: Judenmord. Die Wannsee. Kon- ferenz am 20. Januar 1942. Eine Dokumentation zur Organisation der “ Endlosung ” (Berlin: Metropol, 1992). For Arendt, see Eichmann in Jerusalem . 66. See Franz Neumann, Behemoth: Th e Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942); and Ernst Fraenkel, Th e Dual State: A Contribution to the Th eory of Dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). Th e problem has been considered by Klaus Hildebrand, “Monokratie oder Polykratie? Hitlers Herrschaft und das Dritte Reich,” in Der Führerstaat. Mythos und Realität , ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (Stuttgart: Klett- Cotta, 1981), 95ff . 67. Th e failure to fi nd an “order” constitutes one of the negationist “arguments” proposed by David Irving, Hitler’s War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977); see the demolishing criticism by Martin Broszat, “Hitler und die Genesis der ‘Endlösung’. Aus Anlass der Th esen von David Irving,” Vierteljahrsheft e für Zeit- geschichte 25 (1997): 737–75; Eng. trans. “Hitler and the Genesis of the ‘Final So- lution’: An Assessment of David Irving’s Th eses,” in Aspects of the Th ird Reich , ed. Hannsjoachim Wolfgang Koch (London: MacMillan, 1985), 390–429. See also Dan Jacobson, “Th e Downfall of David Irving,” Times Literary Supplement , April 21, 2000, 11–12, regarding the lawsuit won by Deborah Esther Lipstadt, the author of Denying the Holocaust: Th e Growing Assault on Truth and Memory , who had been sued by Irving. 68. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, Th e Racial State: Germany 1933– 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 250ff . 69. Wolfgang Scheffl er, “La legislazione antiebraica nazista,” in La legislazione an- tiebraica in Italia e in Europa , Atti del Convegno nel cinquantenario delle leggi razziali, Rome, October 17–18, 1988 (Rome: Edizioni della Camera dei Deputati, 1989), 279ff .; Collotti, “Antisemitismo e legislazione antiebraica in Austria,” in La

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legislazione antiebraica , 293ff .; and Roger Errera, “La legislazione antisemita di Vichy,” in La legislazione antiebraica , 319ff . 70. See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Holocaust (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), It. trans. Modernità e Olocausto (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 273ff . 71. Andrzej J. Kamiński, Konzentrationslager 1896 bis heute. Funktion, Typologie (1982; Munich: Piper, 1990), 279ff ; Bruneteau, Le siècle de genocides , 122ff . 72. Saul Friedländer, “Some Refl ections on the Historicization of National Social- ism,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 16 (1987): 313–24 (Friedländer cites the conclusion of Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 256). 73. See Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland Aft er Auschwitz (New York: Ran- dom House, 2006), 248ff . 74. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo, in vol. 1 of Levi, Opere , 86ff . See the studies by Cesare Cases, Cesare Segre, Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Giovanni Tesio, Gi- useppe Grassano, Cynthia Ozick, and Stefano Levi Della Torre, in Primo Levi: un’antologia critica . An English translation of Levi’s book is Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 75. Momigliano, Pagine ebraiche , 15. Momigliano’s judgment almost literally echoes the conclusions of Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Th ird Reich, Bavaria, 1933–1945, new ed. (1983; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. See also Johann-Baptist Metz, “Cristiani ed ebrei dopo Auschwitz. Ed una rifl essione sulla religione borghese,” in Johann-Baptist Metz, Al di là della religione borghese. Discorsi sul futuro del cristianesimo (Brescia: Queriniana, 1981), 37ff ., originally published as Jenseits bürgerlicher Religion (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1980),; and Michel Remaud, Chrétiens et Juifs entre le passé et l ’avenir (Brussels: Lessius, 2000), It. trans. Cristiani ed ebrei tra passato ed avvenire (Bologna: EDB, 2002), 20–21. See also Stefano Levi Della Torre, Mosaico (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1994), 92; and Giovanni Miccoli, “Due nodi: la libertà religiosa e le rela- zioni con gli ebrei,” in Storia del Concilio Vaticano II , vol. 4, ed. Giuseppe Albe- rigo and Alberto Melloni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), 199–219. 76. Giovanni Miccoli, “Antiebraismo, antisemitismo: un nesso fl uttuante,” in Les racines chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme politique. Fin XIX–XX siécles, ed. Catherine Brice and Giovanni Miccoli (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 3–21; and, above all, Miccoli, I dilemmi e i silenzi di Pio XII. Vaticano, Seconda guerra mon- diale e Shoah (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000), 258ff . 77. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: Th e Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 78. Vasilij Grossman, Life and Fate (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006);

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this passage has recently been referred to by Gad Lerner, Scintille. Una storia di anime vagabonde (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2009), 116–17. 79. Henri-Irénée Marrou, De la connaissance historique (Paris: Seuil, 1954), It. trans. La conoscenza storica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1962), 85. See Benoît Lacroix, “Compte-rendu,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 8, no. 3 (1934): 435–41. 80. See Tzvetan Todorov, Face à l’extrême (Paris: Seuil, 1991), Engl. trans., Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Holt, 1997) 285ff . See also Wlodek Goldkorn and Rudi Assuntino, Il guardiano . Marek Edelman rac- conta (Palermo: Sellerio, 1998), 83ff . 81. See Goldkorn and Assuntino, Il guardiano, 28; and Marek Edelman, C’era l’amore nel ghetto (Palermo: Sellerio, 2009), 176. 82. Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Th e Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies have Attempted it? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Th e fundamental works about the issue of bombing Auschwitz are Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981); and Walter Laqueur, Th e Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s Fi- nal Solution (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979). On these two works see the review by L. A. Rollins in Journal of Historical Review 4, no. 1 (2002): 93–108. 83. Segev, Th e Seventh Million, 26ff . See Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” Menorah Journal 33 (August 1945): and Morris, Righteous Victims, 209ff . 84. Cf. , Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 61ff .; but cf. also André Neher, Le puits de l ’exil (Paris: Albin Michel, 1966). 85. Fraenkel, Th e Dual State , 255ff . 86. For a reconstruction of this genealogical line, see David Vital, Zionism: Th e For- mative Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Yaacov Shavit, “Th e ‘Glorious Century’ or the ‘Cursed Century’: Fin-de-Siècle Europe and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History 26 (1991): 553–74; Anita Shapira, “Labour Zionism and the October Revolution,” Journal of Con- temporary History 26 (1991): 623–56. 87. Of Moses Hess, cf. Rom und Jerusalem. Die letzte Nationalitätenfrage (Leipzig: Wengler, 1862). Of David Ben-Gurion, see “Israel’s First Steps,” in Ben-Gurion, Years of Challenge (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1963), 45–68; and for a radical criticism of the years of the Labour Governments, see Vittorio D. Segre, Le metamorfosi di Israele (Turin: Utet, 2006), 79ff . Regarding Hess, see Isaiah Berlin, Th e Life and Opinions of Moses Hess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), then reissued in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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88. Zeev Sternhell, Th e Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State , trans. by David Maisel (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1998)15ff .; see Daniel Carpi and Gedalia Yogev, eds., Zionism: Studies in the History of the Zionist Movement and the Jewish Community in Pal- estine (Tel Aviv: Masada Press, 1975), 49–101; and Arthur Hertzberg, ed., Th e Zi- onist Idea (New York: Atheneum, 1984), 99ff . 89. Cf. Segev, Th e Seventh Million , 63ff .; Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State: Nation, Class, and the Shaping of Modern Israel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 187–200. 90. Gershom Scholem, “Th e Science of Judaism: Th en and Now,” in Th e Messianic Idea of Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 32. 91. Ruth Ebenstein, “Remembered Th rough Rejection: Yom Hashoah in the Aske- nazy Haredy Daily Press 1950–2000,” Israel Studies 8, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 155ff .; and, as regards research and studies, Boaz Cohen, “L’historiographie israélienne de la Shoah,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah 188 (January–June 2008). However, above all, I refer the reader to Dalia Ofer, “Th e Strength of Remembrance: Com- memorating the Holocaust During the First Decade of Israel,” Jewish Social Stud- ies 6, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 31ff . 92. Arille Rein, “L’historien, la mémoire nationale et l’État. L’oeuvre de Ben Zion Dinur pour la commémoration et la recherche sur la Shoah en Israel,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah 182 (January–June 2005): 257–58. 93. Anita Shapira, L’imaginaire d’Israël: Histoire d’une culture politique (Paris: Calman- Lévy, 2005), 292ff .; as well as Hanna Yablonka, “Th e Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel,” Israel Studies 8, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 8ff . On the para- digms of the memory of the Shoah, see Bidussa, ed., Ebrei moderni . 94. Th e fundamental reference work is Georges Bensoussan, Un nom impérissable. Israël. Le sionisme et la destruction des Juifs d’Europe (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 115ff . See Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2005), 59ff .; Ada Yurman, “La ‘victimisation’ comme élé- ment d’une mémoire collective de la société israélienne,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah 182 (January–June 2005): 201. 95. Stefano Levi Della Torre, Essere fuori luogo. Il dilemma ebraico fra diaspora e ritorno (Rome: Donzelli, 1995), 3–60. 96. Martin Buber, “Eine binationale Auff assung des Zionismus,” in Ein Land und Zwei Völker. Zur jüdisch-arabischen Frage (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1983), Ital- ian trans., in Martin Buber, Una terra e due popoli. Sulla questione ebraico-araba (Florence: Giuntina, 2008), 243–50. 97. Edward W. Said, Out of Place (London: Granta Books, 1999), 14. For an observa- tion on the Jewish and Palestinian Arab Diasporas, see Lerner, Scintille , 33ff .

C6901.indb 303 1/27/16 10:26 AM 304 5. the shoah, social anti-semitism, and its aftermath

98. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005. 99. See Dietrich Wetzel, ed., Deutschen, Juden und Palästina Konfl ikt Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1983); and Pierre-André Taguieff , La nouvelle judéophobie (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2002). Of great importance is the distinction between the various components of anti-Semitism proposed by Brian Klug, “A Plea for Distinctions: Disentangling Anti-Americanism from Anti-Semitism,” in Th e Anti-American Century, ed. Ivan Kraster and Alan McPherson (Budapest: Cen- tral European University Press, 2007), 127–59. 100. Regarding the pogrom of 1941, see Gross, Neighbors , 67ff .; regarding the postwar pogroms, see Gross, Fear , 82ff . 101. See Raymond Aron, interview by Mario Baccianini, “Antisemitismo di sinistra,” Mondoperaio 10 (October 1981): 25–29; and Stefano Levi Della Torre, “Fine del dopoguerra e sintomi antisemitici,” Rivista di Storia contemporanea 3 (1984): 455. 102. See the documentation collected by Guri Schwarz, in “Gli echi italiani della guerra del Libano. Considerazioni su antisemitismo, autocoscienza ebraica e memoria della Shoah,” Laboratoire Italien (ENS Éditions) 11 (2011): 133ff ., later developed in Arturo Marzano and Guri Schwarz, Attentato alla Sinagoga. Roma 8 Ottobre 1982 (Rome: Viella, 2013), 175ff . See also the useful synthesis by Gadi Luzzato Voghera, Antisemitismo a sinistra (Turin: Einaudi, 2007); Maurizio Mo- linari, La sinistra e gli ebrei in Italia 1967–1993 (Milan: Corbaccio, 1995), 119ff .; and Alfonso M. Di Nola, Antisemitismo in Italia 1962–1972 (Florence: Vallecchi, 1973). Unsatisfactory is Simon Levis Sullam, L’archivio antiebraico. Il linguaggio dell ’antisemitismo moderno (Rome: Laterza, 2008). Th ere is also the interesting research by Michel Dreyfus, L’antisémitisme à gauche de 1870 à nos jours (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 245ff . 103. See Stefano Levi Della Torre, Antisemitismo (Rome: Dizionario Storico Treccani, 2010).

C6901.indb 304 1/27/16 10:26 AM INDEX

Acerbo, Giacomo, 114, 137, 273n97 anticapitalism, anti-Jewish, 3, 16, 33; Action Française, 111, 124; articles of, Bloch, Marc, and, 145–55; with 85; politics and, 80, 82–85, 90–91, 94, emancipation, assimilation, and social 96–97; with technocracy and social- anti-Semitism, 155–66; with La Lupa , ism, 104 124–32; language and, 7; literature, Adam, Paul, 87 166–80; origins, 5–6; social anti- addiction, 83 Semitism and, 155–66, 181–88 Adler, Victor, 59, 62–63 Anti-Semitic League, 15, 24, 89 Adorno, Th eodor W., 4, 189 anti-Semitism: agriculture and, 47, 77–78, Africa, 138 173; banking and, 18, 72, 88, 168–69, 173; Agliardi, mons. Antonio, 76, 77 defi ned, 4, 7; economics and, 4–5, 16– agriculture: anti-Semitism and, 47, 77–78, 19, 137; feudalism and, 167–68; genesis 173; farming, 14, 15–16; free market, of, 154–55, 181–82; growth of, 16; justifi - 27–28 cations for, 22–23, 26, 28, 34–35, 62–63, Agyriàdes, Paul, 59 132, 135–38, 162; labor and, 45–46, 49, Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 192 89; Marx and, 240n165; media with, 84, Alexander II (Tsar), 24 89–90, 113, 131, 174–75; origins, modern, Alighieri, Dante, 134 16, 73; politics and, 16–18, 45–47, 108–9; Altman, Georges, 278n12 propaganda, 9–10, 54, 79; as rhetoric, 5; Ambrose (Saint), 17 Roman Catholic Church and, 76–77, Amouretti, Frédéric, 84 139–40, 174–75, 182–83, 202, 211, 247n21; Ancient and Modern Protocols of the Meet- as state doctrine, 137–39, 143; as tradi- ings of the Elders of Zion, 51. See also tion, 19. See also social anti-Semitism Protocols of the Elders of Zion , Th e Antisemitism (Arendt), 72 Antelme, Robert, 190 Antoni, Carlo, 153

C6901.indb 305 1/27/16 10:26 AM 306 index

Antschel, Paul. See Celan, Paul Bardèche, Maurice, 106 Aquinas, Th omas, 17 Barrault, Emile, 40 Arab League, 210 Barrès, Maurice, 6, 86–87, 113, 143; criti- Arendt, Hannah, 7, 16, 141, 175, 184, cism of, 149–50; infl uence, 205; politics 242nn188–89; with Eichmann trial, and, 249n49 185–87; with emancipation, criticism Barrès, Philippe (son), 96 of, 66–68; on ethics, collapse of, 9; on Baudeau (Abbé), 28 Nazis, language of, 188; social anti- Bauer, Bruno, 61 Semitism and, 59–73, 156–57, 159; Zion- Bauer, Otto, 62, 63, 239n160 ism and, 70–71 Bavaria, 15, 36 aristocracy, of money, 163 Bebel, August, 7, 8, 63, 182 Aron, Raymond, 99 Belgium, 76 Aron, Robert, 106, 107 Belin, René, 97, 143 Artuys, Jacques, 96 Belloc, Hilaire, 135 assimilation, 61; with anticapitalism, Benda, Julien, 149–51, 278n16 anti-Jewish, 155–66; capitalism and, 60, Ben-Gurion, David, 186, 205 166; criticism of, 69, 71; emancipation Benjamin, Walter, 61, 183 and, 157–60; the Enlightenment and, Bentham, Jeremy, 33, 42, 170 156, 157, 159 Bergery, Gaston, 97 Attolico, Bernardo, 137 Bergson, Henri, 279n20 Auerbach, Erich, 3 Berlin, Isaiah, 61, 255n91 Aufk lärung, 1, 159, 161, 162 Berlin Conference of Wansee, 198–99 Auschwitz. See concentration camps Bernanos, Georges, 109 Austin, John L., 217n12 Bernhard, Georg, 102 Austria, 15, 24, 27, 45–46, 63, 173 Bernstein, Eduard, 63, 216n4 Axelrod, Pavel, 65 Berth, Édouard, 268n49 Berthelot, Jean, 97 Babi Yar massacre, 200 Bertolotti, Maurizio, 47 Bacconnier, Firmin, 90 Bey, Osman, 51 Bahr, Hermann, 7 Bianchi, Michele, 120 Bainville, Jacques, 84 Biarritz (Goedsche), 51, 80 Balaguer, Joaquin, 86 Bible, the, 171, 172; Mosaic law and, 161; Balfour Declaration (1917), 68, 136 usury in Old Testament, 17, 28 Balzac, Honoré de, 94, 169, 232n89; infl u- Bichelonne, Denis, 97 ence, 254n85; Mussolini and, 112; power Bildung, 29, 67 and, 57–58 Billot, Louis (Cardinal), 80 banking, 1, 78; anti-Semitism and, 18, 72, Bismarck, Otto von, 151 88, 168–69, 173; collapse, 25, 88; legisla- Blanc, Louis, 42 tion, 164; Mussolini and, 132 Blanchot, Maurice, 106 Banque du Peuple, 78 Blanquists, 48, 49, 59 Barbera, Mario, 141 blindfolds, synagogues and, 187

C6901.indb 306 1/27/16 10:26 AM index 307

Bloch, Ernst, 61 Buchholz, Friedrich, 163 Bloch, Marc (Narbonne), 27, 30, 278n12, Burrin, Philippe, 198 278n14; with anticapitalism, anti- Butmi, Georgij V., 51, 52 Jewish, 145–55; Kantorowicz and, 147, 148; last will of, 145–47 Caesarism, 42, 53, 54, 57, 117, 148 Blücher, Heinrich, 68 Cahm, Eric, 215n3 Blum, Léon, 58, 108, 135, 225n35 Cahan, Abe, 59, 63 Bobbio, Norberto, 279n20 Calamandrei, Piero, 195 Boivin, Pierre, 258n105 Cantimori, Delio, 115, 178, 181 bombings, 211, 298n55, 302n82 Cantimori Mezzamonti, Emma, 41–42 Bonald, Louis de (Viscount), 2, 3, 6, 20, capitalism, 1; assimilation and, 60, 166; in 152, 155; with emancipation and usury, context, 13–14; with emancipation and 14–37, 163, 164; with feudalism, 35–36, usury, 14–37; Jewish elite and, 43, 44; 38; infl uence, 39, 41, 42, 49, 72, 75, 82, with juiverie (1845–1886), 37–58; nation 90, 106, 116, 162, 166–68; with literature, and, 100; U.S. and, 209; usury and, anti-Jewish, 30, 31, 33–36 14–15, 50, 61. See also anticapitalism, Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 42, 52, 53 anti-Jewish Bonaparte, Napoleon (Emperor), 34, Carducci, Giosuè, 128 43–44, 164 Carlyle, Th omas, 39, 42 Bonapartism, 44, 48, 63 Carnot, Sadi, 55 Bonomi, Ivanoe, 194–95 Castle , Th e (Kafk a), 69 Bosnia, 203 Cavaglion, Alberto, 297n46 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 30, 31, 47, 79, Cazzani, Giovanni (Monsignor), 140 172 Celan, Paul (Antschel, Paul), 188–89, 190 Bottai, Giuseppe, 107, 117, 273n97 Cercle Proudhon, 96, 111, 113 Bouglé, Célestin, 98, 103 Cerfb err, Herz, 159–60 Boulanger, Georges Ernest (General), 25, Cesarani, David, 185–86 48, 49, 63, 88 Césarisme et Christianisme (Proudhon), Bounan, Michel, 8 168, 232n91 Bourgeois, Léon, 55 Chabauty (Abbot), 89 Bourget, Paul, 89, 93, 150 Chabod, Federico, 114, 153, 155, 283n34 Boyer, Antide, 87 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 77 Brasillach, Robert, 106 charity. See social charity Bravo, Anna, 198 Charte du travail, 97, 143 Briand, Aristide, 80 Charter of Quarnaro, 124 Brissot, J.-P., 161 Chateaubriand, René de, 20 Broszat, Martin, 197, 198 Chaux, Édouard, 103 Browning, Christopher, 198 Chirac, August, 6, 49–50, 59, 175 Brunschwig, Henri, 98 Christianity, 168, 232n91; with anti-Jewish Buber, Martin, 61, 208 Christian tradition, 16–24, 34, 43, 189; Buchheim, Adolf, 233n102 with free market, 2; Jews and, 1, 2, 10,

C6901.indb 307 1/27/16 10:26 AM 308 index

Christianity (continued ) conspiracy. See Jews 16–19, 21–22, 34–35, 160, 178–79, 211; corporatism: defi ned, 15; democracy and, Orano and, 122–24; propaganda, Chris- 82; in Italy, 102–3; social anti-Semitism tian Social, 2; Proudhon and, 78–79 and, 80–82, 86, 90–92; technocracy Chrysostom, John, 17 and, 104 citizenship: France and, 160, 164–65; Italy Cortés, Donoso, 20, 165 and, 142; rights, 2, 5, 16, 21, 26, 36–37, Cortesi, Decio, 118 82. See also Declaration of the Rights of Coston, Henry, 58, 109 Man and the Citizen Cousin, Victor, 31 Civelli and Lux, 268n44 Cristo e Quirino (Orano), 122, 123, 133 Civil Code, 24, 142 Critica Nuova (Orano), 122 Civiltà Cattolica , La . See Roman Catholic Croce, Benedetto, 148, 150, 151–52, Church 153, 195 Clagny, Gauthier de, 87 Culte du moi (Barrès, M.), 86 Clemenceau, Georges, 155 Cultural Institute of Rome, 107 Clerc, Henri, 103 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 152 Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas Marie- Curtius, Ernst Robert, 147, 153, 154 Adelaide, count of, 159, 161 Cohn, Norman, 50, 236n122 Damascus, 18 Colamarino, Giulio, 94 Dandieu, Arnaud, 106, 107 Colli, Luigi, 47 D’Andrea, Ettore, 107 colonialism: Israel and, 204, 209, 213; rac- Daniel-Rops, 106 ism and, 138 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 95, 124, 128, 131, 150 Communist Manifesto (Engels and Davy, Georges, 97 Marx), 41 De Ambris, Alceste, 95, 120, 124 Comte, Auguste, 82, 83, 85, 170; infl uence, Déat, Marcel, 258n105; politics and, 108–9; 39, 90–92, 93; infl uences on, 75; positiv- with technocracy and socialism, 96–97, ism and, 251n69; power and, 57 98–101, 102–4 concentration camps: Auschwitz, 7, 10, Declaration of the Rights of Man and the 181, 183, 185, 188, 193–94, 197, 203, 206, Citizen, 1, 34, 86, 152, 155, 161 213; with ethics, collapse of, 16–17; Italy De Donno, Alfredo, 140, 274n103 and, 142; negationism and, 184 De Felice, Renzo, 115, 268n49 Concordat, 133, 134, 142 Defence of Usury (Bentham), 33 Confessions d’un revolutionnaire (Prou- De Gasperi, Alcide, 244n3 dhon), 168 De Gerando, Joseph Marie, 38, 168 Confortatorio di Mantova (Martini), 196 De la Rocque, François (Colonel), 96 Congress of the Socialist International, del Corro, Escobar, 22 59, 63 della Marca, Giacomo, 18 Conseil National Économique, 104 della Margarita, Solaro (Count), 42 Considerant, Victor, 42 Della Rocca, Roberto, 198 Considérations sur la France , 56 Della Torre, Stefano Levi, 19, 207

C6901.indb 308 1/27/16 10:26 AM index 309

De Luc, Jean-André, 162–63 (1845–1886), 43, 46–50, 53–58; on De Maistre, Joseph, 20, 53, 56, 94, 238n147, Malon, 235n119 255n91 Duby, Georges, 227n53 De Man, Henri, 98, 101, 103, 108 Duchêne, George, 167–68, 232n91 De Michelis, Cesare, 50, 51–52, 112, du Lac de Fugéres, Stanislas, 48, 175 236n127, 236n129 Dumézil, Georges, 147, 154, 227n53 democracy, 92; corporatism and, 82; Dumonteil, Jean-Camille, 87 defeated, 149; fascism and, 111; Roman Dupuis, René, 106, 107 Catholic Church and, 84. See also Durkheim, Émile, 75, 76, 83, 258n106; Social Democratic Party infl uence, 98–99; socialism and, 100 Demokratische Verein, 44, 174 Déroulède, Paul, 54, 88, 89, 90 economics: anti-Semitism and, 4–5, Derrida, Jacques, 217n12 16–19, 137; banking, 1, 18, 25, 72, 78, 88, Der Talmud Jude (Rohling), 19 132, 164, 168–69, 173; crisis, 24, 97, 99, Deutschland (Heine), 42 102, 155, 174, 177; feudalism of, 34–36, De Viti De Marco, Antonio, 121 38, 43, 44, 48; free market, 2, 27–28, Dézamy, Th éodore, 169 44, 176–77, 180; in Germany, 142–43; Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et with money, aristocracy of, 163; usury, Montesquieu (Joly), 51–52, 54, 55 1–3, 14–37, 40, 50, 61, 159–65, 168–69, Dialogues philosphiques (Renan), 94 174; utilitarian economics, 34, 42–43; Diario (Calamandrei), 195 Vienna Stock Exchange, 24, 45, 174 Diaspora, 69, 71, 191, 212 Edelman, Marek, 202–3 Die Juden (Lessing), 159 Edict of Nantes, 37 Di Lamennais, Félicité, 165 Eichmann, Adolf, 185–87, 190, 199 Dimier, Louis, 84 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Dinur, Ben Zion, 207 Banality of Evil (Arendt), 185–87 discrimination. See anti-Semitism Einaudi, Luigi, 121 diseases, 83 Ein Wintermärchen (Heine), 42 Disraeli, Benjamin, 41–42 elites, 147; with anti-Semitic propa- Dodecanese Islands, 111 ganda, 9–10; capitalism with Jewish Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von, 66, elite, 43, 44 159–60 emancipation, 1, 6; with anticapitalism, Dominique, Pierre, 97, 101 anti-Jewish, 155–66; assimilation and, Drault, Jean, 48, 109 157–60; criticism of, 66–68, 135, 159–60, Dreyfus, Alfred, 54–55, 59, 80, 84, 89, 187 163, 170; in France, 161–63; infl uence of, Dreyfus Aff air, 4, 25, 46, 60, 69, 70; 29, 66; labor and, 37; with social anti- Drumont and, 54–55; infl uence, 155 Semitism, 59–73; support for, 37, 162; Drumont, Édouard, 2, 6–7, 63, 78, 109, usury and, 14–37, 159–60, 163, 164–65, 134, 235n114; anti-Semitism and, 79, 174; women with self-emancipation, 71 88, 89–90, 173, 175, 183; Dreyfus Aff air Enfantin, Prosper, 40 and, 54–55; infl uence, 113; with juiverie Engels, Friedrich, 41, 88

C6901.indb 309 1/27/16 10:26 AM 310 index

Enlightenment, the, 1, 4, 29, 42; assimila- Ferri, Enrico, 120, 122 tion and, 156, 157, 159; cancellation of, Ferry, Jules, 89 81–82; criticism of, 67, 68, 70; socialism feudalism: anti-Semitism and, 167–68; of and, 39. See also Aufk lärung ; emancipa- economics, 34–36, 38, 43, 44, 48; feudal tion; Haskalah socialism, 167–68, 175 Eribon, Didier, 283n38 Filmer, Robert, 30, 31 Essai philosophique sur le gouvernement Fink, Carole, 278n15 civil (Ramsay), 31 First Vatican Council (1870), 21 Essai sur la régéneration physique, morale Fleury, Claude, 32 et politique des juifs (Grégoire), 161–62 Foa, Vittorio, 141, 274n108 ethics, collapse of, 9, 16–17 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 52 eugenics, 114 forgeries. See Protocols of the Elders of Eusebius of Caesarea, 17 Zion , Th e Evola, Julius, 114 Fortunato, Giustino, 118 expulsion, of Jews: in Italy, 18; in Spain, 22 Foucault, Michel, 217n12 extermination. See genocide Fourier, Charles, 20, 40, 42, 43, 47, 168, 170 Fournier, Marcel, 257n101 Fabrègues, Jean de, 107 Fovel, Massimo, 126, 268n49 Faenza, Andrea da, 18 France, 41, 56, 168, 252n74; citizenship family, 32, 85, 87 and, 160, 164–65; emancipation in, Fanelli, Giovanni Attilio, 107 161–63; free market in, 27–28; propa- Fantocchiani, Gina, 266n20 ganda in, 2 Farinacci, Roberto, 140 Franciscans. See Roman Catholic Church farming, 14, 15–16 Francisci, Pietro de, 114 fascism, 102, 177, 255n88; with anti-Jewish Frankel, Jonathan, 157 anticapitalism and La Lupa, 124–32; De Fratelli Bocca, 268n44 Maistre and, 255n91; democracy and, Frédéric, Pierre, 107 111; Le Faisceau and, 96; Orano and, 112, Frederick II (Holy Roman Emperor), 147 114, 116, 132–43; propaganda and, 137; free market, 1; agriculture, 27–28; Roman Catholic Church and, 134–35; Christianity with, 2; labor and, 44, with socialism, 14–15, 94–97, 101, 103, 176–77, 180 104; with subversion and superstition Freemasons, 77, 120; Judaism and, 245n6, of science, 111–24 247n21; politics and, 124–32 Fayol, Henri, 104 Fresco, Nadine, 219n28 Febvre, Lucien, 149 Freud, Sigmund, 231n85, 234n109 Federzoni, Luigi, 82 Freyer, Hans, 108 Feltre, Bernardino da, 18 Friedländer, David, 162 Fénelon, André-Michel, 31 Friedländer, Saul: anti-Jewish anticapital- Ferrer, Francisco, 131 ism and, 145–47, 148, 155, 182; memory Ferrero, Guglielmo, 117, 119 and, 197, 198

C6901.indb 310 1/27/16 10:26 AM index 311

fund raising, 55, 237n141 Gonet, Gabriel de, 173 Funkestein, Amos, 157, 160 Göring, Hermann, 199 government: with anti-Semitism as state Gailhard-Bancel, Henri de, 77–78 doctrine, 137–39, 143; social charity Galey, Louis-Émile, 107 and, 81 Gallian, Emmanuel, 89 Gramsci, Antonio, 107, 128, 150; Marxism Gauchet, Marcel, 5, 217n13 and, 151; on Orano, 133; science and, 113, Gaxotte, Pierre, 154 119–20 Gellhorn, Martha, 185 Granger, Ernest, 89 genetics, 83, 119 Grattenauer, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 45, genocide, 183, 190, 236n122; Nazis and, 156, 163 184, 185, 199–200; negationism and, 9; Graves, Robert, 53 “new,” 191; propaganda for, 201. See also Great Depression, 97, 99, 102, 155 Shoah, the Great Transformation, 157, 169, 176, Gentile, Giovanni, 133, 255n88 208, 211 George, Stefan, 147–48 Grégoire, Henri, 36–37, 161–62, 164, 166 Gérard de Cambrai (Bishop), 227n53 Grévy, Jules, 25 German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler Gropius, Walter, 102 (Turner), 220n3 Grossman, Vasilij, 202 Germany, 281n27; assimilation in, 156; Grund, C., 163 Aufk lärung, 1, 159, 161, 162; economics, Guérin, Jules, 25, 88, 89, 90 142–43; Nazis, 10, 14, 22, 137, 156–57, 159, Guesde, Jules, 49, 175 179, 184–86, 188, 199–200, 203, 220n2; Guidi, Corrado, 245n6 Social Democratic Party in, 80, 102 Guizot, François, 41, 171 Germinario, Francesco, 265n18 Geschonden Wereld (Huizinga), 277n9 Habsburg Empire, 2, 24, 44, 46, 63 Gesellschaft der Volks, 44, 174 Halévy, Élie, 14–15, 39, 169 Ghillany, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18–19 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), 1, 60, Gibrat, Robert, 97 159, 161 Gimon, Pierre, 107 Haupt, Georges, 39, 231n84 Ginzburg, Carlo, 7, 8, 51–52, 55, 154 Hausner, Gideon, 186 Giolitti, Giovanni, 95, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125 Heidegger, Martin, 189 Giretti, Edoardo, 121 Heine, Heinrich, 42 Giudice, Giovanni, 255n88 Hell, François-Joseph-Antoine, 160, 162, Gli ebrei in Italia (Orano), 113, 116, 123, 133 163 globalization, 11, 192 Henry, Hubert-Joseph (Colonel), 54–56 Gobineau, Arthur de (Count), 23, 114 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 67–68, 71, Goedsche, Hermann, 51, 53, 80 160–61, 205 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 148 Hertzberg, Arthur, 165 Gohier, Urbain, 80 Herz, Henriette, 71

C6901.indb 311 1/27/16 10:26 AM 312 index

Herzl, Th eodor, 46, 51, 64, 71 in, 102–3; emancipation in, 24; Free- Hess, Moses, 205 masons and, 120, 124–32; with Jews, Heydrich, Reinhard, 199 expulsion of, 18; with literature, anti- Hilberg, Raul, 182, 186, 198, 199 Jewish, 113; with Orano and fascism, Himmler, Heinrich, 199 132–43; PSI, 120–21; Racial Manifesto Hirschman, Albert O., 5, 21, 177 and, 139, 273n97; the Shoah and, Histoire ecclésiastique (Fleury), 32 192–94; with superstition of science Historisch-Politische Blätter , 27 and subversion, 111–24 Hitler, Adolf, 7, 9, 10, 11, 138, 199 hoaxes. See Protocols of the Elders of Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, 206 Zion , Th e Jardin, Jean, 106 Hofer, Dalia, 198 Jaspers, Karl, 16 Holocaust. See Shoah, the Jedwabne massacre, 210 Horkheimer, Max, 4 Jerome (Saint), 17 Huizinga, Johan, 147, 148, 277n9 Je Suis Partout (newspaper), 112, 175 Hungary, 15, 173, 209 Jesuits. See Roman Catholic Church Hutcheson, Francis, 42, 170 Jesus, 179, 183, 236n127 Jeune République, 97, 101 Il Divenire Sociale (Leone), 95, 120, 133 Jeunesses Nationales Populaires cadres Il Fascismo (Orano), 135 school, 257n103 Il rinnovamento della Sardegna (Orano), Jew Act (1753), 160 117 Jewish Enlightenment. See Haskalah imbecile. See “socialism of the imbecile” Jewish Museum, 198 Industrial Revolution, 38, 157, 169, 176 Jews, 207; with anti-Jewish Christian Innocent III (Pope), 17–18 tradition, 16–24, 34, 43, 189; capital- Inquisition, 22 ism with juiverie (1845–1886), 37–58; Interlandi, Telesio, 114, 264n9 Christianity and, 1, 2, 10, 16–19, 21–22, Isaac, Jules, 154–55 34–35, 160, 178–79, 211; conspiracy, Israel: colonialism and, 204, 209, 213; Jewish, 136, 141, 162; stereotypes, Diaspora, 69, 71, 191, 212; image of, usury, 1; stereotypes, usury and, 17, 212–13; Israeli Army, 207; with Jewish 40, 168 conspiracy, 136; Palestine and, 191, Jews , Th e (Belloc), 135 203–4, 213; Six-Day War of 1967, 210; Jobbik Party, 209 Zionist socialism and, 204–8 Jogiches, Leo, 64 Italia Cattolica (Orano), 122 John Paul II (Pope), 211 Italian Nationalist Association, 82 Joly, Maurice, 51–55, 56, 57, 236n129 Italian Socialist Party (PSI), 120–21 Jouin, Ernest, 80 Italy: with anti-Jewish anticapitalism and Judaism, 19, 49; Freemasons and, 245n6, La Lupa, 124–32; anti-Jewish legislation 247n21; power of, 212 in, 2; citizenship and, 142; corporatism Judenpech (Buchheim), 233n102

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Judentum und die Kritik , Das (Ghillany), Lafargue, Paul, 88 18–19 Laffi tte, Jacques, 41 Judt, Toni, 196 La France juive (Drumont), 48, 175, juiverie . See Jews 235n114 Lagarde, Paul de, 24, 77 Kafk a, Franz, 69 Lagardelle, Hubert, 112 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 147, 148, 153 La Lupa, 95, 269n51; anti-Jewish anti- Kargl, Frank, 233n102 capitalism and, 124–32; with anti- Kauff mann, Grégoire, 54, 235n118 Semitism, 131; origins, 268n49 Kautsky, Karl, 60, 62, 216n4 Lamaire, Jean, 107 Kershaw, Ian, 199 Lamennais, Hugues-Félicité Robert de, Kipling, Rudyard, 128, 150 20, 38, 152, 168 Kleïber, C. J., 163 land: landowners, 27, 55, 100, 121, 143, Klemperer, Victor, 22, 148, 188, 277n11 225n33; restrictions on owning, 18 Klug, Brian, 304n99 Landra, Guido, 113, 137, 273n97 Korsch, Karl, 231n84 Langbehn, Julius, 77 Kosovo, 203 language: anti-Jewish anticapitalism and, Koyré, Alexandre, 9, 75, 152–53 7; of memory, 188–98; of Nazis, 22, 188 Kronewetter, Ferdinand, 7 L’an 2440, rêve s ’il en fut jamais , (Mercier, Kruševan, Paul A., 51, 52 L.-S.), 165–66 Lapouge, Georges Vacher de, 233n98 labor, 42, 203, 239n160; anti-Semitism La République, 97 and, 45–46, 49, 89; emancipation and, La Revue Sociale , 40, 169, 170 37; free market and, 44, 176–77, 180; Lateran Pacts, 123, 133 trade unions, 97, 102, 105–6, 121–22, 124, La Tour du Pin, René de (Marquis), 76, 128, 143, 220n1; Zionism and, 205 86, 104, 244n3 Labriola, Antonio, 116 La trahison des clercs (Benda), 149, 150 Labriola, Arturo, 121, 122, 128, 268n49 Lattes, Dante, 274n108 La Critique Sociale (periodical), 98 Laur, Francis, 89 La Croix , 26–27 L’Avenir de la science (Renan), 92 La Démocratie Pacifi que, 41, 42 La Vie Socialiste , 98 La dottrina del fascismo (Mussolini and Lazare, Bernard, 61, 69, 71, 134, 183 Gentile), 133, 255n88 Lebanon, 191, 211 La Droite et la Gauche (Gauchet), 217n13 Le barreau de Paris. Études politiques et La droite révolutionnaire. Les origins fran- littéraires (Joly), 53 çaises du fascisme. 1885 –1914 (Stern- Le Bon, Gustave, 93, 252n75 hell), 177 Le Corbusier, 102 L’espèce humaine (Antelme), 190 Le curé du village (Balzac), 58, 169 L’esprit des bêtes (Toussenel), 44 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre Auguste, 168 L’étrange défaite (Bloch, M.), 149, 151, 155 Le Faisceau, 96

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Lefranc, Georges, 99, 258n105 Italy, 113; negationism with, 8; Roman left wing, historical signifi cance, 5 Catholic Church and, 19, 25, 26–27, 52; legislation, 22, 161; anti-Jewish, 2, 137–38, usury and, 18–19, 24–27, 30–31, 33–36. 141–42, 143, 160, 164–65, 171, 199, See also Protocols of the Elders of Zion , 288n74; banking, 164; Civil Code, 24, Th e 142; on race, 138, 142, 143, 179, 199, Lithuania, 24, 60, 65 297n46 Loisy, Alfred, 84 Le Globe . See Saint-Simonians Lolli, Mario, 140 Lejay, Paul, 84 Lombroso, Cesare, 118, 266n24 Le juif, le judaisme et la judaïsation des L’Ordine Nuovo (Togliatti), 271n76 peoples chrétiens (Mousseaux), 19, 49 Louis Philippe (King of France), 41, 168 Lemaitre, Jules, 89 Löwith, Karl, 61 Lenin, Vladimir, 65 Loyseau, Charles, 31 Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire Luchaire, Jean, 97, 101 (Fourier), 43 Lucian of Samosata, 237n134 Leone, Enrico, 95, 112, 120, 133 Ludwig, Emil, 112, 254n85 Leo X (Pope), 18 Lueger, Karl, 7, 24, 45, 46, 174 Le Play, Frédéric, 33, 82, 86, 165 L’uomo delinquente (Lombroso), 266n24 Leroux, Pierre, 40, 169, 170, 290n87 Luther, Martin, 179 Les déracinés (Barrès, M.), 87 Lutheran Church, 210–11 Les juifs, rois de l ’époque. Histoire de la Luxemburg, Rosa, 64 féodalité fi nancière (Toussenel), 34, 41, Luzzatti, Luigi, 124, 125, 126, 129, 269n53 42, 170 Luzzatto, Guido Ludovico, 115 Les origines de la France contemporaine (Taine), 252n74 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 51–52, 53, 54, 55, 56 “Les rois de la République. Histoire des Magnard, Francis, 48 juiveries” (Chirac), 49–50 Maier, Charles, 107–8 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 66, 159, 161 Malesherbes, Chrétien-Guillaume de, 37, Levi, Primo, 182, 189, 190, 201 159, 161, 230n79, 286n58 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 99, 258n105 Mallarmé, Camille, 112, 117, 175, 266n20, Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 103 270n56 Libeskind, Daniel, 198 Malon, Benoît, 49, 86, 89, 175, 235n119 Librairie Phalanstérienne, 41, 170, 223n21 Manin, Daniel, 134 Libya, 111 Mann, Th omas, 148, 151, 153, 154, 281n27 Lichtheim, George, 4, 40, 41 Mantica, Paolo, 131, 268n49 L’idée de décentralisation (Maurras), 82–83 Manuel, Frank Edward, 232n88 Life and Fate (Grossman), 202 Marc, Alexandre, 106 Ligue des Patriotes, 88, 89, 90 Marc-Lipiansky, Alexandre, 107 limpieza de sangre , 22 Marion, Paul, 107 literature, anti-Jewish: anticapitalist, Marr, Wilhelm, 6, 23–24 166–80; capitalism and, 41, 44–45; in Marrast, Armand, 168

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marriage, 36, 252n74 Micheli, Alberto, 268n49 Marrou, Henri-Iréneé, 202 Mill, John Stuart, 251n69 Martin, Marius, 87 Mirabeau, Honoré de, 159, 161, 164 Martini, Luigi, 196 Misère de la philosophie (Marx), 42 Martov, Julius, 65 Missiroli, Mario, 268n49 Marx, Karl, 41, 42, 60, 61, 71, 79; anti- Mistral, Frédéric, 86 Semitism and, 240n165; feudal social- Modena, Gustavo, 134 ism and, 167; Marxism, 151; Proudhon Modigliani, Giueppe Emanuele Ventura, and, 246n18 Giacchino, 132 Mason, Timothy W., 142 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 108 massacres, 13–14, 187, 201; Babi Yar, 200; Momigliano, Arnaldo, 16–17, 114; anti- Jedwabne, 210; Nazis and, 220n2; of Jewish anticapitalism and, 153–54, Palestinians, 211. See also Shoah, the 155–56; with “parallel nationalization,” Massoul, Henri, 255n88 226n45; the Shoah and, 201, 202 Maulnier, Th ierry, 106 money, aristocracy of, 163 Maurogonato, Isacco Pesaro, 134 Monnet, Georges, 258n105 Maurras, Charles, 58, 111, 249n48, 252n79; Montesquieu, 51–52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 153 corporatism and, 86, 91–92; criticism Morès, Antoine-Amedée, 25, 88, 89–90 of, 149–50; infl uence, 113; politics and, Mosaic law, 161 75, 78, 80, 82–87, 90, 92–94 Mosca, Gaetano, 118 Mauss, Marcel, 98–99, 257n101, 258n106 Mosse, George L., 5, 29, 61, 156, 157 Maxence, Jean-Pierre, 106 Mosso, Angelo, 118 Medem, Vladimir, 239n160 Mounier, Emmanuel, 107 media: anti-Jewish anticapitalism and, Mousseaux, Gougenot des, 19, 49 124–32; with anti-Semitism, 84, 89–90, Müller, Adam, 153 113, 131, 174–75; the Shoah and, 185–86 murder, ritual: attitudes toward, 131; Mehring, Franz, 62, 63 banking and, 18 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 9 Mussolini, Benito, 123, 183, 255n88; Méline, Jules, 55 anti-Semitism and, 136, 137; banking Méline General Tariff (1892), 81 and, 132; fascism and, 94–95, 96, 102, Mélonio, Françoise, 31, 79 113; infl uences on, 112; Orano and, 133, memory: archetypes, Jewish, 207; lan- 272n80; science and, 114 guage of, 188–98 Mendelssohn, Moses, 60, 66, 159–60, 161, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Stern- 162, 286n56 hell), 177 Mercier, Ernest, 260n117 Narbonne. See Bloch, Marc Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 165–66 Nathan, Ernesto, 125, 126, 129, 130 Mermeix, Gabriel, 86 nation, 34–35, 41–42, 203, 257n103; Mes idées politiques (Maurras), 252n79 capitalism and, 100; Conseil National Miccoli, Giovanni, 178, 221n6 Économique, 104; Italian Nationalist Michaelis, Johan David, 159 Association, 82; national syndicalism,

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nation (continued ) Ordre Nouveau, 106, 107 133; “parallel nationalization,” 226n45; Origins of Totalitarianism , Th e (Arendt), technocracy and socialism of, 96–109 68 national socialism. See socialism Ortega y Gasset, José, 147, 148 natural politics. See politics Osvobozhdenie (magazine), 64 Nava, Giovanni, 120 Ottolenghi, Raff aele, 183 Nazis, 10, 179; with Eichmann trial, Ottoman Empire, 111, 124 186; with farming and socialism, Ovazza, Ettore, 272n87 14; genocide and, 184, 185, 199–200; Oz, Amos, 296n42 language of, 22, 188; massacres and, Ozanam, Frédéric, 38, 165 220n2; resistance fi ghters and, 203; social anti-Semitism and, 156–57, 159; Paalzow, Ludwig, 163 with violence, anti-Jewish, 137. See also Pais, Ettore, 117, 119 Shoah, the Palestine, 64, 208, 209; Israel and, 191, negationism, 219n28; with literature, anti- 203–4, 213; massacre, Palestinians, 211 Jewish, 8; with rhetorical strategy, 10, Pancrazi, Piero, 195 219n28; the Shoah and, 181–85, 187–88, Papillard, Gaston, 48 199; truth and, 9, 11 Papini, Giovanni, 127–28, 140 Neumann, Franz, 186, 199 “paradigm of extreme injustice,” 9, 219n25 Niceforo, Alfredo, 117, 268n49 “parallel nationalization,” 226n45 Nilus, Sergej, 51, 52 Pardo Roques, Giuseppe, 13–14, 220n2 Nisbet, Robert, 75 “pariah people,” 69 Nodier, Charles, 52 Parti Ouvrier Français, 49 Notions de sociologie (Déat), 98 Pascal, Blaise, 31, 48 Notre Temps , 97, 101 Passaggi (Foa), 274n108 Nuremberg laws, 138, 143, 179, 199 Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings Nuremberg Trials, 185 (Filmer), 31 Pätzold, Kurt, 199 Old Testament. See Bible, the Paul of Tarsus, 123, 134 Olivetti, Angelo Oliviero, 95, 112, 122, 133 Pavone, Claudio, 194, 297n44 Omodeo, Adolfo, 152, 248n36 Pearlman, Moshe, 185 Orano, Paolo, 2, 7, 78, 95, 265n14, 266n20, Péguy, Charles, 112, 150, 268n49 270n56; with anticapitalism, anti- Peixotto, Moses, 164 Jewish, 124–32; career of, 265n18; Pellieux, George-Gabriel de (General), 89 Christianity and, 122–24; fascism and, Pelloutier, Ferdinand, 86 112, 114, 116, 132–43; Foa and, 274n108; Pende, Nicola, 114 Freemasons and, 125–31; infl uence of, Pereire, Isaac, 290n87 133, 183; infl uences on, 112–13, 117–19; La Périer, Casimir Pierre, 41 Lupa and, 268n49; Mussolini on, 133, Périn, Charles, 81–82, 86 272n80; Ovazza and, 272n87; science Perspectives socialistes (Déat), 98 and, 116–19 Pétain, Philippe, 97, 99

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Petit, Annie, 251n69 75–96; Th e Protocols of the Elders of Pigorini, Luigi, 116 Zion, 183–84, 189; Saint-Simonian, Pike, Kenneth, 7 44; with technocracy and socialism, Piłsudski, Józef, 64 96–109 Pini, Giorgio, 113 Prosperi, Adriano, 178–79 Pinsker, Lev, 64 Protestant Reformation, 20, 29, 181 Pisanty, Valentina, 219n28 Protestants, 210–11 Pius IX (Pope), 19 Protocols of the Elders of Zion , Th e, 2, 8, 23, Pius X (Pope), 84, 130 175; genocide and, 183; as hoax, 53–54, Pius XI (Pope), 202 58; infl uence, 112–13, 140; production Plans (periodical), 98 of, 236n122; propaganda of, 183–84, 189; Plechanov, Georgij V., 64, 65 publishing history of, 50–52 Ploncard d’Assac, Jacques, 58 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 2, 4, 71, 80, 111, poetry, 188–89 232n91; Cercle Proudhon and, 96, 111, pogroms. See violence 113; Christianity and, 78–79; with juive- Poland, 24, 60, 64, 65, 200, 202, 210 rie (1845–1886), 38, 40–42; Marx and, Polanyi, Karl, 27, 157 246n18; usury and, 61, 168–69 Poliakov, Léon, 165 Proust, Marcel, 249n48 Polish Socialist Party (PPS), 64 PSI. See Italian Socialist Party politics, 161–62; Action Française and, 80, Psicologia della Sardegna (Orano), 117 82–85, 90–91, 94, 96–97; anti-Semitism Pujo, Maurice, 82, 84 and, 16–18, 45–47, 108–9; Barrès and, 249n49; Freemasons and, 124–32; Quaderni del carcere (Gramsci), 113, national socialism and natural politics, 119, 150 75–96 Politique tirée des propres paroles de Rabinbach, Anson, 231n84 l’Écriture Sainte (Bossuet), 31 race: legislation on, 138, 142, 143, 179, 199, Pontecorvo, Pellegrino, 220n1 297n46; racism, colonial, 138 positivism, 251n69 Racial Manifesto, 139, 273n97 Poujol, Louis, 163 Račkovskij, Pëtr Ivanovič, 50 power: of Judaism, 212; religious, 32; railways, 46, 172, 173, 174, 199 socialism and, 262n138; sovereign Ramsay, André-Michel, 30, 31 power, 31, 57–58, 227n54 Rathenau, Walther, 80, 102, 104 PPS. See Polish Socialist Party Razza, Luigi, 107 Preziosi, Giovanni, 114, 140, 273n97 Reformation. See Protestant Reformation problema del Cristianesimo , Il (Orano), Regnard, Albert, 89 122 religion, power and, 32 Pro Iudaeis (Guidi), 245n6 Rémy de Gurbhard, Caroline, 86 propaganda: anti-Semitic, 9–10, 54, 79; Renan, Ernest, 77, 94, 149, 254n85; de- Christian Social, 2; fascism and, 137; mocracy and, 92; infl uence, 48, 82, 95; for genocide, 201; natural politics and, Mussolini and, 112

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Renaudel, Pierre, 98 Romier, Lucien, 53, 143 Renouvier, Charles Bernard, 149 Romieu, Auguste, 42 resistance fi ghters, 145, 156, 192, 194–96, Root of Our Troubles , Th e, 51. See also 203, 278n12 Protocols of the Elders of Zion , Th e “revolutionary Right,” 93 Rossoni, Edmondo, 107 revolutionary syndicalism, 95, 120–21, Rothschild, James de, 43, 45, 172 124, 126, 268n43 Rothschild group, 43, 46, 72 Reynard, Albert, 59 Rouanet, Gustave, 55 Rhetoric of Reaction , Th e: Perversity, Futil- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30, 31, 32, 86, 153, ity, Jeopardy (Hirschman), 177 227n54 right: “revolutionary Right,” 93; right Russia, 60, 65, 200 wing, historical signifi cance, 5 Russo, Luigi, 195 rights, 209; citizenship, 2, 5, 16, 21, 26, 36–37, 82; loss of, 199. See also Decla- Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, 75, 84, 97, ration of the Rights of Man and the 100, 105, 168, 170 Citizen Saint-Simonians, 259n115; Le Globe and, ritual murder. See murder, ritual 40; infl uence, 83; propaganda, 44 Rocco, Alfredo, 82 Sala, Maria Magda, 140 Roche, Émile, 97, 101 Salomon, Ernst von, 98 Roche, Ernest, 89 Sarteano, Alberto da, 18 Rochefort, Henri, 89 Satta, Salvatore, 194 Rodbertus, Johann Karl, 39 Schlegel, Dorothea, 71 Roditi, Georges, 107 Scholem, Gersholm, 185, 206 Roederer, Louis, 37 Schönerer, Georg von, 45–46 Rohling, August, 19 Schwarz, Erika, 199 Rojahn, Jürgen, 4 science, 92; genetics and, 83, 119; Musso- Rollin, Henri, 51, 53, 55 lini and, 114; Orano and, 116–19; Racial Roman Catholic Church, 2, 130; anti- Manifesto and, 139, 273n97; “scientistic Semitism and, 76–77, 139–40, 174–75, dogmatism,” 83; the Shoah and, 188; 182–83, 202, 211, 247n21; La Civiltà subversion and superstition of, 111–24 Cattolica and, 19, 26, 27, 77, 174, 183, Second International, 5, 59, 60 245n6, 247n21; democracy and, 84; fas- Serafi no Vannutelli (Cardinal), 27 cism and, 134–35; First Vatican Council Sergi, Giuseppe, 116, 118–19 (1870), 21; Franciscans, 18, 179; Inquisi- Sergi, Sergio, 113 tion and, 22; Jesuits, 26, 48, 77, 183; with SFIO. See Socialist Party literature, anti-Jewish, 19, 25, 26–27, 52; Shoah, the (Holocaust), 295n33; concen- with religious power, 32; the Shoah and, tration camps, 7, 10, 16–17, 142, 181, 183, 202; usury and, 17–21; the Vatican, 77 184, 185, 188, 193–94, 197, 203, 206, 213; Roman Empire, 17, 78, 123 denial of, 181–88, 190, 192, 203; with Romania, 173, 188, 206 history, inside and outside, 198–203; Romanini, Alfredo, 135–36, 140 languages of memory and, 188–98;

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negationism and, 181–85, 187–88, 199; Spengler, Oswald, 108, 262n138 social anti-Semitism and, 198–208; Spinasse, Charles, 108 Zakhor and, 203–8 Spirito, Ugo, 80, 94, 107, 108 Sighele, Scipio, 93, 266n24 Spitzer, Leo, 22 Silberner, Edmund, 4, 168, 215n3, 240n165 Stalin, Joseph, 65, 106, 239n160 silk trade, 174, 234 Stella, Federico, 219n25 Simone of Trento, 18 stereotypes, Jews and usury, 1, 17, 40, 168 Six-Day War of 1967, 210 Sternhell, Zeev, 4, 93, 177–78, 216n5 Skinner, B. F., 217n12 Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo Smith, Adam, 32, 34–35, 42, 170 (De Felice), 115 social anti-Semitism: aft ermath of, Storia d’Europa nel secolo nineteenth 208–13; with anticapitalism, anti- (Croce), 151 Jewish, 155–66, 181–88; corporatism Storia di Cristo (Papini), 140 with, 80–82, 86, 90–92; emancipation Strauss, David F., 77 with, 59–73; languages of memory and, Streicher, Julius, 179 188–98; the Shoah and, 198–208 subversion. See science social charity, 81 Suez War (1956), 210 Social Contract , Th e (Rousseau), 86 Sullam, Simon Levis, 217n12 Social Democratic Party: in Germany, 80, superstition. See science 102; in Russia, 65 Sur la mendicité (Bonald), 42 socialism: the Enlightenment and, 39; “Sur les Juifs” (Bonald), 75; anti-Jewish farming and, 14, 15–16; fascism and, 14– anticapitalism and, 33; anti-Jewish 15, 94–97, 101, 103, 104; feudal socialism, Christian tradition and, 34; with eman- 167–68, 175; national socialism, 75–96; cipation and usury, 14–37 of nation with technocracy, 96–109; Sybil; or, Th e Two Nations (Disraeli), power and, 262n138; tasks of modern 41–42 socialism, 258n108; Zionist socialism, synagogues, blindfolds and, 187 204–8. See also social anti-Semitism syndicalism: national, 133; revolutionary, “socialism of the imbecile,” 7, 8, 159, 182 95, 120–21, 124, 126, 268n43 Socialist International, 4, 59, 60, 65 Syrkin, Nachman, 205 Socialist Party (SFIO), 98, 100, 103; in Syveton, Gabriel, 84 Italy, 120–21; in Poland, 64 social relations: anti-Semitism and, 16; Tacitus, 47 family and, 32; functions, 30 Taguieff , Pierre-André, 50 Sorel, Georges, 94, 95, 111, 112, 128, 254n85; Taine, Hyppolite, 75, 82, 90, 93, 252n74 criticism of, 149–50; La Lupa and, Tale of Love and Darkness , A (Oz), 296n42 268n49; on murder, ritual, 131 Talmud, 125, 132, 159, 178 Sorkin, David, 157–58, 286n56 Tancredi, Libero, 131 Sottochiesa, Gino, 136, 140, 273n94 Taparelli d’Azeglio, Luigi, 20, 165 sovereign power. See power Tarde, Gabriel, 83 Spain, 22, 135 tariff s. See taxes

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Tassoni (Marquis), 137 Ukraine, 24, 60, 202 taxes, 36, 81 Ulmann, André, 107 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 104 Umberto I (King of Italy), 112 Taylor, Telford, 185 Un Eichmann de papier (Vidal-Naquet), technocracy: corporatism and, 104; with 187 socialism of nation, 96–109; trade Un homme libre (Barrès, M.), 87 unions and, 102 Union Générale Bank, 88 Teller, Wilhelm Abraham, 162 United Nations, 203 Th éorie du pouvoir politique et réligieux United States (U.S.), 209, 212, 260n117 (Bonald), 30 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Th iébaud, François-Martin (Abbé), 37–38 Man, 209 Th omas, Albert, 98 usury, 169; in the Bible, 17, 28; capitalism Th omas of Monmouth, 18 and, 14–15, 50, 61; connotation, 2–3, Th ompson, Edward P., 39 17–18; emancipation and, 14–37, 159–60, Tocco, Felice, 118 163, 164–65, 174; with Jewish con- Tocqueville, Alexis de, 53, 57 spiracy, 162; with literature, anti-Jewish, “Todesfuge” (Celan), 188–89, 190 18–19, 24–27, 30–31, 33–36; with ritual Todorov, Tzvetan, 202–3, 295n33 murder, 18; Roman Catholic Church Togliatti, Palmiro, 271n76 and, 17–21; stereotypes of Jews and, 1, Toussenel, Alphonse, 2, 4, 6, 20, 34, 71, 17, 40, 168 170; infl uence, 171–73; with juiverie utilitarianism: criticism of, 38; economics (1845–1886), 38, 40–44, 46–49, 57; and, 34, 42–43 usury and, 61, 168–69; with utilitarian economics, 42–43 Vacher de Lapouge, Georges, 43, 173 Toynbee, Arnold, 147 Vallat, Xavier, 78 trade unions. See labor Valois, George, 90, 96, 97, 103–5, 108 tradition, anti-Semitism as, 19 Vannutelli, Serafi no (Cardinal), 174 Traité des ordres et de simples dignitez Varnhagen, Rahel, 71 (Loyseau), 31 Vatican, the. See Roman Catholic Treves, Claudio, 124, 125, 126, 129, 132 Church Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 185 Vaugeois, Henri, 84, 111 Trotsky, Leon, 65 Veblen, Th orstein, 102 truth, negationism and, 9, 11 Ventura, 20 Turati, Filippo, 120, 121, 122, 124 Versailles Peace Conference, 132, 155 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 28 Viance, Georges, 107 Turiello, Pasquale, 118 Victor de Broglie (Prince), 38 Turnel, Joseph, 84 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 28, 88, 183, 198, Turner, Henry A., 220n3 218n16; with anti-Jewish anticapitalism, 5–6; with Eichmann, 187 Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Vienna Stock Exchange, 24, 45, 174 Juden (Dohm), 160 Viereck, Peter, 181

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Villeneuve-Bargemont, Alban de, 38, 42, Weizmann, Chaim, 136 165, 168 Wieder die Juden (Grattenauer, K.), 45 violence: bombings, 211, 298n55, 302n82; Wiesel, Elie, 185 genocide, 9, 183–85, 190–91, 199–201, Wieviorka, Annette, 190 236n122; massacres, 13–14, 187, 200, 201, will, last. See Bloch, Marc 210, 211, 220n2; Nazis and anti-Jewish, Wilson, Woodrow, 80 137; pogroms and, 44, 46, 52, 64, 90; Wissel, Rudolf, 102 ritual murder, 18, 131. See also Shoah, witnesses, 190–91, 219n28 the women: with self-emancipation, 71; syna- Visco, Sabato, 137 gogues and blindfolded, 187 Vita Italiana (Preziosi), 114 World Zionist Organization, 136 Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de, 83 Volia, Narodnaia, 64 Yerushalmi, Yosef H., 179 Volpe, Gioacchino, 115 Youth Aliyah, 68 Voltaire, 160, 165 von Haller, Ludwig, 20, 165 Zakhor, 203–8 von Hase, Karl, 77 Zevi, Shabbatai, 71, 243n194 Von Moellendorf, Wichard, 102 Zionism, 70–71, 242n188; as Jewish von Preysing, Konrad (Bishop), 202 conspiracy, 136, 141; Zionist socialism, 204–8. See also Protocols of the Elders of Warrant for Genocide (Cohn), 236n122 Zion , Th e Wealth of the Nations (Smith), 34–35 Zionist Congress, 23, 52, 236n122 Weber, Max, 69 Zipperstein, Steven J., 157 Weitzman, Lenore, 198

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