While scholars continue to uncover the infinite implications of the Holocaust, a comprehensive legal examination of the anti-Semitic laws born in Mussolini’s Italy, predating the German occupation, had yet to be completed. Rutgers Law–Camden Professor Michael Livingston taught himself Italian to better understand these laws that forever changed Italy’s once thriving Jewish community, whose history dates back more than 2,000 years.
With the support of a fellowship from the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Livingston researched mountains of documents for a decade-long investigation into the pervasiveness of Mussolini’s Race Laws.
In December, his book The Fascists and the Jews of Italy: Mussolini’s Race Laws, 1938-1943 will be published by Cambridge University Press, offering for the first time in the 70 years since Fascism’s end, a comprehensive English-language survey of the anti-Jewish laws enacted and followed by an otherwise just people.
“People think of Italy as a place where nothing bad can happen,” says Livingston. “I’ve found that it’s very different to have an impression than to look at actual documents. The documents don’t lie…Italian Jews prior to the racial laws felt as safe as or safer than virtually any Jewish community in the world, and would have been literally stunned to learn what awaited them a few years later. What things are we doing now that may seem insane to future generations?”
What the documents – Italian legal, administrative, and judicial sources – showcase emphatically is the central role of lawyers in the Race Laws implementation, laws that address who could own radios or homes, who could operate a business, who could marry whom, and of course, who is legally Jewish.
The legal approach is novel to the historical discourse on this time period, which has previously focused on political and social perspectives. Livingston writes in the book:
“As compared to Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, Fascist Italy offered at least a limited amount of independence to judges and lawyers, and a courageous few used this independence to ameliorate or limit the damage resulting from the laws. But others expanded them: and, by providing technical assistance in drafting and interpreting the Race Laws, lawyers were indispensable in making the laws effective.”
According to Livingston, the Race Laws were incredibly pervasive, took too long to be repealed, and produced irreparable damage. The most positive aspect of their existence is to now serve as a haunting lesson for any law student or future attorney. Again, he writes:
“Did the formally legal character of the laws, notwithstanding their apparent immorality—which in any case is likely to be more visible now than it was at the time-- help to explain their reception by the Italian population and the Jews themselves? What are the lessons for the training of future lawyers and the prevention of further Holocausts?”
Prior to joining Rutgers in 1987, Livingston, who has also been a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University School of Law and Bar-Ilan University in Israel (among others) was a legislation attorney for the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress. He teaches courses in tax, comparative law, and law and the Holocaust and directs Rutgers’ Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program.