Racial Laws Research Articles

Silvano Arieti's novel The Parnas: A Scene from the Holocaust

Silvano Arieti was an Italian psychoanalyst who undertook psychoanalysis of schizophrenic patients in the 1960s and 1970s. He left Italy in 1939 at the age of twenty‐four following the Race Laws of 1938, and moved to New York until his death in 1981. A training analyst and author of several psychoanalytic and academic books, Arieti kept his research open in a wide variety of directions, giving equal weight to the internal world – as it seen from the psychoanalytic viewpoint – and to the organic functioning of the brain, as viewed from the perspective of the neurosciences. Arieti's interpretation of schizophrenia helped to overcome the dichotomies between the classical psychoanalytic approach, neurobiological research, and research into cognition, and opened up new paths for an interdisciplinary understanding of mental functioning and creative processes. This paper examines Arieti's book The Parnas (1979); this is a partly‐fictionalised account of a pre‐eminent figure (Parnas in Hebrew means “head”) in the Jewish community in Pisa, Giuseppe Pardo Roques, in the 1930s and early 1940s, who experienced mental illness and was killed in the Nazi extermination of Jews. The paper examines Arieti?s reflections on what he sees as the ‘insights’ provided by mental illness, which are considered through the figure of Giuseppe Pardo Roques, and in the context of the trauma of the Shoah in Italy.

Salir adelante (perseverance): Lessons from the Mexican immigrant experience

Summary Although migration and immigrant issues have been well studied in sociology, economics, and demography there is significantly less information specific to Latino immigrants within the field of social work. This is of particular concern as the population of Latino immigrants and their children continues to grow and access areas of social work practice and policy development. This research study focuses on understanding the experience of first-generation immigrants of Mexican origin living in Denver, Colorado, through the use of qualitative research methods. Seven Mexican immigrants living in Denver described their experience through an in-depth interview process. Grounded theory was the chosen method for analysis. Findings Four themes emerged during the data analysis process: (1) ‘We are working people’; (2) ‘I am not an animal’ (experiencing racism, prejudice and discrimination); (3) fear; and (4) internal strength. Together these themes create a conceptual framework that is useful as a starting place to understand the lives and culture of Mexican immigrants. This conceptual framework highlights how immigrants negotiate racism, prejudice, discrimination, and fear through their strong work ethic and the belief in their ability to ‘ salir adelante’ (to persevere or better oneself or one’s family situation). Applications Results indicate that Mexican immigrants are faced with numerous challenges, particularly due to racist laws, discriminatory procedures, and acts of prejudice. However, results also suggest that Mexican immigrants and their cultural resources provide a source of hope, allowing them to persevere even as they face challenges. The findings have several implications for direct service, advocacy and social justice, and social work education.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki. La littérature, une vie. Judéité/germanisme

Although Marcel Reich-Ranicki is relatively unknown in France, he is a famous figure in German culture. Born in 1920 to a Jewish Polish father and a Jewish German mother, Reich-Ranicki spent his childhood in Poland before finishing his studies in Berlin. It is there that he discovered his lifelong passion for German literature, a passion that saved his life by giving him hope.Reich-Ranicki was sent back to Poland due to increasingly strict racial laws but later managed to escape the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1958, he decided to return to the very country where Nazism was born, the country that was responsible for the murder of his loved ones. How did this man, who went on to become the most famous literary critic in Germany, reconcile his fear of Germans and his admiration for German culture? Reich-Ranicki spent his life reading and defending German literature up until his death in September 2013.

The ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Italian Peril’: Vichy, Italy, and the Jews of Tunisia, 1940–2

During the Second World War, the Vichy government published many of the same antisemitic laws in Tunisia as it did in the metropole. But in Tunisia, the ‘Jewish Question’ also became a question of maintaining control over the French Empire. Vichy racial legislation aimed at the Protectorate’s multinational Jewish population did not only reflect the state’s antisemitic policies; rather, these laws were inextricably bound up in France’s colonial rivalry with Italy. In a colony where French political and economic hegemony had been only tenuously secured in the preceding decades through strategic naturalization, Vichy racial laws presented French authorities with a radically new avenue to consolidate power in the Protectorate; however, they also threatened to upend Tunisia’s economy and provoke Italian intervention. This article explores how the frequently-delayed and often partial application of Vichy anti-Jewish laws in Tunisia resulted from the difficulties of reconciling the aims of economic aryanization with the exigencies of protecting French rule against the pretensions of Fascist Italy.

UNA STORIA POCO NOTA. LE LEGGI RAZZIALI E LA CHIMICA. MILANO 1941

The racial laws inhibited the access to universities. The Israelite community in Milan reacted by establishing a special course, perfectly matching a university course, and chose a curriculum in chemistry. This highly successful attempt is presented in the frame of the scientific and academic situation of the time.

"Il fermi [..] non dovreste in alcun modo lasciare sfuggire il suo libro". Federigo Enriques consulente scientifico della Zanichelli

The outstanding mathematician Federigo Enriques (1871-1946) acted as scientific adviser to the publisher Zanichelli in Bologna, where he was professor of projective geometry at the University. This paper reconstructs his activities from 1894 to 1938, when he was forced to leave the publishing house due to the race laws. Enriques exerted a strong influence on the publisher in the choice of authors (from Castelnuovo to Amaldi and Fermi) and the structure of its book series; he also gave equal consideration to highly specialised texts and those by teachers at high school and university. Together with Eugenio Rignano, he founded the journal Scientia in the pursuit of a necessary synthesis of science, humanities and didactics, which was his hallmark both as a scholar and a chief editor. The development of Federigo Enriques’ deep editorial involvement is documented with reference to book series and titles, relations with authors and sales figures, ending with a look at percentages and ratios between students and teaching staff in Italian schools from unification onwards.

Whiteness in the Press: A Critical Examination of Responses to the Federal Racial Vilification Law after Eatock v Bolt

Using whiteness theory, a subset of critical race theory, this paper analyses responses in The Australian broadsheet newspaper to the highly publicised racial vilification case of Eatock v Bolt. The paper firstly provides a brief introduction to whiteness theory as a critical lens through which to examine law and legal process. The paper then uses this lens to outline the key features of the federal racial vilification law. Secondly, the paper provides an account of the Federal Court’s decision in Eatock v Bolt and the realities of the decision. The second half of the paper introduces the key case study of the thesis, The Australian newspaper, and dissects the nature and extent of the newspaper’s opinion journalism devoted to the Eatock v Bolt decision. The paper concludes that commentary such as that in the The Australian gives momentum to threats to wind back the federal racial vilification law and further entrenches white privilege in public discourse.

Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss: Tsuris 1938 by Andreas Pittler (review)

Reviewed by: Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss: Tsuris 1938 by Andreas Pittler Laura A. Detre Andreas Pittler, Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss: Tsuris 1938. Trans. Vincent Kling. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2013. 204 pp. Detective novels have an undeservedly poor reputation among literary snobs. As Vincent Kling notes in the afterword to his wonderful translation of Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss, students of serious literature have dismissed crime fiction, and detective novels in particular, as meaningless diversions, despite the reality that many of the world’s most well-respected writers, from Dostoyevsky to Faulkner, have used crime and the investigation of wrongdoing as plot devices in their work. Depictions of crime in literature have long helped us to understand who we are and why we hold certain values so strongly, and Andreas Pittler’s novel is a welcome addition to that canon. Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss is the fifth in a series of novels focusing on the work of David Bronstein, a police officer working in Vienna in the first half of the twentieth century. The original title of this book, as it was published in German, was Zores (Tsuris in English transcription), which means “troubles” in Yiddish. Each of the five Bronstein novels has a Yiddish title in German (Tacheles, Ezzes, Chuzpe, Tinnef, and Zores—Plain Speaking, Advice, Impudence, Junk, and Troubles), which, as Kling notes, has a dual purpose. The use of Yiddish in this context emphasizes the ambiguous Jewishness of the central character in the series, David Bronstein, who considers himself to be a Protestant but under the Nuremberg race laws is a Jew. It also references the significance of Jewish culture in early twentieth-century Vienna. These are words that would have been familiar to most Viennese, not just Jews. Kling notes that, for the English translation of this book as well as the four others in the series, an editorial decision was made to change the titles [End Page 155] slightly. This was probably a wise decision and does nothing to diminish the important history depicted within. In this book Bronstein investigates the murder of a Nazi, literally on the eve of Austria’s Anschluss with the Third Reich. The city is filled with tension, and Bronstein himself is anxious for the future as he is a racial Jew. The plot of this novel is very much driven by the actual history of the Anschluss, and many of the book’s characters are significant figures from the period, such as Arthur Seyß-Inquart. Pittler depicts an ethnically diverse Vienna (many, if not most, of the characters have Slavic names) but one that is also heavily divided between supporters of Nazism and those who fear for the future under Nazi control. He shows the reader a city where poverty is rampant and a country run by incompetents who are no match for the rising Nazi movement both inside Austria and abroad. This was a time when some Austrians, including characters in this novel, longed for the restoration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while others wanted to join their fate with that of the German people. The only thing that was certain in Vienna in 1938 was that the status quo was unacceptable and that a change of some kind was on the horizon. After Italy’s injudicious forays in Africa, Mussolini was in no position to support an independent Austrian state, and Nazi Germany, with its dream of a Pan-Germanic empire, was prepared to make the most of the situation. Given Pittler’s background as a historian and journalist, it should be no surprise that he is knowledgeable about these events, but his real gift is the ability to integrate history into a compelling murder mystery. The story is primary here, and it is an action-packed one. Above everything else, Inspector Bronstein and the Anschluss is a gripping book that will captivate any reader familiar with Austrian history but also ardent fans of the detective genre. Thanks to extensive footnotes and a wellwritten afterword, this book is accessible to those who have little or no knowledge of the events of 1938, but the depth of detail that Pittler has included should be of tremendous...

Politics of race, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust

In the renewed studies on Italian fascism, the topics of racism, anti-Semitism, anti- Jewish persecutions and the Holocaust played a major role after the end of the 1980s. In fact, since 1988, the year that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the anti-Jewish laws of 1938, scholars have re-analyzed the role of Mussolini and Italian fascism, rejecting the interpretation of a substantially mild application of racial laws and the myth of «Italian goodness» with regard to the Holocaust. This historical evolution has also been influenced by the international context of historical research and the politics of memory. In this setting, new studies have contributed towards increasing knowledge of the period from 1938 to 1943 and the memory of these events after the Second World War, while there are still some grey areas concerning the period from 1943 until Liberation.

Freedom of speech and racial vilification in Australia: ‘The Bolt case’ in public discourse

This article examines the public discourse that emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 decision of the Federal Court of Australia in Eatock v Bolt. We characterise the narrative of ‘the Bolt case’ as a ‘mobilising discourse’ that countered rather than echoed the decision itself. This discourse had three main messages: encouraging scepticism about the authenticity of fair-skinned Aboriginal persons and judgment by non-Aboriginal persons about the legitimacy of Aboriginal identity according to skin colour; questioning the legitimacy of racial vilification laws and strengthening a libertarian conception of freedom of speech. We explain how such a contrary discourse became dominant in the wake of a successful racial vilification action and consider the implications of these events.本文研究了2011年澳大利亚联邦法庭就伊脱克诉博尔特案做出判决后的公众议论。博尔特案的叙事属于“动员话语”，是对判决的反弹而非反响。该话语主要包括三个信息：鼓励对浅肤色原住人士的真实性的质疑，鼓励由非原住人士根据肤色判定原住民身份的合法性；质疑种族诽谤法的合理性；支持言论自由的观念。笔者解释了何以这种矛盾的话语盛行于一次成功的种族诽谤行动之后，并讨论了这些事件的影响。

The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin by Rebecca Rovit (review)

Reviewed by: The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin by Rebecca Rovit Christine Korte The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin. By Rebecca Rovit. Studies in Theatre History and Culture series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012; pp. 304. Rebecca Rovit’s The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin establishes in both its title and cover image (a production still taken from Ferenc Molnár’s The Play’s the Thing in August 1935) the perplexing fact that an all-Jewish theatre existed at all during the Third Reich. Founded by Dr. Kurt Singer in August 1933, the company was permitted by the Nazis in order to employ Jewish artists who had been ousted from state theatres. It operated under the auspices of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (Cultural Association of German Jews), which emerged as an organizational response to the measures taken against German Jewish artists after the Nazis took power. Goebbels approved the endeavor on the condition that the theatre would be a closed, subscription-based enterprise, with the involvement or attendance of non-Jews forbidden. SS-Kommandant Hans Hinkel was the Ministry of Propaganda official appointed to act as the theatre’s direct overseer and production censor, working closely with Singer to scrutinize content and enforce Nazi directives. For the artists, the theatre initially represented a much-needed opportunity to continue their livelihoods after Germany’s 1933 racial laws effectively removed them from public life; for performers and spectators alike, it provided a space where, as German Jews, they could temporarily escape increasingly hostile daily conditions. For the Nazis, on the other hand, the theatre served the strategic purpose of partitioning two hitherto connected spheres of German and German Jewish cultural life and was used to promote a notion of Jewish culture as foreign and non-Aryan. This agenda forbade the staging of most classical German dramas and necessitated the importation of Yiddish- and Hebrew-language plays, which were indeed foreign to the majority of assimilated Kulturbund members. Rovit has previously written an article for a museum catalog on “Theatrical Performance at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” as well as coedited a collection of essays on Theatrical Performance during the Holocaust, but The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin is her first monograph and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of theatre under dictatorship. As Rovit demonstrates, the paradoxical partnership that emerged between the Kulturbund theatre and the Nazis is emblematic of the complexities and concessions that mark the broader phenomenon of “art-making under duress” (3). The Nazis “protected” the organization and [End Page 615] simultaneously enforced the cultural ghettoization of German Jews. At the same time, a “Jewish theatre” repertoire was suddenly thrust into existence in Germany, often featuring ominous themes of exile and persecution. Rovit accounts for the historical forces and ever-changing Nazi directives that informed the Kulturbund theatre’s selection of plays and dramaturgical decisions, and demonstrates how they produced competing conceptions of “Jewishness” (for example, Zionist, conservative, or assimilated) that existed within a highly diverse German Jewish community. As she shows, these identities were taken up by the three Jewish newspapers permitted to operate under the Third Reich (up until 1939) to influence the reception of productions, with each newspaper showing preference for productions that idealized a specific Jewish milieu (namely, Yiddish shtetls, Zionist Palestine, or bourgeois Germany). Before emigrating to Holland in 1938, Singer proved a formidable force in navigating Nazi strictures about content, as well as intra-Jewish debates about the theatre’s purpose, such as whether, under the circumstances, it ought to promote a distinct Jewish culture or provide entertaining plays of high artistic caliber and intellectual substance. Although keen to promote Jewish cultural identity, Singer was most strongly committed to a humanist, idealist ethos—one that had determined his own cultural formation as an assimilated German Jew during the Weimar Republic. For Singer, the main challenge was negotiating the Nazi directives that prohibited the staging of German bourgeois literary classics. The “pure Jewish culture” that the Nazis expected from the theatre simply did not exist (40). Furthermore, the Nazis prevented not only productions they deemed too “assimilatory” to German culture, but also those they regarded...

German urologists under national socialism

The first full-time professorship for urology at a German university was established in 1937 and in 1942, a rare teaching qualification (Habilitation) for urology was granted, both at the prestigious Berlin University. At the same time, nearly a third of all physicians who worked in the field of urology were classified as "non-Aryan" according to Nazi race laws and were forced out of their profession and their homeland. Many of them committed suicide or, if they refused to flee, were murdered in concentration camps. German urologists also contributed to compulsory sterilization of men according to the "law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring" between 1934 and 1945. Historical sources on the history of urology in Nazi Germany were reviewed and analyzed. These include textbooks and medical journals from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as files from different state and university archives. For urologists, the changing political environment in Germany after 1933 offered possibilities to assert their personal and professional interests. Unfortunately, in many cases, moral principles were thrown overboard, and physicians advanced their own careers and the specialty of urology at the expense of their patients and their Jewish colleagues. Under national socialism, German urologists backed Nazi health and race policies and in exchange gained further professionalization for their specialty, including university positions and increased independence from surgery. Only in recent years has this chapter of German urology's past become a topic of debate among members of the professional society.

Dealing with a dangerous golem: Gino Arias's corporative proposal

Gino Arias (1879–1940) had made his academic debut as a legal historian and devoted himself to economics at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. As a prominent nationalist, he joined the Fascist regime from its very beginning and in 1925 was named official speaker of the Presidential Committee for the study of constitutional reforms. The laws suggested by the Commission were the first step towards the gradual ‘corporatisation’ of the Italian society, a process that Gino Arias encouraged through many essays and writings that appeared in the main Fascist journals and newspapers. This paper seeks to analyse Arias's fate during the rest of the 1920s and 1930s that would eventually lead to a rather dramatic and paradoxical ending: the flight of the ‘Jewish’ Gino Arias to Argentina, due to Fascist racial laws. Gino Arias's elaboration of the ‘revolutionary’ corporatist economy is based on an original reformulation of the individuals’ economic motive. Arias moved from the traditional self-interest motive to a new and particular affectio societatis, an hypothesis, although far from being realistic, that was necessary to give corporatism a sound theoretical foundation. The elaboration of Arias's speculative analysis was strictly related to government's economic policies throughout the Twenties and the Thirties and cannot be understood without referring to the institutionalisation of Fascist corporatism. Arias's affectio societatis represents in fact the theoretical formulation of a widespread cultural process and as such will be examined in this paper.

Carlo Alberto Viterbo: A Neglected Figure of Italian Judaism

Carlo Alberto Viterbo (1889–1974) made wide-ranging contributions over many years to the development and dissemination of Jewish heritage in Italy, and yet there has been no detailed study of his achievements. He was one of the leading figures of the ‘Jewish Renaissance’ based in Florence in the decades before the First World War; he was president of the Italian Zionist Federation in the 1930s; he was at the centre of the bitter divisions between fascist and anti-fascist Jews prior to the Racial Laws. In the period after the Second World War, he was one of the key players to reconstitute Jewish life in Italy, and editor, from 1944 to 1974, of Israel, the most influential Jewish journal of its time. This article draws not only on published material, but also on Viterbo’s unpublished diary notes and letters which have never been studied.

Writing the Shoah for Young Readers: Lia Levi’s Una valle piena di stelle

In this paper, I examine the strategies that Lia Levi implements in her 1997 children’s novel, Una valle piena di stelle, to depict a tale of persecution in the Italian Shoah. I argue that Levi’s main goal in the novel, whose target audience is adolescents, is to evince the dangerous consequences of state-sanctioned persecution and to guide her readers’ formation as ethical citizens. Levi’s narrative creates an affinity between child protagonist and child readers that emotionally engages the latter in an exploration of the Shoah experience. With her child protagonist safe in neutral Swiss territory, Levi depicts instances of the Swiss refugee camp experience that allude to specific experiences within the Nazi concentrationary universe. Thus, the novel serves as an immediate reminder of the consequences of racial laws and a historical lesson on Fascist Italy’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. I contend that this edifying tale of persecution, loss, and the promise of eventual reconstruction, aims to develop a reader committed to ethical action and who will mature into an agent against racist oppression.

“The Disorderly Conduct of a Few”: Crime and Hamilton’s Racial Geography in the Early 1850s 1

Abstract Drawing on a series of criminal cases that took place in Hamilton in late 1852, this paper explores the operation of race in law during the period against the backdrop of Hamilton’s geography. The paper sheds light on the living conditions of a segment of the population that has left scarcely a trace in the historical records. As well, a close examination of Hamilton’s census records and physical space reveals that those found guilty in these trials were linked to a particular racially and ethnically charged, vice-prone space rather than the more respectable central part of the city. The author argues that the construction of Prince’s Island, which lay in the marshes just west of Hamilton, as a “den of vice” probably conditioned the findings of guilt and innocence in one of the trials while promoting the impression that justice was “colour-blind.”

'Race' Definition Run Amuck: 'Slaying the Dragon of Eskimo Status' Before the Supreme Court of Canada, 1939

In April 1939, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that "Eskimos" were "Indians" within the Canadian constitutional framework. Though a renowned anthropologist testified to the "racial distinctness" of "Eskimos," the all-white judges of the court struggled to define "race." The case arose out of a jurisdictional dispute over whether the provincial or federal government should pay for relief aid for the Inuit in northern Quebec. The Inuit community was neither consulted nor represented as an "interested party" at the hearing. When the Eskimo Reference was heard by the Supreme Court, conflicting anthropological evidence demonstrated the discipline's struggle to scientifically measure and distinguish races. The Court decided that "Eskimos" were legally "Indians" based largely on decades-old correspondence between federal government officials about providing relief aid to an Eskimo community. They concluded that the Fathers of Confederation must have intended for all Aboriginal peoples living in Canada upon colonization to be considered Indians. Notably, the Court avoided the question of how to categorize race in law.

Italian Jews: From Social Integration to the Construction of a New European Identity

In this article I discuss the history of Italian Jews from the Emancipation to the racial laws of 1938 and their present-day attitudes to Judaism and the State of Israel. My aim is to suggest how the policy of social integration enabled Italian Jews to construct a new identity without losing their ancestral heritage. The example of Italian Jewry is relevant to understanding the growing need in today‘s European Union—now comprising 27 countries with different languages, cultures, and values—of revising the concept of national identity and of exploring ways of constructing a new European identity.

Race, slavery, and Islamic law in the early modern Atlantic: Ahmad Baba al-Tinbukti's treatise on enslavement

This paper examines one of the earliest intellectual works to directly address the intersecting issues of race and slavery that emerged with the rise of the plantation system that took root in the early modern Atlantic. I examine the works of a Muslim scholar, Ahmad Baba al-Tinbukti, who himself was enslaved, and I examine his use of scholarly traditions and innovative thoughts on the origins of race by Muslim scholars such as Ibn Khaldoun to author a resounding critique of not just race-based slavery, but the entire practice of enslavement as he experienced it in the realms of the Moroccan caliphate of Ahmad al-Mansur. The latter's Caliphal aspirations were aimed at rivalling the Ottoman Empire, whose westward expansion had recently been curtailed. Within this context, Ahmad Baba's rulings served as a critique of the Sa`dis claim to just rule as a Muslim dynasty. This paper aims to bring discussions of race and slavery in the Muslim world into larger discussions about the emergence of slave-based agricultural economies in the West and suggest the importance of Islamic law in our study of the early modern Atlantic.

Industrious rebels and captains of deterrence: defiance interpreted through a Veblenian reformulation of strain theory

Strain and Defiance are criminological theories that lay ambivalent emphasis on the notion of “rebellion,” which is to say that they both regard mutinous behavior as being motivated by positive or negative ends alike. Individuals rebel, say, by stealing in order to achieve higher status (economic strain); or they may violently antagonize authority as a way to “salvage dignity” in an environment in which they have no social stake whatsoever (defiance). Conversely, they may responsibly protest to oppose blind consumerism (strain); or they may civilly disobey racist laws (political defiance). It is here argued that both theories may be construed as special cases of a general problem, which Thorstein Veblen had already diagnosed in 1899. Veblen depicted social dynamics as a battle between the deterring forces of conservatism, which are animated by an overpowering predatory-pecuniary instinct, and those of progressivism, which rely, on the other hand, on an (ever more enfeebled) instinct of cooperation and workmanship. In this Veblenian model, civil defiance represents a challenge of the peaceable middle-class to the rule of the elite, whereas economically-strained defiance is the expression of the attempt of (middle to low) classes possessed by a pecuniary drive to emulate the status of the elite itself.