Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945: Biographies, Discourses, and Transnational Networks (Italian and Italian American Studies) 3030977889, 9783030977887

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ITALIAN AND ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945 Biographies, Discourses, and Transnational Networks Ruth Nattermann

Italian and Italian American Studies

Series Editor Stanislao G. Pugliese, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, USA

This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstanding force in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing their connection to one another. Editorial Board Rebecca West, University of Chicago, USA Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University, USA Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY, USA Phillip V. Cannistraro†, Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY, USA Alessandro Portelli, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy William J. Connell, Seton Hall University, USA

Ruth Nattermann

Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945 Biographies, Discourses, and Transnational Networks

Ruth Nattermann Contemporary European History Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich Munich, Germany

ISSN 2635-2931 ISSN 2635-294X (electronic) Italian and Italian American Studies ISBN 978-3-030-97788-7 ISBN 978-3-030-97789-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4 0th edition: © De Gruyter 2020 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association). This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Amelia Pincherle Rosselli (1870–1954), photograph taken by Mario Nunes Vais in Florence, ca. 1905. The author thanks the Fondazione Circolo Rosselli Firenze for their kind permission to publish the photograph This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to Alfredo, Davide, and Michele with love and gratitude.

Preface

The present book developed out of my Habilitationsschrift, for which I received the Venia legendi from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich on July 2, 2018. My thanks are due, first and foremost, to Martin Baumeister. With his characteristic, casual intellectuality, and seamless creativity, he supervised my Habilitation from Munich and Rome and provided unconditional support for my process. Thanks to him, the experienced long-distance runner, I never ran out of the deep breath required to sustain a research project of this depth and extent and always sustained the joy in what had been achieved. Alongside Martin Baumeister, Michael Brenner has guided my academic career over the course of years with his great intellect and breadth of knowledge. His constantly interested yet relaxed approach has contributed significantly both to my Habilitation and to the conceptual and argumentative development of this book, for which I thank him warmly. I will never forget the discussions in the mentorship group at LMU Munich. Margit Szöllösi-Janze, whom I thank from the heart for her committed support, provided constant motivation and encouragement with her observant and critical yet nurturing eye. I would also like to warmly thank Paula-Irene Villa who, as a sociologist, made me aware of questions and connections that are often missed in historical research. Mirjam Zadoff was also by my side at LMU to provide valuable suggestions for my study. I thank Philipp Lenhard not only for

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many interesting suggestions but above all for the inspiring exchange of ideas within the international German Research Foundation network “Gender-Nation-Emancipation” and many lively conversations. Thanks to generous support from the German Research Foundation and the Max Weber Foundation, I had the opportunity to conduct my research in a transnational context. The study of Jewish women in the early Italian women’s movement got its start at the German Historical Institute in Rome, with which I have long had connections. I warmly thank Lutz Klinkhammer, a longstanding and essential friend and discussion partner, for his team spirit as well as for his scholarly competence and interest with which he supported my work from its beginnings. Carolin Kosuch read parts of the manuscript with a critical eye and enriched it with smart ideas. I thank her and Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi for much valuable advice and especially for many inspiring conversations in the Eternal City. Great thanks are due to Guido Lammers for his capable support of the project through the German Research Foundation. My collaboration with Sylvia Schraut in the professorship of Contemporary German and European History at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich provided enormous drive and inspiration. I thank her from the heart for numerous important suggestions and her selfless support on which I could rely in any situation. The multifaceted exchange of ideas and shared research initiatives with Mirjam Höfner gave me great joy and immense motivation for the final stages of the writing process. Special thanks to Angelika Schaser and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum for their constructive contributions to the German Research Foundation network “Gender-Nation-Emancipation.” The transnational collaboration with great colleagues promoted and enriched the development of my Habilitation. I am also indebted to Tullia Catalan, Filippo Focardi, Petra Ernst-Kühr (whom I sorely miss), Silvia Guetta, Gerald Lamprecht, Simon Levis Sullam, Brunello Mantelli, and Perry Willson for sound advice and critical suggestions. It would have been impossible to research certain hard-to-access archives without the help of several people. My thanks are due above all to Mirco Bianchi, David Bidussa, Laura Brazzo, Eleonora Cirant, Fabio Desideri, Umberto di Gioacchino, Angela Gavoni, Daniela Italia, Gisele Levy, Daniela Loyola, Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Liliana Picciotto, Roberta Ricci, Mirka Sandiford, Susanne Schlösser, and the staff of the National Central Library of Florence. I warmly thank Frank Gent, Lionella Neppi Modona Viterbo, and Bosiljka Raditsa for instructive conversations.

PREFACE

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This book was first published in German in 2020 as part of the scholarly series of the German Historical Institute in Rome. Warm thanks go to Kordula Wolf for her continuous support and helpful counsel in many stages of the publication process. I am deeply grateful to have received the prize “Geisteswissenschaften International” (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, VG Wort and Auswärtiges Amt) which supported the English translation of my book. I would like to extend my thanks to Palgrave Macmillan for their interest in this work, especially to Stanislao Pugliese and to Emily Russell, who were instrumental in bringing the publication to fruition. Ela Harrison has, in her seemingly effortless and elegant way, borne the brunt of the work. I wish to thank her from the heart for her excellent and thoughtful translation, competent advice, and pleasant collaboration. My friends around the world were always ready and willing to listen during the highs and lows of the writing process. I especially thank Sabine Hulbe for her smart comments on various parts of the manuscript. The greatest thanks are, as always, due to my family. My parents and siblings wished me luck, expressed interest, and let me go on my way in confidence. But no one was as closely involved in the production of this study as my husband Alfredo and our two sons. The joy of watching Davide and Michele grow up has amply recompensed all the labors of the research and writing process. Our daily family life was long inhabited by many illustrious female figures, who will probably always remain with us. Florence, Italy January 2022

Ruth Nattermann

Contents

1

Introduction 1.1 State of the Research 1.2 Jewish Identities 1.3 A “Minority Within a Minority” 1.4 Sources 1.5 Structure of the Study

1 5 8 14 19 26

2

Italian-Jewish Family Identities and Secular Subculture 2.1 Marriages and Blood Relationships 2.2 Judaism as Ethical Tradition 2.3 Family Memories 2.4 The Future in the Children: Birth and Upbringing Between Middle-Class Aspirations and Jewish Tradition

35 38 48 51

3

4

Biographies Between Secularism and Jewish Self-Positioning 3.1 Educator, Abolitionist, ebrea laica: The Pioneer Sara Levi Nathan 3.2 Fare gli Italiani Through Pedagogical Revitalization 3.3 Writing as Activism Emancipation, Integration, and Dissociation 4.1 National Reference Points, Transnational Networks: Jewish Actors in the Organized Women’s Movement 4.2 Jewish Women, Catholic Women, Antisemitism

58 65 65 80 94 109 109 154 xi

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5

6

7

CONTENTS

La Grande Guerra: Italian-Jewish Women Between Pacifism, Interventionism, and National Euphoria 5.1 Warmongers and Pacifists 5.2 Changing Relationships 5.3 Deceptive Memories 5.4 Between War and Dictatorship

181 181 193 205 213

Marginalization, Disenfranchisement, and Persecution Under Fascist Rule 6.1 Attitudes Toward Fascism 6.2 Zionism as a New Beginning and Refuge 6.3 The Attack on Rights and the Assault on Lives

233 233 250 272

“Le Emancipate”? Italian-Jewish Women Between Risorgimento and Fascism 7.1 Secular Jewish Family Identities in the Light of Women’s Biographies 7.2 Jewish Transnationalism and Catholic Antisemitism in the Organized Women’s Movement 7.3 The First World War as a Turning Point 7.4 Social Marginalization and Zionist New Beginning During the Fascist Dictatorship 7.5 Phases of Disenfranchisement and Persecution Until 1945

309 310 314 318 323 327

List of Sources and Literature

333

Person Index

369

Place Index

383

Abbreviations

General b. fasc. n. sfasc.

Busta (envelope) Fascicle Number Subfascicle

Institutions ACGV ACIV ACS ADDI ADEI AFF AIF ASPV CDEC CEF CNDI Comasebit DELASEM DEMORAZZA DGIS

Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux, Archivio Contemporaneo “Alessandro Bonsanti” Archivio della Comunità Israelitica di Venezia Archivio Centrale dello Stato Associazione divulgatrice donne italiane Associazione delle Donne Ebree d’Italia Archivio Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Association Internationale des Femmes Archivio storico dell’Università di Pavia Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea Comunità Ebraica di Firenze Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane Comitato di assistenza agli ebrei in Italia Delegazione per l’assistenza agli emigranti Direzione Generale Demografia e Razza Direzione generale dell’Istruzione Superiore xiii

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ABBREVIATIONS

DGPS FACE FILDIS FISEDD FPC FRT FSI Isacem Isrt IVSLA MCRR MPI ONMI PNF PSI RSI UCEI UDCI UFCI UFN Wizo

Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza Federazione Associazioni Culturali Ebraiche Federazione Italiana Laureate e Diplomate Istituti Superiori Federazione italiana per il suffragio e i diritti della donna Fondazione Primo Conti onlus Fondazione Rosselli Torino Federazione Sionistica Italiana Istituto per la storia dell’Azione cattolica e del movimento cattolico in Italia Paolo VI Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti Museo Centrale del Risorgimento a Roma Ministero Pubblica Istruzione Opera Nazionale per la Maternità e Infanzia Partito Nazionale Fascista Partito Socialista Italiano Repubblica di Salò Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane Unione fra le donne cattoliche d’Italia Unione Femminile Cattolica Italiana Unione Femminile Nazionale Women’s International Zionist Organization

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.4 2.5 4.1 4.2

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1

Laura Orvieto, circa 1895 The Lombroso family, ca. 1890. From left to right: Gina, Paola, and Cesare Lombroso, Nina De Benedetti Amelia Rosselli with her sons Nello (left) and Carlo (right), summer 1933 Amelia Rosselli, circa 1905 Gina Lombroso, 1892 Nina Rignano Sullam, circa 1910 Bice Cammeo, Ersilia Majno, and Antonietta Pisa Rizzi on the terrace of the Unione Femminile Nazionale, circa 1900 Amelia Rosselli with her eldest son Aldo (Udine, 1916), a few weeks before his death The Ravenna and Bassani families, Ferrara, 1911. Gabriella Ravenna, standing, third from right; her sister Germana Ravenna (deported in 1943), seated, second from left

43 46 50 52 54 145

147 208

255

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In September 1938, an article appeared in the antisemitic journal La Difesa della Razza with the telling title “Cleansing of the Books.” The anonymous author discussed the planned removal of writings by female Jewish writers, poets, and educators from Italian school curricula in uncompromising terms. He wrote: We have in view an accumulation of books of entertaining literature, some of them very well suited to children. We sink our hands into these piles. And thus we notice that our children are singing to the lyrics of Lina Schwarz, the Jew; our girls are sighing along to Cordelia, the Jew, dreaming along with Emma Boghen Conigliani, the Jew, waxing melancholy with Haydée, the Jew, or being instructed by Orvieto and Errera, the Jews. This list could be continued. What is this monopoly of children’s and entertainment literature all about? Every character that comes from a Jewish pen talmudizes, which is to say, it errs because it interprets – and interprets because it errs – states of mind, impulses, desires, and passions. We do not, therefore, consider ourselves cruel in proposing that there should be no indulgence in the area of entertainment- and children’s literature.1

1 “Bonifica Libraria,” La Difesa della Razza, I, 3 (September 1938).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Nattermann, Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4_1

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It did not take long for the concrete consequences to manifest. From November 1938 at the latest, the writings of Italian-Jewish female authors were not only removed from schools and libraries but taken out of circulation completely. Jewish women, who had well-above-average representation among contemporary children’s book authors and reform pedagogues, no longer belonged to the so-called “Italian race,” according to the official word of the regime; their writings were seen as a danger to the unified ideological orientation of Italian schools. Educational institutions and schools once independent of state control were closed or transformed into state institutions, including the secular Fröbel kindergartens founded in 1869 by the educator Adele Della Vida Levi. However, suppression of works and institutions instigated by Jewish women was not limited to the realm of education but was even extended to the women’s movement. At the end of 1938, the fascist government ordered the dissolution of the Unione Femminile Nazionale (UFN) in Milan, the most important Italian women’s union at the time, since it was a matter of common knowledge that Jewish protagonists were especially highly represented within it. The fate of Nina Rignano Sullam, the founder and long-term influential chairwoman of the Unione Femminile, who spent the last years before her death in 1945 hiding in small villages in northern Italy under assumed names, and of the first Italian agronomist, Aurelia Josz, who was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there at the age of seventy-five, represent just two examples of many Italian-Jewish feminists who met with violent deaths or whose lives were irrevocably changed by persecution and exile. The call for their works’ exclusion from Italian schools in September 1938 was paralleled by the exclusion of the authors themselves from Italian society. The lasting impact of this development can be seen in the fact that even after the collapse of the fascist dictatorship, the great majority of the affected women remained excluded from public Italian consciousness. Even today, many of their names and writings are known at best to a small and expert readership. This absence of memory is, among other things, an expression of the suppression of Italian responsibility for racial legislation and persecution of the Jews that continued for decades after the Second World War, and which also impacted historiography. In his work on the history of the Jews in fascist Italy, published in 1961, the eminent Italian historian Renzo de Felice described the integration of the Jewish minority into Italian society as unproblematic and harmonious and stressed that the “Jewish question” had not existed in Italy since

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the mid-nineteenth century. Antisemitism among Italians, he said, had been nonexistent before 1938.2 De Felice’s writings have had a decisive influence on the longevity of this version of history that has remained prevalent both within and outside Italy, up to the present day in some cases.3 Only in recent years have historians begun to call into question this traditional narrative of an overall successful and complete integration of the Jewish minority into the society of liberal Italy.4

2 De Felice R., Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il facismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1961). This

influential historian still claimed in an interview in 1987 that Italy was “outside the scope” of the Holocaust; see Jacobelli J. (ed.), Il fascismo e gli storici oggi (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1988), 3–6. The adoption of the fascist legislation of 1938 signaled the final cancelation of the Jewish-Italian emancipation of the nineteenth century. Recent studies on the Jews in fascist Italy, especially by Enzo Collotti and Michele Sarfatti, have convincingly demonstrated, however, that the racial laws should be seen not as a starting point for Italian antisemitism on a national-socialist model but as the culmination of a long-term, distinct process; see Collotti E., Il fascismo e gli ebrei: Le leggi razziali in Italia (RomeBari: Laterza, 2004); Sarfatti M., The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). See also the studies of David Bidussa and Filippo Focardi on the myth of the “good Italians,” and the recent critical work by Valeria Galimi on the attitudes of Italian society toward persecution of the Jews in fascist Italy, which also discusses relevant historiographical debates: Bidussa D., Il Mito del bravo italiano (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1994); Focardi F., Il cattivo tedeso e il bravo italiano: La rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2013); Galimi V., Sotto gli occhi di tutti: La società italiana e le persecuzioni contro gli ebrei (Florence: Le Monnier, 2018). 3 The impression that antisemitism had virtually no influence on Italian society still appears in sporadic English-language works of the last fifteen-to-twenty years, such as Lindemann A., Anti-Semitism before the Holocaust (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 86, 91; Stanislawski M., Zionism and the Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 13. 4 See Baumeister M., “‘Ebrei fortunati?’ Juden in Italien zwischen Risorgimento und Faschismus,” in Terhoeven P. (ed.), Italien, Blicke: Neue Perspektiven der Italienischen Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 43–60; Wyrwa U., Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder und die Entstehung des Antisemitismus: Das Deutsche Kaiserreich und das Liberale Italien im Vergleich (Berlin: Metropol, 2015); id., “Der Antisemitismus und die Gesellschaft des Liberalen Italien 1861–1915,” in Novelli-Glaab L., Jäger G. (eds.), “… denn in Italien haben sich die Dinge anders abgespielt.” Judentum und Antisemitismus im modernen Italien (Berlin: Trafo, 2007), 87–106; Schächter E., The Jews of Italy: Between Tradition and Transformation (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011). Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti sets a different focus, but also refers to the need for “deconstruction of the myth of an idyllic and unproblematic integration of the Jews into nineteenth-century Italy” to attain clarity as to the deeper causes of fascist antisemitism: Ferrara degli Uberti C., Fare gli ebrei italiani: Autorappresentazioni di una minoranza (1861–1918) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 8.

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At first glance, the experience of the small Jewish minority in the Italian unitary state seems in fact to have been extremely positive. In no other European country were Jews active in such great numbers in governmental, even ministerial, positions, and they could ascend to the highest ranks of the Italian army. In 1910, Luigi Luzzatti, a Jew, became the Italian prime minister. However, the situation of Jewish women has long been almost entirely overlooked within this perspective. Even after the legal emancipation of the Jews, which initially took place in the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in 1848 and was expanded to unified Italy in 1861 and to Rome in 1870, Jewish women were still not equal citizens due to their gender. The scope of participation for Jewish women, and for women in general, remained confined to social and cultural spheres. It is the thesis of this work that the traditional narrative of successful integration of the Jewish minority into Italian society and the apparently abrupt end to the Italian Jews’ “success story” in 1938 has taken hold primarily due to a focus on the public achievements of Jewish men and a general neglect of the emancipation and integration experiences of Jewish women, which were by no means always uniform. The present study therefore adopts a consciously gender-historical perspective. The goal is to analyze the tensions between participation and marginalization in the emancipation process of Jewish female actors between 1861 and 1945 and to look into the marginalization, disenfranchisement, and persecution that took place during the fascist dictatorship specifically from the perspective of Jewish women. Selected protagonists from the early Italian women’s movement are at the center of the investigation, including all the authors mentioned in the initial quotation from Difesa della Razza. The work combines this gender-historical and biographical approach with methodology drawing on organizational- and discourse-based history. The choice of 1861 as the starting point for the inquiry was based on the fact that the entry of Jewish women into the Italian majority society took place contemporaneously with the establishment and consolidation of organizations and groups which supported the emancipation of women as part of national unification. For Jewish women, this demand for new rights for women represented a means to realize both their continuing social integration as Jews and their emancipation as women.5 The First 5 The connection between the emancipatory demands of Jews and of women has only been the subject of a few studies up to now; see for the German context Schaser A., Schüler-Springorum S. (eds.), Liberalismus und Emanzipation: In- und Exklusionsformen

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World War seemed initially to further these claims. But with Mussolini’s accession to power and increasing state repression, the situation of the Italian women’s movement underwent a fundamental change.6 The longterm perspective chosen here enables a differentiated view of the often conflated anti-socialist, anti-laicist, and anti-Jewish tendencies within the relevant institutions from the 1920s onward. The establishment of the Jewish Women’s Union Associazione delle Donne Ebree d’Italia (ADEI) in 1927 will be a major theme, as will the prehistory and progress of disenfranchisement which became a reality in 1938 and intensified in the years that followed. The assault on Jewish lives from 1943 until the end of the war will be examined closely in order to clarify the largely forgotten fates of Italian-Jewish feminists in flight, in hiding, and in deportation.

1.1

State of the Research

The state of historical research on women’s and gender issues related to Italian-Jewish women has been unsatisfactory for a long time. Although interest in Italian-Jewish history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has significantly increased in recent years, both in Italy and internationally, female characters and gender relationships have been largely ignored within this historiographical development.7 im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010); Frevert U., “Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt. Modernitätserfahrungen von Frauen zwischen Gleichheit und Differenz,” in Volkov S. (ed.), Deutsche Juden und die Moderne (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), 75–94. For Italy, see Tasca L., “Die unmögliche Gleichheit von Frauen und Juden: Antiemanzipatorische Diskurse im italienischen Katholizismus und Positivismus um 1900,” Ariadne 43 (2003): 30–36. 6 On women in fascist Italy, see ead., The Clockwork Factory: Women and Work in Fascist Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Willson P., Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurali (London-New York: Routledge, 2002); de Grazia V., Le donne nel regime fascista (Venice: Marsilio, 2001); on Catholic women’s organizations under fascism, see Gazzetta L., Cattoliche durante il fascismo: Ordine sociale e organizzazioni femminili nelle Venezie (Rome: Viella, 2011). 7 Recent studies include Ferrara degli Uberti, Fare gli ebrei italiani; Schächter, The Jews of Italy; Caffiero M., Storia degli ebrei nell’Italia moderna: Dal Rinascimento alla Restaurazione (Rome: Carocci, 2014); Bettin C., Italian Jews from Emancipation to the Racial Laws (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Cavaglion A., Gli ebrei nell’Italia unita (Milan: Unicopli, 2012); Myers D. et al. (eds.), Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience between Exclusion and Inclusion (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008). For a comparison of the German and Italian situations, see Wyrwa U., Juden in der Toskana und in Preußen im Vergleich: Aufklärung und Emanzipation in

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One exception is Monica Miniati’s study of Jewish women in Italy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, published in French in 2003, which analyzes the Jewish-internal discourse on the role of women in view of the twofold demands of tradition and modernization.8 Miniati’s findings are based primarily on an analysis of the contemporary Jewish press, especially the contributions of the assimilation-oriented periodicals Educatore Israelita and Il Vessillo Israelitico from the 1850s to the end of the First World War. She focuses on the emergent discussions within the Jewish community regarding the roles and functions of Jewish women in the post-emancipatory age. Here, Miniati references the central importance of women for the preservation and transmission of religious tradition and identity within the Jewish family as demanded of them by community leaders in light of the transformation of Jewish self-consciousness, while, simultaneously, they were expected to behave as agents of the Jewish acculturation process. Miniati therefore focuses primarily on religious belonging and behavior, as well as on the perception of women in the context of the Jewish communities. Her research is especially valuable for its exposition of Jewish-internal debates regarding the role of women and the latter’s associated continuity of religious tradition against a background of societal modernization and secularization. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Miniati’s analysis provided an important starting point for the hitherto almost entirely neglected women’s and gender history of Italian Jews. At the same time, her work highlighted the need for additional research and the exploitation of new source materials, especially unpublished correspondence, diaries, and memoirs, for a comprehensive assessment of the thoroughly diverse experiences of Italian-Jewish female characters and how they related to the non-Jewish majority society. Most of the authors who contributed to the 2007 Italian collection of essays Women in the History of Italian Jewry referred to the serious lack of research and to the many still-unexamined sources for Italian-Jewish gender history, especially for the period since

Florenz, Livorno, Berlin und Königsberg i.Pr. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); Toscano M., Integrazione e identità: L’esperienza ebraica in Germania e Italia dall’Illuminismo al fascismo (Milan: Angeli, 1998). 8 Miniati M., Les “émancipées”: Les femmes juives italiennes aux XIXe et XXe siècles (1848–1924) (Paris: Éditeur Honoré Champion, 2003), with an Italian translation from 2008: Le “emancipate”: Le donne ebree in Italia nel XIX e XX secolo (Rome: Viella, 2008).

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Jewish emancipation.9 However, there was little change in the state of the research in the years that followed; even biographical works comprised only sporadic, mostly essayistic contributions.10 The still-deficient state of secondary literature on the movimento nazionale femminile poses another central problem for the study of Jewish women in the early Italian women’s movement. The standard works concentrate on the history of the emergence of the Italian women’s movement in the nineteenth century and largely ignore developments before and during the First World War.11 Nationalist and irredentist positions, which are also to be encountered particularly among Jewish activists, as well as antisemitic prejudices among Catholic and non-Jewish women, have remained largely unstudied in the Italian context. There are a few relevant studies of the development of the organizations of the Italian women’s movement under fascism, but scarcely any attention is paid to the attitudes and experiences of Jewish feminists as these organizations became increasingly fascist and the atmosphere, increasingly antisemitic.12 Historiography has also paid little attention to 9 See e.g. Catalan T., “Donne ebree a Trieste,” in Associazione Italiana per lo Studio del Giudaismo, Italia Judaica, Lucca 6–9 giugno 2005: Donne nella storia degli ebrei d’Italia (Florence: Giuntina, 2007), 347–349; Scardozzi M., “Amiche: Lettere di Marianna, Regina e Lina Uzielli a Emilia Toscanelli Peruzzi,” in ibid., 373 f. 10 On the writer Amelia Pincherle (1870–1954), mother of Carlo and Nello Rosselli, see Amato G., Una donna nella storia: Vita e letteratura di Amelia Pincherle Rosselli: Tragico tempo, chiaro il dovere, Quaderni del Circolo Rosselli 1 (2012); on the writer Laura Orvieto (1876–1953), see Laura Orvieto: La voglia di raccontare le “Storie del Mondo,” Antologia Vieusseux 18 (2012); on the Mazzinian Sara Levi Nathan (1819–1882), see Valentini C., “La banchiera della rivoluzione: Sara Levi Nathan,” in Maraini D. et al. (eds.), Donne del Risorgimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011); on the literary scholar Emma Boghen Conigliani (1866–1956), see Gragnani C., “Istanza Didattica: Emancipazionismo e Biografismo Tardo Ottocentesco: Emma Boghen Conigliani Critica Letteraria,” in ead., Frau O. (eds.), Sottoboschi Letterari: Sei case studies fra Otto e Novecento (Florence: Florence University Press, 2011), 29–54. 11 See Pieroni Bortolotti F., Alle origini del movimento femminile in Italia 1848–1892 (Turin: Einaudi, 1963); Dickmann E., Die italienische Frauenbewegung im 19: Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Domus Editoria Europaea, 2002). Only the recent study by Liviana Gazzetta expands the period under examination to 1925. It is based primarily on published sources, especially the journals of the contemporary women’s movements. The lived experiences and discourses of Jewish feminists are not a focus of the research. See Gazzetta L., Orizzonti nuovi: Storia del primo femminismo in Italia (1865–1925) (Rome: Viella, 2018). 12 See Taricone F., L’Associazionismo femminile in Italia dall’Unità al Fascismo (Milan: Unicopli, 1996); de Grazia Le donne nel regime fascista.

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the establishment and early history of the first Jewish women’s union in Italy, the Associazione Donne Ebree d’Italia (ADEI), founded in 1927 in Milan. The circumstances of its foundation, the political activity and Zionist orientation of its members, which were increasingly combined with anti-fascist goals, as well as their surveillance and persecution by the fascist regime, are largely unstudied.13

1.2

Jewish Identities

Although the participation of Jewish women in the women’s movement of post-emancipation Italy represents an important aspect of the modernization and secularization of Italian Jewry, it would be incorrect to equate this process with the dissolution of a particular Jewish identity. The consciousness of being part of a family history with its roots in Judaism can be considered the most important and longest-lasting component of a secular Jewish self-consciousness that was characteristic of the mostly nonreligious-Jewish actors of the early Italian women’s movement. There was no Jewish women’s union in liberal Italy as there was in Germany. Since the vast majority of Jewish actors were involved in the nondenominational institutions of the Italian women’s movement, Jewish identities have long been almost completely neglected in this context.14 Relevant studies on Jewish women in the first national women’s movements and on Jewish feminist positions and intentions have contributed significantly to a differentiated assessment of Jewish identities in post-emancipation European societies.15 In the case of the Habsburg 13 Among the few existing contributions on the history of the ADEI, see Follacchio S., “Associazionismo femminile e nation building: Il contributo dell’Associazione Donne Ebree d’Italia,” Chronica Mundi 12 (2017): 99–125; Nidam-Orvieto I., “Associazione Donne Ebree d’Italia,” in The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women https://jwa. org/encyclopedia/article/associazione-donne-ebree-ditalia-adei; Miniati M., “Non dimenticare. Il ruolo formativo e culturale dell’Adei (Associazione donne ebree d’Italia), dal dopoguerra a oggi,” in Piussi A. M. (ed.), Presto apprendere, tardi dimenticare: L’educazione ebraica nell’Italia contemporanea (Milan: Angeli, 1998), 167–169. 14 An exception is Annarita Buttafuoco’s work, “Una ‘filantropa politica.’ Profilo di Nina Rignano Sullam,” Il Risorgimento 2 (1989): 143–159. 15 Irmgard Maya Fassmann already represented the protagonists of her study on Jewish women in the German women’s movement as consciously Jewish women; Iris Schröder calls the Jewish social reformers involved in the Frankfurt women’s movement “border crossers” because of their mobility between Jewish and non-Jewish spheres; see Fassmann I. M., Jüdinnen in der deutschen Frauenbewegung, 1865–1919 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms,

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Monarchy, and later the Republic of Austria, where, as in contemporary Italy, there was no Jewish women’s union comparable to the one in Germany, recent studies have clarified the relevance of a widely held concept of Jewishness that defied strict categorization, allowed for multiple social and cultural affiliations, and considered the situationdriven perceptions of self and other.16 In the Eastern-European context, the importance of secular Jewish (female) identities within the Jewish workers’ movements and political unions has been emphasized since the 1990s.17 In explicitly Jewish women’s unions of the period, the continuity of a religious group consciousness played a disproportionately greater role. This is the case both for members of the Union of Jewish Women, established in England in 1902, and for those of the Jüdische Frauenbund, founded in Germany in 1904, as well as for Jewish activists in Switzerland who formed a union of Swiss Jewish Women’s Organizations in 1924

1996); Schröder I., “Grenzgängerinnen: jüdische Sozialreformerinnen in der Frankfurter Frauenbewegung um 1900,” in Gotzmann A. et al. (eds.), Juden, Bürger, Deutsche: zur Geschichte von Vielfalt und Differenz 1800–1933 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 341– 368. 16 See especially Malleier E., “Jüdische Feministinnen in der Wiener bürgerlichen Frauenbewegung vor 1938,” in Grandner M., Saurer E. (eds.), Geschlecht, Religion und Engagement: Die jüdischen Frauenbewegungen im deutschsprachigen Raum, 19: und frühes 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau, 2005), 79–10; ead., “Jeder Sieg der Frauen muss ein Sieg der Freiheit sein, oder er ist keiner,” in Eichinger B. (ed.), Wien und die Jüdische Erfahrung 1900–1938. Akkulturation, Antisemitismus, Zionismus (Vienna: Böhlau, 2009), 277; ead., “Das Engagement von Jüdinnen in gemischtkonfessionellen Vereinen,” in Adunka E. et al. (eds.), Jüdisches Vereinswesen in Österreich im 19: und 20. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2011); Raggam-Blesch M., “Zwischen den Fronten: Jüdische Frauen in feministischen, politischen und philanthropischen Bewegungen im Wien der Jahrhundertwende,” in Grandner, Saurer, Geschlecht, Religion und Engagement, 25–55; and especially the editors’ foreword in ibid., 17–20. According to Marsha Rozenblit, the Jews of the Habsburg Empire had a “threefold identity,” combining, first, political loyalty to the Austrian monarchy; second, a German, Czech, or Polish cultural identity, and, third, an ethnic Jewish self-consciousness; see Rozenblit M., Reconstructing National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 128. 17 See Klepfisz I., “Di Mames, dos Loshn/ The Mothers, the Language: Feminism, Yidishkayt and the Politics of Memory,” Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends 4,1 (1994): 12–47. Freeze C., Hyman P., “Introduction: A Historiographical Survey”, in ead., Polonsky A. (eds.), Jewish Women in Eastern Europe = Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry 18 (2005): 18, 21.

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and were mostly involved in welfare activities.18 A moderate, bourgeois feminism prevailed in all these Jewish women’s associations, although the German women’s union also called male dominance in the religious sphere significantly into question.19 In the case of Italy, the strikingly large number of Jewish women involved in the nondenominational women’s movement initially seems to point to a distancing of those concerned from their Jewish origins. Their laicizing and secular positioning seemed to render consideration of their milieus superfluous. But new research perspectives need to be explored precisely by analyzing the Jewish origins and socialization of the women involved as well as their often only apparently linear secular selfpositioning. This is where the present study starts. Border phenomena and transgressions as well as the mobility and processuality of Jewish identities have been intensively considered in this work. Thus, persons with secular, liberal, and/or socialist outlooks, who had only weak religious ties to the Jewish community, if any, are also taken into consideration. At the same time, women are considered who were involved both in the nondenominational institutions of the women’s movement and in the Jewish communities of their hometowns. The terms “Jewish women” and “Jewish actors” refer in this work to women with largely secular Jewish family identities, primarily defined through ideas of a community of origin, ethical traditions, and forms of communicative memory. The Zionist path acquired significance for some of the women discussed here during the 1920s in the context of the emergence of the ADEI. A general feature consistently observable among these women is their conscious and continuous involvement in extensive,

18 See Tananbaum S., “Jewish Feminist Organizations in Britain and Germany at the Turn of the Century,” in Brenner M. et al. (eds.), Two Nations: British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective (Tübingen: LBI with Mohr Siebeck Publishers, 1999), 371–392; Weingarten-Guggenheim E., “Die jüdische Frauenbewegung in der Schweiz,” in Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund—Fédération suisse des communautés israélites (ed.), Jüdische Lebenswelt Schweiz—Vie et culture juives en Suisse (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2004), 72–85. 19 See Kaplan M., Die jüdische Frauenbewegung. Organisationen und Ziele des Jüdischen Frauenbundes 1904–1938 (Hamburg: Hans Christians, 1981); Richarz M., “Frauen in Familie und Öffentlichkeit,” in Lowenstein S. et al. (eds.), Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, vol. 3 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1997), 96 f.

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INTRODUCTION

11

often transnational Jewish family-and-friendship networks.20 Their familyoriented self-consciousness was fundamental to the creation of a Jewish group identity, which remained vital even within the nondenominational women’s movement. The present study thus sheds new light on the concept of identità famigliare, developed by Barbara Armani and Guri Schwarz for the Jews of post-emancipation Italy, by making further connections relevant for this concept and considering its multiple levels in the context of the selfconsciousness of Italian-Jewish women and their relationships to Italian majority society.21 The main goal is to analyze and clarify the polyphonic texture and diverse characteristics of Italian-Jewish family identities in liberal and in fascist Italy. Such considerations have not yet been taken into account in existing studies of Jewish women in the Italian unitary state. The formation of multiple Jewish identities in post-emancipation Italy has not yet been subject for discussion. Miniati’s research leans heavily on the idea developed by Marion Kaplan for the German-Jewish context of the role of middle-class Jewish women as guardians of religious tradition at home and in the family. But Kaplan’s theory cannot be transferred directly to the Italian situation. It does not do justice to the distinct laicism of Italian-Jewish female activists. Besides the laicism and the anti-clerical character of the Risorgimento, there are also important demographic features to be considered which shaped the Italian emancipation history in quite a different way. While the percentage of Jews in the overall Italian population between 1850 and 1910 was never more than 0.1%, in Germany they comprised 1 to 1.2% during the period between 1871 and 1910. Therefore, the will, but also the pressure to integrate was proportionately greater for the smaller Italian minority.22 20 On this, see Nattermann R., “Weibliche Emanzipation und jüdische Identität im vereinten Italien: Jüdinnen in der frühen italienischen Frauenbewegung,” in Clemens G., Späth J. (eds.), 150 Jahre Risorgimento—geeintes Italien? (Trier: Kliomedia, 2014), 127– 146, 139 f. 21 Armani and Schwarz call for the Italian-Jewish history of the emancipation period to be treated as a history of families. In this view, the emancipated Italian Jews participated in the cultural memory and cultural heritage of closely knit families, which sometimes even took on the characteristics of clans. See Armani B., Schwarz G., “Premessa,” in Armani B., Schwarz G. (eds.), Ebrei Borghesi: Identità famigliare, solidarietà e affari nell’età dell’emancipazione, Quaderni Storici 114 (2003): 627 f. 22 For the demographic development of the Italian Jews, see Della Pergola S., Anatomia dell’ebraismo italiano: caratteristiche demografiche, economiche, sociali, religiose e politiche di

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The strong identification with the laicist character of the Risorgimento and its implicit promise of emancipation left an especially enduring mark on even the private sphere of the Italian-Jewish bourgeoisie.23 The evidence shows that protagonists like Sara Levi Nathan, Amelia Rosselli, and Laura Orvieto did away with Jewish customs in their homes either partially or completely. Their conception of laicism went far beyond the idea of separation between Church and State and amounted to a secularization of life in general. Overall, bourgeois Jewish women identified far more strongly with the laicist culture of liberal Italy than did Catholic women of the higher social strata, who mostly stayed true to the Church and were not infrequently committed to Catholic women’s organizations.24 The vast majority of Jewish protagonists of the Italian women’s movement established in the 1860s, however, operated under the auspices of laicism, which was represented primarily by liberal bourgeois men in the first decades after the establishment of the state. Italian-Jewish feminists thus moved outside of the “bipolar gender model” of liberal Italy.25 Their engagement in the national women’s movement reveals strategies on the part of this “minority within a minority” aimed at achieving acceptance as members of the national community on an equal footing and una minoranza (Roma: Carucci, 1976); id., “La popolazione ebraica in Italia nel contesto ebraico globale,” in Vivanti C. (ed.), Storia d’Italia, Annali 11: Gli ebrei in Italia: dal medioevo all’età dei ghetti (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 897–939. An additional feature of the Italian context is the absence of a Reform movement such as there was in Germany. See Foa A., “Il mito dell’assimilazione. La storiografia sull’Emancipazione degli ebrei italiani: prospettive e condizionamenti,” Ebrei e nazione: Comportamenti e rappresentazioni nell’età dell’emancipazione (storia e problemi contemporanei XX, 45, May–August 2007): 24 f. 23 For the importance of the inclusion of the private, domestic sphere in a differentiated analysis of the Jewish acculturation processes in European societies and of considering ego documents such as diaries, letters, and memoirs, see Hyman P., Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 23; ead., “Does Gender Matter? Locating Women in European Jewish History,” in Cohen J., Rosman M. (eds.), Rethinking European Jewish History (Oxford: Littman Library, 2009), 60. 24 See Janz O., “Konflikt, Koexistenz und Symbiose. Nationale und religiöse Symbolik in Italien vom Risorgimento bis zum Faschismus,” in: Haupt H.-G., Langewiesche D. (eds.), Nation und Religion in Europa: Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus Verlag, 2004), 242. 25 For the bipolar gender model in liberal Italy, see Borutta M., “La ‘natura’ del nemico,” in Ciampani A., Klinkhammer L. (eds.), La ricerca tedesca sul Risorgimento italiano: Atti del convegno internazionale Roma 1–3 marzo 2001, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento 2001 (suppl.): 135.

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INTRODUCTION

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at constructing a female self-consciousness between national and Jewish loyalties. A consideration of secular Jewish identities, which were centrally located within the family, thus demands special reflection on the plurality and the contents of Italian-Jewish family identities. To this end, the significance of collective memory and transmission of ethical principles to the next generation must be considered alongside ideas of Jewish blood relationship, ethnicity, and race that were ubiquitous in the contemporary Jewish discourse and have increasingly become the focus of research into Italian as well as French and German Jewry in recent years.26 Additionally, the role of marriage in creating and maintaining cultural and social milieus needs to be interrogated. It should first be stated that marriages with non-Jews were almost nonexistent among the women treated here. It is a striking fact that these women, who generally came from the educated and well-to-do bourgeoisie, mostly married men from Jewish families of the same social class, who were sometimes even distant cousins.27 Did this strong tendency toward endogamy among the ItalianJewish bourgeoisie fulfill social, cultural, and economic functions beyond the continuity of Jewish identities that were relevant to the kinship ties and alliances between bourgeois (Jewish and non-Jewish) families all over contemporary Europe?28 Presumably, the continual negotiation of family relationships as set out in detail by David W. Sabean a few years ago can be traced in the marriage behaviors of, for example, the Nathan, Rosselli, and Orvieto families, in the form of “cousin or cousin-like marriages,” among other ways. They contributed significantly to the interdependence of family units and to their transregional and transnational expansion, and at the same time were aimed at safeguarding and handing down ownership, education,

26 See Ferrara degli Uberti, Fare gli ebrei italiani, 142; Lenhard P., Volk oder Religion? Die Entstehung moderner jüdischer Ethnizität in Frankreich und Deutschland 1782–1848 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). 27 On the importance of endogamy for the Italian-Jewish community, see Armani B., Il confine invisibile: L’élite ebraica di Firenze 1840–1914 (Milan: Angeli, 2006), 241–243. 28 Dan Diner stresses the inherently European perspective of Jewish history. See Diner D., „Geschichte der Juden—Paradigma einer europäischen Historie,“ in Stourzh G. (ed.), Annäherungen an eine europäische Geschichtsschreibung (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002), especially 85–88.

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and traditions within allied families.29 The social and cultural practices of Jewish families in liberal Italy, as far as they can be reconstructed from ego documents, serve as an indicator for the initiation of such (romantic) relationships and marriages. In this connection, they also become a useful instrument for a differentiated consideration of the concept of family identity. In particular, regarding the Italian-Jewish protagonists treated here and the tensions in the emancipation process of Jewish women in general, this approach can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the diverse and often situation-dependent relationships between tradition and acculturation, as for example in the parallel existence of marriages according to the Jewish rite and civil ceremonies within the same family. In this way, more light can be shed on the ways that Jewish family milieus simultaneously demanded integration and exclusivity in their reciprocal relationships with the majority society. Investigation of the hitherto almost entirely neglected experiences of Italian-Jewish women within their families promises another perspective on the development of identities unleashed by Jewish emancipation and the often fluid transitions between Jewish self-consciousness, Italian national consciousness, and transnational orientation, and will at the same time clarify the parameters of social integration processes in the light of real lived situations and behavior patterns.

1.3

A “Minority Within a Minority”

The oldest female Jewish protagonists focused upon in this study include Sara Levi Nathan, Adele Della Vida Levi, Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo, Carolina Luzzatto, and Nina Modona Olivetti. They were born in the period between 1819 and 1837. In this generation, journalism and literature were the predominant forms of engagement for the Italian women’s movement, whose publishing arm offered Jewish women too a welcome platform for promoting women’s rights from the 1870s onward. In addition, Sara Levi Nathan and Adele Della Vida Levi founded innovative social institutions; they became pioneers of organized welfare provision for women and children in Italy.

29 See Sabean D., “Kinship and Class Dynamics in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Sabean D. et al. (eds.), Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300– 1900) (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 305–307, 310 f.

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INTRODUCTION

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The majority of the women discussed here were born in the late 1860s and 1870s; they were thus born into Jewish families that had newly received legal emancipation. Their often multifaceted involvement, both as authors and journalists and in the organized women’s movement, especially from the late 1890s onward, reveals a comparatively advantageous starting point for Jewish families when compared with the situation in pre-emancipation Italy, as well as the advanced institutionalization of the Italian women’s movement, in which Jewish women could gain an increasingly firm footing. The youngest protagonists of the present research were born in the 1890s and around 1900. These also include a few Zionists, such as Gabriella Falco Ravenna and Marta Bernstein Navarra, both of them pioneers of the ADEI founded in Milan in 1927. Zionist ideas, which were generally on the rise in parts of the Italian-Jewish community by the end of the First World War, also received increased interest in ItalianJewish women’s circles against the background of the fascist dictatorship. Thus, the development of the Italian women’s movement, its representatives, and its themes in general can be observed by analyzing the spheres in which Jewish women of different generations were active. At the same time, examining the involvement of Jewish women in the organizations in question reveals their increasing marginalization from the beginning of the fascist dictatorship onward, culminating in their expulsion from all remaining secular unions of the Italian women’s movement in November 1938. These women undoubtedly comprised a “minority within a minority.” Although an above-average number of Jewish women was involved in the early Italian women’s movement,30 and in women’s movements in Europe in general, by no means was the majority of Jewish women in Italy involved in the feminist groups and organizations of the period. This is especially true of those Jewish women who, even post emancipation, continued to define themselves primarily through their religious 30 For example, the most important Italian women’s association, the Unione Femminile Nazionale (UFN), had a Jewish membership of about 10% from its foundation in 1899 up until the promulgation of the racial laws in 1938; see Novelli-Glaab L., “Zwischen Tradition und Moderne: Jüdinnen in der italienischen Gesellschaft um 1900,” in ead., Jäger, Judentum und Antisemitismus, 110. In comparison, about a third of the membership of the bourgeois German women’s movement was Jewish. Of the ninety-four women’s unions active in Berlin in 1893, thirty were led by Jewish women; see Schüler-Springorum S., Geschlecht und Differenz (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014), 97.

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belonging and gender roles. The important position of women in Judaism results from their notoriously central role within the family, especially as relates to raising children, preparation for feast days, and observation of purity laws. After the establishment of the liberal unified state in 1861, however, religious traditions and observances lost relevance in large sections of the Italian-Jewish community due to the overall process of secularization. But once equality was thus achieved, the community authorities gave women the special responsibility to keep their distance from social modernization processes and to protect their families from the threat of secularization through heightened religious observance. In the contemporary Jewish press, notable authors discussed how to preserve religious tradition and cultural heritage and transmit them to future generations. According to them, women, in their capacity as wives and mothers, should prevent the feared loss of identity of the Jewish community within the new, secularized state. Thus, for example, the Jewish newspaper Educatore Israelita (1853–1874) explicitly demanded improved religious and social education for women to suitably prepare them for their important traditional female functions within the Jewish community. The emphasis was on communicating religious Jewish values and knowledge to girls and young women in kindergartens, schools, and vocational institutions, since they were seen as the guarantors of Jewish religious identity within their (future) families.31 This perspective reveals that Jewish women had significant potential for action in the private sphere. In contrast, their opportunities to engage in Jewish community life and in the secular public sphere remained severely limited. Women, in contradistinction to men, were largely excluded from studying the Torah and from the majority of community activities both de jure and de facto. There were prescriptions and laws that determined the subordinate position of Jewish women in contemporary Jewish society. For example, they could not testify as witnesses before a Jewish court; they did not have equal rights of inheritance with their male relatives; and they could not file for divorce unilaterally.32 The concept of men’s “nature-given” intellectual superiority originated with Rabbi Giuseppe Levi, who wrote in 1864 in Educatore Israelita:

31 See Novelli-Glaab, “Zwischen Tradition,” 113. 32 See Biale R., Women and Jewish Law: An Exploration of Women’s Issues in Halakhic

Sources (New York: Knopf, 1984), 102–120; Miniati, Le “emancipate,” 30–32.

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Women, leave the tough treatments, the peculiar meditations, the intellectual speculation to us calmly and without envy. But these man’s tasks would be all too painful were you, women, not to cast your flowers and the light of your hearts over them… Women, leave the strenuous work of thinking to us calmly; direct your thoughts toward love, toward sweet and holy emotions.33

Despite the rabbi’s demand that women keep away from the intellectual sphere that was the preserve of men and focus on emotionally supporting their partner, the educational level of Jewish women in Italy was generally very high. Mothers taught their children to read and write in the traditional manner. According to a survey of literacy levels in Italy around 1861, only 5.8% of Jewish women were illiterate, making approximately equivalent literacy levels for both genders. In contrast, the level of illiteracy among non-Jewish women was over 80%.34 Meanwhile, in the German context, literacy levels were strongly differentiated by gender: even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, far fewer Jewish women than Jewish men could read and write. Furthermore, in the Germanspeaking context, (relatively) more Jewish women than Christian women were illiterate.35 The generally advantageous educational situation of Jewish women in Italy was largely due to the distinctly middle-class and urban character of the small Italian-Jewish minority. Already in the early phase of Italian unification, the Jewish communities resident in northern and central Italy displayed a predominantly bourgeois, urban profile.36 This characteristic was only strengthened by the immigration of “rural Jews” into towns and the influx of Jews from middle-sized towns into cities like Turin, Milan, Florence, and Rome. Prosperity and increased economic security conferred access to secular education. At the same time, Jewish girls

33 Giuseppe Levi, “L’anima della donna,” Educatore Israelita (November 1864): 328. 34 See Della Pergola, Anatomia; id., La popolazione ebraica, 34 f. 35 See Schüler-Springorum, Geschlecht und Differenz, 61. 36 Immediately before 1861, two thirds of Italy’s Jews lived in Rome, Livorno, and

Trieste, each of whose communities numbered over 2500 members. In the south of Italy, however, there had been no Jewish settlements since the expulsions under Spanish rule in the sixteenth century.

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and young women benefited from the fact that their traditional religious education could pave the way to secular modern education in the humanities and natural sciences.37 Thus, the sociocultural conditions for middle- and upper-class ItalianJewish women’s involvement as authors, journalists, educators, and social workers were generally favorable. And yet only a minority of them became involved in the early Italian women’s movement. Extrication from religiously defined gender-based stereotypes and functions, the development of feminist positions, and active participation in the nondenominational women’s movement not only required secular education and a secure position in society but were strongly dependent, in the family context, on support and encouragement from fathers, husbands, and male relatives. However, patriarchal family structures were by no means unexceptional in the contemporary Italian-Jewish bourgeoisie. This situation, too, contributed to the fact that, even in post-emancipation Italy, Jewish feminists remained “a minority within a minority.” One of the first contributors to the feminist journal La Donna, Cesira Levi Finzi (born around 1850), discontinued her work as a writer and journalist after her marriage, while Bice Cammeo, twenty-five years younger and a social activist from Florence, was prevented from studying at university by her parents. Meanwhile, it appears surprising that Cesare Lombroso’s daughters Gina and Paola studied, became famous scholars, and were active in the contemporary women’s movement, given the anthropologist’s notoriously patriarchal attitudes, but this fits with the picture of the “private” Lombroso that emerges from studying the family’s personal correspondence, who coexisted quite harmoniously with his wife, children, and grandchildren. In contrast, the prominent professor of medicine, Giuseppe Levi, appears even in private as a socialist patriarch with despotic traits, as immortalized by his daughter, the writer and political activist Natalia Levi Ginzburg, born in 1916, in her autobiographical novel Lessico famigliare.38 Although she cannot be considered one of the representatives of the early Italian women’s movement, the secular Jewish identity of her educated bourgeois family—an identity inextricably linked to antifascist positions—resembles in many respects that of the Rossellis and

37 See Baumeister, “Ebrei fortunati?”, 54 f. 38 See Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), especially 3–7, 15 f.

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Lombrosos studied here, with whom the Levi Ginzburgs were close friends and political allies during the fascist dictatorship. However, the distinctive emotional closeness and reciprocally respectful communication between parents and children, siblings and marriage partners that enabled even the female Rossellis to become socially and politically active did not present itself in Natalia Levi Ginzburg’s family context that was strongly dominated by paternal authority. Involvement in feminist activity on the part of wives, daughters, and sisters often ran counter to family-internal power structures. Only very rarely did Jewish women become involved in the contemporary women’s movement against the will of their families. But becoming a feminist activist by no means implied complete rejection of a Jewish selfidentity: this can be clearly demonstrated from the endurance of secular Italian-Jewish family identities in the lives of the protagonists studied here.

1.4

Sources

At present, there are no comprehensive biographical studies of the largely forgotten female Jewish writers, journalists, educators, and social workers in the Italian unitary state. Furthermore, the few existing studies of the history of the organized Italian women’s movement are incomplete and mostly several decades old. Therefore, the present work required largescale investigation of archival source materials that were often difficult to access and in disparate conditions. Personal papers and private and family archives were consulted in order to reconstruct biographies, investigate Jewish (self-)images, and acquire an in-depth understanding of transregional and transnational networks of women, families, and friendships. Especially noteworthy among the numerous archives consulted in Florence, Milan, Pavia, Rome, Turin, Venice, and elsewhere, are the extensive and relatively well-organized archives of the families Orvieto, Lombroso, Rosselli, and Nathan in Florence and Turin, which contain a large number of personal testimonies and letters to and from protagonists such as Sara Levi Nathan, Laura Orvieto, Amelia Rosselli, and the sisters Gina and Paola Lombroso. These collections afford a quite multifaceted picture of the subjects’ wide-ranging family-and-friendship ties from which family identities characteristic for the Jewish-Italian context clearly emerge.

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Meanwhile, documents in the Jewish Community Archive in Venice proved vitally important in tracing the self-image of the educator Adela Della Vida Levi, as well as her letters to her famous son-in-law, Luigi Luzzatti, which have long been unstudied. The letters of the GermanItalian-Jewish women’s rights activist Paolina Schiff to the radical democrat Felice Cavallotti, preserved in the Fondazione Feltrinelli in Milan, as well as relevant documents in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS) in Rome and the university archives in Turin and Pavia provide fascinating insights into her convoluted life path, her efforts to establish the Italian women’s movement, and the obstacles she faced in attaining the position of Privatdozentin. Documents from the Mannheim city archive filled in several gaps in her family background. The author received valuable documents, including letters and memory books, from descendants of the Ancona and Schiff families. She thanks Simon Levis Sullam for vital information on Nina Rignano Sullam’s family background, while Lionella Neppi Modona Viterbo provided relevant findings on the Cammeo family. Through a conversation with Bosiljka Raditsa, Gina Lombroso’s granddaughter, she gained detailed insights into the latter’s ancestors, the Lombrosos’ heterogeneous Jewish self-consciousness, and the thoroughly different emancipatory ideas and female identity concepts of the sisters Gina and Paola Lombroso. Since there was no Jewish women’s union in Italy before 1927 such as there was in Germany, for example, the documents of the most important contemporary secular women’s organizations, in which Jewish women were disproportionately highly represented, are the main focus for study of Jewish women’s engagement in such organizations. In order to analyze their activities in traditionally Jewish spheres (such as Jewish kindergartens, schools, and orphanages) alongside this inquiry, additional research was conducted in the Jewish community archives of Rome, Florence, and Venice. This research revealed that several of the protagonists chosen for this study, including Adela Della Vida Levi, Laura Orvieto, and Nina Rignano Sullam, campaigned in the interests of women, girls, and children not only within nondenominational institutions but also in the context of the Jewish communities of their home cities. Central sources for the nondenominational sphere include the extensive archive of the Unione Femminile Nazionale (from 1899 on) in Milan and the detailed papers of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane (CNDI) (1908 onward) in Rome. The participation of Jewish

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women, both quantitatively and qualitatively speaking, the focus of their work, and their organizational and private connections within the relevant institutions can be traced very clearly through membership registers, applications for membership and resignations, minutes of meetings, project descriptions, and brochures. The archive for the Asilo Mariuccia, a home founded by the UFN for homeless girls in whose conceptual development and practical implementation Jewish activists like Nina Rignano Sullam and Bice Cammeo were significantly involved, is especially interesting in this connection. A significant part of the UFN archive is taken up by the Majno family archive, which includes a large number of hitherto unstudied letters from leading Jewish feminists to the long-time president of the Milan organization, Ersilia Majno. This correspondence is especially useful in supplying biographical information and confirming ideological positions. The collections of the UFN and the CNDI contain comprehensive information regarding the First World War period and document the social and cultural engagement of Italian women on the home front in detail. In general, patriotically motivated Jewish women were involved in especially large numbers. Within the CNDI archive, the documents of the Florentine chapter are preserved in remarkably complete condition. Not only do these reflect the conspicuous engagement on behalf of women’s social and cultural issues by Jewish writers and literati resident there like Laura Orvieto and Amelia Rosselli, whose attitudes and suggestions are preserved in the minutes of meetings; they also point to a long undetected tension between the headquarters in Rome and the Florentine chapter of the CNDI. Investigation of this source material revealed animosities between the group in Florence, with its highly influential members of Jewish origin, and the CNDI headquarters in Rome, dominated by members of the Italian aristocracy. There is a whole series of resignation letters from Jewish members of the Florentine chapter dating from the early 1920s, which is to be seen in connection with the increasing approachment of the CNDI’s leadership toward fascism. For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Jewish and Catholic activists in the organized women’s movement in Italy, research was carried out in the Istituto per la storia dell’Azione cattolica e del movimento cattolico in Italia Paolo VI (ISACEM), where the archive of Italy’s Catholic women’s movement (Unione fra le donne cattoliche d’Italia), founded in 1908, is housed. The correspondence of the board

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of directors, mainly aristocratic women, with ecclesiastical dignitaries and representatives of the secular women’s organizations was examined, revealing an altogether problematic relationship between the Catholic and the laicist women’s groups. The Unione Donne’s publications, which are preserved nearly complete in the archive, are of special interest in tracing the conflict between Catholic and Jewish or nonreligious-Jewish activists and the question of the existence of antisemitic tendencies within the organized Catholic women’s movement. It emerges that anti-Jewish attitudes, along with a strong anti-laicism, determined the attitude of Catholic activists toward Jewish protagonists in liberal Italy far more strongly and enduringly than is commonly assumed. The field of education, the school system, and the fashion industry were especially strongly impacted. The writings of Catholic protagonists also display increased radicalization in the anti-Jewish discourse beginning in 1911, transitioning into openly antisemitic polemic during the First World War. The documents examined verify that the overall exclusion of Jewish women from the Catholic institutions, and their orientation toward the secular organizations, was also set in motion by the Catholics, who distanced themselves from secularism, but also, when all was said and done, consciously distanced themselves from Jews. The central sources for analyzing the situation of Jewish feminists during the fascist era included the correspondence of the relevant actors, the CNDI and UFN archives, as well as relevant documents in the archive of Italy’s Ministry of the Interior. The author has studied the correspondence between the Florentine chapter and the head office in Rome for the 1920s and 1930s, held in the extensive CNDI archives. The correspondence reveals the Rome headquarters’ adoption of the fascist regime’s ideology and its increasing influence over the organization as a whole, which the traditionally mainly left-liberal Florence and Milan chapters sought to avoid—eventually, in vain. The previously unknown defamation campaign initiated against the Jewish, socialist-leaning feminist Nina Sierra in the summer of 1924 by certain leading members of the national women’s organization against the background of the Delitto Matteotti is especially indicative of the CNDI’s turn to the extreme right and points to increasing anti-socialist and antisemitic tendencies within the organization. The archive of the Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza (DGPS) of the Italian Ministry of the Interior contains extensive documentation from the 1930s and 1940s both on the treatment of the

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socialist-oriented UFN and of the Zionist-oriented ADEI. The Ministry of the Interior had classified both these organizations as politically dangerous by the end of the 1930s at the latest, gathered information on their members, observed their activities, and censored their correspondence. In May 1941, the political police designated the board members of the ADEI in Rome as “antifascists,” who belonged to the “antinational, antifascist, and internationalist” Zionist movement. Furthermore, the DGPS documentation on the UFN makes clear that the Milan organization was dissolved in January 1939 on account of its notoriously high level of Jewish membership. The additional fact revealed by this source, which was previously unknown, is that the Turin chapter of the UFN was closed even earlier, in summer 1938, by order of the Turin prefecture. Personal files held in the collection of the Direzione Generale Demografia e Razza (DEMORAZZA) of the Italian Ministry of the Interior were studied for Jewish protagonists of the Italian women’s movement and/or their family members who applied for discriminazione, i.e. exemption from the racial laws, or else whose “racial affiliation” was checked by DEMORAZZA in the late 1930s and early 1940s. These documents clearly reflect the fascist regime’s discriminatory measures and its biologistically oriented racial policies. At the same time, documents in the archive from the Jewish side, often written by the protagonists themselves, provide detailed testimony as to family background and political positioning in terms of distance from or proximity to fascism. The archive of Milan’s Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC) was centrally important for reconstructing the almost unstudied history of the establishment and development of the Zionistoriented ADEI between its foundation in 1927 and its temporary, violent end in 1943. The early history of the first Jewish women’s union in Italy could be traced in the documents in the still disorganized and largely untapped Fondo ADEI. Examination of the reports, organizational communications, and meeting minutes contained therein was supplemented by an investigation of the correspondence of the longtime president of the ADEI, Gabriella Falco Ravenna (Milan) with other pioneers of the organization. Other pointers for a reconstruction of the history of the Jewish women’s movement under fascism, especially during the period of disenfranchisement and persecution, were found in the “ADEI” file in the Fondo Comunità Ebraica di Milano, especially useful for its documents of the Trieste chapter from the 1930s. Furthermore, Gabriella Falco Ravenna’s correspondence of 1934 with her father, Felice

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Ravenna, then president of the Unione delle Comunità Israelitiche Italiane, was consulted. Gabriella Falco Ravenna’s correspondence contained relevant indicators of the ADEI’s ideological development, especially the demand, of which she was a significant instigator, for a Jewish religious identity and the orientation toward Zionism. This development must be understood in its context of the increasingly aggressively antisemitic direction of fascist Italy as the 1930s progressed. The membership lists for the Trieste chapter proved informative in this connection: from the beginning of the 1930s on, the membership of the ADEI included women who had been active in the secular organizations of the Italian women’s movement prior to the fascist dictatorship, but whose sphere of activity was increasingly confined to Jewish institutions even before 1938. This development acquired additional impact with the dissolution of the UFN in January 1939. The violent end of the UFN was reconstructed by examination of relevant sources in the UFN archive, including correspondence between the UFN board, the Italian Ministry of the Interior, and the Milan prefecture. The documents confirm, supplement, and expand on the results of the examination of the archive of the Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza in the ACS. The personal experience of exclusion is made manifest in the letters of the cofounder and longtime president of the UFN, Nina Rignano Sullam, to other remaining members of the board in 1938 and 1939. According to these documents, Rignano Sullam left the organization voluntarily just before the promulgation of the racial laws in 1938, presumably to avoid a forced expulsion. The fact that, in contrast to the CNDI, the UFN did not adapt itself to the fascist regime and its anti-Jewish policies, can be shown by the board members’ attempts, recorded in letters and meeting minutes, to prevent Rignano Sullam’s exit. In December 1938, the UFN was ordered to submit a complete list containing all the names of its Jewish members to Milan’s Fasci Femminili. The dissolution of the most important women’s union in unified Italy followed on January 31, 1939, by decree of the Milan prefecture. The papers of the important Mantuan feminist, Ada Sacchi Simonetta (1874–1944), were consulted at the UFN archive as well. Her papers also included documents belonging to the women’s rights organization Federazione italiana per il suffragio e i diritti della donna (FISEDD) on which she had a profound influence. The violent removal of this socialist-oriented activist from the presidency of the Mantua chapter by

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decree of the local prefecture in 1935 is documented there. Ada Sacchi Simonetta’s letters of autumn 1938 to her Jewish daughter-in-law Maria Sacerdotti, president of the Florence chapter of the Italian union of female academics Federazione Italiana Laureate e Diplomate Istituti Superiori (FILDIS), who was removed from her teaching position overnight due to the racial laws, give an insight into the severe, immediate consequences of the fascist racial laws for the professional and personal circumstances of Italian-Jewish women. After the dissolution of the UFN in January 1939, the ADEI was the only institution left in Italy that provided Jewish women a last, limited sphere for social and cultural engagement. The development of anti-fascist tendencies in this originally quite unpolitical union in the period between 1940 and 1943, which has long been unnoticed in the research, can be proven through related ADEI documents in Milan’s CDEC as well as public-security-related documents in the Italian Ministry of the Interior’s archive. They testify eloquently to the intensive surveillance of the Jewish women’s union on the part of the political police: as a Zionist organization, which furthermore offered aid to interned Jews and their families, at the beginning of the 1940s the ADEI came under suspicion of performing anti-nationalist activities hostile to the regime. The fate of Italian-Jewish feminists during the Shoah was investigated using interviews and reports by contemporary witnesses from the CDEC and from Yad Vashem. Detailed biographical information and conclusive suggestions as to the hiding and capture of the Milan activist Aurelia Josz, who was deported to Auschwitz in July 1944, were found in the CDEC’s collection Vicissitudini dei singoli. Letters, once again, provided insight into the diverse experiences of exiled activists like Gina Lombroso and Amelia Rosselli, consulted by the author in the Lombroso and Orvieto family archives and in the Francesco Papafava Collection in Florence’s Institute of the Resistance. Among the printed sources consulted in the preparation of the present work, the journals of the Italian women’s movement’s press deserve special mention. The most important journals of the early Italian women’s movement were available for consultation in the Biblioteca Italiana delle Donne in Bologna, and a large number of contributions and texts could be attributed to Jewish authors. They fulfill the requirements necessary to reconstruct contemporary discourse. The previously mentioned journal La Donna is of special importance in this connection because of its pioneering position within the emancipation discourse in Italy and

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its transnational circulation. Other journals of the early Italian women’s movement press, like Cordelia and Attività femminile sociale, proved especially informative for research into the discourse of Italian women’s rights activists during the First World War. The contributions published in their pages by both Jewish and non-Jewish women attest to an especially strong identification with the Italian war aims and the justification of violence in pursuit of the supposed fulfillment of Italian unity and a new European order. These writings are particularly emphatic in their reference to Mazzini, the national symbol of Italian unity and figurehead for the early Italian women’s movement; this is especially notable in the nationalist rhetoric of Jewish women. Finally, the printed source materials consulted include Amelia Rosselli’s memoir, Laura Orvieto’s autobiography, Gina Lombroso’s biography of her father Cesare, and posthumously published memoirs and diaries by male and female Jewish authors. The events depicted here are relevant to the reconstruction of family histories and a deeper understanding of Jewish family identities and gender relationships; at the same time, they require an especially critical approach. Importantly, all these ego documents originate from the fascist period or were published during the fascist dictatorship. It is essential to bear this in mind when integrating these texts into the research. However, the fact that these are not directwitness, authentic sources but literary works and posthumously published texts that have likely been altered and adapted to the current interpretational attitudes of their authors does not make them any less interesting for this study. They reveal the search for the past, for the authors’ own roots, and the participation of their ancestors in Italian unification and a supposedly complete national community during the Great War. These memories thus become a poignant anti-thesis to a brutal reality in which the authors no longer belonged to Italian society.

1.5

Structure of the Study

The second chapter presents the concept of identità famigliare with respect to the Jewish self-consciousness of the Italian-Jewish protagonists by drawing on ego documents. The diverse characteristics and developments of secular Jewish family identities that shaped the women’s private self-image and public involvement receive special attention. The concept of Jewish blood ties, the relevance of marriage relationships, and the central significance of ethical tradition, family memories, and

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familial discourses are examined in detail as exemplified by prominent Italian-Jewish families like the Rossellis, the Lombrosos, and the Orvietos. Building on this, the third chapter contains a biographical inquiry into the development and conceptualization of identities among pioneers of the Italian women’s movement between Jewish self-consciousness, national solidarity, and transnational influences. The first subject of focus is Sara Levi Nathan (1819–1882), longtime intellectual companion of the figurehead of national unity, Giuseppe Mazzini, who, with her focus on education, abolitionism, and laicism, shaped the direction of the early Italian women’s movement. The next section deals with the Venetian educator and renowned founder of the Fröbel movement in Italy, Adela Della Vida Levi (1822– 1915), Luigi Luzzatti’s mother-in-law, whose life and work reflect the characteristic mobility of female Jewish activists between Jewish and nonJewish spheres, between connectedness to the organized Jewish community, and to the secular institutions of the young Italian national state. Fare gli italiani—making “Italians” out of the regionally very diverse inhabitants of the new state—was the central goal underlying numerous initiatives in the sphere of education that originated with Jewish women. The central significance of education and instruction within Judaism, which continued to be pursued under changed circumstances, is reflected in the characteristic interest in new pedagogical concepts and the lively commitment to education for girls and women. The generally high levels of literacy in comparison to non-Jewish women made Jewish women especially capable transmitters of knowledge and founders of related institutions. The importance of transnational connections for the transfer of educational concepts to Italy is investigated in addition. The third subchapter deals with the first female Jewish journalists of unified Italy. Both the abolitionist campaign, with the pioneering Sara Levi Nathan as one of its most passionate advocates, and Adela Della Vida Levi’s Fröbel movement were subjects for lively discussion in the longtime pre-eminent journal of the Italian women’s movement, La Donna. Founded in 1868 in Padua by the Italian Gualberta Alaide Beccari, the journal served to disseminate new concepts and to elicit support for them among its readership. Beccari, who was strongly influenced by Mazzini’s ideas, involved Jewish authors in her project from its beginning as a matter of course. The participation of these female Jewish journalists in the contemporary women’s rights discourse is first presented in detail through their biographies, which have largely been neglected by

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the research. The relevance of laicism and transnationalism for the integration of Jewish women and their connections with non-Jewish women, as well as the distinct regional differences within unified Italy, is examined in view of the decidedly secular and European orientation of the journal, with its base in the north of Italy. The relevance of Jewish family identities and supraregional, often transnational Jewish family ties, for the self-concept of the protagonists is an additional theme. The tensions between participation and marginalization in the course of emancipation, already evident from the pioneers’ biographies, acquired increasing poignancy with the consolidation of the organized Italian women’s movement from the 1880s onward. Therefore, Chapter 4 initially addresses specifically the Jewish women who made a decisive contribution to the institutional structuring and ideological development of the women’s movement. Next, the connections between Catholic and Jewish actors and the existence of antisemitic currents in the organizations of the women’s movement are investigated. The focus of the first subchapter is on Paolina Schiff (1841–1926), the Milanese academic and feminist of German-Jewish origins, a cofounder in 1881 of the first Italian women’s organization, Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili (“League for the Promotion of Women’s Interests”), and Nina Rignano Sullam (1871–1945), the already mentioned social worker, a pioneer in the establishment of the most important contemporary women’s organization, Unione Femminile Nazionale, in 1899. Both women were cast out in the cold by fascism and have remained largely unnoticed by relevant historiography for a long time despite their central role in the organizational and conceptual elaboration of the women’s rights discourse in Italy. The transnational life history of the German Studies professor Paolina Schiff provides an especially clear lens for revealing and discussing the early history and initially significant themes of the organized Italian women’s movement in the context of the European peace movement. Both inclusion factors and the problematics of her position as a double outsider—a woman and a Jew—can be examined by the reconstruction of Paolina Schiff’s convoluted life path and how she finally became one of Italy’s first five female private lecturers (Privatdozentin) in 1892 after protracted and arduous efforts. Nina Rignano Sullam, the daughter of the longtime president of Milan’s Jewish community Giuseppe Sullam, was the originator and focal point of the rapidly expanding group of Jewish members of the UFN, who introduced the concept of “political philanthropy” into the Italian

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emancipation discourse by actively helping socially disadvantaged women and girls to help themselves. What were the social and cultural factors behind the conspicuously successful incorporation of Jewish women in Milan’s UFN? Did membership in the laicist women’s organization, with its links to the socialist party, signal a break with their Jewish identity? Or did feminists like Rignano Sullam remain connected to the Jewish community nonetheless? The involvement of Paolina Schiff and Nina Rignano Sullam reveals the characteristic link between national reference points and the transnational connections of the Italian women’s movement that have been underestimated for a long time. The second subchapter examines the relations between Jewish and Catholic women within and in the context of the organized women’s movement. Since the above-average participation of Jewish women in the movimento femminile nazionale, both quantitatively and qualitatively, has pushed the question of the presence and manifestations of antisemitic prejudices among non-Jewish and specifically Catholic Italian women into the background, the hitherto unexamined discourse of the Catholic women’s organization and some of its individual representatives, as well as concrete events, especially women’s congresses, are checked for the existence of antisemitic or anti-Jewish tendencies in connection with antilaicist positions. The inquiry thus also interrogates the still-dominant narrative whereby the society of liberal Italy was virtually unaffected by antisemitism. Is the picture different in the predominantly femaleconnoted spheres in the Italian unitary state such as education, schooling, and fashion? Can antisemitic attitudes be identified in the discourses on education and morality dominated by (Catholic) women, which could be taken up and amplified under fascism? The First World War is the theme of the fifth chapter. The focus is directed to the expectations, experiences, and memories of Jewish women with respect to the Grande Guerra.39 Analysis of ego documents and the writings of Jewish women in the contemporary publications of the women’s movement reveals the significance of the war for the changing self-concept of Jewish women, their relationships to the majority Italian society, and changing gender relationships.

39 On the expectation, experience, memory triad, see Ernst P., “Der Erste Weltkrieg in deutschsprachig-jüdischer Literatur und Publizistik in Österreich,” in Mattl S. et al. (eds.), Krieg. Erinnerung. Geschichtswissenschaft (Vienna: Böhlau, 2009), 62–68.

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The war situation provided Jewish women an excellent opportunity to overtly demonstrate their solidarity with the Italian nation. The first subchapter therefore not only surveys the social and cultural engagement of Jewish women on the home front but also investigates the often contradictory and changing ideological positions of Jewish feminists between pacifism, interventionism, and irredentism. What part did their Jewishness play in these women’s generally strong support for Italy’s entering the war on the side of the Entente? What hopes and expectations rested on the prospect of Italian victory over Austria-Hungary? The second subchapter addresses the war’s impacts on the development of Jewish-Christian relationships and gender relationships. The first question is whether the war experience resulted in an approachment of female Jewish activists to the Catholic milieu. How did Jewish authors perceive their relationship to the Christian majority society and develop it in their writings? These perceptions and representations are presented through examination of primary sources, the incorporation of the results from Chapter 3, and an evaluation of their implications. The focus then shifts to changes in gender relationships and female identities. Both Jewish and non-Jewish women were able to prove their independence—often for the first time—during the war, giving rise to the thesis that the Great War also galvanized developments in the private sphere. Before the war, gender relationships had been dominated by the division between public and private spheres. Especially in bourgeois circles, the private sphere was considered feminine; the public sphere, masculine.40 During the war, however, this contrast between traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” spheres weakened. How is this development expressed in the personal accounts of Jewish women, who generally articulated their demands for emancipation especially clearly and consciously based on their ambivalence toward their position as doubly

40 See especially Willson P. (ed.), Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy 1860–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). On the still little-studied dynamics of gender relationships in Italy during the Grande Guerra, see the microhistorical study of the mobilization of women in Friuli by Ermacora M., “Women behind the Lines: The Friuli Region as a Case Study of Total Mobilization, 1915–1917,” in Hämmerle C. et al. (eds.), Gender and the First World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 16–35. On the developments within Italian families, see Papa C., “La ‘famiglia italiana’ nell’inchiesta dell’Ufficio storiografico della mobilitazione”, in Bartoloni, S. (ed.), La Grande Guerra delle italiane: Mobilitazioni, diritti, trasformazioni (Rome: Viella, 2016), 317–339.

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social outsiders on the one hand, and their central position within the Jewish family on the other? To what extent did they influence new designs for achieving women’s rights and their equal position in the family within the Italian women’s rights discourse? The third section of Chapter 5 examines the memories of Jewish women and their families regarding the “Great War” against the background of fascist legislation using memoirs and autobiographies, including those by Amelia Rosselli and Laura Orvieto. Taking the view that autobiographical texts represent the past in a selective and subjective manner, special attention is paid to the influence of contemporary interpretations and perceptions on the construction of the past. How is the altered perspective produced by the experience of antisemitism and social exclusion reflected in the ego documents? The final subchapter concentrates on the period between the end of the war and the beginning of fascist domination. The main focus is on the ideological developments and new positioning of Jewish women immediately after the war. Their social and cultural commitment to Italy’s involvement in the war as a token of national solidarity had not led to the hoped-for establishment as citizens with equal rights. The hopes of these women for a successful continuation of their integration process both as women and as Jews were severely disappointed by the historical reality. Mussolini took power in Italy just four years after the end of the war. What attempts at personal and political (re)-orientation did Jewish women make in the years between war and dictatorship, not least in view of the antisemitic currents which had manifested much more strongly during the war? Along with a consideration of the varied paths of fascist sympathizers such as the founder of the Fasci Femminili, Elisa Majer Rizzioli, moderate irredentists, and politically left-leaning suffragists, it was important to trace the approachment of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane to fascism as well as the ideological attitudes and decisions of its Jewish members. Is there already evidence of distancing or removal of Jewish actors from the large national women’s organizations in the years between war and dictatorship that can be linked to the increasingly aggressive nationalism and fascist trajectory of these organizations? Chapter 6 examines the marginalization, disenfranchisement, and persecution of Jewish protagonists of the Italian women’s movement during the fascist era from Mussolini’s assumption of power to the end of the Second World War. The exclusion of Jewish feminists from the women’s unions, which had been forced into line, in the years between

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1922 and 1926 is elucidated first, followed by an examination of the increasing importance of the Zionist option and of the Jewish-internal sphere as a new beginning and place of refuge from 1927 on, and, finally, an investigation of the persecution of the rights and eventually the assault on lives of Jewish feminists from the 1930s until 1945. First, attitudes toward fascism within the organized women’s movement during the early period of fascist domination are examined. What were the consequences of the increasing ideological proximity of the CNDI headquarters in Rome to the fascist regime and the decided antisocialism of its predominantly upper-class leadership for the perception and treatment of Jewish feminists, most of whom had always been politically left wing? How were the mechanisms of marginalization and antisocialist motivations, with their latent antisemitic tendencies, connected with radical domestic events like the assassination of the leading socialist figure Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 and the school reform of Giovanni Gentile, who declared Catholic religious education the most important pillar of “national education”? It is likely that the CNDI’s distancing from its originally programmatic laicism in the context of rapprochement between fascism and the Catholic Church was a driver for the marginalization of its Jewish members. At the same time, the role of feminists like Gina Lombroso, Amelia Rosselli, and Bice Cammeo in the anti-fascist networks that emerged around the Rosselli brothers in the early 1920s will be clarified. Here it can be assumed that Jewish family identities, women’s solidarity, and decidedly democratic political positions combined to form a new group consciousness in answer to increasing social, cultural, and political marginalization. The second subchapter focuses on the as yet almost unstudied history of the foundation of the first Jewish women’s union in Italy, the ADEI, founded in Milan in 1927. What motivations lay behind the establishment in Italy, very late in European terms, of a Jewish, Zionist-oriented women’s movement? The creation of the ADEI is reconstructed in the context of the increased vigor of Jewish culture and of Zionist ideas in Italy at the time. It parallels the progressive marginalization of Jewish women and the reduction of their opportunities for participation in secular organizations. Through a biographical examination of the founder, Berta Cammeo Bernstein, who had been involved in the Milan UFN for decades, and of pioneers like the young Zionist Gabriella Falco Ravenna, a picture emerges of a religious Jewish self-concept, with a characteristic combination of practical feminism, anti-fascism, and Zionism,

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which gave rise to the ADEI in Milan. Were the ideals of the founders in Milan perpetuated in the Jewish women’s union that subsequently spread throughout Italy? The third subchapter begins with an examination of the early history of the attack on Jewish rights. Investigation of the situation of Jewish feminists in the period between the promulgation of the Lateran Treaties in 1929 and the implementation of the fascist racial laws provides a lens into the antisemitic politics of fascist Italy which radicalized continuously from the beginning of the 1930s on and was in evidence well before 1938. Was the rapidly progressing, and, by 1935, basically completed fascisization of the organized women’s movement in Italy accompanied by overt antisemitic hostility? This is followed by an investigation of how the spheres of activity for Jewish women’s rights activists were concretely impacted by the final renunciation of the state principle of laicism and the discursive and practical construction of the “Catholic nation.” Which institutions, aside from the ADEI, were still open to them in 1938? Next, the path to the dissolution of the UFN, with the fascist racial laws in the background, is analyzed via relevant documents from the Pubblica Sicurezza as well as letters and minutes of meetings. Were the Jewish members of the most important union in the early Italian women’s movement already under scrutiny by the fascist authorities before the passage of the legislation? What role did the presence of Jewish actors play in the violent ending of this nondenominational organization? The behavior of the non-Jewish members of the socialist-leaning UFN toward their Jewish colleagues is also examined and assessed in the context of the exclusion of Jewish members from the fascist-oriented CNDI. With the passage of the racial laws, the last remaining female Jewish activists were expelled from all the institutions of the Italian women’s movement still in existence. Therefore, for the period of massive and progressive disenfranchisement of Italian Jews between 1940 and 1943, the study focuses on the situation of the ADEI. Both the perception and treatment of the Jewish women’s organization by the fascist authorities and the behavior of the organization’s members come under scrutiny. What survival strategies did the members evolve; how did the Zionistoriented group network both within and outside Italy under conditions of increasing encirclement by the fascist regime? Did the war situation and the emerging reports about extermination camps lead to the development of anti-fascist tendencies within the formerly largely apolitical Jewish women’s union?

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The study ends with a reconstruction of the fates of Jewish feminists from the German occupation of Italy in September 1943 until the end of the war. The focus lies on activists from the ADEI and the UFN, including Gabriella Falco Ravenna, Nina Rignano Sullam, and Aurelia Josz, who managed to survive by escaping or in hiding, or were murdered in extermination camps. This analysis provides a clear picture of the violently altered and often destroyed biographies of the last Jewish representatives of the early Italian women’s movement. Their individual, forgotten fates stand as examples for the expulsion, persecution, and murder of countless Italian-Jewish women, men, and children in the Shoah.

CHAPTER 2

Italian-Jewish Family Identities and Secular Subculture

In May 1872, Sara Levi Nathan wrote a long letter from Genoa to her daughter Janet. Companion of Giuseppe Mazzini, “heroine” of the Risorgimento, matriarch of the Nathan and Rosselli families, she died ten years later and was buried in a civil ceremony in Rome. This letter provides a rare insight into her attitude to Judaism. In the context of an intimate mother–daughter correspondence, written in English, Sara reflected on her thirteen-year-old son Beniamino’s affinity for the Jewish religion, which had evidently been the subject of the previous discussion: As to Ben being inclined to the Jewish rites I think it is owing to the want of religious expansion which is in almost every heart. It remains how to elicit it. It is very certain that true as the Jewish religion is in the spirit that inspired Moses to proclaim the unity of God and some of his laws, it is false nowadays in the form of following that law. Ben’s religious feeling should be directed towards a larger horizon so that his love should extend not only to a limited circle but to the whole work of God.1

This personal statement, one of Nathan’s few surviving pronouncements regarding Judaism, clearly reflects her ambivalent attitude to the 1 Sara Levi Nathan to Janet Nathan Rosselli, May 2, 1972, Fondazione Rosselli Torino (henceforth FRT), Janet Nathan archive, C 1103.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Nattermann, Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4_2

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Jewish religion. As her letter shows, Sara Levi Nathan did not reject Judaism as such by any means, but she regarded the keeping of rituals as obsolete in view of Jewish emancipation and secularization. In fact, this kind of heterogeneous attitude to Judaism, frequently observable within families, became characteristic for the Jewish minority in postemancipation Italy. With the Jewish emancipation laws, the opening of the ghettos, and the initiation of the process of societal integration, Jewish self-consciousness, formerly defined via an unambiguous belonging, underwent a far-reaching change. Jews began to identify themselves more strongly with a national Italian consciousness in parallel with the decreasing influence of the Jewish community and the erosion of the system of religious law. Since the establishment of legal equality had been closely bound up with national unification, Italian-Jews had a great deal of patriotic spirit for the young nation-state, as can clearly be seen from their conspicuous involvement in the political and social development of the country. However, the frequent distancing from, or even abandonment of Jewish communities very rarely signified complete renunciation of a Jewish identity. Kinship networks and friendships played a central role in the continuation of a group consciousness, as in the case of the Levi Nathans. Guri Schwarz and Barbara Armani have rightly emphasized in this connection that the Jewish emancipation process in Italy should not be seen as an individual process but must be interpreted as a matter of family history. On this view, emancipated Jews shared in the memory and cultural heritage of closely connected family units, which resulted in the persistence of an identità famigliare even among the non-religious.2 For the Italian context, however, little research has yet been done on the central role of Jewish women in this development. This is especially the case regarding the protagonists of the Italian women’s movement who are at the center of the present study. It should always be borne in mind when considering the social integration of Jewish women that even after emancipation, they were still not citizens with equal rights due to their gender, and that their integration process thus followed a different course

2 See Armani, Schwarz, “Premessa,” 627 f., 632–634. Alexander Stille takes a similar approach for the fascist era by analyzing the development of the Jewish minority in Italy via the varied experiences and memories of selected families; see Stille A., Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism (London: Vintage, 1992).

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to that of Jewish men.3 The demand for emancipation, which initially related to the Jewish community in general, was still unfulfilled with respect to the position of Jewish women and did not lose its urgency. Precisely because the scope for participation in the Italian nation-state continued to be limited for Jewish women (and for women in general), self-positioning within family contexts remained a constant element in female existence. Thus, the actual social integration of Jewish women took place within their families, as part of the interaction with mothers and sisters, fathers, brothers, husbands, children, and other relatives. The construction of self-concepts between Italian national consciousness and Jewish identities that was characteristic of the protagonists of the early Italian women’s movement is to be seen in the immediate context of their family background. Since the vast majority of Jewish activists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became involved in the women’s movement under the auspices of laicism, liberalism, and/or socialism, their Jewish identity has hitherto been widely ignored in relevant literature.4 An investigation of the Jewish origins and environment of these women as well as their selfpositioning, which was by no means always unambiguously secular, can thus contribute significantly to a deeper understanding of the emancipation and integration processes of Jewish women in unified Italy. Concepts of a community of origin, the transmission of ethical traditions, and memories constituted the three fundamental pillars of the construction of secular Jewish family identities which remained a vital element of the life and work of Jewish protagonists of the early Italian women’s movement.

3 See Hyman, Gender and Assimilation, 18 f. Anna Foa further suggests that the ItalianJewish emancipation should be treated not as a single point in time but rather as a period that contained multiple processes having to do with the enshrinement of those rights into political reality, sociocultural change, and integration; see Foa, “Il mito dell’assimilazione,” 20. 4 Annarita Buttafuoco is the only one to have focused on the connection between Jewish origins and social engagement in her work “Nina Rignano Sullam.” For the standard works, see especially Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini; Dickmann, Die italienische Frauenbewegung; Odorisio M.L. (ed.), Donna o cosa? I movimenti femminili in Italia dal Risorgimento a oggi (Turin: Milvia Carrà Editore, 1986).

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2.1

Marriages and Blood Relationships

Both the pioneers and the younger Jewish protagonists of the Italian women’s movement acted in tightly connected family-and-friendship networks throughout their lives, which determined their biographical development, their self-consciousness as women and as Jews, their everyday lives, and their public involvement to a significant extent. Despite a predominantly secular outlook, the surviving documents clearly reflect the women’s awareness of their connection to their ancestors and their location within a family-oriented community. Significantly, many Jewish feminists came from families in which their mothers, grandmothers, and female relatives had already worked for women’s social and cultural interests to a notable degree. Here, too, there is a clear orientation to the ancestral tradition and desire for continuity. For the writer Amelia Rosselli, it was her husband’s grandmother, the above-quoted Sara Levi Nathan; for the writer Laura Orvieto, her relatives the Errera sisters; for Gina and Paola Lombroso, their grandmother Zefora Levi that served as examples for social engagement and feminine self-consciousness.5 The involvement of these young activists in the Italian women’s movement was thus an expression of a twofold belonging, identifying both with the Italian national and with the Jewish-familial contexts. Prominent Italian-Jewish families like the Rossellis, the Orvietos, and the Lombrosos supported and characterized the social integration process through the adoption of bourgeois values and behavior patterns but at the same time maintained their Jewish identity based on conscious adherence to family traditions and interrelationships, especially through marriages

5 On the educated Errera sisters, Anna, Rosa, and Emilia, who were active as educa-

tors and authors, see Norsa A., “Tre donne che hanno onorato l’Ebraismo italiano: le sorelle Errera,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel 41 (1975): 42–55. On the educated, socially and culturally engaged grandmother Zefora Levi, Paola Lombroso recalled, “Aronne Lombroso [the grandfather] was a mild, good, exceptionally religious but not overly intelligent man; Grandmother, in contrast, was an absolutely superior woman… Everyone who knew her is still overwhelmed, thirty years after her death, by the magic of her active benevolence and her sharp and clearsighted intelligence.” Lombroso P., Lombroso G., Cesare Lombroso: appunti sulla vita, le opere (Turin: Bocca, 1906), 5.

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as well as social, cultural, and economic ties.6 The subculture of which David Sorkin speaks in the German-Jewish context was primarily located within family ties in the Italian case.7 Through creative application of the majority culture, an autonomous system of ideas and symbols emerged that led to the development of complex forms of identity. The biographies of protagonists of the early Italian women’s movement are a vital index of how Jewish tradition was interwoven with non-Jewish bourgeois behavior patterns in varied and often situation-dependent ways. For the Rossellis and the Orvietos, for example, marriages at registry offices took place in parallel with weddings celebrated according to the Jewish rite, and in the Orvieto family, synagogue attendance was juxtaposed with festivities under the Christmas tree.8 The boundaries between subculture and majority culture were permeable and mobile, no doubt, but they always existed: on the one hand, the family—the central locus for

6 Here, the Italian case displays parallels with the bourgeoisification process of German

Jews; see Marion Kaplan’s standard work The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). On the role of German-Jewish women specifically within the process of social integration and modernization, see Schüler-Springorum, Geschlecht und Differenz, 50–66. 7 Sorkin conceives subculture as an “identity that emerged from the ideology of emancipation”; see Sorkin D., The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5–7; on the intellectual character of a secular culture through the example of Berthold Auerbach, see ibid., 140–155. 8 While Carlo Rosselli married the English Quaker Marion Cave in a civil ceremony

in Genoa in July 1926, Nello Rosselli married Maria Todesco, a Jew from Padua, in December 1926 according to Jewish rite. Both the Lombroso sisters had civil ceremonies; see Ciuffoletti Z., Tranfaglia N., “Introduzione,” in Ciuffoletti Z., Corradi G.L. (eds.), Lessico famigliare. Vita, cultura e politica della Famiglia Rosselli all’insegna della libertà (Florence: Edimond, 2002), XVI; Dolza D., Essere figlie di Lombroso. Due donne intellettuali tra’800 e’900 (Milan: Angeli, 1990), 100, 140. In her children’s book Leo e Lia, Laura Orvieto wrote of family Christmas celebrations and the Christmas tree erected for the children (see Orvieto L., Leo e Lia. Storie di due bambini italiani con una governante inglese [Florence: Giunti, 2011], originally published in 1909, 28–33). In the same work, she reported her husband Angiolo and son Leo attending the synagogue (see ibid., 69). The atheist Gina Lombroso in turn wrote in a letter to her son Leo that his sister Nina had begun to read the Bible: Gina Lombroso to Leo Ferrero, January 8, 1928, Fondazione Primo Conti onlus, Fiesole (henceforth FPC), Fondo Leo Ferrero, L.F.C. 778/1. Nello and Carlo Rosselli too read the Old Testament with interest, and Nello in particular saw it as the origin of Jewish family identity; see Sacerdoti Mariani G., “Lessico famigliare,” in Ciuffoletti, Corradi, Lessico famigliare, 20–24.

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both Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeois ideals9 —furthered the acculturation process of Italian-Jewish women; on the other hand, the marked kinship solidarity and the preservation of family connections going back to the ghetto communities created exclusive spheres of activity in which non-Jews were seldom to be encountered. The surviving correspondences provide eloquent testimony to the extensive Jewish networks of friends and relations that were a central component of our protagonists’ living environments. The existence of a secular Jewish subculture is reflected in the letters of actors like Sara Levi Nathan and can also be traced especially in the extensive Rosselli, Lombroso, and Orvieto family archives.10 The extremely small number of Jews within the overall Italian population (about 0.1%) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries additionally intensified the phenomenon of family networks and the transregional, often transnational interconnection of family bonds.11 Quite a 9 The family remained the locus of Christian faith for Italian Catholic men and women loyal to the Pope, in contrast to the laicist self-concept of the young Italian nation state supported by the vast majority of Jewish families. For the history of families in the “long” nineteenth century and the complex of problems related to “family” and “nation” in the “bourgeois” age, see Porciani I., “Famiglia e nazione nel lungo Ottocento,” in ead., Famiglia e Nazione nel lungo Ottocento Italiano. Modelli, strategie, reti di relazioni (Rome: Viella, 2006), 15–53; on Italian families in the Risorgimento specifically, see Ginsborg P., “Romanticismo e Risorgimento. L’io, l’amore e la nazione,” in id., Banti, A. M. (eds.), Storia d’Italia, Annali 22: Il Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), especially 24–34. 10 In Amelia Rosselli’s significant archive, for example, the vast majority of the letters come from men and women of Jewish origin with whom the author had a relationship (and not only in writing), and many of whom were related to or were friends with one another. In contrast, non-Jews, including Catholics, scarcely appear among Rosselli’s correspondents. Even the correspondence of the German-Italian-Jewish feminist Paolina Schiff (1841–1926), who rejected religious Judaism, shows traces of a private and scholarly orientation within the contemporary European- Jewish intellectual milieu. She communicated with Jewish writers, journalists, and publishers in extensive networks reaching as far as Germany, including Leopold Sonnemann (1831–1909). Her translation of the Hungarian-Jewish sociologist and active Zionist Max Nordau’s novel Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, is characteristic of this connection (La malattia del secolo [Milan: Madella, 1888]). Her letters to the literary scholar and politician Felice Cavallotti are located in the archive of the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan (henceforth AFF Milan), Fondo Felice Cavallotti, Corrispondenza 1849–1916. 1. Corrispondenza ricevuta 1860–1898, fasc. Paolina Schiff. 11 Central examples of transnational family connections for the women studied here are those of Nathan and of Schiff, which extended from Germany to Italy and England, and elsewhere. The Lombroso family, originally from Spain, had spread to Italy and France, Germany, Russia, and the USA. On the phenomenon of transnational and transregional

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few young Jewish men and women left their home towns to marry partners of their own social class, in accordance with their parents’ wishes, due to an objective lack of “suitable” candidates at home.12 This practice served additionally to strengthen and further economic relationships between families. The pioneer Sara Levi Nathan, who came from Pesaro and married Moses Meyer Nathan, an English citizen of German-Jewish origins, is exemplary for this process; conversely, the Venetian educator Adele Della Vida Levi found a worthy match, in the eyes of her parents, in the textiles merchant Mosè Levi, who “emigrated” from Piedmont to Venice.13 Marriages within Jewish families were generally an important precondition for the continuation of Jewish identity, which became increasingly detached from a religious self-consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century.14 This was the case for the vast majority of the participants in the early Italian women’s movement: most of them distanced themselves from the Jewish religion but married men from Jewish families.15 Whereas between 1884 and 1885 scarcely a quarter of Jews in Italy (22.9%) married non-Jews, and the percentage rose to 38.9% between families, see Sabean D., Teuscher S., “Rethinking European Kinship. Transregional and Transnational Families,” in Johnson C.H. et al. (eds.), Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 1–21. 12 On the creation of marriage ties, see Allegra L., “La madre ebrea nell’Italia moderna,” in d’Amelia M. (ed.), Storia della maternità (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997), 73 f. 13 On the connection between endogamy, economy, and status in the Italian Jewish community, see Pavan I., “‘Ebrei’ in Affari tra Realtà e Pregiudizio. Paradigmi storiografici e percorsi di ricerca dall’Unità alle leggi razziali,” in Armani, Schwarz, Ebrei borghesi, 782–786. From this perspective, the marriage strategies of Italian Jews were part of a contemporary phenomenon all over Europe. Marriages created long-lasting ties between families and provided the opportunity for numerous additional processes of exchange. Women functioned as mediators for business and political connections, professional opportunities, and additional family-internal marriages; see Joris E., “Kinship and Gender. Property, Enterprise, and Politics,” in Sabean D. et al., Kinship in Europe, 234–237. 14 On the conspicuous endogamy among Italian Jews with the city of Florence as an example, see Armani B., Il confine invisibile. L’elite ebraica di Firenze 1840–1914 (Milan: Angeli, 2006), 241–243. 15 The situation for the children of our protagonists was rather heterogeneous. On the one hand, Carlo Rosselli married an English Quaker, and Nina Lombroso and Leonfrancesco Orvieto married Catholics; on the other hand, Nello Rosselli and the sons and

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1925 and 1934, intermarriages are rarely to be found among the present protagonists.16 Their participation in the nondenominational institutions of the women’s movement in almost no way signaled renunciation of a particular Jewish identity. Despite their markedly laicist self-consciousness, not only the pioneers Sara Levi Nathan and Adele Della Vida Levi but also their sons and daughters remained grounded in Jewish family networks because of their marriages. Other prominent examples among the younger protagonists include the cofounder and longtime chairwoman of the nondenominational, socialist-oriented Milan chapter of the UFN, Nina Rignano Sullam, who married Eugenio Rignano, a Jew, and Laura Orvieto, the writer resident in Florence, born Cantoni, who was even related to her Jewish husband Angiolo Orvieto17 (Fig. 2.1). Marriages between relatives, especially third and fourth cousins, were generally fairly common even within acculturated Italian-Jewish families. They were a visible sign of the existence, continuity, and continual renegotiation of the secular Jewish subculture.18 At the same time, this situation reflects the social, cultural, and economic connections and ties forged by cousin marriages between middle-class families that also existed in the non-Jewish context in contemporary Europe. Laura Orvieto’s father, Achille Cantoni, for example, fell in love with his third cousin, daughters of the secular-oriented Adella Della Vida Levi married Jews. The children of Mazzini’s companion, Sara Levi Nathan, also mostly married into a secular Jewish milieu. 16 See the surveys in Della Pergola, Anatomia, 193–195. 17 On the love match between Nina née Sullam and Eugenio Rignano, see Archivio

Unione Femminile Nazionale Milano (henceforth Archivio UFN), Serie 1.2: Organi amministrativi, Sottoserie 1.2.2.3: Necrologi e commemorazioni, b 3, fasc. 14: commemorazione di Nina Rignano Sullam 1948. On the marriage of Laura Orvieto with her distant cousin Angiolo (his mother Amalia Cantoni was the cousin of Laura’s father Achille) and the tight family connections between the Orvietos and the Cantonis, see Il Marzocco. Carteggi e cronache fra Ottocento e Avanguardie (1887–1913), Mostra documentaria coordinata da Caterina Del Vivo, Catalogo, eds. Del Vivo C., Assirelli M. (Florence: Olschki, 1983), 13–15. 18 The numerous marriage connections between the liberally oriented family of Amelia Rosselli’s mother, the Venetian Emilia Capon, with members of the prominent Venetian Levi family sometimes even led to hereditary diseases; see Rosselli A., Memorie, ed. by Calloni M. (Bologna: Il Mulino), 46 f.—Jewish cousin marriages worked, among other things, to ensure the preservation of family property, a significant proportion of which was traditionally vested in the dowry, within a specific family network. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the overall value of the Jewish dowry surpassed all dowry amounts in the general population; see Groppi A., “Lavoro e proprietà delle donne in età moderna,” in ead., Il lavoro delle donne (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), 159.

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Fig. 2.1 Laura Orvieto, circa 1895

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Maria Cantoni, who became Laura Orvieto’s mother, on a visit to relatives in Milan. Following the love match and marriage, his father-in-law gave him a post in a Milanese bank.19 Cousin marriages were less common among the Lombrosos than the Orvietos and Rossellis, but the eminent atheist anthropologist Cesare Lombroso also insisted on the preservation of Jewish family integrity, community of “blood,” and intellect based on marriage ties. His will was that no attention be paid to religious self-consciousness within the family, as can be seen from the fact that Gina and Paola Lombroso’s marriages were conducted in registry offices and not according to the Jewish rite. In 1899, Paola Lombroso married the forensic pathologist Mario Carrara (1866–1937)20 ; in 1901, Gina became the wife of Lombroso’s disciple, the historian Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942).21 For the Lombrosos, a notable example of an educated Italian-Jewish family in the post-emancipation period, the construction of Jewish family identity based on common “blood” (sangue) took the place of orientation toward the religious collective.22 The idea of a genetic or else biological common ancestry was central to this form of Jewish family self-consciousness. The concept of blood, the genealogical connections it created, and the notion of a common biological belonging among Jews 19 See Orvieto L., Storia di Angiolo e Laura, ed. by Del Vivo C. (Florence: Olschki,

2001), 52 f. In middle-class Italian-Jewish families, as in the contemporary European bourgeoisie in general, visits to relatives, correspondence, and reciprocal invitation of children to games served to intensify family identities within their social class and to a close interweaving of extended family networks; for the European context, see Sabean D., “Kinship and Class Dynamics in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in id. et al., Kinship in Europe, 306, 310 f. 20 Carrara, who took over his father-in-law Cesare Lombroso’s professorship in Turin in 1904, was later among the few Italian professors who refused to swear the oath of fascism. He was removed from all official duties. He maintained his commitment to antifascism to his death, despite political persecution and imprisonment. On Mario Carrara, see Boatti G., Preferirei di no. Le storie dei dodici professori che si opposero a Mussolini (Turin: Einaudi, 2001). 21 Guglielmo Ferrero, a close friend and colleague of Cesare Lombroso, was active in the antifascist resistance, like his brother-in-law Mario Carrara; he died in 1942 in exile in Geneva. On Ferrero, see among others Baldi R. (ed.), Guglielmo Ferrero tra società e politica. Atti del convegno di Genova (4–5 ottobre 1982) (Genoa: Ecig, 1986); Cedroni L., Guglielmo Ferrero. Una biografia intellettuale (Rome: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2006). 22 On the concept of “Jewish blood,” see Armani, Schwarz, “Premessa,” 635; Armani, Il confine, 238–240.

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from different nations that exceeded the cultural and religious dimensions were central themes of Jewish-internal discussion in Italy and elsewhere from the end of the nineteenth century onward.23 They were part of an overall European discourse stretching far back into the past in which blood served as a metaphor for family and kinship relationships. The spiritual freight and the ability to transmit immanent human qualities, which were attributed to blood, were integral to this.24 Gina Lombroso participated in this discourse in that she used the term “Jewish blood” with a certain degree of pride, indicative of her identification with the great Jewish families and their intellectual capabilities. In a letter to her son Leo Ferrero (1903–1933), she praised the literary elegance of the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry (1871–1945) and wondered, “There is this refinement about Valéry … (did not Valéry also have Jewish blood in his veins?) Because these fine … psychological philosophical differentiations that he makes can be traced back to Jewish roots …”.25 Whether Valéry, whose mother Fanny Grassi came from Genoa, actually had Jewish forbears is unclear; far more significant in this context is the importance Gina Lombroso attaches to the term “blood” as a way to refer to common ancestry. Characteristically, she connects the idea of the Jewish blood relationship with the transmission of intellectual qualities

23 On this subject, see in detail Armani B., “‘Ebrei in casa’. Famiglia, etnicità e ruoli sessuali tra norme, pratiche e rappresentazioni,” Ebrei e nazione: 31–56. For the German-Jewish context, see Brenner M., “Religion, Nation oder Stamm. Zum Wandel der Selbstdefinition unter deutschen Juden,” in Haupt, Langewiesche, Nation und Religion, 587–597; on the concept of the “situational ethnicity” of German Jews, see van Rahden T., “Weder Milieu noch Konfession. Die situative Ethnizität der deutschen Juden im Kaiserreich in vergleichender Perspektive,” in Blaschke O., Kuhlemann F.-M. (eds.), Religion im Kaiserreich. Milieus – Mentalitäten – Krisen (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1996), 409–434. In his work on the emergence of modern Jewish ethnicity in France and Germany from 1782 to 1848, Philipp Lenhard exposes the far-reaching negative connotation of “Jewish blood” in the non-Jewish environment: already in early modern Spain, Jewish converts were judged still to be Jews on account of their blood and hence were denied equal rights with Christians; see Lenhard, Volk oder Religion, 82 f. 24 See Sabean D., Teuscher S., “Introduction,” in Johnson C. et al. (eds.), Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 8–11. 25 Gina Lombroso to Leo Ferrero, May 3, 1930, FPC, Fondo Leo Ferrero, L.F.C. 801. Ferrero had met Paul Valéry in Paris, where he often spent time from his youth onward. Valéry wrote the introduction to Ferrero’s study “Léonard de Vinci ou l’oeuvre d’art,” published in 1929.

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Fig. 2.2 The Lombroso family, ca. 1890. From left to right: Gina, Paola, and Cesare Lombroso, Nina De Benedetti

and abilities. Gina’s ideology here shows features both of the contemporary concepts of the binding, spiritual qualities of blood and of her father’s Jewish self-consciousness. The anthropologist Cesare Lombroso emphasized endogamy as the genetic foundation for the functioning and integrity of the family, which he saw as the locus of Jewish identity and tradition26 (Fig. 2.2). Paola Lombroso wrote about her father’s spiritual development—having grown up in a religious home, he had distanced himself from religion at a young age:

26 See Dolza, Essere figlie di Lombroso, 30.

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…the more he distanced himself from the formal religion, the more pride in his own race grew within him, which he perceived as despised or even as hated in his surrounding environment. Fear combined with pride, as often happens, so that he withdrew into himself and avoided the company of his peers, since he could not bear to be treated by them with suspicion and mockery.27

Cesare Lombroso’s process of forging his identity, his incipient atheism, and simultaneous withdrawal into the private, Jewish sphere due to an unaccepting surrounding environment exemplifies one of the compelling reasons for Jews’ generally remarkably strong connection to their families, which did not only occur in the Italian context: in situations involving antisemitic hostility and rejection from the outside, the family always represented a place of refuge and consolation.28 Cesare Lombroso’s “pride in his own race,” as his daughter expressed it, and Gina Lombroso’s allusion to “Jewish blood” in her letter to her son Leo are conceptually connected in an immediate manner. Both were expressions of an a religious Jewish family identity constructed on the idea of a community of origin connected with the substance of blood.29 The emerging concept of “race” in the familiar self-consciousness expressed both the generally strongly biological argumentation of Cesare Lombroso’s research and contemporary constructions of a “racial Jewish unity” (unità della razza).30

27 Lombroso P. and G., Cesare Lombroso, 16. 28 See Kaplan M., “Jewish Social Life, Antisemitism and Jewish Reactions in Imperial

Germany and during the Weimar Republic,” LBI Year Book (2003): 49. 29 On the discursive connection between blood and racial identity, see Sabean, Teuscher, “Introduction,” 8, 10. 30 On Lombroso’s racial theory, which strongly influenced his criminological studies, see Gibson M., “Cesare Lombroso and Italian Criminology, Theory and Politics,” in Becker P., Wetzell R. F. (eds.), Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137–158. The journalist Anselmo Colombo, on the other hand, sometime vice-director of the Vessillo Israelitico, wrote in 1913 of the “ethnic, physical, and psychological characteristica as a consequence of the unity of the [Jewish] race”; Anselmo Colombo, “Ebraismo d’Oriente e d’Occidente,” Vessillo Israelitico VI, 61 (1913): 666. On Colombo’s understanding of a Jewish “racial solidarity” (unità della razza), see also Armani, “Ebrei in casa,” 49; Ferrara degli Uberti, Fare gli ebrei italiani, 105–107. On the attempts of contemporary Jewish doctors to prove the existence of Jewish “racial characteristics” scientifically, see

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Jewish self-consciousness based on a biological community of origin was a pronounced feature of the eminent anthropologist’s family, but it was not the only component of their family identity. Positively connoted ideas of “Jewish blood” and “Jewish race,” which were largely irrational, percolated among the Lombrosos with forms of communicative memory that took on a central role for families of Italian-Jewish protagonists in general and determined their Jewish self-image in a lasting manner.

2.2

Judaism as Ethical Tradition

In contrast to the Lombroso family situation, the concept of a biological community of origin played no part in the Jewish self-consciousness of Amelia Rosselli and her sons. Her family epitomized a secular Jewish identity based on ethical traditions and social engagement. The personal share in common memories and social and cultural practices, which compensated for the diminishing influence and integrative function of the Jewish community in post-emancipatory Italy, is expressively reflected in the Rosselli family history. For acculturated Italian Jews, the family, with the mother at the center, remained the focal point of Jewish identity and Jewish group consciousness. While religious rites and customs were often neglected or given up in the course of the social integration process, traditions, ideals, and ethical principles emanating from Judaism continued a lively existence even in most secular Italian-Jewish families.31 Amelia Rosselli reflected on the significance of religion in her family in her memoirs. Interestingly, in this connection she recalled how, after the family’s relocation from Venice to Rome in 1886, her mother “recognized the necessities of the new age” and did away with “all external [Jewish] practices” but “remained religious in her heart.”32 Influenced by her family’s Italian patriotism and her mother’s internalized religious heritage, the Jewish self-consciousness of Amelia Rosselli and her sons was defined by moral values. Concerning the education of Aldo, Carlo, and Nello, whom Amelia raised with a secular Jewish consciousness, she wrote, “We were Jews, but above all, we were Italians. Therefore I myself, the standard work by Efron J., Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 31 See Artom E., “Per una storia degli Ebrei nel Risorgimento,” Rassegna Storica Toscana 24,1 (1978): 141 f. 32 Rosselli, Memorie, 127.

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who was born and raised in this most deeply Italian and liberal environment, have preserved only the pure essence of my religion in my heart. Religious elements that bear an exclusively moral character; and this was the sole religious education… that I gave my children.”33 Rosselli took innately Jewish elements like humaneness, social justice, and anti-dogmatism as basic ethical principles in the education of her sons. She managed to create a secular Jewish family identity focused on concrete principles that originated in Judaism: the obligation of each individual to work with commitment for the good of the community, sharing of one’s own property with those less fortunate, and participation in the establishment of social justice through conscious, responsible actions.34 Her sons grew up without attending the synagogue or observing Jewish dietary laws and prayers, but nonetheless, through the influence of their mother, they developed a distinctively Jewish self-consciousness. References to a personal Jewishness are commonplace in the family’s correspondence35 (Fig. 2.3). Amelia Rosselli’s indefatigable social engagement in the contemporary women’s movement and, during Mussolini’s dictatorship, in anti-fascist networks, were the expression of an ethically defined Jewish family identity. Thus, the social-political interests and decided antifascism of Carlo and Nello Rosselli were also inextricably linked to the example of their mother and the Jewish-conscious upbringing she gave them. The unjust character of the fascist regime strengthened the

33 Ibid., 128. On Amelia Rosselli’s Venetian family, the Pincherles, and their notable patriotism, see Moorehead C., Una famiglia pericolosa. La storia vera della famiglia Rosselli e della sua opposizione al fascismo di Mussolini (Rome: Newton Compton Editori, 2017), 15–19. 34 Amelia Rosselli was open about her orientation to the Jewish principle of tzedakah; she often used the Italian term giustizia to refer to it in her memoirs. On the difference between Jewish benevolence, which sees the creation of social justice as a religious duty, and the Christian “caritas,” consisting of voluntary, benevolent donations, see Picciotto M., Tzedakah: giustizia o beneficenza? (Milan: Mamash, 2009); Levi D’Ancona L., “‘Notabili e Dame’ nella Filantropia Ebraica Ottocentesca. Casi di Studio in Francia, Italia e Inghilterra,” in Armani, Schwarz, Ebrei borghesi, 741. 35 See Sacerdoti Mariani, “Lessico famigliare,” 25 f.; Amato, Una donna nella storia,

83 f.

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Fig. 2.3 Amelia Rosselli with her sons Nello (left) and Carlo (right), summer 1933

consciousness within the family of personal responsibility for the reconstruction of a free, just, and democratic social order.36 This is exemplified by Carlo Rosselli’s explicit reference, in the foreword to his Socialismo liberale, published in 1930, to his cultural Jewish heritage in the sense of tzedakah.37 However, the most striking example of Jewish self-definition through moral principles comes from his younger brother Nello Rosselli. His passionate position statement at the Fourth Zionist Youth Conference in Livorno in 1924, in which he adopted a distinctly anti-Zionist position and advocated instead for antifascist resistance in the here and now, can be read as the ideological quintessence of his family’s outlook: I am a Jew who does not go to the synagogue on Saturday, who speaks no Hebrew, who does not observe any of the rituals… and yet I stand by my Judaism… I call myself a Jew since the monotheistic conviction that no other religion expresses with such clarity is indestructible within me,

36 For the similar experiences of other Jewish antifascists, see Sarfatti, The Jews, 63. 37 In this work, Carlo Rosselli defined socialism as “Israel’s messianism,” “an earthly

justice, myth of equality, a spiritual torment that refuses any indulgence”. According to him, no rational politics could exist without privileging the idea of justice above all else; see Rosselli C., Socialismo liberale, ed. by John Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 4.

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since I am keenly aware of my personal responsibility…since idolatry in any form is repellent to me, since I look upon our life tasks on this earth with Jewish rigor and consider the mystery of what lies beyond with Jewish serenity…And thus I have a social conception stemming from our best traditions; since I have that religious sense for family that, even seen from the outside, is the fundamental core principle of Jewish society. Therefore, I can call myself a Jew.38

Judaism as a social conception, and the keen awareness of personal responsibility and family solidarity formed the foundations for a socialpolitical engagement that characterized and determined the Rossellis’ way of life. Ethical traditions were the basis for a secular Jewish selfconsciousness and often the central motivation for the outstanding commitment to the early Italian women’s movement and to anti-fascist networks on the part of Amelia Rosselli and other female Jewish actors (Fig. 2.4).

2.3

Family Memories

The tightly interwoven family connections of the Italian-Jewish community, sometimes bewilderingly enmeshed by cousin marriages, clearly emerge from the surviving ego documents. Family identity is constantly evoked, confirmed, and transmitted. Preserving the memory of grandparents and ancestors, who occupy a central role within Judaism, is a central motif in the letters and autobiographies of Italian-Jewish protagonists. This is an expression of the “religious sense for family” of which Nello Rosselli spoke. For another example, Laura Orvieto’s stories about her children Leo and Lia, published in 1909, feature an entire chapter devoted to the family’s Jewish origins. In the story, Leo goes to the synagogue with his father Angiolo and “met his grandfather there, who gave him the blessing, placing a hand on his head and chanting.”39 38 Nello’s speech appeared in the journal Israel on November 20, 1924; see Ciuffoletti Z. (ed.), Nello Rosselli: uno storico sotto il fascismo. Lettere e scritti vari (1924–1937) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979), 1–5. 39 Orvieto, Il Re è ebreo?, 69. On this chapter specifically, which was supposed to be removed from the book by the publisher during fascism, see Del Vivo C., “Asterischi,” Bollettino dell’Amicizia ebraico-cristiana 3–4 (2003): 61–64.

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Fig. 2.4 Amelia Rosselli, circa 1905

Besides Laura Orvieto’s works, Amelia Rosselli’s memoirs and Gina Lombroso’s biographical and autobiographical writings to take the family as foundational material for literary production, with preservation of family memory as the motivation.40 The tight connection between Jewish identity, the family, and commemoration of ancestors for the writer and doctor Gina Lombroso can be seen in her biography of her father, Cesare Lombroso, which she dedicated to her then eleven-year-old son

40 See among others Rosselli, Memorie; Orvieto, Leo e Lia; ead., Storia di Angiolo e Laura; Lombroso Ferrero G., Cesare Lombroso, storia della vita e delle opere (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1921); ead., Manoscritti autobiografici inediti, ACGV, Fondo Gina Lombroso Ferrero. For a comparison of the autobiographical works, see Calloni M., “(Auto)biografie di intellettuali ebraiche italiane: Amelia Rosselli, Laura Orvieto e Gina Lombroso,” in Barbarulli C., Borghi L. (eds.), Visioni in/sostenibili. Genere e intercultura (Cagliari: CUEC, 2003), 139–158.—Natalia Levi Ginzburg’s already mentioned autobiographical novel Lessico famigliare is the best-known example of the literary depiction of a secular Italian-Jewish family and its language as a type of individual symbolic system. The story is focused on antifascist, mostly Jewish family-and-friendship networks. However, Ginzburg’s authoritative father figure is markedly different from Orvieto’s affectionate characterization of male family members. Orvieto’s husband Angiolo gave unconditional support to her social-political and cultural engagement.

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Leo Ferrero. In the foreword, written in December 1914, Gina wrote, “To you, my little Leo, I dedicate this book. I depict the life of your grandfather for you, while you are still on the threshold of life. You will come upon tragic events in these pages, but despite everything, you will read of an existence in which the sun radiantly triumphed over all the accumulated sadness among humans and things.”41 The first chapter, “Family and Childhood,” begins with palpable pride in their Jewish ancestry and precise genealogical information, her family’s social and cultural background. Her presentation relies both on written sources and on the subjective perspective of the oral tradition: Cesare Lombroso was born on November 6, 1835, around 11 o’clock, in Verona; his parents were Aronne Lombroso and Zefora Levi, both of them Jews of the purest and noblest lineage… The Lombroso family, which originated in Spain, emigrated to Tunisia during the Jewish expulsion, where apparently they assumed the name “Solombo” (which means “the radiantly enlightened” in Arabic) and then changed it to Lombroso… Zefora, Cesare Lombroso’s mother… – so say the family members who knew her – was the treasure of the home, a little Rebecca as described by Walter Scott in Ivanhoe: one of those timid and passionate Jewish women in whom the whole ideal, intelligence, and passion of the race dwell intact, in the closed circle of the home, well protected from external hatred.42

In this way, Gina Lombroso brought the world of her ancestors to life. In this world, as she interpreted it, Jewish tradition combined learning and teaching with business acumen and political involvement. Through the example of her grandmother Zefora, she presents her personal idea of the Jewish “race,” the reference point for the Lombroso family’s Jewish selfconsciousness, to the reader: an ideal image, likely playing off the great female figures of the Bible, untarnished by any “external” influences such as intermarriage or conversion, nor also by any antisemitic hostility from the non-Jewish ambient society, but contained within the family sphere43 41 Lombroso Ferrero, Cesare Lombroso, V. 42 Ibid., 1 f. 43 Although Gina Lombroso was not religious, she was absolutely opposed to marriages with non-Jews. Her granddaughter Bosiljka Raditsa reports that Gina was initially horrified when her daughter Nina Ferrero wanted to marry Bogdan Raditsa, a Catholic Croat, in a church ceremony. She recoiled from the idea of inviting her Jewish friends and relations to a church; eventually the ceremony took place in church, but at a great distance from

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(Fig. 2.5). In the letters she wrote to her son Leo Ferrero as an adult, Gina Lombroso continued to emphasize the relevance of Jewish ancestors and their traditions. The connection between Jewish identity and national self-consciousness is reflected in the fact that she depicts the lives of her ancestors within an explicitly Italian context. While Leo Ferrero was working on a novel, his mother wrote to him: Yesterday I spoke with your aunt, who came from Verona, and she described her relatives’ customs to me, and it came to me that the old, antique Italian society is missing from your novel… And the wife’s family is also missing. You say that she came from the petit-bourgeoisie, and that is all, and that he chose her by himself. In the historical reality, at that time it was the relatives who chose the wife, which was also the case for your

Fig. 2.5 Gina Lombroso, 1892

the altar; see the author’s conversation with Bosiljka Raditsa in Florence on January 30, 2013.

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grandfather [Cesare Lombroso]. The grandmother [Nina De Benedetti] was selected by [his cousin] David Levi for him. This gives special color to the period and increases the character’s complexity.44

It is by no means only in writings by mothers for their children that one finds reference to family members and their histories. For example, Laura Orvieto’s husband Angiolo began his sophisticated and emotional eulogy for his friend Amelia Rosselli in March 1954 not with an appraisal of the writer’s life but with a commemoration of his and her ancestors and their shared childhood.45 Angiolo’s audience, the Florentine chapter of the ADEI, was familiar with the specific kinship ties between the Orvietos and the Rossellis: the tight familial network evoked in his speech, which originated in Venice, was a notable expression of the multiply ramified family-and-friendship networks in Italian-Jewish society.46 Orvieto presents the families as the origin of the sense of self, and of their friendship, whose beginnings he humorously depicted: At the end of the nineteenth century… there lived in Venice, near the Ca’ d’Oro, on Ca’ Boldù, madam Amalia Errera, a Levi by marriage, sister of Annetta, a Cantoni by marriage, who had taken her niece Amalia Cantoni - Annetta’s daughter - into her home as her own daughter… In their childhood, Angiolo and Adolfo [Orvieto] went to bathe in the Lido every year with their mother [Amalia Cantoni]. Their mother, who was very attached to her aunt Amalia Levi, always wanted to spend some weeks of

44 FPC, Fondo Leo Ferrero, L.F.C. 840, Gina Lombroso to Leo Ferrero, undated. The novel under discussion was most likely Espoirs, published posthumously in Paris in 1935 with a foreword by his father Guglielmo Ferrero. 45 On the lifelong friendship between Amelia Rosselli, the Orvieto brothers Adolfo and Angiolo, and Angiolo’s wife Laura, whom Amelia met in Florence as a young woman, see Moorehead, Una famiglia pericolosa, 33–35. 46 Amelia Rosselli’s own depiction of the kinship relationships among her ancestors also shows this: “My mother [Emilia Capon] was a Levi by birth and married a Pincherle, which means she belonged to Venice’s Jewish aristocracy. And in fact she was related to all the Levi families. As she got older, she understood that her marriage with my father, who fortunately was not a Levi (I say “fortunately” because the continual marriages between relatives later led, in the case of the Levis in Venice, to frequent cases of neurasthenia and even some instances of mental illness) … should be considered a ‘Mésalliance’”; Rosselli, Memorie, 46 f.

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the summer in Venice. The Pincherle family also lived on Ca’ Boldù, by the Grand Canal; they were both neighbors and close friends of the Levis. As chance would have it, a warm and boisterous affection arose between the Orvieto boys and the Pincherle girl – Amalia, called Amelia.47 Although they were from Florence, Angiolo and Adolfo were by no means as brazen as other boys from their city, but they were extremely lively and also a little violent; they often and readily came to blows, and I cannot rule out that the sweet and pretty Amelia received a few slaps too; however, she knew quite well how to defend herself and developed a strong, combative constitution.48

For Angiolo Orvieto, like Gina Lombroso, memories of his ancestors and of his own past constitute the family as the identity-forming concept and central component of his own biography. This form of expression of secular Jewish self-consciousness based on family memories takes on a different quality in family memorial texts composed in the years of persecution of the rights and assault on the lives of Italian Jews. Here, family memory is combined with the authors’ intent to depict their ancestors as an integral part of the Italian nation in an almost apologetic manner. This intention can be seen especially clearly in the work of Arturo Luzzatto, born in Milan (1861–1945),49 who published the diary of his mother, the patriot Fanny, in 1941 with the title La Famiglia Luzzatto durante il Risorgimento Italiano 1848–1969.50 Luzzatto, an engineer who became a member of parliament at the beginning of the twentieth century, and was the managing director of the Italian steelworks, wrote in his dedication: “I publish this diary – from 1848 to 1860 – found among our family documents, to honor the memory of my mother, Fanny Luzzatto.”51 Luzzatto’s publication was an expression of Italian-Jewish family memory intended not only for his own family circle but for the attention of a wider public as well. Fanny Luzzatto’s diaries (likely modified or 47 Amelia Rosselli, née Pincherle (1870–1954). 48 Angiolo Orvieto, “Commemorazione di Amelia Rosselli,” ACGV, Fondo Orvieto,

Rosselli Amelia. Commemorazioni e stampa relativa, Or.1.2059. Angiolo gave his address on March 14, 1955, at a session of the local ADEI in Florence. 49 On Arturo Luzzatto, see Biagianti I., Un protagonista della siderurgia fra Ottocento e Novecento: Arturo Luzzatto (Florence: Cooperativa Editrice Universitaria, 1978). 50 Fanny Luzzatto, La Famiglia Luzzatto durante il Risorgimento Italiano 1848–1860, ed. by Luzzatto A. (Rome: M. Danesi, 1941). 51 Ibid., 1.

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excerpted by her son) reflect her efforts for Italian unification, her deeply felt patriotism, and her personal courage during the dramatic events of 1859/60, when she—a Jew from Friuli—collaborated with supporters of Italian independence in Turin, Milan, Udine, and elsewhere. Her unconditional identification with Italy “the fatherland,” for which Luzzatto’s mother was ready even to sacrifice her own sons, is expressively reflected in her writings. According to the published book, she wrote in her diary in 1859, “The duty of every woman is to sacrifice herself for the fatherland. And what is a greater sacrifice than to give one’s own sons [to the fatherland]?”.52 Against a background of increasing antisemitic persecution after the racial legislation of 1938 and the massive heightening of anti-Jewish measures under the fascist regime from the beginning of the 1940s onward, this publication can be read as a desperate rebuttal of fascism’s official antisemitic narrative, according to which Jews did not belong to “the Italian race.”53 The Jewish family identity reflected in the title of the published collection of diaries was, for Luzzatto, inextricably linked to a sense of belonging to the Italian nation which had granted the Jews equal footing as citizens. However, when Luzzatto published his mother’s diaries, the Jewish emancipation in Italy already belonged to the past.54 Since 1938, at the latest, the identità famigliare that united Jewish family pride and Italian national consciousness had been confined perforce to the private sphere.

52 Ibid., 9. 53 See the racial “manifesto” in “Il Giornale d’Italia,” July 15, 1938, published in

Sarfatti M., La Shoah in Italia. La persecuzione degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 131–133. On the continually radicalizing fascist “Jewish policy” at the beginning of the 1940s, see id., The Jews, 161–174; Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 102–117. 54 Enzo Collotti writes of the “cancellation” of the Jewish emancipation by fascism; Collotti E., “La politica razziale del regime fascista,” presentation at the conference “L’Invenzione del nemico. Sessantesimo anniversario della promulgazione delle leggi razziali,” Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia e Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 3 December 1998, 3.

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2.4 The Future in the Children: Birth and Upbringing Between Middle-Class Aspirations and Jewish Tradition The largely secular Jewish family identities of members of the Italian women’s movement relied heavily on the memory of ancestors, but at the same time, it was intensified and promoted by familial discourses on the central significance of posterity. Children and grandchildren symbolized the continuation of family traditions, the future, and the continued existence of the Jewish family. Notably, the letters of the Jewish protagonists of the Italian women’s movement are markedly focused on births, upbringing, health, and education. The conversations constantly recur to the discussion of their own children and those of Jewish relatives and friends, sometimes in worried tones regarding the inevitable ailments, sometimes exclaiming in joy at their children’s physical and intellectual successes.55 Women like Amelia Rosselli, Laura Orvieto, Gina Lombroso, and their relatives and female friends exhibit a great deal of interest in the mother–child relationship and in specific questions relating to education and the physical development of their sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren.56 Even children of non-religious, acculturated families received a remarkably regulated mixture of study and play in their daily lives, and great attention was paid to nutritional habits, health, and the treatment of illnesses. For example, in 1908, when the fiveyear-old Leo Ferrero spent several weeks with his grandparents while his parents were traveling, Nina De Benedetti reported to her daughter Gina in detail, often even with exact dates and times, on her child’s games,

55 For example, when the twelve-year-old Carlo Rosselli suffered an illness, his mother

Amelia reported to her friend Laura both on his physical progress and on his study: “He is very sweet and patient – he always has company, and now he has started studying again too. He even had his first Latin lesson yesterday, since the doctor told him that there was nothing to stop him from doing things again; he only had to stay in bed because of a localized situation”; Amelia Rosselli to Laura Orvieto, May 30, 1912, ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or.1.2059, No. 99. 56 Amelia Rosselli’s ongoing interest in the health and nutrition of her grandchildren Amelia and Andrew is an expressive example; see Amelia Rosselli to Marion Cave, February 11, 1936, Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana (henceforth, Isrt Firenze), Fondo Maria Rosselli, fasc. Amelia Rosselli to Marion Rosselli (February 4 1936–November 3, 1948).

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meals, and maintenance, as well as the nursery furnishings.57 Cesare Lombroso, usually represented as a distant patriarch, “is delighted with Leo and keeps saying he cannot believe how sweet he is,”58 wrote Nina De Benedetti in a letter to Gina Lombroso. It is interesting in this connection that, in contrast to her husband, De Benedetti maintained a religious self-consciousness, although her daughters Gina and Paola received a decidedly secular education in accordance with their father’s wishes.59 Nina De Benedetti’s attachment to her religious Jewish heritage, which remained vibrant within the family sphere, may have come to the fore through the connection with her grandson.60 In the case of Laura Orvieto, it is telling that she made the conscious decision to breastfeed her son Leonfrancesco, born in 1900, although employing wet nurses was the norm in contemporary bourgeois circles.61 In this way, Orvieto incorporated the close physical contact that Jewish mothers were traditionally supposed to have with their children into her personal style of mothering from the very beginning. One of her friends, the Jewish educator and author Lina Schwarz (1876–1947),62 wrote to Laura shortly after Leonfrancesco’s birth with great satisfaction: “How wonderful that you can breastfeed, and let us hope that you can continue 57 See the letters of Nina De Benedetti to Gina Lombroso of November 1908, ACGV, Fondo Lombroso, GLF.II.1.64–67. 58 Nina De Benedetti to Gina Lombroso, November 14, 1908, ACGV, Fondo Lombroso, GLF.II.1.67. 59 See Dolza, Essere figlie di Lombroso, 31. 60 The central importance of upbringing and education innate to Judaism was notably

foundational for a cultural heritage preserved and transmitted in the mentality and communication patterns even of acculturated Italian-Jewish families; see Guetta S., “Donne e famiglia nella tradizione ebraica,” in Contini M., Ulivieri S. (eds.), Donne, famiglia, famiglie (Milan: Guerini, 2010), 63–84. 61 On the use of wet nurses in the bourgeoisie of liberal Italy, see Cambi F., Ulivieri S., Storia dell’infanzia nell’Italia liberale (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1988), 187; Genovesi G., L’educazione dei figli. L’Ottocento (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999), 12 f. 62 Lina Schwarz was born in Verona but moved to Milan with her family at the age of ten. Schwarz made a name for herself as a children’s book author and women’s rights activist, among other things through participation in the Unione Femminile Nazionale. A follower of Anthroposophy, she introduced Rudolf Steiner’s work to Italy and was among the founders of the first Steiner school in Italy. There are no detailed monographs on Schwarz’s life and work as yet. For a biographical overview, see the entry in Pisano L. (ed.), Donne del giornalismo italiano. Da Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel a Ilaria Alpi. Dizionario storico bio-bibliografico. Secoli XVIII–XX (Milan: Angeli, 2004), 339 f.

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to do so without weakening yourself.”63 Schwarz, who was the same age as Laura, observed the young boy’s development with a mixture of shared sisterly joy and an educator’s interest. She frequently inquired after him in her letters, “Yesterday I was thinking that Leonfrancesco is six months old already, the sweet boy! You haven’t told me whether he’s already got his first tooth; I’m interested, you should know!” (June 1901); “And Leonfrancesco, how is he…? Has he started talking?” (July 1901).64 Thus, the health, intellectual progress, and character development of the children of Jewish friends and relations received nearly as much attention as that of one’s own children. The close ties between ItalianJewish families were additionally strengthened by common interest in their offspring and their wellbeing. Such concentration on family circles undoubtedly fostered their group consciousness; however, at least in the private sphere, it also reduced interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish families. Kaplan makes a similar observation regarding the social contacts of Jewish men and women in Wilhelmine Germany: according to her findings, the remarkable vitality of German-Jewish families impeded the desire and capacity of most Jews to build closer connections with non-Jewish Germans in the private sphere.65 In this respect, the secular subculture, which had its place in the Italian-Jewish family networks, took its form based on the not infrequently voluntary but sometimes also unconscious distancing on the part of Jewish women from non-Jewish or rather Catholic men and women. For example, when Amelia Rosselli counseled her friend Laura Orvieto, whose son had just had chickenpox, in October 1915, reading between the lines, she alluded not only to the marked interest of Jewish women in matters of health but also to the existence of a sphere inhabited by Jewish mothers, children, and doctors, in which everyday contacts with non-Jews played no significant role: If you haven’t done so already, you should give Leonfrancesco a restorative – this is absolutely necessary after chickenpox. I’m telling you this because Alice D’Ancona’s little son had chickenpox last year, and De Orefice didn’t give him anything; the little boy went into a great decline, 63 Lina Schwarz to Laura Orvieto, December 30, 1900; ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or.5.2.1: Lina Schwarz (to Angiolo Orvieto, to Laura Orvieto) (1899–1946), No. 7. 64 Lina Schwarz to Laura Orvieto, June 29, 1901, July 11, 1901; ibid., Nos. 8 and 9. 65 See Kaplan, Jewish Social Life, 51.

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and then Meyer [?] determined that it was harmful not to have given him anything to build him back up, which is to say that one must always do that after chickenpox…66

The general absence of mention of non-Jewish persons is a striking feature of the correspondence of women like Amelia Rosselli, Laura Orvieto, Lina Schwarz, and the Errera sisters. This does not mean that there was no contact with non-Jews in the actual reality—Laura Orvieto, for example, had contact with non-Jewish nurses and even nuns through her involvement as a Samaritan in the hospitals of Florence67 ; Amelia’s English daughter-in-law Marion Cave was a Quaker. However, involvement in and a sense of belonging to Jewish family-and-friendship networks were the predominant features both in the everyday life and in the thoughts and feelings expressed in the letters of these women. Here, their progeny, wherein lay the future of the family, were the central reference point. However, it was not only Jewish women and mothers who corresponded about their offspring. The correspondence between the Rosselli brothers reveals a remarkably personal involvement and what is at first glance a surprising degree of openness on the part of the writers that encompasses even the most intimate physical aspects like childbirth and breastfeeding. At the end of December 1934, still euphoric at the recent birth of his son Aldo, Nello Rosselli wrote a long letter to his brother Carlo and to Carlo’s wife Marion Cave, who were in exile in Paris. The new father had clearly experienced the birth process up close and personal. It is described in every detail. Nello Rosselli’s presence at the birth clearly demonstrates what was, in the context of relationships at the time, an extraordinarily trusting and egalitarian relationship between husband and wife. As well as providing an unusual insight into the emotions of a new father and representative of the acculturated Italian-Jewish bourgeoisie, Nello’s report is remarkable for its meticulous, vivid description of the birth of his first son within a decidedly familial sphere. His account features his mother Amelia and the Todescos, his parents-in-law, his 66 Amelia Rosselli to Laura Orvieto, October 2, 1915, ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or. 1.2059, No. 106 (emphasis in original). All the people mentioned by Amelia in this passage were of Jewish origin; Alice D’Ancona was a mutual friend of Laura and Amelia. 67 See Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 117.

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daughters Silvia and Paola (nicknamed “Chicchi”), and, in a metaphorical sense, also his eldest brother Aldo, who had died in Carnia at just twenty years old in 1916, for whom the new baby was named. He doubtless provided this detailed description also with the intention to enable the exiled couple, Carlo Rosselli and Marion Cave, to participate in the event in all its details at least in retrospect and in this way to revivify for them the familiar Florentine context in which the birth had taken place: When the labor was progressing regularly… I called the Cappellano [midwife] around 2.30, then the nurse, then Basso [the doctor], then the in-laws… Maria was very calm and detached… Mama, poor thing, trotted like a horse because… everybody needed her… The little boy came into the world in optimal condition, rosy-cheeked and extremely vigorous… In the morning after the birth, Maria forgot what she had been through and started to sit up! … [She] swore that the next time (just the thought of it calls for much courage), she would not listen to the doctor but would breastfeed herself at all costs. And now to the baby. He is a little smaller than his sisters (just under three kilos), but so beautiful, words cannot describe it. Dark blue eyes (like Mama’s), a little nose a bit like Chicchi’s, a forehead… like his father’s, two hands like a pianist’s… He is very well proportioned and has a beautiful, very robust voice…Mama is very happy and moved about the name.68

The birth of the later writer Aldo Rosselli (1934–2013) emerges from his father’s letter as an event that brought together the Rosselli family’s past, present, and future and united the different generations of the family. This context was likely so important to Nello Rosselli because he saw the family as “the fundamental core principle of Jewish society.” Earlier, in 1929, he had written to his mother Amelia, “Sometimes I have the impression that I – if I was really worth it – could establish, with a wife like Maria, the sort of harmoniously constructed family that is presented to us, in a mysterious way, in the Old Testament.”69 The fact that Nello’s 68 Nello Rosselli to Marion Cave, December 21, 1934, Isrt Firenze, Fondo Maria Rosselli, fasc. Nello Rosselli to Marion Rosselli, 11.12.1927–1.8.1935. 69 Nello to Amelia Rosselli, September 27, 1929, quoted in Ciuffoletti Z. (ed.), I Rosselli. Epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli: 1914–1937 (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), 463.

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son Aldo (and his younger brother Alberto) were circumcised at eight days old in accordance with Jewish custom70 indicates the maintenance of a Jewish identity despite any secular orientation on the part of the parents, and the centrality of this identity, embodied in the children and the children’s children, for the family. The varied and often situation-driven connections between tradition and acculturation constituted a characteristic element of bourgeois Jewish family life in post-emancipation Italy. Protagonists like Amelia Rosselli, Laura Orvieto, and the Lombroso sisters, who were involved in the nondenominational institutions of the Italian women’s movement, did not act exclusively as Italian women. The consciousness of being part of a family history rooted in Judaism can be clearly seen both in their everyday life and in their public involvement. The Jewish identity of feminists who had mostly or completely done away with religious customs at home was based on conceptions of a community of origin, ethical traditions, and family memories. Their engagement on behalf of women’s issues, at a time when women still lacked equal rights despite Jewish emancipation, enabled them to combine their cultural Jewish heritage with their Italian national consciousness in a concrete fashion through social engagement and educational ideals. This process gained increasing currency through the establishment of the first national women’s associations at the end of the nineteenth century—these created room for maneuver outside of the Jewish community organizations within which Jewish women were able to actively express their participation in society. However, in view of the central significance of family identities in the Italian-Jewish context, it also needs to be asked whether this development additionally led to a long-term integration of Jewish women into the nonJewish, mostly Catholic society of liberal Italy. At the same time, external exclusion mechanisms, prejudice against Jews, and antisemitism need to be investigated. Did the context of the women’s movement result in lively contacts between Jewish and non-Jewish women, or did Jewish women constitute an individual group even within laicist institutions?

70 As reported by his elder sister, Silvia Rosselli, in her autobiography: Rosselli S., Gli otto venti (Palermo: Sellerio, 2008), 92.

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The following biographical inquiry into pioneers of the Italian women’s movement exposes the development of their identities between laicism and Jewish self-consciousness in the first decades of liberal Italy. Subsequently, the fourth chapter focuses first on the biographies and ideological positions of younger Jewish feminists in national and transnational connections and then turns to an examination of Jewish–non-Jewish relationships and the emergence of antisemitic tendencies in the organized Italian women’s movement at the beginning of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 3

Biographies Between Secularism and Jewish Self-Positioning

3.1 Educator, Abolitionist, ebrea laica: The Pioneer Sara Levi Nathan Sara Levi Nathan, who went down in the history of the Risorgimento as Giuseppe Mazzini’s companion, is not just the oldest protagonist of this study. Her life and engagement became an example and motivator for numerous Jewish and non-Jewish women to work together, within the spheres accessible to women, for the creation of the new Italy, to expand their room for maneuver, and additionally to involve themselves beyond the national contexts. In the February 25, 1882, edition of the leading contemporary women’s rights journal, La Donna, dedicated to Nathan, who had died a few days earlier in London, the editor, Gualberta Alaide Beccari wrote with emphasis: “Friends, let us join in mourning for our Sara, and let us make her life a model for our own. Only in this way can one honor the greats.”1 Indeed, the sophisticated, multilingual Sara Levi Nathan, mother of twelve children, who moved with confidence among the most prominent 1 La Donna XIII, 6 (February 1882): 81 f. On Gualberta Alaide Beccari of Padua (1842–1906), a fervent adherent of Mazzini, see Pisa B., Venticinque anni di emancipazionismo. Adelaide Beccari e la rivista “La Donna” (1869–1890) (Rome: Quaderni Federazione italiana delle associazioni partigiane, 1983); Schwegmann M., Gualberta Alaide Beccari, emancipazionista e scrittrice (Pisa: Domus Mazziniana, 1996).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Nattermann, Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4_3

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politicians of her day, became a pioneer of the women’s movement both nationally and internationally through her commitment to education and abolitionism and through her role as an intercultural mediator. Sara’s own Mazzinian emphasis became a central feature of the early Italian women’s movement in general.2 The life of this “ebrea laica”3 reveals a close interconnection between private and public, between Jewish identity and laicism, which is a conspicuous feature of the biographies of Jewish pioneers of the Italian women’s movement in general.4 No comprehensive biography of Sara Levi Nathan has yet been written. By 1938 and the promulgation of the fascist racial laws if not before, she, along with all the other Jewish representatives of the first Italian women’s movement, was suppressed from the national consciousness and did not find her way back into the public awareness even after the collapse of fascism. It was only in connection with the 150th anniversary of Italian unification and renewed interest in the history of the Risorgimento that “the banker of the revolution” finally began to receive a little attention again.5 But despite this, Sara Levi Nathan has not yet emerged from the “shadow unjustly cast over her.”6 The majority of the surviving information about the protagonist’s childhood and youth comes from a biographical sketch by her close friend

2 Dickmann too stresses the fact that the Italian women’s movement was initially largely recruited from Mazzinian circles: “Über die Grenzen. Die Italienerinnen in der frühen internationalen Frauenbewegung,” in Schöck-Quinteros E. et al. (eds.), Politische Netzwerkerinnen. Internationale Zusammenarbeit von Frauen 1830–1960 (Berlin: Trafo, 2007), 212. On the Mazzinians, their ideological position, and their social engagement, see especially Gazzetta L., Giorgina Saffi. Contributo alla storia del mazzinianesimo femminile (Milan: Angeli, 2003). 3 Valentini C., “La banchiera della rivoluzione, Sara Levi Nathan,” in Doni E. et al. (eds.), Donne del Risorgimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 137–156. 4 On the supposed dichotomy between masculine-public and feminine-private spheres, see Heschel S., “Nicht nur Opfer und Heldinnen,” in Brenner M., Myers D. (eds.), Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung heute (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), 155–157. 5 In her 2011 contribution on “Women of the Risorgimento,” Chiara Valentini focuses primarily on Nathan’s political involvement and financial support of Italian unification; Anna Maria Isastia commemorates Sara Levi Nathan in her biography of the Nathan family: Isastia A. M., Storia di una famiglia. Sarina, Giuseppe, Ernesto Nathan (Turin: Università Popolare di Torino, 2010). 6 Valentini, “La Banchiera,” 156.

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Jessie White Mario (1832–1906) from 18877 and a short account by her daughter Janet Nathan Rosselli (1842–1911).8 Despite the subjectivity of these reports, which portray Sara Levi Nathan in an entirely positive light, they allow for a relatively precise reconstruction of the central events and lines of development of her biography. The subjective perspective is also relevant in that it is more likely to contain personal memories and commentaries from Nathan herself. Upbringing in Pesaro, Modena, and Livorno Sara Levi Nathan’s history begins no differently than that of many other Jewish girls born in Italy a few years after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire and with it, the end of the Jewish emancipation granted by the French. Sara was born on December 7, 1819, the daughter of Enrichetta (“Ricca”) Rosselli and Emanuele Levi in the small Jewish community of Pesaro, which had belonged once again to the Papal State since 1815. Jessie White Mario records that her father was a merchant in the city’s Ghetto Grande. Her education, which Sara Levi Nathan herself must have told her friend about in later years, was in her mother’s hands: “The father, who was a merchant, left all family matters to the mother. She taught her daughters reading, writing, arithmetic, crafts, and a little music. Additionally, she made sure that they conscientiously followed the rites of the Jewish religion.”9 The fact that Ricca Rosselli undertook her daughters’ education reflects the rabbinic dictum according to which the education of female offspring should take place in the home, and the mother should be the daughters’ first teacher.10 So, within the Jewish communities, it was the women who 7 White Mario J., In memoria dell’amica diletta Sarina Nathan, February 19, 1887, Museo Centrale del Risorgimento a Roma (henceforth MCRR), 405, 3. On Jessie White, the wife of the Italian patriot Alberto Mario, who studied in Paris and London but was not allowed to study medicine in England in the 1850s because of her gender, see Certini R., Jessie White Mario una giornalista educatrice. Tra liberalismo inglese e democrazia italiana (Florence: Le Lettere, 1998). 8 The account was published with the title “Una biografia di Sarina Nathan,” Il pensiero mazziniano 9 (September 1979): 52. 9 White Mario, In memoria. 10 On the traditional role of the Jewish mother and her tasks within the household,

see in detail Herweg R. M., Die jüdische Mutter. Das verborgene Matriarchat (Darmstadt: WBG, 1995), 92–94.

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taught girls not only the religious rituals but also reading, writing, and arithmetic. In so doing, they took over the role of the public school, which Jews of both genders were in most cases forbidden to attend. Due to the generally precarious economic circumstances of the Jewish communities, this home education was vested with great importance, for religious reasons also. The high level of education overall enabled Jewish women to practice various professions—primarily as educators, but also as directors of trade- and financial businesses. Additionally, training in “feminine” skills like sewing, weaving, and stitching, which Sara Levi Nathan also learned, enabled girls to earn additional income through work from home. The result of the wide-ranging and solid education received by Jewish girls from their mothers can be seen in particular from the fact that the percentage of illiterate women in the contemporary Jewish population in Italy was just barely 5.8%.11 Sara Levi doubtless profited from the thorough education that Jewish girls received in general. However, her education by her mother came to an abrupt end with Ricca Rosselli’s death in 1830. With his eye on remarrying, her father initially sent Sara and her sister to relatives in Modena, two older women, who were charged with continuing the girls’ education. Three years later, after her sister married, Sara had to move again. This time, she went to Livorno to a cousin of her mother’s, the merchant Emanuele Rosselli, originally from Rome, and his wife Debora.12 By now, the fourteen-year-old girl’s life was fraught with the frequent relocations and loss of a sense of domestic security. But the lively atmosphere of the port town of Livorno, whose Jewish community was especially progressive when it came to girls’ education compared with other Italian cities,13 must have had a positive effect on Sara Levi’s development. She also read 11 See Novelli-Glaab, “Zwischen Tradition und Moderne,” 110; Miniati, Le “emancipate”, 72. On the demographic circumstances, see Sabatello E. F., “Trasformazioni economiche e sociali degli ebrei in Italia nel periodo dell’emancipazione,” in Italia Judaica: Gli ebrei nell’Italia unita, 1870–1945. Atti del IV convegno internazionale (Siena 12–16 giugno 1989) (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1993), 114–124. 12 See White Mario, In memoria. 13 See Funaro, L., “‘Compagna e partecipe’. Donne della comunità ebraica livornese

nel secondo Ottocento,” in Frattarelli L. (ed.), Sul filo della scrittura. Fonti e temi per la storia delle donne a Livorno (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2005), 319–339.

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and studied independently. Jessie White Mario is likely drawing on the recollections of Sara’s later husband, Moses Meyer Nathan, but perhaps also on Sara’s own assessment of her Livorno years, when she describes the now sixteen-year-old Sara as “lively and yet serious, healthy, agile, beautiful.”14 Sara Levi Nathan would attach great value to the thorough education and instruction of girls and women throughout her life, as can be clearly seen from the relevant institutions she founded later in life. Marriage, Motherhood, and Jewish Family Life Sara Levi’s further personal development was crucially determined by her marriage to the German Jew, Moses Meyer Nathan (1799–1859), who had been resident in London since the beginning of the 1830s. Without him, she would probably never have left Italy and the still restrictive conditions for Jews there. The marriage opened up a new existence for her in what was then the most modern city in Europe. Moses Meyer Nathan was a friend of Emanuele Rosselli’s, who had expanded his trading relationships to England and had set up a subsidiary in London. Although White Mario romantically describes the initial encounter between the thirty-seven-year-old stockbroker Nathan and Sara, twenty years younger, as “love at first sight,”15 in all probability this was a marriage arranged by Emanuele Rosselli. It is likely that in his eyes, this wealthy, worldly-wise businessman was a good match for the young girl, a guarantee of her existential security and of the preservation of Jewish family integrity. What is known is that Moses Meyer Nathan met Sara in May 1836 on a visit to Emanuele Rosselli’s house, the wedding was celebrated just two weeks later, and the couple then left for London together.16

14 White Mario, In memoria. 15 “…Nathan fell in love [with Sara] at first sight; he asked for her hand, married her

within a month, and took her with him to London.” White Mario, In memoria. 16 The presumption that this was an arranged marriage is also found in Isastia, Storia di una famiglia, 4, and Valentini, “La banchiera,” 138 f. On Moses Meyer Nathan, see the memoir by Alessandro Levi, Ricordi della vita e dei tempi di Ernesto Nathan, ed. by A. Bocchi (Pisa-Lucca: Domus Mazziniana, 2006), first published in Florence in 1927. In 1911, the jurist and antifascist Alessandro Levi married Sarina, the niece of Ernesto Nathan (1845–1921), son of Sara Levi and Moses Meyer Nathan. Levi was the first biographer of Ernesto Nathan, freemason and mayor of Rome from 1907 to 1913.

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Moses Meyer Nathan was born in 1799 in Rödelheim, near Frankfurt. Little is known of his origins overall, but the family correspondence reveals that he had told Sara about his childhood in Germany. In a letter to her daughter Janet from 1870, she seems moved by the fact that her then sixteen-year-old son Alfred, who was traveling in Germany, by chance ended up in a place where his father had lived as a child: “I have had a letter from Alfred from Offenbach, a place five miles from Frankfurt… A Mr. Mayer recommended them there; it is about the spot where your father spent the first years of his life. It is strange that Alfred should be thrown there.”17 It is assumed that Moses Meyer Nathan was the son of a Rothschild, born out of wedlock, and took his third forename for his surname. This would explain his considerable wealth; after several years’ residence in Paris, he moved to London and reported in his citizenship application that he traded in silver- and gold bullion. On July 4, 1850, Moses became an English citizen. But both in professional and familial contexts, he wrote and spoke mostly in French. His wife Sara also soon had a near-fluent command of French as well as English.18 Her linguistic capabilities were an important precondition for her later role as an international networker. Although the marriage was most likely arranged, and despite their large difference in age, Moses and Sara had a loving relationship. Many years after her husband’s death, Sara wrote to her son Ernesto, “I can only wish that my children … hold his memory in respect, as he was surely the best of all fathers and husbands.”19 No doubt, extrication from the shifting family authorities in Pesaro, Modena, and Livorno, the move from the tight living conditions of the ghettos to England’s metropolis, and the encounter with new people, languages, and ideas were a source of inspiration for the young woman, who probably perceived her marriage as a liberation. Her marriage with Moses Meyer Nathan produced nine sons and three daughters between 1839 and 1859. White Mario portrays Sara Levi Nathan, surely also influenced by the Mazzinian ideal of maternità, as a devoted mother:

17 Sara Levi Nathan to Janet Nathan Rosselli, October 28, 1870, FRT, Janet Nathan Archive, C 1096. 18 See Isastia, Storia di una famiglia, 4. 19 Sara Levi Nathan to Ernesto Nathan, in Levi, Ricordi della vita, 5.

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The first strong passion of this passionate soul was that of motherhood. I see her before my eyes, with the newborn on her lap, how she looked at this being that belonged only to her with a radiant and half-amazed smile… She was the embodiment of motherhood. The nine sons and three daughters she brought forth were seldom cared for by hands other than her own.20

In a different passage, she reports, “In order to know [Sara], one must see her—as I have had the privilege of doing—in the midst of her family— with the baby in arms, two or three toddlers capering around, the older ones studying, one of them playing an instrument, the eldest son coming home from school and looking for his mother to give her a kiss.”21 Elements of Jewish family culture are recognizable in this seemingly remarkably modern, lively family scene. Sons and daughters study at home, although only the eldest goes to school. Furthermore, they are already playing instruments. The physical proximity of the protagonist to her children is also remarkable; this would have been quite unusual in contemporary (non-Jewish) contexts. Normally, middle-class women left their children to be breastfed and raised by wet nurses,22 but Sara Levi Nathan took care of her offspring herself, despite her family’s wealth. Traditionally, Jewish mothers were supposed to maintain a close physicalspatial and emotional relationship with their children.23 Sara Levi Nathan had learned the relevant religious prescriptions regarding the care of children and likely also some basic medical knowledge as part of her Jewish education. The young mother’s level of experience, which increased steadily as the years passed and her family continued to grow, contributed further to the development of her remarkable ability to treat illnesses, on which White Mario reports.24 All twelve of Sara Levi Nathan’s children

20 White Mario, In memoria. 21 Ibid. 22 See Genovesi, L’educazione dei figli, 12 f., 22; Cambi, Ulivieri, Storia dell’infanzia,

187. 23 On the mother–child relationship in the Jewish belief system, see Herweg, Die jüdische Mutter, 92–94. 24 “[Sara] told me about one of her newborns…who was so delicate and listless that she bedded him in cotton wool and bathed him in milk for a whole year…Many of these children owe their health and their life to her marvelous daily, hourly, hygienic measures”; White Mario, In memoria.

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reached maturity—a rare exception given the generally high child death rates in the nineteenth century. In any case, Jewish belief and Jewish culture were a far stronger feature of the young Nathan family’s daily life than they are generally supposed to have been in view of the protagonist’s later, decidedly secular development. Since Sara Levi Nathan’s life has been understood almost solely in the context of her relationship to Mazzini, the Jewish years of her marriage with Moses Meyer Nathan have receded altogether into the background. However, her contemporaries apparently saw her as entirely Jewish. Even five years after her death, Jessie White Mario makes repeated reference to her friend’s Jewish origins in her biography and terms her remarkable involvement in welfare as “a virtue widespread among the Jews”—perhaps in conscious allusion to tzedakah.25 One of Giuseppe Mazzini’s letters shows that the Nathan family attended the synagogue until well into the 1850s. He writes that Sara took “her two angels [children] who were in search of a religion” to the synagogue on Saturday morning.26 Jewish festivals such as Purim were also celebrated within the family. A prayerbook with Moses Meyer Nathan’s handwritten commentary, mentioned by Alessandro Levi in his 1931 essay on “Giuseppe Mazzini’s Jewish Friends,” is a further indicator of the significance of Judaism within the family.27 It can be assumed, in view of the youngest son Beniamino’s affinity for the Jewish faith, that quite varied forms of Jewish identity, both secular and religious, existed side by side within the large family. After the sudden death of her husband in 1859, and with an increasingly laicist world view of her own, Sara Levi

25 White Mario, In memoria. 26 Giuseppe Mazzini to Matilda Biggs, July 1855, quoted in Isastia, Storia di una

famiglia, 12. 27 See Levi A., “Amici israeliti di Giuseppe Mazzini,” Estratto da La Rassegna Mensile di Israel V, 12 (April 1931): 11.

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Nathan probably did away with Jewish practices in the home.28 Beniamino, who was born the year that his father died, must nonetheless have come into contact with Jewish religion and culture as a child, perhaps in the circles of his Rosselli relatives.29 He could hardly have developed an interest in the rituals had Judaism been entirely alien to him. Women’s Emancipation as Path to Social Renewal Living in London for over two decades doubtless had a decisive influence on Sara Levi Nathan’s self-consciousness. Although, at least until 1859, the Nathan family life was shaped by Judaism and, even in the English metropolis, she moved largely within Jewish friend-and-family networks, the significantly more liberal living conditions than in her Italian homeland enabled the protagonist to define her identity beyond the traditional model of Jewish wife and mother. Thus, the fact that Sara Levi Nathan was able to adopt a pioneering role among the Jewish women active in the early Italian women’s movement was largely due to her social and intellectual development in the English capital, far from the Italian ghetto. Moses Meyer Nathan allowed his wife to participate in the lively social connections he maintained in London as a well-traveled, openminded, and multilingual businessman. Sara Levi Nathan frequented the circles of her Rosselli relatives, which included likeminded Italian exiles and English radical democrats close to Mazzini’s cause. In this way, she made close friendships with educated middle-class English women like the already mentioned writer Jessie White Mario, the painter Emilie

28 See Isastia, Storia di una famiglia, 13. Sara Levi Nathan’s fifth son, Ernesto, who was mayor of Rome from 1907 to 1913, was clearly much more strongly influenced than his youngest brother Beniamino by his mother’s education, which was increasingly laicist from the end of the 1850s onward. A freemason, he distanced himself from Rome’s Jewish community at the beginning of the twentieth century; see Caviglia S., L’identità salvata. Gli ebrei di Roma tra fede e nazione. 1870–1938 (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 33, 78. 29 After her husband’s death, Sara Levi Nathan returned to Italy with seven of her children. She initially left the three youngest, including Beniamino, who was just a few months old, with her eldest two sons, David and Henry, twenty and nineteen years old at the time, with friends and relatives in London. The long and arduous journey from England to Italy was likely seen as too risky to the health of five-year-old Alfred, threeyear-old Adah, and baby Beniamino. On Sara Levi Nathan’s return to Italy, see Isastia, Storia di una famiglia, 15–17; Valentini, “La banchiera,” 143.

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Ashurst (1819–1893),30 and the journalist Giorgina Craufurd (1827– 1911), who married the Italian politician Aurelio Saffi (1819–1890) in London in 1857.31 In pre-emancipation Italy, the development of such egalitarian Jewish–non-Jewish networks of women would have been just about unthinkable. Sara’s growing interest in the question of women’s rights developed within the context of these relationships and in direct exchange with her unconventional English friends, all of whom were active in the fledgling women’s movement of the United Kingdom.32 Her encounter with Giuseppe Mazzini was also due to Moses Meyer Nathan’s extensive London contacts—a convicted supporter of Italian unification, he maintained regular connections with Italian exiles, including the Jewish patriot from Modena, Angelo Usiglio, who was a friend of Mazzini’s.33 It was not only Italian Jews who supported the Italian independence movement with special fervency, as the political program of the Risorgimento promised equal footing for the Jewish minority in a future unified state. Moses Meyer Nathan was no exception. By the 1840s if not earlier, he had become Mazzini’s preferred middleman in London, most likely due to his international contacts and his business acumen. Moses provided Mazzini with additional support in the form of financing for his political initiatives, especially the Partito D’Azione founded in 1853.34 The first meeting between Sara Levi Nathan and Mazzini took place soon after her arrival in London in 1837 at a reception at the home of her Rosselli relatives, where Angelo Usiglio and Giuseppe Mazzini were also present.35 Years later, Sara wrote of this encounter in effusive tones, “I had unspeakable good fortune; I met him in 1837 when I arrived on

30 Emilie Ashurst was a close friend of Mazzini’s and the translator of his work “Doveri dell’uomo” into English (1862). In 1860, she married the Italian patriot Carlo Venturi, her second marriage. On Ashurst, see Pesman R., “Mazzini in esilio e le donne inglesi,” in Porciani, Famiglia e nazione, 55–82. 31 On Giorgina Craufurd Saffi, the Mazzinian, see Gazzetta L., Giorgina Saffi. 32 See Crawford E., The Women’s Suffrage Movement. A Reference Guide 1866–1928

(London: Routledge, 2001). 33 In 1838 in Brussels, Angelo Usiglio published a text on the situation of women in the family and society that possibly also reflects his friend Mazzini’s interest in the question of women’s rights; see Miniati, Le “emancipate”, 55. 34 See Belardelli G., Mazzini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010), 182. 35 See Isastia, Storia di una famiglia, 7; Valentini, “La banchiera,” 137.

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England’s hospitable shore, and from that day on I began to live… he was my soul’s ideal, my counselor in the many instabilities of my life.”36 In the period after 1837, but especially after the revolutionary year of 1848, the intellectual and political connection between Sara Levi Nathan and the “prophet” of national unity markedly intensified. Levi Nathan, born in the Pesaro ghetto, dedicated herself to Mazzini’s cause of a united, independent, free, and republican Italy, which promised equal status to the Jews as well.37 She shared Mazzini’s conviction that education and schooling were the most important foundation for the intellectual and moral development of the individual, and of society overall. For both of them, this was the starting point for the creation of a nation based on the principles of equality. As a concrete result of these considerations, Mazzini founded a free school for the children of Italian working-class parents in Greville Street in London in 1841. Sara Levi Nathan too contributed to financing the Libera Scuola for workers.38 The school can be seen as the inspiration for the school for the daughters of indigent parents that she founded in Trastevere in Rome in 1873. The events after Moses Meyer Nathan’s death in 1859, Sara Levi Nathan’s return to Italy, and her involvement in Mazzini’s Partito D’Azione based on her inherited wealth are inevitably the most-discussed aspects of her biography. It is well known that her villa “Tanzina,” where she was in exile in Lugano in the 1860s, was also Mazzini’s place of refuge. The romantic connection between the two protagonists, mention of which has long been avoided in the research, is no longer in doubt.39 36 Quoted in Toschi-Dugnani M., “XIX Febbraio,” La Sveglia Democratica 8 (1913). 37 Mazzini was considered an icon among Italian Jews in general well into the twen-

tieth century, despite his later reception and the misuse of his theses under fascism; see Cavaglion A., “Nei 150 anni dell’Italia unita. Gli ebrei emancipati puntano a ‘uscire dalle Malebolge’,” Keshet VIII, 3–4 (November–December 2010): 41–53. On Mazzini’s reception before and during fascism, see Levis Sullam S., L’apostolo a brandelli. L’eredità di Mazzini tra Risorgimento e fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010). 38 See Isastia, Storia di una famiglia, 7; Valentini, “La banchiera,” 139. For Mazzini’s lasting influence on British reformers, freethinkers, and members of the Cooperative Movement, see Pellegrino Sutcliffe M., “The Toynbee Travellers’ Club and the Transnational Education of Citizens, 1888–90,” History Workshop Journal 76, 1 (2013): 140. 39 The Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale, published in the years before the racial legislation and Sara Levi Nathan’s consequent disappearance from the collective Italian consciousness, depicts in detail her collaboration with Mazzini, her diplomatic missions, her flight to Switzerland in 1862, and her financial support for his initiatives; see the relevant entry in Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale: dalle origini a Roma capitale.

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It is quite possible that as his intellectual companion, beloved friend, and a responsible mother, Sara Levi Nathan became a concrete model for Mazzini’s interpretation of the societal role of women, as expressively presented in his “Doveri dell’uomo,” published in 1860. In this catechism for a laicist nation that preached belief in social solidarity, education, and a spiritual dimension for life, Mazzini also discussed the equal status of women in the new Italy: Love and respect the woman. Seek from her not only comfort, but strength, inspiration, a redoubling of your intellectual and moral capacities. Remove from your consciousness any idea of superiority: you have none… Regard, then, the woman as your companion and collaborator not only in your joys and sorrows, but in your wishes, your thoughts, your studies, and your efforts after social improvement. Treat her equally in your private and political life.40

Mazzini’s ideas became the most important reference point for the pioneers of women’s emancipation in the Italian unitary state.41 Their letters and texts clearly show what an intensive and durable effect the meaning-making impact of his theses had on the cause of women in Italy. From 1878 on, for example, Gualberta Alaide Beccari placed the above-quoted passage as a motto below the title of every edition of La Donna. His female supporters even endorsed the functional division of roles between women and men Mazzini favored despite his call for equality. These included woman’s educational mission and the significance of the role of the mother.42 There was no critical analysis of Mazzini’s theses within the early Italian women’s emancipation discourse. Instead,

Fatti e persone (Milan: Vallardi, 1930–1937), 84–86. On the relationship between Mazzini and Levi Nathan, see Belardelli, Mazzini, 183; Valentini, “La banchiera,” 141, 143. 40 Giuseppe Mazzini, Doveri dell’uomo, ed. by G. Civelli (New York: digitalized 2009),

50. 41 On Mazzini’s influence on the contemporary women’s emancipation discourse, see Falchi F., “Democracy and the Rights of Women in the Thinking of Giuseppe Mazzini,” in Modern Italy 17, 1 (February 2012): 15–30. 42 On the Mazzinian orientation of the early women’s movement, as reflected in the journal La Donna, see Keilhauer A., Frauenrechtsdiskurs und Literatur zwischen nationalen Traditionen und transnationalen Begegnungen. Französisch-italienische Verflechtungen 1870–1890, unpublished Habilitationsschrift, Berlin 2004.

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his characterization of the woman as man’s “companion and collaborator” on equal footing became a topos of the emancipation discourse and a welcome projection screen for female aspirations.43 Above all, Jewish women could initially identify with the partitioning of gender roles promoted by Mazzini in an uncomplicated manner. When Sara Levi Nathan called on Italian patriots to “place a woman by their side in every intellectual and moral effort,”44 this straightforwardly reflected the traditional division of roles, grounded in Judaism, between husband and wife, father and mother. The former stands for the mind and spirit, with the house of study and theory as his domains, while the mother is the practical actor, the realist and custodian of the home, of succor, and of emotional responsiveness. The elements that require this division of roles also create interdependence.45 It is conceivable that Sara Levi Nathan also saw herself as the realist, practical actor in her relationship with Mazzini. However, she was only able to exploit her full scope of action in the postemancipation period, when it became possible for Jewish women too to work on behalf of the position of women in the young Italian nation state, at least within social and cultural spheres. Scuola Mazzini and Abolitionist Federation Sara Levi Nathan’s turn toward laicism, which coincided with her return to Italy, cannot be considered separately from her relationship with Mazzini. As she increasingly distanced herself from the Jewish religion after her husband’s death in 1859, she found a new ideological reference point in Mazzini’s “Doveri dell’uomo.” This work influenced both her religious self-positioning and her views on women’s emancipation. Sara Levi Nathan identified herself with the concept of life as a mission and the spiritual sense of human existence. Inspired by Mazzini’s doctrine, she developed the idea that the liberation of women from their subordinate status could only be achieved through a collective reform of 43 An echo of this can still be found in 1916 in an article by the Jewish journalist

Enrica Barzilai Gentilli in the journal Attività femminile sociale; she wrote that after the war experience, women could no longer be satisfied with giving thanks and smiling, but “should wish to be her husband’s wise companion and persistent collaborator.” “Il fallimento della dote,” Attività femminile sociale IV, 11 (1916): 276 f. 44 Valentini, “La banchiera,” 145. 45 See Herweg, Die jüdische Mutter, 99 f.

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society by means of education. A letter she wrote to her then thirtyyear-old daughter Janet a few months after Mazzini’s death46 reveals her conviction that the implementation of societal changes, along with social legislation, were inextricably linked to the moral revitalization of women through Mazzini’s teachings. The “improvement” of women would also lead to the renewal and improved awareness of men: … we must by now be fully convinced that without the woman is reformed through his moral teaching it is useless wishing for a change of government, or of social laws. It is only by the woman’s frank… [acceptance] to uniform herself to His teaching, by her firm and sincere will to endure all the obstacles that will at first rise against her, that we can hope a reform in the other sex… and even should it fail in this, we should be sure that the next generation would be worthier of Him.47

According to Sara Levi Nathan, women ought to write down “Doveri dell’uomo” in their own words and study it; “… in this way she will find herself mistress of it if she has to communicate it to others.”48 Based on these theoretical considerations, the protagonist engaged herself in putting them into practice, with the intention of embedding Mazzini’s thought in the consciousness of children and young women. The school she founded and funded herself in 1873 for the daughters of indigent parents in Rome’s Trastevere was one of the concrete results of her ideas and also recalled Mazzini’s workers’ school in London. The girls who studied at the Scuola Mazzini were taught moral principles based on “Doveri dell’uomo” instead of the catechism. The school was an overt symbol of laicism, which had taken a steady place in the national selfconsciousness since the conquest of Rome in 1870 and the separation of Church and State.49 Before the end of the Papal State and the opening of the Rome ghetto, it would have been impossible for Jewish women

46 Mazzini died on March 10, 1872, at the home of the married couple Janet Nathan and Pellegrino Rosselli in Pisa. 47 Sara Levi Nathan to Janet Nathan Rosselli, May 2, 1872, FRT, Janet Nathan archive, C 1103 (emphasis in original). 48 Ibid. 49 See Janz, “Konflikt,” 232–234.

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like Sara Levi Nathan to make such a project a reality. And in fact, the Mazzini School faced continual hostility from Catholic circles.50 Amelia Rosselli describes in her memoir how closely connected the Rosselli-Nathan family’s memory of their matriarch, Sara Levi Nathan, was with the name and ideas of Mazzini. Amelia’s husband Joe Rosselli, one of Sara Levi Nathan’s grandsons, met with his siblings every year for his grandmother’s memorial day at the Scuola Mazzini in Rome: “Some of the Nathan sisters [Sara’s daughters] taught there, and later also her grandchildren, the new generation, which grew up with and was educated in the same ideals.”51 But it was not only in the field of education that Sara Levi Nathan paved the way for younger feminists. It was largely due to her expansive network of contacts that the fight against trafficking in women and stateregulated prostitution was among the first important projects of the early Italian women’s movement in an international context. Her connections to English activists forged during her time in London played a decisive role in this. At the end of 1869, when the British feminist Josephine Butler (1828–1906) began her campaign by establishing the Abolitionist Federation and expanded it to Europe, Sara Levi Nathan immediately declared her support, along with the Italians Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837– 1920)52 and Gualberta Alaide Beccari, and her English friends Jessie White Mario, Giorgina Craufurd Saffi, and Emilie Ashurst Venturi.53 As a concrete response to the societal sexual double standard concealed in the state-regulated prostitution introduced with Cavour’s legislation in 1860, the Unione Benefica came into existence in Rome on Sara Levi Nathan’s initiative. It provided accommodation and employment opportunities to homeless young women in order to give them basic security and divert

50 Se Valentini, “La banchiera,” 155. 51 Rosselli, Memorie, 108. 52 On Anna Maria Mozzoni see Murari S., L’idea più avanzata del secolo. Anna Maria Mozzoni e il femminismo italiano (Rome: Aracne, 2011); Macrelli R., L’indegna schiavitù. Anna Maria Mozzoni e la lotta contro la prostituzione di stato (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980); Farina R., “Politica, amicizie e polemiche lungo la vita di Anna Maria Mozzoni,” in Scaramuzza E. (ed.), Politica e amicizia. Relazioni, conflitti e differenze di genere (1860–1915) (Milan: Angeli, 2010), 55–72. 53 On Josephine Butler’s Abolitionist Federation, see Summers A., “Which Women? What Europe? Josephine Butler and the International Abolitionist Federation,” History Workshop Journal 62, 1 (2006): 214–231; Dickmann, Frauenbewegung, 446–448.

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them from prostitution.54 The Asilo Mariuccia, founded by the UFN in 1902 in Milan with the participation of several Jewish activists, shared this concept several decades later. The abolitionist campaign was the first significant community endeavor by Jewish and non-Jewish women for the advancement of women’s rights. This project’s transnational orientation contributed constructively to the networking of Jewish and non-Jewish women. Women like Sara Levi Nathan, whose family-and-friendship networks reached far beyond Italy, who spoke several languages and were intellectually capable, took on a key role in this connection as intercultural mediators. While private and organizational connections between Jewish and non-Jewish protagonists were few and far between within the national Italian context in the first years after 1861, transnationalism and laicism provided important preconditions for the development of Jewish–nonJewish networks of women, as was the case in the Abolitionist Federation. Sara Levi Nathan, the embodiment of the ebrea laica with international contacts, not surprisingly became one of the most significant pioneers of the early Italian women’s movement. Her multifarious life path, which took her from the Pesaro ghetto to London’s metropolis, which made her Mazzini’s companion and an agent of Italian unification, was no doubt unique. In contrast, Sara Levi Nathan’s socialization in the Jewish environment and her initially quite unforeseeable secular development are thoroughly representative of the biographies of many female Jewish protagonists who subscribed to the movimento femminile. With her emphasis on education, laicism, and abolitionism, Sara Levi Nathan inspired younger feminists to get involved and contributed a significant driving force to the development of the Italian women’s movement overall.

3.2 Fare gli Italiani Through Pedagogical Revitalization Italy’s emancipation of the Jews in the nineteenth century had very different consequences for Jewish men and for Jewish women. While Jewish men were able to contribute significantly to the development of the young Italian nation state both politically and militarily after 1861,

54 See Valentini, “La banchiera,” 155.

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the room for maneuver for Jewish women remained limited to social and cultural activities, as it did for women in general. The sphere of education, whose societal relevance was further emphasized by Sara Levi Nathan in her various projects dedicated to the instruction of girls and women, gave Jewish women a direct opportunity to play an active role in the development of a national consciousness.55 Fare gli italiani was the central issue underlying numerous initiatives on the part of Jewish women in the field of education. Along with the traditionally privileged position of education and instruction in Judaism, their above-average literacy levels compared to non-Jewish women made Jewish women especially capable communicators of knowledge and instigators of relevant institutions.56 Additionally, most female Jewish educators profited from their transnational connections, as did Sara Levi Nathan; these enabled and accelerated the transfer of educational concepts to Italy. The city of Venice had a key role in this connection. After the end of Austrian rule in 1866, La Serenissima became the uncontested laboratory for new educational models in Italy because of its multicultural make-up.57 Among the many Jewish women involved in this development, Adele Della Vida Levi stands out for her involvement; it was she who founded Italy’s first Fröbel kindergarten in Venice’s Santi Apostoli quarter. No monograph has yet been published regarding this educator, despite her far-reaching influence on Italy’s development in the field of education.58 Adele Della Vida Levi’s largely unstudied letters to her 55 On the importance of education in liberal Italy, see Soldani S., Turi G. (eds.), Fare gli italiani. Scuola e cultura nell’Italia contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993); on the education of girls and women specifically, see Soldani S., L’educazione delle donne. Scuole e modelli di vita femminile nell’Italia dell’Ottocento (Milan: Angeli, 1989). 56 On the connection between Jewish tradition and pedagogical engagement among Italian-Jewish women, see Hassan K., “Colte, chiare, patriote, persino femministe. Amalia Guglielminetti, Laura Orvieto, Clelia Fano, Adele Levi,” in Garibba P. (ed.), Donne ebree (Rome: Tempi Nuovi, 2001), 78–82. 57 See Filippini N. M., Plebani T. (eds.), La scoperta dell’infanzia. Cura, educazione e rappresentazione. Venezia 1750–1930 (Venice: Marsilio, 1999). 58 Information about Adele Della Vida Levi’s biography is based primarily on contemporary reference works and on a biographical sketch by her niece Gina Lombroso; see Catanzaro C., La donna nelle scienze, nelle lettere, nelle arti (Florence: Biblioteca Editrice della Rivista Italiana, 1892), 94; Greco O., Bibliografia femminile italiana (Venice: Presso i principali librai d’Italia, 1875), 273; Villani C., Stelle femminili. Dizionario biobibliografico (Naples: Dante Alighieri, 1915), 366; Lombroso Ferrero G., Adele Della Vida Levi. Una benefattrice dell’infanzia (Turin: Off. Poligrafica Ed. Subalpina, 1911).

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son-in-law, Luigi Luzzatti (1841–1927),59 express an enormous female self-confidence, a passionate engagement on behalf of education and instruction within a laicist frame of reference, and, simultaneously, a deeply rooted identification with her Jewish family. Like Sara Levi Nathan, Adele Della Vida Levi had connections reaching far beyond the regional and national spheres—Rome, Milan, Trieste, Freiburg, and Paris are just a few of the European cities in which Della Vida Levi had private and professional connections, as can be seen in her letters to Luzzatti.60 Patriotism and Education: Adele Della Vida Levi’s Family Background Adele Della Vida Levi was born in 1822 in Venice, which at the time belonged to Austria as part of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. While the name of her father, Samuele Della Vida from Ferrara, is of Sephardic origin, her mother, Regina Pincherle, had Ashkenazi ancestry. Adele must have had an education typical for Jewish girls such as her contemporary Sara Levi Nathan, but on a more comprehensive and privileged scale, since she grew up in a wealthier and more intellectually lively context than that of the merchant’s daughter in the Pesaro ghetto. Adele’s father Samuele Della Vida was the head of the local Assicurazioni Generali61 ; her educated mother Regina Pincherle (1800–1885) was an inspector of the Jewish girls’ school for decades.62 Thus, Adele grew up On her work as an educator, see Benetti Brunelli V., Il primo giardino d’infanzia in Italia (Milan: Albrighi Segati, 1931), 36–64, 198–365; Ceccon A. “Adele Levi Della Vida e la sua opera in alcuni inediti,” Rassegna di pedagogia XIII (1955): 21–45. 59 Luigi Luzzatti was a jurist and economist, also from a Venetian-Jewish family. He was the founder of the Banca Popolare di Milano, and was the Italian prime minister from 1910 to 1911. On Luzzatti, see Pecorari P., Luzzattiana, Nuove ricerche storiche su Luigi Luzzatti e il suo tempo (Udine: Forum Edizioni, 2010); Piazza F., Luigi Luzzatti: riformatore sociale e statista (Treviso: Canova, 1987). 60 These letters are located in the Luigi Luzzatti collection, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (henceforth IVSLA), correspondence: Levi Della Vida Adele. 61 See Calimani R., Storia del Ghetto di Venezia. Le vicende di una comunità perseguitata (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 312. 62 On Regina Pincherle’s involvement in the Venetian-Jewish community’s girls’school, see the relevant passages in Archivio della Comunità Israelitica di Venezia (henceforth ACIV), b. 187: Scuola Fanciulle (1835–1867), b. 188: idem (1869–1920). On the contemporary Jewish school system in Venice, see Luzzatto Voghera G., Finzi L., Szabados S., “L’Educazione del Bambino Ebreo,” in Filippini, Plebani, La scoperta dell’infanzia,

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in an environment where there was interest in education, surrounded by the scholars of contemporary Venice, who regularly visited her parents’ home. The eminent orientalist Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886–1967), Adele’s grandson, later reported how his father Ettore had remembered his grandmother Regina Pincherle: “… a woman of unique intelligence, multifaceted culture, brilliant spirit; her salon (which the Della Vidas held at the former Palazzo Grimani on the Canal Grande and Rio di Noale) was a popular and pleasant meeting place for scholars and literati…”.63 In the revolutionary year of 1848, the patriot Samuele Della Vida, with his wife Regina, their son Cesare (1817–1879), and their twenty-sixyear-old daughter Adele were among the leading supporters of Daniele Manin’s Repubblica di San Marco, which promised emancipation for the Jews.64 The Della Vidas’ commitment to the cause, like that of many other Venetian-Jewish families, combined promotion of the cause of national independence and liberation from foreign Austrian rule with the desire for social and political equality. Adele’s brother, a personal friend of Manin’s,65 contributed so much money to the revolution that he seriously jeopardized his own modest estate. In 1849, he became a member of Venice’s parliament; his grandfather Leone Pincherle (1814–1882)66 assumed a ministerial position. In February 1849, Adele’s mother Regina

141–149. On the Venetian-Jewish community from the turn of the century on, see Levis Sullam S., Una comunità immaginata. Gli ebrei a Venezia (1900–1938) (Milan: Unicopli, 2001). 63 Levi Della Vida G., “Quattro Lettere di Samuele Romanin,” in Miscellanea in onore di Roberto Cessi (Rome: Storia e Letteratura 1, 1958), 321–344. Giorgio Levi Della Vida, who became a lecturer in Hebrew at the University of Rome in 1920, refused the oath of allegiance to the fascist regime in 1931 and lost his position as a consequence. He emigrated to the USA because of the fascist racial laws, where he worked at various universities. After the Second World War, Levi Della Vida returned to Italy and took the professorship of Muslim History at La Sapienza University in Rome; on his life, see among others Boatti, Preferirei di no; Moscati S., Ricordo di Giorgio Levi Della Vida (Rome: Studi Orientali, 1968). 64 On Manin’s Republic of San Marco, see Ginsborg P., Daniele Manin e la rivoluzione veneziana del 1848–49 (Turin: Einaudi, 1978). 65 Daniele Manin (1804–1857) was himself of Jewish origins; his grandparents Samuel Medina and Allegra Moravia were baptized in 1759; see Calimani, Storia del Ghetto, 303. 66 Leone Pincherle, like Cesare Della Vida a close friend of Daniele Manin’s, was Amelia Rosselli’s father’s uncle. In her memoir, she recalls her father Giacomo Pincherle’s personal pride in his ancestor and his political commitment to the San Marco republic that rebelled against Austrian sovereignty; see Rosselli, Memorie, 53.

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joined twenty-eight other Jewish and non-Jewish Venetian women in signing a call for a monthly contribution to support the “fatherland,” in which the women announced their emphatic intent to resist Austria without compromise.67 However, the Repubblica di San Marco could only claim independence from their Austrian occupiers until August 1849. Consequently, many of the republicans, including Cesare Della Vida and Leone Pincherle, followed Daniele Manin into exile in France.68 Austrian rule continued in Venice for nearly twenty more years. It was only in 1866 that Venice became part of the united Italy, and the Jews there too received full equality. Pedagogical Engagement Between Jewish Tradition and Italian National Consciousness Throughout her life, Adele Della Vida Levi retained the imprint of the liberal, patriotic, and anti-Austrian climate in which she had grown up. Additionally, the Della Vida family’s francophile tendency may have played a role in her marriage to the textile trader from Piedmont, Mosè Levi. Adele’s fundamentally anti-Catholic position resulted from her personal environment and was also based to a large extent on her aversion to Austria.69 When her son Ettore (born in 1852) had to learn German as a young child, she deliberately avoided the Austrian, or rather Catholic

67 “Circolare di alcune pietose donne veneziane per promuovere una sottoscrizione, al fine di dare alla patria una offerta mensile,” February 1, 1948; see Filippini, N. M. et al. (eds.), Donne sulla scena pubblica. Società e politica in Veneto tra Sette e Ottocento (Milan: Angeli, 2006), 123. 68 See Calimani, Storia del Ghetto, 302–312. Leone Pincherle died in Paris in 1882; Cesare Della Vida later returned to Venice. 69 Deep-seated resentments regarding the Catholic Church together with an orientation toward the laicist self-concept of the liberal unitary state led to a widespread anticlerical tendency among Italian Jews, both men and women. The goal of separation from the church authorities can also be clearly seen in a letter from a friend of Regina Pincherle, Adele Della Vida Levi’s mother, to the leaders of Venice’s Jewish community in 1878, in which the necessity of a school system independent of the church is emphasized: “… if we allow the church authorities to get involved, it will be impossible to have the absolute independence and freedom of action that education requires.” Emma Levi Grassini to the leaders of the Jewish community, July 21, 1878, ACIV, b. 188: 1869–1920.

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schools, and instead entrusted Ettore to the Hungarian-Jewish pedagogue resident in Venice, Adolfo Pick (1829–1894).70 He had settled in Venice after participating in the revolt against Austria in 1848–1849, and he taught German at the distinguished Jewish boarding school Collegio Ravà and later at the Paolo Sarpi high school.71 Thus, Adele Della Vida Levi decidedly positioned herself and her family in an anti-Austrian environment that was largely dependent on Jewish relationship networks. Meanwhile, her friendship with Adolfo Pick led her to develop an interest in the methods of the German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852) during the 1860s. His educational doctrine aimed to encourage children in their personal, individual development through play and in harmony with nature.72 The especial popularity of his theories among Jewish women in particular is likely due to the fact that Fröbel viewed the mother as the child’s first and ideal educator, which recalled the traditional role of the mother in Judaism.73 Furthermore, according to Fröbel, social and religious differences should play no role in how children were treated. Thus, Adele Della Vida Levi saw the Fröbel kindergartens as a constructive answer to the exclusion of Jewish children from the Catholic establishments as well as providing them the possibility of being taken care of alongside nonJewish children outside of the Jewish community organizations. The Fröbel Method’s laicist orientation matched Adele Della Vida Levi’s antiCatholic attitude and also met her desire for increasing integration of the Jewish minority into Italian society.

70 See the entry by Alfredo Gigliobianco in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 64 (2005), http://www/treccani.it/enciclopedia/levi-della-vida-ettore_(Dizionario-Biografic o)/. 71 Pick subscribed to the theories of Fröbel and Pestalozzi. On this Hungarian-Jewish educator, see Gasparini D., Adolfo Pick. Il pensiero e l’opera (Florence: Gozzini, 1968); on the relationship between Pick and Adele Della Vida Levi, see Sega M. T., “Percorsi di emancipazione tra Otto e Novecento,” in Filippini et al., Donne sulla scena pubblica, 204. 72 On Fröbel and his educational doctrine, see among others Hebenstreit S., Friedrich Fröbel—Menschenbild, Kindergartenpädagogik, Spielförderung (Jena: Geramond, 2003); Stübig H. F., Wilhelm August Fröbel. Beiträge zu Biographie und Wirkungsgeschichte eines “verdienten deutschen Pädagogen” (Bochum-Freiburg: Projektverlag, 2010). 73 On the great attractiveness of Fröbel’s teachings in German-Jewish circles too, see Fassmann, Jüdinnen, 129–131.

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A striking mobility between Jewish and non-Jewish spheres was characteristic of the Della Vida family and of Jewish families in the emancipation period in general; in the case of women, this was often expressed via a parallel involvement in the Jewish community and in secular institutions. Adele Della Vida Levi’s mother must have functioned as a role model in her life in this connection. Regina Pincherle’s surviving letters reveal a great sense of responsibility regarding her role as inspector of the Jewish girls’ school, and a simultaneous rejection of any form of preservation of the separated Jewish–non-Jewish spheres after emancipation. In a letter to the leaders of the Jewish community written in 1879, she openly criticized the planned construction of a new kindergarten within the former ghetto: I confess to you that it seems to me a very strange idea to take… a warehouse, and to modify and reduce it at considerable expense in order to use it as a kindergarten. To spend 5,000 lire for…probably unhygienic premises, and all this, to establish an educational institution in the ghetto! It seems impossible that such a…proposal would have the permanent effect of not renouncing this shameful slavery from our side, while the state law, through which [the ghetto] was abolished, has made everyone “equal”! You know that I have always been committed to making the best education available even to poor Jews, from their earliest years on. In the course of my many years of service as inspector [of the Jewish girls’ school], I have risked everything, without encountering insurmountable hurdles… I tell you straight: I am not willing to act against my principles when [I hereby request] that a respectable kindergarten for boys and girls will be established with suitable teachers in premises outside of the ghetto…74

Regina Della Vida’s words impressively manifest the tensions between tradition and modernization, between community authority and state power, which characterized the post-emancipatory phase of Italian Judaism. For Regina Della Vida, a pioneering protagonist of Jewish emancipation in an independent Italy, the ghetto symbolized segregation and repression, a relic of older times and a completely unsuitable place in which to educate the younger generation. In progressive manner, she 74 Regina Della Vida to the community leaders, July 11, 1879, ACIV, b. 188: Scuola Fanciulle (1869–1920).

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campaigned not only for a kindergarten outside of the ghetto, but also for the principle of coeducation, which was still seldom practiced in unified Italy.75 The self-assured, even demanding tone of her letter can be explained by her social status and good reputation within Venice’s Jewish community, but it is also an expression of the generally increasing self-confidence of Jewish women following emancipation. As the Jewish community lost significance as a reference point for Jewish life, women, as the focal point of the Jewish family, gained influence in both the public and the private sphere.76 Connections with the Jewish Girls’ School Adele Della Vida Levi’s pedagogical activities were tightly integrated both according to the biographical outlines and in social-cultural contexts. Her self-concept was significantly more complex than her support for the Fröbel Method suggests. Like her mother Regina, she campaigned for the opening up and secularization of the school system, but at the same time, she was very interested in the development of relevant Jewish community establishments. As late as 1886, she wrote concerning the threatened closure of the Jewish girls’ school: “I would be sorry if the school were to close, which is meant precisely for our young Israelite girls, for those who hope to make an income.”77 The support of women and children in economically strained situations and of families living below the poverty line was a constant in Adele Della Vida Levi’s creative output. Her work on behalf of the socially disadvantaged expressed the religiously grounded principle of social justice, which had lasting relevance for all the Jewish protagonists of the contemporary women’s movement and, as in the case of Amelia Rosselli, defined their

75 On the theme of coeducation in contemporary Italy, see Buttafuoco A., “Per un diritto. Coeducazione e identità femminile nell’emancipazionismo italiano tra Ottocento e Novecento,” in Beseghi E., Telmon V. (eds.), Educazione al femminile: dalla parità alla differenza (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1992), 13–30. 76 For a comparable development in the German-Jewish context, see Kaplan M., Jüdisches Bürgertum. Frau, Familie und Identität im Kaiserreich (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1997), 94–96. 77 Adele Della Vida Levi to Padoa, August 17, 1886, ACIV b. 188: Scuola Fanciulle (1869–1920).

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families’ Jewish identity in a lasting manner.78 Although Adele Della Vida Levi herself came from a well-to-do background, she identified herself with “her young Israelite girls,” whose difficult situation she observed at close quarters. In Venice’s Jewish community archive there are numerous letters from the 1870s and 1880s to the management of the Jewish girls’ school in which parents request understanding of the fact that their daughters need to take on paid work and, therefore, to leave school. A father, for example, wrote that he had to send his daughter to a childless aunt since he no longer had the means to provide for her,79 while a mother reported that her daughter now had to learn a craft in order to support her financially,80 and the schoolgirl Regina Silva herself wrote regretfully to the school authorities: “Now that I am already quite grown up, my parents can no longer provide for my upkeep, so I must come to terms with earning my living in a place of work.”81 The generally rather complicated economic situation for Jewish girls, which is quite well documented in the case of Venice, was not significantly different from the conditions of the contemporary Italian communities in general.82 There is no doubt that Adele Della Vida Levi, like most of the Jewish actors in the early Italian women’s movement, came from an altogether more privileged social and cultural background than the majority of Jewish girls in the Italian unitary state. Sara Levi Nathan too was privileged in that she achieved wealth and access to intellectual circles through her marriage with Moses Meyer Nathan. In contrast, many of Sara and Adele’s female Jewish contemporaries were denied higher education and obliged to earn a living—as a seamstress, servant, or nanny, for example—due to their families’ difficult financial situation.83 78 On the significance of active benevolence, tzedakah, in the actions of Jewish women,

see Funaro, “Compagna e partecipe,” 330; Miniati, “Le ‘emancipate’. Le ebree italiane fra Ottocento e Novecento,” in Honess C., Jones V. (eds.), Le donne delle minoranze. Le ebree e le protestanti d’Italia (Turin: Claudiana, 1999), 251. 79 Letter from 1883, undated, ACIV, b. 188: Scuola Fanciulle (1869–1920). 80 Letter from Giustina Fano, May 11, 1883, ACIV, b. 188: Scuola Fanciulle (1869–

1920). 81 Letter from Regina Silva, January 1880, ACIV, b. 188: Scuola Fanciulle (1869– 1920). 82 See Miniati, Le “emancipate”, 44–46. 83 See Novelli-Glaab, “Zwischen Tradition und Moderne,” 110.

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With her accurate knowledge of these circumstances, Adele Della Vida Levi planned her kindergarten with great sensitivity to the needs of socially disadvantaged families and especially working mothers. She considered the six hours of school per day originally prescribed by Fröbel as insufficient when compared to the working hours of a woman in employment: Fröbel certainly wished to apply the method in its original form to children who did not come from poor families… The children are allowed to stay at kindergarten for no longer than six hours per day; but how can one then say to a woman living on bread that she has paid for by working all day long, “You look after your child; the kindergarten can only take him for six hours a day”?84

Adele Della Vida Levi made additional adaptations to the Fröbel Method for the specific needs of contemporary Venice in other areas besides hours of care, which also eventually led to her break with Adolfo Pick.85 The Fröbel Kindergarten in Santi Apostoli: A Laicist Educational Project with Transnational Connections Founding the first Fröbel kindergarten in Italy was an enterprise that would have been unthinkable without Adele Della Vida Levi’s transnational connections. It was Pick who first acquainted her with the German educator’s theories in Venice, but Adele then exploited her language skills and far-reaching connections to forge a relationship with a prominent student of Fröbel’s, the German feminist Baroness Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow (1810–1893). The baroness traveled all over Europe, 84 Levi Della Vida A., “Relazione sul giardinetto infantile situato nella contrada dei SS.

Apostoli di Venezia” (printed manuscript, Rome 1873). Based on similar considerations, in 1872 the socialist of Russian-Jewish origins Elena Raffalovich Comparetti founded another Fröbel kindergarten in Venice, which was free of charge and expressly intended for indigent families; see Barbarulli C., “La ‘ricerca straordinaria’ di Elena Raffalovich Comparetti,” in Soldani, L’educazione delle donne, 325–444; Salah A., “From Odessa to Florence. Elena Comparetti Raffalovich,” in Catalan T., Facchini C., Portrait of Italian Jewish Life (1800s–1930s) = Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, Nr. 8 (November 2015), www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=365. 85 See Filippini N. M., “‘Come tenere pianticelle’. L’educazione della prima infanzia: asili di carità, giardinetti, asili per lattanti,” in ead., Plebani T., La scoperta dell’infanzia, 91–111.

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including to Florence, Rome, and Naples, where she spoke on Friedrich Fröbel’s ideas. She entered a dense correspondence with Adele Della Vida Levi on the subject of educational materials, which served to further strengthen the Venetian woman’s interest in Fröbel’s doctrine.86 Similarly to Sara Levi Nathan, who networked and made common cause with non-Jewish women mostly at the international level against trafficking in girls, Adele Della Levi’s connections with non-Jewish women were primarily beyond the national sphere. Like the Abolitionist Federation, the Fröbel Movement too provided a welcome point of connection in a nondenominational, transnational context. In 1868, Della Vida Levi traveled to Switzerland and Bavaria in order to inspect some of the kindergartens there at close quarters. Back in Italy, she found initial support for her Fröbel kindergarten project primarily among Jewish intellectuals, as can be confirmed by a glance at the signatories to the “Program for the Establishment of a Kindergarten” of April 1869, which included, as well as Adolfo Pick, the famous Venetian surgeon Angelo Minich (1817–1893) and Della Vida Levi’s friend, the educator Adele Trieste Sacerdoti. The five men involved were either doctors or educators, including the philosopher and educator Giorgio Politeo (1827–1913), originally from Split. Two of them, Angelo Minich and Antonio Berti (1812–1879) later became senators. Adele Della Vida Levi thus secured support for the kindergarten from men too from the very beginning. The involvement of well-known doctors, educators, and politically active scholars must have served to underscore the seriousness of her project in the public perception. As soon as it was signed, the program for the kindergarten was published in the feminist journal La Donna. The Giardino d’Infanzia was explicitly aimed at families “who place their children’s welfare above all else and spare no pains to ensure that their children grow up healthy and well educated.”87 The fact that Adele Della Vida Levi’s project drew initial encouragement primarily from Jewish scholars was doubtless also due to the fact that religious discrimination was still practiced against Jewish children after 1866; Venice’s Commissione generale di pubblica beneficenza would 86 See ibid., 96. Gina Lombroso reports that Adele Della Vida Levi also received literature on Fröbel kindergartens from Luigi Luzzatti; see Lombroso Ferrero, Adele Della Vida Levi, 4. 87 “Programma per la fondazione d’un giardino infantile,” La Donna II, 53 (April 1869): 231 f.

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not receive boys and girls of the Jewish faith in state kindergartens.88 Given this situation, the nondenominational Fröbel kindergartens offered a welcome opportunity to circumvent this form of discrimination and work actively on behalf of Jewish integration. The Italian situation was not significantly different in this respect from contemporary developments in Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium, where the newly established Fröbel kindergartens were promoted with especial enthusiasm by Jews for the same set of reasons. The most important German-Jewish supporter of Fröbel’s educational methods was Henriette Goldschmidt (1825–1920), Adele Della Vida Levi’s almost exact contemporary. In 1871, two years after the foundation of the Italian Fröbel kindergarten, Goldschmidt established the Union for Family and Folk Education in Leipzig, which created several kindergartens and other relevant educational establishments. The success of her undertaking was due to a significant degree to the involvement of both Jewish and Christian members. Goldschmidt thus succeeded in fostering collaboration among the Jewish and nonJewish middle classes and to apply Fröbel’s integrative approach in the service of Jewish integration.89 From the antisemitic perspective in contrast, the extraordinary interest in Fröbel kindergartens expressed by Jews everywhere led to their being perceived, around the turn of the century, as “Jewish-internationally occupied.”90 In Italy too, the Fröbel Method drew strong criticism from some quarters. The kindergarten Adele Della Vida Levi opened in Santi Apostoli on November 3, 1869, like Sara Levi Nathan’s Scuola Mazzini in Rome later, came under attack especially from Catholic circles. Instead of the thirty registrations91 anticipated by the April 1869 program, only thirteen children initially attended the new institution. Catholics and conservatives criticized not only the Fröbel Method’s laicist outlook but also its emphasis on play, which in their view would give the children a poor work ethic. Even at the end of the 1890s, the 88 See Filippini, “Come tenere pianticelle,” 96. 89 On Henriette Goldschmidt and her involvement in the Fröbel Movement, see

Fassmann, Jüdinnen, 129–131, 217–219; see also Richarz, “Frauen in Familie und Öffentlichkeit,” 98. 90 Schmid K. A., Schmid G., Geschichte der Erziehung, Vol. 5.3 (Stuttgart-Berlin: Scientia Verlag, 1902). 91 See “Programma per la fondazione d’un giardino infantile,” La Donna II, 53 (April 1869): 231.

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opprobrium of “materialism and atheism” still clung to Fröbel’s theories as represented in the theses of the Catholic journal Civiltà Cattolica and the proceedings of the Fourteenth Catholic Congress in Italy. In their view, these children would grow up with no discipline and would later be no good for work.92 Eventually, however, the laicist orientation of the Italian unitary state won out. In particular, parents from the liberal middle classes increasingly recognized the appeal of the nondenominational, innovative institution, so that by 1872, the number of children in the kindergarten had grown to fifty-one. Baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow personally participated in the project’s development and sent the experienced educator Emilia Fröhlich from Berlin to Venice for six months.93 It is certainly the case that Adele Della Vida Levi’s personal commitment—not only did she assume leadership of the kindergarten after Fröhlich’s departure; she also herself prepared and taught the lessons—played a significant part in the growing success and public visibility of the Giardino D’Infanzia. Her Stories and Songs for the Venice Kindergarten, published in 1873,94 was an innovation for the time. Adele Della Vida Levi also celebrated Venice’s history in her writings in patriotic vein adapted for young children. It is clear that her desire to foster the creation of an Italian national consciousness lay behind this. Her contemporary, Oscar Greco, praised her intentions in his Bibliografia Femminile Italiana of 1875: In her published stories one can read a simple and straightforward presentation that is suitable to the intelligence of children. This will instill useful and reflective knowledge about the history of Venice and its glorious past. The stories are imbued with a true love for the fatherland and arouse interest in the free institutions by which we are governed.95

Adele’s writings later became an example for didactic children’s literature by younger female Jewish writers, among them her niece Paola Lombroso and Laura Orvieto.

92 See Filippini, “Come tenere pianticelle,” 96, 101. 93 See Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 273. 94 Levi Della Vida A., Educazione nuova. Raccolta di racconti e canzoni ad uso del giardinetto infantile di Venezia (Milan: Treves, 1873). 95 Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 273.

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Adele Della Vida Levi’s kindergarten soon received more attention from government circles too and came to be perceived as part of the new laicist national consciousness. In 1872, the Ministry of Education sent the famous pedagogue Aristide Gabelli (1830–1891) specially to inspect the institution. Following his positive observations, the education minister at the time, Antonio Scialoja (1817–1877), wrote a personal letter to Adele Della Vida Levi and encouraged her “to continue this work, which promises an ever-increasing value over the course of time and with the natural progress of public opinion.”96 The project’s growing sociopolitical reputation was doubtless further strengthened due to Adele Della Vida Levi’s generally good connections to leading political circles; her daughter Amelia had married the prominent jurist and economist Luigi Luzzatti in 1864, who became secretary of state for economy, industry, and trade in 1869 and Italian prime minister in 1910.97 Then and later, Adele Della Vida Levi repeatedly called on her influential son-in-law to support and promote her educational initiatives. Her letters to Luzzatti express a close relationship built on mutual trust and the distinctive self-confidence of a driven woman who did not hesitate to seek public attention in order to bring her social projects to fruition.98 In the years that followed, Adele Della Vida Levi’s educational engagement led to an increasing commitment to women’s issues. After additional Fröbel kindergartens were established on her initiative in Padua, Verona, and Florence in the 1870s and 1880s, at the beginning of the twentieth century she began to work on the establishment of a domestic and agricultural school for young girls.99 The institution was opened in 1910 in Rome, where Adele was living with the Luzzatti family at the time. 96 See Filippini, “Come tenere pianticelle,” 97. 97 Adele Della Vida Levi’s personal influence on this marriage can be confirmed from

one of her early letters to Luigi Luzzatti. She urgently brings to his attention the advantages of a marriage with her daughter Amelia in the immediate future and almost pressures him to set a date for the marriage soon; see Adele Della Vida Levi to Luigi Luzzatti, December 25, 1863, IVSLA, Fondo Luigi Luzzatti, correspondence: Levi Della Vida Adele. 98 See, for example, her letter of May 9 (year not stated, ca. 1900), in which she requests Luzzatti’s support for the domestic science school for young girls that she had initiated; IVSLA, Fondo Luigi Luzzatti, correspondence: Levi Della Vida Adele. 99 See Miniati, Le “emancipate”, 130. At the end of the nineteenth century, Adele Della Vida Levi lived with her son in Florence for a few years and was active as an educator there too; see her letter of July 27, 1910 to Luigi Luzzatti, IVSLA, Fondo Luigi Luzzatti,

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Adele Della Vida Levi’s lifelong commitment to pedagogy and education formed a significant part of her self-concept as an active member of the Italian nation state. The young nation’s laicism constituted an important precondition for her initiatives in the social and cultural spheres, which were intended to educate freer and more responsible Italian citizens. Luigi Luzzatti referred to his anticlerical mother-in-law in slightly ironic tones as a “santa laica,” because of her remarkable social commitment.100 However, as was the case for Sara Levi Nathan, Adele Della Vida’s turn toward laicism and a secular way of life was far less unambiguous than it seems at first glance. One can clearly recognize the continuation of a Jewish self-consciousness, both in her clear proximity to the educational establishments of the Jewish community and in her familial context. Although she maintained connections with non-Jewish women too, particularly at the transnational level, in Italy she continued to be grounded to a large degree within Jewish family-and-friendship networks. Neither her son nor her two daughters married non-Jews.101 As was the case in Sara Levi Nathan’s family, the Della Vida Levis too developed a secular Jewish family identity based primarily on marriage ties.

3.3

Writing as Activism

Both the abolitionist campaign, with Sara Levi Nathan as one of its most passionate champions, and Adele Della Vida Levi’s kindergarten movement found a forum for lively discussion in the longtime most important

correspondence: Levi Della Vida Adele; for additional details, see Lombroso Ferrero, Adele Della Vida Levi, 5 f. 100 Luigi Luzzatti to Adele Della Vida Levi, undated, IVSLA, Fondo Luigi Luzzatti, correspondence: Levi Della Vida Adele. 101 Her eldest daughter Amelia married Luigi Luzzatti, and her second daughter Emma married the writer Enrico Castelnuovo (1839–1915). Her son Ettore married Amelia Scandiani, daughter of the secretary general of the Assicurazioni generali. Ettore and Amelia’s already mentioned son, Giorgio Levi Della Vida, later achieved academic recognition at home and abroad as an Islamist; on these interrelationships, see the details in Gigliobianco, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 64 (2005), http://www.treccani.it/enciclope dia/levi-della-vida-ettore_(Dizionario-Biografico)/.

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Italian feminist journal, La Donna.102 The journal, founded in Padua in 1868 by Gualberta Alaide Beccari, served to communicate new initiatives and concepts and successfully gained its readership’s support for these. Beccari, a supporter of Mazzini, involved Jewish writers in her project from the very beginning as a matter of course.103 In so doing, she provided them with opportunities to publish outside of the contemporary Jewish press and furthermore gave their projects public visibility in the context of the emerging women’s movement. Beccari’s journal provided both Jewish and non-Jewish actors with a welcome sphere of activity within which to demand rights for women even before the consolidation of national women’s organizations. Through the influence of the editor, an atmosphere of female solidarity unique in the contemporary newspaper environment emerged within the journal La Donna. Only women worked on the publication, and its audience was also defined as a purely female readership.104 Within the panorama of the young Italian women’s movement press, La Donna was the only journal to explicitly adopt the demand for equal rights as part

102 Adele Della Vida Levi’s project had a privileged place in the reportage from the very beginning; see among others La Donna II, 58 (May 1869), II, 74 (September 1869), III, 149 (February 1871). Abolitionism was one of the feminist journal’s central themes. Among the numerous texts on Josephine Butler’s activities and those of Sara Levi Nathan’s son Giuseppe (“Joe”) Nathan, who was also involved, the report on an ItalianEnglish communal endeavor deserves special attention. It deals with an appeal by English women against “the white slave trade,” supported by the signatures of three thousand Italian women; see “Fratellanza. Inglesi e Italiane,” La Donna IX, 281 (November 1876). 103 In 1870 and 1871, at least two or three female Jewish authors participated in nearly every edition; the first of these was Cesira Levi Finzi (La Donna II, 93), who contributed on an almost continual basis from 1870 until her marriage in 1872; Carolina Luzzatto first appeared on January 30, 1870 (La Donna II, 94), and Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo from April 2, 1871, onward (La Donna III, 155). 104 See Keilhauer, Frauenrechtsdiskurs, 179.

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of its program and to remain continually true to its goals regarding the emancipation of women during its over twenty years of existence.105 Due to the north–south divide characteristic of Italian journalism, La Donna must have been in circulation primarily in northern Italy. However, regular letters from readers show that it was also read in the south. Further, due to literacy rates that were still below 20% in Italy around 1870, the readership was recruited primarily from the middle- and upper bourgeoisie; many of the most important readers were teachers.106 Participation Under the Auspices of National Identification, Laicist Positioning, and International Orientation Gualberta Alaide Beccari’s already mentioned programmatic reference to Giuseppe Mazzini constituted an important point of connection for her early collaborators, both Jewish and non-Jewish, including the prominent feminist Anna Maria Mozzoni, Sara Levi Nathan’s friend Giorgina Craufurd Saffi, and the writer Malvina Frank (1830–1902),107 as well as the patriot of Jewish origins Erminia Fuà Fusinato (1834–1876), who was baptized in 1856.108

105 See Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini, 116; Buttafuoco A., Cronache femminili. Temi e momenti della stampa emancipazionista in Italia dall’Unità al fascismo (Arezzo: Dipartimento di studi storico-sociali e filosofici, Università di Siena, 1988), 26. On the Italian women’s movement press, see further Carrarini R., Giordano M., Bibliografia dei periodici femminili lombardi, 1786–1945 (Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 1993); Franchini S., Pacini M., Soldani S. (eds.), Giornali di donne in Toscana. Un catalogo, molte storie, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2007); on various representatives and organs of the women’s movement press in the nineteenth century specifically, see Catalan T., “Percorsi di emancipazione delle donne italiane in età liberale,” in Isnenghi M., Levis Sullam S., Gli italiani in guerra. Conflitti, identità, memorie dal Risorgimento ai nostri giorni (Turin: UTET), 170–181. On the history of journalism in Italy from a women’s- and gender-historical perspective, see Franchini S., Soldani S., Donne e giornalismo. Percorsi e presenze di una storia di genere (Milan: Angeli, 2004). 106 See Buttafuoco, “Cronache femminili,” 48; Keilhauer, Frauenrechtsdiskurs, 178. 107 On Malvina Frank, see among others Odorisio, Donna o cosa, 23; Murari, L’idea

più avanzata, 65. 108 On the writer and educator Fuà Fusinato, see Leuzzi M. C., Erminia Fuà Fusinato. Una vita in altro modo (Rome: Anicia, 2008).

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Drawing on Mazzini’s concept of a gender-based division of roles, Beccari saw the education of the next generation as the task of women. This should create the foundation for a comprehensive societal renewal. This conviction not only coincided with Sara Levi Nathan’s ideas mentioned above; it determined the nineteenth-century Italian women’s emancipation discourse as a whole.109 Two interrelated reference points clearly emerge from the draft program for the journal of April 12, 1868: national unification, and the educational “mission” of women in the new Italy. Beccari solemnly declared, Italy was created with weapons, but it must be consolidated by means of study and work; it is thus the obligation of each individual who has had the good fortune to be born under Italian skies to participate in this diligently. And woman must by all means keep pace with man in this sacred duty: God has sown the sparks of intelligence in her soul; in her heart he has sown the seeds of all noble sentiment. Woman’s mission is to be man’s angel of consolation, his counselor, his inspiration. Many are untrue to this mission, and man suffers in consequence; [for] if the woman is fully present, the man will also be what he should be.110

Woman’s roles as man’s intellectual and emotional complement and as educator and mother remained central themes for La Donna. Jewish women could identify especially well with these ideal images, which were similar in many respects to the traditional roles of the Jewish wife and mother, and which could now be carried over into the reality of emancipated Jewry in an Italian nation state. Important preconditions for the involvement of female Jewish authors in the journal, along with its reliance on Mazzini, the figurehead of national identification, included Beccari’s educational focus, as well as the journal’s emphatically laicist outlook. As was the case for Sara Levi Nathan’s and Adele Della Vida

109 Sara Levi Nathan, however, wished for an even clearer ideological alignment for the journal with “Doveri dell’uomo.” Her son Giuseppe (“Joe”) Nathan, himself a Mazzinian and promoter of the abolitionist campaign, also periodically gave financial support to the journal; see Isastia, Storia di una famiglia, 94. 110 La Donna I, 1 (April 1869). Here, too, Beccari is directly referencing Mazzini. In “Doveri dell’uomo,” he described the ideal family as a loving unit with a woman at its center—an angelic female creature who makes the daily trials and tribulations seem less arduous and bitter through her love and grace.

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Levi’s projects, the nondenominational journal soon came in for criticism from Catholic circles. Already in the third edition of La Donna, on April 26, 1868, Beccari reacted to an article recently published in the Modena newspaper Il Diritto Cattolico.111 The article, titled “A Danger to Catholic Women,” described Beccari and her collaborators as “infidels” and “materialists.” Beccari wrote in ironic tones that this critique from the pen of an “apostle of darkness and regression” could really only be interpreted as praise.112 La Donna persevered in its laicist demand and thus constituted a welcome sphere of activity specifically for female Jewish activists in a nation based on the separation of Church and State. The secularization of the school system for which Sara Levi Nathan, Adele Della Vida Levi, and many other female activists strove found its expression here in Beccari’s intention “to free women and children from the hands of the clergy and to replace Church schools with secular ones.”113 The journal’s international orientation, which was remarkable in the contemporary context, also favored the involvement of Jewish women, as was the case for the Abolitionist Federation and the Fröbel Movement. La Donna’s highly developed networking can be seen from its abundance of regular reports from abroad, including from England, France, the USA, and Russia.114 Through translations of texts on women’s emancipation into Italian, including letters by the German-Jewish writer Fanny Lewald (1811–1889),115 the journal firmly positioned itself in the context of the international women’s movement. Beccari’s Jewish collaborators certainly benefited from their familyand-friendship connections that often transcended the national sphere.

111 Il Diritto Cattolico was published in Modena between 1867 and 1911 by Pietro Balan and Claudio Boschetti; see De Rosa G., Storia del movimento cattolico in Italia (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1966), 635. 112 See La Donna I, 3 (April 1868). 113 See Dickmann, Frauenbewegung, 196. 114 On La Donna’s international orientation, see also Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini,

118. 115 An excerpt from Lewald’s “Für und wider die Frauen” of 1870, was translated from German into Italian by Beccari’s collaborator Maddalena Gonzenbach; see La Donna IX, 21–23 (1878–1879); XII, 2–3 (1880). Fanny Lewald had given Beccari her personal permission to publish the letter in the journal.

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They were able to pick up on discussions from abroad and even functioned as foreign correspondents. Nina Modona Olivetti (1830–1900) wrote regularly for La Donna from 1874 onward about current political and cultural themes in contemporary France from Paris, her adopted home.116 She likely moved to Paris in the 1850s as part of the great wave of Italian emigration following Garibaldi’s unsuccessful campaign.117 Modona Olivetti made a name for herself in the French capital as an art critic and journalist for many French journals, including Le Monde artistique. From her reportage for La Donna there emerges a transition from an initial focus on cultural themes to political questions regarding women. In 1875, Oscar Greco described her as a “fervent and passionate promoter of women’s emancipation who espoused the principle of equality for both genders and made noble and generous efforts to conquer for woman the [equal] position to which she is entitled.”118 She participated in the first international women’s congress in Paris in August 1878 as a member of the Italian delegation.119 The Poet Erminia Fuà Fusinato (1834–1876): Conversion as an Expression of Female Emancipation The Jewish public took a certain pride in Jewish women’s participation in the national women’s rights discourse, as can be seen from a list of contemporary female Italian-Jewish writers and journalists published in the Vessillo Israelitico (The Jewish Banner) in 1875.120 Il Vessillo Israelitico, the most important Jewish journal in liberal Italy, espoused a decidedly assimilatory ideology.121 The list is based on Oscar Greco’s

116 For details, see Keilhauer, Frauenrechtsdiskurs, 265–277. According to contemporary reference works, this writer and painter, who went by the pseudonym “Crysanthème,” was born in Turin; see Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 368; Villani, Stelle femminili, 487 f.; Catanzaro, La donna nelle scienze, 140; Bandini Buti M. (ed.), Enciclopedia biografica e bibliografica “italiana”. Poetesse e scrittrici, vol. 6 (Milan: Tosi, 1941), 91 f. 117 See Keilhauer, Frauenrechtsdiskurs, 266. 118 Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 368. 119 See Pieroni Bortolotti, “Alle origini,” 148; Keilhauer, Frauenrechtsdiskurs, 277–279. 120 See “Bibliografia femminile israelitica italiana,” Vessillo Israelitico XXIII, 8 (August

1875): 234–238. 121 On the Vessillo Israelitico’s self-concept, see Ferrara degli Uberti C., “Italiani ma ebrei. Rappresentare se stessi fra famiglia e nazione. Appunti sul ‘Vessillo Israelitico’ alla

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Bibliografia Femminile Italiana, published in the same year; it includes the names, among others, of Carolina Luzzatto, Nina Modona Olivetti, Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo, Cesira Levi Finzi, and Fanny Tedeschi, all of whom also wrote for Beccari’s La Donna. Adherence to the Jewish faith was the anonymous author’s central selection criterion for classification as a female “Jewish” writer. Despite its assimilatory approach, the Vessillo Israelitico was strictly against conversion.122 Concerning the already mentioned poet Erminia Fuà Fusinato, who also wrote for La Donna, the author of the “Bibliography of Female Jewish-Italian Writers” wrote an accordingly brief comment: “We would gladly have written about Fuà Fusinato, who was born as one of us. But love has deprived us of her, and we applaud her writings and her name, which deserve to be celebrated, with our heart, but with a downcast heart.”123 Erminia Fuà Fusinato, who in the author’s opinion had lost her right to a place among the female Jewish writers, converted to the Christian faith for reasons of love and not because of religious convictions. Aside from exits from the Jewish communities, which were mostly politically motivated, love marriages played a decisive role in nineteenth-century conversions.124 The story of the poet Fuà Fusinato, who grew up in Padua in an educated, Jewish, anti-Austrian household and converted to Christianity immediately before her marriage to the Italian patriot Arnaldo Fusinato (1817–1888), is no exception in this regard.125 The daughter of a doctor, Marco Fuà, Erminia was encouraged as a poet by

soglia del Novecento,” Bernardini P. L. et al., Gli ebrei e la destra. Nazione, stato, identità, famiglia (Rome: Aracne, 2007), 25–60. 122 In fact, Jews who promoted and actualized conversion or exit from the community had no voice in the Jewish press. Research has long been lacking on the developments surrounding conversion in nineteenth-century Italy as a whole; for the situation in Rome, see Del Regno F., “Gli ebrei a Roma tra le due guerre mondiali. Fonti e problemi di ricerca,” Storia Contemporanea 23 (February 1992): 5–68. For fascist Italy, see Mazzini E., “Konversionen und Konvertiten im faschistischen Italien zum Zeitpunkt der Rassenkampagne,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 95 (2015): 346–369. 123 Bibliografia femminile israelitica italiana, 238. 124 See Catalan T., “Juden und Judentum in Italien von 1848 bis 1918,” in Novelli-

Glaab, Jäger, Judentum und Antisemitismus, 80. 125 Leuzzi, Erminia Fuà Fusinato, provides a detailed biography; see further Finotti F., “Erminia Fuà Fusinato,” in Arslan A., Le stanze ritrovate. Antologia di scrittrici venete dal Quattrocento al Novecento (Venice: Eidos, 1991), 208–218.

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one of her uncles even as a young girl, and she met Fusinato, a prominent poet at the time, in this connection in 1852. When her parents vehemently opposed the idea of marriage with a non-Jew, Erminia fled to relatives in Venice at the age of twenty-two and was baptized and married to Arnaldo there. Fuà Fusinato made a name for herself not just as a poet who wrote primarily on themes connected to the fatherland, but also as an educator. After the overthrow of the Papal State in 1870, she founded Italy’s first high school for girls in Rome, assumed its leadership, and was active among other things as a consultant for the Italian Ministry of Education.126 Her contributions to Beccari’s La Donna expressed her pedagogical interests and desire to collaborate in the contemporary women’s rights discourse. At a time when marriages were arranged by the parents or by other family members (as was likely the case for Sara Levi Nathan), and the preservation of Jewish family integrity was centrally relevant, Erminia Fuà Fusinato’s choice of a love match, against her parents’ will, can be seen as a form of female emancipation that was far ahead of its time. The poet’s commitment to the education of women outside of the Jewish sphere was likely based on her personal experience of hardwon independence. Erminia Fuà Fusinato is the only one of the Jewish representatives of the Italian women’s movement discussed here to have converted during the nineteenth century. However, her baptism is not to be seen as a form of conscious religious assimilation, but as an individual, emotion-driven detachment from family pressures. Unlike the vast majority of Jewish feminists, for whom family solidarity and family memory continued to be considered decisive for the continuity of a Jewish self-consciousness, Fuà Fusinato consciously stepped away from her Jewish family-and-relationship networks. Patriots and Irredentists The writers and journalists who wrote for La Donna in the first decade of its existence whom the Vessillo Israelitico classified as “Israelites,” in contrast to Fuà Fusinato, were a relatively homogeneous group, and not just because of their religious belonging. Modona Olivetti, Levi Finzi, and Pavia Gentilomo Fortis all came (like Fuà Fusinato) from Italy’s northern 126 On Fuà Fusinato’s pedagogical engagement, see Sega, “Percorsi di emancipazione,”

203.

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regions—Piedmont, Lombardy, and the Veneto. Carolina Luzzatto and Fanny Tedeschi127 belonged to the Italian-speaking population of the port city of Trieste, which was part of the Habsburg Empire at the time. Apart from Levi Finzi, they were all born in the 1820s and 1830s—thus still in the pre-emancipatory period.128 They had experienced the revolt against the Habsburg Monarchy at close quarters as young women. Italian patriotism, combined with a strongly anti-Austrian attitude, which has also been seen in the Venetian Adele Della Vida Levi discussed above, was an important common element in the ideological self-positioning of these women. Beccari, from Padua, who had herself followed her father into exile in Turin as a girl, thus appealed to ideological kindred spirits from the north of Italy and from the Trieste area and, in this way, set a decidedly patriotic orientation for her journal in addition to its feminist bent. Beccari’s Triestine collaborator Carolina Luzzatto née Sabbadini (1837–1919),129 is remarkable in this connection for her especially extreme positions. A journalist and writer, she was an adherent of the Pan-Italian movement, which acquired increasing momentum following Italian national unification. After she married Girolamo Luzzatto Coen,

127 Fanny Tedeschi was the daughter of the publisher Abramo Tedeschi; see Curci R., Zani G., Bianco, Rosa e Verde. Scrittrici a Trieste fra’800 e’900 (Trieste: Lint, 1993), 71. 128 The journalist Cesira Levi Finzi was born in Mantua. There is no information as to the year of her birth in the contemporary encyclopedias. Oscar Greco gives 1872 as the year of her marriage with a Finzi, and her first work was published in 1868, so she is most likely to have been born in the late 1840s or early 1850s. Her works too display Italian patriotism and an aversion to Austria. Levi Finzi contributed, among others, to the liberal, anti-Austrian journal La Favilla. On Levi Finzi, see Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 274 f.; Pisano, Donne del giornalismo, 219. 129 On Carolina (Sara) Luzzatto (1837–1919), see Bozzini La Stella M., Carolina Coen Luzzatto (Gorizia: Monfalcone, 1995). Luzzatto came from a religious home and was educated as a girl by the longtime chief rabbi of Trieste’s Jewish community, Marco Tedeschi (1817–1870). She held a salon in Gorizia frequented by Italian scholars and writers, among them the patriot Angelo De Gubernatis and the anti-Slavic writer Giuseppe Marcotti. On Luzzatto’s decided anti-Slavism and her relationship with Marcotti, see Catalan T., “Linguaggi e stereotipi dell’antislavismo irredentista dalla fine dell’Ottocento alla Grande Guerra,” in ead. (ed.), Fratelli al massacro. Linguaggi e narrazioni della Prima Guerra mondiale (Rome: Viella, 2015), 59–63; ead., “The Construction of the Enemy in Two Jewish Writers: Carolina Coen Luzzatto and Enrica Barzilai Gentilli,” in Baumeister M., Lenhard P., Nattermann R. (eds.), Rethinking the Age of Emancipation. Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Family, and Religion in Italy and Germany 1800–1918 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020), 355 f., 360–363.

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Carolina moved to Gorizia, where she founded several Italian newspapers during the 1880s which were shut down one by one by the Austrian authorities because of their pro-Italian orientation. Beginning in 1883, she headed the Corriere di Gorizia, which later continued existence under the name Corriere Friulano and was published until the beginning of the First World War. Pan-Italianism and irredentism had an importance within the Italian women’s movement up until well into the twentieth century that is not to be underestimated but so far has been little studied. Jewish women were often especially receptive to irredentist thinking, since Italy ideally seemed to them a place of freedom and tolerance; a place where, in contrast to Habsburg Austria, antisemitism did not exist. Carolina Luzzatto’s participation in La Donna can be seen as an early symptom of this tendency, which acquired ever-increasing relevance for the Italian women’s movement in the decades to come.130 The fact that in the 1870s and 1880s, about two to five out of an average twenty to twenty-five contributors were of Jewish origin (compared to Jewish representation of about 0.1% in the overall population) reflects above all else the comparatively high level of education and linguistic and literary capabilities of Jewish women, acquired through their education. It is not by chance that all the authors mentioned above, including Erminia Fuà Fusinato, came from wealthy and educated backgrounds that favored their intellectual development and acculturation. Thus, Jewish women’s participation in the Italian feminist discourse was striking from a qualitative perspective, but at the same time, it was restricted to a socially privileged group, concentrated in the north of Italy. The Private Scholar Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo (1822–1894): A “Jewish Woman in Everything and for Everything”? The poet Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo was the best-known Jewish author to regularly contribute to La Donna in the 1870s. There is no archival information regarding her, but in the correspondence of the eminent Hebraist and representative of the “Wissenschaft des Judentums” Samuel

130 See Nattermann R., “Zwischen Pazifismus, Irredentismus und nationaler Euphorie. Italienische Jüdinnen und der Erste Weltkrieg,” in Ernst P., Lappin-Eppel E. (eds.), Jüdische Publizistik und Literatur im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs (Innsbruck et al.: Studien Verlag, 2016), 247–263.

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David Luzzatto (1800–1865), published in 1890, one can find parts of his regular correspondence with her.131 Reconstruction of her biography depends primarily on the details given in contemporary reference works. Besides the relevant Italian encyclopedias, Pavia Gentilomo appears in the list of the “jüdische Frauen in der Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst” published in 1879 by the German rabbi and historian Meyer Kayserling (1829–1905).132 Her inclusion in his work is proof of the reputation this poet achieved, within her lifetime, even beyond Italy. Such renown contrasts starkly with the lack of awareness of this Italian-Jewish poet today, who has been consigned to forgetfulness by fascism and National Socialism. There are various claims in the literature regarding her place of birth (Pavia, Milan, or Padua), but the information regarding Pavia seems most likely to be correct.133 The Lombard city was under Austrian rule when Eugenia was born on January 4, 1822. Her father, Salomone Pavia, was a wealthy and distinguished jeweler; her mother, Regina Capriles, was described as a strong personality with a “sharp mind.”134 The educated, anti-Habsburg environment in which Pavia Gentilomo grew up must have been very similar to Adele Della Vida Levi’s family background. Their intellectual mothers were certainly female role models for both women. According to her contemporary Oscar Greco, Pavia Gentilomo stood out for her great intelligence even as a girl and was suitably encouraged by her parents, thanks to their social position.135 They engaged the Lombard historian and writer Egidio De Magri, who studied the history of Milan, as a private tutor, as well as the Milanese educator Giuseppe Sacchi, who 131 See Luzzatto S. D., Epistolario italiano, francese, latino, pubblicato dai suoi figli, 2 vols. (Padua: Salmin, 1890). 132 Kayserling M., Die jüdischen Frauen in der Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst (Berlin: Brockhaus, 1879), 294. 133 Pavia is named as her place of birth in her contemporaries Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 373, and De Gubernatis, Dizionario biografico, 798. Catanzaro’s reference work of 1890 refers to her as a “poetessa padovana” (Catanzaro, La donna nelle scienze, 152), and it is likely that Carlo Villani in 1915 and even Maria Bandini Buti in 1941 were referring to him; see Villani, Stelle femminili, 515; Bandini Buti, Enciclopedia biografica, 119. Meyer Kayserling writes that Pavia Gentilomo was born in Milan; see Kayserling, Die jüdischen Frauen, 294. 134 Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 373. 135 See ibid.; De Gubernatis, Dizionario biografico, 798; Bandini Buti, Enciclopedia

biografica, 119; Catanzaro, La donna nelle scienze, 1890; Villani, Stelle femminili, 515.

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worked with innovative psychological methods and already in the 1830s campaigned for the establishment of institutions to care for pre-schoolage children in Milan. After his appointment as a chief jeweler to the Royal House of Sardinia, Pavia Gentilomo also accompanied her father on his business trips within Italy and to the French part of Switzerland in the 1830s.136 This talented actor’s development corresponds in many ways to that of the “Wundertöchter” of the late Enlightenment in Germany, whose fathers outright paraded them and who were known as “Universitätsmamsellen.” In Pavia Gentilomo’s case too, the comprehensive program of education that her socially progressive and wealthy parents could provide were clearly supposed to prove the capacity of women for higher education. Her path as a scholar shows parallels to the biography of Dorothea Schlözer (1770–1825), who learned nine languages as a girl, as well as the traditional subjects like history and mathematics, and made numerous journeys, including to Italy, with her father, the historian and political scientist August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809).137 Both moved in contemporary intellectual circles, but both Pavia Gentilomo and Schlözer were denied a life in academia due to the near-insurmountable restrictions on women at European universities. At the same time, Pavia Gentilomo’s family environment was more accommodating than Schlözer’s to her development as a reputed private scholar. While it was initially her acculturated parents who supported Eugenia’s intellectual evolution, both her husbands later provided unconditional support for her career as a poet. In 1839, at the age of seventeen, she married the Venetian-Jewish intellectual Giuseppe Gentilomo, whom she had met on one of her visits to Venice with her father. After the wedding, she resided in Venice. Greco writes, “…encouraged by him [Gentilomo], she nurtured her poetic genius with an excellent course of studies.”138 Around this time, she also met the Venetian writer and journalist Luigi Carrer (1801–1850), who recognized Pavia Gentilomo’s talent as a poet 136 See among others Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 373; De Gubernatis, Dizionario

Biografico, 798; Kayserling, Die jüdischen Frauen, 294. 137 See Kern B., Kern H., Madame Doctorin Schlözer. Ein Frauenleben in den Widersprüchen der Aufklärung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988); Kleßmann E., Universitätsmamsellen. Fünf aufgeklärte Frauen zwischen Rokoko, Revolution und Romantik (Berlin: Die Andere Bibliothek, 2017). 138 Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 374.

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and promoted her. Two odes resulted from this intellectual relationship in 1842; they celebrate the cultural wealth of the cities of Venice and Florence in patriotic manner. However, Gentilomo’s sudden death in 1844 put a temporary end to the twenty-two-year-old’s creative output. She “shut herself up in her grief.”139 It was only three years later that she published “Nicaule.” Pavia Gentilomo dedicated the poem, whose theme was the encounter between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, to her deceased husband. It would become her most famous work, and it marked the beginning of her intensifying literary engagement with Old Testament themes.140 It is likely that these references to the Jewish Bible were a manifestation of Pavia Gentilomo’s conscious engagement with her Jewish heritage and identity, in a manner unique among the pioneers of the Italian women’s movement. She used her excellent linguistic knowledge to make translations of Hebrew poems into Italian. Her conscious preoccupation with the Hebrew language and literature was likely due in large part to the desire for emancipation, to her desire to involve herself in a cultural sphere that at the time was largely the preserve of Jewish men, which can also be observed among nineteenth-century Jewish feminist scholars especially in central- and eastern Europe.141 In this way, Pavia Gentilomo brought these texts out of an intellectual ghetto and made poems read primarily in scholarly Jewish circles accessible to a wider, Italian-reading public. In the 1860s, however, the period of national “resurrection,” she wrote works with a patriotic bent.142 Thus, in her literary output, Pavia Gentilomo moved consciously between Jewish- and nationally connoted loci.

139 Ibid. 140 These works include “Rebecca,” “La benedizione di Giaccobbe ai figli,” “Il canto

di David,” and “Sulla Distruzione di Gerusalemme,” all of which were composed in the 1840s and 1850s. 141 See Naimark-Goldberg N., Jewish Women in Enlightenment Berlin (OxfordPortland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 296 f. 142 Examples include “Sei canti popolari” (1860), “I Colombi di San Marco” (1865), “Pel Centenario di Dante” (1865). These poems can be seen as part of the developing “Risorgimento Canon”; see Banti A. M., La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi, 2000).

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In 1856, in response to the success of her “Nuove poesie,” published in 1851, and her growing public reputation, the poet was named a “corresponding member” by the University of Venice, which was an enormous recognition for a woman, especially a Jewish woman, at the time. Only two decades later were women able to study at Italian universities.143 But Pavia Gentilomo now had the opportunity to carve out a place for herself in the world of scholarship which was accepted, at least by a portion of her educated, liberal contemporaries, independent of her gender and her faith. Like Giuseppe Gentilomo before him, her second husband too, the lawyer Leone Fortis encouraged Eugenia in her cultural activities. She was thirty-three years old at the time of her second marriage.144 For Pavia Gentilomo, and for female Jewish protagonists in general, her husband’s material and ideological support was an important precondition for her social and cultural engagement. Interest in the question of women’s rights often arose not at a distance from their husbands but within quite egalitarian relationships.145 Pavia Gentilomo’s work with Beccari’s La Donna and with other organs of the emerging Italian women’s movement reflected her identification with the contemporary women’s emancipation discourse.146 It is questionable whether she was truly “a Jewish woman in everything and for everything,”147 as the Vessillo Israelitico wrote with satisfaction. Certainly one can see a clear consciousness of her Jewish roots in her

143 See Raicich M., “Liceo, università, professioni: un percorso difficile,” in Soldani,

L’educazione delle donne, 147–181. 144 “He asked for her hand, and she married him on December 10, 1856. And this awoke her genius to new life.” Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 377. 145 An exception is the journalist Cesira Levi Finzi, who wrote on pedagogical themes and other matters for several Italian newspapers and journals from 1868 on and became a contributor to La Donna in the 1870s. However, she ceased publishing after her marriage in 1872: “…she put down her pen and did not take it up again, thus destroying the hopes that many good people had placed in her.” Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 275. It is conceivable that Levi Finzi’s husband prevented her from continuing her work as a journalist. Laura Pisano also refers to the end of Levi Finzi’s activity as a writer after her marriage; see Pisano, Donne del giornalismo, 219. 146 See De Gubernatis, Dizionario biografico, 278. Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo also wrote, for example, for the journal Donna e famiglia, published in Genoa beginning in 1862, whose positions were more moderate than those of Beccari’s La Donna. 147 R. L., “Le donne poetesse,” Vessillo Israelitico XXIX, 8 (August 1881): 247.

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application of themes from the Jewish Bible and Hebrew poetry. She also did not marry non-Jews; in contrast to the convert Fuà Fusinato, she positioned herself in a decidedly Jewish family environment. However, the sense of national belonging likely played just as great a role in the poet’s life as her connection to Judaism. She devoted several works to members of the Italian royal house in the 1860s. “Love and fatherland were the strings of her lyre,”148 says Greco in emphatic praise of her patriotism. Pavia Gentilomo’s self-consciousness rested on a connection between Jewish identity and love of the Italian fatherland, which determined her existence as a woman, a scholar, and a pioneer of the national women’s movement. As was the case for the pioneers Sara Levi Nathan and Adele Della Vida Levi, the first Jewish contributors to the journal La Donna also displayed close engagement with the Italian women’s rights discourse. Here too, however, laicism and transnationalism were important preconditions for the involvement of Jewish women and the beginning of their institutional incorporation alongside non-Jewish women. The fact that Beccari’s female Jewish contributors constituted a well-to-do and educated group who resided in northern Italy and in the Trieste region also points to the social conditions for the establishment of Jewish–non-Jewish networks of women in unified Italy. Finally, with the exception of the convert Fuà Fusinato, the lasting relevance of Jewish family relationships and marriage ties for their self-positioning is clearly to be seen in the biographies of all the pioneers studied here. The tensions within the emancipation process of Jewish women between participation and exclusion gained increasing urgency with the consolidation of the organized women’s movement.

148 Greco, Bibliografia femminile, 374.

CHAPTER 4

Emancipation, Integration, and Dissociation

4.1 National Reference Points, Transnational Networks: Jewish Actors in the Organized Women’s Movement Paolina Schiff (1841–1926): A German-Italian-Jewish Feminist Probably no other representative of the early Italian women’s movement embodied transnationality, together with sociopolitical and scholarly engagement, in such a fascinating manner as did Paolina Schiff. Born in Mannheim of German-Jewish origins, she was closely associated with politicians, women’s rights activists, and adherents of the international peace movement both in Italy and on the European stage. Her biography is an important example of Jewish emigration paths and integration strategies, but it also expresses a complicated relationship with Judaism and a continual struggle against her twofold marginalization as a woman and as a Jew. Despite Schiff’s historical relevance as one of Italy’s first five female Privatdozentinnen, cofounder of the first Italian women’s rights organization Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili and international networker, and her level of recognition in the contemporary European

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Nattermann, Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4_4

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women’s movement and in literary and political circles, the relevant literature up to now has treated her as something of a marginal figure.1 Hence, Paolina Schiff’s biography, which is difficult to access and often seems contradictory, disguises a woman who, with her intercultural competences and the intellectual and practical mobility that characterized her lived experience, was likely the most significant contemporary mediator between the Italian and international women’s rights discourses. However, as a socialist, a feminist, and a Jew, Schiff was ideologically demonized by fascism, which removed her successfully and for the long term from public life and from the collective memory. She died in 1926 in seclusion in Milan.2 1 Among the biographical sketches, see the contribution of Stefania Bartoloni in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 91 (2018), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ paolina-schiff_(Dizionario-Biografico)/, of Beatrice Pisa in Farina R. (ed.), Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995), 994 f., and the entry in Gianni E., Dal radicalismo borghese al socialismo operaista. Dai congressi della Confederazione Operaia Lombarda a quelli del Partito Operaio Italiano (1881–1890) (Milan: Pantarei, 2012). On Schiff’s sociopolitical involvement, see Nattermann R., “Zwischen Mannheimer Liberalismus und Mailänder Radikaldemokratie. Frauenbewegung und Frauenwahlrecht in der Konzeption der deutsch-italienisch-jüdischen Feministin Paolina Schiff (1841–1926),” in Holtz S., Schraut S. (eds.), 100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht im deutschen Südwesten. Eine Bilanz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2020), 111–127; ead., “Vom Pazifismus zum Interventionismus. Die italienische Frauenrechtlerin Paolina Schiff (1841–1926),” in Dunkel F., Schneider C. (eds.), Frauen und Frieden? Zuschreibungen – Kämpfe – Verhinderungen (Opladen-Berlin-Toronto: Barbara Budrich Verlag, 2015), 73–85; Buttafuoco A., “Motherhood as a Political Strategy. The Role of the Italian Women’s Movement in the Creation of the Cassa Nazionale di Maternità,” in Bock G., Thane P. (eds.), Maternity and Gender Policies. Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London: Routledge, 1994), 187–191; Ridolfi M., La democrazia radicale nell’Ottocento Europeo. Forme Della Politica, Modelli Culturali, Riforme Sociali (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005), 330. On her importance as a lecturer, see Polenghi S., “‘Missione naturale’, istruzione ‘artificiale’ ed emancipazione femminile. Le donne e l’università tra Otto e Novecento,” in ead., Ghizzoni C. (eds.), L’altra metà della scuola. Educazione e lavoro delle donne tra Otto e Novecento (Turin: EDUCatt, 2008), 305–310. 2 Schiff’s extensive archives, which included a valuable library and letters from, among others, Sara Levi Nathan and her family, Giosuè Carducci, Felice Cavallotti, and Angelo Mazzoleni, was handed over by Ottavia Aliverti (Schiff’s niece), immediately after her death to the Biblioteca Civica in Milan’s Castello Sforzesco; see the obituary for Paolina Schiff in Città di Milano. Bollettino municipale mensile di Cronaca amministrativa e di Statistica 8 (31/8/1926): 271. However, the library was almost completely destroyed in the bombardment of 1943; it is likely that Paolina’s papers, which are no longer to be found, were also a victim of the castle fire. The author thanks Dr. Frank Gent, a descendant of Paolina’s brother Friedrich Schiff, for much information on the Schiff

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German-Jewish Bourgeoisie and Italian Irredentism: Paolina Schiff Between Mannheim, Trieste, and Milan Paolina’s grandfather, born Samuel Schwalbach in Hanau in 1771, changed his name to Schiff as part of the name reform among the Jews of Baden. He settled in Mannheim around 1797 upon marriage with the Mannheim Jew Augusta Fuld. Paolina’s father Samson Schiff (1807– 1885) was the couple’s fifth son. The Grand Duchy of Baden’s law on Jewish emancipation enacted in 1809, as well as his wealthy family background, enabled him to receive a thorough education in unrestrictive circumstances and training as a silversmith. His family’s political outlook was liberal, which must have also influenced the development of Paolina Schiff’s world view.3 After the early death of his first wife, in 1838 Samson Schiff married Barbara (Babette) Maier. Eight children came of the marriage; Paolina, born Pauline on July 28, 1841 in Mannheim, was the third. It can be taken as a given that the Schiffs provided their children with a broad education, based on the successful careers of their sons in economics and the arts, as well as Paolina’s level of education, especially in literature, history, and languages, which is clearly to be seen in her letters and publications.4 As members of Mannheim’s acculturated Jewish middle class, Samson Schiff and Babette Meier most likely gave their sons and daughters a liberal and secular education.5 Paolina’s father, who died in 1885

family and for furnishing various documents from the family archives, as well as Dr. Susanne Schlösser of the Marchivum Mannheim for detailed information on the ancestors and relatives of this German-Jewish feminist. 3 According to Dr. Susanne Schlösser, the family page in the Mannheim city archive has an attached document from the Royal Saxon Police Directorate dated 1854, which reports the “loudly proclaimed democratic attitudes” of one of Paolina’s father’s brothers, the language teacher Adolph Schiff. On the debates within the contemporary liberal Mannheim bourgeoisie from a political and gender-historical perspective, see Schraut S., Frau und Mann, Mann und Frau. Eine Geschlechtergeschichte des deutschen Südwestens 1789–1980 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2016), 64–68. 4 Paolina’s brother Friedrich Schiff, born in 1845, made a name for himself in the craft industry as an ironworker in Venice and elsewhere. Samson Schiff’s eldest son from his first marriage, Wilhelm Schiff (who later called himself Guglielmo) studied in Venice and Vienna and became an important sculptor. 5 Simone Lässig suggests that beginning in the 1860s, the proportion of Jewish boys in the student body of Mannheim’s high schools increased visibly and rapidly and, in the years after the establishment of the Empire, rose to 28.3%; see Lässig S., Jüdische Wege

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in Milan, was buried in the Jewish section of the Monumental Cemetery there; however, his gravestone does not bear any Jewish attributes.6 Paolina Schiff’s casket was also laid to rest in the Jewish section of Milan’s Cimetero Monumentale. The protagonist herself died unmarried and childless; elsewhere, the Schiffs’ laicist, acculturated tendencies are attested to by the increasing number of marriages of members of the family with non-Jewish men and women from the end of the nineteenth century onward.7 It emerges from Schiff’s surviving correspondence that by the time she reached adulthood (at the latest), she had distanced herself from the Jewish religion, although she did not convert to Christianity. It is likely that over the course of her life, Paolina Schiff became an atheist. Her explicit critique of Moses, the biblical patriarch, is exceptional in the context of this study; activists like Sara Levi Nathan, Adele Della Vida Levi, and the Lombroso sisters, despite their often decidedly secular world views, by no means fundamentally rejected Judaism. In contrast, in a letter dated 1890, Schiff explicitly pronounces against the Jewish patriarch Moses. At the same time, it is clear that she was also distanced from the Christian religion. Ultimately, the text is an expression of her areligious and anti-clerical world view, which likely drew on her secular, liberal education in Mannheim and was further strengthened in Italy by the intellectual influence of Mazzini. Reading between the lines, one can recognize an allusion to the writer’s “Jewish blood,” which significantly recalls Gina Lombroso’s secular Jewish self-consciousness: Moses and Christ – both of them were Jews, but one stands at the beginning of a history while the other is the son of a rich evolution. Why must one always go back to Moses, the origin, the vigorous, violent Moses… ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 234. 6 The fact that Samson Schiff was rooted in the German language to the end of his life can be seen from the inscription on his gravestone (Cimitero Monumentale Milano, Campo II, 95), which is written in German: “… snatched from his family in the seventyeighth year of his life; may your gentle, righteous soul rest in the protection of the everlasting.” 7 See Bartoloni, “Schiff,” 487. On Paolina Schiff’s husband, see the data in ACS, Francesco Crispi archive, Rome, fasc. 332: Comizio per la pace a Milano 1889.

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who is full of righteous intolerance of slavery, is “manly but not human”… I am not saying that Jesus had the last word, or that the humility of the Gospel has passed into my blood…8

In 1850, Paolina’s father Samson Schiff emigrated to Trieste. It was most likely that concrete professional reasons brought the silversmith to the port city that was then under Austrian rule. His eldest brother, Leopold Schiff, had already been established as a merchant in Trieste for nearly twenty years and lived there with his family. Samson’s wife Babette Maier also moved to Trieste with their eight children in 1852. At the time, Paolina Schiff was eleven years old. In the years that followed, her father prepared numerous ritual objects both for Trieste’s synagogues and for its churches. Additionally, he carried out contract work for various wealthy families and for the brother of the Austrian emperor, Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, who was then building the Castle Miramare near the port city. Schiff’s family became very wealthy during their time in Trieste.9 Paolina’s interest in the Italian unification movement also began to increase at this time. She herself, together with her parents and siblings, integrated themselves into the city’s Italian-speaking population, with their connections to the Jewish families resident there clearly playing a decisive role in this process.10 The home of their well-to-do uncle, Leopold Schiff, was a popular meeting place for Jewish scholars, with whom the young Paolina too was able to form social and cultural connections. As can be seen from her correspondence, she read and wrote German very well throughout her life, but she quickly came to prefer Italian over German as an adolescent.11 8 Paolina Schiff to Felice Cavallotti, May 16, 1890, AFF Milano, Fondo Felice Cavallotti, Serie Attività politica, 36/2. 9 On Samson Schiff of Mannheim’s creative output in Trieste, see Crusvar L., “Sansone Schiff di Mannheim. Attività e Opere di un Argentiere Ebreo nella Trieste di Metà Ottocento,” Atti e Memorie della Società Istriana di Archeologia e Storia Patria 41 (1993): 149–168. 10 Tullia Catalan’s study on the history of the Jewish community in Trieste contains a reference to a visit by the eminent rabbi Marco Tedeschi (1817–1869) to the home “of Madam Schiff,” which, according to Catalan, most likely refers to the wife of Paolina’s uncle Leopold Schiff; see Catalan T., La Comunità ebraica di Trieste (1781–1914). Politica, società e cultura (Trieste: Lint Editoriale, 2000), 116. 11 One can gather from the proceedings of the International Women’s Congress in Berlin in 1896 that Schiff requested a German colleague, Rosalie Schönflies, to read out her speech, which was written in German, on her behalf; see Schönflies R. et al.

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Gent attests to a strongly Italophile attitude among his ancestors that also took on irredentist features.12 The fascination that irredentism held for many Jews cannot be separated from the project of the Italian Risorgimento and its implicit promise of emancipation.13 Schiff’s writings show no sign of the extreme, Pan-Italian-oriented irredentism like that of her contemporary Carolina Luzzatto, but her experiences in Trieste certainly laid the foundations for her later, openly anti-Austrian position. The fact that during the First World War, Paolina Schiff became a supporter of Italian entry to the war, contrary to her pacifist ideals, must be interpreted in connection with the pro-Italian, often irredentist milieu in Trieste in which she grew up.14 The Schiffs’ identification with the goals of the Italian unification movement was likely also the motivation for the family’s move from Trieste to Milan in 1860. Following the defeat of Austria in 1859, Lombardy became a possession of the house of Sardinia-Piedmont, which formed the nucleus of the newly established Kingdom of Italy. Jews here too would now receive full equality. In Lombardy’s Radical-Democratic Circles: The Encounter with Felice Cavalotti For the nineteen-year-old Paolina, the move initiated a new phase of life. The Lombard metropolis was the most European city in Italy at that time. After her childhood in Mannheim and adolescence in Trieste, Milan, with its cultural diversity and industrial progressiveness must have held a special fascination for the young woman. The neighboring city of Pavia too, where she studied literature, became a landmark in her life.15 The University of Pavia was the starting point for the various connections Schiff made with personalities from political and cultural life in the years that followed. Her encounter with the radical democrat, lawyer, and poet (eds.), Der internationale Kongress für Frauenwerke und Frauenbestrebungen in Berlin, 19–26 September 1896. Eine Sammlung der auf dem Kongress gehaltenen Vorträge und Ansprachen (Berlin: H. Walther, 1897), 45. 12 See the letter to the author from Frank Gent, October 23, 2013. On contemporary irredentism, see among others Pagnini C., Risorgimento e Irredentismo nella Venezia Giulia (Gorizia: Istituto giuliano di storia, cultura e documentazione, 1994). 13 See also Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder, 83. 14 See Nattermann, “Vom Pazifismus zum Interventionismus.” 15 See Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 994.

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Felice Cavallotti (1842–1898), who graduated in law in Pavia and later taught literature there, had a decisive influence on her intellectual development. In the late 1870s, he became Schiff’s most important mentor. Pavia’s academic, republican networks also produced Paolina’s connection to the patriot Agostino Bertani (1812–1886), who founded the political party Estrema sinistra together with Cavallotti in 1886, as well as to Cavallotti’s former fellow student Angelo Mazzoleni (1838–1894), who later took a leading position alongside Schiff in the Lombard Peace Movement. Like Sara Levi Nathan, Paolina Schiff thus gained access to the inner circle of contemporary Italian politicians with Mazzinian, republican leanings. The predomiant laicism in these circles, and the identification of men like Mazzoleni with the contemporary women’s emancipation discourse were central preconditions for the ready acceptance as an intellectual and political comrade-in-arms of a woman of Jewish origins who came from Germany. Paolina’s outstanding education, political interest, and intercultural capacities also stood her in good stead for her entry into the Lombard political and intellectual circles.16 It is most probable that Schiff became associated with Cavallotti, whose plays she made known to the German-speaking world, at the end of the 1870s. Around the same time, she was translating poems and stories from German into Italian.17 Her oldest surviving letter to the radical democrat comes from July 7, 1876. In that same year, the political “right” shaped by Sardinia-Piedmont was replaced in Italy by the “left” under Agostino Depretis. Paolina seems to have recognized the opportunity to become sociopolitically active alongside Cavallotti, who, like herself, came from the democratic milieu of the University of Pavia. In decidedly polite, but at the same time slightly ironic tones, she asked the radical democrat for an appointment: Most esteemed sir, Felice Cavallotti, I allow myself, esteemed sir, to request you to receive me tomorrow around two o’clock at your office. The reason

16 She must have been a charismatic, persuasive speaker who could charm her audience. As late as 1908, the socialist daily newspaper Avanti wrote of the then sixty-seven-yearold Paolina’s speech at the first Italian women’s congress in Rome: “Paolina Schiff, more impassioned than ever, speaks with her usual sympathetic, mischievous authority and wears a dress of an indefinable purple color,” “Primo Congresso delle donne italiane,” Avanti!, April 27, 1908, 1. 17 See Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini, 198.

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for my coming is that I wish to lay before you a literary work that has been entrusted to me by a third party. – I am sure that I will receive a friendly reception from the… author of the ‘Alcibiades,’18 and will add nothing more than the request that you will excuse me, honored sir, if I might steal a quarter of an hour from your many noble pursuits. With the greatest of respect… Paolina Schiff.19

Thirty-five years old at the time, Schiff was already active as a journalist and writer when she sought a meeting with Cavallotti on her own initiative. Among his contemporaries, he was considered the true political heir of Mazzini and Garibaldi. The encounter between the German-Jewish scholar and the Italian politician who was one year younger and who had espoused the ideal of social justice as a poet and a politician, was clearly a success. The politically and literarily interested Paolina became one of his closest confidants and likely a “companion and collaborator” on an equal footing, in line with Mazzini’s ideals, in Cavallotti’s private and political life. Her letters bear witness to the close friendship that developed between the two protagonists in the course of time. Schiff’s correspondence from 1880 to 1896 reflects not only her precise knowledge and acute observation of the political situation along with a passionate interest in social issues, but also the mutual trust with her addressee, sustained with great intellectual openness and no lack of critical thinking. Meanwhile Cavallotti, who became a member of parliament in 1873 and, in his first speech in parliament, identified “honesty, justice and equality, freedom and progress, as well as the courage of one’s own convictions” as the new religion and armament of the young Italy,20 must have integrated Paolina Schiff, with her liberal, German-Jewish, bourgeois background, into his circle of political and intellectual companions as a matter of course.

18 Cavallotti had published a stage play on the Athenian statesman and war hero

Alcibiades in 1872 with a critique of political corruption as its main focus. 19 Schiff to Cavallotti, July 7, 1876, AFF Milano, Fondo Felice Cavallotti, Corrispondenza 1849–1916. 1. Corrispondenza ricevuta 1860–1898, fasc. Paolina Schiff. 20 See “Discorsi parlamentari di Felice Cavallotti: Pubblicati per deliberazione della Camera dei Deputati,” Rome 2014, quoted in Iacchini G., Felice Cavallotti, http://rad icalsocialismo.it/i-nostri-maestri/felice-cavallotti/.

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Transnational Feminism: Activist of the Women’s and Peace Movements Schiff’s Milan period did not only feature her approachment to Italian radical democracy. It was also the beginning of her increasingly intensive engagement with women’s rights issues and her extraordinary commitment to the organized women’s movement, in which she would play a leading role in the years that followed. Similarly to the way that Sara Levi Nathan’s interest in the contemporary women’s emancipation discourse had developed within her circle of English female friends in London, Schiff met a group of young activists in Milan who were campaigning for women’s rights. After making her first contact with the women’s movement, especially with contributors to Beccari’s journal La Donna, probably while she was still in Trieste, Paolina joined the circle around Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920) and Anna Kuliscioff (1855–1925) in Milan.21 The protagonist found another friend in the activist Alessandrina Ravizza (1846–1915), just a few years younger, whose mother was German. Like Paolina, Ravizza, née Massini, had grown up in a multicultural and multilingual environment; she herself spoke eight languages. Her father came from Milan but had fled to Russia, where Alessandrina was born, during the Napoleonic War. Having returned to her father’s homeland, the young woman made a name for herself primarily in the area of welfare. Along with Schiff, in 1979 Ravizza initiated the Milan soup kitchen and, in addition, was involved in educational projects and

21 Anna Maria Mozzoni, from a wealthy Milanese family, came to public notice in 1864

with her piece, partly inspired by Mazzini, “La donna ed i suoi rapporti sociali” (“Woman and her Social Relations”) and went on to become the central figure of the nineteenthcentury Italian women’s movement. On Mozzoni, see among others Farina, “Politica, amicizie e polemiche”; Macrelli, L’indegna schiavitù, Murari, “L’idea più avanzata.” On Anna Kuliscioff (her real name was Anja Rosenstein), a doctor from a RussianJewish family who had an important part in the founding of Italy’s Socialist Party, see among others Addis Saba M., Anna Kuliscioff. Vita privata e passione politica (Milan: Mondadori, 1993); Casalini M., La signora del socialismo italiano. Vita di Anna Kuliscioff (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1987); Pillitteri P., Anna Kuliscioff: una biografia politica (Venice: Marsilio, 1986). A portion of the correspondence between Kuliscioff and her life partner Filippo Turati can be found in Filippo Turati, Anna Kuliscioff. Amore e socialismo: un carteggio inedito, ed. by C. Dall’Osso (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2001). On Kuliscioff’s commitment to the rights of women and working mothers, see Minesso M., “Cittadinanza e tutela della maternità nell’Italia giolittiana. La classe dirigente politica, la Kuliscioff, i socialisti,” in Passaniti P. (ed.), Lavoro e cittadinanza femminile. Anna Kuliscioff e la prima legge sul lavoro delle donne (Milan: Angeli, 2016), 74–98.

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free medical assistance for indigent men, women, and children. She was also among the pioneers of the first women’s associations established in Milan.22 Schiff’s increasingly significant role in the Italian and international women’s movement from the 1870s onward must be seen as a result of her ideological positioning. With her connections to representatives of radical democracy, who introduced Paolina to the international peace movement, and her proximity to feminists like Mozzoni and Kuliscioff and to the contemporary labor movement, Paolina found herself at a point of interface for sociopolitical engagement. Schiff’s well-to-do family background and kinship connections in Germany and England also furthered her development as an international activist.23 The relationship networks outlined here were determinative for Paolina’s intellectual and political development. According to Pieroni Bortolotti, the protagonist was possessed of a “lively, humane sensibility, which she combined with the demand for female independence.” She also highlights Schiff’s ability to mediate and balance between differing political camps.24 The fact that Schiff’s commitment to women’s emancipation was accompanied by a remarkable interest in the peace movement up until the First World War can also be explained by the history of the establishment of the Italian women’s movement. Feminism, pacifism, and the European idea were crucial motivations for Schiff and her comrades.25 In its early period, the Italian women’s movement was part of a significantly larger and more complex movement working for the preservation of peace and for the unity of Europe. The origins of the Italian women’s movement, with its decidedly transnational orientation, in actual fact lay in nineteenth-century organized pacifism. 22 On Ravizza’s convoluted biography and her involvement in the early Italian women’s movement, see Scaramuzza E., La santa e la spudorata: Alessandrina Ravizza e Sibilla Aleramo. Amicizia, Politica e scrittura (Naples: Liguori, 2004). 23 Besides their position in similar political-social milieus, Schiff’s contacts with Sara Levi Nathan, Judith Butler’s Abolitionist Federation, the Italian patriot Alberto Mario, and his wife Jessie White Mario go back to her family connections in London, where two of her uncle Leopold Schiff’s sons were active on the stock exchange. 24 Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini, 196 f. 25 See the groundbreaking work by Pieroni Bortolotti F., La Donna, La Pace, L’Europa.

L’Associazione internazionale delle donne dalle origini alla prima guerra mondiale (Milan: Angeli, 1985).

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The International League of Peace and Freedom was founded in Geneva in 1867 with the goal of preventing a war between France and Prussia. The league combined pacifists, socialists, and refugees of the 1848 revolution from many countries, including Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Schiff’s mentor Felice Cavallotti also participated in the organization. The league was initially based in Geneva, and then in Bern. The figurehead of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, longtime comrade of Giuseppe Mazzini, was named honorary president. The league’s official publishing arm significantly bore the title of Etats unis d’Europe (“United States of Europe”). Shortly after the establishment of the peace union, the Swiss feminist Marie Goegg (1826–1899),26 wife of the one-time Baden revolutionary Amand Goegg (1820–1897) and one of the league’s cofounders, called for the admission of female members and the explicit adoption of the call for women’s rights among the new organization’s stated goals. According to Goegg, the goal of organized pacifism—lasting peace in Europe—could only be achieved with the help of women with equal rights, who would not permit their children to be subjected to the barbarism of war.27 The Swiss woman’s open appeal for the establishment of an international women’s association as part of the League for Peace and Freedom must be seen as an immediate consequence of these considerations. It is not by chance that it was Italian feminists, with their effective European networking, from whom Goegg expected an active dissemination of her ideas at the international level. Already in June 1868, Gualberta Alaide Beccari published an open letter from Goegg in her journal La Donna, calling on women from all nations to enroll in the planned international union.28 Goegg appealed to women to found national committees to 26 On Marie Goegg, née Pouchoulin, born in Geneva and of Huguenot origins, see among other Anteghini A., Parità, pace, libertà. Marie Goegg e André Léo nell’associazionismo femminile del secondo Ottocento (Genoa: Name, 1998); Rappaport H. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2001), 259–261. 27 On the establishment of the international women’s organization in connection with the International League for Peace, see Cooper S. E., Patriotic Pacifism. Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 290; Offen K., European Feminisms 1700–1950. A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 150 f. 28 Marie Goegg, “Open Letter to Gualberta Alaide Beccari, as well as Statute for the Association Internationale des Femmes of June 1868,” La Donna I, 25 (1868): 99 f.

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support the peace league, to network with one another through correspondence and visits, and to establish their own clubs with libraries and lecture and discussion forums. The planned associations were intended to have a decidedly secular orientation in order to bridge not only social but also cultural and religious differences between women.29 The official founding of the Association Internationale des Femmes (AIF) took place a few weeks after the publication of Goegg’s call to action in La Donna at the second congress of the peace league in July 1868 in Bern. There, it was also achieved that women should be accepted as equal, voting members of the league. Rather few women initially joined the AIF itself, since Goegg’s feminist demands seemed too radical to many bourgeois women at the time. The actual number of official members also remained low in the years that followed. It was feminist pioneers who worked within the framework of the AIF for the equality and self-determination of women; one of the prime focuses of their work was their commitment to the international abolitionist movement. Goegg found immediate support for her undertaking from the English feminist Josephine Butler, the German-Jewish feminist Rosalie Schönwasser (1828–1908), the French circle surrounding the journalist Léon Richer (1824–1911) and the feminist Marie Deraismes (1828– 1894), who published the journal Droit des femmes,30 as well as the group involved in Beccari’s La Donna. A few activists from Portugal and the USA also joined later. Swiss women took on the central organizational tasks.31 In actual fact, the social and ideological scope of the AIF was very greatly restricted compared to what was suggested in the appeal to the masses expressed in Goegg’s open letter of 1868. In the years that followed, the organization’s membership comprised activists who were 29 On the history, activists, and goals of the international women’s organization founded by Goegg, see Nattermann R., “Feministinnen in der europäischen Friedensbewegung. Die Association Internationale des Femmes 1868–1914,” in Bühner M., Möhring M. (eds.), Europäische Geschlechtergeschichten (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2018), 67–80. On the International Peace League founded in 1867, see Durand A., “Gustave Moynier and the Peace Societies,” International Review of the Red Cross 314 (October 1996): 532–550. 30 On the feminist-republican circle around Richer and Deraismes, see Rochefort F., “The French Feminist Movement and Republicanism, 1868–1914,” in Paletschek S., Pietrow-Ennker B. (eds.), Women’s Emancipation Movements in the 19th Century: A European Perspective (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 81–83. 31 See Pieroni Bortolotti, La Donna, La Pace, 54, 96, 102.

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mostly from wealthy, educated, middle-class families, especially from Switzerland, France, Italy, and England, and who were capable of assuring financial support for the undertaking as demanded by the articles of incorporation. Regarding the desired bridging of religious differences, women from protestant (including Huguenot) backgrounds, like Goegg, the founder, herself, were able to involve themselves in the union side by side with activists of Jewish origins. As was the case for the women’s right’s journal La Donna, the organization’s decidedly secular orientation, as well as the fundamentally laicist position of its members, played a key role in the inclusion of women from various religious backgrounds. Along with its laicist principles, the AIF was also quite politically homogenous; its protagonists came primarily from European radical-democratic circles. The fact that Goegg had explicitly addressed the Mazzinian Beccari and her readership in her call to action also indicates the limits of the AIF’s claim to political transcendence. With the contemporary European culture struggle in the background, the AIF positioned itself in the anti-clerical camp, as the involvement of the French freemason Richer serves to emphasize. The AIF kept a conscious distance from Catholic circles.32 With regard to their stated goal of “woman’s intellectual and social improvement,” the members of the international women’s union were active, primarily in Switzerland, France, and Italy, through their publication Journal des femmes, founded in 1869, and through reading circles, lectures, and political training courses. As prescribed by the organization’s articles of incorporation, the activists involved also initiated the formation of local and national peace committees. In Italy, Anna Maria Mozzoni in particular was engaged in the foundation of local peace committees.33 Paolina Schiff, with her position in transnational networks, was also involved in these initiatives from the outset. Her friendships both with Mozzoni and with Cavallotti, himself a member of the international peace movement, played a decisive role in this. Schiff’s commitment was based on the conviction that pacifism could only work in combination with women’s emancipation.34

32 See Nattermann, “Feministinnen,” 69. 33 See Dickmann, “Über die Grenzen,” 217. 34 See Schiff P., “L’influenza della donna sulla pace,” Conferenza tenuta a Milano il 6 maggio 1888 (Milan: Bellini, 1888); ead., “La Pace gioverà alla donna?” Conferenza tenuta a Milano nel Ridotto della Scala (Milan: Galli, 1890).

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A few years later, however, the German-Italian-Jewish feminist along with the rest of them was forced to witness the failed realization of a constructive, lasting internationalism in the early women’s movements in the face of the supremacy of contemporary nationalisms. As soon as they felt that “their own” nation’s existence was threatened, female activists usually prioritized the cause of their nation over pacifist and feminist principles, which were tied to the goal of an international common understanding.35 Neither the AIF nor anyone else could find a lasting solution to the conflict between national interests and boundaries on the one hand, and internationally binding human values and rights on the other. The organization was dissolved in 1870, during the German–French war, and its international successor organization, founded two years later, the Association pour la Défense des Droits de la Femme, and its journal, Solidarité, also ceased to exist in 1880. The short-lived nature of the AIF and its successors, which occurred in the context of an increasingly aggressive nationalism in Europe, thus indicates the instability of pacifist influences in the early national and international women’s movements. The female European pacifists would be a minority in the First World War.36 At the same time, the fact that the transnational, democratic tradition of the first Italian women’s movement traced back to the organized European pacifism of the nineteenth century and its central female and male actors should not be overlooked. Paolina Schiff’s breakthrough as an activist in the women’s and peace movements came around 1878, a few years after the beginning of her collaboration with Felice Cavallotti. At a session of the international women’s organization in 1879, led by Marie Goegg, there was a special announcement regarding the engagement of a new member in Italy, Paolina Schiff, who had invested great energy into propagandizing and disseminating Salvatore Morelli’s (1824–1880) parliamentary initiatives.37 Morelli, a prominent jurist, journalist, and writer, had published

35 See Planert U., “Vater Staat und Mutter Germania. Zur Politisierung des weiblichen Geschlechts im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in ead. (ed.), Nation, Politik und Geschlecht. Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne (Frankfurt a. M., New York: Campus Verlag, 2000), 50. 36 See Wilmers A., Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung (1914–1920). Handlungsspielräume, politische Konzeptionen und gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen (Essen: Klartext, 2008), 43–45. 37 See Pieroni Bortolotti, La Donna, La Pace, 179.

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a groundbreaking work on the necessity for women’s emancipation in 1861 and had campaigned for votes for women, abolitionism, equality of marriage partners, the rights of illegitimate children, and divorce ever since.38 The ideas and proposed legislation of this follower of Mazzini received great attention even abroad; on his death in 1880, American feminists wrote that with him, the greatest defender of women’s rights worldwide had died.39 It is likely that Schiff had met him while he was a member of parliament, at the first international congress on women’s issues in Paris in 1878, to which she had been sent to represent female pacifists in Italy.40 She remained true to his work even after Morelli’s death. Her initiative to erect a memorial to honor the “representative of women” was based on the intention to secure a place in the public consciousness for the champion of women’s emancipation, who had died in poverty in 1880, as a reminder of the continuing urgency of his ideas and the longoverdue need for a solution to the question of women’s rights. In 1881, Schiff was able to form a committee in Lombardy whose members identified with Morelli’s intentions and gathered donations for the memorial. Although the necessary funds were raised and the sculpture was prepared, her project failed due to resistance from conservative circles. Even in early 1886, the feminist still hoped to be able to erect Morelli’s memorial in his chosen home of Naples. She wrote to Cavallotti in March 1886, when she finally had to give up on her efforts, “You must also know that Mr. Amore,41 the mayor of Naples, although he has many good qualities, is very much behind the times, and the ideas promoted by the memorial’s

38 Morelli’s “La donna e la scienza o la soluzione del problema sociale” first appeared in 1861 and was translated into French and English. On Morelli, see among others Conti Odorisio G. (ed.), Salvatore Morelli (1824–1880). Emancipazione e democrazia nell’Ottocento europeo (Naples: ESI, 1992); Sarogni E., L’Italia e la donna. La vita di Salvatore Morelli (Turin: D. Piazza, 2011). 39 On Morelli’s connections to the women’s movement in the US, see Conti Odorisio, Salvatore Morelli, 192. 40 For details on the congress in Paris, see Dickmann, Frauenbewegung, 504–509. 41 This refers to the aristocrat Nicola Amore (1828–1894), mayor of Naples from 1883

to 1887.

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supporters, as well as the memory [of Morelli] itself, will find no great goodwill from his side.”42 Despite this defeat, Schiff’s initiative had propagandistic success. The committee she had founded and led demonstrated the fact that there was a considerable group of male and female activists in Milan and Lombardy who were ready to bring the demand for women’s emancipation into the public gaze and to finance projects in its service. The Comitato Lombardo thereby became one of the important precursors of the establishment of the first Italian women’s organization. The Foundation of the Lega Promotrice Degli Interessi Femminili (1881) The Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili (League for the Promotion of Women’s Interests) came into being, not by chance, in Milan, and in the same year as the memorial committee in Morelli’s honor. It was founded by Paolina Schiff and Anna Maria Mozzoni.43 The women’s league continued Salvatore Morelli’s efforts after the equal status of women in political life, in the family, and at work, as well as his commitment to the struggle against the “white female slave trade,” as expressed in full detail in the woman’s rights journal La Donna on February 5, 1881: In consideration of the enormous disadvantage in which the social situation of women… finds itself today, and mindful of their abasement, degradation, and exploitation, some female citizens have created an organization, the Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili… In consideration of the fact that the state excludes women from all rights –apart from those that declare them taxable and punishable – and mindful of their subordinate status in the family and in the workplace… and mindful of the prescriptions of the

42 Schiff to Cavallotti, March 30, 1886, AFF, Fondo Felice Cavallotti, Corrispondenza 1849–1916.1. Corrispondenza ricevuta 1860–1898, fasc. Paolina Schiff. On the memorial project, see Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini, 173; Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 994. 43 On the league’s planning and establishment phase, see Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini, 172–174; Dickmann, Frauenbewegung, 145–153; Buttafuoco A., “Vie per la cittadinanza. Associazionismo politico femminile, Lombardia tra Ottocento e Novecento,” in Gigli Marchetti A., Torcellan N. (eds.), Donna lombarda. 1860–1945 (Milan: Angeli, 1992), 21–29.

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moral police, who place the women outside of common rights and keep them enslaved… Mindful, finally, of the fact that there is no legal avenue for women to put an end to this situation, since they are denied the right to vote, the Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili acknowledges that the complexity of these conditions contradicts modern consciousness and that democracy will prevail in the course of progressive change, more or less severely, but consistently.44

Anna Maria Mozzoni, who chaired the newly established organization together with Paolina Schiff, had already outlined the objectives and intentions of the league in January 1881 in an open letter to Gualberta Alaide Beccari. The organization intended to expand from Milan throughout Italy and to represent the interests of women in parliament, in chambers of commerce, syndicates, law courts, and congresses. A primary objective was to promote votes for women at the imminent national assembly in Rome.45 Mozzoni’s letter clearly shows that the jurist Angelo Mazzoleni had also been involved in the planning phase of the league. It is likely to Schiff’s credit that this likeminded spirit was won over to make common cause with the league, and particularly to achieve greater attention and prestige for it in political and juristic circles. In her obituary for the peace activist Mazzoleni, who died in 1894, Paolina termed him a “friend, companion, and energetic supporter of our cause.”46 For Schiff, the issue was to make it clear that the question of women’s rights also pertained to men and was to be considered a general social problem. She worked even more strongly than Mozzoni to leverage her connections with Cavallotti’s circle to obtain the ideological and material support of contemporary politicians for the league. For example, in March 1882, she invited the radical democrat Giuseppe Marcora (1841–1927)47 to participate in a

44 “Program for the Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili,” La Donna XII, 16 (February 1881): 242 f. 45 See La Donna XX, 15 (January 1881): 238. 46 Paolina Schiff, “Discorso funebre,” in Mazzoleni U., Ricordo agli amici di Angelo

Mazzoleni (Milan: Galli, 1895). 47 Marcora, a lawyer and politician, came from the extreme left; he too had studied law in Pavia. Marcora maintained connections with the league, as can be seen from Paolina Schiff’s letters to him. Originally from Milan, he was president of Italy’s House of Representatives from 1904 to 1919 and was elected senator in 1921. On Marcora, see

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public lecture series organized by the women’s union, with a lecture on the theme of “The woman and her political right to vote.”48 However, the young Italian women’s organization’s hopes for the widely announced electoral reform were deeply disappointed. The electoral reform of 1882 established neither general voting rights for men nor voting rights for women at all. There was strong opposition to votes for women even on the left.49 As a result of this defeat, the demand for political participation by means of voting in free elections, which was characteristic of the league’s early days, faded into the background for a while. International Networker and Maligned Jewish Feminist Even after 1882, the commitment to peace remained a central theme within the young Italian women’s organization. Again, it was Schiff who took a leading role. From the end of the 1880s onward, her name increasingly appeared in connection with events associated with the historical and social foundations of pacifism. In 1887, she supported her friend Mazzoleni in the creation of the Lombard union “Society for Peace and International Arbitration” and assumed its presidency, alongside the notable Milanese journalist and later Nobel prizewinner Teodoro Moneta (1833–1918).50 In the years that followed, Schiff delivered numerous lectures on relevant themes in order to fashion a public consciousness around the necessity of a way of life without violence. Thanks to her

among others Soresina M., “Lo studio dell’avvocato Giuseppe Marcora. Materiali per una biografia professionale,” Il Risorgimento 57,1 (2005): 5–60. 48 See Schiff to Marcora, March 25, 1882, Museo del Risorgimento Milano – Civiche Raccolte Storiche, Archivio Giuseppe Marcora. 49 See Boukrif G., “Der Schritt über den Rubikon.” Eine vergleichende Untersuchung zur deutschen und italienischen Frauenstimmrechtsbewegung (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006), 170 f.; Romanelli R., “Alla ricerca di un corpo elettorale. La riforma del 1882 e il problema dell’allargamento del suffragio,” in Pombeni P. (ed.), La trasformazione politica nell’Europa liberale, 1870–1890 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), 171–211. 50 Moneta, a journalist and writer, headed the important Milanese daily newspaper Il

Secolo from 1867 to 1895 and played a leading role from the 1880s on in the Italian and international peace movement. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1907. On Moneta, see Ragaini C., Giù le armi! Ernesto Teodoro Moneta e il progetto di pace internazionale (Milan: Angeli, 1999); Canale Cama F., La pace dei liberi e dei forti. La rete di pace di Ernesto Teodoro Moneta (Bologna: Bologna University Press, 2012).

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good reputation in contemporary Milan’s educated bourgeois circles, she was able to speak several times in the small lecture hall at La Scala. Her lectures “Woman’s Influence on Peace” of 1888 and “Will Peace Serve Woman?” of 1890, both presented and published in Milan, expressively reflect her conception of the connections between women’s emancipation and pacifism.51 However, conservative Catholic circles declared open war on Schiff. A defamatory article appeared in 1890 in La Civiltà Cattolica, the antiJewish and anti-feminist-oriented journal, as an immediate reaction to Schiff’s discussions of peace, which was fundamentally directed against her personally.52 As a Jew, a feminist, and a scholar, who appeared in public instead of allowing herself to be confined to the domestic sphere, Schiff was the bogeyman par excellence for reactionary Catholic circles. She was apparently also perceived as a danger through the potential influence of her emancipatory thinking on Catholic women, since in 1889 she had spoken on the question of women’s rights before an assembly of Milanese Catholic women.53 At the end of the 1880s, Schiff employed all her energies to bring the women’s emancipation discourse to the widest possible audience. According to the Civiltà Cattolica, she placed herself “outside of domestic life, in the midst of political and literary competitions, in the academies and scholarly meeting places, between the tattling of the daily presses and the prattling of public rallies.”54 It is most likely that the last point in this derogatory characterization refers to Schiff’s participation in the international peace rally of January 51 Schiff: “L’influenza della donna sulla pace”; ead., “La Pace.” For details on the contents and historical context, see Nattermann R., “La paix des Dames. Paolina Schiff, La pace gioverà alla Donna?, Italie 1890,” in Le Gac J., Virgili F. (eds.), L’Europe des Femmes, XVIIIe-XXie siècle. Recueil pour une histoire du genre en VO (Paris: Perrin, 2017), 90–93. 52 On the journal’s antisemitic tendency, see Lebovitch Dahl D., “The Antisemitism of the Italian Catholics and Nationalism. ‘The Jew’ and ‘the Honest Italy’ in the Rhetoric of La Civiltà Cattolica during the Risorgimento,” Modern Italy 17,1 (February 2012): 1–14. 53 See Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini, 260. On the interrelationships between antisemitism and anti-feminism, see Volkov S., “Antisemitismus und Antifeminismus. Soziale Norm oder kultureller Code,” in ead., Das jüdische Projekt der Moderne (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011), 62–81; Planert U., Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich. Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), especially 71–78. 54 “Cose che non hanno sugo; ossia Paolina Schiff,” La Civiltà Cattolica (1890): 463.

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1889 in Milan. The event itself was already a thorn in the flesh of conservative Catholics, since it was an initiative of the avowedly anti-clerical Mazzoleni.55 Paolina Schiff was the only woman to participate in the public discussions, alongside representatives from many European countries, including Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900). The rally particularly opposed Italy’s joining Germany and Austria in the Triple Alliance as well as the opposition to France. Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, in preparation since 1887, and the forward march of colonialism in general were also observed with great concern by pacifists.56 To this extent, the rally was also conceived as a public protest against the course of action of the Italian government. As emerges from relevant documents in the Francesco Crispi archive, the peace initiative was subscribed to mostly by social democrats, socialists, and anarchists. The authorities took meticulous notes on the participants’ speeches. At the time, the Crispi government sought to quell the emerging socialist worker movement through restrictions on the freedom to organize and the freedom to gather.57 Specific information was demanded as to Paolina Schiff’s origin and family background—she likely came under particularly intense scrutiny from the observers because she was a woman, and because of her GermanJewish name.58 Despite the dangerous situation, the activist consciously used the rally to repeat the point about the disadvantaged role of women in politics and in society. A telegram sent from the Milan prefecture to Rome recorded that Schiff had explicitly called for the participation of women in public life.59 Her appeal was a direct admonition to Crispi, who had spoken out against votes for women in 1883 because, in his view,

55 Mazzoleni had already delivered a passionate speech against the papacy, which he called “the negation of the modern Italy,” in 1873 in Milan; see Marina Tesoro’s entry on Mazzoleni in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, http://www.treccani.it/encicl opedia/angelo-mazzoleni_(Dizionario-Biografico). 56 On the ideological and organizational foundations of the contemporary Italian and international peace movement, see Angelini G., Nazione, democrazia e pace. Tra Ottocento e Novecento (Milan: Angeli, 2012). 57 See Meriggi M. G., Cooperazione e mutualismo. Esperienze d’integrazione e conflitto sociale in Europa fra Ottocento e Novecento (Milan: Angeli, 2005). 58 ACS, Fondo Francesco Crispi Roma, fasc. 332: Comizio per la pace a Milano 1889. 59 Telegram, January 15, 1889, ibid.

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“women were traditionally too closely tied to the private sphere.”60 Schiff herself placed great hopes regarding peace and women’s emancipation in the social democrat Liebknecht, whom she met in person at the event. She maintained ties with him in connection with the question of women’s rights in the years that followed.61 Practical Feminism and Social Justice: Paolina Schiff’s Casse di Maternità Schiff’s commitment to peace ran parallel to her striking interest in social issues, which became particularly acute during the 1880s in industrialized Milan. Within the Lega, the working conditions of women and children and the theme of working women in general acquired special significance. Schiff became the central figure in the actions taken. As early as 1881, this feminist who was working as a translator wrote in the journal La Donna, “It is an imperative necessity that woman should be allowed to share in the advantage of creating for herself, out of her own work, an existence worthy of the name, in a manner that reflects her own interests and capabilities.”62 For Schiff, work represented an important path to female emancipation—a concept that would acquire new significance in the Italian women’s rights discourse during the First World War and was especially supported by Jewish feminists. The experiences of Jewish emancipation, which was accompanied by a remarkable commitment on the part of male and female Jewish activists to Italian unification, clearly often had the impact of creating the impression among Jewish women that they needed to “merit” woman’s emancipation as well. In addition, there was the goal of material and intellectual independence, pursued by middleclass women both Jewish and non-Jewish, which would be provided by a paid professional position. Schiff herself must have been keenly

60 See Isastia A. M., “La battaglia per il voto nell’Italia liberale,” in Ferrari Occhionero M. (ed.), Dal diritto di voto alla cittadinanza piena (Rome: La Sapienza, 2008), 31–35. 61 In a letter of 1890, Liebknecht promised his “friend,” as he called Schiff, that he would campaign personally at the labor movement rally in London in May for the introduction of fairer working conditions for women; see Paolina Schiff’s transcript of Liebknecht’s letter of 1890 (no information as to the month), which she sent to Cavallotti; AFF Milano, Fondo Felice Cavallotti, Serie Attività politica, 36/2. 62 Paolina Schiff, “I nostri interessi,” La Donna XII, 17 (March 1881).

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conscious of her own privileged situation as a well-educated woman from a wealthy and progressive background. Her actions therefore were aimed in two directions: for one, she engaged powerfully during the years that followed in campaigning for the rights and protection of working women; for the other, in the 1890s, with her election as one of Italy’s first female lecturers, she gained access to the male-dominated university establishment of the young unified state for female academics. Two of Schiff’s initiatives to benefit female workers deserve special attention. The first was the foundation of the first female trade union in 1883, in which the female seamstresses of Milan’s textile industry banded together63 ; the second, the project for maternity insurance for female factory workers in 1894.64 Her idea was to create a communal fund based on small contributions from working parents for their daughters, supplies of money from worker organizations, and especially from trades and industries chambers of commerce. In her draft proposal, Schiff provided for a contribution of 40% from the state to create the necessary capital; she also expected that the state would take on the correct processing and administration of the maternity insurance. Wealthy activists, herself first among them, were to participate in the planned fund through financial contributions. In this way, she wished to lay the foundations for an insurance that would enable working women to devote themselves to their families during the period of motherhood without thereby losing their incomes or their jobs.65 Despite various procedural difficulties, funds of this sort were established, in accordance with Schiff’s proposal, at the

63 At the time, women in textile factories earned half as much as men. On Schiff’s initiative, see the report in La Donna XIV, 1 (December 1883): 9–11; Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle origini, 194. 64 On Schiff’s maternity fund, see in detail Buttafuoco A., Le origini della Cassa Nazionale di Maternità (Arezzo: Dipartimento di Studi Storico-Sociali e Filosofici, Università di Siena), 13–21; Nattermann R., “Unrecognized Transnationalism. A Counter History of the Early Italian Women’s Movement,” in Schaser A., Schraut S., SteymansKurz P. (eds.), Erinnerin, vergessen, umdeuten? Europäische Frauenbewegungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, New York, Campus Verlag), 352–354. 65 Schiff designed the project in 1894 as a commission by the Lega per la tutela degli interessi femminili (the successor organization of the Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili); see Schiff P., Istituzione di una Cassa d’Assicurazione per la Maternità (Milan: Galli, 1895); Buttafuoco, Cassa Nazionale, 14 f.

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end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, in cities including Milan, Turin, and Rome.66 The conditions for initiating a maternity insurance fund were most favorable in Milan—later, too, it continued to be the strongest of the various maternity funds financially speaking. Paolina Schiff had attracted the interest of the Jewish banker and diplomat Ugo Pisa (1845–1910) in the project. Pisa, a supporter of Garibaldi’s who, like many of her friends and comrades, had studied law in Pavia, was a well-traveled and extremely wealthy businessman. In 1898, he became a senator. A noted philanthropist, he made a name for himself in particular as a supporter of Milan’s welfare organization Società Umanitaria, which provided work, financial support, and education to the needy.67 In February 1904, Pisa donated 20,000 lire for the establishment of the maternity fund in Milan. He remained the institution’s chief donor to the end of his life and served on its committee, which also included the Milanese lawyer Luigi Majno (1852–1915), husband of the feminist and longtime chairwoman of the UFN, Ersilia Bronzini Majno (1859–1933).68 After Pisa’s death, his sister-in-law Antonietta Pisa Rizzi (1871–1955) was elected president. She also came from a Jewish family, was involved in the labor movement, and was among the founders of the UFN in 1899.69 The network of supporters and committee members of the Società Umanitaria, the UFN, and Milan’s maternity insurance fund contained multiple overlaps. They were largely recruited from Milan’s wealthy Jewish bourgeois circles, to which Paolina Schiff’s family also belonged.

66 Ibid., 17–21. 67 On Ugo Pisa, see among others Bistolfi G., “Figure lombarde. Ugo Pisa e Giuseppe

Candiani,” Nuova Antologia 230 (1910): 525–531; Maifreda G., Gli ebrei e l’economia milanese. L’Ottocento (Milan: Angeli, 2000), 139. On the Società Umanitaria, see among others Decleva E., Etica del lavoro, socialismo, cultura popolare. Augusto Osimo e la Società umanitaria (Milan: Angeli, 1984); Ghezzi M., Canavero A. (eds.), 1893–1903. Alle origini dell’Umanitaria (Milan: Angeli, 2013). 68 Luigi Majno was president of the Società Umanitaria several times in the 1890s and was a member of parliament for the Socialist Party from 1900–1904. After the May riots in Milan in 1898, he defended the well-known jurist Filippo Turati and Anna Kuliscioff who, along with many other socialists, had been imprisoned after the riots, in court. A deep personal friendship developed between him and Turati in the years that followed. On Luigi Majno, see Gaballo G., Il Nostro Dovere. L’Unione femminile tra impegno sociale, guerra e fascismo (1899–1939) (Novi Ligure: Joker, 2015), 22 f. 69 On Pisa Rizzi, see ibid., 47.

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In the maternity fund, Schiff put into practice her individual conception of a confluence of state provision, individual responsibility on the part of the workers and their organizations, and assistance via donations from rich patrons. This form of active welfare reflected the orientation toward a just social order that was a guiding principle for Jewish representatives of the Italian women’s movement in general, that traced back to the pioneers Sara Levi Nathan and Adele Della Vida Levi, and that can also be seen in the self-consciousness of younger activists like Amelia Rosselli. Schiff’s dedicated parallel enlistment of both socially disadvantaged and wealthy persons to create a common financial foundation for the maternity fund can be linked with ethical principles going back to Judaism: the duty of each individual, whether rich or poor, to work together for the good of the community. As a socialist, her consciousness of responsibility for socially disadvantaged persons was significantly reflected, as well as in her engagement on behalf of working women, in her decades-long involvement in the Asili Notturni, a home for homeless people in Milan.70 Her charitable work went far beyond pure donations and was based on a distinct sense of justice and active social responsibility. The subtlety with which Jewish origins manifested in the life and work of secular protagonists like her is not to be underestimated. The secular welfare sphere and social work specifically enabled nonreligious actors of Jewish origins to maintain their cultural heritage and at the same time, to be “modern” women.71 Through her maternity fund, Schiff recurred as a feminist to a central theme of the contemporary women’s movement that was continually and equally relevant to its Jewish and non-Jewish members: motherhood as a significant contribution on the part of women to society and to the young nation had become a leitmotif of the Italian women’s rights discourse

70 The organization’s archives reveal that Schiff was not only involved for years as the only woman on the Asili Notturni’s committee but even bequeathed part of her estate to the home for homeless people in her will; see the official minutes of November 15, 1926, countersigned by the prefect of Milan, “Archivio dei Luoghi Pii Elemosinieri (Azienda di Servizi alla Persona Golgi-Redaelli),” Milan: Asili Notturni Sonzogno. 71 See Kaplan, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 285. Kaplan’s observation that civic ethos and feminist convictions replaced a consciousness based on the fulfillment of religious commandments for many German-Jewish feminists could thus also be applicable to the atheist Paolina Schiff.

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with the foundation of Beccari’s journal La Donna, if not earlier.72 In fact, Adele Della Vida Levi’s Fröbel kindergartens and Paolina Schiff’s maternity funds must be seen as two different outcomes of the same emancipatory concern—both were intended to support working mothers. Motherhood and professional activity should not be mutually exclusive; working women were thus encouraged to have children without falling into existential difficulties or being unable to continue with their careers. In her programmatic plea for a “practical feminism,” Ersilia Majno wrote with reference to Schiff’s project that all women, regardless of their economic capacity and social status, bore the social responsibility to get out of the state of “mere desire.” It was necessary, she said, to take action in order to establish the right to a free motherhood, far removed from distress and poverty.73 Thus, Annarita Buttafuoco was correct in describing the maternity fund as a significant early field of experimentation for Italian feminists in which, for the first time, they explored their ability to create a new society on their own terms.74 During that period, the women’s rights discourse in other countries too increasingly recognized the significance of motherhood, and the demand for security for working mothers grew commensurately. Schiff’s pioneering project was taken up in Germany in various forms, including by the socialist Lily Braun (1865–1916) and the Jewish feminists Alice Salomon (1872–1948) and Henriette Fürth (1861–1938), which is further evidence of the transnational networking of the first women’s movements and the frequent mediating function performed by Jewish activists.75 The international congresses on women’s issues, at which Paolina Schiff was regularly present, were especially fertile ground 72 See Bock G., Geschlechtergeschichten der Neuzeit. Ideen, Politik, Praxis (Göttingen:

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 267 f.; Buttafuoco, “Motherhood as a Political Strategy,” 187–191. 73 Majno E., “Vie pratiche del femminismo,” unpublished manuscript, Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno (Bronzini), cartella XVIII, b. 1, fasc. 14. 74 See Buttafuoco, Cassa Nazionale, 13. 75 On the significance of maternity funds in the transnational context, see Bock,

Geschlechtergeschichten, 268–270; on the transnational networking among contemporary feminists, see Schüler A., Frauenbewegung und soziale Reform. Jane Addams und Alice Salomon im transatlantischen Dialog 1889–1933 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004); on the biographical backgrounds and organizational involvement of Braun, Fürth, and Salomon, see Schaser A., Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1848–1933 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2006), 129, 131 f., 138.

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for disseminating innovative concepts. Besides the first conference in 1878 in Paris, she spoke, by then as a representative of the Lega per la tutela degli interessi femminili (League for the Protection of Women’s Interests), in Berlin in 1896 and in London in 1899.76 The International Congress on Occupational Accidents in Paris in 1900 was a key moment in bringing her maternity fund project to wider attention; here, Schiff presented the maternity funds already functioning in several Italian cities to the attendees in French.77 In the years that followed, Schiff continued to elaborate on her project. Along with two other Jewish members of the UFN, Bianca Arbib and Nina Sierra, Schiff worked on draft legislation for state maternity insurance, which she presented to a wider public at the national women’s congress in Rome in 1908, at the age of sixty-seven. In April 1909, she addressed Luigi Luzzatti with a personal request for support.78 The draft legislation was accepted by the Italian parliament in 1910, confirming the long-term success of Schiff’s initiative. The Impossible Equality of Paolina Schiff the Academic In view of the reputation that Paolina Schiff attained in political leadership circles and in the national and international women’s movement, at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century she appeared to be a woman of German-Jewish origins who had successfully integrated into the contemporary Italian society. However, a differentiated treatment of 76 In 1889, the Lega promotrice was dissolved by the Italian authorities as a consequence of the ban on socialist unions and media productions, but it was reconstituted in 1894 under a different name; see Dickmann, Frauenbewegung, 152. On the Berlin conference, see the collection of lectures and addresses delivered there, including Schiff’s speech, in Schönflies et al., Der internationale Kongress, 45 f. 77 See Schiff P., Scodnik H., “Les Caisses de prevoyance et d’assistance pour la maternité en Italie,” in Congrés International des Accidents du Travail et des assurances sociales. Paris 1900 (Paris: Librairie polytechnique Ch. Béranger, Éditeur: Comité Permanent du Congrés International des accidents du travail, 1901), 679 f. 78 See Schiff to Luzzatti, April 9, 1909, IVSLA, Fondo Luigi Luzzatti, fasc. 4, sez. B, Cassa Maternità. The familiar tone with which she first thanks Luzzatti (who was finance minister and chair of the “committee for social legislation” at the time) for his greetings and then requests his support for her proposal attests to Schiff’s close involvement in the network of Italian-Jewish families and her good level of acquaintance with the political upper echelons of liberal Italy. During the same period, she had already received a positive response from the education minister, Luigi Rava, as can be seen from her letter.

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her biography would be incomplete without taking into consideration her situation as an academic as well. Schiff was one of the first five female Privatdozentinnen in Italy, but she was only able to teach in a university setting after many years and in very difficult circumstances.79 Paolina had already publicly expressed her conviction that professional work was an important step on the path to female emancipation in connection with the founding of the Lega.80 She herself set a good example, working as a translator, writer, journalist, and assistant to Cavallotti, before resolving in the mid-1880s to apply to become a lecturer in German language and literature at an Italian university. Her novel Il Profugo had been published by the publishing house Bertolotti in 1881, and in 1885 she published a work titled Geschichte der deutschen Literatur neben Metrik der deutschen Sprache für italienische und deutsche Schulen (A History of German Literature along with Metrics of the German Language for Italian and German Schools ) in Milan.81 As a well-studied literary scholar, she was thoroughly qualified for such an academic appointment. However, the university establishment turned out to be all but closed to Schiff, a woman of Jewish origins well known for her emancipatory claims and democratic world view.82 The protracted and sometimes polemic application and examination procedures in Milan, Pavia, and Turin clearly reflect the contrast between the Italian professorial body on the one hand and Schiff, the outsider, on the other.83 79 See Polenghi, “Missione naturale,” 306–310. 80 See Schiff, “I nostri interessi,” La Donna XII, 17 (March 1881). Also significant

in this connection is her contribution to a German-language collection on gender relationships published in 1908: “Das Weib im Erwerbsleben,” in Koßmann R., Weiß J. (eds.) Mann und Weib. Ihre Beziehungen zueinander und zum Kulturleben der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Union, 1908), 168–240. 81 More works followed a few years later. In 1888, Schiff published a literary study, Die deutschen Schriften des Mittelalters (The German Texts of the Middle Ages ) in Milan, and in the same year, her Italian translation of Max Nordau’s novel, Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts (The Disease of the Century), appeared. 82 Latent antisemitism, combined with anti-feminism, may have been at the root of the generally negative attitude toward Schiff on the part of tenured Italian academics. In contrast (male) Jewish professors in contemporary Bologna were largely untouched by antisemitic discrimination or attacks; see Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder, 178–185. 83 The relevant exchanges can be found in the Archivio storico dell’Università di Pavia (ASPV), Fascicoli personale docente: Paolina Schiff; ASPC, Lettere e Filosofia, Corrispondenza, b. 776, fasc. 4, Verbali Consiglio di Facoltà (1889), as well as in the ACS, Ministero Pubblica Istruzione (MPI), DGIS (1890–1895): b. 182, DGIS (1897–1910): b. 172.

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The years between 1885 and 1901 featured a bewildering succession of applications, rejections, examinations, short-term teaching contracts, and referrals of Schiff’s applications to other universities. But this humiliating and laborious process did not only highlight the subordinate position of female scholars in academia. It was a visible proof of the general misgivings regarding the acceptance of women into the institutions of the Italian unitary state, together with a deeply rooted mistrust of female independence. In 1890, Schiff wrote to Cavallotti, apparently in the immediate aftermath of her negative experiences, Here in Italy, the democrats truly take an unjust view of the life and the person of women. From a middle-class standpoint, a woman generally has two choices: either she can sell herself as a prostitute, if she is really poor, or else she can buy herself a husband, if she is rich. Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule. Another salvation for women is work, but this often goes beyond female powers, because it is not adapted to women.84

In ironic tones, Schiff sketched here a quite realistic picture of female existence in contemporary Italy. Women of all social classes were excluded from political life and, despite various promises of reform, still had no voting rights and required the written permission of their husbands in order to participate in organizations. In the unparalleled tenacity with which Schiff fought to become a Privatdozentin against all the odds, one can also clearly discern her principal effort: to achieve an equal position for women in the male-dominated institutions of the new Italy. After protracted applications and rejections, the activist finally became a Privatdozentin at the University of Pavia in 1892, although she was only allowed to teach German grammar and not, as stated in her application, German literature. One year later, she received a contract from Milan’s Accademia scientifico-letteraria to teach both German language and literary studies. Sigismondo Friedman, a German studies professor of Jewish origins, seems to have campaigned personally on her behalf.85

84 Paolina Schiff to Felice Cavallotti, May 16, 1890, AFF Milano, Fondo Felice Cavallotti, Serie Attività politica, 36/2. 85 One of the first Jewish members of the UFN, who was also close to Paolina Schiff at the time, was Teresa Friedman Coduri of Milan. She was probably directly related to the German studies professor. See the record of Friedman Coduri’s registation in the UFN on June 6, 1905, Archivio UFN, b. 2, fasc. 8: Domande di adesione – 1 (1905–1910).

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Schiff became his collaborator and continued teaching German grammar and literature into her old age at the Milanese academy.86 A letter of October 1901, in which Schiff reacts to the rejection of a teaching contract in literature at the University of Pavia with trenchant sarcasm, makes clear the fundamental conflict between the claim to participate per se on the one hand and the attitude of rejection brought against herself as a woman, and probably also as a Jewish woman, by the established professorial class on the other: In the given circumstances it was perhaps a little gullible of me to have sent you my courteous application – but I refuse to give up the hope that I will receive justice in the end, and I hope that this will also benefit the brilliant talents of which there is surely no lack among your faculty. Without losing the steadfastness and the belief in the task entrusted to me, I will carry on and constantly keep before my eyes how great an honor it is to teach at a university, and especially at that of Pavia.87

Schiff’s hard-won lectureship was undoubtedly only a partial victory. Her rocky road to the university did not only reveal the restrictive conditions for female academics at the time. Paolina Schiff’s social integration too turned out to be less complete than it seemed at first glance. Nonetheless, the significance of this woman born in Mannheim for the establishment of the organized Italian women’s movement and its transnational orientation cannot be stressed enough. Numerous social projects, including the first Italian women’s trade union and the maternity funds that expanded from Italy to Europe, were due to Schiff’s initiatives. Her selfless commitment to the home for homeless people in Milan was a clear sign of her humanitarian nature. Her multifarious sociopolitical engagement is the visible proof of her intellectual and organizational capacities, but especially of a self-consciousness based on the ideal of social justice.

86 See Polenghi, “Missione naturale,” 308–310. In 1909, Schiff was additionally hired as a translator and interpreter of German for the civil court in Milan; see Pisa, “Paolina Schiff,” 994. 87 ASPV, Fascicoli personale docente: Paolina Schiff, October 3, 1901.

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Nina Rignano Sullam (1871–1945): Women’s Emancipation Through Social Work and Education “I was young, inexperienced, and beset with the vague need to do something useful,” is how the social worker Nina Rignano Sullam later wrote, with great modesty, about the beginning of her involvement with the UFN, to whose foundation and development she would make great contributions over the course of decades.88 This most important women’s organization in the Italian unitary state is primarily associated to this day with its longtime charismatic chairwoman Ersilia Majno,89 but Rignano Sullam’s contribution in terms of social initiatives and concepts was no less than that of Majno. Furthermore, Rignano Sullam was the originator and focal point of the circle of Jewish members of the UFN that rapidly expanded from 1899 onward. Without Rignano Sullam’s ideological and

88 Archivio UFN, Serie 1.2: Organi amministrativi, Sottoserie 1.2.2.3: Necrologi e commemorazioni b.3, fasc. 14: commemorazione di Nina Rignano Sullam 1948. The protagonist was a cofounder of the UFN in 1899 and its president from 1909 onward; in 1919, she was made a member of its executive board. Rignano Sullam was continuously active in the organization until her voluntary exit in July 1938. 89 Ersilia Majno, née Bronzini, born in the province of Novara, was raised after the early death of her mother by relatives on her mother’s side, likely in the circle of the Jewish Cammeo Bernstein family resident in Milan. Majno made deep, lifelong friendships, in particular with the later founder of the ADEI, Berta Cammeo Bernstein, and the latter’s younger Florentine cousin, Bice Cammeo. Due to the great economic difficulties of her father, a small-goods merchant, Majno was forced to quit her studies at the University of Milan as a young woman. Thereafter, one of her elder brothers taught her English and French, and she continued her private studies in literature, history, and philosophy. In 1883, Ersilia married the lawyer Luigi Majno, who, together with her brother Edgardo Bronzini, worked at a Milanese law firm and also taught law at the University of Pavia from 1889 to 1891. Ersilia Majno’s involvement with women’s rights began with her work for the free midwife service (Guardia ostetrica) founded by Paolina Schiff’s friend Alessandrina Ravizza for indigent women in Milan in 1888. Here, Majno also met Anna Kuliscioff, the later cofounder of the UFN Edvige Vonwiller, and other representatives of the contemporary Milanese feminist movement that was closely associated with socialism. Drawing on these experiences, in 1894 Ersilia Majno joined the local Associazione Generale delle Operaie for the protection and education of female workers, whose presidency she assumed shortly afterward. On Ersilia Majno, see the detailed contribution of Fiorenza Taricone in the Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 223–227; Pieroni Bortolotti F., Socialismo e questione femminile 1892–1922 (Milan: Angeli, 1974); Demi C., Ersilia Bronzini Majno. Immaginario biografico di un’italiana tra ruolo pubblico e privato (Bologna: Pendragon, 2013); Gaballo, Il nostro dovere, 22–39. On Ersilia Majno’s kinship ties with the Cammeo Bernsteins, see Fiorenza Taricone’s article on Frida Marx in the Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 710 f.

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material support, which she consciously exercised in the background, the organization would probably not have survived several personal and financial crises.90 The Establishment of the Unione Femminile Nazionale: Laicism, Socialism, and Jewish Subculture The founding of the UFN took place ten years after the dissolution of the Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili as a consequence of the 1889 ban on socialist unions, also in Milan. The initiative for the Unione was based primarily on the network of connections between members of the Lega, the Società Umanitaria, and other social organizations in the Lombard metropolis. The decisive impulse came from the female workers’ organization Associazione Generale delle Operaie, on whose committee both Majno and Rignano Sullam were already active. Paolina Schiff, too, was among the first members of the UFN.91 Since becoming active in the Milanese female workers’ organization, Ersilia Majno had pursued the idea of bringing together the various women’s unions and groupings formed from the late 1880s onward into one organization. The underlying intention was to further the democratization of the organized women’s movement and to pool their various powers—she wanted working-class women to collaborate with women from the middle and upper bourgeoisie. At the center of the project developed by Majno along with her friend, the wealthy Swiss woman Edvige Vonwiller (1856–1898),92 was the idea of a house that would 90 On Nina Rignano Sullam, see Fiorenza Taricone’s entry in the Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 1048–1050; Buttafuoco, “Nina Rignano Sullam”; D’Amico F., Nina Rignano Sullam nella Milano del primo Novecento. Contributi teorici e attività filantropica (Tesi di Laurea), Università degli Studi di Milano, Anno accademico 2006/2007; Nattermann R., “‘Aber die Realiät ist immer anders als die Vorausschau’. Das Jahr 1938 als Brucherfahrung im Leben der Mailänder Feministin Nina Rignano Sullam,” Münchner Beiträge zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 15, 2 (2021): 40–51. 91 A detailed listing of the UFN’s early committee members, who formed a Comitato Promotore and a Comitato Organizzatore, can be found in one of the organization’s first public communications in the archive of the socialist Osvaldo Gnocchi Viani (1837– 1917), based in Milan. He was secretary of the Società Umanitaria from 1893 onward and supported the UFN from the very beginning; see Unione Femminile, June 2, 1903, AFF Milano, Fondo Osvaldo Gnocchi Viani, fasc. Unione Femminile Milano: 148/1. 92 Due to her early death, Edvige Vonwiller, the daughter of a Swiss man and a Venetian woman of French origins, who, like Majno, was involved in the free midwife service

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be a common setting for the “exchange of ideas and projects.” They wanted this to provide a library, assembly rooms, and offices for the members. Majno hoped that as a direct result of this spatial proximity between activists of different social and political backgrounds, a spirit of solidarity would emerge that she considered a prerequisite for the struggle to improve the legal and social situation of women. The founders consciously formulated the program of 1899 in order to circumvent the sort of ban that had eventually been suffered by the Lega. It was established as a goal of the organization that “… the material and moral wellbeing of women… must be the firm and continual concern of every responsible woman, especially those on whom fortune has bestowed wealth, education, and fine feelings, and who must find in that the reason and the duty to work with intensive love and for the common benefit.”93 It was Nina Rignano Sullam who provided the initial capital from her own means to rent and open suitable premises in Milan and thus enabled the official founding of the UFN.94 Despite the effort to bring diverse world views together, from the outset the organization identified itself primarily with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), founded in 1892, to which Ersilia Majno and the majority of the other founders were close. In the years that followed, the socialist tendency largely dominated the organization’s membership and conceptual orientation. Among its numerous initiatives in social and cultural spheres, the Asilo Mariuccia and the Ufficio Indicazione ed Assistenza for unemployed and indigent women achieved especial significance. A common feature of these institutions, and of the UFN as a whole, was a decidedly laicist outlook.95

and numerous other social organizations in Milan, did not see the project to fruition. However, her husband, the banker Alberto Vonwiller, was a founder member of the UFN; see Gaballo, Il nostro dovere, 25. 93 Unione Femminile, “Programma istitutivo (1899),” Archivio UFN, b.1, fasc. 1: costituzione in cooperativa (1899–1905). 94 See the letter from Rignano Sullam to Majno, 1899 (undated), Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 10, fasc. 1. 95 The Asilio Mariuccia, founded in 1902 by members of the UFN in Milan, which

provided housing, education, and employment opportunities to girls and young women at risk of becoming prostitutes, was named after Ersilia Majno’s daughter, who had died a few months previously of diptheria at just thirteen years old, on Nina Rignano Sullam’s explicit request. On the UFN’s most successful and best-known project, see Buttafuoco A., Le Mariuccine. Storia di un’istituzione laica. L’asilo Mariuccia (Milan: Angeli, 1985).

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From its foundation in 1899 to its violent end in January 1939, the number of Jewish members of the UFN was disproportionately high.96 Not only Rignano Sullam but Jewish feminists in general found the UFN to be their most fertile ground for involvement in the contemporary Italian women’s movement. For these women, its programmatic laicism was one of the most important preconditions for participation. As was the case for the pioneers of the Italian women’s movement, Sara Levi Nathan and Adele Della Vida Levi, a distinctly anti-clerical and anti-Catholic attitude was also often to be found among younger Jewish feminists. As well as Nina Rignano Sullam, this was also the case, for example, for Ersilia Majno’s friend, the Florentine social worker Bice Cammeo (1875–1961), who was active both in the Asilo Mariuccia and the Ufficio Indicazione ed Assistenza.97 The enrollment of Jewish women can be observed relatively precisely for the period between 1899 and 1938 based on the largely complete surviving membership lists and yearly admissions. About a third of new members on average each year were of Jewish origins; in individual years, such as 1907 and 1908, they even comprised half of the new members.98

On the establishment and development of the UFN, see Bartoloni S. (ed.), Attraversando il tempo. Centoventi anni dell’Unione femminile nazionale (1899–2019) (Rome: Viella, 2019); Gabelli, Il nostro dovere; Imprenti F., Alle origini dell’Unione Femminile. Idee, progetti e reti internazionali all’inizio del Novecento (Milan: Biblion, 2012); Buttafuoco A., “Solidarietà, Emancipazionismo, Cooperazione. Dall’Associazione Generale delle Operaie all’Unione Femminile Nazionale,” in Fabbri F. (ed.), L’Audacia insolente. La cooperazione femminile 1886–1986 (Venice: Marsilio, 1986), 79–110; D’Amico F., Per l’elevazione materiale e morale della donna e del genere umano. L’Unione Femminile Nazionale di Milano dall’impegno sociale allo scioglimento (1908–1939) (Tesi di Laurea in Storia e documentazione storica), Università degli Studi di Milano, Anno accademico 2009/2010. 96 See also Novelli-Glaab, “Zwischen Tradition und Moderne,” 114; Buttafuoco, “Nina Rignano Sullam,” 151. 97 On the educated Florentine Bice Cammeo, a sister of the jurist Federico Cammeo (1872–1939), who was also friends with Laura Orvieto and Amelia Rosselli, see Guarnieri P., “Tra Milano e Firenze. Bice Cammeo a Ersilia Majno per l’Unione Femminile,” in Angelini G., Tesoro M. (eds.), De Amicitia. Scritti dedicati a Arturo Colombo (Milan: Angeli, 2006), 504–515; ead., Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism. From Florence to Jerusalem and New York (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 110. 98 See Archivio UFN, b. 2 fasc. 8: Domande di adesione – 1 (1905–1910), fasc. 9: Domande di adesione – 2 (1911–1920), fasc. 10: Domande di adesione – 3 (1921– 1956). The numbers would be even higher if one accounted for more unknown members

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In contrast, the documents of the decidedly more conservative Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane (CNDI) reveal quite a different picture.99 Although this organization, founded in Rome in 1903 and influenced by women from the Italian aristocracy like Gabriella Spalletti Rasponi (1853–1931) also counted Jewish women among its members, they played a markedly smaller role, especially in the CNDI’s headquarters at Rome, than in Milan’s UFN. The latter’s ideological orientation clearly created a context in which Jewish–non-Jewish encounters and connections could take place more frequently from the end of the nineteenth century onward, but here too there are traces of a secular Jewish subculture. The comparison between the UFN and the CNDI suggests the conclusion that the sociopolitical climate of the Lombard metropolis was more amenable to the social involvement of Jewish women than the culture at Rome, strongly influenced by the Catholic Church, where the ghetto was only opened up in 1870.100 One of the central motivations for the remarkable, continuous influx of Jewish activists into the UFN was certainly its orientation to the concept, shaped largely by Nina Rignano Sullam, of the sort of “political philanthropy” that has already been seen in Paolina Schiff’s activities. Instead of limiting itself to mere donations, the UFN began the work of combining benevolence with modern social work based upon the latest scientific insights and offering needy people help through self-help. Similarly to the German context, the crux of this development can be discerned in the Jewish principle of social justice, which represented a clear departure from the traditional nineteenth-century philanthropy through active sociopolitical engagement.101 Buttafuoco’s thesis that it was Jewish actors who introduced the idea of “political philanthropy,” increasingly central with non-Jewish or “neutral” surnames who nonetheless had Jewish mothers. But the admission protocols only include the father’s first and last names. 99 On the history of the CNDI, see Taricone, L’Associazionismo femminile, 21–50. 100 On the socialist-oriented culture of contemporary Milan, see Cicalese M. L., “Ori-

entamenti culturali e idealità pedagogiche nella Milano del primo Novecento,” in Alfassio Grimaldi U. et al. (eds.), La cultura milanese e l’università popolare negli anni 1901– 1927 (Milan: Angeli, 1983), 191–231. On the socialist tendency of the contemporary Milanese women’s organizations, including the UFN, specifically, see Imprenti F., Operaie e socialismo. Milano, le leghe femminili, la Camera del lavoro (1891–1918) (Milan: Angeli, 2007). 101 See Kaplan, Jüdisches Bürgertum, 262–274; on the development of Jewish philanthropy between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Italy, France, and England,

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in the general Italian women’s emancipation discourse from the end of the 1890s onward, seems thoroughly convincing in the light of the biographies presented here.102 Nina Rignano Sullam Between Jewish Family Identity and Secular Engagement Nina Costanza Sullam was born on July 14, 1871, in Milan, a good ten years after the Jewish emancipation laws had been extended to Lombardy. Her father, Giuseppe Sullam (1842–1927), who came from Venice, was a well-respected engineer and president of Milan’s Jewish community from 1912 to 1920. Her mother, Bice Pisa (1849–1905), was a sister of the prominent philanthropist Ugo Pisa, who had supported Paolina Schiff’s maternity insurance fund.103 Knowledge of her family context enables a deep-rooted understanding of Nina Rignano Sullam’s lifelong commitment to serving the welfare of the community—the home in which she grew up was not only wealthy and educated but also religious and community oriented. Although the protagonist, like Paolina Schiff, in all likelihood became an atheist in adulthood,104 she must have received a religious education and have been well acquainted with Milan’s community institutions, kindergarten, and schools. It is interesting to note that later, Rignano Sullam found her prime sphere of activity in the UFN’s laicist Asilo Mariuccia, but she also bequeathed a generous portion of her will to the Asilo Israelitico

see Levi D’Ancona L., “‘Notabili e Dame’ nella Filantropia Ebraica Ottocentesca. Casi di Studio in Francia, Italia e Inghilterra,” in: Armani, Schwarz, Ebrei borghesi, 741–776. 102 See Buttafuoco, “Nina Rignano Sullam,” 151. 103 On the extended Sullam family, see the documents in CDEC Milano, Fondo Angelo

Sullam, b. 1, fasc. 1: Carte di Famiglia Sullam 1866–1978. On Giuseppe Sullam’s work as community president, see CDEC Milano, Fondo Comunità Ebraica di Milano, b. 3, fasc. 9; Corrispondenza 1912–1920. The author also thanks Simon Levis Sullam (Venice) for valuable information about Nina Rignano Sullam’s family and kinship connections. One of her cousins was the jurist Angelo Sullam (1881–1971), who was president of the Jewish community in Venice from 1919 to 1929 and an important representative of Italian Zionism. 104 As assumed by Buttafuoco, “Nina Rignano Sullam,” 144.

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in Milan.105 Like the vast majority of contemporary Jewish protagonists of the Italian women’s movement, she also married a Jew. In 1897, the then twenty-five-year-old Nina Sullam married the educated engineer from Livorno, Eugenio Rignano (1870–1930), who made her acquainted with the democratic socialism of contemporary Milan.106 The fact that this was a love marriage, not a match arranged by the parents, emerges from the words of a close friend of Nina’s: “Eugenio Rignano [was] the chosen, beloved companion of her life.”107 The intellectual inspiration and ideological and material support that Nina Rignano Sullam received from Eugenio were central preconditions for her social involvement.108 Rignano’s autorizzazione maritale of April 1905 is also preserved, with which the engineer, with notarial authorization, gave his wife Nina the unconditional permission to participate officially in any kind of organization. A husband’s dispensation of this sort was a legal requirement at the time and was thus the formal prerequisite for involvement in the organized women’s movement, in case such involvement went beyond pure donations or ideological support109 (Fig. 4.1). 105 The decidedly laicist orientation of the Asilo Mariuccia was the explicit wish of Rignano Sullam herself, due especially to her misgivings toward Catholic educational institutions. Buttafuoco points to the activist’s “strong ties” with the Jewish community, which reveal her deep-seated Jewish self-consciousness; Buttafuoco, Le Mariuccine, 36, 388. 106 Eugenio Rignano studied engineering in Turin and settled in Milan after graduation. An adherent of positivism, Rignano was also trained in biology, psychology, and theoretical philosophy. The engineer joined the PSI, but he was mostly engaged with the theoretical foundations of the socialist movement; he espoused a democratic socialism and belonged to Osvaldo Gnocchi Viani’s group in Milan. In 1901, Rignano supported the foundation of Milan’s adult education center and was its president for a long time. He was also involved in the Società Umanitaria and, in 1907, founded the journal Rivista di Scienza. On Rignano, see Mosetti P., Tacchinardi D., “Società Umanitaria e UPM. I Protagonisti,” in Alfassio Grimaldi et al., La cultura milanese, 240–250. 107 Archivio UFN, Serie 1.2: Organi amministrativi, Sottoserie 1.2.2.3: Necrologi e commemorazioni, b. 3, fasc. 14: commemorazione di Nina Rignano Sullam 1948. 108 For example, Nina Rignano Sullam’s obituary reads, “Eugenio Rignano died in 1931. His spirit remained alive in the empty house; his scholarly and philosophical works lived on… Nina… gathered all these; so long as she lived she remained loving and attentive [toward this heritage], gave it due care, even at the expense of her own needs and at personal sacrifice”; ibid. 109 Autorizzazione maritale generale concessa da Eugenio Rignano alla moglie Nina Rignano Sullam, April 5, 1905, Archivio UFN, Serie 1.5.1. Diritti delle donne, b. 8, fasc. 55: Condizione giuridica della donna: attività pro legge Sacchi per l’abolizione

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Fig. 4.1 Nina Rignano Sullam, circa 1910

The Jewish friendship and family networks within the UFN, which grew steadily from 1899 onward, can largely be traced back to the group around Rignano Sullam. The tight connection between the Pisa and Sullam families was based, as in many other Italian-Jewish families, on cousin marriages. Her grandmother on her father’s side was Costanza Pisa (for whom Nina received her second name), a daughter of the prominent banker Zaccaria Pisa; her uncle on her mother’s side was the senator Ugo Pisa, the most important supporter of Milan’s Società Umanitaria and the maternity fund. His sister-in-law Antonietta Pisa Rizzi was among

dell’autorizzazione maritale. The husband’s permission as prerequisite for activity within organizations was finally abolished in Italy by the Sacchi Law in 1919. The UFN and the Milanese adult education center, likely encouraged by Eugenio Rignano, also championed this legislation; see the joint meeting on the draft Sacchi Law in Archivio UFN, b. 8, fasc. 55.

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the founders and most influential members of the UFN. One of the senator’s daughters, Fanny Norsa Pisa (1884–1958), who would become the president of the welfare organization Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia during the fascist dictatorship, was already active in UFN in its early days.110 Her sister, Vittoria Cantoni Pisa, also joined the UFN in 1910; she joined the Zionist Movement in the early 1920s and became chairwoman of the ADEI in the 1930s (Fig. 4.2). The personal connections and influential position of the Sullam and Pisa families in the welfare sphere in Milan played an important role in the recruitment of additional suitable activists for the women’s organization. The connections of Eugenio Rignano, who was president of the newly founded adult education center at the time, doubtless also helped to establish the UFN in Lombard-Jewish intellectual circles. Eugenio himself became an official member of the UFN in 1908, as can be seen from the membership lists.111 The continually increasing number of Jewish members and supporters of the UFN from its beginnings onward, who also included members of the closely knit, eminent Treves, Finzi, and Cantoni families,112 was among other things a consequence of the remarkable family identity of Italian Jews, which contributed within the UFN and elsewhere to the development of a secular subculture. There is no precise information as to where Nina Rignano Sullam studied or to her teachers. However, her parents must have given the gifted girl a broad and modern education with special attention to intercultural competencies, alongside the transmission of Jewish learning. Her correspondence with Majno reveals, besides a comprehensive general 110 On the Pisa-Sullam kinship relationships, see Maifreda G., Gli ebrei e l’economia milanese. L’Ottocento (Milan: Angeli, 2000), 139; on Ugo and Fanny Norsa Pisa’s support for the Opera Maternità, see Associazione donne ebree d’Italia (ed.), Dalla nascita ai giorni nostri. Breve storia della Federazione italiana della Wizo (Milano: Associazione donne ebree d’Italia, 1971). 13. On Fanny Norsa Pisa, see Beatrice Pisa’s entry in Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 881 f. 111 See the membership application form of April 8, 1908, Archivio UFN, b. 2, fasc. 8: Domande di adesione – 1 (1905–1910). 112 Virginia Treves Tedeschi, Ada Treves Segre, and Bianca Arbib Finzi joined the UFN

between 1905 and 1908, joined by Elisa Treves Treves in 1909 and Vittoria Cantoni Pisa in 1910. All of them later became central activists in the women’s organization; they campaigned among other things for women’s voting rights, women’s education, and the national maternity funds; see the relevant enrollment documents in Archivio UFN, b. 2. fasc. 8: Domande di adesione – 1 (1905–1910).

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Fig. 4.2 Bice Cammeo, Ersilia Majno, and Antonietta Pisa Rizzi on the terrace of the Unione Femminile Nazionale, circa 1900

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education and a special interest in pedagogical and juristic issues, an outstanding knowledge of foreign languages. In addition to Italian, her mother tongue, Rignano Sullam spoke at least three other languages fluently: German, English, and French.113 It is most probable that before her marriage, she made several educational journeys within Europe. One of her cousins studied in Berlin and sent her German newspapers from there, as she mentions in a letter.114 As was also the case for Sara Levi Nathan and Paolina Schiff, Nina Rignano Sullam’s education and linguistic competence constituted important preconditions for her increasingly leading role within the organized women’s movement as an international networker and communicator of ideas. For this, she made greatest use of the written word. Rignano Sullam seems not to have possessed the distinctive self-confidence, the fascination, and the public impact that must have been effected by Mazzini’s companion, Levi Nathan, and Cavallotti’s trusted friend, Schiff. She herself described her character as “lively, sometimes rebellious, and quick tempered,” but at the same time, she confessed to having little trust in her own abilities and to being often tormented by self-doubt.115 In another place, she spoke of her “thinking organism,”116 likely in reference to her sometimes introverted, contemplative manner. At the same time, her letters reveal an impressive optimism, along with steadfastness and creativity, which were tangible in her projects and inspiring to her colleagues. Transnational Perspectives: English Settlements, German Education Policy, and the International Struggle Against the Trade in Girls Like Paolina Schiff, Rignano Sullam saw training in a profession, which could help financially insecure women to earn an income, as one of the most important prerequisites for female emancipation. She sought to put

113 See Buttafuoco, “Nina Rignano Sullam,” 144; D’Amico, Nina Rignano Sullam, 8. 114 See Nina Rignano Sullam’s letter to Ersilia Majno of September 12, ca. 1906

(undated), Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 10, fasc. 1. 115 See the letter to Ersilia Majno, ca. 1904 (undated), Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 10, fasc. 1. 116 Rignano Sullam to Majno, ca. 1905 (undated), Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 10, fasc. 1.

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these ideas into practice in the Asilo Mariuccia. Regarding her own situation, this married, childless actor, who lived in wealthy conditions and did not practice a profession (in her official application to the UFN, she left “profession” blank),117 clearly saw the area of secular welfare as the long-desired sphere in which to actualize her individual capacities and her independence as a woman. In keeping with this, Sullam placed great emphasis on the education of Italian feminists, most of whom, like herself, had received a comprehensive, generally humanities-oriented education but seemed to her, in comparison with those elsewhere in Europe, to be insufficiently prepared for the implementation of effective social work. Professional instruction in fundamental legal knowledge, especially of the various labor and social laws in Europe, was, in her eyes, urgently necessary. She wrote to Majno: If Italian women wish to work with the same efficiency and the same recognition as their European friends, they really must be better prepared in the relevant areas. Experience and practice are not sufficient; we need a little culture, and indeed, in this area; not the classical and literary culture fabricated in the classrooms. – A course that starts with an introduction to general questions, then gradually [elucidates] the labor laws in various countries, the forms of [social] security, social assistance, philanthropy… the organization of charitable organizations and the laws that govern them; the progress in other countries compared to our own, etc.; and all this in the form… of a true and real teaching, not concentrated into the brief span of a single lecture.118

Nina Rignano Sullam thus initiated a course of studies given by Italian jurists in the Unione’s premises beginning, at the latest, in 1908.119 It is likely that Rignano Sullam’s call for a continuous course of studies in seminar form was also influenced by her identification with the methods

117 See Rignano Sullam’s membership application in Archivio UFN, b. 2, fasc. 8: Domande di adesione – 1 (1905–1910). 118 Rignano Sullam to Majno, November 17, ca. 1900 (undated), Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 10, fasc. 1. 119 Archivio UFN, Serie 1.4. Attività culturali e formative, b. 7, fasc. 49: Corso giuridico sulle Condizioni della donna nel Codice, sulla legislazione scolastia e delle opere pie e sulla legislazione del lavoro; 27/3/1908; programma a stampa e invito alla prolusione del professor E. Porro.

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of the Milanese adult education center, still in its early days, which Eugenio Rignano led at the time. Sullam did not only follow the women’s rights discourse and the development of social legislation in Italy; she was also well informed about the situation in other European countries through her reading of foreign newspapers and publications. Her lively interest in juristic questions was likely encouraged by her husband, Eugenio, who at the time was heavily involved in contemporary jurisprudence, especially regarding the reform of inheritance law.120 Nina became a catalyst for cultural transfer within the UFN—she consciously drew on initiatives and concepts from the international discourse and communicated them to her colleagues in order to explore with them the potential for new legislation and methods to combat social problems and to improve the education system within their own national context. It was Rignano Sullam who acquainted Italian activists with the Settlement Movement that started in London in 1884; in a well-researched article published in 1901 in the journal Unione Femminile, she elucidated the English concept of settlement for her readership and called for the establishment of similar settlement homes for the sake of public welfare and to educate socially disadvantaged people.121 The basic thinking behind the Settlement Movement, which quickly spread from England to many other countries from the 1880s onwards, and had attracted especial interest in the USA, involved a special form of social activity: people from privileged social strata were to settle in places where poor people lived, in order to work together with them as neighbors and to provide them with knowledge, education, and support in seeking employment and in the area of healthcare. The Settlement Movement in England and the USA was galvanized especially by feminists from the 1880s onward.122 Rignano Sullam must have learned of the settlements through her extensive reading of foreign newspapers, but perhaps also through her

120 See D’Amico, Nina Rignano Sullam, 8. 121 Rignano Sullam, “Che Cosa sono i Settlements inglesi?” Unione Femminile I, 3–4

(1901). 122 On the origins of the Settlement Movement in England and its female followers, see Bentley Beauman K., Women and the Settlement Movement (London, New York: Radcliffe Press, 1996); for the American context, see among others Hutchinson Crocker R., Social Work and Social Order. The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

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family connections in England. Notably, a similar conception was behind the idea of a house as the focal point of the UFN. The intentions of the Settlement Movement were manifested especially clearly in the Ufficio Indicazione ed Assistenza created by the UFN in 1900. The institution’s goal was to provide indigent individuals with an orientation in the complex Italian bureaucracy to support their applications for state subsidies. In addition, the Ufficio Indicazione ed Assistenza filed complaints with the police in cases of criminality, prostitution, alcoholism, etc., which were brought to its attention by persons seeking help. In a short time, the office had become a point of contact for unemployed, sick, old, and mistreated people, especially women.123 The Ufficio’s workers included pioneers of the UFN like Elisa Boschetti, Carla Gadola Lancini, and Larissa Boschetti Pini, but the institution’s soul was Nina Rignano Sullam, who adopted the humanitarian concept of the Settlement Movement and always had an open ear for needy people.124 In issues regarding social work, education, and training, Sullam was generally oriented toward current international developments. In a letter to Majno, for example, she reported on a newspaper article about the Pestalozzi schools in Germany that she wanted to publish in the UFN’s journal. The reform-pedagogical ideas of the Swiss Pestalozzi would thus be communicated to Italian women also.125 In another place, she described the Prussian welfare education law, enacted in 1900, in even more detail, which she considered worth striving for in Italy too: I have read in the German newspapers about a law that has been promulgated this year in Germany and is called the Fürsorgeerziehungsgesetz. It is a law for the protection of children and youth from birth to eighteen years old that charges the state with the duty to oversee all orphans, neglected children, and those growing up in corrupt conditions, and to provide for

123 On the goals and content of the institution, see Relazione degli Uffici Indicazioni e Assistenza (1907–1908–1909), Archivio UFN, b. 9, fasc. 62. 124 See D’Amico, Nina Rignano Sullam, 16–18. 125 Her cousin who studied in Berlin had provided her with this article; see Rignano

Sullam to Majno, November 17, ca. 1900 (undated), Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 10, fasc. 1.

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their education. Apparently forty to fifty thousand children in Prussia alone have been placed under state protection.126

The cultural heritage of the pioneer Sara Levi Nathan was clearly present in Rignano Sullam’s ideal of fair education and training, especially for socially disadvantaged groups. The acute problem of the trade in women and girls, which had developed into a central theme of the Italian women’s rights discourse through the efforts of Mazzini’s companion, was also one of Nina Rignano Sullam’s most important concerns. Her committed involvement in this area matched the thoroughly international effort of feminists in general, and Jewish feminists in particular, in favor of abolitionism. One of the most important activists in this sphere at the time was Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), who founded the Jüdischer Frauenbund in 1904 in Berlin and worked throughout her life for institutions which, like the Asilo Mariuccia, strove to deter the trade in girls through social work on behalf of young women who were at risk due to poverty. The founding, in 1907, of the home for single mothers in NeuIsenburg in Hesse was one of the most important concrete results of this effort.127 It is most likely that Rignano Sullam, with her generally good knowledge of the international situation, became aware of the initiatives of German-Jewish feminists to protect girls at risk of prostitution and drew inspiration from them for projects of her own.

126 Nina Rignano Sullam to Ersilia Majno, ca. 1900 (undated), Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 10, fasc. 1 (emphasis in original). On the Prussian welfare education law, see among others Nitsch M., Private Wohltätigkeitsvereine im Kaiserreich. Die praktische Umsetzung der bürgerlichen Sozialreform in Berlin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), 191. Due to her unreservedly positive estimation of the legislation, Nina Rignano Sullam was unaware that its practical implementation was beset with serious problems. In fact, the mere “risk” of neglect was often sufficient grounds for referral to state welfare educational institutions. This was not only determined when parents neglected or mistreated their children, but even when parents or children demonstrated behavior that was not socially conforming or “civil.” In this case too, which was based on the subjective assessment of the authorities, there were grounds for admission to public education; see Kuhlmann C., “So erzieht man keinen Menschen!” Lebens- und Berufserinnerungen aus der Heimerziehung der 50er und 60er Jahre (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), 12. 127 On the founder of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, see among others Konz B., Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936). Ein Leben für jüdische Tradition und weibliche Emanzipation (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2005). On the girls’ home, see Heubach H., Das Heim des jüdischen Frauenbundes in Neu-Isenburg 1907–1942 (Neu-Isenburg: Stadt NeuIsenburg, 1986); Schröder I., “Grenzgängerinnen,” 359.

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So, the establishment of the Comitato contro la tratta delle bianche (Committee against the White Female Slave Trade), which came into being in 1901 under the auspices of the UFN, was also largely due to Nina Rignano Sullam and Ersilia Majno. The surviving documents detail the Milanese committee’s decades-long, continuous activity on the national and international levels, including participation in congresses in London, Madrid, Paris, and elsewhere, interrogation of juristic questions regarding prostitution and the trade in women, as well as the discussion of concrete possibilities for the protection of orphaned, indigent, and abandoned girls, which resulted in the founding of the Asilo Mariuccia in 1902.128 This was the area in which Rignano Sullam was most strongly able to express her identification with the contemporary laicist women’s rights discourse and, at the same time, her solidarity with the approach of the Italian-Jewish communities contro la tratta delle bianche. The struggle against the “white female slave trade” was a central concern for Jewish institutions in Italy, through whose ports the trade was often trafficked.129 It is clear from the relevant documents in the archive of the Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane that there was a great degree of overlap between the involvement of Jewish community representatives and that of members of the UFN; the Unione’s leadership maintained ties both with the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls, headquartered in London, and with the laicist UFN’s Comitato italiano contro la tratta delle bianche.130 In all likelihood, these connections were facilitated 128 Archivio UFN, Sottoserie 1.5.3: Assistenza sociale (1891, 1901–1951), b. 10, fasc. 63: Comitato contro la tratta delle bianche. On the Committee against the White Female Slave Trade. See also Schettini L., “Il comitato italiano contro la tratta. Impegno locale e reti internazionali,” in Bartoloni, Attraversando il tempo, 37–60. 129 The relevant documents in the archive of the Unione della Comunità Ebraiche

Italiane (henceforth UCEI) reveal in particular the personal involvement of the Chief Rabbi of Genoa’s Jewish community, Giuseppe Sonnino. The Italian port city had an especially serious problem with the trade in girls and women; see Sonnino to Sereni (president of the Comitato delle Comunità Israelitiche italiane Roma), December 29, 2012; UCEI, Fondo “Attività del Consorzio delle Comunità Israelitiche Italiane fino al 1924,” b. IV, fasc.18: “Tratta delle bianche.” 130 Evidence for their good relationship can be found in the fact that in 1913, in the lead-up to an international congress on the “Suppression of the White Slave Traffic” in London, the leadership of the Union of Jewish Communities, based in Rome, even consulted with Ersilia Majno, then chairwoman of Milan’s Committee against the White Female Slave Trade, about which Italian representative to send to London; see the letters

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by Rignano Sullam’s Jewish origins and the generally strong presence of Jewish women in the UFN, all the more so considering that the community’s documents show no evidence of other connections with Italian women’s organizations such as the CNDI. The “political philanthropists” of the UFN thus became the link between the Jewish and the general abolitionist movements. Nina Rignano Sullam’s creative work was a successful continuation of the commitment inaugurated by Sara Levi Nathan to education and abolitionism. As was the case for Mazzini’s companion, Rignano Sullam’s work on behalf of women took place in a laicist context. The UFN’s ideological position was an important precondition for the participation of Rignano Sullam, and of Jewish activists in general, in the organized women’s movement. At the same time, however, the UFN’s distinctive orientation toward laicism, education, and abolitionism, in combination with modern social work, must also be interpreted as a consequence of the above-average participation of Jewish women, whose cultural heritage influenced the institution. Nina Rignano Sullam’s biography thus reflects not only the progressive emancipation of Italian-Jewish women but also the continuation of a Jewish identity which was increasingly separate from religion but preserved a vibrant existence within interpersonal connections and social concepts. She integrated herself in the nondenominational women’s movement of the Italian unitary state, but at the same time, remained rooted in Jewish family networks and within the organized Jewish society.

4.2

Jewish Women, Catholic Women, Antisemitism Catholic Hostilities Between Anti-Judaism and Anti-Laicism

In the foreword to his Pagine ebraiche, Arnaldo Momigliano, both of whose parents were murdered in the Shoah, wrote that “this gigantic of Samuel Cohen, secretary of the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, to Emilio Sereni (May 11, 1913), Ersilia Majno to Anselmo Colombo (June 18, 1913), and Emilio Sereni to Claude G. Montefiore (Rome, June 24, 1913): UCEI, Fondo “Attività del Consorzio delle Comunità Israelitiche Italiane fino al 1924,” b. IV, fasc. 18: “Tratta delle bianche.” On the significance of the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women for the Jewish women’s movement in Great Britain, see Tananbaum S., “Jewish Feminist Organisations in Britain and Germany at the Turn of the Century,” in Brenner M. et al. (eds.), Two Nations. British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 375, 381–383.

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crime would never have happened, had… an indifference toward Jewish fellow citizens, nurtured for centuries, not predominated. This indifference was the end product of the hostility of the Church, which considered “conversion” the sole solution to the Jewish problem.”131 The role played by Italian women in the creation, maintenance, and radicalization of Catholic antisemitism as referred to by Momigliano is still largely unknown. The disproportionately high level of participation of Jewish women in the movimento femminile nazionale has pushed the question of the existence and manifestations of antisemitic prejudices among Italian-Catholic women into the background.132 The relevant historiography has therefore remained in the grip of the predominant narrative whereby antisemitism did not exist in Italy before 1938.133 Italian women seem to have been uninvolved with anti-Jewish thoughts and actions. At first glance, the massive influence exercised by female Jewish activists such as the above-discussed Nina Rignano Sullam on the UFN, the most important organization of the early Italian women’s movement, supports this concept of an untarnished relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish female activists in liberal Italy. But this superficial perspective does not do justice to the distinctive laicism and socialist orientation of the UFN.134 Instead, the kind of differentiated evaluation of Jewish–non-Jewish relationships within and around the early Italian women’s movement that would reveal evidence of the existence of antisemitic tendencies really requires the conscious intention to include contemporary Catholic 131 Arnaldo Momigliano, Pagine ebraiche, ed. By S. Berti (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), XXXI. 132 An exception within the relevant women’s and gender history is the contribu-

tion of Liviana Gazzetta, “Tra antiebraismo e antifemminismo. Temi dell’intransigentismo cattolico in Italia tra’800 e’900,” Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa 85–86 (2014): 209– 228. Furthermore, Maria Teresa Sega also refers to antisemitic events in her study of the “twofold emancipation” of Jewish women in the Veneto; see Sega M. T., “Percorsi di emancipazione tra Otto e Novecento,” in Filippini, Donne sulla scena pubblica, 203 f. 133 In the postwar period, there were even some Jewish actors who contributed to this narrative of an Italian society devoid of antisemitism before 1938 due to subjective, altered recollection processes; see Wyrwa, “Antisemitismus,” 87; Baumeister, “Ebrei fortunati?” 44 f. 134 For example, Bettin stresses the close connections between the ADEI, founded in 1927 in Milan, and “sympathetic Catholic women like Ersilia Majno” without acknowledging the socialist orientation of the longtime president of the UFN and the women’s union’s decidedly laicist outlook; see Bettin C., Italian Jews from Emancipation to the Racial Laws (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 109.

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institutions and their female protagonists in the research. Additionally, it is essential to be aware of the link between anti-Judaism and antilaicism that was central to the Italian context—without this, it would be impossible to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the stance of female Catholic activists and how they viewed Jewish women. This strategy makes it possible both to examine exclusion strategies on the part of Catholic women and to shed new light on the deeper reasons for the remarkably strong orientation of Jewish women toward the laicist organizations. At present, only a few sporadic studies on antisemitism in the Italian unitary state between 1861 and 1922 have been published. Little research has yet been done on the question of a possible continuity of antisemitic attitudes and discourses from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries up until fascism.135 However, there is scholarly consensus on the fact that anti-Jewish prejudices in Italy’s political and cultural tradition essentially originated among Catholics. In his work on antisemitism in liberal Italy, Ulrich Wyrwa too has stressed the importance of the Catholic Church in the creation and development of modern antisemitism in Italy.136 AntiJewish prejudices in the Italian unitary state manifested primarily in the form of Catholic anti-Judaism: the rejection of Judaism for largely religious reasons, including traditional calumnies related to ritual murder, usury, and conspiracy.137 However, the boundary between this and a

135 See especially Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder; id., “Antisemitismus”; id.,

Come si crea l’antisemitismo. La stampa cattolica italiana fra Otto e Novecento: Mantova, Milano, Venezia (Florence: Giuntina, 2020). See also Canepa A. M., “Cattolici ed ebrei nell’Italia liberale (1870–1915),” Communità 179 (1978): 43–109; id., “Reflections on Antisemitism in Liberal Italy,” The Wiener Library Bulletin 31 (1978): 104–111; Toscano M., “L’uguaglianza senza diversità. Stato, società e questione ebraica nell’Italia liberale,” in id. (ed.), Ebraismo e Antisemitismo in Italia: Dal 1848 alla guerra dei sei giorni (Milan: Angeli, 2003), 24–47; Pavan I., “L’impossibile rigenerazione. Ostilità antiebraiche nell’Italia liberale (1873–1913),” Storia e problemi contemporanei 50 (2009): 34–67; Levis Sullam S., “I critici e i nemici dell’emancipazione degli ebrei,” in Flores M. et al. (eds.), Storia della Shoah in Italia. Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni (Turin: UTET, 2010), 37– 61. Levis Sullam discusses the continuity of antisemitic discourses in Europe in general in L’archivio antiebraico. Il linguaggio dell’antisemitismo moderno (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2008). 136 See Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche “Antisemitismus,” 97–100, 104.

Konfliktfelder,

266–275,

366–369;

id.,

137 See Miccoli G., “Santa Sede, questione ebraica e antisemitismo fra Otto e Novecento,” in id., Antisemitismo e cattolicesimo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013), 39–264.

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racial form of antisemitism was often fluid.138 In particular, the periodical La Civiltà Cattolica, which functioned as the official mouthpiece of the Vatican, the Jesuits, and conservative Catholic circles in liberal Italy, often made reference to the Jewish “race” in its attacks on Jews and on Judaism. An especially blatant example occurs in an article from 1893, in which the Jesuit Rafaele Ballerini proclaimed, “This race of Jews does not belong to Italy.”139 Another relevant feature of the anti-Jewish discourse in the Italian unitary state besides these partially biological influences, however, is its frequent co-occurrence with a marked degree of anti-laicism. As can be seen in the contemporary Catholic press, the critique of the liberal, laicist state is in many cases accompanied by hostility toward the Jews, who were now equal and upwardly mobile citizens. The emancipated “Jew” now became a new bogeyman, the epitome of the kind of modernity against which intransigent Catholics crusaded. It is not by chance that polemical, anti-Jewish texts often also contain attacks on another religious minority that now had equal rights: the Protestants. Finally, anti-Jewish and antiProtestant attacks were also directed against the laicist conception of the liberal Italian state as such, the freedom of religion and conscience, and the separation of Church and State.140 It can be established that propaganda hostile to Jews did in fact exist in the Italian unitary state, often combined with pronounced anti-laicism, which runs counter to the traditional picture of a society completely untouched by antisemitism. However, crucially, in contrast to the situation in other European countries, anti-Jewish expressions had no influence on the political culture of liberal Italy. By shunning political life and excluding itself from the nation, the Catholic Church gave

138 On the close connection between religious anti-Judaism and secular, biological antisemitism in the Italian context, see Caffiero M., Storia degli ebrei nell’Italia moderna, especially 216 f. 139 The article is cited in Lebovitch Dahl, “The Antisemitism of the Italian Catholics,” 11. The fascist “Manifesto della Razza,” published more than four decades later in July, 1938, contains direct parallels to Ballerini’s biological rhetoric. It explicitly maintains that “the Jews do not belong to the Italian race”; see “Il Fascismo e i problemi della razza,” published in Il giornale d’Italia, July 15, 1938, printed in Sarfatti, La Shoah, 133. 140 See Miccoli G., “Antiebraismo, antisemitismo. Un nesso fluttuante,” in id., Brice C. (eds.), Les racines chrétiennes de l’antisemitisme politique (fin XIXe–xXe siècle) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2003), 4 f.

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up its ability to influence political culture in Italy.141 This circumstance makes it even more important to consider social and cultural contexts, in which women were particularly active, in order to evaluate the presence of antisemitic tendencies in the Italian unitary state. The combination of anti-laicism and anti-Judaism evolved into a significant point of conflict in the relationships between Catholic and Jewish female protagonists. As the above biographical investigations have made clear, women of Jewish origins were active primarily in the laicist organizations of the Italian women’s movement. They played a central role in the founding of secular educational institutions and the establishment of reform-pedagogical methods in the areas of education and training, traditionally the domain of Catholic women and the Church. Despite the laicist national concept, Catholicism had great influence, on the Italian school system above all.142 Female actors were important allies for the Church in their support for this process. As religion became feminized to a notable degree in liberal Italy, women, especially from the upper classes, usually retained strong ties to the Church and often became involved in Catholic women’s orders and ecclesiastical unions. The laicist culture of liberal bourgeois men also secured far-reaching influence even after 1861 for the Catholic religion and Church over spheres that were primarily female connoted, including education, family, and welfare.143 When Jewish protagonists like Sara Levi Nathan and Adele Della Vida Levi, who were discussed at the beginning of this study, made personal and conscious efforts on behalf of the foundation of laicist educational institutions in liberal Italy, this should be seen in direct connection with the continued dominance of the Catholic Church in the area of education. Adele Della Vida Levi, who founded Italy’s first Fröbel kindergarten in Venice in 1869, saw the nondenominational kindergartens as a constructive answer to the exclusion of Jewish children still practiced at the time by Catholic institutions. Likewise, in 1873, Sara Levi Nathan created the

141 See Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 9; Wyrwa, “Antisemitismus,” 100. 142 See Janz, “Konflikt,” 242; Chiosso G., “Die Schulfrage in Italien. Volkss-

chulbildung,” in Lill R., Traniello F. (eds.), Der Kulturkampf in Italien und in den deutschsprachigen Ländern (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), 267 f.; Wyrwa, “Antisemitismus,” 100. 143 On the religious attitudes and the feminization of religion in liberal Italy, see Janz, “Konflikt,” 242 f.; Meriggi M., “Soziale Klassen, Institutionen und Nationalisierung im liberalen Italien,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 213.

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nonreligious Scuola Mazzini in Rome’s Trastevere, in which girls were taught moral principles based on Giuseppe Mazzini’s doctrine instead of the catechism. As was shown in Chapter 3, both institutions were subject to hostility from Catholic circles. The critique of the Fröbel Method was notably expressed in contributions to the Civiltà Cattolica.144 It is at least likely that anti-Jewish motivations played a role in the Catholic polemic as well as anti-laicist ones; likewise, in the contemporary German antisemitic discourse, the Fröbel kindergartens were depicted as a dangerous breeding ground for “Jewish internationalism.”145 It is also worth noting that not only did Jewish instigators of laicist institutions like Sara Levi Nathan and Adele Della Vida Levi draw sometimes heavy criticism from Catholic circles, but also female Jewish teachers in public Italian schools, especially in rural regions, were sometimes discriminated against by the local population because of their Jewish origins.146 But even in the big cities, the situation of female Jewish teachers seems not to have always been easy. In several letters to her Florentine cousin Angiolo Orvieto, Emilia Errera (1866–1901),147 who taught Italian at Milan’s Confalonieri grammar school around the turn of the century, expressed her despair over the machinations and harassment she was subjected to, primarily at the hands of the headmistress.148 Unlike her colleagues, who seem to have generally been appointed because of good connections, Errera, who was trained in literature and history, had obtained her position after a regulated, official application process. Within the school’s non-Jewish environment, she was an outsider. This seems to have eventually resulted in direct confrontations—“and I truly rebelled, perhaps for the first time in my life; but only against injustice and deceit, I

144 On the polemic against the Fröbel Method from Catholic circles, see Gazzetta, “Tra antiebraismo e antifemminismo,” 222; Valentini, “La banchiera,” 155; Filippini, “Come tenere pianticelle,” 96, 101. 145 See Schmid, Schmid, Geschichte der Erziehung, 471. 146 See Sega, “Percorsi di emancipazione,” 203. 147 Emilia Errera was born in Trieste. Her father Cesare Errera came from Venice, where she also trained as a teacher. In addition, she studied literature and history at the Istituto di magistero in Florence, with the well-known historian Pasquale Villari among her teachers. On Emilia Errera, see Norsa, “Tre donne,” 42–55. 148 See Emilia Errera’s detailed letters to Angiolo Orvieto of July 12 and August 31, 1900, ACGV, Carte Orvieto, Or. 2.8, 23–24.

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assure you.”149 She urgently pleaded with Angiolo to support her in her efforts to find a position at a different school in Milan. Emilia also relied on the special support of the Jewish senator from Padua, Leone Romanin Jacur (1847–1928), whom she and Angiolo knew very well, due especially to their family ties with Venice. In this way, external hostilities had the effect of creating a strong bond between Emilia Errera, and probably other Jewish teachers who experienced discrimination in the workplace as well, and Jewish family-and-friendship circles. The supposed ease with which Jewish men could gain a professional foothold in liberal Italy was by no means the case to the same degree for Jewish women. Catholic schools and educational institutions in the Italian unitary state now, no doubt, saw themselves as bastions of the Church against laicist institutions and projects that often originated with initiatives by Jewish women. Yet, the potential of liberal Italy’s school system as a breeding ground for anti-Jewish thinking has not been researched up to now. However, the dominant position of Catholicism in the area of education surely raises the question of the possible presence of Catholic anti-Judaism in Italian schools and other educational institutions.150 A case of the deliberate indoctrination of Italian school children in Verona with antisemitic thinking is little known even in specialist circles. On one of the last days of the Carnival there in 1904, teachers (nuns) and students at the Catholic Seghetti girls’ school performed the comedy “La falsa mendicante” (“The False Beggar-woman”), which is riddled with antisemitic stereotypes from ritual murder to the Jewish global conspiracy.151 One of the principal Jewish characters is called Sara Levi, in a likely reference to the well-known anti-clerical women’s rights activist, Sara Levi Nathan. In the foreword, the author—a Catholic priest—wrote: “This theater piece was written to make it clear to Christian families that Judaism is the true social plague of Europe.”152 The Catholic theater had developed into a genre of its own in Italy at the time that was used specifically for pedagogical purposes and in some cases was also leveraged 149 Emilia Errera to Angiolo Orvieto, July 12, 1900, ACGV, Or. 2.8, 23. 150 See also Wyrwa, “Antisemitismus,” 100. 151 This episode is described in detail in Gazzetta, “Tra antiebraismo e antifemminismo,” 223–225; the case is also mentioned in Sega, “Percorsi di emancipazione,” 203; Schächter, The Jews of Italy, 108. 152 Garagnani T., La falsa mendicante. Dramma in cinque atti (Verona: Salesiana, 1891), 7.

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to disseminate antisemitic propaganda. Significantly, two other convent schools also presented theater pieces with antisemitic content, also in 1904, in Rome.153 The Jewish newspaper Il Corriere Israelitico protested vigorously against the anti-Jewish incident in Verona which, to make matters worse, had taken place in an educational setting, and spoke of the Istituto Seghetti’s “clerical-antisemitic propaganda.” The event was also criticized in the liberal Veronese newspaper, L’Adige. The Italian minister of culture, Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando, who found out about the episode, issued a public warning to the school authorities with the instruction to avoid such instances in the future.154 Thus, this event was not only a relevant case of deliberate dissemination of antisemitic thinking at a Catholic girls’ school but also of the contrast between Church and State that still existed at that time. However, the tensions between the liberal governing classes and Catholicism diminished steadily from the turn of the century onward. Jewish–Catholic Relationships From the beginning, relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish female activists within and around the early Italian women’s movement were by no means unproblematic. Documents from the relevant organizations’ archives and personal papers reveal that Jewish protagonists like Amelia Rosselli, Laura Orvieto, Gina Lombroso, and Nina Rignano Sullam were principally rooted in their extensive Jewish family-and-friendship networks, even as members of the nondenominational organizations. As has been made clear above, a strikingly large number of women of Jewish origins, many of whom were related to one another, participated in the UFN, which had close links to the Socialist Party. Jewish women were 153 See Schächter, The Jews of Italy, 144. On the Catholic theater and the contemporary literary depiction of Jews, see among others Pivato S., Clericalismo e laicismo nella cultura popolare italiana (Milan: Angeli, 1990); Canepa A. M., “L’immagine dell’ebreo nel folklore e nella letteratura del postrisorgimento,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel 5–6 (1978): 383–399; Gunzberg L. M., Strangers at Home. Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 154 See Schächter, The Jews of Italy, 108; Gazzetta, “Tra antiebraismo e antifemminismo,” 225; Sega, “Percorsi di emancipazione,” 203. The Vessillo Israelitico termed the event in Verona a scandal; see “Lo scandalo nell’Istituto Seghetti di Verona,” Vessillo Israelitico LII, 3 (March 1904).

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also involved in the more conservative CNDI, but to a significantly lesser extent overall than in the UFN. Regional differences played a decisive role when it came to the CNDI—while Jewish women were scarcely represented at its headquarters in Rome, there was a higher proportion of them within the important Florentine chapter.155 The CNDI aimed at a gradual cultural education of women; in contrast, the UFN stood up for their political and social rights above all. However, the two organizations shared a decidedly laicist orientation, co-created, in the case of the UFN, in significant measure by Jewish activists, which was also an important prerequisite for the active participation of Jewish women in both associations. The pioneers Sara Levi Nathan and Adele Della Vida Levi had already decisively influenced the laicist orientation of the Italian women’s movement in the 1860s and 1870s. Their remarkable degree of anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism was also continued in the following decades in the participation of younger Jewish feminists. While it is probable that large sections of liberal Italy’s bourgeois and elite classes remained more strongly Catholic than has long been assumed,156 Jewish feminists could identify with the official anti-clerical discourse of the Italian unitary state in an immediate and lasting manner. This tendency can be clearly seen in Paolina Schiff’s letters to Felice Cavallotti. In January 1885, for example, she criticized the Italian mentality she perceived as often irrational, since it had been influenced by the Catholic clergy for centuries, and thus could only be opposed through the power of reason: In Italy there exists an embedded, most deeply transmitted priesthood that exerts a lasting influence; it is in the blood of women and men and constitutes the sort of atavism that is like a force of nature. Therefore we need a

155 Jewish women, including Amelia Rosselli, Laura Orvieto, Mary Nathan Puritz, and Ernestine Paper, were numerically strong in the Florentine chapter of the CNDI. At the beginning of the twentieth century, about 10% of the ca. two hundred members of the Tuscan chapter overall were of Jewish origins; see ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 4: Rubriche con elenchi delle socie, domande di adesione e circolari di convocazioni, Elenco delle iscritte alla federazione femminile toscana. 156 See Meriggi, “Soziale Klassen,” 210–213.

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determined defense of the spirit, a lucid and vigilant strength of consciousness, in order not to succumb passively to this deeply rooted mystification of reason.157

The feminization of religion already mentioned, which took place primarily in the upper social classes of liberal Italy, did not apply to the Jewish protagonists of the Italian women’s movement. They continued to be strongly committed to laicism, which, at least in the first decades after the establishment of the state, was mainly espoused by liberal bourgeois men.158 But the laicist and anti-clerical position of Jewish women’s rights activists did not just accord with the official national consciousness of liberal Italy—many of the surviving ego documents express deeply felt, personal resentments toward the Church and the often backward methods of Catholic institutions. The chorus of critics became especially loud in the first decade of the twentieth century. Fanny Luzzatto, an activist from Friuli who trained as a nurse around the turn of the century, wrote in September 1901 that the nuns working in the hospitals were “more concerned with following the rules of the order than those of reason.”159 Bice Cammeo, a member of the UFN from Florence, made negative comments several times in her letters to Ersilia Majno regarding the dominance of the clerical class and congregations in her Tuscan hometown.160 For Ida Cammeo, who was also active in social work, the comprehensive ideological influence of the Catholic Church represented an impediment to the development of reasonable methods for helping socially needy

157 Paolina Schiff to Felice Cavallotti, January 4, 1885, AFF Milano, Fondo Felice

Cavallotti, Corrispondenza 1849–1916. 1. Corrispondenza ricevuta 1860–1898, fasc. Paolina Schiff. 158 On the bipolar gender model in liberal Italy, see Borutta, “La ‘natura’ del nemico,”

135. 159 Fanny Luzzatto to Ersilia Majno, September 15, 1901, Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 12, fasc. 1. Fanny Luzzatto was the sister of the jurist Fabio and the doctor Oscar Luzzatto. The jurist Fabio Luzzatto (1870–1954) was one of the twelve Italian university lecturers who refused the oath to fascism in 1931. 160 See, for example, Cammeo’s letter of August 9, 1907, which takes aim at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and an undated letter in which she harshly criticizes the “clericals” and refers to herself and Majno as “we liberals”; Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 9, fasc. 1.

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women in a manner suitable to the times.161 Again, Amelia Rosselli harbored a deep mistrust for educational homes managed by nuns. It is likely that the antisemitic incidents in the convent schools of Verona and Rome in 1904 served to strengthen this thinking. In Rosselli’s view, the nuns made the girls entrusted to them work for their own purposes and wanted to drive them eventually into the cloister instead of preparing them for a paid profession and an independent existence. In the meeting minutes of the Florentine chapter of the CNDI in January 1910, which records the discussions regarding a necessary reform of Italian educational institutions, one can read, “Rosselli says that in the educational institutions for girls managed by nuns, these often exploit the girls for their labor – for example, they only let them make buttonholes, so that they have not learned the craft completely by the time they leave the institution.”162 It is striking that the number of anti-clerical statements from Jewish women’s rights activists and the emphasis placed on their institutions’ laicist orientation increased in step with a general upswing in the Catholic culture of Italy.163 At the beginning of the twentieth century, a generation arose in Church and State that was no longer influenced by the contradictory foundational concepts of the Italian unitary state.164 Against this background, the tensions between Catholic and Jewish women noticeably increased, especially as the younger Jewish feminists

161 See the letter of Ida Cammeo to Ersilia Majno, May 8, 1906, Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 9, fasc. 1. 162 CNDI, Federazione femminile toscana, Seduta XXXI, January 20, 1910, Archivio Centrale dello Stato (henceforth, ACS), Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3: Verbali delle sedute del Consiglio 1907—December 1914. 163 Although anti-clericalism had already penetrated most of the middle classes and a

significant portion of the working class in the nineteenth century, it never took hold in the majority of the Italian population; see Borutta M., Antikatholizismus. Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 157 f. 164 See Formigoni G., L’Italia dei cattolici. Fede e nazione dal Risorgimento alla Repubblica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 57–76. Marco Meriggi speaks of “multiple Italies” that developed in contradistinction to the liberal Italy after unification, including the Catholic Italy and the reactionary Italy. This “Catholic Italy” achieved increasing significance and influence from the beginning of the twentieth century onward; see Meriggi M., “Die Konstruktion von Staat und Nation. Der Fall Italien,” in Clemens, Späth, 150 Jahre Risorgimento, 20.

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continued to uphold the Risorgimento’s laicist ideal. However, the sociocultural context had changed significantly in comparison to the early years after the state’s foundation. By this point, the Catholics had built up a broad subculture, supported by numerous organizations and unions, which promoted the development of a specifically Catholic national selfconsciousness in Italy. Feminists were increasingly socially marginalized, especially when they were of Jewish origins. In 1906, for example, the Turin city council banned a previously announced course at the Turin adult education center, which was explicitly aimed at women, due to “lack of confidence in the morals associated with the name of the section leader [of the UFN] in Piedmont.”165 The “section leader” was the educated Jewish woman Ada Treves Segre, wife of the prominent doctor Zaccaria Treves, who was mostly involved in treating mentally ill children based on new psychiatric methods and knowledge.166 The conservative Catholic circles of Piedmont’s capital, which had become influential at the local political level as well, must have seen Ada and Zaccaria Treves’s emphasis on science, secularism, and feminism as an ideological danger for devout Catholics, and especially for Catholic women. Over the course of the twentieth century, laicism and anti-clericalism lost their hold over the Italian bourgeoisie in general. They came to be associated, above all, with the radical-republican and socialist worker movements, an orbit that also included the UFN. But even the politically moderate CNDI continued to support the separation of Church and State in its ideological outlook. United Against Jewish and Laicist Women: The “Congresso Nazionale Delle Donne Italiane” of 1908 and the Breakaway of Catholic Women The issues between Catholic women and laicist women, the latter including a considerable number of Jewish women, came to a head in

165 See Ada Treves Segre to Ersilia Majno, November 7, 1906, Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 11, fasc. 6. 166 See Canadelli E., Zocchi P. (eds.), Milano scientifica 1875–1924, Vol. 1 (Milan: Sironi, 2008), 283–288. Zaccaria Treves died of tuberculosis in 1911 at just forty-four years old; his wife Ada and their two sons Marcello and Ugo emigrated to Palestine after the promulgation of the racial laws.

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1908. In April of that year, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane organized the first national women’s congress in Rome.167 The event was opened by the mayor of Rome, Ernesto Nathan, son of the pioneer Sara Levi Nathan, a convicted anti-clericalist, a known freemason, and a spokesman for women’s emancipation.168 The strikingly large group of participants of Jewish origins included Ernesto Nathan’s wife Virginia Mieli and their daughter Mary Nathan Puritz, who was a member of the CNDI’s Florence chapter, Paolina Schiff, Amelia Rosselli, Laura Orvieto, the writer Anna Errera, and the poet Virginia Treves Tedeschi (“Cordelia”), a renowned champion of voting rights for women.169 During the conference, a fierce debate broke out over the position of Catholic religious education in Italian elementary schools. Religious education had been optional in Italy since 1877, but in practice it had generally remained the rule.170 Right before the conference, there had been lively discussions both in parliament and in the contemporary press regarding this contentious issue. When it came to a vote, the Jewish women present closed ranks behind the Milanese socialist Linda Malnati (1855–1921) in support of the elimination of religious education. Alice Hallgarten Franchetti (1874–1911) was the sole Jewish activist to side with the Catholic camp, led by the teacher Adelaide Coari (1881– 1966).171 Meanwhile Eugenia Lebrecht Vitali (1858–1931), a Jew from

167 On the congress, see Willson, “Women,” 36 f.; Boukrif, “Der Schritt über den Rubikon”, 201–203. 168 On Nathan see Levi, Ricordi della vita; Isastia, Storia di una famiglia. 169 Other Jewish participants included Alice Hallgarten Franchetti, Alina Wollemberg,

Maria Levi Della Vida, Luisa Rava, Letizia Maurogonato Pesaro, Pia Sartori Treves, Giulia (?) Ascoli Nathan, Eugenia Lebrecht Vitali, Eugenia Ravà, and Virginia Treves de Leva; see Atti del I Congresso Nazionale delle Donne Italiane (Rome: Stab. Tip. Soc. Ed. Laziale, 1912). 170 See Chiosso, “Die Schulfrage,” 266 f., 296–298. 171 The German-Jewish protagonist Hallgarten Franchetti, born in New York, was

among the few contemporaries of Jewish origins to join with Catholic women, and a few Protestants, in the local so-called Unioni per il bene or Unioni morali, aimed at providing welfare. The first union of its kind was founded in Rome in 1894, and more unions came into existence in the years that followed, in Venice and elsewhere. On these Unioni, see Gazzetta L., “Spiritualità, riforma educativa ed emancipazione femminile. Una rete locale in età giolittiana,” in Chemello A., Finotti F. (eds.), Fogazzaro nel mondo (Vicenza: Accademia Olimpica, 2013), 512–531. In 1901 and 1902, Hallgarten Franchetti also made a name for herself as the founder of two schools for children from agricultural

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Verona, was a particularly active supporter of Malnati’s position, emphasizing the need for children’s education that was scientific, secular, and rational. It is more than likely that the antisemitic incident at the Catholic girls’ school in her hometown just four years earlier further strengthened Lebrecht Vitali, who was educated in law and literature, in her rationalist attitude.172 Even the fundamentally Catholic president of the laicist CNDI, Gabriella Spalletti Rasponi, agreed with Malnati’s proposal, since she was of the opinion that Catholic religious education in Italian schools was “poorly delivered.”173 In the end, the decision was in favor of Malnati’s proposal. This drew fierce reactions from Catholic circles, as also reflected in the contemporary press. In June 1908, the Civiltà Cattolica published a long account of the congress that was effectively a piece of slander, combining anti-laicist, anti-Jewish, and anti-freemason prejudices in an absurd and unqualified manner.174 With heavy sarcasm, the author mocked the approving words for the first public gathering of Italian women’s rights activists of the prominent Jewish professor of medicine and senator, Pio Foà (1848– 1923), who had traveled there from Turin, and in the same connection, ridiculed Maria Montessori, who, as a feminist and scientist, represented his target par excellence: “It was a true 1848 of ‘renaissance’ for Italian

families, which aroused great interest in Maria Montessori; see Fossati R., “Alice Hallgarten Franchetti e le sue iniziative alla Montesca,” Fonti e documenti. Centro Studi per la storia del modernismo 16–17 (1987–1988). 172 See Vitali Lebrecht E., “Sulla coltura e sull’educazione morale e, a seconda delle varie credenze, religiosa nelle scuole,” in Atti del I Congresso Nazionale. Vitali was born in 1858 in Ferrara. In 1880, she moved to Verona with her family and married Guglielmo Lebrecht, who had Polish-Jewish origins. The well-educated and wealthy activist was involved both in Verona’s women’s union Associazione per la donna, known among other things for its decidedly anti-colonialist attitude, and in the city of Verona’s Società Umanitaria; see Sega, “Percorsi d’emancipazione,” 213 f. 173 The view taken by Gabriella Spalletti Rasponi at the 1908 congress was recapitulated at a session of the Florentine chapter of the CNDI in early January 1911. Here, another member of the CNDI, Signora Tordi, maintained that although she was Catholic, she was “against the religious education in the schools, because it is poorly communicated.” ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 4: Federazione femminile toscana: Verbali delle Assemblee 1907–1913, January 13, 1911. 174 Antonio Pavissich S. I., “Il Primo Congresso delle Donne Italiane. Estratto dalla Civiltà Cattolica, quad. 1391, June 6, 1908.

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women, said Professor Foà from Turin, whose most glorious laurels were laudably reaped for him by Madam Doctor Montessori.”175 Immediately after the congress, Pope Pius X (1903–1914) himself personally called for a tighter organization of Italian-Catholic women and for their conscious separation from non-Catholic groupings; thus, the establishment of the Italian-Catholic women’s association Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia (UDCI) in April 1909 was an immediate reaction to what the Catholic leadership saw as the acute threat of the laicist women’s organizations.176 In the UDCI’s journal, it was recorded in 1910 that “the Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia came into being in response to the Italian Women’s Congress [of 1908]. This congress made it clear that a strong strain of ideas and principles quite alien to everything Catholic exists within the Consiglio nazionale delle donne Italiane, an offshoot of the international women’s union….”177 At the same time, reports appeared in the socialist press of the mocking of Jewish schoolchildren by their classmates, which served to emphasize the need for nondenominational schools that would provide education without religious differences and discrimination.178 In the period that followed, attacks from the intransigent Catholic camp against contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish women’s rights activists in the laicist organizations took on a strongly anti-Jewish character that was combined with anti-feminist and anti-laicist prejudices in an increasingly aggressive manner. In the opinion of the prominent

175 Ibid., 18. 176 See Dau Novelli C., “L’associazionismo femminile cattolico (1908–1960),” Bollet-

tino dell’archivio per la storia del movimento sociale cattolico in Italia 33 (1998): 113. On the history of the UDCI’s establishment, see Gazzetta L., “‘Fede e fortezza.’ Il movimento cattolico femminile tra ortodossia ed eterodossia,” in Filippini, Donne sulla scena pubblica, 240–43; ead., Cattoliche, 46–51; Gaiotti de Biase P., Le origini del movimento cattolico femminile (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2002). 177 “Per la sincerità e per la chiarezza,” in Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia, Supplemento al Bolletino trimestrale: Azione cattolica femminile, Marzo 1910, 1. 178 See, for example, Linda Malnati, “Ecco l’ebrea…” in Il Secolo Nuovo, December 11, 1909. These ideas were not unjustified. Just as female Jewish teachers in public schools sometimes encountered antisemitic prejudices, Jewish children and adolescents were sometimes mocked and marginalized by their schoolmates. This can be seen, for example, in the memoirs by Enzo Levi, Memorie di una vita (1889–1947) (Modena: STEM Mucchi, 1972), 12, and by Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Anni di prova (Verona: Neri Pozza, 1969), 95.

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upper-class Catholic Elena da Persico (1869–1948),179 editor-in-chief of the Catholic women’s journal Azione Muliebre (Women’s Action) published in Milan, the Jewish-laicist protagonists of the congress were dangerous “intellectuals and modernists.”180 This expression contained hidden contemporary antisemitic stereotypes. The emancipated, upwardly mobile, and successful Jewry here became the symbol of a modernity that sought to dismantle the Christian social order. For da Persico, female Jewish academics, writers, and scholars, such as those who were at the helm of the national women’s congress, were the epitome of godless feminist intellectuals and, as she emphasized in 1909, champions of the sort of “heresy that Pius X has referred to as Modernism.”181 The programmatic and structural similarities between anti-feminism and antisemitism discernible for the contemporary German-speaking context began to emerge in Italy as well in da Persico’s polemics against Jewish feminists after the women’s congress in Rome.182 Additionally, the countess da Persico’s social and cultural positioning is one more piece of evidence in favor of Shulamit Volkov’s thesis whereby antisemitism functioned as a cultural code for membership of a conservative milieu.183 Tendencies toward anti-feminist antisemitism were increasingly able to take root in intransigent Catholic (women’s) circles of the Italian upper classes from the beginning of the twentieth century onward. The inherent conflict between devout Catholics and Jewish and nonJewish members of the laicist women’s organizations that had come fully 179 Da Persico, born in Verona and originally educated as an elementary school and French teacher, headed the journal Azione Muliebre for many years, wrote novels, and worked as a journalist. She was among the leading members of the Catholic women’s organization Unione Donne. The Catholic Church reveres her as venerabile (“venerable”). Liviana Gazzetta has highlighted da Persico’s fascist sympathies in a monograph; see Gazzetta L., Elena da Persico (Verona: Cierre, 2005). 180 See Da Persico E., “Cronaca di Treviso. La questione femminile e la donna cattolica,” La Difesa, May 25, 1909. 181 Ibid., 5. 182 On the German context, see Planert, Antifeminismus, especially 71–78; on the

fusion of antisemitism and anti-feminism in da Persico’s writings, see Nattermann R., “Die Konstruktion des ‘gefährlichen Anderen.’ Antifeministischer Antisemitismus in den Schriften der italienischen Aktivistin Elena da Persico (1869–1948),” in Frauen & Geschichte Baden-Württemberg (ed.), Antisemitismus – Antifeminismus. Ausgrenzungsstrategien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Roßdorf: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2019), 85–104. 183 See Volkov, Antisemitismus und Antifeminismus, 62–81.

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to light at the congress in 1908 could no longer be defused thereafter. The pronounced anti-laicism of the Catholic UDCI nipped any attempt at approachment in the bud. When the CNDI addressed the Catholic women’s union again with an official invitation to another women’s congress in Turin three years later, the UDCI declined to participate in demonstrative fashion with a public statement.184 The chairwoman, Cristina Giustiniani-Bandini, cited irreconcilable disagreements over teaching and education as a central reason for their lack of participation.185 The letter of refusal was celebrated and commented upon in many articles in the Catholic women’s press of 1911. In these texts, the laicist organizations of the women’s movement were generally represented as “freemason” unions, and their members were styled, with a clearly derogatory connotation, as “anticlerical female doctors and professors.”186 As it happened, no further joint congress took place. The decisiveness and unanimity with which Jewish women at the conference in Rome in 1908 had advocated for the introduction of nondenominational education in Italian schools made them the perfect target for attacks that combined anti-laicism with anti-Jewish tendencies. What is more, the demonstrative boycott by the Catholic women’s organization of the women’s congress in Turin happened within the context of an increasingly antisemitic climate in Italy unleashed by the war with Libya in 1911 and the general advance of an aggressive form of nationalism.187 The connection between Catholic anti-Judaism and anti-laicism that was at play in

184 See Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia, supplemento mensile al Bollettino trimestrale: Azione cattolica femminile, Gennaio-Febbraio 1911, VIII–IX, and the relevant documents in ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 1, fasc. 1: Congressi nazionali e assemblee. The congress was intended to take place during the Esposizione internazionale dell’Industria e del Lavoro, which was on display from April to October 1911 in Turin to mark fifty years of Italian unification. 185 Cristiana Giustiniani-Bandini, “Astensione delle Donne Cattoliche dall II Congresso femminile (Torino, Settembre 1911),” Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia, GennaioFebbraio 1911, VIII–IX, 1. 186 See for example Cristina Giustiniani-Bandini, “Commenti,” Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia, Gennaio-Febbraio 1911, VIII–IX, 7 f., “Movimento femminista in Italia,” Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia, Maggio-Giugno 1911, XII–XIII, 2. 187 See Catalan T., “Le reazioni dell’ebraismo italiano all’antisemitismo europeo (1880– 1914),” in Miccoli, Brice, Les racines chrétiennes, 41–47; Schächter, The Jews of Italy, 133–136.

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the Italian context turned out to be especially explosive in the case of the women’s movement, since women of Jewish origins played a central role in the nondenominational unions—the UFN in particular, but also the Florence and Turin chapters of the CNDI. Their outstanding level of involvement in the spheres of teaching and education, whose overhaul they strongly influenced through their application of Fröbel’s and Montessori’s methods, must have been seen by female Catholic activists as a threat to their own room for manoeuver. A strong tendency to discredit the liberal state’s freedom of belief and conscience can be observed within the UDCI in the aftermath of the debates over the Turin congress. It was repeatedly emphasized in lectures and texts that Catholicism was Italy’s sole religion. These statements were explicitly directed against the equality of all religions, including Judaism, as state-recognized and legally protected religious communities, established in 1889 in the penal code of unified Italy.188 At the beginning of 1911, it was claimed in the UDCI’s journal that “there is no religion in Italy besides the one, true religion – namely, the Catholic religion. There is no right to freedom and mutual respect for one who does not respect God and protect the freedom of the Church as the most valuable good.”189 In agreement with the concept of the “Catholic fatherland” promoted by the Civiltà Cattolica, which was developed as a counter-concept to the liberal unitary state not least through the use of antisemitic enemy images,190 the Catholic women’s union aimed to propagate a homogeneous and exclusive Italian national consciousness based on Catholicism. Conscious homogenization toward the inside was accompanied by an aggressive attitude against laicism and all ideologies and religious orientations that were not Catholic. This also applied to the definition of the women’s movement. Since the UDCI equated “Italian” with “Christian” and “Catholic,” in their view, laicist and Jewish women did not belong to the community of Italian women. As polemics over the women’s congress in Turin continued, Princess Giustiniani-Bandini wrote in the 188 See Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 13 f. 189 “Perché ci asteniamo,” in Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia, Gennaio-Febbraio

1911, VIII–IX, 2. 190 See Lebovitch Dahl, “The Antisemitism of the Italian Catholics,” 11 f. Not by chance, the Civiltà Cattolica had spoken of the “anti-national work” of the women’s congress at Rome in 1908; see Pavissich, “Il Primo Congresso delle Donne Italiane,” 22.

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liberal-monarchist newspaper Il Giornale d’Italia in March 1911: “Our civilization is Christian, and Italian women, in their immense majority, are profoundly Catholic … We ask only one thing: that the women’s movement in Italy be Catholic, just as Italian women are Catholic.”191 The same chauvinistic concept occurs in a text published a few weeks later in the UDCI’s journal. It was underlined that the only union to truly represent “the soul of the Italian woman” was Italy’s Catholic women’s union.192 With this emphasis on a supposed ideological superiority and exclusivity, the authors consciously drove the lines of conflict between the Catholic organization and the laicist unions deeper. In the following years as well, the Catholic women’s organization continued to be the prime mover in this separation. At the European level, the Italian context was not unique in this respect. In contemporary France, the sociocultural conditions for the organized women’s movement were very similar, with a laicist state and a majority Catholic society. Here too, women of Jewish origins were strikingly strongly represented in the secular organizations.193 Analogously to the pronounced distancing from laicist women’s unions in the Italian unitary state on the part of Catholic women, the French Catholic women’s organizations categorically refused to work together with the laicist Conseil National des Femmes, although its members were quite open to collaboration. In France too, there was strong distrust for laicism among female Catholic actors; with the Dreyfus Affair as a potent memory, and in view of the high number of Jewish protagonists in the nondenominational organizations, Catholic women’s circles, like those in Italy, had an increasing tendency to combine anti-laicist and antisemitic prejudices.194 The ideological divide between the Catholic and the laicist women’s movements had become irreconcilable by the beginning of the twentieth century at the latest in France, whereas members of the secular organizations in Italy showed themselves willing to negotiate for several more years. At the beginning of the First World War, the CNDI made one more attempt to contact the UDCI but were forced to admit that “the Catholic women

191 Cristina Giustiniani-Bandini, “La polemica femminile. Risposta delle donne cattoliche al Comitato Nazionale,” Giornale d’Italia, March 3, 1911. 192 Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia, Maggio-Giugno 1911, XII–XIII, 2. 193 See Bard C., Les filles de Marianne (Paris: Fayard, 1995). 194 See Rochefort, “The French Feminist Movement,” 90.

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work in a strongly religious sphere and only help Catholic families.”195 In view of the insuperable unwillingness of the Catholic women’s organization to compromise, eventually all that the laicist unions could do was to discontinue their efforts to achieve an understanding, which had also been supported by Jewish feminists. “Jewish-Freemason Conspiracies” and “Parisian Fashion Jews” After 1911, anti-laicist and anti-Jewish positions within the UDCI combined in more and more irrational ways. The traditional antisemitic prejudice regarding a Jewish-freemason conspiracy found its way into the mix. On this issue, female Catholic actors proved far more aggressive than the male supporters of Italian nationalism, who generally avoided connecting Judaism and freemasonry in their contemporary, extensive press campaign against the freemasons.196 In November 1912, Cristina Giustiniani-Bandini published a call to all regional committees of the UDCI warning against a newly reissued children’s book on the Italian Risorgimento that had been read in Italian elementary schools for decades. The book, Giovane Italia, by the schoolbook author Onorata Grossi-Mercanti (1853–1922)197 was republished in a third edition in 1911 with light editing by the well-known Jewish publisher Enrico Bemporad (1868–1944) in Florence.198 The fact that Grossi-Mercanti belonged to the laicist CNDI199 no doubt strengthened the UDCI’s mistrust of the author. The theme of the work was also not in any way consonant with the ideology of female Catholic 195 Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3, Processi Verbali del Consiglio: Gen. 1915Feb. 1921, April 27, 1915. 196 The only exception to this, in the Italian nationalist press organ L’idea nazionale, came from the journalist and writer Paolo Orano, who would also initiate an antisemitic campaign many years later, in 1938, with his text “Gli ebrei in Italia,” in the runup to the enactment of the racial laws; see Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder, 118–121. 197 On Grossi-Mercanti, who also worked as a teacher in the Italian school system, see Weber C., “Schulbuchautoren im Königreich Italien 1861–1923,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 88 (2008): 434. 198 Grossi-Mercanti O., Giovane Italia: Libro di Lettura per la sesta classe elementare maschile (Florence: Bemporad, 1911). 199 See ACS Roma, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 4: Rubriche con elenchi delle socie, domande di adesione e circolari di convocazioni, Elenco delle iscritte alla federazione femminile toscana.

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activists, who opposed the liberal unitary state. A scathing review of the first edition and Grossi-Mercanti’s supposed glorification of the Risorgimento’s “heroes,” running to several pages, had already appeared in the Civiltà Cattolica in 1892.200 The anonymous reviewer connected the publication by Bemporad, referred to in clearly negative tones as an “editore giudeo,” with the children’s book’s supposed implicit attack on the “true” Italy, the “Catholic fatherland.”201 In her article of 1912, Giustiniani-Bandini made what was perhaps a conscious reference to the polemic published in the Civiltà Cattolica many years previously. After expressing her indignation at the removal of any reference to “religion, the Church, Jesus Christ, God” in the new edition and referring to the “innocent children” as “victims of this malevolent action,” the countess proclaimed, “We will not find out… who bears the greatest responsibility for this – the publishing house, or the lady author. We will only stress that the little secularized book [constitutes] an eloquent symptom of a comprehensive freemasonic conspiracy against Christian education… [and] a threat to the soul of the Catholic Italy.”202 Giustiniani-Bandini’s attack on the new edition of Grossi-Mercanti’s Giovane Italia must certainly be read in connection with the nationalist as well as antisemitic tendencies that had acquired new impetus in Italy in the course of the war with Libya.203 Not by chance, the chairwoman of the UDCI combined the rhetoric of the “Catholic fatherland” with the topos of a Jewish-freemason conspiracy, blatantly embodied, in her eyes, by the publisher Bemporad and the author Grossi-Mercanti. However,

200 Grossi-Mercanti O., Come si è fatta l’Italia. Storia del Risorgimento italiano, narrata ai fanciulli (Florence: Bemporad, 1891). 201 “Rivista della Stampa, II. Onorata Grossi-Mercanti, Come si è fatta l’Italia: storia del Risorgimento italiano, narrata ai fanciulli, Firenze 1891,” Civiltà Cattolica 3 (1892): 449–454, here 450 f. 202 “Attenti ai libri di testo nelle scuole dello stato. Circolare per i libri di testo inviata a tutte le Presidenti dei Comitati,” Unione fra le Donne Cattoliche d’Italia, XXIII (November 1912), 1. 203 In the national elections of 1913, the number of voters increased from three to nine million men based on the expansion of the Italian census voting rights (suffragio universale). The Nationalist Party, founded in 1910, was thereafter supported by portions of the Catholic camp and won its first seats in Parliament. As a consequence of these developments, nationalist propaganda was successfully propagated, combined with antisemitic prejudices, primarily at the local level and in rural areas; see Schächter, The Jews of Italy, 136 f.

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Giustiniani-Bandini partially concealed her article’s antisemitic aspersions against the Florentine publisher under the guise of anti-laicism.204 In contrast, at a public lecture in Genoa four years later, the influential Elena da Persico made no secret of her hatred of Judaism. Thematically speaking, the journalist and author also departed from the connection with anti-laicism, which was until then the predominant anti-Jewish discourse among Catholic women and which primarily targeted the sphere of schooling and education—da Persico devoted herself to the fashion industry. Her text, from February 1916, which was published with the title of “Moda e carattere femminile” (“Fashion and Female Character”) to great acclaim in Catholic circles, contained unconcealed antisemitic expressions.205 Given the war situation, the countess exhorted her public to thriftiness and frugality and emphasized the absolute necessity of making common cause against the apparently imminent decay of morals.206 Members of the Catholic Church, both male and female, had already been observing the changes in female fashion with concern for several years. The transformation had become especially obvious from the beginning of the First World War onward.207 204 Giustiniani-Bandini’s article would not be the only text written by Catholic women directed against the “laicization” of books and journals for children. In June 1918, for example, the author “Nonna Paola,” writing in the Unione Donne’s journal, criticized the fact that a Christmas story published in a “really beautiful children’s journal” (likely referring to the Corriere dei Piccoli, founded by Paola Lombroso in 1908) contained no reference to “the name of God” and the holiday’s religious significance. The author cited further examples from the contemporary children’s press, which she referred to as “toxically antireligious” and as an affront to “the tender love of the fatherland”; see Nonna Paola, “Che cosa leggono i nostri bimbi?,” Bolletino dell’Unione fra le donne cattoliche d’Italia LVII, Febbraio 1917. 205 Da Persico E., Moda e carattere femminile (Turin: L.I.C.E. Berruti & C., 1925); On the notorious lecture’s intention and contents, see also Gazzetta, Elena da Persico, 115 f.; ead., “Tra antiebraismo e antifemminismo,” 226–228. 206 The exhortation to frugality and “more decent,” austere clothing became part of a general morality discourse during the war. For example, the nationalist Teresa Labriola published an article in September 1918 titled “Per la serietà dell’abbigliamento femminile,” in which she maintained, “evil predominates in superfluities”; Attività femminile sociale IV,9 (September 1918): 224. 207 The newly popular short haircuts, shorter skirts, and the forgoing of restrictive corsets were seen as especially immodest and unfeminine by Catholic circles; see Gigli Marchetti A., “Regina della casa, regina della moda. La moda in un secolo di storia 1850–1950,” in ead., Torcellan N. (eds.), Donna lombarda 1860–1945 (Milan: Angeli, 1991), 537–553; Ermacora, “Women behind the Lines,” 28.

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Da Persico saw immense danger in the temptation of Catholic women with fashionable and, in her eyes, immoral clothing, most of it allegedly manufactured by Jews. Jewish-freemason sects already had literature and the theater in their hands, she said, and were now set to monopolize the entire fashion industry. By means of this control, the Jewishfreemason conspiracy would ultimately be able to effect the “paganization” (paganizzazione) of all social life.208 Referring to the French context, which was of great importance in the reception of antisemitic thinking in Italy in general, she stated: In 1885, Edouard Drumont made reference to this danger in his book La France juive. The tailors, he wrote, are nearly all of Jewish origins… and he railed against the incoherence of Christian women who favored this fashion, which leads to an anti-Christianization of tradition and the downfall of morality… We have seen that Drumont’s predictions have come true… we experience how in this very century of “feminism,” millions of women are obeying the command of a man: the Jewish freemason tailor from the French capital…”209

Da Persico’s explicit reference to Edouard Drumont is evidence for the lasting importance of his writings to the antisemitic discourse in Italy. The Catholic newspaper La Difesa, published in Venice, had already reported in detail on the French author and his antisemitic publications in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and sometimes even published central passages from his work.210 It is entirely likely that da Persico, who came from Veneto, had read these texts as a twenty-year-old. Her 1916 lecture was the most strongly antisemitic text by an Italian author before the fascist period. Da Persico’s reference to Drumont hints at a secular antisemitism that went beyond the mostly anti-Jewish-anti-laicist character of Catholic women’s discourse up to that point. In a nutshell, she was drawing 208 The combination of anti-Jewish and anti-freemason attitudes with which the author identified can be seen clearly in the text: “Launoy, a member of the freemason’s union in France, elucidated the action of Jewish-freemason sects in the theater, in literature, in fashion, at a conference in Paris. He showed how circumstances that seem unconnected are in fact very consciously aimed at a common objective: the paganization of the universe, the destruction of Christianity, and among the movements of this global conspiracy he ascribed special relevance to those involved in the fashion industry”; da Persico, Moda, 7. 209 Ibid., 6 f. 210 See Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder, 308–310.

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on antisemitic topoi like parasitic “financial Jewry,” the Jewish global conspiracy, and economic exploitation. The “Jewish freemason tailor” from Paris became the epitome of the corrupt, power-crazed, and lecherous Jew who wished to lead virtuous Catholic Italian women into moral turpitude.211 Furthermore, the theme of fashion and clothing was directly connected with the cultural construction of the body. The subtext was that if Catholic women were to succumb to temptation and dress their bodies in “lascivious” materials produced by Jewish hands, it would be a betrayal of both their faith and their morals.212 Da Persico stylized anything considered Jewish—in this case, “Jewish fashion”—as foreign, other, and dangerous, and the women who wore this clothing, as “heathenized” and eroticized foreign bodies in the “Catholic fatherland” of Italy.213 The stereotypes employed by the author to appeal to Italian women thus originated from the European discourse—the antisemitic image of the “Parisian fashion Jew” and his destructive influence on virtuous women is to be found not only in Drumont, but also in German antisemitic representations from the end of the nineteenth century onward.214

211 See da Persico, Moda, 7. 212 “… behind this masculine dictate stands the Jewish freemason tailor from the French

capital, and the women obey him by putting on such tight-fitting dresses that they cannot take a step and wearing the lowest necklines even in the coldest winter… We see how clothing no longer reflects… the woman’s soul, but… transforms them into impertinent adventurers and girondist revolutionaries”; da Persico, Moda, 7 f. 213 Da Persico’s concept of a supposedly dangerous transformation of female bodies through “Jewish fashion” should be seen in connection with the exotic image of the “Jewish woman,” often made use of for antisemitic purposes, from which, in her opinion, the “Christian, Catholic woman” had to differentiate herself, inside and out, as a matter of necessity. On the stereotype of the “beautiful Jewess,” who appears, especially in antisemitic depictions, as a seductress with ruinous powers and as an expression of exotic foreignness, see Grözinger E., Die schöne Jüdin. Klischees, Mythen und Vorurteile über Juden in der Literatur (Berlin: Philo, 2003), 7–28; Frübis H., “Die schöne Jüdin. Bilder vom Eigenen und vom Fremden,” in ead. et al. (eds.), Projektionen – Rassismus und Sexismus in der visuellen Kultur (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1997), 112–124. 214 An article appeared in the antisemitic “Deutsch-soziale Blätter” in 1897 that antic-

ipated the direction of da Persico’s text: “Let someone read about the hustle of the Parisian fashion Jews in Drumont’s ‘Judaized France,’ and then let him think of how the fashion coming out of Paris will be aped by German women and girls”; Deutsch-Soziale Blätter 12 (1897), 216; see Lichtblau A., Antisemitismus und soziale Spannung in Berlin und Wien, 1867–1914 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), 142.

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Da Persico’s treatment resonated strongly with the Italian-Catholic women’s organizations. Within the context of the nationwide—and now largely forgotten—“Campagna contro la moda anticristiana” (“Campaign against the anti-Christian Fashion”), started by the Catholic women’s organizations in 1920 with the express approval of the Pope, which achieved great importance within contemporary Catholic culture, da Persico’s text from 1916 became a central reference point.215 The campaign was intended to propagate Christian “purity” and virtue, but at the same time, it served to disseminate the concept of an italianità solely definable through Catholicism. This constituted the counterfoil to all things “foreign” and “heathen,” which were absorbed into the diffuse term of “anti-Christian fashion.”216 In the mid-1920s, during the early period of fascist rule, da Persico’s “Moda e carattere femminile” was published in a second edition. The underlying idea of tackling an allegedly “anti-Christian,” or rather “immoral,” “Jewish” fashion gained increasing traction, especially after the concordat of 1929. Catholicism was now declared the only valid religion in the Italian state.217 According to the Catholic Church’s official version, “the Italy of the Conciliazione is no Italy if it submits to a corrupt fashion. The Church and the fatherland want a Christian and Italian fashion.”218 In the 1930s, the fascist “Female Youth” initiated the crociata della purezza, a “purity crusade” against supposedly indecent fashionable women’s clothing. This constituted a continuation of the “Campaign against the anti-Christian Fashion” initiated years earlier by Catholic women.219 Even before the beginning of the fascist dictatorship, the relationship between female Catholic and Jewish actors was already far more conflicted than is generally assumed. The decisive distancing of the Catholic UDCI from the nondenominational women’s unions demonstrated a convergence of anti-laicist motivations and anti-Jewish attitudes 215 See Gazzetta, Elena da Persico, 114–117. 216 See the reports and letters in the UDCI archive: “Campagna contro la moda anti-

cristianam in seguito all’appello del papa,” Isacem, Rome, Fondo UDCI, b. 45, fasc. 4. 217 See Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 14, 19 f.; Sarfatti, The Jews, 45. 218 Quoted in Gazzetta, “Tra antiebraismo e antifemminismo,” 228. 219 See De Giorgio M., “Sante purezze,” in ead., Le italiane dall’unità ad oggi. Modelli culturali e comportamenti sociali (Rome-Bari: Laterza 1992), 86–89.

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that can be traced back to the strong presence and often leading roles of Jewish women in the laicist organizations. For this reason, the central connection, in the Italian context, between Catholic anti-Judaism and anti-laicism turned out to be particularly explosive within the women’s movement. In contrast to the political culture of liberal Italy, areas like teaching, education, and fashion, which were dominated by the Catholic Church and especially by Catholic women, provided a thoroughly fertile ground for the dissemination of anti-Jewish thought. This was where the antisemitic discourse that would be continued and radicalized under fascism got its start.

CHAPTER 5

La Grande Guerra: Italian-Jewish Women Between Pacifism, Interventionism, and National Euphoria

5.1

Warmongers and Pacifists

The Great War as “the Fulfillment of the Risorgimento” Nine months after da Persico’s antisemitic speech in Genoa warning Italian women of the supposedly acute threat of a “Jewish-freemason conspiracy,” the Jewish writer Anna Errera (1870–1940)1 published the first part of an essay on the Italian Risorgimento—the epitome of anticlerical forces, but also the fundamental rejection of foreign rule—in the Lombard journal Per il nostro soldato (For Our Soldiers ). Italy had been involved in the war against the Central Powers for a year and a half on 1 The cousin of Angiolo Orvieto and younger sister of the scholar already mentioned, Emilia Errera, and of the educator Rosa Errera, moved from Trieste to Venice, where her family originated, after the early death of their mother. At the end of the nineteenth century, she moved to Milan with her two sisters. In addition to her work as an educator and writer, especially of children’s literature, she was involved in Milan’s UFN from the beginning of the twentieth century onward. Anna Errera came to notice at the national women’s congress in 1908 in Rome that led to the breach between Catholic and laicist activists with a lecture on theoretical issues regarding contemporary pedagogy. The interest in Giuseppe Mazzini cultivated within the Errera family inspired the writer to produce a biography of the national figurehead: Vita di Mazzini (Milan: Casa Editrice E.S.T., 1932). On Anna Errera, see Norsa, “Tre donne,” 42–55; Fava S., Percorsi critici di letterature per l’infanzia tra le due guerre (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2004), 253–257.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Nattermann, Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4_5

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the side of the Entente. At the beginning of November 1916, a few days before the journal was published, the Italian army had made another unsuccessful attempt to penetrate Habsburg Trieste.2 In her text, “L’Antica Fiamma” (“The Ancient Flame”), Errera, who was born in Trieste, emphatically evoked the spirit of the Italian “resurrection”: “And again, it is Mazzini’s voice who demands us to purge from the heart everything that is not ideal; who demands that Italy should be independent, free and united… and again, it is Cavour’s bold wisdom, and again the charisma of Garibaldi that calls our youth to war.”3 The interpretation of the Grande Guerra as the fulfillment of the Risorgimento and a “just war of liberation” on behalf of Italy’s ultimate independence, freedom and unity, characteristic of Italian-Jewish feminists in general, is clearly to be seen in this passionate appeal by Anna Errera, who came from a family of “fervent patriots”4 (her Venetian great-grandfather Abramo Errera had participated in the rebellion against Austrian rule during the transitional government of the Repubblica di San Marco in 1848/1849). This perspective owed much to the ideas of Mazzini, the central figurehead of the Italian women’s movement, and it accorded with the predominant discourse in the contemporary women’s movement press.5 The pioneer Anna Maria Mozzoni, who was now nearly 2 In her foreword to Errera’s text, the journal’s editor, Marchioness Maria Spinelli

Monticelli, drew attention in propagandistic style to the historical conflict with Austria, the arch-enemy she subsumed under the designation of “German.” She saw the current military conflict as a “war of freedom” from Habsburg rule: “Anna Errera’s pages allow us to relive the most brilliant and dreadful moments of our oppression and our glorious resurrection. And it is good to remember! To remember what the German ultimately represented, at that time, for our fatherland… to remember the ‘classical’ barbarity of our perpetual enemy – barbarity that today has reached the highest degree of perversity and atrocity. – To remember to multiply our powers a 100-fold in material and moral resistance against our enemy so that, thereby, our fatherland may eventually become free from great ignominy and filth!” Maria Spinelli Monticelli, “Prefazione” to “L’Antica Fiamma,” Per il nostro soldato II, 24 (November 19, 1916). 3 Anna Errera, “L’Antica Fiamma,” ibid. The rest of the essay was published in Per il nostro soldato II, 26 (December 17, 1916) and III, 1 (January 14, 1917). 4 As described by Laura Orvieto in her autobiography, in which she discusses her husband’s Venetian ancestors; see Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 7. 5 In May 1916, an article appeared in one of the early Italian women’s movement’s leading journals, Cordelia, titled “In the Flames of War,” which clearly displays the identification with the Italian war aims and the idealization of the conflict as such: “And yet our war is so beautiful that it has emerged in purity out of the pain of these years. It is a holy war of liberation and almost an act of justice that lives on indestructible in the

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eighty years old, also saw Italy’s engagement on the side of the democracies as the fulfillment of the Risorgimento. Italian interventionists favored the recourse to Mazzini’s ideal of nationalism as the promise of emancipation and full participation in their conception of a supposedly necessary completion of national unity and their demand for a European new order, while largely ignoring the exclusive and aggressive elements of this ideal.6 While many Italian women from the lower social classes protested against the war, since it would inevitably exacerbate their already difficult living conditions, women who supported interventionism came primarily from the middle and upper bourgeoisie.7 This reference to the Risorgimento became increasingly important for Jewish women like Anna Errera. It became an expression of the patriotic euphoria unleashed by the First World War in the Jewish minority in Italy overall. They saw the conflict as an outstanding opportunity to provide concrete proof of the Jews’ national solidarity with the patria e gran madre Italia and of their gratitude to the Royal House of Savoy

context of claims to nationhood”; “Tra le fiamme della guerra,” Cordelia 35, 20 (May 14, 1916): 633 f. The idea of a “war of salvation and liberation” developed into a topos in the contemporary discourse and a constant point of reference for authors; see also Giovanni Morelli in his “Reflections on the War,” Natale di Guerra: Numero unico a favore dei feriti (December 19, 1915). 6 See Levis Sullam, L’Apostolo a Brandelli, 56–58; Belardelli, Mazzini, 242. The development of the prominent art critic Margherita Sarfatti (1880–1961), who was also involved in the Milanese chapter of the UFN for a time, to become Mussolini’s muse and “inventor” of Italian fascism during the war constitutes an extreme example for the dangerous transformation of a liberally oriented patriotism into a militant nationalism with imperialist undertones; see Nattermann R., “Heroic Fathers, Patriotic Mothers, Fallen Sons: National Belonging and Political Positioning in Italian-Jewish Families’ Versions of World War I,” in Baumeister, Lenhard, Nattermann, Rethinking the Age of Emancipation, especially 376 f., 383 f. Among the numerous works on Margherita Sarfatti, see especially Bartoloni S., “Margherita Sarfatti. Una intellettuale tra Nazione e Fascismo,” in Mori M. T. et al. (eds.), Di generazione in generazione. Le Italiane dall’Unità ad oggi (Rome: Viella, 2014), 207–220; Urso S., Margherita Sarfatti: dal mito del Dux al mito americano (Venice: Marsilio, 2003); Wieland K., Die Geliebte des Duce. Das Leben der Margherita Sarfatti und die Erfindung des Faschismus (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004). 7 See Willson, Women, 48.

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for having granted Jewish emancipation.8 The World War, said the Settimana israelitica (Jewish Weekly) in May 1915, was the “moment of truth” for Italian Jews.9 Female Jewish protagonists, who had not yet achieved equality owing to their gender, placed great hopes in the potential of the war to favor a successful continuation of the social integration process as it related to the emancipation both of Jews and of women. The following pages will trace the disconnects between these great expectations and the actual war experience, which featured horror and pain but also a sense of national belonging, as well as the memories of the conflict in the context of an altered personal and political reality.10 The idea that Italy’s involvement in the First World War would also benefit the Jews living under oppressive conditions elsewhere initially played a great part in the positive evaluation of the Grande Guerra.11 Jewish women in the Italian minorities in cities like Trieste and Trento saw the war as a promise of liberation from the “Austrian yoke” and of the implementation of national and territorial unity. From this perspective, Italy, in contrast to the Habsburg Empire, was seen as an idealized locus of freedom and tolerance where antisemitism had no place.12 How poorly this version corresponded to the historical reality can be seen, not least, from Elena da Persico’s antisemitic attacks presented to

8 See Toscano M., “Gli ebrei italiani e la prima guerra mondiale (1915–1918): tra crisi religiosa e fremiti patriottici,” in Italia Judaica: Gli ebrei nell’Italia unita, 1870–1945. Atti del IV convegno internazionale (Siena 12–16 giugno 1989) (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistic, 1993), 285, 289 f., 292. 9 “L’Ora della prova,” Settimana israelitica (May 28, 1915). 10 On the conceptual triad of “expectation, experience, memory” in the context of the

First World War, see Ernst, “Der Erste Weltkrieg in deutschsprachig-jüdischer Literatur,” especially 59–61; on the historical development of the memory of the First World War in Italy, see Labanca N., “La prima guerra mondiale in Italia, dalla memoria alla storia, e ritorno,” in: id., Überegger O. (eds.), La Guerra Italo-Austriaca (1915–18) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014), 303–323. On the experiences and memories of Jewish women in the German and Habsburg context, see Ernst P. et al. (eds.), “The Great War. Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914–1918)” = Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC 9 (October 2016), http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/index.php?issue=9. 11 See Miniati, Le “emancipate”, 198. 12 This concept of Italy as a “safe harbor” for the Jews, “the land of divine dew”

(in Hebrew, “I-tal-Jah”), went back many centuries; see Pugliese S. G., “Israel in Italy. Wrestling with the Lord in the Land of Divine Dew,” in id. (ed.), The Most Ancient of Minorities. The Jews of Italy (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 1.

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the Italian public during the Great War itself. Nonetheless, the traditional narrative of Italy as a “safe harbor” for Jews continued to be attractive and convincing. A remarkable example for the often markedly irredentist position of Italian-Jewish protagonists is the author Enrica Barzilai (1859–1936), from an educated and wealthy Triestine family. Along with her husband, the journalist Alberto Gentilli, she initiated discussions regarding the so-called “unredeemed” territories in lectures and literary salons.13 The Triestine journalist Carolina Luzzatto, discussed in Chapter 3, held even more extreme positions. She had been one of the first Jewish contributors to the Mazzinian-influenced feminist journal La Donna and became known from the 1880s onward as the founder of several Italian newspapers in Gorizia. At the beginning of the First World War, when she was nearly eighty years old, she was interned by the Austrian authorities, without regard for her great age, because of her long-term involvement in the Pan-Italian movement. However, shortly before she died in 1919, she was able to experience the “rebirth” of Gorizia as part of Italy.14 Under the political circumstances of the First World War, Italian patriotism combined with a pronounced anti-Austrian attitude, which had played a central role in the ideological positioning of many Jewish pioneers of the Italian women’s movement at the end of the nineteenth century, including Adele Della Vida Levi, achieved new urgency for the younger generation of Jewish feminists. It is no accident that they often came from families that had been directly involved in the Italian wars of independence. In many cases, the Grande Guerra signaled a longterm intensification of Italian-Jewish family identities based on the revival and transmission of memories of fathers’ and relatives’ commitment to Italian unification and the Jewish emancipation that came with it. In the already mentioned biography of Cesare Lombroso, first published at the end of 1914, his daughter Gina devoted a lengthy chapter to “Lombroso the soldier,” who had registered voluntarily for the Piedmontese army in 1859 in order “to beat Austria.”15 In her autobiography, 13 See Curci, Zani, Bianco, Rosa e Verde, 87–95. Enrica’s brother was the lawyer and politician Salvatore Barzilai (1860–1939), a founder member of the Partito Repubblicano. A freemason, he served as a minister without portfolio in Antonio Salandra’s government in 1915 and 1916. 14 See Catalan, “Linguaggi,” 59–63; ead., “The Construction of the Enemy”. 15 See Lombroso Ferrero, Cesare Lombroso, 89.

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Laura Orvieto represented her father, Achille Cantoni, as an idealistic “Garibaldian volunteer,”16 and Amelia Rosselli wrote in her memoir of “a Pincherle, my father’s uncle, a close friend of Daniele Manin, who was involved in the triumvirate of the provisional government [of the Repubblica di San Marco].”17 The underlying causes of the dangerous fascination that interventionism and irredentism exerted on the vast majority of Italian-Jewish female activists in the First World War undoubtedly lay in their family histories and lasting identification with the ideals of the Risorgimento. Nevertheless, both this quite obvious continuity and the experiences of Jewish women in Italy in the Grande Guerra and their memories of the war have largely been ignored by the research up to now. The relevant historiography has focused for decades on the political and military participation of Jewish men on the scene of war.18 Where the role of Jewish women during the war is discussed at all, it is primarily for their involvement in welfare activities within the Jewish community organizations.19 The frequent parallel involvement in both Jewish and secular institutions during the war, and the connections between secular social involvement and Jewish tradition, which were characteristic of the self-consciousness of the protagonists studied here, have remained under-examined in this perspective.20 However, the fact that this sort of approach is indispensable in the Italian context is made clear, among other reasons, by the lack of emergence of any Jewish women’s union in Italy such as there was in Germany or England in the buildup to the First World War. An international 16 Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 52. 17 Rosselli, Memorie, 53. 18 This concentration on male protagonists can be seen both in Tedeschi F., Gli israeliti italiani nella guerra 1915–1918 (Turin: Ferruccio Servi, 1921) and in the newer related studies by Toscano, “Gli ebrei italiani,” 285–302; id., “Ebrei ed ebraismo nell’Italia della grande guerra. Note su una inchiesta del Comitato delle comunità israelitiche italiane del maggio 1917,” in id. (ed.), Ebraismo e antisemitismo in Italia. Dal 1848 alla guerra dei sei giorni (Milan: Angeli, 2003), 123–154; id., “Religione, patriottismo, sionismo. Il rabbinato militare nell’Italia della Grande Guerra (1915–1918),” Zakhor 8 (2005): 77–133. 19 See Miniati, Le “emancipate,” 219–221. 20 Marion Kaplan has elaborated on this connection in the German-Jewish context

in a convincing manner; see Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 193–195, 219–223.

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women’s congress took place in Rome in May 1914, at which some of the contemporary Jewish women’s unions, like the German Jüdischer Frauenbund, the English Union of Jewish Women, and representatives of the American Council of Jewish Women were also present. The German, English, and American representatives urged the foundation of a Jewish women’s union in Italy that would serve the additional function of encouraging its members in their religious Jewish self-consciousness, but this did not come to pass. Only ten Italian women were present at the congress.21 In fact, Italian-Jewish feminists continued to be active mostly within the laicist organizations in the First World War, as they had been before. Women and Interventionism The crisis that gripped the Italian women’s movement when war broke out was not without impact on its Jewish protagonists. The question of neutrality versus intervention, which held the whole of Italy in suspense in 1914, divided the women’s movement. While a small group of steadfast pacifists spoke out against the war, many associations signed an appeal against the so-called Disfattismo, the national “defeatism.”22 Italian women only played a minor role at the women’s peace congress held in The Hague at the end of April 1915, just a month before Italy’s entry into the war, despite the Italian women’s movement’s far-reaching transnational connections. While Jewish feminists like Rosika Schwimmer from Hungary and Bala Birnbaum from Belgium were among the leading speakers of the peace conference, there were no Jewish

21 See Miniati, Le “emancipate,” 184–188. 22 See Brigadeci C., Forme di resistenza al fascismo. L’Unione femminile nazionale

(Milan: Unione Femminile Nazionale, 2001), 3; Guidi L., “Un nazionalismo declinato al femminile,” in ead. (ed.), Vivere la guerra. Percorsi biografici e ruoli di genere tra Risorgimento e primo conflitto mondiale (Naples: Clio Press, 2007), 94. On the few remaining pacifists in Italy, see Bianchi B., “Towards a New Internationalism. Pacifist Journals Edited by Women, 1914–1919,” in Hämmerle et al., Gender and the First World War, 179; on the international networking of contemporary pacifist feminists, see Garroni M. S., “Lo sfilacciarsi della rete. Pacifiste femministe tra Europa e Stati Uniti,” in Bartoloni, La Grande Guerra, 75–97.

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women among the Italian participants.23 Their general support for interventionism and irredentism proved stronger than their demand for peace during this period.24 The former relevance of international pacifism for the development of the Italian women’s movement was overcome by the overwhelming relevance of personal national interests and the phantom of a democratic interventionism. The prominent pacifist Paolina Schiff, discussed above, who became part of the women’s movement at the end of the nineteenth century largely due to her involvement in the international peace movement and was a member of Italy’s Socialist Party from 1892 onward, continued to support Italian neutrality at the beginning of the war.25 But after 1917, she too took a position in the interventionist camp. The influence of her family’s irredentist background on her attitude to the war issue should probably not be underestimated; they had lived in Habsburg Trieste for a while at the end of the nineteenth century before resettling in Milan.26 The Privatdozentin of German-Jewish origins joined with her ideological kindred spirits, Anna Kuliscioff and Filippo Turati, in prioritizing the “defense of the fatherland.” Kuliscioff had initially taken a neutral position at the beginning of the war, but from 1915 onward she turned increasingly toward interventionism. Born in Russia, she saw Italy’s participation 23 The Italian women were represented at the conference by the socialist Rosa Genoni

(1867–1954), who worked in Milan as a teacher, journalist, and stylist, and was involved in humanitarian activities and organizations. On Genoni, see Bartoloni S., Donne di fronte alla Guerra. Pace, diritti e democrazia (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2017), 206 f., 214–219. For details on the congress, see Wilmers A., Pazifismus in der internationalen Frauenbewegung (1914–1920). Handlungsspielräume, politische Konzeptionen und gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2008), 35–55. On Schwimmer, an internationally reputed pacifist, see Wenger B. S., “Radical Politics in a Reactionary Age. The Unmaking of Rosika Schwimmer, 1914–1930,” Journal of Women’s History 2, 2 (1990): 66–99. 24 See Russo A., “‘Viva l’Italia tutta redenta!’ Interventiste alla vigilia della Grande Guerra,” in Guidi, Vivere la guerra, 128 f. 25 Previously, in 1915, Schiff had written a letter to the participants in the women’s peace conference in which she appealed to the principle of reason as a counter to the principle of might, or rather, of violence: “The exclusion of women from the great problems of mankind is an out and out warlike and violent principle. Women are predestined to transform the principle of might into the principle of reason among their male brethren. One can achieve this purpose through the exercise of intelligence, conducted with love,” quoted by Antonella Valoroso, “Dove nascono le nostre libertà,” Corriere della Sera, La Ventisettesima Ora, January 8, 2016. 26 See Nattermann, “Vom Pazifismus zum Interventionismus,” 83 f.; ead., “Feministinnen,” 76 f.

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in the war on the side of the Entente as a “democratic war” against the reactionary Central Powers.27 Although she was more moderate in her political convictions than Schiff or Kuliscioff, the Venetian-born Amelia Rosselli had also favored Italian entry into the war on the side of France and Great Britain since 1914. At the time, the writer was the head of the literature department of Florence’s Lyceum, an international cultural women’s organization based on the English model, established in 1908.28 In her memoirs, Rosselli portrayed a largely interventionist attitude among her family and friends, which was closely connected with a deep-rooted antipathy for the Habsburg Empire.29 Even with hindsight, she employed the term “war of liberation”: In that fateful year, 1914, we and our friends were all interventionists. Aldo, a first-year medical student, played a lively part in the student demonstrations against Austria. The hope for a war of liberation on behalf of Trento and Trieste exercised a horrid fascination on young and old… It was difficult to remain under the heavy cloak of neutrality that hung over Italy at the time; the atmosphere was too strongly charged with passions…30

Expressions of irredentism apparently existed within the Rosselli family in 1914 as well, despite the fact that Amelia Rosselli anticipated the horrors of the Great War. Her unpublished letters to her son Carlo and her friend Laura Orvieto reveal the inner conflict between political conviction and human consternation, with which many of her contemporaries also had 27 On “interventionist socialist women,” including Kuliscioff, see Willson, Women, 47. Addis Saba reports that Kuliscioff confessed not to want the war yet felt a keen awareness of the reality that Italy would eventually have to confront. There could be no holding back in the face of the “general conflagration”; Addis Saba, Anna Kuliscioff , 288. 28 On the Lyceum’s history and Amelia Rosselli’s important role within the organization, see Bulletti P. “Amelia nel Lyceum di Firenze (1908–1937),” in Vieri, Amelia Rosselli Pincherle, 29–38; Simona Maionchi, Lyceum Club Internazionale di Firenze – circolo culturale femminile (unpublished manuscript; Archivio del Lyceum, Florence); Mirka Sandiford, La presenza di Amelia Rosselli al Lyceum: risultanze d’archivio (unpublished manuscript; Archivio del Lyceum, Florence). 29 On the widespread war spirit, especially among young, bourgeois Italian men and women, see Papa C., L’Italia giovane dall’Unità al fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2013), 186–198. 30 Rosselli, Memorie, 139.

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to contend.31 On August 3, 1914, the day Germany declared war on France, Rosselli wrote to her second son, Carlo, who was then fourteen years old: My dear Carlo, I am truly horrified by these gruesome reports and am finding it hard to believe that it is really true that we must live through one of the most horrific and murderous wars that there has ever been. With these new weapons of destruction, it will be a real massacre. I am very sorry for France, which has simply been overwhelmed, and I fear that it is bound to end in disaster for the country.32

Less than three weeks later, she confessed to Laura Orvieto her concerns about the uncertainty of the role of Italy, which was still officially allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary: “These catastrophic events have made me numb and deprived me of any joy… Two million men are about to throw themselves against each other, and the uncertainty about our Italy weighs on me like a monstrous nightmare.”33 Nervousness, trepidation over the fate of her country, and shock at the horror of war are the central themes of her letter to her friend. Toward the end, however, Rosselli openly expressed her resentment against the German warmonger: “I fervently hope that the Germans get a good beating from all sides. They have done so much to deserve it!”.34 Amelia’s aversion to Germany and Austria noticeably strengthened from then on, along with her intense sense of belonging to the Italian nation—the ideal of her Jewish ancestors—and her hopes for Italy’s intervention on the side of the democracies, France and Great Britain. In this respect, she ignored the fact that such an alliance would also include Tsarist Russia, whose aggressively anti-Jewish policies had long been well known throughout Europe. The fact that Italian soldiers would be shown to have been responsible for the suffering and deaths of innocent women and children in Germany and in the Habsburg Empire was also, at least temporarily, overlooked due to deep-rooted national resentments. 31 See Russo, “Viva l’Italia tutta redenta,” 128. 32 Amelia to Carlo Rosselli, August 3, 1914, Isrt Firenze, Fondo Maria Rosselli: Lettere

di Amelia Rosselli. 33 Amelia Rosselli to Laura Orvieto, August 21, 1914, ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or.1.2059. 34 Ibid.

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The question, subject for lively discussion at the time in Italy’s Jewish community and all over Europe, as to whether Jews should avoid potentially fighting against their “Jewish brothers” (fratelli-nemici)35 does not appear in Rosselli’s considerations. At that time, her Italian national loyalty and still decidedly anti-Zionist attitude surpassed any sense of solidarity with Jewish men and women in the enemy camp.36 Interventionism increasingly gained the upper hand, both in the family sphere and in the Italian women’s movement press, and soon manifested in aggressive forms. Just two months after Italy’s entry into the war, in July 1915, the journal L’Unità d’Italia, published in Rome by the Comitato nazionale femminile per l’intervento italiano (National Women’s Committee for Italian Intervention), initiated a campaign to exclude women of German and Austrian origins from the Italian women’s organizations.37 Then, after the disastrous defeat of Caporetto in the spring of 1917, several women’s unions in Milan organized an elective assembly for the war, in which many members of the Unione Femminile also participated.38 Unlike the CNDI in Rome, the socialist-oriented Milanese UFN had consciously restrained itself from public statements about the war in its first years, although leading members like Nina Rignano Sullam and Bice Cammeo were thoroughly in favor of Italian intervention. After Caporetto, however, the organization’s attitude drastically changed. A concrete written result was the special issue “La Riscossa” (“Attack” or “Recapture”), which was distributed among the Italian population and in the trenches.39 Here, the authors called for the socialist daily paper

35 See Toscano, “Gli ebrei italiani,” 288; Penslar D. J., Jews and the Military. A History (Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 152–159. 36 Rosselli later wrote regarding the change in her attitude to Zionism, “At the beginning of the century, a Zionist movement began in Italy too. I was strongly against it, because I thought it extremely dangerous for the italianità of the Jews… Today, at a distance of thirty years, I denounce my passionate intransigence of that time. I have been constrained in the course of a long and painful mental process to admit the existence of the Jewish problem.” Rosselli, Memorie, 128 f. 37 See Guidi, “Un nazionalismo,” 100 f. 38 See Schiavon E., Interventiste nella Grande Guerra. Assistenza, propaganda, lotta per

i diritti e Milano e in Italia (1911–1919) (Milan: Mondadori, 2015), 272. 39 La Riscossa - Unione Femminile nazionale, numero unico, gennaio 1918, Milan.

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Avanti and the publications associated with Disfattismo to be suspended and for the Germans to be driven out of Italy.40 As one of the few remaining pacifists, Ersilia Majno, the longtime president of the UFN, distanced herself from these positions. In her view, the class struggle, women’s emancipation, and female solidarity constituted an indivisible unit.41 In contrast to Paolina Schiff, Majno stayed true to her pacifist convictions.42 However, her principled rejection of the barbarity of war did not prevent her from working solidly within the UFN on behalf of the soldiers and their families on the home front. In June 1915, the still majority pacifist-oriented Milanese women’s union had emphasized in a public communication: “Although the Unione Femminile Nazionale remains true to its principles and pacifist ideal… it does not think it appropriate to withhold its support from the families who are suffering the harmful consequences of the war in large numbers.”43 The fact that the Milanese women’s union had already been focused on welfare before 1914, and had professionalized its social work activities thanks to pioneers like Nina Rignano Sullam, surely prepared it well for aid activities during the First World War. The Grande Guerra provided these feminists a key opportunity to put their acquired knowledge and abilities to multiple uses and thus also to prove their worth as potential citizens.44 The UFN’s activities ranged from establishing support facilities for war orphans to caring for widows of the fallen, training nurses, and producing and collecting clothing for soldiers, who thanked the women’s union for their support in numerous letters.45 After Caporetto, a committee to aid refugees was formed within the UFN consisting exclusively of Jewish women, among them Nina Rignano Sullam and Rosa Errera (a sister of 40 See Schiavon, Interventiste, 273. 41 Brigadeci, Forme di resistenza, 3 f. 42 Majno even left the UFN for a while in 1921, when it began to support nationalist

women’s organizations and participated in a committee in Milan to guarantee the functioning of public services. In her resignation letter, Majno described the committee as an “organization of female strike-breakers under the pretext of work discipline for the good of the country”; see Brigadeci, Forme di resistenza, 4. 43 “Comitato Pro Esercito,” June 1915, Archivio UFN, Milano, b. 11, fasc. 68: Prima Guerra mondiale – 1 (1913–1918). 44 See Willson, Women, 48. 45 Archivio UFN, b. 11, fasc. 69: Prima Guerra mondiale – 2 (1917–1919).

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the writer Anna, mentioned above).46 In tandem with the involvement of Jewish soldiers at the front, Jewish women saw their involvement on the home front as providing them the possibility to furnish vivid proof of their national solidarity and gratitude toward the Italian “fatherland.”47 This contributed significantly to their hopes for public recognition as women and as Jews, and the granting of political rights.

5.2

Changing Relationships

Jewish-Christian Approachments and Distances in the Everyday Life of Wartime During the war, their active involvement in hospitals and welfare organizations led to a more intensive encounter between Jewish women and the non-Jewish Italian majority society. This was especially true for nurses. Initially, the close contacts with sick and wounded soldiers and with doctors and colleagues, including many nuns, created a lasting, everyday interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish, or rather Christian, persons and spheres, often for the first time. At the beginning of the twentieth century, about forty percent of Italian nurses were still nuns.48 By May 1915, around four thousand Italian women had trained as Red Cross nurses, including women of Jewish origins. Most Crocerossine were unmarried, childless women from the upper middle classes. Many came from the CNDI. Red Cross nurses became war icons in Italy and in

46 The Commissione Pro-Profughi’s members were Rosa Errera, Nina Rignano Sullam, Larissa Boschetti Pini, and Nyves Yarach; see L’Opera dell’Unione Femminile ProProfughe, anonymous, undated (most likely from 1917), Archivio UFN, b. 11, fasc. 68: Prima Guerra mondiale – 1 (1913–1918). The Italian-Jewish agronomist Aurelia Josz also took part in aid activities for refugees in Milan; see Schiavon, Interventiste, 271. 47 The fact that the Italian militaries viewed the support of Jewish women as a clear sign of patriotism and national identity can be seen in a letter from Colonel Giovanni Francovi to the UFN: “Special thanks is due to the esteemed lady Nina Rignano Sullam, who contributed to the success of the [Christmas] festivities with great patriotic generosity, which bears, beyond its great relevance for humanity, the stamp of Italianità”; Colonello Commandante del Gruppo Giovanni Francovi to the Unione Femminile, Bressanone, January 4, 1919, Archivio UFN, b. 11, fasc. 69: Prima Guerra mondiale – 2 (1917–1919). 48 See Willson, Women, 49.

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other countries.49 The involvement of Jewish nurses combined the tradition of Jewish benevolence with a distinctly Italian patriotism such as can also be seen in the writings of contemporary female Jewish authors. This characteristic combination clearly did not escape the notice of their contemporaries. The head of the military hospital in Ferrara thanked the Red Cross nurse Fanny Luzzatto, already mentioned above, who cared for wounded soldiers on the front lines with great personal courage, with these words: Since the beginning of this glorious war, you… have gifted the treasure of mercy and love of humanity in your care for our brave wounded and sick soldiers. Your work, which you have carried out in an honorable, Italian manner in the military hospitals of Udine, Cormons, and Ferrara…has constantly aroused admiration in everyone, and you were mentioned as an especially rare example among [the nurses]… Along with the thanks of the officers and the medical corps, I repeat what will bring you more satisfaction than any honor and any praise… The grateful echo… of the blessing that many of those restored to health and their families have asked me to convey to you.50

The military doctor’s characterization of Fanny Luzzatto as an “honorable” Italian and the emphasis on her inclusion in the blessing and prayers of Italian, most likely Catholic families, is significant. In the doctor’s eyes, and likely those of the protagonist herself, she had proven her italianità in time of war. The war diaries of Silvia Treves (1891–1987), who came from an educated and wealthy Florentine family, are another outstanding example 49 On Italian Red Cross nurses in the First World War, see Bartoloni S., Italiane alla guerra. L’assistenza ai feriti, 1915–1918 (Venice: Marsilio, 2003); ead., “Al capezzale del malato. Le scuole per la formazione delle infermiere,” in ead. (ed.), Per le strade del mondo. Laiche e religiose fra Otto e Novecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), 215– 247; Scardino Belzer A., Women and the Great War. Femininity under Fire in Italy (Basingstoke-New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). On the various portrayals and images of nurses in the Great War, see Hämmerle C., “‘Mentally Broken, Physically a Wreck …’. Violence in War Accounts of Nurses in Austro-Hungarian Service,” in ead. et al., Gender and the First World War, 91 f.; Schönberger B., “Motherly Heroines and Adventurous Girls. Red Cross Nurses and Women Army Auxiliaries in the First World War,” in Hagemann K., Schüler-Springorum, S. (eds.), Home/Front. The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford-New York: Berg, 2003), 91–93. 50 Maggiore Medico Direttore Antonio De Napoli, letter of “praise and thanks,” Ferrara, February 10, 1919, Archivio Fondazione Guido Ludovico Luzzatto, Milan.

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of the combination of secular Jewish identity with Italian national consciousness and patriotic spirit. Like Luzzatto, she was active directly on the front line as a voluntary nurse from 1916 onward, in Carnia and elsewhere. Her writings clearly attest to a subjective sense of intense common cause with non-Jewish Italian men and women through the shared experience of war.51 The twenty-five-year-old reflected in several passages on the deep connection and sense of unbreakable community that seemed to develop between herself and the sick and wounded. In September 1916, she wrote: When I think back on some of those evenings among the severely wounded, in the darkness of the wagons, on their suffering and my desire to help them, to ease their pain, and on my instinctive impulse to awaken their strength in them, which came from my natural affection… my recognizing admiration at what they had suffered for us [Italian men and women]… I become aware that I have never otherwise experienced similar moments of this kind of emotional community and trembling sympathy that I felt inside myself.52

Despite the subjectivity of this assertion, which reveals the emotional nature of the young diarist, away from her familiar environment for the first time, there is no doubt that the proximity of Jewish women to non-Jewish men in the extreme circumstances of the war contributed to mutual understanding and promoted, at least for a time, a sense of human and national solidarity. However, this was only part of the reality. In April 1917, for example, Treves wrote of the “abhorrent colonel” who had repeatedly prevented her Florentine cousin, Aldo Neppi, from visiting her, and in another passage, of her non-Jewish colleagues in the military hospital of the small town Portogruaro in Veneto, who bullied

51 Extensive excerpts from the diary covering the period from March to December 1917 were published in the 1970s; see Treves S., “Diario di una crocerossina fiorentina, 1917–1918,” Rassegna storica toscana XX, 2 (July–December 1974): 233–278. Monica Miniati has published several quotations from the unedited diaries in her study; see Miniati, Le “emancipate,” 217. Stefania Bartoloni’s relevant study also makes several references to Treves’s diaries; see Bartoloni, Italiane alla guerra, especially 191, 217. On the intentions and themes of nurses’ diaries, see Hallett C. E., Containing Trauma. Nursing Work in the First World War (New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 9–15. 52 Silvia Treves, Diari inediti, September 1916, quoted in Miniati, Le “emancipate,” 217 (emphasis in original).

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her and “condemned [her] to silence.”53 However, interaction with the nuns, who were generally distrusted by Jewish women due to the antisemitic incidents described earlier, appear from Treves’s diaries to have been unproblematic.54 The young nurse also reported how in December 1917 she entered a Catholic church, where a “beautiful song” could be heard.55 These sorts of statements are markedly different from the quite overwhelmingly anticlerical attitude among Jewish women in the lead-up to the war. The largely emotional approach to the Catholic culture of the Italian majority society on the part of Jewish women, which can also be seen in Treves’s diaries, took on a primarily patriotic character during the Grande Guerra. A glance at contemporary social initiatives and publications in Jewish journals also confirms this. In August 1916, one could read in the most important assimilation-oriented journal, Il Vessillo Israelitico, that a day nursery founded by Jewish women in Ferrara, and tellingly named “Cavour,” cared exclusively for Catholic children of soldiers at the front. The article’s author referred to this situation in entirely positive tones.56 Furthermore, the writer Ada Cagli della Pergola (1859–1941),57 who had acclaimed the significance of the Jewish Pesach and the religious maturity of Jewish girls in the Vessillo Israelitico in 1899 and 1900, expanded her sense of national solidarity to the point of using religious-Christian rhetoric in identifying with the melancholy and homesickness of Italian soldiers experiencing their second “war Christmas,”

53 See Treves, “Diario,” 237 f. The reasons for the colonel’s and Treves’s colleagues behavior remain unknown, but it should not be excluded that anti-Jewish prejudices played a role in their treatment of her. 54 “Yesterday evening we went to the nuns, to give them greetings” (Portogruaro, March 25, 1917), Treves, “Diario,” 233; “After lunch we visit the nuns. A more than cordial reception” (Portogruaro, July 1, 1917), Treves, “Diario,” 242. However, as is the case for all retrospectively published ego documents, it cannot be ruled out that in the 1970s, Treves specifically selected such passages for the publication of the diaries, or adapted the original words to current needs and intentions. 55 See Treves, “Diario,” 270. 56 See “La guerra. Corrispondenza da Ferrara,” Vessillo Israelitico LXIV, 16 (August

1916): 423. 57 Ada Cagli della Pergola, who came from Ancona, had studied with the writer Eugenia Levi at the Magistero Superiore in Florence. She wrote for the women’s movement’s press as well as children’s literature, usually under the pseudonym “Fiducia.”

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writing in the CNDI’s journal in 1916. Was this perhaps also a reaction to the by now overtly antisemitic expressions of female Catholic activists regarding a supposed “Jewish-freemason conspiracy” within the laicist women’s organizations? The author’s allusion to Christian themes is clear: Formerly this day was full of intimate, quiet joy for them [the soldiers] too, with sweet tastes, childlike and innocent, recalling the forgotten prayers on the lips in the memory of the scenes of childhood. The festival of the nativity, so human and moving, becomes the epitome of their former life. The mother, the spouse, the far distant children.58

It also seems, as Treves’s recollections have already suggested, that connections developed between Jewish women and Catholic nuns, whose relationship before the conflict were largely distant or even hostile. Back in 1901, Fanny Luzzatto had criticized the nuns working alongside her in the hospital for their irrational actions. Laura Orvieto, who provided nursing training for indigent women in Florence during the First World War and worked with the Samaritans herself, made an approving remark in her autobiography regarding the relationship with nuns: How much dedication and, I would say, sometimes even holiness Laura saw in the nurses entrusted to her and the nuns who worked with her; a strong sense of duty and feminine caprices, a bit of boasting, and a sense of absolute discipline, those who do everything and never ask for anything, those who are attentive and ready, admired by the soldiers…59

For Orvieto, collaboration with the nuns in the First World War marked the beginning of a continuous approachment to the Catholic Church and to the Catholic culture of the Italian majority society. Her husband’s friendly contact, described in her autobiography, with Father Ermenegildo Pistelli, with whom Angiolo Orvieto founded the Ufficio Notizie for families of soldiers at the front and initiated various aid campaigns for Italian troops over the course of the war, no doubt

58 Ada Cagli Della Pergola (“Fiducia”), “Natale di guerra,” Attività femminile sociale IV, 2 (December 1916). See also Miniati, Le “emancipate,” 224 f. 59 Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 117.

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contributed to this approachment.60 Orvieto quoted the priest as having remarked of the commitment of Angiolo and his Jewish colleagues, “Let us thank God that the Jews exist.”61 Although the writer was never baptized, her son Leonfrancesco married a Catholic, the Italian aristocrat Adriana Guasconi, in the 1920s. Angiolo and Laura ultimately survived the period from 1943 to 1944 hidden in a cloister, the hospice of Father Massimo da Porretta, near Florence.62 Angiolo’s cofounding of the union for Jewish-Christian friendship (Amicizia ebraico-cristiana) in 1950 together with the then mayor of Florence, the Christian democrat Giorgio La Pira (1904–1977) was a clear sign of this religious-cultural connection that Laura and Angiolo probably also saw as an expression of their italianità.63 The roots of this development undoubtedly trace back to the First World War period. However, Laura Orvieto’s enduring approachment to the Catholic milieu through her experiences of the First World War was exceptional among the Jewish actors of the early Italian women’s movement. Affirmations of Jewish-Christian solidarity like those in Cagli Della Pergola’s article were an expression of a patriotic attitude and Italian national spirit during the First World War. The vast majority of Jewish feminists continued to define themselves primarily via laicism, the more so since their attempts at achieving an understanding with the Catholic women’s organization at the beginning of the war once more had come to nothing due to the Catholics’ uncompromising self-separation. Despite the intensification of her connections with Catholic actors, even Laura Orvieto remained true to her social and cultural commitment to two laicist institutions, the CNDI and the Lyceum. Furthermore, an uninterrupted involvement with the Jewish community in her hometown of Florence is clearly to be seen in the writer’s social activity. During and immediately after the First World War, the orphanage Pro Infanzia Israelitica, which Orvieto had founded in Florence in 1907 for impoverished Jewish half and full orphans, became extremely important due to

60 See ibid., 116 f. 61 Ibid., 117. 62 See “Nota al Testo” in Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, XIII. 63 On the founding of the Amicizia ebraico-cristiana, see among others Baldi Cucchiara

S. et al. (eds.), Giorgio La Pira e la vocazione di Israele (Florence: Giunti, 2005), 66–68.

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the increased number of parentless and destitute children.64 Unlike the other Jewish orphanage in the Tuscan capital, Pro Infanzia accepted half orphans and also cared for children who still had a mother and father but required care outside of the parental home due to existential problems and/or chronic illness in the family.65 The institution is an eloquent demonstration of Orvieto’s Jewish self-consciousness, her orientation to the principles of social justice, and the responsibility of individuals for the good of the community. In 1917, the Pro Infanzia became a lifeline for two Jewish girls from Genoa, the Passigli sisters, whose father fought in the war and whose mother had died. Since the Jewish community in Genoa had no resources to care for the girls, and the communities of Turin and Rome only accepted boys in their orphanages, the president of the Jewish community of Genoa finally sent a desperate plea to the Pro Infanzia by telegram, seeking to prevent at all costs the eventuality of the girls being taken into a Catholic orphanage or a Catholic family and being baptized.66 The Florentine institution immediately acted on the children’s behalf.67 On the one hand, this episode indicates the contemporary importance of Orvieto’s initiative, which became especially relevant in view of the small number of Jewish orphanages in Italy at the time and the general lack of opportunities for female full and half orphans during the World War.68 On the other hand, it highlights the Jewish communities’ policy 64 See the detailed report of 1915 in the archive of the Jewish community of Florence: Società Pro Infanzia Israelitica Firenze, Relazione, Archivio della Comunità Ebraica di Firenze (henceforth, Archivio CEF), Sezione Opere Pie: Pro Infanzia Israelitica, b. 15.1. On Laura’s involvement in the Pro Infanzia, see Viterbo L., “Impegno sociale ed educativo nella comunità ebraica fiorentina,” Antologia Vieusseux 18, 53–54 (2012): 65–84. 65 See Società Pro Infanzia Israelitica Firenze, Relazione, 5 f., Archivio CEF, Sezione

Opere Pie: Pro Infanzia Israelitica, b.15.1. 66 See the telegram from Rabbi Sonnino, president of the Jewish community of Genoa, to the president of the Jewish community of Florence, Samuel Hirsch Margulies, November 1917 (undated), Archivio CEF, Sezione Opere Pie: Pro Infanzia Israelitica, b.15.1. The search for Jewish orphanages that could receive the girls is reflected in a detailed exchange of letters between the Jewish community presidents of Genoa, Rome, Turin, Padua, and Florence; see UCEI, b. 8, fasc. 47: “Bambine Passigli e Coen” (ricovero presso l’orfanotrofio di Roma), 16/1/1917–5/3/1917. 67 See the letter of thanks from Sonnino to Margulies of November 9, 1917, Archivio CEF, Sezione Opere Pie: Pro Infanzia Israelitica, b.15.1. 68 On February 7, 1917, the president of Rome’s Jewish community wrote to Florence that the “issue of the Jewish orphanages was always serious and has now become even

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of keeping a distance from the contemporary Catholic institutions, which was directly related to the justified fear that Jewish children would be forcibly baptized.69 The Jewish-Christian approachment remained incomplete during the war, although the positive connections described by Treves and especially by Orvieto were certainly a part of the everyday war experience. Transformed Gender Relationships, New and Withheld Women’s Rights Both at home and at the front, the war situation not only effected a generally greater proximity between female Jewish actors and their non-Jewish fellow citizens; it also transformed gender relationships to the point that women were able, often for the first time, to demonstrate their independence. The contrast between traditionally “male” and “female” spheres became weaker, at least temporarily, during the war.70 The experience of being left alone while husbands and sons went off to war, but especially the knowledge that they could make a living on their own through paid work, created a new female self-confidence in particular among bourgeois Italian women. The political background for this included the discussions that had been already going on in Italy since the beginning of the century regarding a reform in the juridical position of women aimed at abolishing the already mentioned autorizzazione maritale and enabling women to have access to all professions, and granting them the right to public employment. This theme became especially relevant during the war

more serious due to this terrible war”; Sereni to Margulies, February 7, 1917, UCEI, b.8, fasc. 47: “Bambine Passigli e Coen.” 69 The notorious case of the kidnapping and baptism of the Jewish boy Edgardo

Mortarafrom Bologna in 1858 had left Italy’s Jewish community with a lasting fear of forced baptisms; see Kertzer D. I., The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (London: Knopf, 1997); Scalise D., Il caso Mortara. La vera storia del bambino ebreo rapito dal papa (Milan: Mondadori, 1997); Mortara E., Writing for Justice. Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015). The extent of forced baptism of Jewish children in Italy is still largely unknown, but the Mortara case was no exception; see Caffiero M., Battesimi forzati. Storie di ebrei, cristiani e convertiti nella Roma dei papi (Rome: Viella, 2009). 70 On the development of gender relationships in Italy, see Willson, Gender, Family, and Sexuality; for the period of the First World War, see Ermacora, “Women behind the Lines,” 16–35.

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due to the growing demand for female work.71 The Milan chapter of the UFN, represented by Nina Rignano Sullam and Ersilia Majno, was particularly active in these discussions.72 The emancipatory debate was further strengthened by the Jewish writer Virginia Treves Tedeschi (1855–1916),73 the wife of the publisher Giuseppe Treves (1838–1904), who campaigned for women’s voting rights in the Comitato Lombardo Pro Suffragio Femminile from 1909 onward. In 1916, from her chosen home of Milan, she published a text titled “Le donne che lavorano,” in which she introduced her readers to the idea that work was the preferable instrument of female emancipation.74 Since women had been able to work “the miracle,” in the midst of all the horrors of war, of revealing their strengths and their value to themselves and to the world, in her eyes, the conflict had set in motion a process that could not be reversed: “It can be established that the war has forwarded the women’s rights issue by leaps and bounds.”75 Significantly, Treves Tedeschi connected the solution to the women’s rights issue with the idea of peace, although for her this also meant territorial expansion. The by no means pacifist concept of Italy as the supposed “liberator” of the territories under Habsburg rule, which is also to be found in the contributions of the Italian-Jewish women mentioned earlier, is clearly to be seen in the writings of the widow of Giuseppe Treves of Trieste: she thought that the war was an unavoidable step to securing a future

71 See Willson, Women, 57. On the theme of women’s work in contemporary Italy, see

among others Ballestrero M. V., “La legge Carcano sul lavoro delle donne e dei fanciulli,” in Passaniti, Lavoro e cittadinanza femminile, 44–59; Curli B., Italiane al lavoro, 1914– 1920 (Venice: Marsilio, 1998); Ortaggi Cammarosano S., Donne, lavoro, grande guerra (Milan: Unicopli, 2009); Soldani S., “Lo Stato e il lavoro delle donne nell’Italia liberale,” Passato e Presente 24 (1990): 23–71. 72 See the joint event to discuss the draft of the Sacchi laws organized by the UFN and the Università popolare di Milano, likely on Nina Rignano Sullam’s initiative; Archivio UFN, Serie 1.5.1. Diritti delle donne, b. 8, fasc. 55: Condizione giuridica della donna: attività pro legge Sacchi per l’abolizione dell’autorizzazione maritale. 73 On Treves Tedeschi, born in Verona, who wrote under the pseudonym of “Cordelia” and published several children’s journals in Milan, see among others Arslan A., “Scrittrici e giornaliste lombarde tra Ottocento e Novecento,” in Gigli Marchetti, Torcellan, Donna lombarda, 249–264; Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 1062. 74 Treves Tedeschi V., Le donne che lavorano (Milan: Treves, 1916). 75 Ibid., 194, 202.

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(complete) peace; citizens would have to be willing to make every sacrifice in order to create a greater and more distinguished fatherland for their children.76 As for women’s emancipation, the new female self-confidence that emerged during the war should empower women to preserve the room for maneuver, won with great effort, in a future of peace also: After the war, life will be more difficult…many things will have to be reorganized… there will be work for everyone, and after the exam that woman has passed with flying colors, all careers will be open to her. I wish that the new woman will be able to answer the call and will be convinced that work can confer the greatest of joys… So let us go forward with courage, and let us all work, for ourselves, for our families, and for humanity.77

From 1916 onward, the concept of work as the path to emancipation was a common thread through the discourse of the Italian women’s movement’s bourgeois camp. The everyday life of women from the lower social classes was already largely conditioned by work prior to the war. Now, women from the upper middle classes, who were not compelled to earn a living through paid activity, began to see work as an expression of female self-consciousness and of liberation from a type of immaturity conditioned by gender roles.78 In this respect, Jewish women from the acculturated bourgeoisie like Treves Tedeschi were no different from the non-Jewish bourgeois actors with whom they collaborated in the laicist organizations. For example, an article on “Women and Employment” appeared in the CNDI’s journal in the same year that Treves Tedeschi’s essay was published. Its author referred to several occupations in offices and banks, formerly performed by men, in which women could now prove their intellectual capacities.79 Bourgeois women became increasingly aware that 76 Ibid., 199. 77 Ibid., 202 f. 78 Already in 1911, Laura Orvieto had published an essay in Il Marzocco on the profes-

sional activity of women, in which she wrote, “The work is for the good of others. Can a stream of industriousness not emanate through the woman from the home, where the man already provides an adequate contribution for the family’s upkeep, which holds the feminine spirit and pride up high and reveals a broader horizon to the human personality?” Mrs. El (Laura Orvieto), “Il lavoro e la donna,” Il Marzocco (September 24, 1911). 79 “By now, a large number of women have taken their places among the employees of banks and public institutions, having been called upon to do so. The female element for which, before the war, everyone was trying to prove its intellectual incapability has…

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through working, they could both advance the cause of their own independence and—as nurses, teachers, and tailors, for example—serve Italy’s cause in the war.80 Many women from the wealthy middle and upper classes, whose bourgeois educations had always included sewing, became involved in textile work and the manufacture of uniforms.81 The calls for a reform of the social position of women, which grew louder during the war, were directed not only at the workplace, but also at the family. The long-overdue abolition of the autorizzazione maritale, which among other things made women’s participation in organizations and exercise of public offices conditional on the written permission of their husbands, would guarantee more independence and equality for women in their relationships with their husbands, and within the family in general. Thus it is no accident that actors like Treves Tedeschi, Laura Orvieto, and Enrica Barzilai Gentili, all of whom emphasized women’s right to work, also remarked on the consequences of the war situation for gender dynamics within the family in their writings. In her essay on women’s work, Treves Tedeschi emphasized that this new women’s independence would have a constructive effect on the relationships between spouses and their children… “the family will run like the wheels of a perfectly functioning machine, and the house will become like a haven, where the children who come home from school and the parents who return from work meet again and exchange their ideas…”.82 Consonant with Treves Tedeschi’s concept of a “democratization” of family structures, Laura Orvieto, with her interest in pedagogy, called for children’s education to be accommodated to these changes within the family, which was now to be no longer an “absolute monarchy,” but a “republic,” in which “two beings join together to find the best way

before humanity’s astonished eyes, actually proved the opposite of what was naively and malevolently claimed.” Luisa Costa, “Le donne e gli impieghi,” Attività femminile sociale IV, 9 (September 1916): 228–230. On the female office workers during the war, see Curli, Italiane al lavoro, Chapters 5 and 6; Willson, Women, 54. 80 In 1915, writing in Il Marzocco, Laura Orvieto appealed to women “that our work, be it free or remunerated, should benefit our combatants and should be accompanied with thoughts of love for all soldiers of the just cause, in the great name of Italy,” “Lavoro femminile gratuito e retribuito,” Il Marzocco (July, 1915). 81 See Willson, Women, 52 f. 82 Treves Tedeschi, Le donne che lavorano, 19.

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forward in complete equality.”83 The irredentist Enrica Barzilai Gentilli also saw the wife’s equal status as having directly positive consequences for the relationship between mothers and children. Her November 1916 article on the “failure of the dowry” expresses the lasting significance of the dictum, originating with Mazzini, that the woman should be the man’s intellectually equal “companion,” which had been a guiding principle of the Italian women’s emancipation discourse since the early days of the women’s movement: The woman who has learned, in this tragic period of war, to provide for herself, can no longer be content to bestow gratitude and smiles, but wants to be her husband’s wise companion and persistent collaborator. The love of work, and the knowledge and experience of the virtue of sacrifice constitute this new female capital, more certain and solid than the previous one that used to decide about the appropriateness and the advantage of a marriage – a capital that in years to come will not only make the union of two loving beings more likely but will also allow the woman to participate more actively in her own children’s development.84

Feminists like Barzilai Gentilli, Orvieto, and Treves Tedeschi must have seen the abolition of the autorizzazzione maritale with the Sacchi Law of 1919 as a personal triumph in view of their efforts for women’s equality within the family. Great, if not total success was also achieved regarding work. The new law enabled Italian women to practice all professions (with various restrictions) and to be accepted as employees for the first time. Most female actors interpreted this development as a direct “reward” for their engagement in the war.85 Therefore, it must have seemed all the more bitter to them that they did not receive the long-desired female voting rights in 1919, the realization of which they had greatly hoped for due to the work they

83 Laura Orvieto, “Come educherò le mie figlie,” Almanacco della donna italiana (1920): 116–125. 84 Enrica Barzilai Gentilli, “Il fallimento della dote,” Attività Femminile Sociale IV, 11 (November 1916): 277. 85 See Soldani S., “Lo Stato e il lavoro,” 69. The law was based on a draft by the president of the Partito Radicale, Ettore Sacchi. However, as before, women still could not become public prosecutors, judges, or diplomats; a large number of public offices also still remained closed to them.

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had accomplished and the efforts they had expended.86 Furthermore, in Italy’s Jewish communities, the situation remained largely unchanged for women after 1918 despite their outstanding engagement in the area of welfare, in hospitals, in children’s homes, and in orphanages during the war. It was only in 1922, and only in Trieste, that women were able to become elected representatives of the Jewish community.87 In addition, despite the Sacchi Law’s undeniable political and social relevance for the legal position of women in contemporary Italy, it is not clear to what extent the vision of the “new” Italian family described with such optimism by Treves Tedeschi and Orvieto was actually put into practice after the end of the war, or whether a reversion to the traditional gender roles took place over the long term.88

5.3

Deceptive Memories

Amelia Rosselli separated from her husband Giuseppe (“Joe”) Rosselli quite early on and raised their three sons, Aldo, Carlo, and Nello as a single mother for the most part.89 Her friend Laura Orvieto sought, together with her husband Angiolo and their children Leonfrancesco (1900–1977) and Annalia (1903–1954), to put into practice their theory of the family as a “res publica.” The euphoria with which Amelia and Laura had received Italy’s entry into the war in 1915 was soon replaced by genuine anxiety over the fate of their sons as they prepared to fight in that very war. Carlo and Nello Rosselli were both called up as late as 86 The prominent nationalist activist Teresa Labriola wrote in February 1918 in Attività Femminile Sociale “…as the woman has worked in the greatest undertakings of the war, she has proven herself for what she is, the worker of the tribe, the first and elemental focal point of the nation”; Attività Femminile Sociale VI, 2 (February 2018): 32. 87 In 1915 and 1916, the Jewish community of Florence, which was especially proactive in the contemporary movement toward a Jewish rinascità, underwent a partial reform of voting rights. This made women eligible for membership of certain committees—ritual, education, and welfare—which were subordinated to the relevant departments of the community council. However, women could not participate in the council itself; see Miniati, Le “emancipate”, 192. 88 See Ermacora, “Women behind the Lines,” 31; Willson, Women, 60. 89 On the Rosselli family, see among others Fiori G., Casa Rosselli. Vita di Carlo e

Nello, Amelia, Marion e Maria (Turin: Einaudi, 1999); Ciuffoletti, I Rosselli. Epistolario familiare; Ciuffoletti, Corradi, Lessico famigliare; Moorehead, Una famiglia pericolosa; Taglietti G., Le Donne di Casa Rosselli. Amelia Pincherle, Marion Cave, Maria Todesco, Amelia Junior e Carlo Rosselli (Cremona: Persico, 2008).

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the beginning of 1918; Laura’s son Leonfrancesco was trained alongside Nello, his coeval, at a barracks in Vigevano near Pavia. When Orvieto visited her son there at the end of May 1918, she was troubled to learn that “Lieutenant Velardi, a friend of Aldo’s, who had taken the two boys under his protection, has now left Vigevano.”90 Amelia and Laura devoted the central portion of their memoirs to the First World War; their works express the life-changing significance of the conflict for both these Italian-Jewish writers.91 These texts bear witness to the generally complex relationship between (war) experience and memory, especially as related to the transformation and fragmentation of memories against the background of current political events and the human need to construct meaning. They constitute a characteristic component of the Jewish memory of the Great War in Italy, which was largely covered over or destroyed by the devastating experiences of the Second World War.92 The fact that Amelia’s memoirs and Orvieto’s autobiography were written during the fascist dictatorship makes it all the more necessary to consider their construction of the past in light of their current situation. Both protagonists produced their memories at a considerable temporal distance and with the knowledge of the death of Amelia Rosselli’s eldest son, Aldo, and many of his young friends. Amelia’s memories were written between 1932 and the end of the 1940s; she wrote the majority in exile 90 Orvieto to Amelia Rosselli, May 27, 1918, FRT, Archivio di Amelia Rosselli, M 2152.0. 91 Women’s memories of the Great War both in the Italian context and in the European context in general have been little studied up to now. Christa Hämmerle has focused on the war accounts of nurses in the Habsburg Empire in “Mentally broken”, as well as in “Counter-Narratives of the Great War? War Accounts of Nurses in Austro-Hungarian Service,” in Bessel R., Wierling D. (eds.), Inside World War One? The First World War and its Witnesses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 143–166. Alison S. Fell examines the autobiographies of French and British “war heroines”: Fell A. S., “Remembering French and British First World War Heroines,” in Hämmerle et al., Gender and the First World War, 108–126; on the memories of Italian-Jewish women, see Nattermann R., “The Female Side of War. The Experience and Memory of the Great War in Italian-Jewish Women’s Ego-Documents,” in Madigan E., Reuveni G. (eds.), The Jewish Experience of the First World War (Basingstoke-New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 233–254. On the memories of male actors, see especially Winter J., Remembering War. The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2006), 62–76; on familial and historical recollections of the war, see ibid., 8–13. 92 On the long-term forgetfulness of the Jewish experience and memory of the First World War in Austria too, see Ernst, “Der Erste Weltkrieg,” 62–68.

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in Switzerland and America (1938–1944) after the murder of her sons Carlo and Nello by fascist henchmen.93 Meanwhile, Orvieto wrote most of her autobiography in 1938 and 1939, the last part of it away from her home in Florence, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, where she had retreated with Angiolo in 1939 after the promulgation of the Italian racial laws in November 1938.94 The bitterness and sense of isolation in view of the laws passed just a few months previously are clearly detectable in her writings. The tragic undertone in both authors’ works reveals their belated recognition of the horror of the Grande Guerra, which was initially almost entirely underestimated and which had seemed to them, years earlier, the fulfillment of the Risorgimento. Amelia Rosselli devoted nearly a whole chapter of her autobiography to her son Aldo, who died in Carnia in March 1916 at just twenty years old95 (Fig. 5.1). The day of Italy’s entry into the war, which Rosselli described with great emotion, in retrospect acquired a central symbolic significance: How, and with what emotion, I remember the evening of May 15, 1915!96 Aldo had rushed home with the great news. Carlo and Nello, who were already in bed, got up; Aldo wanted to hang the flag outside, and its ring was on the wall under the window of Nello’s room. I see them before me even now, all three of them, opening the window – the two younger ones in their long nightshirts down to their ankles – putting the flag pole in the ring with an enormous effort, while the bells of the Palazzo Vecchio sounded the alarm. A sob constricts my throat… Under this flag, to defend this flag, one of these three would die a few months later! … And as I watched them, another vision suddenly came to my mind: the balcony of my childhood home on the Canale Grande in Venice; my father, mounting the flag in front of that balcony on the occasion of great national festivities. 93 On the history of the memoir’s production, see the introduction by Marina Calloni in Rosselli, Memorie, 16 f. 94 See Del Vivo, “Introduzione,” VII. 95 This refers to the second part of the memoir, “A Firenze,” which is largely dedicated

to Aldo and his death; Rosselli, Memorie, 107–174. Rosselli’s eldest son was sent to the front at Pal Grande at his own request in early 1916. The young lieutenant fell in battle during an Austrian attack on Italian positions in the night of March 26 and 27. Half a year later, he was posthumously granted the silver medal for bravery. His colonel had originally recommended him for the gold medal; see Valiani, “Introduzione,” in Ciuffoletti, Epistolario familiare, X. 96 The date is incorrect; Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary on May 23, 1915.

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Fig. 5.1 Amelia Rosselli with her eldest son Aldo (Udine, 1916), a few weeks before his death

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And that banner was nothing so brand new as this one, but old and faded – it had been exposed far too long to the sun in 1849. I adored it. I had been taught to adore it.97

Rosselli’s son Aldo, as well as his younger brothers Carlo and Nello, were already dead at the time that this portion of the memoirs was written. In Amelia’s memory, not by chance, it was her three sons who mounted the Italian flag on the Rossellis’ home together and in so doing, symbolically gave new life to the patriotic, liberal ideals of their Venetian grandfather. The latter had been directly involved in the anti-Habsburg revolts of 1848/1849 and had worked for the cause of the Repubblica di San Marco. Thus, Amelia consciously created a connection between the atmosphere of the Risorgimento and the Grande Guerra, in which liberal Italy, now a thing of the past, became the ideal image of fatherland and freedom. It is likely that in this way the author also sought to elucidate her family’s interventionist attitude and, in a certain sense, to justify it. With the death of her son, the nationalist undertones disappeared from Amelia’s private and public writings. However, her patriotism seemed unbroken, perhaps even strengthened by this personal experience.98 When Laura Orvieto began to be interested in the Zionist Movement around 1919, Amelia’s reaction was dismissive. In a letter to her friend, she stressed her national self-consciousness, referring explicitly to Aldo’s death for his Italian “fatherland”: “I have suffered that pain exclusively as an Italian… especially as an Italian mother of an Italian soldier who fell for Italy.”99 Looking back on her ideals of justice and freedom, which the war had not been able to realize, she resumed in her memoirs, “The homecomers saw that their sacrifice, instead of being honored, was mocked as a pointless cause. And so the dreadful, nearly monstrous question arose in the heart of every grieving mother—Why? Why so much blood, so much pain, and a whole generation sacrificed?”100 Laura Orvieto made even clearer reference than Amelia Rosselli to fascism and the discriminatory legislation against the Jews who had sacrificed their lives for the cause of Italy in such great numbers during the 97 Rosselli, Memorie, 140 f. 98 See also Amato, Una donna nella storia, 112. 99 Amelia Rosselli to Laura Orvieto, undated (1919?), ACGV, Fondo Orvieto,

Or.1.2059. 100 Rosselli, Memorie, 163.

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First World War. In contrast to her friend Rosselli, Orvieto lived exclusively in Italy during the writing of her memoirs. She lived through the increasingly violent antisemitic course of the fascist regime in close proximity and at first hand. Between 1936 and 1938, nearly all Jews were forced out of public office, as the fascist press intensified its anti-Jewish campaign.101 As a consequence of the racial legislation of November 1938, Laura had to leave the Florentine Lyceum, with which she had been involved since its foundation in 1908. The deeply felt resentment at this personal humiliation can be seen clearly in her autobiography. She wrote of Amelia’s son Aldo, “Aldo gave up his radiant life on the Italian Alps. Lucky Aldo, because if he were still alive today, he would be expelled from the army, in spite of the bravery medal that was given to his mother at that time.”102 Thus, Amelia Rosselli’s and Laura Orvieto’s memories of the First World War do not only reveal the euphoria of national euphoria and irredentist passion that is to be seen in the majority of ego documents and writings by Jewish women at the beginning of the war. With the temporal and spatial distance, in the writings both of Rosselli and of Orvieto, grief at the fallen sons and friends dominates the images, thoughts, and feelings connected with the war. At the same time, the experiences of exclusion, persecution, and exile during the fascist era intensified the memories of the Great War as the last central moment in which the protagonists perceived themselves as a part of the national community.103 A similar motivation lay behind the memory book for the Jewish Red Cross nurse Emilia Contini Ancona (1859–1937), published by the stockbroker Clemente Ancona in April 1938 in memory of his deceased wife in her hometown of Ferrara.104 The antisemitic course of the fascist regime was already heading toward the racial laws enacted in November of that year. Like Fanny Luzzatto and Silvia Treves, Emilia Contini Ancona had distinguished herself in the First World War as a nurse who was also engaged in various forms of social work. Among other things, she was 101 See Sarfatti, The Jews, 100–129. 102 Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 115. 103 See Nattermann, “The Female Side of War,” 252–254. 104 Ancona C., In memoria di Emilia Ancona Contini nel primo anniversario della

morte (Ferrara: private publication, 1938). The author thanks the great-granddaughter of Clemente and Emilia, Sara Ancona (Padua), for supplying the memory book as well as extensive additional information on Emilia Contini and her family.

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involved in the above-mentioned Cavour day nursery in Ferrara for the children of soldiers at the front.105 The memory book is a combination of reports on Emilia’s war involvement, thank you letters to herself and her family, and obituaries from ministers, the army, and Jewish community institutions.106 In the introduction, Clemente Ancona wrote of his deceased wife, “Her engagement throughout the long war was always distinguished by constancy and love. This Italian citizen, who was filled with fervent patriotism, wanted to be useful and received [great] recognition for the services [she] provided.”107 Clemente Ancona’s emphasis on Emilia’s involvement in the war, her patriotic ardor, and her Italian citizenship (which in truth was incomplete) reveals the deep need to represent his wife as an integral part of the Italian nation.108 The publication was primarily intended for Clemente’s children and grandchildren, but with the by now aggressive antisemitic policy in the background, it was in all likelihood directed at a wider Italian readership also. Clemente Ancona apparently sought, in a desperate way, to prove his wife and family’s belonging to the Italian nation through her engagement and national solidarity in the First World War. The urgency of his portrayal is explicable in light of the contemporary discussions on the position of the Jews in Italy, which came to a head in the declaration of the notorious “Manifesto della Razza” of July 1938, according to which the Jews did not belong to the “Italian race.”109 For Laura Orvieto too, the confrontation with the antisemitism of fascist Italy resulted in a retrospective re-evaluation of the Great War. The antisemitic tendencies which had become more strongly apparent 105 See Miniati, Le “emancipate,” 216. 106 The commemorative volume for the Jewish war nurse shows structural similari-

ties to the memory books and writings published by bourgeois Italian families during the First World War for their fallen relatives; see Janz O., Das symbolische Kapital der Trauer. Nation, Religion und Familie im italienischen Gefallenenkult des Ersten Weltkriegs (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2009), 355–365. 107 Ancona, In memoria di Emilia Ancona Contini, 8. 108 In this respect, the publication matches the intention of the Jewish engineer Arturo

Luzzatto, mentioned in Chapter 2. He too published the diary of his mother, the patriot Fanny Luzzatto, in a period of massive antisemitic persecution in Italy, in order to underline his family’s belonging to the Italian nation; see Luzzatto, La Famiglia. 109 See paragraph 9: “Gli ebrei non appartengono alla razza italiana,”; “Il Fascismo e i problemi della razza,” Giornale d’Italia, July 15, 1938, printed in Sarfatti, La Shoah, 133.

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among female Catholic protagonists at the beginning of the war, and their decisive separation from Jewish and laicist women, which Orvieto had experienced at first hand, found no place in her recollections of the First World War. Instead, the writer idealized the relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish Italian men and women during the war. Despite all its tragedy, the conflict was presented in her autobiography as a period of strong, national community solidarity, in which Jews and non-Jews alike had worked in harmony for the Italian cause: …At that time, we believed in the unconditional struggle for Italy’s independence, so that the enemy could be expelled from Italian territory forever, beyond the Alps, so that he would no longer command a people that was finally free, free in their own will, their own strength, their own sacrifice. This is what we believed at that time; this is what we wanted at that time, all of us united, we Italians, without racial discrimination and difference, in a common love and a common belief.110

Antisemitic hostility and increasing existential hardship under fascism led to a deceptive commemoration of the First World War as a period of complete national community for Italian-Jewish actors like Laura Orvieto, Amelia Rosselli, and Clemente Ancona. Because of their exclusion from Italian society, they turned toward the past, proceeding selectively as a matter of necessity. The reconstruction of past events was based on their need for meaning in the present. In the memories of Jewish authors, the First World War assumed the aura of a bygone era in which antisemitism among Italians seemed to have not existed. The antisemitic attitudes that were manifestly present in Catholic (women’s) circles, but also the success with which the racial legislation could be implemented in Italy only two decades after the end of the Great War, stand in stark contrast to this idealistic image.

110 Oriveto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 119.

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Between War and Dictatorship

In the summer of 1919, when Amelia Rosselli visited the city of Bozen, which had been annexed by Italy after Austria’s capitulation, she wrote to Laura Orvieto, I cannot say that I feel at home; “at home” in the sense of Italy. We are in the home of others, and even the most aggressive nationalism could not convince anyone otherwise. “To invade the house of others” – this is the impression that I immediately had when I arrived in Bozen. One must wish and accept this occupation as an unavoidable necessity, but there is no joy in it. As you can see, I am sincerely impartial, despite my truly nationalist past… The sight of these poor, ravaged villages, the still visible traces of the war on the landscape that blooms once again between so many ruins! Unforgettable impressions, unforgettable presence of those who are no more… A cleansing bath, a comfort after the sad outcome of this very sad year, the drunkenness of ‘italianità,’ which took away the breath and the word.111

The gruesome reality of the war, with its enormous human, material, and moral destruction and devastation, had led to a fundamental change in Rosselli’s self-consciousness. The lasting grief for her fallen son and the immediate confrontation with the extent of the destruction, still visible long after the war’s end, which the resident of Florence likely saw with her own eyes for the first time on her journey to the north of the country, strengthened in her the recognition that she had fallen victim to an ideological phantom.112 Over a million Italian soldiers and civilians had lost their lives in the war. The conviction, still omnipresent in Rosselli’s letters of 1915, regarding Italy’s “just” war and the supposed necessity of “liberation” of the “unredeemed” territories from Austrian rule, which can be

111 Amelia Rosselli to Laura Orvieto, July 31 [1919], ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or.1.2059 (emphasis in original). 112 In an undated letter to Laura Orvieto most likely written towards the end of 1919, Amelia Rosselli described her deeply emotional, transcendent proximity to her fallen son: “For some time, since this autumn… I hear Aldo’s voice talking to me from very high above. It is as if he had become detached from this Earth where my maternal pain had held him in desperation, from a vain, desperate illusion – finally there was a transcendence of me, a recognition of the sublimity of the light in which he found himself… the memory of him that he left behind, the light that surrounds him…”; Amelia Rosselli to Laura Orvieto, undated, ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or.1.2059.

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seen in the writings of many other Italian-Jewish female actors also, was replaced by the sense of having violently invaded the “house of ‘others’.” According to the terms of the peace treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in September 1919, Austria had to cede South Tyrol as far as Brenner, Venezia Giulia, Trieste, and Istria to Italy. The ideal of italianità, with its connotations of justice and freedom, cultivated by Rosselli’s family since the early days of the Risorgimento, had now lost its meaning for Amelia and become the byword for nationalist, “drunken” aggression. Like the writer herself in this letter to Laura, Angiolo Orvieto too, in his obituary for their friend, spoke of Rosselli as a “longtime nationalist” who had transformed into an ex-nazionalista due to her experiences in the First World War.113 The conviction of many Jewish soldiers and their families that by fighting for the fatherland, they would set the final seal on their bond with the Italian nation and the royal house of Savoy, which had originally granted equality and freedom to the Jews, was reduced ad absurdum by the brutal reality of the war for Rosselli and many others. There is no longer any patriotic rhetoric to be seen in a letter Laura Orvieto wrote to Amelia Rosselli in 1919, more than three years after Aldo’s death. All that remained was grief at the war deaths of her friends’ sons: “I think of Aldo with yet greater tenderness than in former times, when he still lived in our world, in our everyday lives, and I combine these [former times] in a thought of love for these boys who were so different and yet in the end so similar in their verve and their dignity.”114 When the son of the Jewish doctor and activist Ernestina Paper died in spring 1919, probably as the result of a war injury, the minutes of a meeting of the Florentine chapter of the CNDI only noted that condolences were to be sent to Paper. In this passage, nationalist undertones and references to the death of the young man for the “fatherland” were deliberately omitted by those present.115 In contrast, in July 1918, the then 113 Angiolo Orvieto, “Commemorazione di Amelia Rosselli,” ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or.1.2059: Rosselli Amelia. Commemorazioni e stampa relativa, 6. 114 Laura Orvieto to Amelia Rosselli, July 21, 1919, FRT, Archivio di Amelia Rosselli,

418. 115 See CNDI, Federazione Femminile Toscana, Adunanza CXXXVII, April 2, 1919,

ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3: Federazone Toscana. Processi verbali del consiglio: Gennaio 1915-Febbraio 1921. The physician Ernestina Paper, née PuritzManasse, was born to a Jewish family in Odessa in 1846. She initially studied medicine at the University of Zurich, since women were not permitted to study in Russia at the time. In 1872, she moved to Pisa to continue her medical studies, which she completed

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chairwoman of the Federazione Toscana, Baroness Elena French Cini, had written in the CNDI’s publication Attività Femminile Sociale that all forms of Disfattismo should be combated with patriotic propaganda for the sake of the “beloved fatherland.”116 In November 1919, Paper announced her intention to resign from her position as president of the department of hygiene within the Federazione Toscana due to her age.117 It should not be excluded, however, that the death of her son was the real reason for her decision to leave the organization which had been primarily interventionist during the war, and in which she herself had been involved as a doctor for years. The early pacifist and pioneer of the Italian women’s movement, Paolina Schiff, who became an interventionist in the course of the war, also increasingly withdrew from public life after the end of the war. The disappointment at the failure of her political ideals and the belated realization of the inhumanity of the war, in which many of her closest relatives had lost their lives, caused her distinctive sociopolitical engagement, which had always been a defining feature of her life, to stagnate.118 The military nurse Silvia Treves, who was still young during the war, took a different path. After the conflict was over and she returned to her hometown of Florence, she became involved in the laicist women’s

in 1877 at the Istituto di Studi Superiori in Florence. She was the first woman in the Italian unitary state to graduate with a university degree. In 1878, she opened a medical practice in Florence for women and children; her patients later included Amelia Rosselli’s three sons. Within the Florence chapter of the CNDI, Paper was especially involved in issues to do with public hygiene and health. She was also a member of the committee that worked for the construction of a girls’ high school in Florence. On Ernestina Paper, see among others Polenghi S., “Missione naturale,” 297 f., Raicich M., “Liceo, università, professioni: un percorso difficile,” in Soldani, L’educazione delle donne, 147, 150 f. 116 Elena French Cini, “La Federazione Toscana. Resoconto dal Maggio 1917 al Maggio 1918,” Attività Femminile Sociale IV, 7 (July 1918). 117 See the letter from Ernestina Paper to Elena French Cini of November 26, 1919; ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 3, fasc. 13: Documentazione della Federazione Femminile Toscana. 118 See Nattermann, “Vom Pazifismus zum Interventionismus,” 85. Frank Gent reports that all Paolina’s male relatives with the surname Schiff who fought in the First World War (some of them for Great Britain) lost their lives.

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organizations.119 The life-changing human experiences and the selfconfidence she acquired during the war undoubtedly impacted the young woman’s self-consciousness and sensitized her to the issue of women’s rights. However, her former, primarily emotional affinity for the Catholic culture of the Italian majority society did not last beyond the war, as can be seen from her activity in the secular environment. The examination of these women indicates that female Italian-Jewish protagonists followed thoroughly different ideological paths after the war, ranging from pronounced anti-nationalism for Rosselli and sociopolitical resignation for Schiff and Paper to a newly awakened consciousness of themes surrounding women’s emancipation in the case of Silvia Treves. Overall, even after the war, Jewish feminists continued to be largely liberal or socialist in outlook, while the organized Italian women’s movement generally took a sharp turn to the right, to the point of assuming fascist positions.120 But the ever-strengthening fascist movement would soon captivate even a few Jewish protagonists. Political Crossroads The great hopes placed by Jewish and non-Jewish feminists in the outcome of the war, both in view of Italy’s power-political objectives and regarding a transformation of gender hierarchies, family-internal power structures, and the granting of new rights to women, were only very conditionally realized. While the war experience had temporarily led to an approachment between masculine and feminine spheres of activity, there was no fundamental revision of the subordinate social position of women after the end of the conflict. Even within the family, the patriarchal structures largely reasserted themselves.121 Marginalization of women could also be seen in the social unrest that broke out in 1919 as a result of

119 In the postwar period, Silvia Treves’s name appears in the membership lists and among the participants of the gatherings of the CNDI’s Federazione Femminile Toscana, see ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, sfasc. 4, Rubriche con elenche delle socie (1920–1935). 120 On the ideological development of the CNDI specifically from the First World War onward and its turn toward fascism, see Rossini D., “Il Consiglio nazionale delle donne italiane. Affinità e contrasti internazionali,” in Bartoloni, La Grande Guerra delle italiane, 113–129. 121 See Ermacora, “Women behind the Lines,” 30 f.; Willson, Women, 60.

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economic hardship and the political crisis in the country. The liberal political system had reached the end of its powers. Women did participate in the nationwide strike and occupation of factories and land that took place in 1919 and 1920—the biennio rosso—but their role was significantly reduced within this development in comparison to the war period. Even as organized labor was reestablished, women were increasingly forced to the margins.122 The above-mentioned Sacchi Law of 1919 brought important social reforms, but the state continued to withhold the most important one— voting rights for women. At the beginning of 1919, the feminist Margherita Ancona (1881–1966),123 successor in the presidency of the Comitato Lombardo Pro Suffragio to Virginia Treves Tedeschi, who had died in 1916, made an emphatic plea to readers of the journal Attività Femminile Sociale to join forces in the coming months and work together to secure voting rights.124 The fact that women in Russia had received voting rights following the revolution of February 1917, and that after the end of the war, voting rights for women were introduced, among other places, in newly independent Poland, in Germany, and in Austria, raised the hopes of Italian suffragettes that they too would receive their

122 On the participation of women in the social protests and political struggles of the postwar period, see Kaplan T., “Women and Communal Strikes in the Crisis of 1917– 1922,” in Bridenthal R., Koonz C. (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 429–449; Pieroni Bortolotti F., Femminismo e partiti politici in Italia 1919–1926 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978), especially 84–90. 123 Margherita Ancona was born in Palermo; her family moved to Milan when she was a young girl. Her twin sister was the doctor Luisa Ancona (1881–1951). Margherita studied literature and taught for a long time at Milan’s Beccaria high school. Like her sister Luisa, Margherita Ancona was involved in the women’s movement throughout her life, especially as a suffragette. After the founding of the Italian association of women academics (FILDIS) in 1922, Margherita was elected president of its Milan chapter. She was also a member of the feminist women’s union Associazione per la donna, in which the above-mentioned activist Eugenia Lebrecht Vitali, who spoke in favor of the abolition of religious education in Italian schools at the national women’s congress in Rome in 1908, was also involved. On Ancona, see Taricone F., “La FILDIS e l’associazionismo femminile,” in Addis Saba M. (ed.), La corporazione delle donne. Ricerche e studi sui modelli femminili nel ventennio (Florence: Vallecchi, 1988), 139; on Margherita and Luisa Ancona, see Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 51 f. 124 Margherita Ancona, “Per una pregiudiziale,” Attività Femminile Sociale VII, 1 (January 1919): 4–7.

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long-awaited position as citizens with equal rights.125 In April 1919, Ancona organized a congress of the Pro Suffragio femminile association in Milan, in which the UFN was also significantly involved. The fact that the Catholic people’s party, the Partito Popolare Italiano, established in January 1919, had also adopted voting rights for women as part of their foundational manifesto, intensified the laicist UFN’s insistence on their own political program. The new Catholic party hoped that most women would vote for the Church and stem the tide of socialism, while the UFN expected to supply the parties on the political left with potential voters. Nina Rignano Sullam gave a speech at the Pro Suffragio femminile event in which she connected the demand for women’s voting rights with the democratic revitalization of the Italian nation for which she and her likeminded colleagues were striving: [Nina Rignano Sullam] is of the view that… an extensive involvement of women in the coming elections would be the means and the best opportunity for an intensive propaganda campaign in support of the recognition of their political rights; she suggests that the Italian suffragettes… establish a common program in advance for propaganda and the [political] campaign that goes beyond their own demands and contains some concrete, essential aspects for national renewal.126

Rignano Sullam’s vision of a national community in which both men and women could participate in free, democratic elections was not realized through the legge Sacchi. The fact that Jewish feminists, who had always been in the front line of the struggle to achieve women’s voting rights in Italy, remained true to their ultimate goal despite this result, can be seen from a statement by Amelia Rosselli. At a time when her sons Carlo and Nello were increasingly politically active, the ex-nationalist was primarily dedicated to strengthening the political influence of women in Italy, so that they too could participate in the hoped-for democratic reconstruction of the country. At a session of the Florentine chapter of the CNDI in November 1919, she made express reference to the fact that “as soon 125 On the development of the female suffrage movement in Italy and the initiatives during the First World War, see Schiavon E., “Il movimento suffragista, 1895–1918,” in Bartoloni, La Grande Guerra, especially 139–147. 126 Federazione nazionale Pro Suffragio Femminile – Comitato Lombardo, Congresso nazionale pro suffragio femminile, Milan, April 27–28, 1919, Archivio UFN, b. 53, fasc. 2.

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as they have received the right to vote,” women should actively participate in the political life of the country.127 Like Nina Rignano Sullam, Amelia Rosselli saw women’s voting rights as an essential precondition for democratic renewal after the disastrous experience of the World War. The remarkable and continuous commitment to the establishment of women’s voting rights on the part of Jewish women in particular undoubtedly reflected their need for a continuation of their integration process as women and as Jews which had already been the motivation behind the social and cultural activities of Jewish feminists from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. Their goal was to break through the twofold social marginalization to which Jewish women, unlike Jewish men, continued to be subjected. The antisemitic tendencies within the increasingly stronger Catholic women’s movement that manifested at the beginning of the First World War conferred new, urgent relevance on this demand. The establishment of the Catholic people’s party intensified the influence of Catholicism on political, social, and cultural levels, from which the Catholic women’s movement also profited. Not by chance, perhaps, it was the feminist of Jewish origins, Margherita Ancona, who addressed a combative appeal to the readership of Attività Femminile Sociale in the same year. In her article, the literary scholar with close ties to the UFN spoke against the enduring legal disadvantage of women in Italy but at the same time criticized what she saw as the longineffectual modus operandi of the women’s movement: “In fifty years, we have accomplished nothing… is it really worthwhile to continue like this? If we have been following the wrong path, let us change it, but let us not wait forever and waste time, breath, and paper so that our excellent, most courtly, pious, and intelligent legislators can thumb their noses at us.”128 Ancona’s bitter sarcasm was aimed above all at the weakness of the liberal system, which became increasingly apparent after the war and in view of the incomplete success of the legge Sacchi. The activist’s fears would come true. The government led by the liberal Francesco Saverio Nitti fell in June 1920, before it could bring the discussion of women’s suffrage before the senate. As a consequence, the majority decision already achieved in the Camera was annulled, and the question was postponed to 127 See CNDI, Federazione Femminile Toscana, Adunanza CXLIV, November 19, 1919, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3: Federazione Toscana. Processi verbali del consiglio: January 1915–February 1921. 128 Margherita Ancona, Attività Femminile Sociale VII, 1 (1919): 6 f.

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the next legislative period.129 Meanwhile, the nationalist, anti-democratic member CNDI activist, Teresa Labriola, accused the Comitato Lombardo Pro Suffragio Femminile led by Ancona of being willing to support only socialist candidates in the upcoming elections.130 Jewish Feminists Between Irredentism and Fascism Like Margherita Ancona and Nina Rignano Sullam, Jewish feminists, especially from the UFN circles, continued their commitment to the establishment of women’s rights within the left-wing political spectrum during the period between the end of the war and the fascist dictatorship. Generally, however, there was a marked increase in right-wing positioning within the Italian women’s movement. The vision of a new, “strong” Italy of the dissenter Benito Mussolini, who had resigned from the Socialist Party in 1914 as a champion of Italy’s entrance into the war and had founded the pro-interventionist journal Il popolo d’Italia (which would become the official organ of the fascist party in 1922) in Milan was met with agreement by many Italian feminists. Mussolini’s early female supporters were mostly activists from the CNDI. In view of the ideological shift from patriotic zeal toward a thoroughly aggressive nationalism that occurred in the large national women’s organizations during the war, the threshold for acceptance of fascist positions was overall far lower in the CNDI than in the socialist-influenced UFN.131 It was not only Mussolini’s Jewish mistress Margherita Sarfatti who expected fascism to realize both her political ambitions for irredentism and new opportunities for the social development of women. For quite a few female actors, fascism seemed to be a new and liberating power. Although only nine women were present in March 23, 1919, when 129 On the campaign for female suffrage in Italy after the First World War, see Contigiani N., “La forzatura delle pareti domestiche e la cittadinanza ‘mediata’,” in Passaniti, Lavoro e cittadinanza femminile, 112–117. 130 See Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 51. Teresa Labriola (1874–1941), who was born in Naples and whose mother was originally from Germany, campaigned as an ardent champion of interventionism from 1914 onward. When her propagandistic, pro-Italian ambitions gained the upper hand at the beginning of the war, she resigned from the CNDI. On Labriola, see Follacchio S., “‘L’ingegno aveva acuto e la mente aperta.’ Teresa Labriola. Appunti per una biografia,” Storia e problemi contemporanei 17 (1996): 65–89. 131 See Willson, Women, 83.

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Mussolini founded the Fasci di combattimento (fascist combat unions) in a salon at the Piazza Santo Sepolcro in Milan and, in so doing, officially established the fascist movement, only a short time later the first female fascists began to organize independently. At the time, women were still also welcome in the fascist circles and local groups that rapidly spread throughout Italy but were initially largely an urban phenomenon. In a period when the issue of votes for women was the subject of lively discussion in parliament and the promulgation of the legge Sacchi was imminent, the official program of the Fasci di combattimento of June 1919 also called for voting rights for women over twenty-one years of age as well as equal access to professional occupations.132 The new fascist movement thereby sought to increase its political attractiveness for potential female supporters. In March 1920, Elisa Majer Rizzioli (1880– 1930), a former war nurse of Jewish origins, founded the first fascist women’s organization, the Fasci Femminili, in Monza; it soon spread to other cities primarily in northern and central Italy. As was the case with male fascists “of the first hour,” the early fascist women’s groups also included both actors who hoped that fascism would radically transform Italy and members of the traditionally conservative elites. These primarily saw fascism as a welcome tool in the fight against socialism and communism. Many of the early female fascists came with experience from other associations, especially welfare organizations; like Sarfatti and Majer Rizzioli, most of them were from the wealthy, educated middle class or were of aristocratic origins. Some of them had begun to be interested in the fascist movement due to the events in Fiume and considered themselves primarily as irredentists.133 The irredentist enthusiasm so characteristic of many Jewish feminists during the war acquired new currency in this connection. In September 1919, the celebrated poet and war veteran Gabriele D’Annunzio had seized power in Fiume after military detachments mutinied in VenetiaGiulia and occupied the Dalmatian city with the overall tacit approval of

132 See Dittrich-Johansen H., Le “militi dell’idea.” Storia delle organizzazioni femminili del Partito Nazionale Fascista (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 31 f.; de Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 55. 133 On the establishment of the Fasci Femminili, see Dittrich-Johansen, Le “militi dell’idea,” 37 f.; Willson, “Italy,” in Passmore K. (ed.), Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 11–32; de Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 55–62.

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their commanding officers. A strongly pro-Italian movement had taken shape in Fiume immediately after the end of the war and had called for unification with Italy. Furthermore, the national-imperialist movements in Italy were energetically supported by the newly established Fasci di combattimento in their demand that the whole of Dalmatia, including Fiume, should be annexed.134 The Venetian-born Majer Rizzioli, who had long been a passionate irredentist, joined D’Annunzio’s “March on Fiume” in September 1919.135 Even the liberal-minded Laura Orvieto was among the members of a women’s committee in Florence that indirectly supported D’Annunzio’s cause in 1919 by providing the children of the city of Fiume with food, clothing, and medicines. Thus, the tradition of Jewish benevolence was once more combined with a partially resurrected belief in irredentism, nurtured by the illusion of a “just” Italian rule.136 The deeply patriotic former war nurse Emilia Contini Ancona also received children from Fiume who were sent to her hometown of Ferrara as part of propagandist pro-Italian activities: “During the great soldier-poet’s Fiume campaign, she [Emilia Contini Ancona] cared for the children from Fiume who were staying in Ferrara on a visit; she welcomed them into her home sometimes and was aroused to quivering emotion by their patriotic songs.” In March 1922, she received a personal dedication from Gabriele D’Annunzio in thanks for her patriotic commitment “per la causa bella.”137 The great attraction of irredentism for many female Jewish actors can be explained in large part by the fact that the irredentist movement in Italy was anti-Austrian and anti-socialist, but not antisemitic. The Jewish

134 On the crisis in Fiume, see Mantelli B., Kurze Geschichte des italienischen Faschismus (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2008), 37–41; Schieder W., Der italienische Faschismus 1919–1945 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2010), 21 f. 135 See de Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 59. 136 See “Pro-Bambini di Fiume,” Florence, February 1920, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 1,

fasc. 2: Attività delle Sezioni (1910–1930). D’Annunzio was very well known to Orvieto because of their joint work for Il Marzocco. At the beginning of 1919, Orvieto joined a committee in her Florence home that campaigned for the twinning of the city of Florence with the city of Zara. In February 1919, a group of Florentine citizens (male and female) traveled to Zara redenta to ceremonially hand over the Italian flag to the city’s Italian-speaking community and to give a gift to Zara’s children; see the relevant official announcement of February 1919, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 6. 137 Ancona, In memoria di Emilia Ancona Contini, 8. A copy of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s handwritten dedication of March 11, 1922, can be found on p. 11 f.

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minority in the “unredeemed” territories was seen as part of the Italian nation.138 The fact that the Jews resident in those areas were even among the most significant instigators and decisive supporters of irredentism can be seen, not least, in the family biographies of protagonists like Paolina Schiff. While women like Orvieto and Contini Ancona embodied a mostly idealistic form of irredentism, far removed from any idea of violence, irredentist attitudes induced Elisa Majer Rizzioli into militant fascism.139 She was the same age as Margherita Sarfatti and, like her, came from Venice. Her father, Angelo Majer, belonged to La Serenissima’s wealthy Jewish middle class; her mother Maria came from the aristocratic Marin family. Their daughter Elisa was given a meticulous education; looking back, Majer Rizzioli described herself as a “girl nurtured with study and dreams.”140 In 1904, she married Nicola Rizzioli, a notary from a prominent Venetian family. The war in Libya was a decisive experience in Majer Rizzioli’s life, as she herself later recorded in her memoirs. In October 1911, filled with patriotic zeal, the childless, thirty-one-year-old Elisa left the safety of her home and traveled to Libya to care for wounded Italian soldiers as a voluntary Red Cross nurse: “I had never left my husband, had never traveled anywhere alone. But now, this was a duty, and Nicola understood it and supported me in it.”141 Given this background, it is not surprising that Majer Rizzioli took the interventionist side from the outset of the First World War and renewed her activity as a Red Cross nurse when Italy joined the war. “To live, to 138 On the frequent affinity of Jews for irredentism, see Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder, 83. 139 No monograph has yet been written on Majer Rizzioli. On her biography, her fervent commitment to the First World War, and conspicuous relevance for early fascism, see Nattermann R., “‘Libro di Guerra’. Krieg und Faschismus in den Erinnerungen einer italienisch-jüdischen Kriegskrankenschwester,” in Hämmerle C. et al. (eds.), Erinnerungsbilder und Gedächtniskonstruktionen. Das Erbe des Ersten Weltkriegs in Zentraleuropa (1918–1939) (forthcoming 2022). On her central role within the early history of the Fasci Femminili, see Dittrich-Johansen, Le “militi dell’idea,” 35–38, 51–54, 63–68; see also the short biography by Giulia Galeotti in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, http://www.tre ccani.it/enciclopedia/elisa-mayer_(Dizionario-Biografico) and the entry by Rachele Farina in Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 668 f. 140 Bisi Albini S., Le nostre fanciulle. Norme e consigli, con profilo dell’autrice, ed. by Elisa Majer-Rizzioli (Milan: Antonio Vallardi, 1922), VI. 141 Majer Rizzioli E., Acconto agli eroi. Crociera sulla Memfi durante la conquista di Libia (Milan: Libreria editrice milanese, 1915), 18.

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fight, and to die for the defense of the fatherland” became her passionately irredentist ideal; she persisted in her conviction regarding a just Italian war despite her immediate proximity to the brutal violence of combat.142 Along with her service as a voluntary war nurse, she also continued the tradition of Jewish benevolence in her own way by organizing an aid committee for needy families of soldiers and acting as secretary of the Comitato di assistenza civile in Venice. Her war memoirs were published in Milan for the first time in 1919 with the title of Fratelli e sorelle. Libro di Guerra 1915–18 (“Brothers and sisters. Book of War 1915–1918”). Her conviction here articulated, that the political (liberal) class wished to lead Italy into utter humiliation, is a clear reflection of the image of the “mutilated victory” that established itself in wide sections of the country’s nationalist bourgeoisie after the peace accord and the failure to secure Dalmatia.143 This was ultimately the trigger for the autocratic occupation of Fiume by D’Annunzio’s insurgents. In accordance with her aggressively nationalist stance, Majer Rizzioli followed the “prince of poets” to Fiume and also supported his campaign from an organizational standpoint— by founding the Associazione pro Fiume (later: Comitato nazionale pro Dalmatia) in 1919 and assuming its leadership, she provided D’Annunzio with an important political and financial lobby.144 A year later, Majer Rizzioli met Mussolini for the first time, in Milan. Their personal conversation strengthened the activist in her ideological development. She moved to the Lombard capital, joined the Fasci di combattimento, and began to write for Mussolini’s Il Popolo d’Italia. The founding of the Fasci Femminili in March 1920 was thus seamlessly absorbed into Majer Rizzioli’s outstanding political activism of that year. In October 1922, the “fascist of the first hour” participated in the March on Rome as a nurse and was later honored for this by Mussolini. In the years that followed, she was highly influential in creating the image

142 In “Nazario Sauro,” her work written for children, Majer Rizzioli recounts the story of the renowned Italian officer and irredentist, who was hanged by the Austrians in Pola in Istria, with great rhetorical emphasis; see Majer Rizzioli E., Nazario Sauro (Milan: Vallardi, 1930). 143 See Majer Rizzioli E., Fratelli e sorelle. Libro di guerra 1915–1918 (Milan: Vallardi, 1919). On the former war nurse’s propagandistic war memoir and her development into a convicted fascist, see also Isnenghi M., “Scenari dell’io nei racconti sociali della Grande Guerra,” in Bartoloni, La Grande Guerra, 280, 285. 144 See de Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 58–60.

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of the “perfect fascist woman” who was grounded in her own abilities and was manifestly adapted for a war situation in particular. The “fascist woman” was supposed to have good knowledge of care for the sick and of languages, to be able to swim and to drive a car, and finally, to possess “special gifts” like courage, steadfastness, and a willingness to self-sacrifice. At the same time, Majer Rizzioli remained a moderate feminist who also worked to promote greater influence on the part of women within the Fascist Party. Unlike the dazzling figure of Margherita Sarfatti, however, Majer Rizzioli receded into the political background already in the early period of fascism. After her successful service to the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), as an inspector of fascist women’s groups among other things, she was soon ignored by Mussolini. The journal Rassegna femminile italiana she founded at the end of 1924 was unceremoniously dissolved by the party secretary, Roberto Farinacci, in January 1926. Majer Rizzioli was not the only victim of fascism’s anti-feminist policies.145 From the mid-1920s onward in particular, several female functionaries in local groups who worked against the marginalization of women in the PNF and espoused a “fascist feminism,” including Pia Bartoloni from Bologna, were deliberately excluded by the party leadership. As soon as the party no longer needed women like the founder of the Fasci Femminili to establish a broad societal consensus, they were reduced once again to marginal figures.146 The marginalization by the fascist leadership of the initially successful Jewish activist Majer Rizzioli, whom Mussolini himself supported at one time, in the mid-1920s, was thus primarily due to anti-feminist motivations. However, it should not be excluded that even then, anti-feminist tendencies were combined with latent antisemitism within the party—and this would intensify in the years to come.147

145 On the anti-feminism of Mussolini and the fascist leadership, see Dogliani P., Il fascismo degli italiani. Una storia sociale (Turin: UTET Libreria, 2008), 120. 146 See Novelli-Glaab, “Zwischen Tradition und Moderne,” 125. On anti-feminist attitudes within the PNF and the exclusion of Majer Rizzioli, see Willson, Women, 84; de Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 60–62, 66 f. 147 As early as 1924, the sociologist Robert Michels remarked that there was a strong antisemitic tendency within fascism; see Fabre G., Mussolini razzista. Dal socialismo al fascismo, la formazione di un antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005), 444. The antisemitic “fascists of the first hour” included, among others, the journalist Giovanni Preziosi and

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Ideological Tensions in the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane Majer Rizzioli, with her development from irredentism to fascism, from service as a voluntary Red Cross nurse in Libya and participation in the march on Fiume to founding the Fasci Femminili, represents an extreme example for the early and virtually unconditional adoption of fascism by a female Jewish activist—alongside the much more famous Margherita Sarfatti. Majer Rizzioli’s and Sarfatti’s remarkable ideological radicalization was significantly different from the contrary development of many of their Jewish contemporaries, including, for example, Margherita Ancona, Nina Rignano Sullam, and Amelia Rosselli. This is not to say that Jewish feminists immediately distanced themselves from fascism as a general rule. In the 1920s and even the early 1930s, the UFN collaborated with fascist institutions in the welfare sphere, including in the context of the Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia, founded in 1925, in which the already mentioned activist Fanny Norsa Pisa, Nina Rignano Sullam’s cousin, played an especially important role. Unlike the CNDI, however, the UFN maintained a critical attitude toward the regime, which would lead to various conflicts with the fascist government, especially from the mid-1920s onward.148 In contrast, the CNDI received fascism with open arms and willingly adapted itself to the regime after Mussolini seized power. The occupation of Fiume and the establishment of the Fasci Femminili increased the sympathies of this women’s union, which had become increasingly nationalist and anti-socialist since the First World War, for the growing fascist movement. Numerous representatives of the CNDI expected that fascism would curb socialism, effect a national renewal by achieving its power-political goals, and introduce voting rights for women.149 However, the CNDI’s openly pro-fascist tendency did not meet with the agreement of all its members. A small group within the national women’s organization chose a different path. From as early as 1920, the CNDI’s Federazione Toscana, based in Florence, whose members included a striking number of Jewish women, among them Amelia Rosselli, Laura Orvieto, Bice Cammeo, Ernestina Paper, Ernesto Nathan’s the presbyter Umberto Benigni, who published the first two Italian translations of the antisemitic text “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” 148 See Brigadeci, Forme di resistenza, 4–6. 149 See Taricone, L’Associazionismo femminile, 82–87.

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daughter Mary Nathan Puritz, and Giorgina Zabban,150 opposed the increasing turn toward the political right that took place above all in the large, aristocrat-dominated group at the CNDI’s headquarters in Rome and began to spread throughout the organization as a whole. Meanwhile, the Florentine chapter of the national women’s organization maintained its left-liberal and laicist stance, due in large part to the ideological orientation of its influential Jewish members and the more liberal, mostly bourgeois urban culture of the Tuscan metropolis compared with Catholic Rome. The tensions within the CNDI markedly increased from the beginning of 1920, when the country’s political crisis came to a head and there were violent confrontations between socialists and fascists in Milan, Turin, and elsewhere. In March 1920, there was criticism among representatives of the Federazione Toscana against the Roman chapter, because it made a public statement against divorce in connection with a draft law originating from the socialist camp that was currently under discussion.151 Unlike the Roman group, the Florentine chapter mostly supported the draft law. Amelia Rosselli insisted on clarification from Rome, not least in regard to the question of whether the relevant statement was meant to express

150 The writer and translator Giorgina Zabban (1869–1958), née Pardo-Roques, was one of Amelia Rosselli’s closest friends. She wrote under the pseudonym “Giorgia Pisani.” Carlo and Nello Rosselli affectionately called Giorgina and her husband Giulio Zabban “aunt Gì” and “uncle Giù.” Giorgina Zabban’s brother, Giuseppe Pardo-Roques, was the longtime president of the Jewish community in Pisa; he was murdered by German soldiers in 1944. On the friendly relationship between the Rossellis and the Zabban-Pardo-Roques couple, see Calabrò C., Liberalismo, democrazia, socialism. L’itinerario di Carlo Rosselli (Florence: Florence University Press, 2009), 3; on the crime against Giorgina’s brother Giuseppe Pardo-Roques, see among others Forti C., Dopoguerra in provincia. Microstorie pisane e lucchesi, 1944–1948 (Milan: Angeli, 2007), 38; Zuccotti S., The Italians and the Holocaust. Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 198. 151 Beginning with the first draft laws in 1876 by Morelli, one of Paolina Schiff’s political role models, there had been several other attempts to introduce a divorce law in the Italian unitary state, but without success. The last relevant draft law before fascism was proposed by the socialist representatives Guido Marangoni and Costantino Lazzari in 1920. The divorce issue was deliberately avoided during the fascist dictatorship, mainly to avoid conflicts with the Catholic Church; see Coletti A., Il divorzio in Italia. Storia di una battaglia civile e democratica (Rome: Savelli, 1974); Passaniti P., “Dalla tutela del lavoro femminile al libero amore. Il diritto di famiglia nella società dell’avvenire,” in id., Lavoro e cittadinanza femminile, 133–142.

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only the opinion of the Federazione Romana or if it was claiming to speak for the CNDI in its totality.152 This event served to heighten the inherent conflict between the Roman and the Florentine chapters. Just two months later, in May 1920, the Tuscan representatives refused to sign a new CNDI statute drafted at the headquarters in Rome (perhaps in reaction to the current point of contention surrounding divorce), in clear unwillingness to submit to the Federazione Romana.153 During the same period, the Milan section, whose members were often involved in parallel with the UFN and other Lombard women’s organizations, also increasingly distanced itself from Rome due to political differences. In this case too, it is likely that the divorce debate was the triggering factor. The Milanese women’s unions are known to have had close ties to socialism ever since their establishment at the end of the nineteenth century by the circle surrounding the pioneers Paolina Schiff, Ersilia Majno, and Nina Rignano Sullam. In December 1920, the minutes of a meeting of the Tuscan chapter recorded: [Signora Viganò] reports on a letter from the Milan chairwoman, Donna Carla Levelli, in which she explains that the chapter is in the process of dissolution. Nearly all the Milanese ‘socie’ are members of other associations, which have a political character, and are therefore to be removed from the C. N. [Consiglio Nazionale]. In this way, the question of the C. N.’s apolitical character is raised once again – that is to say, whether it is a good thing or not, that it maintains this apolitical character. Signora Rosselli is of the opinion that the C. N. is heading for its own agony.154

152 See CNDI, Federazione Femminile Toscana, Adunanza CXLVIII, March 30, 1920, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3: Federazione Toscana. Processi verbali del consiglio: January 1915–February 1921. 153 See CNDI, Federazione Femminile Toscana, Adunanza CLII, May 19, 1920. ACS Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3: Federazione Toscana. Processi verbali del consiglio: January 1915-February 1921. The new statute was officially adopted in the general assembly of the CNDI on April 15, 1921. In article 4, it stated, “The C. N. should have no political or religious orientation”; see Statuto approvato nell’Assemblea Generale del 15 Aprile 1921, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 1, fasc. 1. 154 CNDI, Federazione Femminile Toscana, Adunanza CLV, 8. December 1920, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3: Federazione Toscana. Processi verbali del consiglio: January 1915–February 1921.

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As it turned out, a lasting solution could not be found to the increasingly overt conflicts between the Tuscan (and Lombard) group and the Rome headquarters. By 1920, the chasm between the CNDI’s still liberal and socialist members—who were concentrated in Florence and Milan— and the membership in Rome, which was mostly conservative, often aristocratic, and thoroughly receptive to fascism, was already too deep. Although, since its founding in 1903 in Rome, the women’s organization had worked to bridge social, political, and religious differences, it had lost its “apolitical character” since the First World War at the latest, if this had ever been part of its reality at all. During the fascist dictatorship, the always dominant Federazione Romana would represent the CNDI to the outside world from an ideological perspective, while the regional chapters gradually adapted themselves to the party line of the Rome headquarters or else lost their significance. Amelia Rosselli’s prophecy of 1920 that the CDNI was heading for its own agony was confirmed by the fact that the majority of the regional branches of the organization, with their various political nuances, fell away in favor of enforced ideological conformity. Significantly, several Jewish protagonists of the Florence chapter made demonstrative exits from the CNDI in the years between 1920 and 1922. Mary Nathan Puritz, the daughter of Ernesto Nathan, granddaughter of the Mazzinian pioneer of the Italian women’s movement Sara Levi Nathan, and relative of Amelia Rosselli, announced her intention to leave the organization for “moral and family reasons” in July 1920.155 This manner of describing the reasons for her resignation likely contained a subtle hint of the fact that she could no longer identify either with the CNDI’s ideological orientation or with the group as a whole. As a direct descendant of Sara Levi Nathan, Mary Nathan Puritz felt herself committed to the radical-democratic ideals of the early Italian women’s movement and its laicist-Jewish circle of pioneers. Her family identity was no longer reflected within the CNDI, whose connections with the fascist movement were becoming ever closer. In August 1920, even the Federazione Toscana received an official invitation from Florence’s Fascio di

155 Mary Nathan Puritz to “Gentilissima Signora” (probably French Cini, the chair-

woman of the Federazione Toscana), July 1, 1920, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5: Corrispondenza della Federazione femminile Toscana con la Presidenza del Consiglio nazionale e con altri e documentazione relativa a congressi, manifestazioni, lettere di nomina e di dimissioni, distintivi a spilla del Congresso di Firenze del 1926 (1908–1934), fasc. Corrispondenza CNDI, Sezione Firenze, 1922.

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Combattimento to participate in a public festival on the anniversary of the march on Fiume.156 The ardently patriotic Laura Orvieto, who belonged to the same networks as Mary Nathan Puritz, also left the CNDI in the early 1920s. In her letter to the chairwoman (it is not clear whether it was Spalletti Rasponi or the aristocrat, Ida Uzielli De Mari,157 who was chairwoman of the Florentine chapter at the time), the writer referred with subtle irony to the current discussions regarding the CNDI’s supposedly intended “apolitical character”: Revered chairwoman, when the “Consiglio” requested that I collaborate on the commission “Vita Civile e Politica” in the past year, I gladly accepted, convinced that there was a need among our women to clarify their ideas regarding politics. And I believe this still, but now I see that there is more urgent work to do in my party. Therefore, I resign the commission. And I request, dear chairwoman, that you accept my resignation.158

The party referred to by Laura Orvieto here must have been the Unione Politica Nazionale, which Angiolo Orvieto had cofounded in Florence immediately after the end of the First World War. The new party had a liberal-patriotic orientation. One of its stated goals was to address the growing tide of “Bolshevism” occurring in Italy, as well as elsewhere, after the October Revolution—a detail that should not be underestimated in view of the antisemitic, fabricated prejudice circulating in fascist and

156 See the letter from the secretary of the Commissione Esecutiva, Dante Romoli, to the Federazione Femminile Toscana of August 23, 1920; ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5: Corrispondenza della Federazione femminile toscana con la Presidenza del Consiglio nazionale e con altri e documentazione relativa a congressi, manifestazioni, lettere di nomina e di dimissioni, distintivi a spilla del Congresso di Firenze del 1926 (1908–1934), fasc. Corrispondenza CNDI, Sezione Firenze, 1922. 157 Ida Uzielli De Mari (1871–1952) came from the deeply traditional Genoese aristocratic De Mari family. Her husband, Colonel Paolo Uzielli, was of Jewish origins but had been baptized in 1901 (before they married). The couple’s children received a strongly Catholic upbringing. In 1938, the year in which the Italian racial laws were promulgated, Paolo Uzielli made an official application for discriminazione based on their being an “entirely Aryan and Catholic family”; see Maryks R. A., “Pouring Jewish Water into Fascist Wine.” Untold Stories of (Catholic) Jews from the Archive of Mussolini’s Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 247–249. 158 Laura Orvieto to “gentile Presidente,” undated, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, fasc. Corrispondenza CNDI, Sezione Firenze, 1922.

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conservative Catholic circles at the time, which saw an inherent connection between Jews and the Bolshevist revolution.159 It is thus conceivable that Angiolo’s political engagement against the “Bolshevist threat” was also, to some degree, apologetic. Through her exit from the CNDI, Laura Orvieto clearly signaled her disapproval of the organization’s ideological course and its stipulated “apolitical character,” which was ultimately a farce. At the same time, her emphasis on the need for clear political goals and her intention to support her husband’s party was perhaps also in part a reaction to the rumors of a Bolshevist-Jewish conspiracy that were also circulating within the anti-socialist, pro-fascist Federazione Romana.160 It is likely that such prejudices were heightened in view of the high number of Jewish activists within the UFN, whose orientation toward socialism was well known. After Mary Nathan Puritz and Laura Orvieto, the Florentine activist Ida Modigliani Barletti also announced her resignation from the CNDI in 1922, but without giving written reasons for her departure. She had distinguished herself during the war as an inspector of voluntary nurses for the Comitato di Firenze. She too could not identify with the fascist tendencies within the organization and the increasing distance from its original, laicist character which came to light in the debate over divorce. She consciously signed her laconic resignation letter with her full surname, “Ida Modigliani Barletti.”161 During the war, the activist had signed her official letters with “Barletti,” her husband’s surname, but her letter of resignation also included her Jewish maiden name. It is likely that she signed herself “Modigliani Barletti” to express her Jewish origin and her

159 See Maryks, “Pouring Jewish Water,” 179. Angiolo was elected to the Florence city council as a representative of the Unione Politica Nazionale in the local elections of 1920. Significantly, the Jewish poet was not re-elected in the next elections of 1924, by which time the fascists were already in power. 160 See also Gori C., “Laura Orvieto: un’intellettuale del Novecento,” Genesis 3, 2 (2004): 199. 161 Ida Modigliani Barletti to the “Gentile Segretaria,” March 7, 1922, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5: Corrispondenza della Federazione femminile toscana con la Presidenza del Consiglio nazionale e con altri e documentazione relativa a congressi, manifestazioni, lettere di nomina e di dimissioni, distintivi a spilla del Congresso di Firenze del 1926 (1908–1934), fasc. Corrispondenza CNDI, Sezione Firenze, 1922.

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solidarity with the feminists Mary Nathan Puritz and Laura Orvieto, as well as her separation from the group around Spalletti Rasponi.162 In the same year, Amelia Rosselli resigned from her role as vicepresident of the Tuscan chapter.163 The Catholic Beatrice Rosselli Del Turco, who belonged to Florence’s old aristocracy, took her place. Thus, in the early 1920s, the Florentine chapter lost its liberal character, largely shaped by Jewish actors, in parallel with the rise of fascism, and became more strongly dominated by philo-fascist aristocrats like Ida Uzielli De Mari, Beatrice Rosselli Del Turco, Gabriella Incontri, and Olga D’Urbino (who became treasurer in early 1922), quite analogously to the Federazione Romana.164 This development corresponds to Perry Willson’s observation that the proportion of aristocratic women who wished to defeat the “red threat” was also strikingly high within the leadership of the Fasci Femminili from its very beginnings.165 The national women’s organization’s accommodation to fascism was also in large part influenced and controlled by its aristocratic leadership.

162 The parents of Ida Modigliani (born in Florence in 1889) were the haberdasher Samuele Modigliani, a member of Florence’s Jewish community, and the Catholic Emma Chelli. Ida Modigliani was baptized in 1890, as can be seen from her file in the DEMORAZZA inventory. According to the fascist racial legislation of November 1938, Ida Modigliani came from a “mixed marriage.” Since her mother was a non-Jew and since Ida had been baptized at the end of the nineteenth century, according to the “audit of the race” (accertamento della razza) performed by the notorious Direzione generale demografia e razza of the Italian Ministry of the Interior at the end of 1940, she was determined “not to belong to the Jewish race”; see ACS, Fondo Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale Demografia e Razza (henceforth: DEMORAZZA), b. 380, fasc. 29,278. 163 See ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, fasc. Corrispondenza CNDI, Sezione Firenze, 1922. 164 See, among others, the communication of January 31, 1922, regarding Olga

D’Urbino’s election as treasurer and the text from December 22, 1922, two months after the March on Rome, regarding Beatrice Rosselli Del Turco’s nomination as vice-president of the Federazione Toscana. On January 11, 1922, Gabriella Incontri had circulated suggestions as to the reception of new members in the Florence chapter to committee members; ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, fasc. Corrispondenza CNDI, Sezione Firenze, 1922. 165 See Willson, Women, 83, 85.

CHAPTER 6

Marginalization, Disenfranchisement, and Persecution Under Fascist Rule

6.1

Attitudes Toward Fascism

The Fascist Course of the National Women’s Movement Just a few days after the March on Rome, the chairwoman of the CNDI, Countess Spalletti Rasponi, sent a telegram to Mussolini. She emphatically proclaimed that “in this sacred hour of Italian renewal, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane applauds the great future of our Italy with confidence.”1 This confirmed the ideological direction being taken by the national women’s organization, whose philo-fascist tendencies had already increased markedly since the end of the First World War, as well as the dominant role of the Rome chapter during the fascist era. The leading circles of the CNDI expected Mussolini’s inauguration as prime minister 1 Spalletti Rasponi’s emphatic message to Mussolini of October 31, 1922, was quoted

at a session of the central committee of the CNDI on November 11, 1922; see ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5: Corrispondenza della Federazione femminile Toscana con la Presidenza del Consiglio nazionale e con altri e documentazione relativa a congressi, manifestazioni, lettere di nomina e di dimissioni, distintivi a spilla del Congresso di Firenze del 1926 (1908–1934), fasc. Corrispondenza CNDI, sezione Firenze 1922. On Mussolini’s “March on Rome” and the fascist takeover, see Albanese G., Mussolinis Marsch auf Rom: Die Kapitulation des liberalen Staates vor dem Faschismus (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2015), especially 95–135; Schieder W., Benito Mussolini (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2014), 39–46.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Nattermann, Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4_6

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by King Vittorio Emanuele III on October 30, 1922, to result, the first and foremost, in the granting of female suffrage, which still had not happened after the end of the war. Mussolini, who strongly relied on the support of women in his establishment of the fascist regime, opportunistically nurtured these hopes. In May 1923, he chaired the opening of the congress for the “International Alliance for Female Suffrage” and stressed that the fascist government would support the realization of this goal. The granting of women’s voting rights, he said “would most likely have advantageous consequences, since in her exercise of this new right, the woman would employ her fundamental qualities of balance, equity, and wisdom.”2 In reality, Mussolini’s ideas regarding women’s participation in the national “renewal” were more than murky. Although he presaged voting rights for them at an early stage, in the years that followed he successively drew back from his promises, significantly reduced the involvement of potential female voters in his plans, supported a 1925 law allowing for limited female voting rights in the community elections, and finally, in 1926, abolished the elections completely—a “progressive development in the opposite direction,” as Franca Pieroni Bortolotti has rightly described it.3 Fascist policy toward independent women’s organizations like the UFN, the Italian union of women academics (Federazione Italiana Laureate e Diplomate di Istituti Superiori, FILDIS), and the suffragist union Federazione Italiana per il Suffragio e i Diritti civili e politici delle Donne (FISEDD) also proved ambiguous; these were not dissolved directly after the consolidation of the fascist dictatorship and the establishment of fascist women’s unions but continued to exist, in part, until well into the 1930s.4 At the same time, from the very beginning of a fascist rule, there was stronger pressure on the independent women’s organizations to assimilate ideologically and to eliminate activists critical of the

2 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, vol. 19, ed. by Edoardo and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1956), 215. 3 See de Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 63. On fascism’s contradictory image of women and the regime’s ambivalent policies regarding women, see also Dogliani, Il fascismo degli italiani, 120–124. 4 See Willson, Women, 79 f.; on the history of the FILDIS from 1922 until its dissolution in 1935 specifically, see Taricone F., Una tessera del mosaico. Storia della Federazione Italiana Laureate e Diplomate di Istituti Superiori (Pavia: Antares, 1992), 23–29.

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regime from their ranks.5 The CNDI’s documents reveal how the philofascist union was already marginalizing politically undesirable members in the 1920s and promoting the absorption of smaller women’s associations into the CNDI itself with the support of the fascist government. It is clear that such strategies were intended to create a unified orientation, loyal to the regime, within the organized Italian women’s movement.6 As early as 1923, barely a year after Mussolini took power, a number of protagonists with close ties to the UFN, including the Milanese socialists Linda Malnati and Carlotta Clerici, began to make efforts to oppose the threat of fascisization and imposed alignment of the Italian women’s organizations. At a small gathering “to reach an agreement between the women’s unions,” they stated, similarly to the actors in the previous debates between the CNDI’s headquarters at Rome and its local chapters in Florence and Milan, that “even after voting rights have been achieved, the apolitical women’s unions, which are dedicated to social purposes, should maintain their apolitical character in all circumstances” in order to create a common space for women from different political groups. This would enable the discussion of problems relating to women’s interests outside of the narrow circles of political parties, which could then be reported back to those parties by women from the groups in question.7 However, after the promulgation of the enabling statute for the fascist dictatorship in December 1922, which empowered Mussolini to form a government independent of the parliament, and with the creation of the Grand Council of Fascism as well as the fascist militia organization, the dictatorship was so firmly consolidated by the beginning of 1923 that any idea of upholding and promoting political pluralism with a view to commonly held feminist interests was doomed to failure from the outset.

5 The Associazione per la donna, which was on the left of the political spectrum and had campaigned primarily for political equality for women, announced its dissolution at the end of 1925. Given the current political environment, it saw no more possibility to “engage constructively in the defense of women’s interests”; see Taricone F., “La FILDIS, 149. 6 See ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, Lettere da Roma e Documenti vari 1924/1925. 7 ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, fasc. 13, sfasc. 5, 1923: Ordine del giorno, Convegno

per un’Intesa fra le Associazioni femminili. Although the location of the gathering was not recorded, it must have taken place in Milan.

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This was especially true when such ideas were expressed by socialist female actors, or by those with ties to socialism.8 In the very next year, the CNDI began to make a conscious effort to remove from the organization any members who did not align with its desired ideological direction. The exclusion of the longtime Jewish activist Nina Sierra in the summer of 1924 was an especially blatant example of this. The incident exemplified the steadily increasing profascist trajectory of the organization from 1920 onward that had started with the fascist turn at the headquarters in Rome and had led, by 1922, to a series of departures of left-liberal-oriented actors from the Tuscan chapter. Nina Sierra, a writer resident in Florence, also belonged to the Federazione Toscana and had simultaneously been a member of the UFN for many years. Highly educated, with socialist leanings, she had written for the women’s movement press since the beginning of the century; in 1903, her comprehensive lecture on the political and social demands of contemporary feminism was published in the UFN’s journal.9 At the beginning of the century, Nina Sierra had collaborated with Paolina Schiff and Bianca Arbib, prominent feminists of Jewish origins, in the preparation of the already mentioned draft law on the establishment of national maternity funds that was adopted by the Italian parliament in July 1910. Together with Bice Cammeo, she was also on the committee of a home for young single mothers founded by the Florentine chapter of the CNDI in November 1910. Sierra was closely involved in the networks of Jewish-laicist feminists.10 The action against the politically undesirable protagonist began in June 1924, at a time, significantly, when Mussolini’s dominance had been clearly consolidated, and against the immediate background of the notorious Matteotti murder. After the manipulated elections of April 1924, the fascist government had an overwhelming majority in parliament, the monarchy was behind Mussolini, and the Catholic Church was on its way to coming to terms with fascism. On June 10, 1924, fascist 8 Fiorenza Taricone speaks of the development and dominance of the “female-fascist”

movement within the Italian women’s movement from 1923 onward; see Taricone, L’Associazionismo femminile, 87. 9 Nina Sierra, “Femminismo,” Conferenza tenuta il 14 Aprile 1903 alla Università Popolare di Alessandria d’Egitto, pubblicata a cura del Periodico Unione Femminile, Milan, 1903, Archivio UFN, cartella 65, fasc. 3, Pubblicazioni 1901–1905. 10 See Miniati, Le “emancipate”, 147, 180.

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henchmen murdered the leader of the Unitary Socialist Party, Giacomo Matteotti, who had openly denounced the violence and illegality of the fascist government in a trenchant speech before parliament at the end of May and had called for the elections to be annulled.11 The antisocialist tendencies within the CNDI came to a head in this context. As a longtime activist within the UFN, Nina Sierra was clearly seen as a particularly suitable target for attack. In a brief, anonymous letter of June 1924, Sierra was accused of lack of commitment to the section committee of which she was a member and of failure to identify with the goals of the organization. She was therefore to leave her position and be replaced by another activist. The typed letter was signed only by “un numeroso gruppo di socie” (a large group of members ).12 It is most likely that these were primarily representatives of the group of philo-fascist aristocrats who had by then become strongly dominant in the national women’s movement as a whole. The Catholic Florentine aristocrat Beatrice Rosselli Del Turco, who had become vice-president of the Federazione Toscana immediately after the March on Rome, probably played a key role in this event.13 In contrast, the liberal-minded longtime chairwoman of the Tuscan Federation, Elena French Cini,14 immediately distanced herself from the event and expressed her regrets about it in a letter to Nina Sierra. The latter responded with unmistakable bitterness:

11 See Schieder, Der italienische Faschismus, 38–40; Mantelli, Kurze Geschichte, 67–69. 12 Consiglio Nazionale Donne Italiane, June 1924, to Nina Sierra (undated). ACS,

Archivio CNDI, b. 5, Lettere da Roma e Documenti vari 1924: “Documenti relativi all’incidente Circolare anonima.” The sources do not preserve the identities of the instigators of this action. However, it is clear that this anonymous text was also sent to a handful of other politically undesirable members of the Florentine chapter in June 1924 who, like Sierra, were supposed to be expelled from the committee and replaced by pro-fascist activists. 13 Nerina Traxler, a committee member who became president of the Florentine chapter in the 1930s, spoke at the end of June 1924, with direct reference to the anonymous letter affair, of the “erroneous assessment” on the part of Marchioness Rosselli Del Turco, which she deeply regretted. See Traxler to Bonaventura, June 24, 1924, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, Lettere da Roma e Documenti vari 1924: “Documenti relativi all’incidente Circolare anonima.” 14 Elena French Cini was very highly thought of by, among others, Laura Orvieto and Amelia Rosselli. In 1908, Orvieto described her as “a delicate and almost vanishingly petite lady, with a willing and strong spirit”; Mrs. El (Laura Orvieto), Donne d’ogni paese. Una seduta del Convegno femminile di Ginevra, Il Marzocco, September 13, 1908.

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Everyone thinks with the brain that he possesses, and those ladies only consider the work useful that they do themselves. They are not capable of comprehending the importance of the propaganda of the written and spoken word. I remember how, many years ago, Signora Majno had several thousand [copies] of my lecture on feminism15 published in Milan at the expense of the Unione femminile, shared it widely, and said she considered it valuable propaganda. My recent lecture on the trade in women and girls16 could be just as useful if not for the current circumstances that prevent its dissemination. Since you would regret it if I were to resign, I will not do so but will simply finish out my term and also resign from the Federazione, without scandal, so as not to play those ladies’ game.17

Sierra’s reference to “the current circumstances” preventing the reissue of her treatise on the trade in women and girls is clearly to be seen as a critique of the CNDI’s ideological direction and of the limitations on freedom of speech being imposed by Mussolini, which was further impacted by the abolition of freedom of the press in July 1924. Sierra’s decision to withdraw from the CNDI because of this affront was met with regret by the remaining liberal members of the Florentine chapter of the Federazione Toscana. At the beginning of July, Sierra received a letter from the section committee that described the incident as “an act of anonymous malice motivated by unspeakable purposes” and expressly requested Sierra to stay.18 However, her departure pursued by the anonymous campaign could no longer be prevented. On July 3, 1924, the activist announced that she would not stand for election for health reasons; she submitted her official letter of resignation in October 1925.19

15 Nina Sierra, “Femminismo.” 16 Nina Sierra, “La tratta delle bianche,” La Rassegna Nazionale 161 (1908): 30–43. 17 Nina Sierra to Elena French Cini, Rome, June 22, 1924, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b.

5, Lettere da Roma e Documenti vari 1924: “Documenti relativi all’incidente Circolare anonima.” 18 See CNDI, Sezione di Firenze, to Nina Sierra (undated) and Sierra’s letter to French Cini of July 3, 1924, in which she confirmed the contents of the letter from the Florentine chapter: ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, Lettere da Roma e Documenti vari 1924: “Documenti relativi all’incidente Circolare anonima.” 19 See Sierra to French Cini, July 3, 1924, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, Lettere da Roma e Documenti vari 1924: “Documenti relativi all’incidente Circolare anonima”; Sierra to French Cini, October 29, 1925, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, Lettere da Roma e Documenti vari 1925.

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This incident is a clear indicator of the extent to which fascism had already penetrated the CNDI and of how powerless the remaining democratic forces had become. Left-liberal and socialist tendencies in particular were consistently eliminated. The action against the Jewish feminist Nina Sierra was primarily taken because of political motivations that had become particularly explosive with the persecution of its opponents by the fascist government and the murder of Giacomo Matteotti. Sierra’s many years of involvement in the UFN and her proximity to socialist feminists like Ersilia Majno and Paolina Schiff must have been the deciding factors. At the same time, it cannot be excluded that there were also antiJewish attitudes within the “anonymous group,” which saw Nina Sierra, the secular Jew, as a threat to the organization’s ideological orientation. The originally pronounced laicism of the CNDI had been losing its relevance to a significant degree from the beginning of the 1920s onward due to the change in the make-up of the organization effected by the recruitment of philo-fascist, Catholic aristocrats and the exclusion of left-liberal and socialist members, many of whom were feminists of Jewish origins. This development was paralleled by the approachment between fascism and the Catholic Church underway since 1922. In this context, the ideological contrast between the CNDI and the Catholic women’s movement weakened. There had already been signs of an alignment in 1920 when the Rome headquarters of the CNDI had spoken out in public against divorce.20 In the fascist era, there was no conflict between the CNDI and the Unione Femminile Cattolica Italiana (UFCI), which developed out of the UDCI in 1919. Aristocrats and members of the upper middle class, who had come to dominate all chapters of the CNDI, were also in control of the Catholic women’s movement. In 1923, the CNDI had officially acknowledged the school reform by the minister of education, Giovanni Gentile21 ; one of the central points of the reform was the emphasis 20 See CNDI, Federazione Femminile Toscana, Adunanza CXLVIII, March 30, 1920, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3: Federazione Toscana. Processi verbali del consiglio: January 1915–February 1921. 21 The central committee of the CNDI officially accepted the school reform at a

session in June 1923. Significantly, it was the traditionally left-liberal-leaning Florentine chapter that expressed criticism of Gentile’s reform a little later in a letter to the headquarters in Rome. The Turin chapter also expressed concerns, especially regarding the exclusion of women from leading roles (“capi-istituto”) in Italian schools. See Taricone, L’Associazionismo femminile, 89.

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on Catholic religious instruction as the most important foundation of national education and for the “reconstruction of the Italian spirit.”22 It is obvious that Jewish schoolchildren and teachers were especially affected by this measure, as it represented a huge incentive for prejudice, hostility, and marginalization in the sphere of education. The “myth of the Catholic nation” for which the Catholic women’s movement had already declared at the beginning of the century was in this way supported by the state.23 It was precisely this topic that had led to strong disagreements between devout Catholic women and (Jewish)-laicist protagonists at the congress of 1908. The potential for conflict had been defused to a marked degree by the ideological transformation of the CNDI. It is significant that as well as Sierra, the defamation campaign of 1924 also targeted the scholar Laura Puccinelli Calò, wife of the famous liberal politician and educator Giovanni Calò, who had explicitly distanced himself from Gentile’s fascist school reform that same year.24 She left the committee of the Federazione Toscana immediately after receiving the anonymous letter on June 14, 1924.25 The fact that the non-Jew Puccinelli Calò was also embroiled in the confrontation is further evidence of the deeply political character of the anonymous letter-writing campaign. It is likely that latent anti-Jewish

22 See Gentile G., Il fascismo al governo della scuola (novembre’22 – aprile’24). Discorsi e interviste (Palermo: Remo Sandron Editore, 1924), 35. On Gentile’s goals, see Ambrosoli L., Libertà e religione nella riforma Gentile (Florence: Vallecchi, 1980), 66–80. On the intended identification of Italian society with the “fascist nation” and the cultural support for a shared consciousness of “the people” on the part of the fascist regime, see also Tarquini A., Storia della cultura fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 7. On the central position of Catholicism in the construction of national-cultural identity in fascist Italy, see Duggan C., Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 312. 23 See Sarfatti, The Jews, 44 f.; on the “myth of the Catholic nation” promoted by the Catholic women’s organization, see Gazzetta L., Cattoliche durante il fascismo. Ordine sociale e organizzazioni femminili nelle Venezie (Rome: Viella, 2011), 141–156. 24 Giovanni Calò (1882–1970) taught at the University of Florence and was undersecretary to the minister of education in the Facta government from February to August 1922. On Giovanni Calò’s pedagogical engagement, see among others Carrannante A., “Giovanni Calò nella storia della nostra scuola,” Cultura e scuola 137 (1996): 229–250. 25 See Laura Puccinelli Calò to “Illustre Presidente del Consiglio Direttivo CNDI” (this probably refers to the president of the Federazione Toscana, Elena French Cini), June 14, 1924, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 5, Lettere da Roma e Documenti vari 1924: “Documenti relativi all’incidente Circolare anonima.”

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prejudices played an additional role in the defamation of Nina Sierra, but her political position must have been the fundamental reason for the marginalization campaign against her. The accommodation of the large national women’s union to the fascist regime and the demise of its laicist ideal had a generally negative impact on the room for maneuver of feminists of Jewish origins who had participated in the secular organizations of the Italian women’s movement in such large numbers since the end of the nineteenth century. It made the marginalization of protagonists like Nina Sierra, Amelia Rosselli, the Lombroso sisters, and many others a foregone conclusion. Anti-fascist women and their families found themselves in existential danger from the 1920s onward. The already existing Jewish family and friendship networks drew even more closely together in the face of this acute external hostility. Jewish Feminists in Anti-Fascist Networks A few months after Matteotti’s murder, on November 16, 1924, Gina Lombroso wrote to her twenty-one-year-old son Leo Ferrero, “The world is very different now. But no matter how many disillusionments await you, remember that you are our future, that you cannot and must not let yourself be beaten…I wish you strength and resistance. Your Mama.”26 Gina Lombroso’s always distinctive Jewish identity based on continuity between the generations was becoming increasingly bound up with an anti-fascist family consciousness. Her family, which had been resident in Florence since 1916 and had been decidedly opposed to fascism from the outset, was keenly aware of the increasingly negative political changes and the repressive climate following Matteotti’s murder. Instead of resignedly withdrawing into the private sphere, the family engaged in open confrontation with the regime. As early as December 1923, the eminent historian Guglielmo Ferrero had joined the central committee of the newly founded Associazione nazionale per il controllo democratico, initiated by Filippo Turati. On November 8, 1924, immediately before Gina Lombroso’s combative letter to her son Leo, the prominent liberal-democrat politician Giovanni Amendola created the Unione nazionale in which liberal-democrats, socialists, and communists banded together against fascism. Ferrero joined this oppositional union 26 Gina Lombroso to Leo Ferrero, November 14, 1924, FPC, Fondo Leo Ferrero, L.F.C. 773.

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too, spoke at its first congress in Rome in 1925, and was among the initiators of the “Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti” in the same year.27 Together with his wife Gina, he was among the central personalities of the anti-fascist-intellectual networks in Florence, who also included Gaetano Salvemini—a good friend of the family—Piero Calamandrei, Ernesto Rossi, and the Rosselli brothers, who already in late 1920 had created the Circolo di Cultura as a political and cultural forum.28 The connection between the Lombroso Ferreros and the Rossellis was especially close, both privately and politically speaking. Gina had met Amelia in 1916 after her move from Turin to Florence; they became friends, and a brotherly friendship also developed between their sons, especially Nello Rosselli and Leo Ferrero.29 Both Gina Lombroso and Amelia Rosselli were active members of the Florentine Lyceum. In 1917, they cofounded the interdisciplinary women’s union Associazione divulgatrice donne italiane (ADDI) in the Tuscan capital for the promotion, dissemination, and reception of scientific texts by women in particular. Authors like Salvemini and Ferrero too published numerous essays for the ADDI in the years that followed.30 However, Lombroso’s Associazione, with its anti-fascist bent, began to be marginalized from 1923 onward as ideological tensions within the organized Italian women’s movement increased overall while fascism grew in strength. It was stated in the journal Almanacco della Donna Italiana of 1923 that at this time, the ADDI was composed of a “limited circle of specialists”—this most likely referred to members of the Lombroso Ferrero and Rosselli families and other intellectuals close to the Circolo di Cultura—and was not connected to any other women’s association.31 From 1925 onward, the women’s union was no longer mentioned in the journal. By this time, in fact, Gina Lombroso had been largely excluded from the cultural life of the Tuscan capital. The Lombroso Ferrero family was under police surveillance from 1924 onward because of their decidedly anti-fascist attitude. 27 See Colarizi S., I democratici all’opposizione. Giovanni Amendola e l’Unione Nazionale (1922–1926) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1973), 67. 28 On the Circolo di Cultura, see Spini V., “Firenze e la tradizione rosselliana,” in Ciuffoletti, Corradi, Lessico famigliare, 34. 29 See Dolza, Essere figlie di Lombroso, 158. In 1924, Nello joined Amendola’s Unione nazionale alongside Leo’s father Guglielmo Ferrero. 30 See ibid. 31 Almanacco della Donna Italiana (1923): 333.

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The fascist government sought to isolate and silence Guglielmo Ferrero. Hard-pressed by the constant shadowing, the family withdrew to their country house, Ulivello, in the little village of Strada in Chianti, near Florence. During this period, Leo Ferrero published his first journalistic pieces and comedies, but the publication of his writings was utterly suppressed by the fascist regime by 1925 at the latest. In 1928, he and his sister Nina emigrated to Paris.32 This general expulsion from public life, together with the strong rightward trend within the national women’s movement, intensified the solidarity between anti-fascist feminists of Jewish origins who, with their tightly interconnected networks, had always constituted an individual group within the relevant institutions. Gina Lombroso’s friend Amelia Rosselli was increasingly caught in the crossfire. Like the Lombroso Ferreros, she and her sons were under strong surveillance beginning in 1924, if not earlier. After Mussolini’s military coup of January 3, 1925, in which he assumed political responsibility for the death of Matteotti and announced an “unmasked dictatorship,” the remaining oppositional groups and organizations were summarily dissolved.33 These included the Florentine Circolo di Cultura which, according to the local prefecture, was “the center of an obstinately antinational propaganda with hostile attitudes toward the present government.”34 On December 31, 1924, black shirts had destroyed the Circolo di Cultura’s headquarters in Borgo Santi Apostoli, and had initiated a hunt for anti-fascists. Thereupon, the leadership of the anti-fascist movement Italia Libera, including Ernesto Rossi and Carlo and Nello Rosselli, had shut themselves up, armed, in their mother’s villa on the Via Giusti. When she came home that night, Amelia Rosselli immediately recognized the danger of the situation but withdrew to her room without a word.35

32 See Dolza, Essere figlie di Lombroso, 159 f. 33 See Schieder, Benito Mussolini, 47–58. 34 Quoted in Ciuffoletti, Epistolario familiare, 233. 35 See ibid., 131. The Circolo di Cultura had been set up with furniture from the

Rosselli household, which was burned by the black shirts, together with books and newspapers, in the Piazza Santa Trinità that same night. With her imperturbable practicality in the midst of the tragedy of the situation, Amelia later inquired of her sons whether “our table” had also been burned; see “Intervento di Mariella Zoppi,” in Vieri, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, 23.

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Not by chance, it was once again Amelia Rosselli’s house where, in the immediate aftermath of the closure of the Circolo di Cultura, central representatives of the opposition—Carlo and Nello Rosselli, Ernesto Rossi, Dino Vannucci, and Nello Traquandi—gathered to found the antifascist underground newspaper with the telling name of Non mollare. The introductory words of the first edition, which appeared in January 1925 and was nationally circulated throughout the networks of the antifascist movement, Italia Libera, now operating underground, recalled Gina Lombroso’s appeal to her son Leo: “One must offer resistance to those who seek to intimidate us every single day with new threats … One must offer resistance despite the weapons of the militia, despite the impunity guaranteed the villains, despite every decree signed by the King.”36 In the following months, the Casa Rosselli in the old town of Florence became the hub and the fulcrum of the anti-fascist underground. Not only was Amelia Rosselli well informed about her sons’ activities; she opened up for them and for their ideological comrades her own house, her private family sphere, at great personal danger, as a locus of resistance against the dictatorship. As it turned out, the systematic persecution of anti-fascist actors pursued by Mussolini from the beginning of 1925 onward primarily targeted the Florentine Non mollare group surrounding Carlo and Nello Rosselli.37 Again, it was the Rosselli house in which their friend and political ally Gaetano Salvemini sought refuge the night before his illegal emigration to France. He had been arrested in Rome in June 1925 but was released in July through an amnesty. At the time, Carlo and Nello were working at the secluded villa of a friend near Cortona, while Amelia had withdrawn to the country house Il Frassine in Rignano sull’Arno near Florence. Anti-fascist intellectuals were avoiding the city for the time being. During that period, Gina Lombroso wrote with ironic undertones to her friend Salvemini from her country house Ulivello that one would be able to “sublet a house in Florence without problems, while one waited for the future… We too do not recommend going back there

36 Non Mollare. Bollettino d’informazione durante il regime fascista (January 1, 1925):

1. 37 See Moorehead, Una famiglia pericolosa, 121–126.

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again. Indeed, it would be urgently [necessary] to contrive something in view of the situation of the intellectuals who can no longer go home.”38 When he arrived at the Rosselli home, Salvemini only encountered the cook, the maidservant, and the gardener, whom Amelia described in her memoir with unconcealed ridicule as an “authentic spy, disguised as a bunny rabbit.”39 Salvemini left the Via Giusti unscathed in the early hours of the next morning, but the gardener had meanwhile reported his nighttime visit to the local fascists. That same evening, black shirts burst into the Rosselli house and destroyed it, demolishing furniture, overturning bookcases, and smashing objects of value. It was Angiolo Orvieto, the husband of her closest friend Laura, who personally brought the news of the fascist attack to Amelia Rosselli in Rignano sull’Arno the morning after and accompanied her back to Florence.40 “They had destroyed everything, and the reality surpassed all my expectations. In order to get to my study, I literally had to pass over a pile of rubble,” the author later recalled.41 A commissar of the Pubblica Sicurezza was already waiting for her and subjected her to lengthy interrogation, primarily regarding Carlo Rosselli’s socialist orientation and his political networks. Furthermore, the commissar confiscated some personal letters from Amelia Rosselli’s brother, the longtime liberal senator Gabriele Pincherle (1851–1928).42 In her memoir, Amelia Rosselli depicted the devastation of her house, the familial bastion of resistance against the dictatorship, as a turning point and key experience in her life, a harbinger of the horrors to come for her family: “By now I was about to, and even more than being, I felt that I was about to enter a stormy zone of my life, both myself and my sons.”43

38 Gina Lombroso to Gaetano Salvemini, July 24, 1925, Isrt Firenze, Archivio Salvemini, scatola 88. 39 Rosselli, Memorie, 176. 40 See the depiction of the incident in ibid., 178 f., Ciuffoletti, Epistolario familiare,

234. 41 Rosselli, Memorie, 179. 42 Pincherle, a learned jurist, was elected senator in 1913. He was a member of the Alta

Corte di Giustizia, an institution of the Kingdom of Italy created by the Statuto Albertino responsible for prosecuting severe crimes against the state. Pincherle resigned his position just a few months after the incident at his sister’s home, in November 1925; see Gabriele Pincherle, Senatori dell’Italia liberale, https://notes9.senato.it/web/senregno.nsf/9a29a2 e73f1c125785d0059b96c/2058711efc39ff54125646f005e826a?OpenDocument. 43 Rosselli, Memorie, 183.

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Her longtime, politically like-minded Jewish friends provided Amelia with spiritual and emotional support in this desolate and dangerous situation. In particular, the Florentine networks closed ranks even more tightly in the face of this brute force openly exercised by the fascists against one of their own. These also, and particularly, included actors who had been involved in the women’s movement for decades alongside Amelia and who were not prepared to go along with the fascist direction of the national women’s union. The forced exit of Nina Sierra against the background of Matteotti’s murder clearly had the impact of a call to arms. In 1925, fascist discrimination and violence seemed to take a strongly antisemitic turn.44 However, as the contemporary persecution of nonJewish anti-fascists suggests, antisemitism was not the primary motivation; instead, at that time, it was likely an additional reason for attacks on Jewish opponents of the regime like the Rossellis. Female Jewish protagonists were thoroughly conscious of this tendency. The normally rather shy and restrained feminist Bice Cammeo,45 who had long been involved both in the Milanese UFN and in the Florentine Lyceum, wrote Amelia a letter full of empathy and solidarity in the immediate aftermath of the fascist rampage in the Rosselli home: …on my return from one of my usual journeys, I am hearing of the destruction of your house, which has made a painful impression on me, but at the same time I am relieved that no one in the family was present. 44 In November 1929, the American-Jewish journal The American Hebrew quoted the exiled Italian politician and diplomat, Carlo Sforza, who saw the fascist attacks in Florence in 1925 as an “antisemitic turning point”; see Sarfatti, The Jews, 49. 45 In her memoir, Amelia described Cammeo, who gave the adolescent Carlo private tuition in mathematics, as “a highly intelligent woman with a great talent for mathematics. A dear friend of ours, sister of the famous lawyer [Federico] Cammeo”; Rosselli, Memorie, 126. Unlike her well-known brother, who taught law at the University of Padua beginning in 1905, at the University of Bologna beginning in 1911, and at the University of Florence beginning in 1925, the unmarried Bice Cammeo was unable to study at a university because her parents forbade it. Despite her conspicuous social and cultural involvement in the UFN, the Federazione Toscana of the CNDI, and the Florentine Lyceum, she was prone to depression due to her childlessness and renunciation of university education, which was only increased by having to care for her mother during a long illness. In May 1912, Amelia Rosselli wrote to Laura Orvieto regarding their mutual friend, “I am so sorry for her. Her great suffering has removed the usual mask from her face that is so inscrutable to me, and when I saw her soul so exposed, I loved her all the more…” Amelia Rosselli to Laura Orvieto, May 30, 1912, ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or.1.2059, 99.

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Any commentary seems superfluous to me; I only want you to know how keenly I share in your sorrow. In sincere friendship, always yours, Bice Cammeo.46

Her longtime friend thus explicitly positioned herself on the side of Amelia Rosselli’s family, around which a social vacuum had formed in Florence.47 Bice Cammeo’s identification with the values of female solidarity, as embodied by her mentor Ersilia Majno and by the UFN, which Cammeo herself had played a decisive role in shaping from its foundation onward, quite clearly took precedence over the fact that her elder brother, the career lawyer Federico Cammeo (1872–1939), had willingly come to terms with fascism. He was one of the most important figures in public law in fascist Italy until well into the 1930s.48 Bice Cammeo, who respected her brother but rejected fascism, stayed faithful to her friend Amelia Rosselli in the years that followed also. The persecution of the anti-fascist resistance reached a peak in October 1925 with the murder of the socialists Gustavo Console and Gaetano Pilati in Florence. At the same time, the construction of the dictatorship was rapidly pushed forward. The notorious law of December 24, 1925, established Mussolini’s absolute rule; as “head of the government,” executive power was now in his sole hands. During the next three years, professional groups like lawyers and journalists, in whose ranks there was suspicion of oppositional activities, were forced into conformity. From April 1926 onward, prefects had the power to send opponents of the regime into police detention without previous trial. Finally, after a few failed attempts to assassinate Mussolini, the government dissolved all oppositional unions and parties with the “Law for the Defense of the State” of November 25, 1926. In addition, a political secret police force was created to combat anti-fascism.49 Anti-fascist groups could no longer 46 Bice Cammeo to Amelia Rosselli, July 19, 1925, FRT, Archivio di Amelia Rosselli, C386. 47 Ciuffoletti speaks of the isolation of the Rosselli family after the attack on their house; Ciuffoletti, Epistolario familiare, 234. 48 Federico Cammeo taught at the University of Florence from 1925 onward and, even in the final years before the passage of the racial laws, from 1935 to 1938, was chair of the department of law there. At the end of 1938, one year before his death, he was dismissed from his university position because he was a Jew. On Cammeo, see Cipriani F., Scritti in onore dei patres (Milan: Angeli, 2006), 193–220. 49 See Mantelli, Kurze Geschichte, 73 f.

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survive, even underground. Carlo Rosselli, now a member of the Socialist Party executive committee, was detained in December 1926 and, after five months in prison, was sent into police detention, first to the island of Ustica and then, in September 1927, to the island of Lipari. Nello was arrested in Florence in June 1927 for “antifascist activities and correspondence with oppositionals” and also exiled to the island of Ustica. The two brothers, both of them recently married, were thus violently separated from their families, their studies, and their work.50 Once again, Bice Cammeo took the part of the ostracized Rossellis in this hopeless situation. In a letter to Carlo’s wife, Marion Cave,51 Cammeo assured the latter of her unconditional solidarity and familiar connectedness with Amelia, Nello, and especially Carlo, which she based in part on common experiences and memories that went back for years: I want to express to you my deepest sense of admiration that I have for all [of you], and the sincere friendship stretching back many years that ties me to Carlo and his Mama. I recall Carlo as a child and as an adolescent with maternal tenderness, and already at that time, with maternal pride: I myself have seen the flourishing of the civil and social virtues that make him great today. I remember the tumultuous and painful summer of 1914. I was in Viareggio in the same hotel as him… At that time he was both child and man; we had endlessly long discussions about the current political events… Today he is someone else. No one can stop him now… and I am proud that at that time I understood his spirit, that I… guided him, helped him, encouraged him to win the struggle between child and man.52

Thus, family memories found their way into current political events. They confirmed and strengthened the long-established characteristic group consciousness of Jewish feminists like Cammeo, Rosselli, and Lombroso Ferrero, which had combined with anti-fascist positions in parallel with 50 See Ciuffoletti, Epistolario familiare, 236. 51 Although the Englishwoman Marion Cave was a Quaker, her marriage with Carlo

Rosselli made her a direct participant in the familial Jewish consciousness of the Rossellis and their networks. She, too, was an active member of the Circolo di Cultura. 52 Bice Cammeo to Marion Cave, August 11, 1927, FRT, Archivio di Amelia Rosselli,

M 2721. A few weeks later, Cammeo wrote to Amelia Rosselli, “Dear Amelia, your life has become a [painstaking] uphill path, but today I daresay that it was worth going up to find two sons like Carlo and Nello at the top. Few mothers have suffered as you have, but few mothers can claim to have brought forth two heroes!” September 21, 1927, FRT, Archivio di Amelia Rosselli, M 1242.

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Mussolini’s rise. At the same time, the spheres for public participation became narrower for these actors; their group increasingly fell back on its own resources. This can also be seen from the extent of their organizational involvement or else marginalization. For example, Amelia Rosselli, who had already left her position as vice-president of the Federazione Toscana in 1922, remained an official member of the Florentine Lyceum until her emigration in 1937 but resigned from her position as the Lyceum’s vice-president in 1924 because of a dispute within the committee. Rosselli’s friends Laura Orvieto and Giorgina Zabban resigned their positions at the same time.53 Although the Lyceum preserved a certain level of autonomy and continued to provide some limited scope for social and cultural exchange even for Jewish women involved in anti-fascist networks (Nello’s wife Maria Todesco joined the Lyceum in 1931), fascist infiltration could not be permanently prevented here either. In the mid-1920s, the Federazione Toscana of the conformist CNDI began to hold their meetings on the Lyceum’s premises in a demonstrative fashion, and there were soon fascist functionaries among the events’ attendees.54 The repressive climate exerted itself unmistakably. How strongly young anti-fascist women too felt circumscribed and threatened by the dictatorship in their daily lives can be seen in a letter from one of Amelia Rosselli’s nieces who visited the grave of her cousin Aldo near Udine in 1926. For the family, his final resting place had become the symbol of “another,” democratic Italy.55 Amid the brutality of the fascist persecution directly impacting the family, for Amelia’s niece, Aldo’s grave was a place where “I forget all the hostilities that surround me… all the evil that makes me suffer so much.”56 Soon, exile was the only way out for anti-fascist families. Gina Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero emigrated to Geneva in 1930; after the 53 See Bulletti P., “Amelia nel Lyceum di Firenze (1908–1937),” in Vieri, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, 29–38. Laura Orvieto reported in her autobiography that she had barely participated in committee meetings for years even before the exclusion of Jewish members of the Lyceum, which became official in January 1939; see Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 126 f. 54 See Bulletti, “Amelia nel Lyceum,” 24. 55 See Nello Rosselli’s letter to his mother of September 12, 1928, in Ciuffoletti,

Epistolario familiare, 389–391; see also Nattermann, “Heroic Fathers,” especially 377, 385 f. 56 Rosselli’s niece to Amelia Rosselli (“Zia mia”), August 14, 1926. FRT, Archivio di Amelia Rosselli, M 1334.

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murder of her sons in 1937, Amelia Rosselli emigrated first to Switzerland, from there to England, and finally to the USA.57 Hemmed in by fascism, the Jewish-internal sphere strongly increased in importance. For not a few female activists, Zionism and a newly awakened Jewish consciousness became a place of refuge within a hostile environment.

6.2

Zionism as a New Beginning and Refuge

The emergence of a new Jewish self-consciousness among Italian Jewish protagonists was reflected in the foundation of the Associazione Donne Ebree d’Italia (ADEI) in 1927.58 The largely unstudied beginnings of this first Jewish women’s union in Italy, whose creation had still been impossible during the First World War, stand in direct relationship to the conditions of the fascist dictatorship. Its foundation must be seen as the consequence of two parallel developments. On the one hand, the persecution of anti-fascist groups and the progressive fascist infiltration of the still-existing women’s associations led to the marginalization of Jewish (and non-Jewish) actors who had always been on the left of the political spectrum. Their room for maneuver in the secular sphere became ever more limited, and the struggle for political equality had receded out of sight. The approachment of the once decidedly laicist CNDI to the dominant Catholic culture of fascist Italy was now a further disruptive factor for what had long been the rather unproblematic integration of Jewish members into the large national women’s organization. At the same time, especially between 1923 and 1928—during the fourth wave of immigration to Palestine—Jewish cultural circles and Zionist groups became intensively active in Italy, which aroused an increased interest in Judaism and in Zionist ideas among some Jewish

57 See Moorehead, Una famiglia pericolosa, 325–332. 58 There has long been a lack of monographic research on the history of the ADEI’s

foundation and its early years. On the organization’s beginnings, see Associazione donne ebree d’Italia, Dalla nascita ai giorni nostri, 7–35; Follacchio S., “Associazionismo femminile e nation building. Il contributo dell’Associazione Donne Ebree d’Italia,” Chronica Mundi 12,1 (2017): 99–125, Miniati M., “‘Non dimenticare.’ Il ruolo formativo e culturale dell’Adei (Associazione donne ebree d’Italia), dal dopoguerra a oggi,” in Piussi A. M. (ed.), Presto apprendere, tardi dimenticare: l’educazione ebraica nell’Italia contemporanea (Milan: Angeli, 1998), 167–169.

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secular women too.59 The Pro Cultura movement was active in several cities, especially Florence, Milan, and Padua. Due to the presence of Rabbi Samuel Hirsch Margulies (1858–1922), originally from Galicia, the leader of the local rabbinical college, Florence became a flourishing center of contemporary Italian Zionism.60 Laura Orvieto too participated actively in the lectures and seminars of the Florentine Zionists, led by the Triestine scholar Ciro Glass (1901–1928).61 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Italian Zionism, like contemporary Western European Zionisms in general, saw itself primarily as a philanthropic-humanitarian movement striving to provide political and economic assistance to their “poor Jewish brothers” in Eastern Europe so that they could emigrate to Palestine and there create a new and better life. Thus, supporting the Zionist movement was compatible with loyalty to the Italian fatherland.62 The situation changed in the early

59 The relevant events, especially Hebrew language courses, seminars on Jewish history, and initiatives connected with Jewish holidays, were mostly organized by the Federazione Associazioni Culturali Ebraiche (FACE); see Sarfatti, The Jews, 64. A Zionist union, the Federazione Sionistica Italiana (FSI) had existed in Italy since 1901, but even in the 1920s, the organization was largely dominated by male members; see Marzano A., “Figure Femminili del Sionismo Italiano,” Italia Judaica, Lucca 6–9, June 2005, 447–466. 60 See Marzano A., Una terra per rinascere. Gli ebrei italiani e l’emigrazione in Palestina prima della guerra (1920–1940) (Genoa-Milan: Marietti, 2003), 17 f. 61 Ciro Glass was born in Fiume but spent his childhood and youth in Trieste. In 1919, he moved to Florence and came into contact with Rabbi Margulies; he became the director of the Israel publishing house and president of the central commissariat of the Israel national fund Keren Hayesod in Italy; see Marzano, Una terra, 23. On Orvieto’s interest in the Zionist movement, see Nattermann, “The Italian-Jewish Writer Laura Orvieto.” Angiolo Orvieto also frequented the Zionist circles in Florence. In the immediate postwar period, he had depicted the tension between Italian patriotism and the yearning for Palestine, the land of the “forefathers,” in some of his literary works. His poem cycle Il Vento di Sion. Canzoniere di un ebreo fiorentino del Cinquecento, published in Florence in 1928, was inspired by Zionist meetings in the Via dei della Robbia in Florence. However, as was the case for the vast majority of contemporary Italian Jews, the Orvietos’ Zionist interest did not lead to political action but was limited to cultural Zionism; see Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 129 f. 62 The philanthropic-humanitarian direction of Italian Zionism was officially established in October 1901 at the second Italian Zionist Congress in Modena with the statute of the Federazione Sionistica Italiana, to which Felice Ravenna was elected president; see Marzano, Una terra, 16. On the Western-European philanthropic-humanitarian tendency of Italian Zionism and its concept of the “East-European Jew” see Hahn H.-J., “Europäizität und innerjüdisches Othering. ‘Ostjuden’ im literarischen Diskurs von Heine bis Zweig,” in Battegay C., Breysach B. (eds.), Jüdische Literatur als europäische Literatur.

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1920s. The Jewish Youth Congress (Convegno giovanile ebraico), which took place in Livorno in 1924, created a noticeable upswing in Italian Zionism, which began to detach itself from its formerly primarily philanthropic tendency while becoming a matter of increasing awareness and discussion even among young Italian Jews who did not belong to the organized Zionist movement. This altered form of Jewish self-reflection was largely due to the dominance of Catholicism in all areas of social life and the progressive approachment between fascism and the Catholic Church. However, the elitist concept of an “integrative Judaism” propagated by Alfonso Pacifici (1889–1981)63 in Livorno, which was based not on religion alone but permeated the entire life of each individual Jew and was intended to awaken in each the consciousness of an integrative belonging to the Jewish people—as a member of a chain reaching back for generations—was accepted by only a small minority of Italian Zionists. At the same time, the idea of a Jewish nation, and with it, the option of a new Jewish homeland in Palestine, aroused lively interest in the context of the youth congress of 1924 even among acculturated Italian-Jewish men and women. Three main tendencies took shape within Italian Zionism: first, there was the socialist Zionism, embodied by the prominent activist and later partisan Enzo Sereni (1905–1944), who played a leading role in representing this stance at the congress in Livorno64 ; second, the liberal Zionism (the “general” Zionists), and third, the religious, so-called “revisionist” Zionism, whose aggressively nationalist tendencies proved to have an ideological affinity with fascism.65 Europäizität und jüdische Identität 1860–1930 (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2008), 124–138. 63 The Florentine rabbi, lawyer, and journalist Alfonso Pacifici, one of the most important contemporary Italian Zionists, had studied with Samuel Hirsch Margulies in Florence. He was the founder and director of the journal Israel. In 1934, he emigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem. On Pacifici and his concept of “integrative Judaism,” see Salvadori R. G., Gli ebrei di Firenze: dalle origini ai nostri giorni (Florence: Giuntina, 2000), 88 f.; Molinari M., Ebrei in Italia: un problema di identità (1870–1938) (Florence: Giuntina, 1991), 46–48. 64 Enzo Sereni emigrated to Palestine in 1927 and was one of the founders of the kibbutz Givat Brenner. During the Second World War, he fought for the British army. He was captured in Italy in May 1944 and executed in November 1944 in the Dachau concentration camp. On Sereni and his family, see the work by his sister Clara Sereni, Il gioco dei regni (Florence: Giunti, 1993). 65 See Sarfatti, The Jews, 63. For details on the development of contemporary Italian Zionism and its ideological variations, see Bidussa D., “Il sionismo italiano nel primo

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Interestingly, however, the discussions at the Jewish Youth Congress of 1924 did not only reflect the diversely developing tendencies in contemporary Zionism; they also became the key reference point for a “Jewish anti-fascism” with present-day relevance, due to the presence of Nello Rosselli. In his speech at Livorno, which later became famous, and which was discussed in the second chapter of this study, Rosselli decisively distanced himself from the Zionists and the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Based on his laicist and yet Jewish-conscious education received from his mother Amelia, Rosselli emphasized that the ethical values of justice, freedom, and social responsibility, which, for him, were inextricably tied to Judaism, mandated sociopolitical engagement in the here and now—in concrete terms, resistance against the fascist dictatorship in Italy.66 Berta Cammeo Bernstein and the Establishment of the Associazione delle Donne Ebree d’Italia Significantly, the social worker Berta Cammeo Bernstein (1866–1928), founder of the ADEI, was situated at the interstice of the two developments: the increasing marginalization and persecution of left-wing and/or anti-fascist activists and the contemporary revitalization of Jewish religious and Jewish Zionist identities. She had been active in the laicist, socialistleaning Milanese UFN for decades, which had to limit its activities to the sphere of welfare under fascism,67 and found her way to Judaism and Zionism relatively late on. However, the Jewish principle of social justice to which Nello Rosselli referred in Livorno had always been paramount in her sociopolitical engagement. Gabriella Falco Ravenna (1897–1983), who succeeded Cammeo Bernstein as president of the Milanese ADEI in 1928, wrote in her assessment of this prominent activist:

quarto del Novecento. Una ‘rivolta culturale?’” in Bailamme 5–6 (1989): 168–244; Bailamme 7 (1990): 95–172. 66 On Nello Rosselli’s speech in Livorno, see Di Porto B., Il problema ebraico in Nello Rosselli: Giustizia e libertà nella lotta antifascista e nella storia d’Italia. Attualità dei fratelli Rosselli a quaranta anni dal loro sacrificio (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1978); Belardelli, Nello Rosselli, uno storico antifascista (Florence: Passigli, 1982), 44–48. 67 See Willson, Women, 79.

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… Berta Bernstein Cammeo had dreamed of social justice since her youth, and lived through injustice, misery, and moral debasement… She was an early champion of social work, an extremely active consulting member of the ‘Asilo Mariuccia,’ but only with advancing age did she, who came from a family of assimilated Jews, hear the call of her fathers and internalize the Jewish Idea in its entirety. She did not miss one conference, not one lecture by Rabbi Prato,68 not one Zionist gathering; but perhaps the decisive impulse in fact came from her conversations with Signora Nanny Margulies69 … [The latter] later settled in Eretz Israel and was a member of the committee of the Wizo for many years…70

Unlike Gabriella Falco Ravenna, whose father Felice Ravenna (1869– 1937) was one of the founders of the Zionist association in Italy and its president until 1920,71 Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s acculturated family was not at all involved in Zionism (Fig. 6.1). However, the Cammeos placed great value on the continuation of a Jewish family identity, as can be seen from their marriages and their close kinship ties. Berta Cammeo Bernstein, a cousin of the anticlerical activist Bice Cammeo who was

68 This refers to the prominent rabbi David Prato (1882–1951), Chief Rabbi of Rome in 1937/38 and 1945–1951. Born in Livorno, Prato moved to Florence in his youth to study with Samuel Hirsch Margulies at the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano. Berta Cammeo, who herself came from Florence, attended David Prato’s lectures and seminars. In 1938, the rabbi, who was accused of antifascism and Zionism by the fascist authorities, emigrated to Israel; see Prato D., “Una Vita per l’Ebraismo,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel 79, 1–3 (2013): 109–232. 69 This refers to the Zionist Nanny, née Auerbach, born in Poland in 1899, daughter of Rabbi Baruch Menachim Auerbach, who married the journalist and economist Heinrich Margulies, who also came from Poland, in Berlin in 1915. The couple emigrated to Palestine in 1925, where Margulies became director of the Anglo-Palestine Bank. Nanny Margulies founded a nursery in Tel Aviv and served on the committee of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (Wizo). The ADEI joined the Wizo in 1931 on her encouragement; see Lopez S., “Gli Antefatti,” in Associazione donne ebree d’Italia, Dalla nascita ai giorni nostri, 11–14; Polacco E., “La Fondazione e l’Attività nel Primo Quinquennio,” in Associazione donne ebree d’Italia, Dalla nascita ai giorni nostri, 23 f. 70 Falco Ravenna G., “Berta Bernstein Cammeo e gli Albori dell’ADEI,” in Associazione donne ebree d’Italia, Dalla nascita ai giorni nostri, 16. 71 Felice Ravenna, the jurist originally from Ferrara, was also president of the Comunità israelitiche italiane from 1930 to 1937; see among others Della Seta S., “Dalla tradizione a un mondo più moderno. Un ebreo autentico in un’epoca di passaggio. Note per un profilo di Felice di Leone Ravenna,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel 53,3 (1987): LXXI–LXXVII.

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Fig. 6.1 The Ravenna and Bassani families, Ferrara, 1911. Gabriella Ravenna, standing, third from right; her sister Germana Ravenna (deported in 1943), seated, second from left

nine years younger, came, like the latter, from Florence.72 Both were among the pioneers of the Milanese UFN. Little is known about Berta Cammeo’s childhood and youth, but Gabriella Falco Ravenna’s words suggest that the family had economic difficulties. This was likely a further reason for the actor’s drive to work on behalf of socially disadvantaged girls and women, as she later did through the UFN and the Asilo Mariuccia. Her marriage in the late 1880s to the tailor and textile entrepreneur Arturo Bernstein (1855–1912), who was born in Berlin and fled to Italy as a child,73 provided the young woman with existential security.

72 Berta Cammeo’s father Giacomo (born 1828) and Bice Cammeo’s father Cesare (born 1832), both born in Livorno, were brothers. 73 The information regarding Arturo Bernstein’s immigration to Italy is contradictory and not verifiable based on the scant available sources. His birthplace is generally given as Berlin, but Bernstein’s grandson Aldo Ascarelli writes that Arturo Bernstein lost his parents at eleven years old in a “Russian Jewish pogrom” and fled as a lone orphan from Germany to Italy. Fiorenza Taricone also mentions a pogrom that made Arturo Bernstein

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The couple moved to Milan, the center of the Italian textile industry, where Bernstein built a successful fashion company.74 The family achieved great wealth in the Lombard capital and were able to provide their eight children—among them the linguistic and literary scholar Marta Bernstein Navarra (1895–1965)—with an excellent education that included studies in England, Switzerland, and elsewhere.75 Education, financial prosperity, as well as the transnational connections of the Bernstein family and their enterprise were central prerequisites for Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s ideological and material support of the UFN and the ADEI. Even the early death of her husband Arturo, who died before the outbreak of the First World War at just forty-seven years old, could not weaken her creative powers. The establishment of the first Jewish women’s organization in Italy is inextricably linked with its founder’s biography. The fact that a group of female Jewish actors joined together in Milan during the fascist dictatorship was directly due to Cammeo Bernstein’s connections to contemporary socialism, her involvement in the fight against the trade in women and girls, and her personal approachment to the resurgent Italian an orphan; see her entry on Marta Bernstein in Navarra in the Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 145, and the memoir by Ascarelli, “Il più vivo dei miei figli,” in Pezzana A. (ed.), Quest’anno a Gerusalemme. Gli ebrei italiani in Israele (Florence: Giuntina 2008), 32. It is a fact that in 1866, the Jews in united Italy, including Venice, were emancipated, which certainly favored the incorporation of the orphaned Jewish boy. Bernstein was probably cared for by relatives already resident in Italy and learned the tailor’s trade as an adolescent. 74 The doctor Aldo Ascarelli (1916–2006), son of Berta Cammeo’s daughter Wanda Bernstein, resident in Israel from 1945 onward, wrote, “My mother was Milanese, from a wealthy family; the grandfather was Arturo Bernstein, who was married to a Cammeo from Florence. At eleven years old, he had escaped a Russian pogrom and traveled alone to Italy, no one knows how… My grandfather was the first person in Italy to manufacture clothing on production lines, the Prêt-à-Porter. The factory bore his name, and hundreds of female tailors worked there, manufacturing French models, copied from an excellent designer…who traced the items of clothing on display in the windows in Paris…”; Ascarelli, “Il più vivo,” 32. It is quite possible that the Catholic activist Elena da Persico, who lived in Milan, also had Bernstein’s firm in mind when she made her antisemitic attack on the “Jewish fashion,” which was supposedly inspired by a “Jewish freemason tailor from Paris.” 75 Marta Bernstein Navarra studied languages and literature, including in London. She graduated from the University of Milan in French in 1916 and in English in 1917; see the entry by Fiorenza Taricone in the Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 145. Ascarelli also reports that his mother, Wanda Bernstein Ascarelli, was educated at a boarding school in Switzerland; see Ascarelli, “Il più vivo,” 32 f.

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Zionism. Together with her daughters, Marta and Elda (1893–1944), who had married Ersilia Majno’s son Edoardo in 1915, Berta Cammeo Bernstein belonged to the inner circle of the Majno family. Their salon was frequented by important personalities in Italian socialism like Filippo Turati and Anna Kuliscioff until the 1920s.76 Both their political orientation—diametrically opposed to fascism—and their accordance with the practical feminism of the UFN through social work, educational projects, and help through self-help for socially disadvantaged women were guiding lights for Cammeo Bernstein and her daughters, who also came to play leading roles in the Jewish women’s association. It is true that the regional groups of the ADEI, which gradually came into being, not infrequently distanced themselves during the 1920s and 1930s from the ideological roots of the Milanese pioneers, came to terms with fascism, and reduced the ideal woman to the role of a good wife, mother, and ardent Zionist. But it should not be forgotten that the origins of the organization lay in the characteristic nexus between socialism, anti-fascism, feminism, and Zionism that developed around Berta Cammeo Bernstein in Milan in the mid-1920s.77 Organizationally speaking, the prehistory of the ADEI is directly connected to Cammeo Bernstein’s aid projects for refugees, which went back to the First World War period and whose intention must also have been influenced by the personal experiences of her husband, Arturo Bernstein, who had fled to Italy as an orphan.78 In response to the waves of emigration of Jewish men, women, and children from Eastern Europe in the early 1920s, who took ship from Italian ports like Venice, Trieste, Naples, and Genoa, primarily to South America but also to Palestine, the need for humanitarian action on behalf of refugees and to combat the trade in women and girls became especially acute. The Comitato italiano di assistenza agli emigranti ebrei (Italian Aid Committee for Jewish

76 See Lopez G., “Ricordo di Marta Navarra,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel 41 (1975): 417–429; Taricone, “La FILDIS,” 142. 77 For example, Arturo Marzano ignores the feminist roots of the ADEI; see Marzano, “Figure Femminili,” 447 f. 78 On Cammeo Bernstein’s work for refugees in the First World War, see Lopez, “Ricordo di Marta Navarra,” 418. As was mentioned above, a committee Pro-Profughi had formed within the UFN too after Caporetto, composed exclusively of Jewish members, including Nina Rignano Sullam; see Archivio UFN, b. 11, fasc. 68: Prima Guerra Mondiale – 1 (1913–1918).

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Emigrants) came into being in 1921 against this background, with Nina Rignano Sullam’s cousin Angelo Sullam, a founder member of the Italian Zionist Federation and president of the Jewish community in Venice at that time, at the helm.79 Thanks to the traditionally good contacts between members of the UFN and contemporary Jewish institutions, a close collaboration developed between Majno’s Comitato contro la tratta delle bianche and Sullam’s aid committee for Jewish emigrants.80 Berta Cammeo Bernstein personally supported the connection with Angelo Sullam and, in 1925, founded a small association to support and protect Jewish women and girls in the emigration process, which is generally considered an early stage of the ADEI.81 In addition, as Gabriella Falco Ravenna suggests, there were Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s conversations with the Zionist Nanny Auerbach Margulies, who moved to Tel Aviv in June 1925 and became involved in social work on behalf of women and girls there.82 In the same 79 On Angelo Sullam and his influence on contemporary Zionism, see Brazzo L., Angelo Sullam e il Sionismo in Italia tra la Crisi di Fine Secolo e la Guerra di Libia (Rome: Società Editrice Dante Alighieri, 2007). 80 The cooperation and exchange, especially on legal questions regarding emigration and the protection of women and children, is clearly reflected in the correspondence between Ersilia Majno and Angelo Sullam’s colleague, the Triestine jurist Giacomo Levi Minzi; see the relevant letters in Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 28, fasc. 4: Anna e Frida Marx, and Giacomo Levi Minzi (1922–1924). At the end of November, 1923, the collaboration resulted in the foundation of the Comitato Intersociale di Trieste, Istria, e Zara contro la tratta delle Donne e dei Fanciulli, which was incorporated into the national aid committee for Jewish immigrants. The connections were extremely close on a personal level too. In 1924, Levi Minzi asked Ersilia Majno, whom he confidently addressed as “Mamma Majno” in his letters, for Anna Marx’s hand in marriage. Majno had taken Anna Marx into her home after the death of her parents and, said Levi Minzi, she became Majno’s “spiritual daughter”; see Giacomo Levi Minzi to Ersilia Majno, Trieste, January 7, 1924, Archivio UFN, Fondo Ersilia Majno, cartella 28, fasc. 4. Anna Marx, the sister of the president of FILDIS, Frida Marx Ceccon, was involved in the UFN, in its committee against the trade in women and girls, and also, from 1927 onward, in the Milanese ADEI. 81 See Cammeo Bernstein’s letter to Angelo Sullam of February 27, 1924, CDEC Milano, Fondo Angelo Sullam, Corrispondenza del presidente 3 gennaio 1924 – 5 gennaio 1925, b. 18, fasc. 185. On Cammeo Bernstein’s establishment of the Associazione di soccorso per le donne ebree, “which would become our ADEI in 1927,” see Lopez, “Ricordo di Marta Navarra,” 418. 82 The fact that Nanny Auerbach Margulies was at least temporarily resident in Italy (and traveled to Palestine from there), where she made contact with Italian-Jewish female actors, was probably also due to the kinship ties between her husband Heinrich Margulies

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year, Auerbach Margulies had tried to establish a Jewish women’s union in Milan to support the development work in Palestine.83 From the autumn of 1925 onwards, Cammeo Bernstein began to contact potential members and organize the first meetings in her home. Supported by her daughters, Marta and Elda Bernstein, the then twentyeight-year-old, highly educated Gabriella Falco Ravenna (whose father, Felice, was vice-president of the Consorzio of Italy’s Jewish communities at the time), the wealthy Zionist Vittoria Cantoni Pisa mentioned above (Rignano Sullam’s cousin and daughter of the deceased senator Ugo Pisa; she had joined the UFN in 1910), the foreign-language teacher Susanna Gugenheim, and the philologist Augusta Jarach, Cammeo Bernstein gradually constructed the ADEI’s inner circle.84 In September 1928, right after the founder’s death, Gabriella Falco Ravenna recalled the first small gatherings at which Cammeo Bernstein read out letters from Palestine and so shaped the group’s self-concept, opening up a view into a new world.85 Gabriella Falco Ravenna’s husband, the prominent jurist Mario Falco (1884–1943), prepared the articles of incorporation. The union established three concrete goals: first, “the promotion of institutions that support and aid Jewish mothers and children in Palestine and in Italy”; second, “the preparation of Jewish

and the Florentine rabbi Samuel Hirsch Margulies. The author thanks Dr. Lionella Neppi Modona Viterbo (Florence) for this suggestion. 83 See Gabriella Falco Ravenna, “Discorso inaugurale tenuto da Gabriella Falco il marzo 1927 nella sala del Lyceum di Milano,” p. 1, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI (in riordinamento), cartella V.77.AS/V.82.AS 1927–1936, Assemblee generali; Lopez, “Gli Antefatti,” 14. In addition, in June 1925, Auerbach Margulies published an article in the journal Israel in which she called on Italy’s Jewish women to organize and appealed to their Jewish consciousness: “Il dovere della donna ebrea. Appelllo alle donne ebree d’Italia,” Israel X, 23 (June 5, 1925). The Zionist likely saw the wealthy Milanese Jewish community, with its close ties to the UFN, as the best environment in which to establish a Jewish women’s union in Italy, which she originally wished to connect with the Verein jüdischer Frauen für die Sozialarbeit in Palästina in Berlin. This plan failed due to the Italian pioneers’ preference for an independent Italian organization; see Falco Ravenna, “Discorso inaugurale,” p. 1, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI (in riordinamento), cartella V.77.AS/V.82.AS 1927–1936, Assemblee generali. 84 See Falco Ravenna, “Berta Cammeo Bernstein,” 17. Augusta Jarach, who was also active on the ADEI’s first executive committee, was murdered during the Shoah. 85 Gabriella Falco Ravenna, “Berta Cammeo,” September 28, 1928, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, fasc. 1928–1950.

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women for emigration to Palestine”; third, “the dissemination of Jewish spirit and Jewish culture among Jewish women and children in Italy.”86 Thus, material support and social work, as well as training and education projects in Italy and in Palestine, constituted the fundamental pillars of their future activities. Regarding the name of the organization, after lengthy discussions, the founders decided on (the union of) “Jewish women of Italy” (donne ebree d’Italia) rather than “Italian Jewish women” (donne ebree italiane) so that their project would also include Jewish women resident in Italy who did not have Italian nationality.87 Although, at first glance, this seems like a decision based on practical considerations, in fact it was fundamentally an index of the development of a new self-consciousness among the pioneers in the direction of identification with a Jewish-national community. Thanks to the close interconnections between the Milanese women’s associations that went back for decades, and to the strong presence of their Jewish members, the inaugural gathering of the ADEI on March 16, 1927, could take place in the hall of the Milanese Lyceum; the audience included both Jewish and non-Jewish men and women. For the meetings, which took place regularly from May 1927 onward, Ersilia Majno offered the UFN’s premises in the Corso di Porta Nuova.88 Through its emphatic positioning within the established Milanese women’s movement, the young ADEI also aimed to prevent the sort of antisemitic attacks that an association with explicitly Jewish character and Zionist orientation would likely have encountered.89 Although the fascist government did not officially pursue an antisemitic policy in the 1920s, severe anti-Jewish outrages had been carried out by fascist organizations in Libya as early as 1923. Another antisemitic incident had taken place in Italy just a few months earlier: in the course of the wave of violence unleashed by the failed assassination attempt on Mussolini in October 1926, the synagogue in Padua had been destroyed by a gang of fascists in early November 1926, and the Jewish books and sacral objects kept there had 86 Associazione delle donne ebree d’Italia, L’Assemblea costitutiva dell’Adei, May 23, 1927, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, cartella V.77.AS/V.82.AS 1927–1936, Assemblee generali. 87 See Falco Ravenna, “Berta Bernstein Cammeo,” 18. 88 On the inaugural assembly in the UFN premises and the close connection between

the UFN and the Milanese ADEI, see also Gaballo, Il nostro dovere, 362. 89 See Lopez, “Gli antefatti,” 14.

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been destroyed.90 The pioneers’ concern regarding antisemitic defamation and attacks was thus by all means reasonable, even if the gatherings of the ADEI went on undisturbed until the 1930s. Political Refuge and Locus of Jewish Consciousness At a time when the publication of the essay by the Jewish-laicist actor Nina Sierra on the trade-in women and girls was prevented, activists critical of the regime were driven out of the CNDI, and Mussolini had placed every kind of association under police observation by law,91 the new establishment of a women’s organization independent of the Fascist Party and the Fasci Femminili was quite remarkable. It became possible because Berta Cammeo Bernstein consciously laid emphasis on the philanthropical character of the new association without formulating political claims.92 In this way, the pioneers of the ADEI created a place for themselves that, in the first decade of its existence at least, was largely untroubled by the fascist dictatorship’s repressive measures, in which they could be socially active while simultaneously deepening a common Jewish consciousness. Unlike the increasingly marginalized UFN, whose members were suspected of socialism and laicism, the early ADEI appeared to be an apolitical space, at least from the outside. Significantly, numerous members of the UFN joined the Jewish women’s union over the course of time, since it offered them a relatively protected environment for

90 See Sarfatti, The Jews, 48 f. The incidents in Libya were relevant in the context of the ADEI’s foundation since, in its early period, the ADEI acted on behalf of needy Jews in the Italian colony of Libya as well as of Jewish women and children in Palestine. In 1930, Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s daughter Marta Navarra became chairwoman of the ADEI’s aid commission pro Tripoli, which primarily took care of Jewish children from the city of Tripolis; see Lopez, “Ricordo di Marta Navarra,” 419. 91 On the law in question, see Aquarone A., L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 68–70, 393–394. 92 This initially unproblematic relationship to fascism was further promoted by the fact that one of the central goals of the ADEI, the support of socially disadvantaged mothers and children, corresponded with the intentions of the fascist organization Opera Nazionale per la Maternità e Infanzia (ONMI) founded in 1925, which cared for needy young mothers, pregnant women, and infants. It came into existence two years before the birth campaign propagated by Mussolini to promote the “demographic strength” of the nation; on the ONMI, see de Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 94–104; Willson P., “Opera nazionale per la maternità e l’infanzia (Onmi),” in Luzzatto S., de Grazia V. (eds.), Dizionario del fascismo, vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 273–277.

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carrying out social projects and for intellectual exchange, at least until the 1930s, without invoking overt conflict with the fascist authorities and the political police. By 1928, several important members of the UFN had already joined the ranks of the Milanese ADEI: besides the founders Berta Cammeo Bernstein and Vittoria Cantoni Pisa themselves, the Piedmontese chapter president Ada Treves Segre was a notable example. She had been subject to attacks from conservative Catholic circles in Turin as early as 1906 because of her feminist activities, and probably also because of her Jewish socialist background.93 Additional members included the journalist and educator influenced by Mazzini, Anna Errera, and Ersilia Majno’s “spiritual daughter,” Anna Levi Minzi née Marx (1895–1952).94 Being an explicitly Jewish, philanthropic institution, the ADEI managed to largely evade the accusation of a “Jewish-freemason conspiracy” that had become a central antisemitic prejudice since the beginning of the twentieth century in intransigent Catholic circles faced with the strong presence of actors of Jewish origins in the laicist associations of the Italian women’s movement. Avoiding such prejudices seemed all the more necessary since the law of November 1925 establishing police surveillance of organizations and the ban on membership in private societies for public employees was specifically directed against freemasons, whom the antisemitic propaganda of fascist Italy generally equated with Jews.95 While there was almost no scope anymore for political activity on the part of socialist and (left-)liberal-oriented Jewish feminists in the national women’s organizations by the mid-1920s, the ADEI became a place of refuge in which, in the beginning, the networks of the UFN could also 93 Ada Treves Segre’s son, who was a doctor, like his father, who died in 1911, treated indigent Jews in Milan referred to him by representatives of the Milanese Commissione Israelitica di Beneficenza free of charge from 1928 onward. This committee collaborated directly with the ADEI; see Assemblee Generale Ordinaria, March 20, 1928, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, cartella V.77.AS/V.82.AS 1927–1936, Assemblee generali. 94 See the ADEI membership lists from 1928/1929 onward; CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, fasc. 1928–1950. Anna Levi Minzi, née Marx, had good contacts with the organized Zionist movement through her marriage with Angelo Sullam’s colleague Giacomo Levi Minzi. In 1929, she represented the ADEI at the Zionist World Congress in Zurich. 95 See Sarfatti, The Jews, 54. In September 1926, for example, the fascist politician and

diplomat Giuseppe Bastianini stated to an audience of members of the Fascist Party in the USA that Italy was engaged in a struggle with “the terrible coalition of the demonicfreemason-Jewish world”; see Guerrini I., Pluviano M., “La propaganda antisemita fascista nell’America del Sud,” in Burgio A. (ed.), Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia (1870–1945) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), 349 f.

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continue to function in part, under different auspices and with the toleration of the fascist regime. Thus, already in 1927, quite a few Jewish actors, including Ada Treves Segre and Anna Errera, who had long been exclusively involved in the laicist unions of the Italian women’s movement, took refuge in the Jewish-internal sphere—and not as a result of the racial laws, which were only promulgated more than a decade later. However, the ADEI was not merely a temporary retreat for them but also a new sphere in which to develop and reflect on a transformed Jewish self-consciousness that was beginning to transcend the traditionally deeprooted, secular Jewish family identities and networks within the pre-fascist Italian women’s movement. Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s identification both with the Jewish religion and with contemporary Zionism set the tone for the ideological orientation of the first Jewish women’s union in the history of Italy. At a time when she was herself already ill and physically diminished in capabilities, she deliberately chose Gabriella Falco Ravenna, who came from a religious and Zionist home, and the ardent Zionist Vittoria Cantoni Pisa as her successors, and so assured the ideological and organizational continuity of her project. On the other hand, actors who were Jewish in origin but were remote from any religious tradition or bourgeois Jewish lifestyle (involving, for example, synagogue attendance and the keeping of Jewish holidays) were unable to identify with the circle of the Donne ebree d’Italia, at least in its early days. Wanda Bonfiglioli from Ferrara, a friend of Gabriella Falco Ravenna’s and later chairwoman of the local ADEI, reported in May 1927 that “there are only a few elegant Jewish ladies in Ferrara who are not ashamed to be Jewish, and therefore our task [of membership recruitment] becomes ever more difficult.”96 This statement is evidence for the fact that by the end of the 1920s, open acknowledgment of a Jewish family background was by no means a matter of course in Italy. In concrete terms, the antisemitic acts of violence in Padua in 1926 and the incipient press campaign against Jews may have been decisive factors in the growing fear of antisemitic hostility. Membership 96 Wanda Bonfiglioli to Gabriella Falco Ravenna, May 17, 1927 (?), CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, cartella V.76.AS, Corrispondenza di Gabriella Falco Ravenna; Wanda Bonfiglioli. In a letter of December 1928, Bonfiglioli also lamented the fact that many young people had distanced themselves from the Jewish religion and community: “…the young people between twelve and sixteen or seventeen years of age split off into study groups and distance themselves from the religion, and also from solidarity with one another”; Wanda Bonfiglioli to Gabriella Falco Ravenna, December 28, 1928, ibid.

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in a Jewish women’s organization could certainly attract public attention and prejudice. At the same time, these actors’ distancing from their Jewish origins expressed their unconditional identification with the Italian nation in a manner that left no room for the multiple identities of an Italian and Jewish self-consciousness such as that of the members of the UFN, for example. It is likely that not a few upper middle class Jewish women also wished to distance themselves from the proletarian roots of the Jewish communities in Rome, Venice, and Livorno by emphasizing their italianità and repudiating their Jewish origins. However, Falco Ravenna was opposed in principle to any kind of opportunistically motivated inclusion of wealthy ladies in the organization. She feared that such a policy would cause their specific goals—the curation and dissemination of Jewish culture and the implementation of social aid for Jewish institutions in Italy and in Palestine—to recede into the background. She wrote in response to Bonfiglioli, “…we receive your offer of help with great thanks, but we do not conceal from you that the spirit of the Associazione is a little different.”97 Falco Ravenna’s decided emphasis on a Jewish group consciousness defined by knowledge of Jewish history and religion, the Hebrew language, and Zionism, can also be seen in a letter she wrote a few months later to Giuseppina Formeggini in Modena: “…we need the moral and material support of all women who consider themselves Jewish. Since these have already sown the good seed, it will not be difficult for them to understand and to disseminate the spirit that animates our union.”98 Immediately after the first assembly in 1927 in Milan, local chapters of the ADEI were established, with the founders’ encouragement, in Turin, Genoa, and Ferrara, but it was the Milanese group in particular, from the beginning of its existence, that placed great emphasis on the teaching and learning of Jewish history and culture, alongside its practical activities 97 Gabriella Falco Ravenna to Wanda Bonfiglioli, November 4, 1927, ibid. Even in October 1934, Gabriella stressed to her father Felice Ravenna that the goal of the ADEI was to disseminate Jewish culture and the Jewish spirit among women and children in Italy in order thus to participate in the aim of spiritual Jewish rebirth; see Gabriella Falco Ravenna to Felice Ravenna, October 12, 1934, CDEC Milano, Fondo Leone e Felice Ravenna, b. 8, fasc. 73: corrispondenza Agosto-settembre-ottobre 1934. 98 Gabriella Falco Ravenna to Giuseppina Formeggini, March 29, 1928, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, cartella V.85.AS, Corrispondenza di Gabriella Falco Ravenna (Giuseppina Formeggini, Rosa Pavia, Delia Foà). Giuseppina Formeggini became president of the Modena chapter of the ADEI, established in 1928.

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like the manufacture of clothing and collection of donations for Palestine. Evening lectures and seminars took place every two weeks, following the Pro Cultura model. Among other offerings, Gabriella Falco Ravenna spoke on the legends of the Talmud, Augusta Jarach on Jewish prayer, Betty Baer Stein, a longtime member of the UFN, on the Polish mystic and legendary founder of the Chassidic movement, Baal Shem Tov.99 In this way, Jewish women who were also members of the laicist associations, including Cammeo Bernstein and her daughters, Vittoria Cantoni Pisa, Ada Treves Segre, and Anna Errera, were able to (re)discover and realize a religious Jewish self-consciousness outside of the Jewish community, for which, by now, there was hardly any room in public life in fascist Italy. Against the Fascist School Policy The ADEI’s stated goal of “promoting Jewish spirit and Jewish culture” in Italy was not confined to the group itself. In response to the fascist school policy, which made Catholic religious education obligatory and fundamental to all study in Italian elementary schools from late 1923 onward, the pioneers demonstratively initiated a course in Jewish religion at a Milanese elementary school for girls in 1928.100 Thirty-five girls participated in the course, for which, as in similar cases, the Milanese city administration had only given permission on condition that it took place outside of regular school hours. Despite this permission, relations with the school directors were frequently tense, as the latter proved incapable of collaborating with the Jewish teaching staff and sometimes even tried to prevent the instruction from taking place. The longtime member of the Milanese ADEI Evelina Polacco reported that the initiative at the Via Ruffini girls’ school was in a tough position; the course was often compromised or even had to be temporarily suspended.101

99 See the report on the Assemblea Generale Ordinaria, March 20, 1928, CDEC

Milano, Fondo ADEI, cartella V.77.AS/V.82.AS 1927–1936, Assemblee generali. 100 “We have also managed to initiate a course in Jewish religion at the girls’ school in Via Ruffini. It is attended by a good thirty-five girls and taught by Signora [Ermilina] Misan Levi”; see ibid. 101 See Polacco E., “La Fondazione e l’Attività nel Primo Quinquennio,” in Associazione donne ebree d’Italia, Dalla nascita ai giorni nostri, 30 f.

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The strong concerns among laicist and Jewish-laicist protagonists, already discussed at the women’s congress in Rome in 1908, regarding the introduction of obligatory Catholic education, which countermanded the legally established religious equality in the Italian state and promoted discrimination against Jewish teachers and students, had been vindicated by Giovanni Gentile’s school reform. While the formerly laicist CNDI, whose own members had strongly criticized obligatory Catholic religious education at the women’s congress of 1908, had come into line with fascism and officially supported Gentile’s school reform in 1923, it was the activists of the ADEI—not by chance—including even participants in the congress of 1908 like the educator Anna Errera, who now campaigned decidedly in favor of the at least partial preservation of Jewish religious education in public schools. They did so in an effort to counter the fascist attack on the legal equality of religions and the attempt to abolish state laicism with all the means at their disposal. In so doing, the ADEI placed themselves firmly on the side of the Consorzio of Jewish communities, whose leading representatives had protested against Gentile’s school policy from the outset. In their eyes, this policy was predestined to stir up antisemitic prejudices, to endanger the jobs of Jewish teachers at public schools, and potentially to favor the forced proselytization of Jewish children by Catholic teaching staff.102 The goal of promoting Jewish spirit and Jewish culture in Italy, as set down in the ADEI’s statutes in 1927, thus accorded with the Jewish revival movement then underway, and equally, like the youth congress in Livorno, constituted a reaction to the progressive marginalization of Jewish culture and religion in the fascist state. At the same time that the ADEI began its educational initiative at the Milanese girls’ school, it joined the supraregional Federation of Cultural Jewish Unions (Federazione associazioni culturali ebraiche, FACE) and sent Vittoria Cantoni Pisa and Augusta Jarach as its representatives to the FACE cultural congress in Venice in July 1928. Here too, the problems directly connected with the fascist school policy were the focus

102 See Sarfatti, The Jews, 45 f. In early 1924, Angelo Sereni (1862–1936), the president of Rome’s Jewish community and of the Consorzio of Jewish communities in Italy, reported that Giovanni Gentile had stated to him that it was entirely possible that Catholic teachers would attempt to proselytize Jewish children within the new school system; see Israel 9, 22 (June 5, 1924) and 9, 46 (November 20, 1924).

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of discussion. Not by chance, Jarach gave a lecture on suitable textbooks for teaching at Jewish schools which were scarcely in circulation anymore in 1928.103 The fact that the entirety of instructional reading material in Italian schools now had to have an explicitly Catholic Christian character inevitably had a negative impact on the religious (self-) consciousness of Jewish children. The attack, tinged with antisemitism, initiated even before the First World War by representatives of the Catholic women’s organization on the supposedly “laicized” schoolbooks published by “Jewish publishers,” which were supposed to be replaced by reading materials with an expressly Catholic Christian character, had its continuation with the fascist school reform. Thus, the goals of the reactionary Catholic camp, reaching far back in time, became a reality in the pedagogical sphere during fascism.104 Concealed Zionism While the early ADEI’s Milanese activists in particular strove, within the limited scope of their powers, to oppose the progressive removal of Jewish culture and identity from the realm of education and the fascist violation of the legal principle of equality of religions, to which end they did not shrink from altercations with fascist school directors, among other things, the Zionist orientation of the women’s union was shielded from the public gaze as far as possible from the very beginning. Despite the fact that the founders had already made preparation of Jewish women for emigration to Palestine one of the central goals of their organization in 1927, and the ADEI had joined the Women’s International Zionist

103 See Polacco, “La Fondazione,” 30. 104 Even the prominent writer Laura Orvieto, whose Stories of the Greeks and the

Barbarians was still being read in Italian schools in the 1930s, due to the contemporary popularity of classical culture and mythology, had to suffer the consequences of the removal of Jewish culture and identity from contemporary (school) literature. On February 12, 1929, one day before the conclusion of the concordat between the Catholic Church and the fascist state, Orvieto’s publisher, Bemporad, requested that she remove an entire chapter (“Is the King a Jew?”) from her well-known work Leo e Lia, in which the Jewish identity of the writer and her children, the book’s protagonists, were in the foreground. Orvieto resisted this request and confined herself to changing the title to “The King and Leo”; for details, see Nattermann, “The Italian-Jewish Writer Laura Orvieto.” The relevant letter from Enrico Bemporad to Laura Orvieto of February 22, 1929, is located in the Orvieto family archive, ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or.5.1.9.

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Organization (Wizo) in March 1928,105 the Zionist character of the organization was consciously underplayed by its members for many years, in fear of repressive measures on the part of the fascist authorities.106 In general, the fascist government had a conflicted attitude to Zionism. On the one hand, the settlement of Italian Jews in North Africa and in the Near East including Palestine seemed a useful instrument against Great Britain in the fascist policy of expansionism in the Mediterranean; on the other hand, Zionism came to be classified as an anti-national movement whose followers were suspected of separatism, disloyalty to the fascist nation, and subversive internationalist activities.107 This form of antiZionist polemic reached a crescendo at the end of 1928. Incensed by the public attention stirred up by the Zionist Congress in Milan at the beginning of November 1928, on November 29, Mussolini published his notorious article on Zionism in the Popolo di Roma, which also appeared in other Italian newspapers the next day. Mussolini’s provocative question, “Are you a religion, or are you a people?” was directly aimed at a Jewish readership. The responses, a reflection of the contemporary ideological positioning of Italian Jews, were not long in coming. The press, on propagandistic grounds, mostly published the decidedly anti-Zionist declarations of Jewish followers of fascism.108 Furthermore, the Jewish community in Venice emphasized its assimilatory attitude and declared that it decidedly distanced itself from the ideas and actions of persons who did not place the fatherland above all else. The Consorzio of Italy’s Jewish communities stated, in appeasing manner, that Italian Jews, whether Zionist or not, were equally patriotic. The ADEI’s membership, for their

105 The Wizo was founded in England in 1920 by, among others, Chaim Weizmann’s wife Vera Weizmann. It had its headquarters in London, as well as branches in Europe and Latin America, until the establishment of the State of Israel. 106 See Polacco, “La Fondazione,” 22 f. 107 See Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 20 f.; Sarfatti, The Jews, 59 f. 108 Even in the 1920s, Italian Jews were generally just as affected as non-Jews by

the fascisization process in Italian society. In the elections for the council of the Jewish community in Florence in November 1926, for example, a group stood for election that explicitly called itself “fascist” and met with no resistance; see Sarfatti, The Jews, 54. On “fascist Jews,” see Sarfatti M. (ed.), Italy’s Fascist Jews. Insights on an Unusual Scenario = Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, 11 (October 2017), http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/index.php?issue=11; Klinkhammer L., “Ohne Sehnsucht nach einem ‘noch blaueren Himmel.’ Jüdische Anhänger Mussolinis in Italien,” Münchner Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 15,2 (2021): 25–39.

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part, could identify with the official position of the Italian Zionist Federation: the organized Zionists emphasized their twofold loyalty, to “the entire Jewish tradition, in which the idea of Zion is central,” and their unbroken love for Italy. However, Mussolini sharply repudiated the Zionists’ declaration in a subsequent newspaper article of December 1928. In his eyes, there was only one option for Italian Jews: unconditional loyalty to fascist Italy, which was irreconcilable with the effort to establish a Jewish state.109 Hereby, the Duce communicated his principled rejection of the Zionist ideology in unmistakable fashion to the Jewish minority. Special caution was required of the ADEI in particular, which was just beginning to establish local chapters primarily in northern and central Italy at the time, since official identification with Zionism would have severely endangered the existence of the organization at that moment. Any suspicion of anti-national activities had to be avoided. Some members also feared “to endanger themselves and their families by participating in a union that openly proclaimed itself as Zionist.”110 Within the group itself, however, the members were not shaken from their substantially Zionist make-up. The fact that Gabriella Falco Ravenna in particular insisted on the Zionist orientation of the ADEI from the beginning can be seen, among other things, from the letters she wrote to activists outside of Milan in the early days of the organization. In March 1928, for example, she explained to Giuseppina Formeggini, who would establish the chapter in Modena a little later, “… it must not be forgotten that our association – although it accepts all tendencies – has a philo-Zionist character.”111 Interestingly, such statements, contained in the women’s private, still uncensored correspondence, were contradicted in the same month in official communication by the ADEI, the meeting minutes for the Milan headquarters of March 20, 1928. In connection with their imminent

109 In Mussolini’s view, Zionism was not only hostile to Italian fascism as an antinational movement but was also promoting British imperialism. For details on the antiZionist press campaign of 1928 and the associated controversies, see Nahon U., “La polemica antisionista del Popolo di Roma nel 1928,” in Carpi D. et al. (eds.), Scritti in memoria di Enzo Sereni: Saggi sull’Ebraismo Romano (Milan-Jerusalem: Fondazione Sally Mayer, 1970), 216–253. 110 See Polacco, “La Fondazione,” 22 f. 111 Gabriella Falco Ravenna to Giuseppina Formeggini, March 16, 1928, CDEC

Milano, Fondo ADEI, cartella V.85.AS, Corrispondenza di Gabriella Falco Ravenna.

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admission to the Wizo, Vittoria Cantoni Pisa emphasized that the ADEI had voting rights regarding all issues related to social work in Palestine, but not regarding Zionist propaganda “since the ADEI is not a Zionist institution.”112 Such communications in the context of public events that were under the scrutiny of the fascist authorities were doubtless intended to immediately deflect any suspicion of anti-national activities on the part of the Jewish women’s union. In contrast, a continual connection was maintained in private, both with new immigrants to Palestine and with women who visited the country to prepare for future emigration.113 So as not to endanger the existence of the organization, the philanthropic orientation of its undertaking was strongly emphasized to the outside world—the manufacture of clothing in sewing circles, collection of medications and foodstuffs as well as donations for Palestine, but also, and especially, the social work within Italy. The subtle accusation that the ADEI behaved “like a kind of philanthropical association in the service of cultural, religious, and national Jewish revival without participating in the cause of Zionist activism that was already bringing thousands of European Jews together [to Palestine] for the construction of Eretz Israel ”114 turns out, on closer attention, to have been a conscious strategy on the part of the organization, which was trying to secure its survival in fascist Italy in this way. Although none of the central figures of the early ADEI emigrated permanently to Palestine before 1938, for many of them and their families, Eretz Israel was a concrete goal representing the possibility of a durable new beginning. Vittoria Cantoni Pisa, for example, the longtime president of the ADEI who also represented the women’s organization in the Italian Zionist Federation from 1932 on, emigrated to Tel Aviv with her husband Arrigo Cantoni a few months after the promulgation of the fascist racial laws, in 112 See Assemblea Generale Ordinaria, March 20, 1928, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, cartella V.77.AS/V.82.AS 1927–1936, Assemblee generali. 113 For example, in early 1928, Gabriella Falco Ravenna reported to the president of the Turin chapter of the ADEI, Valeria Fubini, “that a certain Signora Pugliese… has returned from Palestine…[She] is full of enthusiasm about what she saw, the fruit of the effort and intelligence of Jews worldwide – nurseries, schools to prepare girls for motherhood and household management, women’s organizations to support indigent and inadequately educated women…”; Falco Ravenna to Fubini, February 17, 1928, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, cartella 1927–1928, Corrispondenza di Gabriella Falco Ravenna, Valeria Fubini (Torino). 114 Marzano, “Figure femminili,” 456.

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April 1939, and even after the end of the war never returned to Italy. Her daughter Marcella had already moved to Jerusalem with her family in March 1939. The feminist Ada Treves Segre, who headed the Piedmontese chapter of the UFN for many years and was involved in the ADEI in parallel from the 1920s onward, emigrated to Rehovot in March 1940; her son Marcello Treves had moved to Tel Aviv in January 1939. Anna Marx, Ersilia Majno’s “spiritual daughter” and wife of the Zionist activist Giacomo Levi Minzi, settled in Palestine in December 1938 and only returned to Italy after the end of the Second World War.115 Although the organization’s Zionist orientation was hidden as much as possible against the background of fascist polemic and repression, a Zionist self-consciousness was undoubtedly present among the founders of the ADEI, especially within the important Milanese group. However, the fact that the union showed a rapid increase in membership numbers all over Italy between 1927 and 1937 (from 117 to 1334 women) and the number of local chapters increased to twenty-three116 had mostly to do with the increasing social marginalization of Jewish women under the conditions of fascist rule. Since the ADEI accepted all ideological tendencies, as Gabriella Falco Ravenna had written in 1928, the association developed into a locus of Jewish solidarity, even for non-Zionist women, in the context of which cultural and social activities were still possible. A further consequence of this, however, was that the local groups often diverged greatly from the ideals of the pioneers in Milan. The particular combination of feminism, anti-fascism, and Zionism, which characterized the group that had emerged in immediate proximity to the socialistleaning UFN, could not survive within the large organization. In 1935, the ADEI was incorporated into the Union of Jewish Communities of Italy. In the 1930s, both the headquarters and the local chapters were anxious to nurture good relations with the fascist regime. There were also 115 On the dates and places of these persons’ emigrations, see the details in Marzano, Una terra per rinascere, 368 f., 371. Anna Marx Levi Minzi, whose husband had died in 1931, had already temporarily settled in Palestine with her son Guido in 1934. Her son later joined the kibbutz Givat Brenner and changed his first name to “Gad”; see ibid., 368. 116 See the details in Nidam-Orvieto, ADEI. After the first chapters in Milan, Turin, Genoa, and Ferrara, further chapters of the ADEI were established in Venice, Livorno, Florence, Padua, Modena, and in the Italian colony of Tripolis by 1929. Branches in Rome and Alessandria followed in 1930, and in Trieste, Pisa, and Bologna in 1931; see Marzano, “Figure femminili,” 456; Polacco, “La Fondazione,” 24–26.

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fascist sympathizers throughout the ranks of the ADEI.117 The situation only changed in 1938. At that point, the Jewish women’s union could no longer provide a place of refuge for its members, whether of fascist or anti-fascist leanings. For many activists, the concrete Zionist option—emigration to Palestine—became a means of survival at a time of persecution that would also fundamentally transform the organization’s political self-consciousness.

6.3 The Attack on Rights and the Assault on Lives Resignations and Exclusions (1931–1935): The Prelude to Disenfranchisement The Lateran treaties of 1929 proclaimed Catholicism the sole valid religion in the Italian state. The equal position of all religions as recognized by the state and as legally protected religious communities, established in the penal code of the unified Italy in 1889, was thereby abolished. The principle of laicism, which had been one of the central preconditions for Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century and a determining factor in the conspicuous involvement of Jewish feminists in the secular organizations of the Italian women’s movement since the turn of the century no longer existed. Judaism was now categorized as a so-called “tolerated cult.”118 Catholic associations, including the Catholic women’s organization, achieved considerable gains in power. In the years that followed, there was also new support for action against a supposedly “anti-Christian,” “immoral,” and “Jewish” fashion. Intransigent Catholicism and fascism entered a dangerous alliance in the so-called “purity crusade” organized by the fascist “female youth” in the 1930s. This constituted a continuation of the “campaign against the anti-Christian 117 During the Ethiopian War, which generally achieved a high level of consensus in Italian society, there was emphatic discussion at an ADEI committee meeting in March 1936, for example, of the “passionate participation of Jewish-Italian women [sic] in the sublime events of the historical hour that the fatherland is living through.” The head office enthusiastically encouraged all chapters of the ADEI to donate gold for the fatherland and clothing for the combatants at the front; see L’Assemblea Generale dell’ADEI, March 31, 1936, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, cartella V.77.AS/V.82.AS 1927–1936, Assemblee generali. 118 See Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 13 f.

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fashion” initiated by Catholic female activists in 1920 and larded with antisemitic stereotypes.119 While Jewish women joined the ADEI in increasing numbers against this background and the organization began to spread throughout Italy,120 there was also a renewed exit of Jewish women from the CNDI in the early 1930s since, through its acceptance of the fascist school and religious policies, the organization had thoroughly distanced itself from its formerly laicist self-consciousness. In 1931, after the death of Gabriella Spalletti Rasponi, who had led the national women’s organization for nearly thirty years and had been instrumental in setting its pro-fascist course, the fascist government nominated Countess Daisy di Robilant, a passionate supporter of Mussolini, to be the new president of the CNDI.121 She played a significant role in the progressively enforced conformity of contemporary women’s organizations. In December 1931, it was announced at a session of the Federazione Toscana that Daisy di Robilant had been asked by the minister of justice, Alfredo Rocco, “to rearrange” the CNDI. The government wanted to subsume those women who were not members of the Fasci also and, for that purpose, to make the CNDI into a “grand federation of all women’s associations.” In the background was the adoption of the new penal code and prosecution procedure, largely influenced by Rocco, on July 1, 1931, which was no longer focused on the rights of citizens but on the rights of organizations.122 119 Da Persico’s antisemitic text of 1916 was republished in 1925. Two years later, she gave a lecture in Verona that was, once again, heavy with antisemitic prejudice. The contemporary Catholic women’s press in general disseminated ideas and attitudes discriminatory toward Jews; see Gazzetta, Cattoliche, 160 f. Barely a year after the promulgation of the Italian racial laws, da Persico published an article that made direct reference to her lecture of 1916, regarding the supposed existence of “Jewish sects” that had the fashion industry “completely in the palm of their hand”; da Persico, “Tristezze estive,” Azione Muliebre (August–September 1939): 343. 120 For example, right after its establishment in 1931, the poet Ida Finzi (“Haydée”) also joined the Triestine chapter of the ADEI; she had written primarily for the secular women’s movement press for decades and had been involved in laicist organizations like the Lyceum; see Elenco delle Socie (Trieste) dell’anno 1933–1934, CDEC Milano, Fondo Comunità Ebraica di Milano, b.2, fasc. 4: ADEI. 121 On Robilant and her pro-fascist attitude, see de Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 132; Taricone, L’Associazionismo femminile, 98 f. 122 See CNDI, Federazione Femminile Toscana, Adunanza di Consiglio, December 15, 1931, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3: Federazione Toscana. Processi

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However, several longtime members of the CNDI were not willing to participate in this course of action. Among the (few) resignation announcements that survive from the early 1930s, significantly, there are letters from Ernesto Nathan’s daughter, Mary Nathan Puritz, who had already left in 1920 “for moral and family reasons,” and Laura Puccinelli Calò, who had left the committee of the Florentine chapter during the anonymous letter campaign in 1924. Nathan Puritz wrote to the president of the Federazione Toscana, Nerina Traxler, in 1931 that she wished definitively to withdraw from the CNDI. She requested that “this fact be acknowledged” and her name “be permanently removed from the membership lists.” The liberal scholar Puccinelli Calò, who was not Jewish, also concisely made known her irrevocable exit from the union, as did two Jewish protagonists also resident in Florence—Eloisa Levi Sarfatti and Laura Franchetti Morpurgo, the wife of the longtime director of Florence’s national library, Salomone Morpurgo, who had been forced into early retirement in 1924 because of his regime-critical attitude.123 The organizational “rearrangement” of the national women’s union had far-reaching consequences, especially for members of the FILDIS, the Italian association of academic women. One of the new vice presidents of the CNDI was Maria Castellani, president of the fascist Associazione Donne Professioniste e Artiste, founded in 1926, which suffocated the FILDIS’s activities. As the Italian section of the International Federation

verbali del consiglio. Just one month later, the president of the Tuscan chapter, Nerina Traxler, stated again that “the CNDI is intended to become a federation of all the central women’s unions in Italy—professionals, intellectuals, artists, graduates, craftswomen, and rural housewives”; see CNDI, Federazione Femminile Toscana, Adunanza di Consiglio, January 19, 1932, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 3: Federazione Toscana. Processi verbali del consiglio. On the adoption of the new penal code and prosecution procedure of July 1, 1931, see Mantelli, Kurze Geschichte, 99 f. 123 See Mary Nathan Puritz to Nerina Traxler, 1931 (undated), CNDI, Federazione Femminile Toscana, b. 6, fasc. 13, sfasc. 5; Laura Puccinelli Calò, November 8, 1932, Eloisa Levi Sarfatti, April 16, 1931, and Laura Franchetti Morpurgo to “Presidenza del Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane,” 1934 (undated). Eloisa Levi Sarfatti (born 1883) was the wife of the famous psychologist Gualtiero Sarfatti, one of the founders of social psychology in Italy. The couple fled to Switzerland in 1944; see Sarfatti M., “Gino Bartali e la fabbricazione di carte di identità per gli ebrei nascosti a Firenze; Documenti e commenti 2” (uploaded January 17, 2017; last update February 3, 2017), http://www.michelesarfatti.it/documenti-e-commenti/gino-bartali-ela-fabbricazione-di-carte-di-identita-gli-ebrei-nascosti-firenze.

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of University Women, the FILDIS had a pronounced international character and received both Italian and non-Italian academics of all political orientations and religions within its ranks. The association fostered collaboration between female university graduates worldwide. The Milanese group in particular, which was the nucleus of the organization, contained many actors of Jewish origins, most of whom came from UFN circles and also played leading roles in the ADEI. Significant examples include Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s daughter, the Anglicist and Romanist Marta Bernstein Navarra, the lawyer Frida Marx Ceccon (who was general secretary until 1931 and subsequently president of the FILDIS), and the philologist Susanna Gugenheim, who had constructed the ADEI together with Berta Cammeo Bernstein and Gabriella Falco Ravenna.124 The president of the Rome chapter of the FILDIS was one of Mary Nathan Puritz’s sisters, Sarina Nathan Levi Della Vida (1885–1937) who, due to her name and her family history, was seen as embodying par excellence the antisemitic prejudice of a “Jewish-freemason conspiracy” within the secular women’s organizations, which reached back to the time of the First World War.125 The fact that in 1935, the CNDI committee euphemistically “invited” the FILDIS to dissolve itself was ultimately connected with Alfredo Rocco’s ordinance and the goal of transforming the national women’s union into a super-organization. The FILDIS was now definitively replaced by the fascist Associazione Donne Professioniste e Artiste, which was incorporated into the CNDI.126 It is not clear from the available sources whether the generally strong presence of Jewish women within the academic women’s union was an additional reason for what was, in reality, a forced dissolution. However, one might suspect that this was the case, given the already well-advanced attack on Jewish equality, especially in consequence of the legal downgrading of Judaism with the Lateran treaties, and the ever-intensifying anti-Jewish press campaigns.127 As early as 1929, Jewish academics had been excluded from the two most important scientific organizations, which were controlled by the 124 A complete membership list for the Milan group can be found in Taricone, Una tessera, 19–22. 125 Sarina Nathan Levi Della Vida, granddaughter of Sara Levi Nathan and daughter of Ernesto Nathan, was married to Mario Levi Della Vida (1880–1956), a grandson of the anticlerical pioneer of the Italian women’s movement, Adele Della Vida Levi. 126 See Taricone, L’Associazionismo femminile, 98. 127 See Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 19–21; Sarfatti, The Jews, 45 f., 49, 60.

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government—the Accademia d’Italia and the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche.128 Furthermore, the arrest of a group of Piedmontese antifascists in March 1934, who included the prominent Jewish intellectuals Sion Segre, Carlo Levi, and Leone Ginzburg, all of them members of the Giustizia e Libertà movement led by Carlo Rosselli, significantly increased suspicion of a general connection between Judaism and antifascism.129 These events inevitably increased antisemitic prejudices against Jewish activists in secular unions, especially when, as was the case with the FILDIS, they had an international and intellectual character.130 In the same year that the academic women’s association ceased to exist, the president of the suffragist organization FISEDD, Ada Sacchi Simonetta from Mantua (1874–1944), was removed from office.131 The professional librarian, who came from a notable family of Mazzinian patriots, had cofounded the Mantuan section of the FILDIS and was active in the left-leaning feminist Associazione per la Donna until its compulsory dissolution in 1925. Sacchi herself was not Jewish, but she had close ties to the networks of Italian-Jewish feminists. Her daughterin-law Maria Sacerdotti, a Jew, had been president of the Florentine

128 See Capristo A., “L’esclusione degli ebrei dall’Accademia d’Italia,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel 67 (2001): 1–36. 129 See Segre Amar S., “Sui ‘fatti’ di Torino,” in Valabrega G. (ed.), Gli ebrei in Italia

durante il Fascismo, vol. 2 (Milan: CDEC, 1962), 125–127. 130 Fiorenza Taricone sees a connection between the events in Piedmont and antisemitic attitudes toward the FILDIS, which had numerous Jewish members outside of the group in Milan as well; see Taricone, “La FILDIS,” 159. 131 See also Gabrielli P., Tempio di virilità. L’antifascismo, il genere, la storia (Milan: Angeli, 2009), 106. Ada Sacchi Simonetta’s father, the doctor Achille Sacchi, had played a leading role in the Italian unification wars as a follower of Garibaldi. Her mother, Elena Casati, who also came from a patriotic family, had maintained close contacts with Mazzini. After the early death of her parents, Ada Sacchi was raised by relatives in Genoa, where she studied and graduated in literature in 1898. A year later, Ada married the Mantuan patriot Quintavalle Carlo (“Vallino”) Simonetta. After several years of school teaching, she became the head of the Union of Libraries and Museums in Mantua. She founded various feminist unions together with her sister, Beatrice Sacchi (1878–1931), including the Mantuan Associazione della Donna and the local chapter of the FILDIS. No biography has yet been written on Ada Sacchi Simonetta, whose extensive papers are located in the UFN in Milan. On the Sacchi family, see Bertolotti M., Sogliani D. (eds.), La nazione dipinta. Storia di una famiglia tra Mazzini e Garibaldi (Milan: Skira, 2007).

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chapter of the FILDIS, also dissolved in 1935.132 On April 4, 1935, the FISEDD received, without adequate explanation, the following lapidary communication from the prefect of Mantua, Raffaele Montuori: “In view of the fact that Dr. Ada Sacchi in Simonetta… conducts activities that conflict with the political and legal ordinances of the state…Dr. Ada Sacchi in Simonetta is removed from her position as president of the federation mentioned.”133 Ada Sacchi’s courageous attempt to raise an objection to this measure went unanswered. The regime-critical feminist was replaced in short order by the teacher Irma Arzelà in Morucci, a member of the Mantuan Fasci Femminili, and the FISEDD was subsumed under the Fasci Femminili Mantovani.134 Just a few months later, the new president addressed Maria Montesano (1882–1968), granddaughter of the Jewish-laicist pioneer Adele Della Vida Levi, who had been involved both in the FILDIS and in the FISEDD, in calculated, polemic fashion. Neither had Ada Sacchi officially announced her resignation after her removal from office, she said, nor had all the members made their financial contribution for 1935 in accordance with the regulations. It was clearly her intention to harass the former members of the FISEDD with warnings of this kind.135 132 Maria Sacerdotti, a teacher, was the wife of Ada Sacchi Simonetta’s son, the doctor Bono Simonetta; her papers are part of the Fondo Ada Sacchi Simonetta in the UFN archive. 133 Letter from Raffaele Montuori, prefect of the province of Mantua, of April 4, 1935; Archivio UFN, Fondo Ada Sacchi Simonetta – Maria Sacerdoti Simonetta, FISEDD, b. 12, fasc. 6: Corrispondenza. Rimozione di Ada Sacchi dalla Presidenza 1935. 134 See “Lettera di difesa di Ada Sacchi al prefetto Montuori,” February 2, 1935, ibid.; see also her official letter to Arzelà Morucci of May 8, 1935, in which she gives an account of the FISEDD’s financial situation, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 2, fasc. 9, sfasc. 8: Attività sociale, Associazioni femminili, Federazione italiana per il suffragio (1923–1935).—On April 13, 1935, Ada Sacchi Simonetta wrote a detailed letter to the “cara Presidente” (presumably Arzelà Morucci), in which she made direct reference to Montuori’s letter of dismissal: “As regards the ‘conduct of activities,’ it is however well known that the federation had for many years restricted itself to directing a few small inquiries to his excellency the head of government from time to time”; Ada Sacchi to the president, Mantua, April 13, 1935, Archivio UFN, Fondo Ada Sacchi Simonetta – Maria Sacerdotti Simonetta, FISEDD, b. 12, fasc. 6. 135 See Irma Arzelà to Maria Montesano, December 3, 1935, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 2, fasc. 9, sfasc. 8. The educator Maria Montesano, who lived in Rome, worked with Maria Montessori and the psychiatrist and (child) neuropsychologist Giuseppe Ferruccio Montesano (1968–1961), one of her husband’s brothers. She had been active in the spheres of welfare and education since the beginning of the twentieth century. Between

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By 1935, the fascisization of the organized Italian women’s movement was almost complete. Jewish actors were scarcely represented anymore in these unions, especially the CNDI, due to voluntary or compulsory resignations and exclusions.136 They switched to the ADEI in increasing numbers. Meanwhile, the UFN, which focused on the sphere of welfare, to outer appearances at least, continued to offer Jewish feminists a locus for social involvement until 1938. But even this space was finally closed to them with the promulgation of the racial laws. The Violent End of the Unione Femminile Nazionale (1938–1939) The progressive exclusion of Jewish actors from the national women’s movement ran parallel to the slow but steady exclusion of Jews from positions of state leadership and from national cultural associations. In the early 1930s, the Accademia d’Italia was forbidden to receive Jewish scholars in its ranks, and the prefects encouraged the government to replace all Jewish podestà with non-Jews quite generally. Between the end of 1936 and the beginning of 1938, nearly all Jews were removed from public office, while the press stepped up its anti-Jewish campaign of defamation.137 A few female protagonists tried to get around these discriminatory measures by converting to Christianity. The lawyer Frida Marx Ceccon (1900–1970), for example, president of the FILDIS, dissolved in 1935, and longtime collaborator of the UFN, who was a member of the Milanese bar from the 1920s onward, was baptized in

1904 and 1907, she worked at the “Giuseppe Mazzini” girls’ school in Trastevere founded by Sara Levi Nathan, was vice president of the Associazione per la donna, dissolved in 1925, and served on the advisory board of Giuseppe Montesano’s school for children with learning disabilities in Rome. Montesano wrote a detailed account of her many years of social and pedagogical engagement in February 1939, perhaps in the context of an application for discriminazione: “Relazione sull’attività svolta dal 1902 ad oggi,” February 21, 1939, ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 2, fasc. 9, sfasc. 8. On Montesano, see also Taricone, “La FILDIS,” 147. 136 This can be seen from the surviving membership registers and lists of attendees, especially for the sessions of the CNDI, from 1933 onward; see ACS, Archivio CNDI, b. 4, fasc. 13, sfasc. 4. 137 For details on the antisemitic propaganda and press campaigns from the beginning of the 1930s onward, see Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 40–57; on the exclusion of Jews from the Accademia d’Italia, positions of state leadership, and public office, see Sarfatti, La Shoah, 74–76.

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July 1937.138 For his part, the education minister, Giuseppe Bottai, anticipated the social separation of Jews and non-Jews as early as February 1938 by requesting the universities to prepare a list of all Italian and foreign Jews on their teaching staff and in their student bodies. Thus, the foundations for the promulgation of the racial laws were laid well in advance.139 The UFN, whose high number of Jewish members was a matter of general knowledge, also came under the scrutiny of the fascist leadership well before November 1938. In April 1938, Adelchi Serena, then vice secretary of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, wrote to the department for public safety of the Ministry of the Interior with a warning reference to the president of the Turin chapter of the UFN, Elisa Treves.140 Significantly, the reason for his letter was the actor’s Jewish origins, in connection with the women’s union’s socialist tendencies. The arrest of several Jewish anti-fascists in Piedmont four years earlier had clearly aroused suspicion particularly of the Turin section of the UFN among party circles. Serena wrote: The establishment of the Unione goes back to the year 1905. It had socialist tendencies in the past, and today it is led by an Israelite [sic] president who is not enrolled in the [Fascist] Party. Likewise, the members

138 Frida Marx Ceccon, who was related to Karl Marx, was originally from Solingen. She moved to Milan to marry the Italian lawyer Ernesto Ceccon, where she was among the pioneers of the UFN and the FILDIS. One can gather from the official document on the “assessment of racial affiliation” of Vera Ceccon, the daughter of Frida Marx and Ernesto Ceccon, dated 1941, that Frida was baptized on July 3, 1937, in the Church of San Nazaro in Milan. As the daughter of an “Aryan” father and a mother baptized before 1938, Vera did not fall under the category of “half-breed”; see ACS, Fondo Ministero dell’Interno, DEMORAZZA, b. 321, fasc. 23562. 139 See Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 60. 140 Elisa Treves, born in 1874 in Turin, was the widow of Samuel Treves. There are no

details of her biography to be found either in the documents of the UFN or in the ACS. It is likely that Elisa Treves was related by marriage to the longtime president of the Turin UFN, Ada Treves Segre, who was already planning her emigration to Palestine in the late 1930s. On Treves, see the scanty details in the prefect of Turin’s letter to the Ministry of the Interior, May 20, 1938, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale Pubblica Sicurezza (henceforth, DGPS), Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 30, fasc. 345: UFN.

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of the committee, with one exception, are not enrolled in the party. One should seize the opportunity and suspend the activities of the organization in question.141

There was not long to wait for the consequences. Like the FILDIS three years earlier, the UFN too was now “invited” to suspend its activities. On July 5, 1938, the prefect of Turin informed the Ministry of the Interior by telegram that Elisa Treves had dissolved the union at the end of June.142 The fact that the closure of the Piedmontese chapter was directly related to its president’s Jewish origins is further proof of the inexorably antisemitic direction taken by the fascist government, which noticeably intensified in the months before November 1938. For the Fascist Party and the Ministry of the Interior, the dissolution of the Turin chapter came to be seen as a “model” for the end of the Milanese UFN.143 Nina Rignano Sullam, who had maintained close contacts with the Piedmont chapter since its establishment, anticipated this development and, in view of the hostile action against Elisa Treves, was probably under no illusions regarding her own fate as a Jewish member of the renowned women’s union. It was clearly her intention to pre-empt a forced exit by resigning 141 Adelchi Serena, Partito Nazionale Fascista, to the Ministero dell’Interno, April 23, 1938, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 30, fasc. 345: UFN. 142 See the telegram from the prefect of Turin, Baratono, to the Ministry of the Interior, July 5, 1938, ibid. In May 1938, the prefecture of Turin had reported to the Ministry of the Interior, likely based on statements from the president, Treves, and the committee, that the local chapter of the UFN had been constantly active in the sphere of caring for children and mothers and in the areas of work and education, especially in the form of further-education courses for female workers, but had no political character. These details reflect the UFN’s deliberate strategy of focusing on the sphere of welfare during the fascist era in order to preserve its existence for as long as possible. The letter further stated that the president of the chapter, Elisa Treves, although not a member of the party, displayed “good moral and political behavior.” The other members of the committee also conducted themselves in a “regular” manner. These arguments had apparently not been accepted by the party and the Ministry of the Interior. See the letter from the Turin prefecture to the Ministry of the Interior of May 20, 1938, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 30, fasc. 345: UFN. 143 “Now that the Unione Femminile Nazionale of Turin has been ordered to dissolve, analogous arrangements are being made regarding the Unione femminile nazionale in Milan”; letter to the Ministry of the Interior from the party executive committee, December 7, 1938; ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 30, fasc. 345: UFN.

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voluntarily. Immediately after the closure of the Turin chapter, on July 3, 1938, she wrote a long letter to the committee of the Lombard headquarters from her holiday home in Tremezzo in which she requested the understanding of her friends and longtime political comrades regarding her voluntary departure. The health reasons she mentioned may not have convinced her addressees, since her work for the UFN had been a defining feature of Nina Rignano Sullam’s entire life. There is a concealed reference to her fear of expulsion and concern that she would share Elisa Treves’s fate in her comment that she could no longer do something for the union: Dear committee members and friends, loneliness is a good counselor, and from a distance one sees things more clearly. And I have had to convince myself that I can no longer maintain my position on the council of the Unione Femminile Nazionale. The nearly forty years that I have worked on it are no good reason to remain, now that I can do nothing, or almost nothing. I had hoped that my health would permit me to maintain a certain equilibrium and to lead a nearly normal life once again, but sadly, I have to convince myself that this won’t be possible any longer. To follow you in spirit from a distance, with the interest and affection that I have for this institution, which has been and remains always very dear to me – this I can do! … With gratitude for the kindness with which you have always treated me, I embrace you.144

Just a day later, Graziella Sonnino Carpi, who had been involved in the UFN since 1918, also announced her resignation. The UFN committee had confirmed her in her role just a few days earlier in a conscious effort to counter the regime’s antisemitic policies and the incidents in Turin. Sonnino Carpi explained that she wanted to move to Rome to her son and that therefore, “with true sorrow,” she had to resign from the UFN.145 Meanwhile, the internal political events continued to escalate. The regime geared up for a massive attack on the rights of Jews in Italy. The 144 Nina Rignano Sullam to the UFN committee, July 4, 1938, Archivio UFN, b. 1, fasc. 3: Atti originali e documentazione fondamentale (1905–1946). At the time, the committee consisted of Maria Giovanardi, Teresa Lancini, Clara Roghi, Clara Ferri, Larissa Boschetti Pini, all of them non-Jews, and Frida Marx Ceccon, who had converted in 1937 and was secretary of the committee; see the details in Archivio UFN, Libro Verbali Vol. 12 (1937–25/06/1947). 145 Graziella Sonnino Carpi to the UFN committee, July 4, 1938, Archivio UFN, b. 1, fasc. 3, Atti originali e documentazione fondamentale (1905–1946).

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“Manifesto della Razza,” signed by a group of fascist scholars and with Mussolini himself likely one of the authors, began to be circulated from July 14, 1938. The document’s central claim was that “the Italian race [is] Aryan in origin” and that the Jews did not belong to “the Italian race.” The degrading of Italy’s Jewish population thus became pseudoscientific reality, and the promulgation of the racial laws could no longer be prevented.146 The UFN committee met that same day, and the members held detailed discussions on the departures of Nina Rignano Sullam and Graziella Sonnino Carpi. Despite the threatened dissolution of the organization by the regime and the persistent discrimination against Jewish actors, the committee members tried until the last moment to get both their comrades to change their minds. Thus, the UFN’s policy was completely different from the CNDI’s opportunistic strategy of excluding Jewish women as much as possible even before 1938. The exit of the notable pioneer Nina Rignano Sullam, the soul of the UFN, who had had such a great influence on the union’s political, social, and cultural orientation since the beginning of its existence, was deeply regretted by her colleagues: Giovanardi says that she strongly insisted to Signora Rignano, driven by her own affection, devotion, and admiration, and that of the entire committee toward her. She also communicated to her the desire of all the committee members to find a solution that would… enable Signora Rignano to remain in her position, even without undertaking specific activities, so that the Unione would not be deprived of her precious suggestions and counsel. Despite everything, Signora Rignano stood by her decision and gave assurances that her thoughts would always be with the Unione.147

Thus, Nina Rignano Sullam’s nearly forty years of membership in the UFN, which had always represented far more than just an organization to her, came to an end in July 1938. It had been part of her whole 146 The article, “Il fascismo e i problemi della razza,” is printed in Sarfatti, La Shoah, 131–133; for details on the pseudoscientific, fundamentally biologistic character of the “Manifesto della Razza,” see Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 60–62. On the anti-Jewish campaigns in Italy that escalated continuously from the summer of 1938 onward, see Duggan, Fascist Voices, 305–310. 147 Verbale della seduta del Consiglio del 12 luglio 1938, Archivio UFN, Libro Verbali Vol. 12 (1937–25/06/1947).

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life and the symbol of her humanitarian ideals. She may have anticipated the fact that her own voluntary exit presaged the organization’s violent dissolution just a few months later. As early as August, there were negotiations between fascist leading circles and the Vatican, which agreed to the idea of a discriminatory legislation against the Jews, although it distanced itself from the racism of the antisemitic campaign. The first measures were announced in early September, including the exclusion of Jews—teachers and students—from all state schools.148 The fascist school policy that had already gotten underway at the beginning of the 1920s and had targeted the Jewish religion and culture from the outset now came to a head. Ada Sacchi Simonetta’s daughter-in-law Maria Sacerdotti, a teacher and the president of the Florentine chapter of the FILDIS until 1935, was summarily removed from her teaching position.149 Her deep despair over this act of discrimination, the loss of her professional identity and existential security, can be seen from the surviving letters of Ada Sacchi Simonetta, who provided unconditional support to her son’s wife, the mother of her grandchildren, in this hopeless situation. She had experienced exclusion in her own life in 1935, when she was removed from the presidency of the FISEDD because of her anti-fascist orientation. On September 5, 1938, the same day that the “Ordinance for the Defense of the Race in the Fascist School” came into force, the Mantuan scholar wrote to her daughter-in-law, “…these days’ enormous events prompt me to take up the pen to assure you of all my affection and understanding. I beg you to be calm and sensible… May your family, to which you can now devote yourself exclusively, give you the greatest possible satisfaction, comfort, and serenity.”150 The fact that the fascist regime’s anti-Jewish measures had a considerable influence on the attitudes of the non-Jewish Italian population can

148 See Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 69–71. 149 Maria’s father Cesare Sacerdotti, a prominent professor of general pathology, also

lost his teaching position at the University of Pisa in 1938; see the exchange of letters between Cesare Sacerdotti and Vallino Simonetta, who sought to console the father of his daughter-in-law with counsel and comfort in this desolate time, in Archivio UFN, Fondo Ada Sacchi Simonett —Maria Sacerdotti Simonetta, b. 15, fasc. 3, Corrispondenza di Maria Sacerdotti, di Cesare Sacerdotti e altri 1920–1938. 150 Ada Sacchi Simonetta to Maria Sacerdotti Simonetta, September 5, 1938, ibid.

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be seen in another letter Ada Sacchi Simonetta wrote to Maria Sacerdotti just two days later: Make sure not to write postcards [to me], since we are now considered Jews here because we do not go to church, and I am even receiving visits of condolence; a lady said to me yesterday, ‘now your husband will lose his job.’ In Mantua it is not advisable to let on that you are [a Jew]. Your written comments regarding this are very transparent.151

Ada Sacchi Simonetta’s precautions were by no means unfounded. The process of disenfranchisement marched inexorably on during the following weeks and months for Maria Sacerdotti, as it did for everyone considered Jewish by the fascist regime’s definition. After the exclusion of Jewish teachers and students from Italian schools there followed, at the beginning of October 1938, the notorious “Declaration concerning the Race” by the Grand Council of Fascism, which established the precise criteria determining who was to be treated like a Jew.152 The ordinance of November 17, 1938, with the eloquent title of “Measures for the Defense of the Italian Race”—generally termed “the racial laws”—summarized the fascist Grand Council’s principles in an initial, normative corpus. Henceforth, “mixed marriages” were prohibited, Jews were banned from participating in trade, business, and public administration, and they were

151 Ada Sacchi Simonetta to Maria Sacerdotti Simonetta, September 7, 1938, ibid. Apparently, the atheists Ada Sacchi Simonetta and Vallino Simonetta were “suspected” of being Jews because they were not practicing Catholics. Furthermore, their son Bono had married a Jew. Since the philologist Vallino Simonetta taught in a Mantuan high school and many people thought he was a Jew, there were obviously rumors that he would also lose his job. Ada Sacchi’s warning to her daughter-in-law not to make any obvious remarks on postcards uncovered by envelopes was understandable, given the hostilities directed against the family as a whole since the summer of 1938, but principally against Maria Sacerdotti herself. Ada Sacchi Simonetta wished, above all, to protect her daughter-in-law’s reputation and integrity through these precautionary measures. 152 According to the criteria of the Fascist Grand Council, persons were considered Jews (a) if both their parents were Jews, (b) if their father was Jewish and their mother was of some other nationality [sic], (c) if they came from a mixed marriage but practiced the Jewish religion. (d) Persons from mixed marriages who had received baptism before October 1, 1938, were not considered Jews. See Gran consiglio del fascismo, Dichiarazione sulla razza, October 6, 1938, printed in Sarfatti, La Shoah, 134–136. For details on the legal definition of “Jew” in fascist Italy, see Sarfatti, The Jews, 131–138.

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excluded from the Fascist Party.153 The ordinances signaled the final cancellation of the Jewish emancipation of the nineteenth century in Italy, the memory of which was a constant in the parental homes of female Jewish actors. Whereas deep-rooted gratitude for the granting of equality had once been a decisive motivation for the engagement of Jewish actors in the Italian women’s movement, they were now directly impacted by the fascist regime’s antisemitic measures. The phase of increasing social marginalization that had begun in the 1920s reached its peak in November 1938, when Jews, by law, no longer belonged to the Italian nation whose construction had meant freedom and equality for their ancestors. After the promulgation of the racial laws, the definitive end was in imminent sight for the Milanese UFN, which had been cofounded and significantly shaped by Jewish women in a climate of emancipation and laicism. On December 3, 1938, the representative of Milan’s Fasci Femminili wrote to the UFN demanding a list with the names of all members “of the Jewish race” and that the latter should be excluded from the organization.154 Three days later, the president, Teresa Lancini, sent a list to the Fasci Femminili in which, for tactical reasons, she only included the UFN committee members, since none of these were Jewish. She wrote, “The committee consists of seven ladies, all of whom are Aryan… the two Jewish committee members, Signora Nina Rignano Sullam and Graziella Sonnino, who resigned in July, have been replaced.”155 However, the dissolution of the Milanese UFN was already a foregone conclusion. In the view of the fascists, the socialist-oriented women’s union, which had always been strongly influenced by Jewish feminists, had maintained its existence in the fascist state under the guise of a welfare organization for too long. To make matters worse, not a single member

153 See Regio decreto-legge of November 17, 1938, Provvedimenti per la difesa della razza italiana, which was enacted into law on January 5, 1939, printed in Sarfatti, La Shoah, 137–142. 154 See the letter from Lola Carioli Condulmari, a representative of the Fasci Femminili di Milano, to the UFN committee, December 3, 1938, Archivio UFN, b. 1, fasc. 3: documenti e atti sciolti. 155 Teresa Lancini to Lola Carioli Condulmari, Fasci Femminili di Milano, December 6, 1938, ibid. According to the list supplied by the president, Teresa Gadola Lancini, the committee consisted of Maria Giovanardi Metz, Clara Roghi Taidelli, Larissa Boschetti Pini, Clara Ferri Benetti, Gemma Mantella Zambler, and Ada Gianni Lambertenghi.

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of the committee was a party member.156 As had been the case for the Turin UFN, significantly, the decisive step in the organization’s dissolution came from the party leadership. Just one day after Lancini’s letter to the Fasci Femminili, which had obviously been passed on to the party, the vice-secretary Adelchi Serena wrote to the Ministry of the Interior noting that “the UFN Milano continues to pursue activities that constitute interference and anachronism, especially in the sphere of welfare for young female workers coordinated by the Fasci Femminili.” He urged, therefore, that the necessary measures be taken to dissolve the women’s union.157 Within a few weeks, an abrupt, violent end was prepared for the most important organization of the early Italian women’s movement. On December 14, 1938, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the UFN to close,158 and on January 31, 1939, the Milan prefecture issued a decree according to which the UFN headquarters were to be dissolved and its property confiscated.159 The responsible notary, Edoardo Messere, meticulously documented the organization’s liquidation in a report to the Milan prefecture that ran to over seventy pages. On February 4, 1939, Messere went to the UFN accompanied by a sergeant and demanded that the acting president, Clara Roghi, hand over the keys to the offices of cash and accounting. Initially, summoning great personal courage, she vehemently refused to do so.160 Only after the notary threatened to break 156 The Milan prefecture had already remarked upon this fact on August 7, 1938; see ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947) b. 30, fasc. 345: UFN. The relevant documents also state that the UFN’s legal adviser Arturo Milla, a Jew, had expressed “subversive ideas” in the past. 157 Adelchi Serena, PNF Direttorio Nazionale, to the Ministry of the Interior, December 7, 1938, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 30, fasc. 345: UFN. 158 As recorded by the Milan prefecture on February 26, 1942, ibid. The small UFN chapter in Catania, led by Irene Pace Fassari, was dissolved by an analogous ordinance from the Ministry of the Interior on December 29, 1938; its property was confiscated and, in January 1939, handed over to the local Federazione Provinciale dei Fasci di Combattimento, see ibid. 159 See Decreto del prefetto di Milano riguardo allo scioglimento dell’UFN, January 31, 1939, Archivio UFN, b.1, fasc. 5. 160 Messere himself reported on the incident as follows: “The staff cannot surrender the keys to the offices of cash and accounting. When Signora Roghi, the acting president, was asked to do this, since the president was absent due to indisposition, she explained over the telephone, in an extremely aggressive and quite disrespectful manner, that she could

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down the doors could the eviction of the UFN finally begin. Messere stated in his report that he had placed the seal on the house and begun to inventory its contents that same day. Many objects, lists, and records were destroyed during the emptying of the house, which had been the symbol of the Unione for decades, the locus for collective discussions, study, and work in the spirit of practical feminism. When the liquidation was complete, the local Fascio took over the building in the Corso di Porta Nuova to use it as a night shelter and employment office. All the UFN’s remaining activities, especially in the area of supporting female workers, were put to a stop.161 Nina Rignano Sullam, who was staying alone in the small Ligurian village of Finalmarina at the time, heard about the disastrous incident from a Milanese acquaintance. At first, as was her wont, she tried to maintain her clarity and composure, but she could not conceal her grief over the injustice that had occurred. On February 7, 1939, presumably immediately after she received the news from Milan, she wrote to her longtime friend and colleague Maria Giovanardi: Naturally, I was not surprised; we had been expecting this solution for a long time. But the reality is always different from what is foreseen, and the grief and bitterness over the event are no less… I try to imagine what happened, and what final fate awaits many beloved things!... Farewell, dear Maria; I am so sorry that it was you who had to bury the building that all [of us] constructed with so much effort, love, and striving, and which has survived so many years.162

not surrender them since she did not know who had them”; Relazione del liquidatore della Unione Femminile Nazionale, Dott. Edoardo Messere, Milano, per S. E. il Prefetto di Milano, 1; ACS, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912– 1947), b. 30, fasc. 345: UFN. 161 See the written witness statement by Ersilia Majno’s son Edoardo Majno, the husband of Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s daughter Elda, in Gaballo, Il nostro dovere, 369. The last UFN committee meeting took place on November 23, 1938. The next entries in the UFN’s register books begin as late as March 15, 1943, made by the responsible government commissioner Augusto Amatori, and later by the liquidations commissioner Alberto Anceschi, confirming the establishment of the UFN as a Società Cooperativa; see Archivio UFN, Libro Verbali Vol. 12 (1937—25/06/1947). The UFN building in Corso di Porta Nuova was severely damaged in the bombardments of summer 1943. 162 Nina Rignano Sullam to Maria Giovanardi, February 7, 1939, Archivio UFN, b. 1, fasc. 5 (emphasis in original).

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Rignano Sullam’s deeply felt grief at the end of the UFN, the epitome of her ideals of women’s emancipation and social justice, was reflected even more intensely in another letter sent to Giovanardi two weeks later. Between the lines, one can read her critique of the fascist authorities’ procedures and their shameful disregard for the humanitarian values and activities of the women’s union, which Rignano Sullam affirmed in a final, combative exclamation: When I read your letter again, the tears come; I feel the regret that often comes over me these days, that I was far away from you in this time of suffering, that I did not have a part in the common torture… There is the great pain regarding… the indifference, perhaps the lack of understanding of many efforts, much enthusiasm… beliefs in ideals that have been misinterpreted… In any case, dear [Maria], how beautiful and good it has been to continue the work courageously until the final moment and to die in the front line!163

The cofounder and central protagonist of the UFN never permanently returned to Milan before her death in 1945. The racial laws had not only driven her out of Italian society completely but had also destroyed the institutions and networks that had largely defined her life. Nina Rignano Sullam’s strongly felt Jewish family identity showed itself anew in the fact that she—in contrast to Frida Marx Ceccon, for example—was neither baptized nor did she make an application for discriminazione (exemption from the racial laws) after November 1938 to evade the regime’s persecution, despite her pessimistic forebodings. It was not only her colleague Frida Marx Ceccon from whom Rignano Sullam differed in her decided upholding of a Jewish self-consciousness. Arturo Milla, the legal adviser who had worked for the UFN for years, applied to the department for demography and race of Italy’s Ministry of the Interior (DEMORAZZA) for discriminazione, which was granted in 1939. He announced his exit from the UFN in writing on January 17, 1939, in connection with the persecution of its Jewish members and its threatened closure: “Although I am confident regarding my application for discriminazione, I consider it necessary, in accordance with the superior regulations that reflect the ‘race problem,’ to resign my position as

163 Nina Rignano Sullam to Maria Giovanardi, February 23, 1939, ibid.

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legal advisor of the [UFN]… I leave with sincere sadness for the institution to which I have belonged for many years…”164 Milla was married to a non-Jew and had been a member of the Fascist Party since 1926. He stated in his documents for the DEMORAZZA that he had been enrolled in the membership list of Milan’s Jewish community in the course of the reorganization of Italy’s Jewish communities in 1929 but that this had not meant anything to him “apart from obedience and the regulation in accordance with a law of my country.”165 The Milanese activist Fanny Norsa Pisa (1884–1958), a cousin of Nina Rignano Sullam and sister of the cofounder of the ADEI, Vittoria Cantoni Pisa, was also granted discriminazione through an application to the DEMORAZZA in July 1939 because of her family’s special distinctions and her own national engagement.166 The different paths taken by the daughters of the prominent Milanese senator and philanthropist Ugo Pisa after 1938 constitute a relevant example of the development of diverse ideological positions within a single Jewish family.167 While Vittoria Cantoni Pisa chose the Zionist option and emigrated permanently to Tel Aviv in April 1939, Fanny Norsa Pisa made reference to her longtime national engagement and her family’s traditional patriotism in her detailed written plea to the DEMORAZZA. Interestingly, Fanny

164 Arturo Milla to the UFN, January 17, 1939, Archivio UFN, b. 1, fasc. 3: atti originali e documentazione fondamentale (1905–1946). 165 Application for discriminazione by Arturo Milla, November 26, 1938, ACS, Fondo

Ministero dell’Interno, DEMORAZZA, b. 91, fasc. 6655. According to the relevant documents, Milla’s wife was the non-Jew Rosetta Cova; his daughters, Eloisa, Laura, and Maria Giovanna, were Catholic. Milla’s reference to the reorganization of the Jewish communities relates to the preparations for the “Falco” law of 1930/1931 (named after Gabriella Falco Ravenna’s husband, the jurist Mario Falco), which established generally applicable standards for all Jewish communities in Italy for the first time in Italian history; see Dazzetti S., “Gli ebrei italiani e il fascismo. La formazione della legge del 1930 sulle comunità israelitiche,” in Mazzacane A. (ed.), Diritto economico e istituzioni nell’Italia fascista (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2002), 219–254. 166 See the letter to the Milan prefecture of July 2, 1938, with the relevant recommendation to the DEMORAZZA; ACS, Fondo Ministero dell’Interno, DEMORAZZA, b. 47, fasc. 3869. 167 This phenomenon was by no means an exception. In the prominent Turin Foa family, for example, the son Vittorio Foa was a known participant in the antifascist underground; on the other hand, his elder brother Giuseppe was a member of the PNF, although he simultaneously sympathized with antifascist positions; see Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal, 13, 118–127.

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Norsa laid special emphasis in her application on her father’s participation in the Italian wars of independence in the nineteenth century, her brother Luigi’s distinction in the First World War, and her own distinguished service for mothers and children in the First World War. She presented herself as a convicted fascist.168 As longtime president of the Milanese maternity fund, which had been cofounded and largely financed by Ugo Pisa in 1904, Fanny Norsa Pisa had worked in close collaboration with the fascist ONMI and was a member of the Fasci Femminili. In 1937, she joined the PNF.169 Fanny Norsa Pisa decisively distanced herself both from any religious Jewish identity and from her sister Vittoria’s Zionist self-consciousness in her application: “The writer has never devoted herself to religious practices or to Zionist or political activities.”170 For Nina Rignano Sullam, in contrast, there was no question of a written disavowal of her Jewish origins and her cultural heritage. Unlike Arturo Milla and Fanny Norsa Pisa, she made no effort to obtain an exemption from the racial laws. In early 1939, even emigration abroad was apparently no longer a realistic option for the sixty-four-year-old childless widow. Rignano Sullam likely saw withdrawal from the Lombard metropolis to the solitude of the Ligurian villages as providing her only possibility of preserving her personal integrity and, at the same time, of avoiding the regime’s discriminatory measures as much as possible. “I live here in a sort of lethargy,” she wrote to Maria Giovanardi in February 1939, “I look at the sea, the sky, trying to forget.”171 Nina Rignano Sullam did not yet know that the outbreak of the Second World War and the imminent persecution of the lives of Italian Jews would soon and 168 Norsa Pisa stressed her more than thirty years of involvement in the Milanese

maternity fund and other welfare institutions, which she “intensified during the First World War and nowadays is arrayed with fascist discipline among those who work for the demographic campaign that the paternal heart of the Duce has willed”; Fanny Norsa Pisa to the Ministry of the Interior, November 29, 1938, ACS, Fondo Ministero dell’Interno, DEMORAZZA, b. 47, fasc. 3869. 169 See the letter from the Milan prefecture of July 2, 1938, to the DEMORAZZA as

well as the relevant documents, including Fanny Norsa Pisa’s Fasci Femminili membership card which she attached to her application; ACS, Fondo Ministero dell’Interno, DEMORAZZA, b. 47, fasc. 3869. 170 Fanny Norsa Pisa to the Ministry of the Interior, November 29, 1938, ibid. 171 Nina Rignano Sullam to Maria Giovanardi, February 7, 1939, Archivio UFN, b. 1,

fasc. 5.

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permanently thwart any return to Milan for her. She would spend the last years of her life in hiding, under assumed names, and would not live to see the revival of the UFN after the end of the Second World War.172 Last Retreats Nina Rignano Sullam was not the only protagonist of the early Italian women’s movement to choose the path of solitude in response to the racial laws. Laura Orvieto too withdrew from Florence to Cortina d’Ampezzo with her husband Angiolo in the spring of 1939 and wrote the last parts of her autobiography there.173 Excluded from the Italian nation by law and increasingly isolated due to the emigration of friends and family members, Orvieto tried to put words to her thoughts and feelings about the grave state of affairs from the seclusion of the mountains: When [Angiolo and Laura] have overcome the extremely painful crisis, they wait in solitude. Solitude, because many friends have left Italy to travel far away: to Brazil, Cuba, India, Argentina, Australia, Palestine… Angiolo and Laura stay. ‘Even when the mother treats her children badly, she is nonetheless always the mother, and it cannot be the case that one does not love her,’ says Angiolo.174

The “painful crisis” of which the writer spoke referred both to their increasing isolation and to the bitter experience of exclusion. After her voluntary exit from the CNDI, the Lyceum was the only secular women’s association in which Orvieto was still active in the 1930s. However, a few weeks after the promulgation of the racial laws, the committee of the Lyceum published an official letter stating that all Jewish members were to leave the association immediately.175 Even earlier, antisemitic tendencies had become noticeable within the organization that had readily 172 See Gaballo, Il nostro dovere, 371. 173 See Del Vivo, “Introduzione,” VII. 174 Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 136 f. 175 See Sandiford M., “Il Lyceum di Firenze ai tempi di Amelia,” in Vieri, Amelia

Pincherle Rosselli, 46 f. The author thanks Mirka Sandiford for valuable information regarding the Lyceum’s anti-Jewish policy in 1938; see also the unpublished work on the history of the organization by Simona Maionchi, “Lyceum Club Internazionale di Firenze – circolo culturale femminile,” Florence 2001 (unpublished manuscript), especially 4 f.

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accommodated itself to the fascist regime. The official announcement resulted in Laura Orvieto’s expulsion at the end of 1938 from this association which she had helped to develop at the beginning of the century and had influenced for decades, together with her already exiled friends Gina Lombroso and Amelia Rosselli.176 The policy of the Lyceum, which was able to continue its activities unmolested into the 1940s after the exclusion of all so-called “non-Aryans,” was diametrically opposed to the UFN’s approach. By integrating and supporting its Jewish activists until the last moment and even expressly seeking to dissuade Nina Rignano Sullam from leaving, the Milanese women’s union consciously ran the risk of being dissolved by the regime, which ultimately became the bitter reality. In contrast, the Lyceum, like the CNDI before it, chose the path of ideological assimilation which, after the passage of the racial laws, resulted in the exclusion of all its Jewish members. After the expulsion of Jewish feminists from all the organizations of the Italian women’s movement still in existence and the violent end of the UFN in January 1939, the ADEI was the only institution in Italy that provided Jewish women a last, limited, sphere for social and cultural commitment. As a Jewish union, and thus under suspicion of anti-national activities, however, it was under especially intensive surveillance by the fascist authorities from the end of 1938 onward. This was especially the case for individual members and their families who had come under suspicion of a Jewish-internal or rather Zionist conspiracy.177 In March 1939,

176 “…little by little, the Jewish members left the Lyceum, even though they continued paying their membership dues; now they do not even pay these anymore, since they have been excluded from the association as non-Aryans”; Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, 127. 177 When Arrigo Bernstein, one of the sons of the founder of the ADEI, Berta Cammeo Bernstein, and brother of the activist Marta Bernstein Navarra, applied for discriminazione in 1939, this was rejected, in spite of evidence of his various relevant distinctions during the First World War. The stated reason was that both the Ministry of the Interior and the Italian consulate in Paris had made reference to Arrigo Bernstein “according to which he had devoted himself to illegal money laundering and anti-national activities.” The latter clearly referred to the Zionist orientation of Arrigo Bernstein and his family. Furthermore, he had never demonstrated solidarity with the regime. Due to the political suspicion which he was under, according to the prefect, his application for discriminazione could not be honored. It was also recorded that Bernstein was not a member of the Fascist Party; see Prefettura di Milano, August 7, 1939, ACS, Fondo Ministero dell’Interno, DEMORAZZA, b. 252, fasc. 17655. Even in the early 1940s, Arrigo Bernstein’s name

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for example, the political police gathered precise information about the family and political background of the president of the organization at the time, Vittoria Cantoni Pisa, and the treasurer of Bologna’s branch of the ADEI, Elisa Fiano Neppi, and passed it on to the Ministry of the Interior. Regarding “The Jew Elisa Fiano” (as it called her), the letter reported, among other things, “The recipient is married to a Jew, the lawyer Neppi Vittorio, son of Graziadio, born in Ferrara on November 13, 1885, a university professor, who was released from his teaching duties following the regulations of the law for the protection of the race.”178 The background to this was the confiscation of a letter from Cantoni Pisa to Fiano Neppi of December 1938 in which the president affirmed the continued existence of the Bologna chapter, which had lost numerous members in the weeks after November 1938. At the time, many of its members mistakenly thought that it had already been dissolved. A short time later, a letter from the Milan prefecture to the Ministry of the Interior, whose subject was again the correspondence between Cantoni Pisa and Fiano Neppi, made explicit reference to the fact that Vittoria Cantoni Pisa was not a member of the Fascist Party. “The entire Cantoni family is of the Jewish race and religion and lives in thriving economic conditions.”179 The Cantoni Pisa couple only escaped further interference by emigrating to Palestine in April 1939. The Bolognese group was not the only one whose existence was threatened by the promulgation of the racial laws.180 While the membership of the ADEI had grown steadily until 1938, especially as a result of the displacement of Jewish actors from the secular organizations of the

appears among the ADEI’s members and financial supporters; see the register of members and donors for the period from 1940 to 1941, CDEC Milano, Fondo ADEI, fasc. 1928– 1950, anno 1940–1941. 178 Divisione Polizia Politica, Appunto per l’On. Divisione Affari generali e riservate, March 8, 1939, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37: ADEI. 179 Document from March 26, 1939, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37: ADEI. 180 How hard Cantoni Pisa tried to secure the continuity of the Bologna chapter can

also be seen clearly from another confiscated letter in which she expressly informed the Bolognese activist Emma Sonino that the chapter “still exists” and called on its members “to maintain their membership, and also to pay their dues”; Vittoria Cantoni Pisa to Emma Sonino, February 26, 1939, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37: ADEI.

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women’s movement, after November 1938 there was a rapid quantitative decrease in the membership. The numbers dropped from a total of 1258 members in 1938 to just 689 in 1939. A report on the 1938/1939 period stated: The financial report on the activities of the ADEI headquarters during the fiscal year 1938/1939 unfortunately reflects, in its figures, the grave situation caused by the current events, which has put the spirit of steadfastness and self-sacrifice of the ‘Donne Ebree d’Italia’ to a stern test… the large difference in the membership count and the enormous decline in revenues leave us at a loss regarding the future options for our ADEI.181

The considerable decline in membership can be explained, on the one hand, by the emigration of numerous members, and on the other, by the justified fear on the part of many women that their membership of the ADEI would reveal their Jewish origins and put them at immediate risk of denunciation and of persecution by the regime.182 According to the surviving lists, the membership count for the Triestine ADEI, for example, had fallen between 1938 and 1939 from seventy-eight to just seventeen members. However, it is questionable whether this figure 181 Relazione della Presidenza e delle Sezioni e Relazioni sul resoconto finanziario della Centrale dell’ADEI per l’anno sociale 1938–1939, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37: ADEI. Turin, Trieste, Florence, and Padua showed the greatest losses, while the chapters in Alessandria, Ancona, Pisa, and Naples had already dissolved or were in the process of dissolution. The traditionally strong chapters in Milan, Venice, Ferrara, and Rome, as well as the groups in Verona, Vercelli, and Rovigo still made the greatest contributions to the ADEI at the time. 182 For a further example in connection with the effort to save the Bolognese chapter, Cantoni Pisa suggested to the treasurer, Elisa (“Lisetta”) Fiano Neppi (the president of the ADEI in Bologna, Wanda Ascarelli, had dropped out due to ill health) that she should call on all members of the ADEI in Bologna to take a clear position regarding their membership once again: “Each individual member should be asked to state explicitly whether she wants to stay or not. In this way, the fearful and indifferent ones would leave, but the good members [who had erroneously announced their resignation because they assumed that the chapter had already been dissolved] would join once again, and thus the chapter would be saved and could continue its existence, a little diminished, naturally, but formed from a conscious and faithful group”; Vittoria Cantoni Pisa to Lisetta Fiano Neppi, December 26, 1938. The letter is appended to a text from the Divisione Polizia Politica, Appunto per l’On. Divisione Affari generali e riservati, March 8, 1939, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37: ADEI.

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represents the actual number of remaining Triestine members, since a significant portion of the group had already emigrated.183 Significantly, two members appeared in the list as “X.Y.,” without names: “These are two long-time members who wish not to be mentioned in the list by name.”184 The real number of ADEI members in Trieste and other Italian cities might thus have been at least slightly higher than stated in the relevant documents even after 1938. However, this last resort no longer offered any kind of protection. From the early 1940s onward, it was not only the organization as such whose existence was threatened; the assault on the lives of its members was now only a matter of time. “Anti-Fascist Internationalists”: Surveillance of the ADEI (1940–1943) According to Mussolini’s original plans, the fascist regime’s antisemitic policy was to result in the expulsion of all Jews from Italy. In September 1938, the Duce had ordered the expulsion of the vast majority of foreign Jews, and in February 1940 it was decided that all Italian Jews would also be driven out of the country within the next ten years.185 When Italy entered the war on the side of Nazi Germany in June 1940, however, this project came to a standstill. Jewish men, women, and children were now trapped in a country that rejected and discriminated against them. The antisemite Giovanni Preziosi had already ascribed “the blame for the war” to “the Jews” in his journal La Vita Italiana, shortly after the invasion of Poland: “The war was planned by America’s Jewry, whose most important European instrument is the government of Great Britain—men whom a press massively dominated by the most superior finance Jews describes

183 As a consequence of the racial laws of November 1938, an estimated 6000 Jews emigrated abroad from Italy, especially to France, Great Britain, North and South America, and Palestine. The USA received about a third of the Jewish emigrants from Italy; see Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 92. 184 ADEI Sezione di Trieste, Elenco delle Socie anno 1938/49; CDEC Milano, Fondo Comunità Ebraica di Milano, b. 2, fasc. 4: ADEI. See also the membership list or rather count (seventy-eight members) for the period from 1937 to 1938 in the Elenco delle Socie (Sezione di Trieste) anno 1937/38, ibid. 185 See Sarfatti, The Jews, 144–146.

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as the “best” Englishmen, presenting their policy as authentic English policy.”186 The fascist regime intensified its anti-Jewish measures in the period that followed, not least because it wished to highlight this supposed responsibility of the Jews as a whole. From June 1940 onward, Italian Jews who were considered a threat to the regime, as well as foreign Jews whose homelands pursued anti-Jewish policies, were interned.187 Fascist Italy also began to exploit Jewish workers in increasingly systematic fashion. In May 1942, a few months after the notorious Wannsee Conference, specific groups of Italian Jews were forced to work for the war economy. Just one year later, internment and labor camps were established for Italian Jews.188 Despite the steep decline in membership that the ADEI had had to accept since the end of 1938, the tasks and activities of the only union in Italy still to provide Jewish women with room for maneuver at that time intensified in connection with these developments. After Vittoria Cantoni Pisa’s emigration to Palestine in April 1939, Gabriella Falco Ravenna, the confidant and “disciple” of the ADEI’s founder, Berta Cammeo Bernstein, became president of the organization. The daughter of the former president of the Unione delle comunità ebraiche italiane promoted cooperation between the women’s union and Jewish aid organizations and made significant efforts to ensure that the ADEI stayed true to Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s ideal of practical feminism combined with 186 Giovanni Preziosi, “E la guerra ebrea è venuta,” La Vita Italiana, September 15,

1939. 187 Whereas at the end of 1937, anti-Jewish legislation had only existed in Germany, such legislation spread between 1938 and the summer of 1939 in various forms and degrees of radicalism, besides in Italy, to Romania and Hungary, as well as to the territories and countries annexed by national-socialist Germany. For details on fascist Italy’s internment policy after 1940, see Spartaco Capogreco C., I campi del duce. L’internamento civile nell’Italia fascista (1940–1943) (Turin: Einaudi, 2004); Voigt K., Il rifugio precario. Gli esuli in Italia dal 1933 al 1945, vol. 2 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996), 1–22. The biggest internment camp for foreign Jews was in Ferramonti in Tarsia, near Cosenza, which commenced operations in June 1940. Concerning the “camp-ghetto” (Voigt’s term), see ibid., 193–239. 188 See Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 112–117. The phase of systematic murder of European Jews outside of Italy got underway at this time. The first regular mass shootings of Jews, during which up to several thousand Jewish men, women, and children were murdered, began to take place after Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, in which fascist Italy was significantly involved; Sarfatti, La Shoah, 51.

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social engagement. From November 1939 onward, the ADEI worked in concert with the newly established Jewish aid organization Delegazione per l’assistenza agli emigranti (DELASEM)189 and, in keeping with its own goals formulated in 1927, supported Jewish emigrants and indigents, whose numbers had been drastically increasing as a consequence of the racial laws. From 1940 onward, the members also came to the aid of the families of internees by donating clothing, money, food, and medicines.190 Apart from the headquarters in Milan, which had come into being in the UFN’s orbit and had a feminist, socialist, and anti-fascist character, the ADEI had seen itself in principle as a rather apolitical union during the 1920s and 1930s. It consciously avoided conflict with the fascist government and concealed its Zionist orientation to the outside world. In the period between 1940 and 1943, however, the Jewish women’s union developed increasing anti-fascist tendencies. Due to the intimate, familiar atmosphere that predominated in the starkly reduced local branches, secret meetings in members’ homes could be organized in which “dangerous” political themes like the course of the war and the condition of the Jews were discussed. Most likely, reports of the extermination of the Jews in Eastern Europe were also spreading within the ADEI toward the end of 1942, especially because of its members’ close connections with foreign Jewish internees. It is guaranteed that residents of the camp at Ferramonti knew of the extermination camps in the east from the end of

189 The DELASEM was founded in November 1939 following the dissolution of the Jewish aid committee Comitato di assistenza agli ebrei in Italia (Comasebit) by order of Mussolini. It supported indigent Jews in Italy as well, under the guise of its primary aim of caring for emigrants. For details on the establishment and history of the DELASEM, see Voigt, Il rifugio precario, 335–351; Antonini S., Delasem. Storia della più grande organizzazione ebraica italiana di soccorso durante la seconda guerra mondiale (Genoa: De Ferrari, 2000). Specifically regarding the women’s groups in the DELASEM which collaborated with the ADEI, see Relazione fatta alle Sezioni Femminili nell’Ottobre 1941 in Due anni DELASEM , Genoa 1942, pp. 13–23, printed in Sarfatti, The Jews, 261–269. 190 “The [ADEI’s] aid has been extended to needy families of Jews who have been

sent to concentration camps or political detention”; Questura di Roma an Ministero degli Affari Esteri, July 23, 1941; ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37: ADEI. On the collaboration between the ADEI and the DELASEM, see Nidam-Orvieto I., ADEI; Voigt, Il rifugio precario, 341.

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1942 at the latest since nearly all of them had family members who had been deported to Poland in the preceding months.191 In order to avoid censorship, invitations to the ADEI’s events were ever more frequently delivered in person rather than being sent by post. Many of the meetings took place in activists’ homes so that there could be no party members in the audience.192 In this way, even in the early 1940s, the Milanese headquarters at least was able to divert the local prefecture’s attention from the organization’s Zionist tendencies and to represent itself to the outside world as a purely cultural and welfare organization. In September 1941, the prefect of Milan responded to an inquiry from the Ministry of the Interior that the local ADEI had exclusively cultural and welfare-related goals in Italy (and not in Palestine). “A small portion” of the approximately one hundred members went to the synagogue every week to make clothes for benevolent purposes or to hear the Chief Rabbi Gustavo Castelbolognesi’s lectures on Jewish culture.193 In contrast, the Rome chapter of the ADEI had already fallen under suspicion of subversive, anti-fascist activity in May 1941. Despite all their precautionary measures, word had got out about the group’s engagement on behalf of Jewish internees, as well as the Zionist orientation of its members, none of whom were members of the Fascist Party, probably through a denunciation. On May 23, 1941, the political police notified the Ministry of the Interior, referring to a “trusted source,” that the women’s union.

191 See the telegram some foreign Jewish prisoners in the Ferramonti camp managed to send to President Roosevelt in December 1942 in Sarfatti, The Jews, 167. 192 See Nidam-Orvieto, “ADEI.” The ADEI’s letters sent through the post were regu-

larly seized by the political police, among these also a letter from Dina Bassani, secretary of the Milanese ADEI, to the wife of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Alice Toaff. She wrote, among other things, about the Milanese headquarters’ financial situation and the subcommittee for Tripolis; see the attachment to the text sent from the Divisione Polizia Politica, “Appunto per la Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati” of the Ministry of the Interior and to the prefecture of Milan, February 15, 1941, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37: ADEI. 193 See Prefettura di Milano to the Ministero dell’Interno, September 26, 1941, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37: ADEI.

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engages in secret propaganda on behalf of Zionism, the known movement with an antinationalist, antifascist, and expressly internationalist policy for the reconstruction of Palestine and a Jewish state under English sovereignty. All the group’s committee members are antifascists, including the president, Emma Fano, wife of a certain Commander Fano, who has never been a member of the Fascist Party and is a fervent Zionist… [The union] holds lectures on the Zionist policy which openly flout the guidelines of the regime. It should be added that the union operates an aid committee for foreign Jews whom the government has sent into political detention and to concentration camps.194

The prejudices against Zionism that had long circulated among fascists and were promoted by Mussolini himself had been further intensified by the war situation and the opposition to Great Britain, as well as the concurrent radicalization of fascist “Jewish policy.” Thus, the ADEI came under the scrutiny of the Roman authorities once more as an “unmasked” Zionist, and thus, in the fascists’ view, dangerous, anti-national movement that was hostile to the regime. Additionally, there was their support for Jewish internees that were considered opponents of the regime, which the political police saw as proof of the group’s involvement in an anti-fascist conspiracy. In the weeks that followed, detailed information was gathered about the ADEI, the Rome chapter’s meetings, and its president, Emma Fano.195 On July 23, 1941, the police headquarters in Rome reported to the Foreign Ministry: The meetings, which are called ‘charity teas,’ take place every week on Mondays and Wednesday from October to June…The headquarters in Milan is also engaged in charitable activities on behalf of indigent Jews in Italy and the colonies, but it is unknown whether they send donations to Palestine in support of the movement for a Jewish state under English sovereignty. It cannot be excluded that when they are gathered together, the members complain about the racial laws. Emma Fano is married to Davide 194 Capo Divisione Polizia Politica to the Ministero dell’Interno, May 23, 1941, ibid. 195 On Emma Fano, see Polacco, “La Fondazione,” 25.

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Fano, the son of Emanuele and Elvira Forti, born in Venice on 22/7/1876, and receives instructions and counsel from him regarding the proceedings of the chapter in question.196

Although the ADEI was able to continue its existence, under difficult circumstances, until September 1943, after the summer of 1941 it became nearly impossible, at least for the members of the Rome chapter, to organize unobserved gatherings. The acts of the Ministry of the Interior contain several specific reports on the Jewish women’s union’s events for the period up to 1943 from Rome’s police headquarters, with details on the location, the speakers, and the topics of the lectures.197 It is extremely unlikely that Emma Fano was influenced and guided by her husband in the leadership of the Rome chapter since this “indefatigable initiator” (as her contemporary, Evelina Polacco, described her) had cofounded the Roman branch of the ADEI in 1926 and had shaped it greatly through her own work. She had already been president for twelve years at the time.198 The police headquarters’ remark is more reflective of the antisemitic prejudice against Zionist, anti-fascist “internationalism,” which the convicted Zionist and formerly successful businessman Davide Fano seemed expressly to embody, all the more so since he had never been a member of the Fascist Party.199

196 Questura di Roma to the Ministero degli Affari Esteri, July 23, 1941, ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37: ADEI (emphasis in original). 197 See, for example, Questura di Roma to the Ministero dell’Interno, February 9, 1943: “Today there was a meeting of the ADEI from 18:30 to 19 o’clock at the Jewish community’s premises, Lungotevere Sanzio Nr. 9; the teacher Cesare Elise spoke on the theme ‘An interesting liturgical gesture’”; ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37/2 (1939–1943): ADEI. 198 See Polacco, “La Fondazione,” 25. 199 Davide Fano, born in Venice, was the executive director of the stock company

Casermaggi in Rome until 1938; see Questura di Roma to the Ministero degli Affari Esteri, July 23, 1941, ACS, Minister dell’Interno, DGPS, Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Fondo Associazioni (1912–1947), b. 4, fasc. 37/2 (1939–1943): ADEI.

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Flight, Hiding, and Deportation: Fates of Italian-Jewish Feminists (1943–1945) Despite antisemitic hostility and intensified police surveillance, the ADEI continued its work for two more years, supporting indigent Jewish families with its limited remaining capabilities and organizing furthereducation courses for women preparing to emigrate.200 However, the German occupation of Italy in September 1943 and the establishment of the Republic of Salò (RSI) signaled a violent, abrupt end to the nearly twenty years of existence of the first Jewish women’s union in Italy. The persecution of the lives of the Jews in Italy began on September 8, 1943.201 Like all Jews not located in the southern territories of Italy that had been liberated by the Allies, the ADEI members, who were based mostly in Rome and in the cities in northern and central Italy, began, together with their families, to fight for their survival. Many of them fled or tried to hide in order to evade the impending deportation.202 Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s daughter, Marta Bernstein Navarra, a central figure in the Jewish women’s union, managed to flee from Milan to nearby Switzerland at the last minute, where her son Dario Navarra already awaited her. She returned to Italy after the war and assumed the presidency of the ADEI; she emigrated to Israel in 1963.203

200 See Nidam Orvieto, “ADEI.” 201 On the phase of “the assault on Jewish lives” in the period from 1943 to 1945, see

Sarfatti, The Jews, 178–211; ead., La Shoah, 98–123; Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, 126– 150. On the German occupation of Italy and the Republic of Salò, see Klinkhammer L., Das nationalsozialistische Deutschland und die Republik von Salò 1943–1945 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). 202 On the deportation and extermination of the Italian Jews, see especially Picciotto L., Il libro della memoria. Gli ebrei deportati dall’Italia (1943–1945) (Milan: Mursia, 1991), 877–903; Levis Sullam S., I carnefici italiani. Scene dal genocidio degli ebrei, 1943–1945 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2016); Flores M. et al. (eds.), Storia della Shoah in Italia: vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni, vol. 1: Le premesse, le persecuzioni, lo sterminio (Turin: UTET, 2010); Matard-Bonucci M. A., L’Italie fasciste e la persécution des juifs (Paris: Perrin 2007), 402–430. 203 See Peerugia A., “Marta Navarra: una grande educatrice,” Il Portavoce. Rassegna

Adei-Wizo 6 (1985): 6; see also the entry by Fiorenza Taricone in the Dizionario biografico delle donne lombarde, 145; Lopez, “Ricordo di Marta Navarra,” 419 f., 428. Dario Navarra was active in several Jewish aid organizations in Switzerland, supporting refugees and partisan groups on the Italian-Swiss border. After the end of the war, he was a founder member of the first HeChalutz group in Italy; see the interview with Dario Navarra in

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The Milanese philologist Augusta Jarach, however, now sixty-eight years old, had made a significant contribution to the development of the ADEI alongside the pioneer Berta Cammeo Bernstein in the late 1920s, had a different fate. She was arrested by Italians in February 1944 in the small Piedmontese town of Casale Monferrato, near Alessandria. It is likely that she had sought final refuge in her remote birthplace but there fell victim to a denunciation. Jarach was initially taken to the Fossoli concentration camp in the province of Modena and later deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered immediately after her arrival on February 26, 1944.204 Meanwhile, the younger activist Gabriella Falco Ravenna, whose distinctly Jewish self-consciousness had inspired the work of the ADEI from its early days and continued to motivate it even during the years of persecution, survived, together with her daughters, Anna Marcella and Graziella, thanks to the selfless assistance of the Roman jurist Arturo Carlo Jemolo (1891–1981).205 After Mario Falco’s sudden and tragic death at the age of just fifty-nine at Gabriella’s sister’s country house near Ferrara, where the family had taken refuge from the bombings in Milan in September 1943, at first Falco Ravenna could see no way out for herself and her daughters. Then, the Catholic-liberal anti-fascist Jemolo, a longtime friend and colleague of Mario Falco’s, offered to accommodate her and her daughters in his home in Rome. They arrived a few days after the notorious raid on the Roman ghetto of October 16, 1943, and were able to secure their survival under false names, first in Rome and then, from November 1943 onward, with Jemolo’s family in the nearby small

the collection of eyewitness discussions in the CDEC Milano, http://digital-library.cdec. it/cdec-web/audiovideo/detail/IT-CDEC-AV0001-000171/dario-navarra.html. 204 See Picciotto, Il libro della memoria, 356 f. From December 1, 1943, the Italian authorities had begun to arrest Jews and intern them in transit camps in the Italian provinces. From the end of December onward, the prisoners were taken to the Fossoli concentration camp and thence deported to Auschwitz in the following months. In March 1944, the Fossoli camp came under German command; see Picciotto L., L’alba ci colse come un tradimento. Gli ebrei nel campo di Fossoli 1943–1944 (Milan: Mondadori, 2010); Ori A. M., Il Campo di Fossoli. Da campo di prigionia e deportazione a luogo di memoria (Carpi: APM, 2004). 205 On the life and work of the jurist Jemolo, see Spadolini G. (ed.), Jemolo. Testimone di un secolo (Florence: Mondadori Education, 1981).

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town of Ariccia.206 Half of Jemolo’s house there was confiscated by the Germans. The former president of the Jewish women’s union lived unrecognized in extremely close contact with German soldiers and, with her good knowledge of the German language, was even often used by them as an interpreter. In January 1944, the Jemolo and Falco Ravenna families moved back to the Italian capital to escape the battles, and Gabriella’s daughter Anna Marcella Falco (1923–2014) became an active member of the resistance there. In a certain sense, the young, Jewish-conscious activist’s anti-fascist commitment continued the foundational ideals of the Milanese ADEI, based on a combination of Judaism, anti-fascism, and feminism, which her mother had helped to shape. Gabriella Falco Ravenna and her daughters experienced the liberation from Jemolo’s house in Rome. After the end of the war, the family emigrated to Palestine.207 The fates of the last surviving Jewish women from the UFN resemble that of the ADEI in many respects. They exemplify the struggle for survival of numerous Italian-Jewish actors in the period between 1943 and 1945. Nina Rignano Sullam, a broken woman after the violent dissolution of the UFN, refused to leave her Italian homeland despite all the warnings. After the German occupation of Italy, she initially took refuge with friends in Milan, presumably from the UFN circles. In order not to put them continually at risk, however, Rignano Sullam, who was over seventy years old, went into hiding between late 1943 and early 1944 in 206 On the raid on the Roman ghetto and the deportation of the Roman Jews, see Baumeister M. et al. (eds.), 16 ottobre 1943. La deportazione degli ebrei romani tra storia e memoria (Rome: Viella, 2016). – Gabriella Falco Ravenna’s mother Marcella Padoa and sister Germana Ravenna set out for Rome from Ferrara in November 1943 to meet Gabriella and her daughters there. During the journey, they made a stop in Florence (apparently to acquire forged papers) and lodged with the nuns of the Convento del Carmine. However, the Jewish men, women, and children staying there, about seventy in total, were betrayed and arrested by Italians and Germans at the end of November 1943. Marcella Padoa and Germana Ravenna were initially taken to Verona and then deported to Auschwitz on December 6, 1943. Marcella Padoa was murdered directly upon arrival. It is not known when and where the forty-seven-year-old Germana died; see Picciotto, Il libro della memoria, 486, 524; see also Gabriella Falco Ravenna’s report of her mother and sister’s deportation, http://digital-library.cdec.it/cdec-web/viewer/cde cxDamsHist018/IT-CDEC-ST0018-000093#page/1/mode/1up. 207 See the detailed report for Yad Vashem by Gabriella Falco Ravenna, https://www. yadvashem.org/education/other-languages/italian/educational-materials/testimonies. html; Ravenna P., La famiglia Ravenna 1943–1945 (Ferrara: Corbo Gabriele, 2001). The author thanks Dr. Laura Brazzo, CDEC Milano, for additional information on the history of Gabriella Falco Ravenna’s survival between 1943 and 1945.

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various small villages in Liguria and in the provinces of Como and Varese under assumed names. Persecution, war, and hiding shaped the final years of her life. Her already compromised state of health was worsened by the privations and sometimes desolate living conditions. The cofounder of the UFN died in seclusion in Varese, a few weeks after liberation, on May 26, 1945.208 Leaving Italy was also out of the question for Bice Cammeo, Ersilia Majno’s close confidant and pioneer of the UFN, who had founded a section of the Milanese women’s union in her hometown of Florence at the beginning of the twentieth century and had been involved in social work on behalf of women and children since her youth. In 1943, Cammeo was sixty-eight years old and weighed down by fate. Her brother Federico, who had been expelled from the University of Florence in 1938, died in 1939; his son Cesare, who had also been expelled from the department of law, had committed suicide out of desperation in 1941. Bice Cammeo went into hiding in Florence at the end of 1943, probably sheltered by people whom she had herself supported in her work for the Ufficio Indicazione ed Assistenza or her home for abandoned children.209 She was the only member of her family to survive the war. Her niece Maria Cammeo, whom Bice had dearly loved, taught, and helped to raise, as well as her sister-in-law Clotilde Levi and the latter’s sister Lina Levi were arrested in Florence and deported to Auschwitz in 1944.210 Bice Cammeo preserved her life, but she did not resume her social work activities after the war. She died in seclusion in Florence in 1961. Meanwhile, the educator Aurelia Josz, who had founded the first agricultural school for women in Italy in 1902 and collaborated with the UFN for many years, was not able to avoid deportation. When her younger sister Valeria Vita Josz fled to Switzerland with the rest of the family in 1943,211 the unmarried, seventy-four-year-old Aurelia stayed behind

208 See Buttafuoco, “Nina Rignano Sullam,” 156; D’Amico, Nina Rignano Sullam,

48. 209 As assumed by Dr. Lionella Neppi Modona Viterbo in her conversation with the

author in Florence, February 15, 2017. 210 See Picciotto, Il libro della memoria, 177, 395; Guarnieri, Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration, 110. 211 Aurelia Josz, born in Florence, whose parents Lodovico Josz and Emilia Finzi immigrated to Italy from Hungary via Trieste in the second half of the nineteenth century, was the eldest of four siblings. Her brothers Italo and Livio, the latter of whom emigrated

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alone in Italy because she had broken her arm and felt too weak for the dangerous journey. Her brother Italo, a reputed painter whom she had lived with in Milan, had died a few months earlier. Like Jarach, Rignano Sullam, and Falco Ravenna, Josz, now all alone, left war-torn Milan in the summer of 1943 and sought refuge at a family home in the small Ligurian town of Alassio. Shortly before their departure for Switzerland, Aurelia’s relatives took her to a local monastery, where they thought she would be safe. It is not known exactly when this innovative educator and pioneer of the Italian women’s movement was arrested, but it is assumed that she was denounced by the nuns between the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944. Already frail, Josz was initially imprisoned in Genoa and then in the Fossoli camp. She was deported to Auschwitz on June 26, 1944, and was murdered there immediately upon arrival.212 Only a few of the Jewish feminists who were active in the Italian women’s movement before their expulsion or until the violent end of their institutions survived to see Italy’s liberation in April 1945. Gina Lombroso died in exile in Geneva in 1944 without having seen her homeland again. Paola Lombroso had fled to Switzerland in 1943 and spent the last year of Gina’s life with her there.213 The fascist authorities had been censoring the correspondence between the sisters since the 1930s, making any personal exchange of ideas on the escalating persecution of the Jews in Europe and the impact of the racial laws and the war on Paola

to Marseilles, probably in the late 1930s, were both painters. The DEMORAZZA inventory contains Italo Josz’s application for discriminazione, which was rejected in September 1939. The reasons given were that Italo Josz had never been a member of the Fascist Party, had never displayed solidarity with the regime, and had no military distinctions. Aurelia Josz had worked on parts of her brother’s application to support him, as the relevant documents show. However, she herself did not apply for discriminazione; see ACS, Fondo Ministero dell’Interno, DEMORAZZA, b. 67, fasc. 4809. 212 See the notes to the interview of Aurelia Josz’s great-niece, Simonetta Falcone, née Heger, conducted by Liliana Picciotto in 1993 in Milan. Simonetta Heger’s mother was Eleonora Vita Josz, a daughter of Aurelia’s sister Valeria Josz; CDEC Milano, cartella “Vicissitudini dei singoli,” 434, Class. 1.2: Josz, Aurelia (Anno 1993, settembre 7 – 1995); see also Emanuele Tortoreto, “Un ricordo di Aurelia Josz, fondatrice della Scuola,” Notiziario della Scuola Agraria del Parco di Monza 2 (June–August 1995). On the dates of Aurelia Josz’s capture and deportation, see Picciotto, Libro della memoria, 362. 213 Both Gina’s husband Guglielmo Ferrero and Paola’s forty-year-old daughter Maria Gina died in 1942, so the two sisters lived alone together in Geneva from 1943 onward. Paola stayed in Geneva after Gina’s death and returned to Turin in August 19945; see Dolza, Essere figlie di Lombroso, 109.

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Lombroso’s everyday life in Italy impossible.214 Even after Paola’s arrival in Geneva, the formerly inseparable sisters could only spend a few months together in a time of war, persecution, and annihilation. The anti-fascist Gina Lombroso did not live to see either the capitulation of the German forces in Italy or Mussolini’s death, shot by partisans on April 28, 1945, while fleeing to Switzerland. Her ideological comrade and friend Amelia Rosselli, in exile since 1937, whose sons had given their lives for the fight against fascism, participated passionately—from a distance—in the epoch-making global political events in the spring of 1945. On May 10, 1945, she wrote an emotional letter from Larchmont, near New York, to an old friend of the family: “The events of these last weeks are stunning. The simultaneous end of both tyrants, and what an end for Mussolini! – It really seems that the divine justice, sooner or later, always strikes.”215 Rosselli was not to return to Italy before June 1946, but she sought to contact her surviving friends in Florence immediately after the end of the war. Having long been in the dark as to the fate of her closest friend, Laura Orvieto, due to the censorship of letters, the war, and the Shoah, she had found out about the Orvieto couple’s survival in the hospice of Pater Massimo da Porretta in Barberino del Mugello after the liberation of Florence, in autumn 1944.216 Laura and Angiolo had been in hiding

214 From the end of the 1930s onward, the surviving correspondence between Gina and

Paola Lombroso comprises primarily “non-risky” reports on everyday family matters, especially regarding the grandchildren. Mention of political events was deliberately avoided. Gina Lombroso’s growing concern for the fate of her sister Paola in an increasingly dangerous Italy in the early 1940s can only be read between the lines. On March 16, 1941, for example, Gina wrote to Paola, “We are constantly awaiting your so irregular news! But at least we have many things here, we see many people…and I always think of you, that you are so alone… while [in the past] you were so much used to having a lot of company”; Gina Lombroso to Paola Lombroso, ACGV, Fondo Lombroso, II.3.3.501 (16/3/1941–5/4/1941). Gina’s concern for her sister is even more visible in an undated letter, probably from 1943. Gina seems to have asked a coded question about the fate of the Jews in Italy: “I am very worried about what is happening with the “h” [sic], and I would be grateful if you would keep me in the loop”; Gina Lombroso to Paola Lombroso, undated (1943?) ACGV, Fondo Lombroso, II.3.3.1182. 215 Amelia Rosselli to Piero (Calamandrei?), Larchmont, May 10, 1945, Isrt Firenze, Fondo Francesco Papafava. 216 See Rosselli’s letter to her daughter-in-law Maria Todesco, in which she writes about the news of the Orvietos; Rosselli to Todesco, Larchmont, November 3, 1944, ibid.

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among the old and frail residents of the hospice, housed in a monastery close to Florence, since 1943.217 Laura Orvieto was one of the few surviving Jewish protagonists to continue her social and cultural engagement after 1945, despite the rupture caused by the fascist dictatorship and the Shoah.218 Immediately after the liberation, she founded the children’s literary journal La Settimana dei ragazzi, which she published until 1947. Laura shared the details of her initiative with her friend, Amelia Rosselli, in their lively correspondence re-established from May 1945 onward.219 Orvieto’s renewed cultural engagement on behalf of children was supposed to demonstrate that the fascist dictatorship had been unable to permanently annihilate the former, freethinking ideals of Jewish feminists in the area of education and instruction.220 However, the formerly closely knit networks of Italian-Jewish feminists that relied on family ties, friendships, and the common cause of women’s emancipation were irrevocably destroyed after the Shoah. Both the UFN

217 See “Nota al Testo” in Orvieto, Storia di Angiolo e Laura, XIII. 218 Paola Lombroso too was able to reconstruct her Casa del Sole, a home for children

with tuberculosis, after her return from Switzerland. The institution had been fascisized in the 1930s and bombarded during the war, and then closed. She also continued her project of “rural libraries,” which had likewise been suspended in the 1930s by the fascist authorities due to her antifascist attitude. Like Orvieto, Paola Lombroso dedicated herself to children’s literature once again after the war. In 1950, four years before her death, she received the highest distinction from the Italian Ministry of Education for her social and cultural services to children and youth; see Dolza, Essere figlie di Lombroso, 109 f. 219 In June 1945, Amelia Rosselli wrote to Laura Orvieto, who had sent her the first three editions of La Settimana dei ragazzi to Larchmont, “I am delighted to find in these pages the sort of healthy optimism regarding all the burdensome and adverse things of life that has always been one of your most beautiful qualities… Even in the contributions not directly written by yourself, one feels the influence of your thinking, your moral stance. Brava, Laura!” Rosselli to Orvieto, June 4, 1945, ACGV, Fondo Orvieto, Or.1.2059, 129. 220 In the journal’s first edition, Orvieto addressed her young readers as follows: “From the time that you were born, it was always the rule that one could never say what one wanted, but only what one was ordered [to say]… In this journal, we can say everything that we want, and so we will speak about everything… we will also speak of Chinese and Russian, and of American and English children who sent their fathers and big brothers to liberate us from a slavery that threatened to suffocate us”; Laura Orvieto, “Cari ragazzi,” La Settimana dei Ragazzi, April 1, 1945.

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and the ADEI were reconstructed after the end of the war, but under very different auspices.221 The deep-seated patriotism motivated by their ancestors’ involvement in the creation of the Italian nation that had guided the conspicuous interest of Jewish actors in the Italian women’s movement from the end of the nineteenth century onward and had spurred them to break new ground in their sometimes excessive nationalism during the First World War was shamefully betrayed by fascism. The varied history of Italian Jewry between Risorgimento and fascism, ranging from emancipatory successes and seemingly complete social integration to antisemitic hostility and persecution, is expressively reflected in the biographies and fates of Jewish protagonists of the early Italian women’s movement. In May 1944, Amelia Rosselli looked back from the temporal and spatial distance of exile on her convoluted, momentous life path which had begun in a family of ardent patriots in Venice. She wrote, “I have always believed in the succession of human life through different stages. But when I think of my former existence, it seems to me that in truth I have – in one single life – lived through a long succession of different lives.”222

221 On the reconstruction of the UFN after 1945, see Gaballo, Il nostro dovere, 378–382; on the development of the ADEI in the postwar period, see Follacchio, “Associazionismo femminile;” Miniati, “Non dimenticare,” 171–174. 222 Amelia Rosselli to “cari amici,” Larchmont, May 10, 1944, Isrt Firenze, Fondo Francesco Papafava.

CHAPTER 7

“Le Emancipate”? Italian-Jewish Women Between Risorgimento and Fascism

The convoluted development of Italian-Jewish female protagonists between Risorgimento and fascism presents itself as a history of incomplete emancipation. Their societal integration process was neither straightforward nor unproblematic and remained far away from the often-quoted “success story” of the Jews in Italy. At the same time, Jewish actors had a pathbreaking and enduring influence on the conceptual and institutional development of the early Italian women’s movement and its transnational networking. From a gender-historical perspective and by focusing on representatives of Italy’s first women’s movement, the ambitions, achievements, and setbacks of Jewish women in their commitment to the young Italian nation have come to the fore. These included instances of accomplished participation, innovative sociopolitical initiatives, and far-reaching emancipatory successes, but also of social and cultural marginalization and antisemitic hostility, which manifested to an increasing extent during the First World War and radicalized continuously from the beginning of fascist rule onward. Even in the often idealized case of Italy, female Jewish actors assumed the same characteristic position of twofold outsiders as Jewish women in Europe in general. Due to their limited public room for maneuver, they never achieved the same degree of societal integration as did Italian-Jewish men, whose achievements in politics, culture, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Nattermann, Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4_7

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and the military in post-emancipatory Italy have significantly contributed to the construction of the Italian-Jewish “success story.” The fact that the promulgation of the fascist racial laws in 1938 was not an abrupt, unforeseen end to an idyllic integration that had been achieved at all levels, but the culmination of a long-term social and political development, is expressively demonstrated by the examination of Italian-Jewish female protagonists and their relationships with the non-Jewish, Catholic majority society.

7.1 Secular Jewish Family Identities in the Light of Women’s Biographies The initial research into the biographies of pioneers of the Italian women’s movement has clearly revealed the emergence of secular Jewish family identities that were of central importance for the self-positioning of acculturated women and men in post-emancipatory Italy. Within the overall European context, this development represents an important feature of Italian-Jewish history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unlike in Germany, for example, there was never any confrontation between reform-Jewish and neo-Orthodox tendencies in Italy. Instead of this, and due to the lack of an organized reform Judaism, bourgeois Italian-Jewish men and women often distanced themselves from religious practice altogether. This option was especially relevant for Jewish protagonists of the Italian women’s movement. However, both for them and for Jewish men and women in general, the acculturation and secularization process very rarely signified the renunciation of a particular Jewish identity. The outdated thesis of a fully assimilated Italian Jewry misjudges the conspicuous Jewish self-confidence of Italian Jews, who saw themselves as the oldest diaspora-Jewish community in Europe and looked back on their heritage with pride.1 Instead, Italian-Jewish identities took on various forms in the postemancipation era and, as was the case in contemporary European societies in general, assumed an increasingly mobile and processual character.

1 See Baumeister, “Ebrei fortunati?”, 57; Wyrwa, “Der Antisemitismus und die Gesellschaft des liberalen Italien,” 101 f; Luzzatto Voghera G., Il prezzo dell’eguaglianza: Il dibattito sull’emancipazione degli ebrei in Italia (1781–1848) (Milan: Angeli, 1998), 167–185.

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Recent studies have pointed to the relevant connection between nationalpatriotic and ethnic-racial discourses in liberal Italy as an expression of Jewish difference. This clearly extended beyond the definition of Judaism as a purely religious community, demanded particularly by the state with the abolition of autonomy for the Jewish community. Jewish conceptions of ethnicity were part of a development all over Europe that was directly connected to the fundamental transformation of a Jewish collective consciousness within the course of emancipation.2 This even included the biologistic idea of a “common blood,” as in the case of the Lombroso family, which relied on a longstanding European discourse whereby blood functioned as a metaphor for family and kinship relationships. The concept of blood, the genealogical connections to which it gave rise, and the notion of a common biological belonging of Jews from different nations that went beyond cultural and religious dimensions became increasingly important themes for Jewish-internal discussion, both within Italy and in the rest of Europe, from the end of the nineteenth century onward. The women’s biographies that have been analyzed here are expressive examples of the emerging plurality of Italian-Jewish identities. For the protagonists studied here—educated, acculturated women from the middle and upper Jewish bourgeoisie—the secular-connoted identità famigliare took the place of a self-consciousness defined via religion. Their secular Jewish family identities were largely based on conceptions of a community of origin, the transmission of ethical traditions, and family memories. As was the case for the contemporary European bourgeoisie in general, the continuous negotiation of kinship ties and family identities was carried out primarily through marriages. These contributed to the close connections and to the supraregional and transnational expansion of Italian-Jewish family bonds and, at the same time, guaranteed the preservation of property, education, and traditions within family alliances. This was true for the social and cultural environment of the pioneer Sara Levi Nathan, among others. The intellectual development of this educator and abolitionist, who grew up in a traditional Jewish environment and later became the epitome of the ebrea laica, illustrates the contemporary transformation of Jewish self-consciousness in light of the diminishing 2 See Ferrara degli Uberti, Fare gli ebrei italiani, 142; Lenhard, Volk oder Religion?, 28 f.

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influence of the Jewish communities and the erosion of normative religious systems. With her characteristic self-positioning between Jewish family consciousness, laicism, and anticlericalism, Giuseppe Mazzini’s companion also shaped the ideological orientation of younger Jewish representatives of the Italian women’s movement. Unlike women from the higher social classes and the aristocracy, who remained far more attached to Catholicism than has long been assumed, female Jewish actors were able to identify with the official anticlerical discourse of the Italian unitary state immediately and enduringly. Sara Levi Nathan’s ideas, inspired by Mazzini, of a secular, equitable education system without religious limitations and gender or class differences, as well as her transnational involvement in the fight against the trade in women and girls continued to be paradigmatic for the engagement of Jewish feminists in the Italian women’s movement until well into the twentieth century, albeit under significantly altered social and political conditions. Jewish actors, with their traditionally high levels of education and their tight interconnections within transnational Jewish family-and-friendship networks, often played a key role in the transnational networking of the young Italian women’s movement, including with Judith Butler’s Abolitionist Federation, and in the transfer of innovative pedagogical concepts like the Fröbel Method. While private and organizational connections between Jewish and non-Jewish female protagonists were still rare within the Italian national context in the first years after 1861, transnationalism and laicism constituted important prerequisites for the development of Jewish–non-Jewish networks in the international women’s movement from the end of the nineteenth century onward. In contrast to Jewish men, who were able to actively participate in the development of the young Italian nation state in the political and military spheres after emancipation, the scope of participation for Jewish women—and for women in general—was limited to social and cultural areas of activity. The sphere of education, so central to Judaism, whose essential social importance Sara Levi Nathan had underscored in her laicist institutions for the education of socially disadvantaged girls and women, was precisely where Jewish women had the potential to play an active role in the development of a national consciousness. Significantly, it was the well-educated Adele Della Vida Levi, from a Venetian family of convicted republicans, who founded Italy’s first Fröbel kindergarten in Venice in 1869. The characteristic mobility between Jewish and non-Jewish spheres and institutions, exemplified by the life and work of

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Sara Levi Nathan, can also be clearly seen in Della Vida Levi’s parallel engagement in the girls’ school of the local Jewish community and in the secular Fröbel project. At a time when Jewish boys and girls had no access to Venice’s public kindergartens due to their religious affiliation, the nondenominational Fröbel kindergartens provided a means to circumvent this form of discrimination and to contribute actively to Jewish integration. In this respect, the Italian situation corresponded to contemporary developments in Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium, where the newly established Fröbel kindergartens were supported by Jews in particular, for similar reasons. Della Vida Levi’s pedagogical initiative drew heavy criticism from conservative Catholic circles in Italy, reflecting the marked anti-laicism of the contemporary Catholic discourse which, however, also probably contained subtle anti-Jewish prejudices. These confrontations marked the beginning of a long-term conflict in the sphere of education and instruction, which radicalized over the following decades and assumed increasingly antisemitic features in the runup to the First World War, since this sphere continued to be dominated by the Catholic Church despite the laicist conception of statehood in liberal Italy. Thus, it is quite natural that Sara Levi Nathan’s abolitionist campaign and Adele Della Vida Levi’s kindergarten movement found an important forum for discussion in the feminist journal La Donna, founded in Padua in 1868 by the Mazzinian Gualberta Alaide Beccari. As has been shown, Beccari included Jewish authors in her project from the outset as a matter of course. Along with her programmatic recourse to Mazzini, the explicitly transnational and laicist outlook of the most important feminist journal of unified Italy was centrally important for the inclusion of Jewish protagonists. Significantly, La Donna too was the target of Catholic polemics against the laicism and supposed “lack of faith” of its authors. The fact that the first Jewish contributors to the leading women’s movement journal were a wealthy and educated group resident in northern Italy and in the region of Trieste is, in addition, an indication of the limitations of Jewish integration in liberal Italy from a social standpoint. All the women’s biographies examined in the first part of the study make clear the central relevance of Jewish family-and-friendship networks for the self-consciousness of Italian-Jewish feminists in the first two decades after Italian unification and the simultaneous opening up of the ghettos. Despite their strong identification with the laicist conception of

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statehood in liberal Italy, their foundation and promotion of secular institutions, and their remarkably lively participation in the laicist organs of the emerging Italian women’s movement, they continued to be located primarily within their own group, both in private and in public. Contacts with non-Jewish women took place for the most part within transnational networks. The incipient integration of female Jewish pioneers in the society of the young Italian nation state moved between the poles of participation and sometimes voluntary, sometimes enforced exclusion, which manifested themselves in individual and diverse ways in the biographies of the Jewish pioneers.

7.2 Jewish Transnationalism and Catholic Antisemitism in the Organized Women’s Movement With the consolidation of the organized Italian women’s movement from the 1880s onward, the tensions within the emancipation process of Jewish feminists gained in intensity. An examination of the protagonists of the most important contemporary women’s organizations, especially the Milanese academic and feminist of German-Jewish origins, Paolina Schiff, initiator of the Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili, and the social worker and cofounder and longtime president of the UFN, Nina Rignano Sullam, allows for the reconstruction of the role of Jewish actors as international networkers and of the history of the organized Italian women’s movement in the context of the contemporary European peace movement. Paolina Schiff’s educated and transnational family background—she was born in Mannheim and raised in Trieste in an Italian-Jewish irredentist environment—was a decisive factor in her increasingly important position from the 1870s onward within both the Italian and the international women’s movements. With her involvement in feminist, political, and intellectual networks, above all in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Great Britain, this feminist and pacifist epitomized the transnational tradition of the first Italian women’s movement, whose originally strong orientation toward the international peace movement would collapse during the First World War. The generally strong identification of Jewish men and women with the Italian unification movement, based on its inherent promise of emancipation, is clearly exemplified in Paolina Schiff’s family history. With her connections to the contemporary Lombard radical-democratic circles, which introduced her to the European peace movement, her proximity

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to Jewish and non-Jewish feminists both within and outside of Italy, as well as her contacts with the international labor movement, Schiff, Felice Cavallotti’s university assistant, found herself in a key position for transnational sociopolitical engagement at the end of the nineteenth century. She became a champion for the two central goals of the early organized women’s movement, which were maintained within the relevant institutions until the fascist era: the achievement of female suffrage, and the establishment of state maternity funds to support working mothers. The fact that Schiff’s pioneering Casse di maternità project was taken up in a different form in Germany by the socialist Lily Braun and the Jewish feminists Alice Salomon and Henriette Fürth is further proof of the transnational networking of the contemporary women’s movement and the frequent role of Jewish women as mediators or transmitters of information. The maternity funds constituted an important experimental field for the sort of “practical feminism” that was characteristic of the Italian context and was central to politically left-leaning women’s associations like the UFN. In keeping with Sara Levi Nathan’s earlier conceptions, practical feminism aimed at making changes in the law and bringing about a fundamental improvement in the social conditions of working women and mothers. While Schiff appeared at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century to be a successfully integrated actor of German-Jewish origins, particularly in republican-anticlerical and socialist circles, as an academic, she continued to embody the characteristic position of a twofold outsider as a woman and a Jew. Like Sara Levi Nathan and Adele Della Vida Levi years earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century Paolina Schiff too became the target of polemics from reactionary Catholic circles with antifeminist and anti-Jewish overtones. Schiff’s protracted efforts to achieve an appointment as a Privatdozentin clearly reflect the subordinate position of female scholars at the time in academic circles and the reservations of the established professorial class in unified Italy regarding claims to female participation, which likely also contained subtle anti-Jewish prejudices against a well-known socialist feminist of Jewish origins. Like Schiff’s Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili, the UFN too— the most important organization of the early Italian women’s movement, founded in 1899—had close ties to the socialist culture of the Lombard capital. The foundation and early history of the UFN have been associated primarily with the charismatic activist Ersilia Majno to this day, but the importance of Nina Rignano Sullam, daughter of the longtime

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president of the Milanese Jewish community, Giuseppe Sullam, cannot be stated strongly enough, both for the organizational structure and for the conceptual development of the institution. Unlike Schiff, Rignano Sullam was closely connected with the organized Jewish community of the Lombard metropolis throughout her life, although she apparently became an atheist in her younger years. Her Jewish self-positioning was largely based on her extended family-and-friendship networks, which also constituted the starting point for the continually expanding group of Jewish members of the UFN. Up until its forced closure following the promulgation of the racial laws, the association registered the highest proportion of Jewish members (consistently around 10%) of all the secular women’s organizations in Italy. Although there were traces of a secular Jewish subculture within the UFN as well, its socialist and laicist orientation created an environment in which Jewish–non-Jewish relationships increased steadily from the end of the nineteenth century onward. In contrast, actors of Jewish origins played an altogether less important part in the CNDI, founded in Rome in 1903 and shaped by women from the Italian aristocracy. The sociopolitical climate of the Lombard metropolis favored the integration and sociopolitical involvement of Jewish women more significantly than did the culture in Rome, strongly influenced by the Catholic Church, where the ghetto had been opened up as late as 1870. A further central reason for the remarkable influx of Jewish feminists into the UFN was the concept of “political philanthropy,” largely developed by Nina Rignano Sullam, which had already been a feature of Paolina Schiff’s engagement. Instead of limiting themselves purely to making donations, they attempted to combine welfare with modern methods of social work and to provide needy people with help through self-help based on active sociopolitical engagement. In addition, Rignano Sullam picked up on social and educational initiatives from the international discourse and made them known within the UFN in order to draw inspiration from these for their own projects. Her involvement in the struggle against the trade in women and girls matched the general, distinctively transnational commitment in favor of abolitionism among contemporary Jewish feminists. The Committee against the White Female Slave Trade, founded in 1901, gave Nina Rignano Sullam the opportunity to express both her identification with the contemporary laicist women’s rights discourse and her solidarity with the Italian-Jewish communities in their measures against the trade in women and girls.

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The UFN’s central spheres of activity confirm the successful continuation of the initiatives begun by Sara Levi Nathan in the 1860s. The women’s union’s distinct orientation toward laicism, education, and abolitionism, in combination with modern social work, was due in large part to the above-average participation of Jewish women, whose cultural heritage could thus influence the organization. Nina Rignano Sullam’s biography is therefore not only exemplary for the progressive emancipation process of Italian-Jewish women but also for the continued existence of a Jewish identity which was increasingly detached from religion but remained an active principle within interpersonal relationships and social concepts. The fact that the ADEI came into existence in 1927 against a background of starkly altered political and social circumstances in immediate personal and local connection with the UFN in Milan is a relevant indicator of this continuity. With the successful establishment of the most important secular women’s organizations in liberal Italy from the beginning of the twentieth century onward—the UFN in Milan and the CNDI in Rome—the tensions between Jewish-laicist and Catholic activists markedly increased. The combination of Catholic anti-Judaism and anti-laicism, central for the Italian context, proved especially explosive within the contemporary women’s movement, since Jewish women were represented in large numbers, and often in leading positions, in the laicist institutions. Furthermore, they assumed central roles in the foundation of secular educational institutions and in the establishment of reform-pedagogical methods in the sphere of education and instruction, areas still largely dominated by the Catholic Church and especially by Catholic women from the upper social classes, despite the state’s laicist self-concept. Many of them became involved in Catholic women’s orders and ecclesiastical associations as part of the feminization of religion. In contrast, the vast majority of Jewish feminists were active under the auspices of laicism, which was represented primarily by liberal bourgeois men at least for the first decades after the establishment of the state. Thus, Jewish feminists moved outside of the bipolar gender model of liberal Italy. In the twentieth century, and with a new generation, laicism and anticlericalism gradually lost their resonance for the Italian bourgeoisie. The strife between Catholic and laicist women, including many Jewish actors, regarding the position of Catholic religious education in Italian elementary schools unleashed in 1908 in the context of the national women’s congress in Rome was an expression of the increasing strength

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of the Catholic majority culture and the consequently heightened ideological contrasts within the women’s movement. The examination of the respective discourses shows that the organized Catholic women’s decisive self-distancing from the nondenominational women’s unions from 1908 onward was based on a convergence of anti-laicist motivations and anti-Jewish attitudes. The polemics of Catholic activists displayed, in an increasingly obvious way, the programmatic and structural similarities between anti-feminism and antisemitism. A radicalization process is observable from the Libyan War of 1911/1912 onward, which led to the intensification of antisemitic tendencies in Italy. Between 1911 and the beginning of the First World War, the Catholic women’s movement strove to propagate a uniform and exclusive national consciousness based on Catholicism, in agreement with the concept of the “Catholic fatherland” as presented by the Civiltà Cattolica. This was directed against laicist and Jewish women alike. The development reached a peak in 1916, when the prominent Catholic activist Elena da Persico warned Catholic women of the danger of a “Jewish-freemason conspiracy,” drawing on antisemitic stereotypes from the overall European discourse. Da Persico’s idea of combating a supposedly “anti-Christian,” “Jewish” fashion acquired increased resonance during the fascist dictatorship, especially from the Concordat of 1929 onward. In contrast to the political culture of liberal Italy, areas traditionally dominated by the Catholic Church, and especially by Catholic women, such as education, the school system, and fashion, offered fertile ground for the dissemination of anti-Jewish thought, which could then be radicalized under the fascist dictatorship.

7.3

The First World War as a Turning Point

The study of the expectations, experiences, and memories of ItalianJewish feminists in the context of the First World War has clarified the drastic and lasting relevance of the Grande Guerra for ideological developments, Jewish–non-Jewish relationships, and transformations of gender relationships. As their writings reveal, they initially interpreted the war above all as the fulfillment of the Risorgimento and as a just “war of liberation” for Italian independence and unity. Jewish and non-Jewish interventionist women, most of them from the middle and upper bourgeoisie, preferentially referred to Mazzini’s concept of nationalism as a

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promise of emancipation and participation, while deliberately ignoring the exclusive and aggressive elements of this concept. For Jewish women, the recourse to the Risorgimento was furthermore an expression of the patriotic enthusiasm unleashed by the First World War in Italy’s Jewish minority in general. The war situation provided an outstanding opportunity for them to prove their national solidarity and gratitude toward the Royal House of Savoy for having granted Jewish emancipation. Jewish feminists placed great hopes in the war for a successful continuation of the social integration process in terms of both Jewish and women’s emancipation. The idea that during the First World War, Italy would act on behalf of Jews living in oppression in other places played a significant role in the positive assessment of the war in its early phase. Female Jewish protagonists of the Italian minorities in cities like Trieste and Trento hoped for liberation from the “Austrian yoke” and the combination of national and territorial unity. Despite the antisemitic tendencies that had become visible within the women’s movement in the runup to the conflict and its beginning, Italy seemed from this idealistic perspective to be a place of complete freedom and tolerance. This is why irredentist positions were frequently to be found among Jewish members of the Italian women’s movement. Overall, Italian patriotism in combination with a strongly anti-Austrian attitude, which had already been central to the ideological self-concept of the pioneers of the Italian women’s movement, now acquired new urgency for the younger generation of Jewish feminists too under the political circumstances of the Grande Guerra. Notably, protagonists like Gina Lombroso, Laura Orvieto, and Amelia Rosselli came from families that had directly participated in the Italian wars of independence. In many cases, the First World War effected a long-term intensification of ItalianJewish family identities based on the revitalization and transmission of memories of the commitment of fathers and ancestors for Italian unity and the Jewish equality that went with it. The generally strongly interventionist tendency among Jewish feminists is expressively reflected in Amelia Rosselli’s correspondence from that period. When the debate over neutrality versus intervention split the Italian women’s movement in 1914, Jewish actors ranked predominantly among the interventionists. The disastrous defeat of Caporetto in autumn 1917 shifted the few remaining pacifists in the Italian women’s movement from their ideals as well. The long-time peace activist and

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socialist Paolina Schiff, for example, still supported Italian neutrality at the beginning of the war, but from 1917 onward, she positioned herself in the interventionist camp alongside Kuliscioff and Turati. Even leading representatives of the pacificist-oriented Milanese UFN like Nina Rignano Sullam favored an Italian entry into the war on the side of the Entente after Caporetto at the latest, interpreting it as a “democratic war” against the reactionary Central Powers. This overwhelming illusion ousted the significance of international pacifism, which had been a defining feature of the development of the Italian women’s movement in the nineteenth century. Along with the remarkable receptivity of Jewish women to irredentism and interventionism, the ego documents and journals examined here also reflect a temporary approachment between Jewish protagonists and the Catholic milieu based on the experiences of the war. Active participation in aid organizations and hospitals led to an intensified encounter between Jewish women, especially nurses, and the non-Jewish Italian majority society. The relationship with nuns in the extreme situation of the war, which is represented as having been free from tension in the diaries of the red cross nurse Silvia Treves and in the autobiography of Laura Orvieto, differs remarkably from the predominantly anticlerical attitude of Jewish protagonists prior to the conflict. However, the substantially emotional approachment to the Catholic culture of the Italian majority society during the First World War had a fundamentally patriotic character, as can be confirmed by looking at the contemporary social initiatives and publications in the Jewish press. Only in Laura Orvieto’s case did the experiences of the First World War lead to lasting ties beyond the period of conflict to the Catholic milieu of her chosen home of Florence. At the same time, her own primary allegiances continued to be to the laicist associations and to the Florentine Jewish community. Affirmations of Jewish-Christian solidarity that can be seen in the contemporary publications of female Jewish writers were primarily an expression of patriotic sentiments and Italian national spirit. Despite the socially and politically strengthened Catholicism, the vast majority of Jewish feminists continued to define themselves in terms of a distinctive laicism, which they saw as the central heritage of the Risorgimento, especially given that their attempt to reach an understanding with the Catholic women’s movement had failed once more at the beginning of the war due to the latter’s uncompromising self-distancing. A conscious distancing of the Jewish communities from Catholic institutions can also

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be seen with respect to the acute problem of Jewish war orphans. The Jewish-Christian approachment during the First World War proved to be incomplete and not durable. Both at home and at the front, the war situation not only brought about a generally greater proximity between female Jewish actors and their non-Jewish fellow citizens but also transformed gender relationships to the point that women were able to prove their independence, often for the first time. A new female self-consciousness began to develop especially among members of the Italian bourgeoisie, with the discussions underway since the beginning of the century regarding a reform of the legal position of women as the political background. While Nina Rignano Sullam, who had knowledge of legal matters, actively participated within the UFN in the preparations for the draft Sacchi law, writers like Virginia Treves Tedeschi, Enrica Barzilai Gentilli, and Laura Orvieto influenced the current feminist discourse through their contributions to the contemporary women’s emancipation press. Like other bourgeois members of the laicist women’s organizations in general, they emphasized the concept of work as the path to emancipation as well as to the equal position of women within the family. Several of these texts point to their authors’ steadfast identification with Mazzini’s dictum whereby the wife was her husband’s intellectually equal “companion,” which was closely tied to the Jewish-laicist figurehead of the Italian women’s movement, Sara Levi Nathan. This connection constituted a further point of reference for the central importance of the Risorgimento in the emancipatory conceptions of Jewish feminists during the Grande Guerra. The promulgation of the legge Sacchi in July 1919 signaled a partial emancipatory success. The new law allowed women to practice many professions and abolished the autorizzazione maritale, which had given husbands administrative powers over their wives. However, Italian women were still denied the primary goal of the Italian and the European women’s movements altogether: the right to vote. In Italy’s Jewish communities too, the subordinate position of women remained largely unchanged despite their outstanding social and cultural engagement during the war. Italian-Jewish feminists were still quite some distance away from their goal of complete social and political emancipation both as women and as Jews. As has been shown from the surviving memoirs of Italian-Jewish women and their families regarding the First World War, authors like

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Laura Orvieto and Amelia Rosselli omitted both the intensifying antisemitism and the still unfulfilled intentions as to women’s emancipation in connection with the Grande Guerra. This can be explained based on the context in which these ego documents were produced; they were written mainly during the 1930s and 1940s. Present antisemitic hostility and increasing existential hardship led to a deceptive memorialization of the Great War among Italian-Jewish women and men as a period of complete national community. The alleged success story of Italian Jews that was only annihilated under fascism appears to be confirmed on this version of events. In hindsight, Italian-Jewish protagonists perceived the Great War as a bygone era in which antisemitism had not existed among their Italian fellow citizens. The demonstrable presence of antisemitic attitudes in Catholic (women’s) circles and the successful promulgation of the fascist racial laws only two decades after the end of the world war clearly contradict this ideal image. The few years between the end of the First World War and the fascist takeover of power were a period of political and personal crossroads. In the postwar period, both Jewish and non-Jewish women chose quite varied ideological options that were directly influenced by their own experience of the war. In general, the failure to achieve equal footing for women as citizens led to a markedly strong effort on behalf of female suffrage specifically among Jewish actors. The antisemitic tendencies that had become apparent within the Catholic women’s movement at the beginning of the world war conferred new relevance on the old demands for emancipation and the desire to put an end to their twofold outsider position as women and as Jews. In general, in the period between war and dictatorship, Jewish feminists continued to lean mostly (left-)liberal or socialist, whereas the organized Italian women’s movement took a strong turn to the right toward fascist positions. However, even a few Jewish protagonists like Margherita Sarfatti and Elisa Majer Rizzioli, who founded the Fasci Femminili in 1920, came under the spell of the strengthening fascist movement. D’Annunzio’s “March on Fiume” had the effect of rekindling the characteristic irredentist enthusiasm of the war period in quite a few Italian-Jewish activists. For most of them, this was limited to an idealistic irredentism in connection with their enduring Italian patriotism, but for Majer Rizzioli, it led to militantly fascist attitudes. Regarding the organizations of the Italian women’s movement, the socialist-oriented UFN maintained a critical stance toward fascism. In

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contrast, the Rome-based CNDI, which had already assumed more strongly nationalist and antisocialist positions during the war, took on a pro-fascist course in the postwar period. The analysis of the archives of the relevant organizations has clarified that from the early 1920s onward, it was the chapter of the CNDI based in Florence that increasingly opposed the ideological direction of the headquarters in Rome, which was strong in membership and dominated by aristocrats. The Federazione Toscana maintained its largely left-liberal and laicist orientation well into the postwar period, due in large part to its influential Jewish members. The ideological conflicts between the dominant Rome headquarters and the Florentine chapter, which gradually came to a head from 1920 onward as can be seen from the sources, bear witness to the CNDI’s increasing accommodation to fascism and to the departure from the organization’s decidedly laicist origins, which had constituted a central precondition for the participation of Jewish women and their identification with the goals of the CNDI since the beginning of the century. One of the consequences was massive transformations of the membership structure: between 1920 and 1922, several prominent Jewish members of the Florentine group made demonstrative exits from the CNDI, to be replaced by philo-fascist aristocrats. Thus, in the early 1920s and in parallel with the rise of fascism, the Florentine chapter lost its liberal character, which had been largely shaped by its Jewish members, and became ever more strongly dominated by aristocratic sympathizers of the fascist movement, analogously to the headquarters in Rome. This ideological development, which the CNDI chose in the postwar period, had its origin in the emergence of aggressive nationalism during the First World War, from which the threshold to assuming fascist positions was very low. The tracks for the fascisization of the national women’s movement and the marginalization of actors critical of the regime, including many Jewish women, were laid down in the years between war and dictatorship.

7.4 Social Marginalization and Zionist New Beginning During the Fascist Dictatorship The fascist dictatorship initially excluded Jewish women from society, then, from 1936 onward, persecuted their rights, and finally, from 1943 onward, deprived them of their lives. The emancipation of the Jews that

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had been extended throughout Italy in 1861 was abolished in 1938, after little more than seven decades. The analysis of the situation of Jewish feminists has shown that their marginalization phase was already underway during the 1920s. Within the CNDI, which explicitly declared its solidarity with fascism immediately after the March on Rome, political and latent anti-Jewish motivations combined in the targeted exclusion of ideological deviants. As has emerged from the documents examined, the aim of forging a unified orientation for the CNDI, loyal to the regime, through the marginalization of politically undesirable members and the subsumption of smaller women’s associations into the main organization was already being steadily implemented from the beginning of fascist rule onward. The exclusion of the long-time Jewish member Nina Sierra from the CNDI, achieved by slanderous means against the background of Matteotti’s murder, is a clear sign of the already advanced fascist penetration of the national women’s association in 1924. Sierra’s proximity to the UFN and to socialist feminists like Paolina Schiff must have constituted the main reason for the hate campaign. At the same time, it cannot be excluded that antisemitic attitudes were also present in the leading circles of the CNDI, dominated by Catholic aristocrats, who would have seen the secular Jew Nina Sierra as a threat to the ideological direction of the national women’s association. With its renunciation of the laicist principle, the CNDI’s differences with the Catholic women’s organization lessened, a development that ran parallel to the approachment between fascism and the Catholic Church. Significantly, the CNDI explicitly agreed to Giovanni Gentile’s school reform in 1923, which focused on the significance of Catholic religious education as the most important foundation for national education. In contrast, back in 1908, it was on precisely this point that arguments had broken out between devout Catholic women and (Jewish-)laicist members of the CNDI. The large national women’s association’s accommodation to the fascist regime and the disappearance of its laicist ideal had a generally negative impact on the room for maneuver for feminists of Jewish origins, who had for decades been involved in the Italian women’s movement predominantly under the aegis of laicism. The marginalization of secular, especially anti-fascist protagonists, was thus preordained. However, with the murder of Matteotti and the increasingly brutal persecution of political opponents on the part of the regime, anti-fascist women like Amelia Rosselli and the Lombroso sisters were not only

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threatened with institutional exclusion. The analyzed surviving private correspondence show that from the mid-1920s onward, the already existing Jewish family-and-friendship networks drew even closer together in the face of the acute existential danger. The gradual exclusion from public life through continual police surveillance, coupled with the strong turn to the right within the national women’s association, brought about an intensified solidarity between anti-fascist feminists of Jewish origins, who had always maintained close mutual connections within the relevant organizations. Amelia Rosselli, whose sons Carlo and Nello developed into central figures of the opposition, became a focal point of the anti-fascist networks. Fascist discrimination and violence seem to have taken a strongly antisemitic turn in the mid-1920s in Florence, and were aimed directly against actors like the Rossellis. At the time, however, as can be seen in the case of Nina Sierra’s defamation, antisemitism was probably not yet the prime motivation but rather an additional reason for attacks on Jewish opponents of the regime. The fact that Jewish feminists were quite aware of this tendency can be seen from the letters of Bice Cammeo, who declared unconditional solidarity with the ostracized Amelia Rosselli and her sons. The letters revealed how identification with the values of women’s solidarity and the awareness of common family memories found their way into current political circumstances. These confirmed and strengthened the group consciousness characteristic of Jewish protagonists like Rosselli, the Lombrosos, and Cammeo, which had combined with anti-fascist positions in parallel with the rise of Mussolini. In the face of fascist encirclement, the Jewish-internal sphere gained increasing significance even for secular Jewish women from the mid-1920s onward. It became a place of refuge in a hostile environment. As the analysis of the foundation and early history of the ADEI has demonstrated, the establishment of the first Jewish women’s union in Italy was directly related to the conditions under fascist dictatorship. It was the result of two parallel developments: first, the persecution of anti-fascist groups and the progressive fascist infiltration of the still-existing women’s associations led to the marginalization of actors who had always been on the left of the political spectrum. At the same time, Jewish cultural circles and Zionist groups moved into intensive activity in Italy between 1923 and 1928, triggering heightened interest in Judaism and Zionist ideas among secular Jewish women too. The social worker Berta Cammeo Bernstein, founder of the ADEI and former long-time member of the UFN, was

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positioned, significantly, at the intersection of these two developments. The establishment of a group of female Jewish actors in 1927 in Milan, which formed the nucleus of the ADEI, was directly related to Cammeo Bernstein’s ties to contemporary socialism, her advocacy against the trade in women and girls, and her personal approachment to the revitalized Italian Zionism. The sources clearly show that the origins of the organization lay in the characteristic nexus of socialism, anti-fascism, feminism, and Zionism that had developed around Berta Cammeo Bernstein in Milan in the mid-1920s. At a time in which actors critical of the regime were excluded from the CNDI and Mussolini had placed every form of union under police surveillance by law, the new establishment of a women’s organization independent of the Fascist Party and the Fasci Femminili was remarkable. The undertaking became possible because Berta Cammeo Bernstein consciously emphasized the philanthropic character of the ADEI without formulating political claims. In this way, the pioneers of the ADEI created a place for themselves that, in the first decade of its existence at least, was largely untroubled by the fascist dictatorship’s repressive measures, in which they could be socially active while simultaneously deepening a common Jewish consciousness. From the end of the 1920s onward, numerous members of the UFN also joined the Jewish women’s association, since it offered them a relatively protected sphere for the implementation of social and cultural projects until well into the 1930s. The Milanese ADEI thus became a political place of refuge in which even the networks of the UFN could initially be partially maintained, under different auspices and with the tolerance of the fascist regime. At the same time, the Jewish women’s union developed into a locus of a transformed, increasingly religious Jewish self-consciousness that began to transcend the secular Jewish family identities and networks within the pre-fascist Italian women’s movement. In this context, the approach to countering the fascist school policy acquired central importance, since the latter, with its strong emphasis on Catholic religious education and the exclusively Catholic Christian character of the entire curriculum, had realized the long-term goals of the intransigent Catholic camp, especially the Catholic women’s organization, in the pedagogical sphere. The construction of the “Catholic nation” advanced steadily under fascism. Therefore, the ADEI’s decided promotion of Jewish religious education represented an effort to combat the progressive removal of Jewish culture and identity from the sphere of education and to counter the fascist violation of

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the legal principle of equality of religions with all the means still at its disposal. On the other hand, the ADEI’s Zionist orientation was concealed from the public gaze as much as possible from the outset. Although the founders, Berta Cammeo Bernstein, Gabriella Falco Ravenna, and Vittoria Cantoni Pisa, declared preparation of Jewish women for emigration to Palestine as one of the principal goals of their organization and the ADEI also joined the Wizo in March 1928, its members underplayed its Zionist character for years out of a justified fear of fascist repression. The background to this was the generally contradictory attitude of fascism toward Zionism, which in November 1928 took a decidedly antiZionist path. Mussolini himself suspected the movement of separatist and subversive internationalist activities. As an examination of the ideological positioning and life paths of representative actors has shown, a Zionist self-consciousness was undoubtedly present among the pioneers of the ADEI, especially the important Milanese group. However, the fact that the association demonstrated a rapid increase in membership numbers all over Italy between 1927 and 1937 was primarily due to the increasing marginalization of Jewish women under the conditions of the fascist dictatorship. Since the ADEI accepted all ideological tendencies, it developed into a place of Jewish solidarity even for nonZionist women within which they could still realize social and cultural activities. At the same time, the local groups often diverged far from the ideals of the Milanese founders. The unique connection between feminism, socialism, and Zionism could not be durably maintained within the larger organization. In the 1930s, there were even fascist sympathizers in the ranks of the ADEI. It was only in the years after the promulgation of the racial laws that the organization’s political self-consciousness transformed toward strongly anti-fascist positions.

7.5

Phases of Disenfranchisement and Persecution Until 1945

The years after the conclusion of the Lateran treaties, concretely the period between 1931 and 1935, can be defined as “the prelude to disenfranchisement.” After Catholicism was declared the only valid religion of the Italian state in 1929 and the equality of all religions, formerly enshrined in law, was thereby abolished, the principle of laicism no longer existed. Fascism had annihilated one of the central prerequisites

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for the nineteenth-century Jewish emancipation, which had always been a defining feature for the strong engagement of Jewish feminists in the secular women’s associations. The membership counts of the ADEI steadily increased in this context, whereas several activists of Jewish origins exited the CNDI in the 1930s now that the organization had, in accordance with the fascist school and religious policies, completely distanced itself from its former laicist selfconcept. Countess Daisy de Robilant, a supporter of Mussolini who was named president of the CNDI by the fascist government in 1931, played a significant role in the progressively fascist alignment of the contemporary women’s organizations. Once again, it was several Jewish members of the CNDI resident in Florence who demonstratively exited the organization in 1931. They made a stand against the new president’s intention of transforming the CNDI into a fascist “great federation of all women’s associations.” The CNDI’s structural “reorganization” had far-reaching consequences especially for the Italian association of academic women (FILDIS), in whose local sections numerous women of Jewish origins had leading positions. For example, the president of the Rome chapter of the FILDIS was Sarina Nathan Levi Della Vida, a granddaughter of Sara Levi Nathan and granddaughter-in-law of Adele Della Vida Levi, who, with her name and her ancestry, seemed to embody par excellence the antisemitic prejudice of a “Jewish-freemason conspiracy” within the secular women’s associations. In 1935, the committee of the CNDI euphemistically “invited” the FILDIS to dissolve itself. It is most likely that the generally strong presence of Jewish women within the academic union was one of the primary reasons for its enforced ending. The arrest of a group of Piedmontese anti-fascists in 1934, all of them members of the Giustizia e Libertà movement led by Carlo Rosselli, had greatly strengthened suspicions of a fundamental connection between Judaism and anti-fascism. The event unleashed Jewish prejudices against female and male Jewish actors in secular associations, especially those, like the FILDIS, that had an international and intellectual character. By 1935, the fascisization of the organized Italian women’s movement was largely complete. As can be proven from membership lists, letters, and meeting minutes, by the mid-1930s, Jewish women were scarcely to be found in the relevant associations, due to voluntary or forced resignations and exclusions. They increasingly switched over to the ADEI. The UFN too, which to external appearances was focused on welfare activities,

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continued to provide a limited space for social engagement on the part of Jewish feminists until its violent end after the promulgation of the racial laws. The inexorable radicalization of fascist “Jewish policy” in the months before November 1938 can be clearly seen from the progressive exclusion of Jewish protagonists from the national women’s movement. This paralleled the exacerbation of the defamatory campaign against the Jews in the press and the anticipated separation of Jews and non-Jews in Italian universities. The relevant documents of the Pubblica Sicurezza reveal that the UFN, with its high number of Jewish members, had also already come under the scrutiny of the fascist leadership before the promulgation of the racial laws. The Turin chapter was the first to be dissolved, as early as July 1938, due to the Jewish origins and “socialist leanings” of its president, Elisa Treves, under pressure from the Fascist Party and with the consent of the Ministry of the Interior. In this way, the model was created for the dissolution of the important Milanese UFN. The association’s pioneer and figurehead, Nina Rignano Sullam, had already announced her voluntary exit from the organization at the beginning of July, a few days before the publication of the “Manifesto della Razza.” The attempts of nonJewish members to dissuade Rignano Sullam from her decision once again underscore the distinct ideological difference between the UFN and the CNDI, which had already excluded Jewish women as much as possible before 1938. After the promulgation of the racial laws, the definitive end was at hand for the Milanese UFN, which had been cofounded and greatly influenced by Jewish women in 1899, in a climate of emancipation and laicism. In early December 1938, the Milanese Fasci Femminili demanded a list of the names of all the UFN’s members “of the Jewish race,” together with the request that these women be excluded from the organization. In mid-December 1938, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the UFN to close, and on January 31, 1939, the Milanese prefecture issued a decree according to which the UFN headquarters was to be dissolved and its property confiscated. After the violent evacuation of the house, the symbol of the association, the local Fascio took possession of the building. Nina Rignano Sullam, who had withdrawn to Liguria, never returned permanently to Milan before her death in 1945. Her deeply rooted Jewish family identity revealed itself in the fact that, in contrast to Frida Marx Ceccon and other members of the UFN, and despite the

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persecution of the fascist regime, she neither took baptism nor applied for an exception from the racial laws. From November 1938 onward, all the institutions of the Italian women’s movement still in existence expelled their last Jewish members. After the violent end of the UFN, the ADEI was the only organization in Italy still open to Jewish women. But while the ADEI’s membership numbers had steadily risen up until 1938 as a consequence of the displacement of Jewish actors from the secular women’s organizations, after the passage of the racial laws there was a rapid quantitative decline in membership. This can be explained, on the one hand, by the emigration of numerous protagonists, and on the other, by the fear on the part of many women that their membership of the ADEI would reveal their Jewish heritage and lay them directly open to the regime’s oppressive measures. Thus, the actual membership counts after 1938 might have been at least slightly higher than indicated in the relevant documents. From the beginning of the 1940s onward, the existence of the organization was increasingly imperilled. Against the background of the war situation and the incipient extermination of the Jews in Eastern Europe by Italy’s German ally, the fascist government stepped up its anti-Jewish measures also. In this context, the ADEI, which, aside from its Milanese group, had during the 1920s and 1930s seen itself as a rather apolitical union and consciously avoided conflicts with the fascist government, developed anti-fascist tendencies. In May 1941, its Rome chapter fell under suspicion of anti-fascist activities, since none of its remaining members belonged to the Fascist Party and the close connections between the women’s union and interned Jews had come to light. Furthermore, the members’ Zionist orientation and their contacts with Palestine could no longer be concealed. The prejudices against Zionism, promoted by Mussolini himself, gained new ground due to the opposition to Great Britain, Italy’s war opponent, and to the concurrent radicalization of the fascist “Jewish policy.” As the relevant documents have revealed, by 1941 at the latest the fascist authorities considered the members of the ADEI politically dangerous “antifascist internationalists.” Although the Jewish women’s union as a whole continued its existence until September 1943 under increasingly difficult circumstances, for the Rome chapter it became nearly impossible to organize unobserved gatherings from the summer of 1941 onward.

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With the German occupation of Italy in September 1943 and the establishment of the RSI, the assault on the lives of Italian Jews began. The reconstruction of the fates of Jewish feminists in the period between 1943 and 1945, who sought to preserve their lives through flight or in hiding, or else were murdered in extermination camps, provides a relevant part of the immense historical dimension of the persecution and murder of Italian-Jewish women, men, and children in the Shoah. After September 8, 1943, the members of the ADEI, who resided primarily in Rome and in northern and central Italy, began to fight for their lives. While Berta Cammeo Bernstein’s daughter Marta Bernstein Navarra managed to escape to Switzerland, and Gabriella Falco Ravenna together with her daughters took refuge with the lawyer Arturo Carlo Jemolo in Rome and Ariccia, the philologist Augusta Jarach, one of the pioneers of the ADEI, was deported to Auschwitz in February 1944. Flight, hiding, and deportation also shaped the fates of the last Jewish members of the UFN. Nina Rignano Sullam spent the last two years of her life under assumed names in various small villages in northern Italy; Bice Cammeo, who was nearly the same age, was the only member of her family to survive in a hideout in Florence. On the other hand, the Milanese agronomist Aurelia Josz, who believed herself safe in a monastery in Alassio, was apparently denounced at the end of 1943. After several months of imprisonment and internment, the seventy-four-year-old was deported to Auschwitz and murdered immediately after her arrival on June 26, 1944. Laura Orvieto and Paola Lombroso were among the few surviving Italian-Jewish feminists to resume their social and cultural engagement after the war. Their friendship with Amelia Rosselli, who returned to Florence from American exile in 1946, was also able to bridge the abyss of the Shoah. However, the formerly far-reaching national and transnational networks of the Italian-Jewish feminists were irrevocably destroyed after war and genocide. While the Jewish protagonists of the Italian women’s movement were largely forgotten after 1945, their intellectual achievements in terms of legal reforms, pedagogical innovations, and modern social work within the women’s movement lived on. These constituted the cultural heritage of the pioneers who had not been able to experience emancipation as women and as Jews during their lifetimes. At the end of the Second World War, in the midst of loss and destruction, Paola Lombroso designed a project for the future support and care of Italian schoolchildren from her Swiss exile. However, her text went far beyond a simple scope of work. It was an expression of the ideal

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going back to Sara Levi Nathan of a democratic social order without religious restrictions, which had always been the strongest motivator for the engagement of Jewish women in the Italian women’s movement between Risorgimento and fascism: Now that the defeat of Germany is becoming a certainty and the end of the war is in sight, those of us waiting to return to Italy have before our eyes the vision of the ruins that we will find there, and not only the irremediable bereavements but also the needs which we must come to help meet. Besides the global problems, which only the work of governments will be able to resolve, there are more concrete problems that our individual efforts can take on… With the greatest respect for all religions, we laicists carry within us… the passionate desire to work together for the material and moral reconstruction of a world that can erase the present shame and pain, a world of justice and freedom, for whose new and old principles husbands, brothers, and sons have laid down their lives, for whom many of us grieve and yearn to ensure that their memory and their sacrifice will never vanish.3

3 Paola Lombroso to “Cara Amica,” undated (1944), Archivio UFN, b. 10, fasc. 64: Maternità e infanzia (1901–1949).

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Person Index

Note: The page number followed by ’n’ and ’f’ denotes footnotes and figures A Alcibiades, Athenian statesman and general , 116n Aliverti, Ottavia, niece of Paolina Schiff , 110n Amatori, Augusto, 287n Amore, Nicola, 123 Anceschi, Alberto, 287n Ancona, Clemente, stockbroker, 20, 210, 210n, 211, 212 Ancona Contini, Emilia. See Contini Ancona, Emilia Ancona, Luisa, doctor, 217n Ancona, Margherita, literary scholar, 217, 219f, 220, 226f Arbib, Bianca, 134, 146n, 236 Arbib Finzi, Bianca. See Arbib, Bianca Arzelà in Morucci, Irma, 277 Ascarelli, Aldo, physician, grandson of Berta Cammeo Bernstein, 255n Ascarelli, Wanda, 256n Ascoli Nathan, Giulia [?], 166n

Ashurst Venturi, Emilie, painter, 79 Auerbach, Baruch Menachim, rabbi, father of Nanny Margulies , 254n Auerbach, Berthold, 39n Auerbach Margulies, Nanny. See Margulies, Nanny

B Baal Shem Tov, 265 Baer Stein, Betty, 265 Balan, Pietro, Catholic priest and journalist , 98n Ballerini, Raffaele, Jesuit , 157 Bandini Buti, Maria, 99n, 104n Baratono, Pietro, prefect , 280n Bartoloni, Pia, 225 Barzilai, Enrica. See Barzilai Gentilli, Enrica Barzilai Gentilli, Enrica, 204, 321 Barzilai, Salvatore, lawyer and politician, 185n

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Nattermann, Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4

369

370

PERSON INDEX

Bassani, Dina, 298n Basso, [?], doctor to the Rosselli family, 62 Bastianini, Giuseppe, politician and diplomat , 262n Beccari, Gualberta Alaide, 27f, 65, 65n, 76, 79, 95–98, 100–102, 107, 108, 117, 119f, 120, 125, 133, 313 Bemporad, Enrico, publisher, 173f, 267n Benigni, Umberto, presbyter, 226n Bernstein, Arrigo, son of Berta Cammeo Bernstein, 292n Bernstein, Arturo, textile manufacturer, husband of Berta Cammeo Bernstein, 255, 255n, 257f Bernstein Cammeo, Berta. See Cammeo Bernstein, Berta Bernstein, Elda, daughter of Berta Cammeo Bernstein, daughter-in-law of Ersilia Majno, 257, 259, 287n Bernstein Navarra, Marta, linguist and literary scholar, daughter of Berta Cammeo Bernstein, 15, 256, 256n, 261n, 275, 292n, 301, 331 Bernstein, Wanda, daughter of Berta Cammeo Bernstein, 256n Bertani, Agostino, politician, 115 Berti, Antonio, senator, 90 Biggs, Matilda, 72n Birnbaum, Bala, 187 Bisi Albini, Sofia, 223n Boghen Conigliani, Emma, 1, 7n Bonfiglioli, Wanda, 263, 263n Boschetti, Claudio, 98n Boschetti, Elisa, 151 Boschetti Pini, Larissa, 151, 193n, 281n, 285n

Bottai, Giuseppe, 279 Braun, Lily, 133, 315 Bronzini, Edgardo, lawyer, brother of Ersilia Majno, 138n Bronzini Majno, Ersilia. See Majno, Ersilia Butler, Josephine, 79, 79n, 118n, 120, 312

C Cagli della Pergola, Ada, writer, pseudonym: Fiducia, 196, 196n, 197n, 198 Calamandrei, Piero, 242, 306n Calò, Giovanni, politician and educator, 240 Cammeo Bernstein, Berta, 32, 253f, 254, 256, 257, 257n, 258, 258n, 259, 261, 261n, 262, 263, 265, 275, 287n, 292n, 296, 301, 302, 325f, 327, 331 Cammeo, Bice, 18, 20, 21, 32, 138n, 141, 141n, 147, 163, 191, 227, 236, 246–248, 254, 304, 325, 331 Cammeo, Cesare, father of Bice Cammeo, brother of Giacomo Cammeo, 255n Cammeo, Cesare, lawyer, son of Federico Cammeo, 304 Cammeo, Federico, lawyer, brother of Bice Cammeo, 141n, 247, 247n, 304 Cammeo, Giacomo, father of Berta Cammeo Bernstein, 255n Cammeo, Ida, mother of Bice Cammeo, 163, 246n Cammeo, Maria, daughter of Federico Cammeo, 304 Cantoni, Achille, banker, father of Laura Orvieto, 42, 42n, 186

PERSON INDEX

Cantoni, Arrigo, husband of Vittoria Cantoni Pisa, 270 Cantoni, Laura. See Orvieto, Laura Cantoni, Marcella, daughter of Vittoria Cantoni Pisa, 271 Cantoni, Maria, mother of Laura Orvieto, 44 Cantoni Orvieto, Amalia, mother of Angiolo Orvieto, 42n, 61 Cantoni Pisa, Vittoria, daughter of Ugo Pisa, president of the ADEI , 146, 146n, 259, 262, 263f, 265, 266, 270, 289, 293f, 293n, 294n, 296, 327 Capon, Emilia, mother of Amelia Rosselli née Pincherle, 42n, 55n Cappellano, [?], midwife, 62 Capriles, Regina, mother of Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo, 104 Carducci, Giosuè, 110n Carioli Condulmari, Lola, 285n Carrara, Maria Gina, daughter of Mario Carrara and Paola Lombroso, 305n Carrara, Mario, 44 Carrer, Luigi, writer and journalist , 105 Casati, Elena, mother of Ada Sacchi Simonetta, 276n Castelbolognesi, Gustavo, rabbi, 298 Castellani, Maria, 274 Castelnuovo, Enrico, writer, 94n Catanzaro, Carlo, 81n, 99n, 104n Cavallotti, Felice, 20, 40n, 110n, 115, 115f, 116, 116n, 119, 121, 122f, 123, 125, 129n, 135f, 136, 148, 162, 315 Cave, Marion, wife of Carlo Rosselli, 39n, 58n, 61, 62, 62n, 248, 248n Cavour, Camillo Benso, Count , 79, 182, 211

371

Ceccon, Adele, 82n Ceccon, Ernesto, lawyer, husband of Frida Marx Ceccon, 279n Ceccon, Vera, daughter of Frida Marx Ceccon, 279n Chelli, Emma, mother of Ida Momigliani Barletti, 232n Clerici, Carlotta, 235 Cohen, Samuel, secretary of the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, 154n Colombo, Anselmo, Journalist , 47n, 154n Console, Gustavo, 247 Contini Ancona, Emilia, 210, 210n, 222, 223 Cordelia. See Treves Tedeschi, Virginia Costa, Luisa, 203n Cova, Rosa, 289 Craufurd Saffi, Giorgina, 74, 74n, 79, 96 Crispi, Francesco, 112n, 128 D D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 221, 222, 224, 322 da Persico, Elena, 169f, 169, 175, 176, 178, 181, 184, 256n, 273n, 318 da Porretta, Massimo, friar, 198, 306 De Benedetti, Nina, wife of Cesare Lombroso, 55, 58, 59, 59n De Gubernatis, Angelo, 102n, 104n, 105n, 107n Della Vida, Cesare, member of parliament in the Repubblica di San Marco,brother of Adele Della Vida Levi, 83 Della Vida Levi, Adele, 2, 14, 20f, 27, 27f, 41, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87–94, 98, 98f, 102, 104, 108, 112, 132, 133, 141, 158, 159,

372

PERSON INDEX

162, 185, 275n, 277, 312, 313, 315, 328 Della Vida, Samuele, 82f De Magri, Egidio, historian and literary figure, 104 De Napoli, Antonio, army doctor, 194n Deraismes, Marie, 120 di Robilant, Daisy, 273 Dreyfus, Alfred, 172 Drumont, Edouard, 176 Durand, André, 120n D’Urbino, Olga, 232 E Elise, Cesare, 300n Errera, Abramo, Venetian patriot , 182 Errera, Anna, writer, 1, 38, 38n, 61, 166, 181–183, 262, 265, 266 Errera Cantoni, Annetta, 55 Errera, Cesare, father of Anna, Emilia, and Rosa Errera, 159n Errera, Emilia, literary scholar and historian, 38n, 159f, 181n Errera Levi, Amalia, 55 Errera, Rosa, educator and writer, 38n, 181n, 192, 193n F Falco, Anna Marcella, daughter of Mario Falco and Gabriella Falco Ravenna, 303f Falco, Graziella, daughter of Mario Falco and Gabriella Falco Ravenna, 302 Falco, Mario, lawyer, husband of Gabriella Falco Ravenna, 259, 289n, 302 Falco Ravenna, Gabriella, 15, 23, 32, 34, 253, 254, 254n, 259, 259n, 263, 263f, 263n, 264, 264n,

265f, 269, 269n, 270n, 271, 275, 289n, 296, 302, 303f, 303n, 305, 327, 331 Falcone, Simonetta, née Heger, great-niece of Aurelia Josz, 305n Fano, Davide, 299–300 Fano, Emanuele, 300 Fano, Emma, 299f Fano, Giustina, 88n Faracovi, Giovanni, colonel , 193n Feltrinelli, Giangiacomo, 20, 40n Ferrero, Guglielmo, 44, 44n, 241f, 243, 249, 305n Ferrero, Leo, 45f, 53, 54, 58, 241f, 242, 243 Ferrero Lombroso, Gina. See Lombroso, Gina Ferrero, Nina, 39n, 53n, 243 Ferri Benetti, Clara. See Ferri, Clara Ferri, Clara, 281n, 285n Fiano Neppi, Elisa (“Lisetta”), 293, 294 Finzi, Emilia, mother of Aurelia Josz, 304n Finzi, Ida, poet . See Haydée Foà, Delia, 264n Foa, Giuseppe, 289n Foà, Pio, senator, professor of medicine, 167f Foa, Vittorio, 289n Formeggini, Giuseppina (“Pina”), 264, 269 Forti, Elvira, 300 Fortis, Leone, lawyer, second husband of Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo, 107 Franchetti Morpurgo, Laura, 274, 274n Frank, Malvina, 96 French Cini, Elena, 215, 215n, 237, 237n Friedman Coduri, Teresa, 136n

PERSON INDEX

Friedman, Sigismondo, Germanist , 136 Fröbel, Friedrich, 2, 27, 81, 85, 87, 89–93, 133, 158, 159, 171, 312 Fröhlich, Emilia, educator, 92 Fuà Fusinato, Erminia, 100, 101, 103, 108 Fuà, Marco, doctor, father of Erminia Fuà Fusinato, 100 Fubini, Valeria, 270n Fuld, Augusta, grandmother of Paolina Schiff , 111 Fürth, Henriette, 133, 315 G Gabelli, Aristide, educator, 93 Gadola Lancini, Teresa, 151, 285n Garagnani, Timoleone, priest , 160n Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 99, 116, 119, 131, 182, 186, 276n Genoni, Rosa, 188n Gent, Frank, viii, 110n, 114, 215n Gentile, Giovanni, 32, 239f, 240, 266f, 324 Gentilli, Alberto, journalist , 185 Gentilomo, Giuseppe, scholar, husband of Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo, 105, 107 Gianni Lambertenghi, Ada, 285n Ginzburg, Leone, 276 Ginzburg, Natalia, 18f, 52n Giovanardi, Maria, 281n, 282, 287, 287n, 288, 288n, 290, 290n Giustiniani-Bandini, Cristina, 170, 170n, 171, 172n, 173–175, 175n Glass, Ciro, 251 Gnocchi Viani, Osvaldo, 139n, 144n Goegg, Amand, revolutionary from Baden, 119 Goegg, Marie, née Pouchoulin, 119–122 Goldschmidt, Henriette, 91

373

Gonzenbach, Maddalena, 98n Grassi, Fanny, mother of Paul Valéry, 45 Greco, Oscar, 81n, 92, 92n, 99, 99n, 102, 104, 104n, 105, 105n, 107, 108, 108n Grossi-Mercanti, Onorata, schoolbook author, 173f Guasconi, Adriana, aristocrat, wife of Leonfrancesco Orvieto, 198 Gugenheim, Susanna, 259, 275 H Hallgarten Franchetti, Alice, 166, 166n Haydée, poet, pseudonym of Ida Finzi, 1, 273n I Incontri, Gabriella, 232 J Jarach, Augusta, 259, 265, 266, 302, 305, 331 Jemolo, Arturo Carlo, lawyer and historian, 168n, 302, 331 Josz, Aurelia, 2, 25, 34, 193n, 304f, 331 Josz, Italo, painter, brother of Aurelia Josz, 305 Josz, Livio, painter, brother of Aurelia Josz, 304n Josz, Lodovico, father of Aurelia Josz, 304n Josz, Valeria, sister of Aurelia Josz, 305n K Kayserling, Meyer, rabbi and historian, 104, 104n

374

PERSON INDEX

King Solomon, 106 Kuliscioff, Anna, orig. Rosenstein, Anja, 117f, 117n, 131n, 138n, 188, 257, 320

L Labriola, Teresa, 175n, 205n, 220, 220n Lancini, Teresa, 281n, 285, 285n, 286 La Pira, Giorgio, 198n Launoy, Jean de, 176n Lazzari, Costantino, 227n Lebrecht, Guglielmo, 167n Lebrecht Vitali, Eugenia, 166, 166n, 217n Levelli, Donna Carla, 228 Levi, Alessandro, lawyer, husband of Sarina Nathan, 69n, 72 Levi, Carlo, 276 Levi Castelnuovo, Emma, daughter of Adele Della Vida Levi, 94n Levi, Clotilde, wife of Federico Cammeo, 304 Levi, David, cousin of Cesare Lombroso, 55 Levi Della Vida, Adele. See Della Vida Levi, Adele Levi Della Vida, Giorgio, orientalist, grandson of Adele Della Vida Levi, 83, 83n Levi Della Vida, Maria, 166n Levi Della Vida, Mario, physician, grandson of Adele Della Vida Levi, 275 Levi, Emanuele, merchant, father of Sara Levi Nathan, 67 Levi, Enzo, 168n Levi, Ettore, son of Adele Della Vida Levi, 83, 84, 94n Levi, Eugenia, writer, 196n

Levi Finzi, Cesira, 18, 95n, 100, 101, 102n, 107n Levi Ginzburg, Natalia. See Ginzburg, Natalia Levi, Giuseppe, professor of medicine, father of Natalia Ginzburg , 18 Levi, Giuseppe, rabbi, 16 Levi Grassini, Emma, 84n Levi, Lina, sister of Clotilde Levi, 304 Levi Luzzatti, Amelia, wife of Luigi Luzzatti, daughter of Adele Della Vida Levi, 93, 93n, 94n Levi Minzi, Anna. See Marx, Anna Levi Minzi, Giacomo, lawyer, 258n, 271 Levi Minzi, Guido (“Gad”), son of Anna Marx, 271n Levi, Mosè, husband of Adele Della Vida Levi, 41, 84 Levi Nathan, Sara, 12, 14, 19, 27, 42f, 65–82, 88, 90, 91, 94, 96–98, 108, 112, 115, 117, 132, 141, 148, 152, 154, 158–160, 162, 166, 229, 311f, 312, 313, 315, 317, 321, 328, 332 Levi Sarfatti, Eloisa, 274, 274n Levis Sullam, Simon, viii, 20, 143n Levi, Zefora, mother of Cesare Lombroso, 38 Lewald, Fanny, 98 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 128 Lombroso, Aronne, father of Cesare Lombroso, 38n, 53 Lombroso, Cesare, 18, 26, 44n, 44–47 Lombroso Ferrero, Gina. See Lombroso, Gina Lombroso, Gina, 18f, 19, 20, 25, 26, 32, 38, 44–47, 59, 112, 185, 241–244, 249, 292, 305f, 306f

PERSON INDEX

Lombroso, Paola, 18f, 19, 20, 38, 44, 46f, 59, 92, 175n, 305, 306, 306n, 307n, 331, 332n Luzzatti, Luigi, 4, 20, 27, 82, 82n, 90n, 93, 93n, 94, 94n, 134 Luzzatto, Arturo, member of parliament , 56, 211n Luzzatto, Carolina (Sara), née Sabbadini, 14, 95n, 100, 102f, 102n, 103f, 114, 185 Luzzatto Coen, Carolina. See Luzzatto, Carolina Luzzatto Coen, Girolamo, husband of Carolina Luzzatto, 102 Luzzatto, Fabio, lawyer, 163n Luzzatto, Fanny, nurse, sister of Fabio and Oscar Luzzatto, 163, 194, 197, 210 Luzzatto, Fanny, protagonist of the Risorgimento, mother of Arturo Luzzatto, 56, 211n Luzzatto, Guido Ludovico, 194n Luzzatto, Oscar, physician, 163n Luzzatto, Samuel David, 104 M Maier, Barbara (Babette), seamstress, mother of Paolina Schiff , 111f Majer, Angelo, 223 Majer Rizzioli, Elisa, 31, 220–226, 322 Majno, Edoardo, lawyer, son of Ersilia Majno, son-in-law of Berta Cammeo Bernstein, 257, 287n Majno, Ersilia, 21, 133, 133n, 138, 138n, 139–141, 147, 153, 153n, 163, 192, 201, 228, 239, 247, 257, 258n, 260, 262, 271, 287n, 304, 315 Majno, Luigi, 131, 131n, 138n Malnati, Linda, 166f, 168n, 235 Manin, Daniele, 83, 84, 186

375

Mantella Zambler, Gemma, 285n Marangoni, Guido, 227n Marcora, Giuseppe, radical democrat , 125 Marcotti, Giuseppe, 102n Margulies, Heinrich, journalist and economist , 254n, 258n Margulies, Nanny, née Auerbach, 254, 258 Margulies, Samuel Hirsch, rabbi, 199n, 251, 252n, 254n, 259n Marin, Maria, 223 Mario, Alberto, patriot , 67n, 118n Marx, Anna, wife of Giacomo Levi Minzi, sister of Frida Marx Ceccon, 258n, 262, 271 Marx Ceccon, Frida, lawyer, 258, 275, 278, 279n, 281n, 288, 329 Marx, Karl, 279n Matteotti, Giacomo, 32, 237f, 239f, 241, 243, 246, 324 Maurogonato Pesaro, Letizia, 166n Mazzini, Giuseppe, 25–28, 35, 65, 72–78, 96f, 97, 116, 117n, 119, 123, 148, 152, 154, 159, 181f, 182, 183, 204, 229, 262, 276, 276n, 278n, 312f, 313, 318, 321 Mazzoleni, Angelo, lawyer and pacifist , 110n, 115, 125, 126, 128 Medina, Samuel, grandfather of Daniele Manin, 83n Messere, Edoardo, 286 Michels, Robert, sociologist , 226n Mieli, Virginia, wife of Ernesto Nathan, 166 Milla, Arturo, 286n, 288f, 290f Milla, Eloisa, 289n Milla, Laura, 289n Milla, Maria Giovanna, 289n Minich, Angelo, surgeon and senator, 90

376

PERSON INDEX

Misan Levi, Ermilina, 265n Modigliani Barletti, Ida, 231f Modigliani, Samuele, father of Ida Modigliani Barletti, 232n Modona Olivetti, Nina, 14, 99f, 100, 101 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 154 Moneta, Teodoro, journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, 126, 126n Montefiore, Claude G., 154n Montesano, Giuseppe Ferruccio, psychologist and neuropsychiatrist, brother-in-law of Maria Montesano, 277n Montesano Levi Della Vida, Maria. See Montesano, Maria Montesano, Maria, educator, granddaughter of Adele Della Vida Levi, 277, 277n Montessori, Maria, 167f, 171, 277n Montuori, Raffaele, prefect , 277 Moravia, Allegra, grandmother of Daniele Manin, 83n Morelli, Giovanni, 183n Morelli, Salvatore, lawyer, politician, journalist, and author, 122–124, 227n Morpurgo, Salomone, director of Florence’s National Library, 274 Mortara, Edgardo, 200n Moses, biblical patriarch, 35, 112 Mozzoni, Anna Maria, 79, 96, 117f, 121f, 124f, 125f, 182 Mussolini, Benito, 5, 31, 49, 183n, 220, 221, 224–226, 233–236, 238f, 244, 247f, 249, 260, 261, 268f, 295, 299f, 325–328, 330 N Nathan, Adah, 73n Nathan, Alfred, 70, 73n

Nathan, Beniamino (“Ben”), 35, 72 Nathan, David, 73n Nathan, Ernesto, mayor of Rome 1907–1913, son of Sara Levi Nathan, 69n, 70, 73n, 166, 227, 229, 274, 275n Nathan, Giuseppe (“Joe”) i, 95, 97 Nathan, Henry, 73n Nathan, Janet. See Nathan Rosselli, Janet Nathan Levi Della Vida, Sarina, wife of Mario Levi Della Vida and daughter of Ernesto Nathan, 275, 328 Nathan, Moses Meyer, stockbroker, husband of Sara Levi Nathan, 41, 69, 70, 72–75, 88 Nathan Puritz, Mary, daughter of Ernesto Nathan, 162n, 166, 227, 229–232, 274f Nathan Rosselli, Janet, daughter of Sara Levi Nathan, 35, 67, 70, 70n, 78, 78n Nathan, Sarina, wife of Alessandro Levi and niece of Ernesto Nathan, 69n Navarra Bernstein, Marta. See Bernstein Navarra, Marta Navarra, Dario, son of Marta Navarra Bernstein, 301, 301n Neppi, Aldo, 195 Neppi, Graziadio, 293 Neppi Modona Viterbo, Lionella, viii, 20, 259, 304 Neppi, Vittorio, lawyer, professor of jurisprudence, 293 Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 219 “Nonna” Paola (pseudonym), journalist and Catholic activist , 175n Nordau, Max, 40n, 135n

PERSON INDEX

Norsa Pisa, Fanny, daughter of Ugo Pisa, president of the ONMI , 146, 226, 289f O Orano, Paolo, journalist and writer, 173n Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele, politician, 161 Orvieto, Adolfo, journalist , 56 Orvieto, Angiolo, poet and journalist,husband of Laura Orvieto, 39n, 42, 42n, 51, 52n, 55, 56f, 56n, 159f, 181n, 197f, 198, 205, 207, 214, 214n, 230, 231, 245, 251n, 291, 306 Orvieto, Annalia (“Lia”), daughter of Angiolo and Laura Orvieto, 39, 52n, 205, 267n Orvieto, Laura, 1, 7n, 12, 13, 19–21, 25, 26, 31, 38f, 42–47, 51, 55, 58–61, 63–64, 92, 141n, 161, 162n, 166, 182n, 186, 189f, 190n, 197f, 197, 198, 199n, 202n, 203, 203n, 204n, 205, 206, 209–213, 213n, 214, 222, 227, 230–232, 237n, 246n, 249, 249n, 251, 267n, 291, 292f, 306, 307n, 319–322, 331 Orvieto, Leonfrancesco (“Leo”), son of Angiolo and Laura Orvieto, 41n, 59, 60, 198, 205, 267n P Pace Fassari, Irene, 286n Pacifici, Alfonso, rabbi, lawyer, and journalist , 252 Padoa, Marcella, mother of Gabriella Falco Ravenna, 303n Padoa, Pellegrino, 87n Papafava, Francesco, 25, 306n

377

Paper, Ernestine, née Puritz-Manasse, doctor, 162n, 214f, 216, 227 Pappenheim, Bertha, 152 Pardo-Roques, Giorgina. See Zabban, Giorgina Pardo-Roques, Giuseppe, president of Pisa’s Jewish community, 227n Passigli, [?], sisters, Jewish half-orphans , 199 Pavia Gentilomo, Eugenia, 14, 95n, 100, 103–107, 107n, 108 Pavia, Rosa, 264n Pavia, Salomone, jeweler, father of Eugenia Pavia Gentilomo, 104 Pavissich, Antonio, 167n Perugia, Ada, 301n Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 85n, 151 Pick, Adolfo, educator, 85, 89, 90 Pilati, Gaetano, 247 Pincherle, Gabriele, senator, brother of Amelia Rosselli, 245 Pincherle, Giacomo, Venetianpatriot,father of Amelia Rosselli, 83n, 186 Pincherle, Leone, Minister of the Repubblica di San Marco, grandfather of Adele Della Vida Levi, 83 Pincherle, Regina, scholar, mother of Adele Della Vida Levi, 82f, 82n, 84n, 86f Pincherle Rosselli, Amelia. See Rosselli, Amelia Pisa, Bice, mother of Nina Rignano Sullam, sister of Ugo Pisa, 143 Pisa, Costanza, grandmother of Nina Rignano Sullam, 145 Pisa, Luigi, 290 Pisa Rizzi, Antonietta, cofounder of the UFN, sister-in-law of Ugo Pisa, 131, 145f

378

PERSON INDEX

Pisa, Ugo, philanthropist, senator, 131, 143, 145, 259, 289, 290 Pisa, Vittoria. See Cantoni Pisa, Vittoria Pisa, Zaccaria, banker, great-grandfather of Nina Rignano Sullam, 145 Pistelli, Ermenegildo, friar, 197 Pius X., pope, 168f Polacco, Evelina, 265, 300 Politeo, Giorgio, philosopher, educator, 90 Porro, Ercole [?], lawyer, 149n Prato, David, rabbi, 254, 254n Preziosi, Giovanni, politician and journalist , 225n, 295 Puccinelli Calò, Laura, wife of Giovanni Calò, 240, 240n, 274, 274n Pugliese, [?], Zionist pioneer, 270n Q Queen of Sheba, 106 R Raditsa, Bogdan, 54n Raditsa, Bosiljka, viii, 20, 53n Raffalovitch Comparetti, Elena, educator, 89n Ravà, Eugenia, 166n Rava, Luigi, lawyer and politician, 134n Rava, Luisa, 166n Ravenna, Felice, cofounder and president of the Italian Zionist Federation, father of Gabriella Falco Ravenna, 24, 251n, 254, 254n, 259, 264n Ravenna, Germana, daughter of Felice Ravenna, sister of Gabriella Falco Ravenna, 255f, 303n

Ravizza, Alessandrina, 117, 118n, 138n Richer, Léon, French journalist , 120 Rignano, Eugenio, engineer, husband of Nina Rignano Sullam, 42, 144, 146, 150 Rignano Sullam, Nina, 2, 8n, 20, 21, 24, 28, 29f, 34, 37n, 42, 138–146, 148–155, 161, 191n, 192, 201, 218–220, 226, 228, 258f, 259, 280–282, 285, 287–292, 303, 305f, 314–317, 320f, 321, 329, 331 Rocco, Alfredo, lawyer and politician, 273f Roghi, Clara, 281n, 285n, 286 Roghi Taidelli, Clara. See Roghi, Clara Romanin Jacur, Leone, senator, 160 Romoli, Dante, 230n Rosenstein, Anja. See Kuliscioff, Anna Rosselli, Alberto, theater director,son of Nello Rosselli and Maria Todesco, 63 Rosselli, Aldo, medical student and First-World-War lieutenant, son of Amelia Rosselli née Pincherle, 48, 61, 62, 189, 205–207, 209, 210, 214f, 249 Rosselli, Aldo, writer, son of Nello Rosselli and Maria Todesco, 63f Rosselli, Amelia, née Pincherle, writer, mother of Aldo, Carlo, and Nello, 7n, 12, 13, 19, 21, 25, 26n, 31, 32, 38, 40n, 42n, 48, 49n, 49, 51, 52, 52n, 55, 55n, 56n, 58, 60, 61, 63, 79, 83n, 87, 132, 141n, 161, 162n, 164, 166, 186, 189f, 189, 190, 205–210, 212–214, 218, 219, 226–229, 232, 237n, 241–245, 246n, 247, 249, 250, 292, 306, 307n, 319, 322, 324n, 331

PERSON INDEX

Rosselli, Amelia, poet, daughter of Carlo Rosselli and Marion Cave, 58n Rosselli, Andrew, engineer, son of Carlo Rosselli and Marion Cave, 58n Rosselli, Carlo, 7n, 39n, 41n, 48, 50f, 50n, 58n, 62, 189f, 205f, 207, 209, 218, 227n, 244, 245, 248f, 248n, 276, 325, 328 Rosselli, Debora, wife of Emanuele Rosselli, 68 Rosselli Del Turco, Beatrice, 232, 237 Rosselli, Emanuele, merchant, cousin of Sara Levi Nathan’s mother, 68f, 69f Rosselli, Enrichetta (“Ricca”), mother of Sara Levi Nathan, 67f Rosselli, Joe (Giuseppe), husband of Amelia Rosselli née Pincherle, 79, 205 Rosselli, Maria. See Todesco, Maria Rosselli, Marion. See Cave, Marion Rosselli, Nello, 7n, 39n, 41n, 48–51, 61, 62f, 205f, 207, 209, 218, 242–244, 248f, 249n, 253n, 253, 325 Rosselli, Paola (“Chicchi”), translator, daughter of Nello Rosselli and Maria Todesco"/b, 62 Rosselli, Pellegrino, husband of Janet Nathan, 78n Rosselli, Silvia, writer and psychoanalyst, daughter of Nello Rosselli and Maria Todesco, 62f Rossi, Ernesto, 241–244 S Sabbadini, Carolina. See Luzzatto, Carolina Sacchi, Achille, doctor, follower of Garibaldi, 276n

379

Sacchi, Beatrice, 276n Sacchi, Giuseppe, educator, 104 Sacchi Simonetta, Ada, 24, 276f, 283f, 284f Sacerdotti, Cesare, professor of pathology, father of Maria Sacerdotti, 283n Sacerdotti, Maria, president of the Florentine FILDIS,daughter-in-law of Ada Sacchi Simonetta, 25, 276, 283f, 284f Saffi, Aurelio, politician, 74 Saffi, Giorgina. See Craufurd Saffi, Giorgina Salandra, Antonio, 185n Salomon, Alice, 133, 315 Salvemini, Gaetano, 242, 244f Sarfatti, Gualtiero, psychologist , 274n Sarfatti, Margherita, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226f, 322 Sartori Treves, Pia, 166n Sauro, Nazario, 224n Scandiani, Amelia, daughter-in-law of Adele Della Vida Levi, 94n Schiff, Friedrich, craftsman, brother of Paolina Schiff , 111n Schiff, Leopold, merchant, uncle of Paolina Schiff , 113, 113f, 113n, 118n Schiff, Paolina, 20, 28f, 29f, 40n, 109–118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 128, 131, 133, 134, 137, 139, 142, 143f, 148f, 162, 166, 188n, 188, 189, 192, 215, 215n, 216, 223, 227n, 228, 236, 239, 314–316, 320, 324 Schiff, Samson, silversmith, father of Paolina Schiff , 111f Schiff, Samuel, orig. Schwalbach, Samuel,grandfather of Paolina Schiff , 111

380

PERSON INDEX

Schiff, Wilhelm (Guglielmo), sculptor, half-brother of Paolina Schiff , 111n Schlözer, Dorothea, 105, 105n Schönflies, Rosalie, 113n, 134 Schwalbach, Samuel. See Schiff, Samuel Schwarz, Lina, 1, 59–61 Schwimmer, Rosika, 187 Scialoja, Antonio, economist and politician, 93 Scott, Walter, 53 Segre Amar, Sion. See Segre, Sion Segre, Sion, 276 Serena, Adelchi, 279, 286 Sereni, Angelo, 200n, 266 Sereni, Clara, 252n Sereni, Emilio, 154n Sereni, Enzo, Zionist activist and partisan, 252 Sforza, Carlo, politician and diplomat , 246n Sierra, Nina, 22, 134, 236–241, 246, 261, 324f Silva, Regina, 88n Simonetta, Bono, physician, son of Ada Sacchi and Vallino Simonetta, husband of Maria Sacerdotti, 277n, 284n Simonetta, Quintavalle Carlo (“Vallino”), philologist, husband of Ada Sacchi, 276n, 283n, 284n Sonino, Emma, 293n Sonnemann, Leopold, publisher, journalist, and politician, 40n Sonnino Carpi, Graziella, 281, 282 Sonnino, Giuseppe, rabbi, 153n, 199n Spadolini, Giovanni, 302n Spalletti Rasponi, Gabriella, 142, 167, 230, 232f, 273 Spinelli Monticelli, Maria, 182n

Sullam, Angelo, lawyer and Zionist activist , 143n, 258, 258n, 262n Sullam, Giuseppe, engineer and president of Milan’s Jewish community, father of Nina Rignano Sullam, 28, 143, 316

T Tedeschi, Abramo, publisher, father of Fanny Tedeschi, 102n Tedeschi, Fanny, 100, 102 Tedeschi, Felice, 186n Tedeschi, Marco, rabbi, 102n, 113n Toaff, Alice, 298n Todesco, Maria, wife of Nello Rosselli, 39n, 61, 205n, 249, 306n Tordi, [?], CNDI activist , 167n Traquandi, Nello, 244 Traxler, Nerina, 237n, 274, 274n Treves de Leva, Virginia, 166n Treves, Elisa, 279f, 280f, 329 Treves, Giuseppe, publisher, husband of Virginia Treves Tedeschi, 201f Treves, Marcello, son of Ada Treves Segre, 165n, 271 Treves, Samuel, 279n Treves Segre, Ada, 165, 262f, 262n, 263, 265, 271, 279n Treves, Silvia, war nurse, 194, 210, 215, 216, 320 Treves Tedeschi, Virginia, poet, pseudonym:Cordelia, 146n, 166, 201–205, 217, 321 Treves Treves, Elisa, 146n Treves, Ugo, son of Ada Treves Segre, 165n Treves, Zaccaria, physician, husband of Ada Treves Segre, 165 Trieste Sacerdoti, Adele, 90 Turati, Filippo, 117n, 131n, 188, 241, 257, 320

PERSON INDEX

381

U Usiglio, Angelo, patriot , 74 Uzielli De Mari, Ida, 230, 232 Uzielli, Paolo, colonel , 230n

von Marenholtz-Bülow, Bertha, feminist and student of Friedrich Fröbel , 89, 92 Vonwiller, Alberto, banker, 140n Vonwiller, Edvige, 138n, 139, 139n

V Valéry, Paul, French poet and philosopher, 45 Vannucci, Dino, 244 Velardi, [?], lieutenant , 206 Venturi, Carlo, patriot , 74n Viganò, [?], member of the Federazione Toscana of the CNDI , 228 Villani, Carlo, 81n, 99n, 104n Villari, Pasquale, historian, 159n Vita Josz, Eleonora, niece of Aurelia Josz, 305n Viterbo, Lionella. See Neppi Modona Viterbo, Lionella Vittorio Emanuele III., King of Italy, 234

W Weizmann, Chaim, 268n Weizmann, Vera, 268n White Mario, Jessie, writer, 67, 67n, 69–73, 79, 118n Wollemberg, Alina, 166n Y Yarach, Nyves, 193n Z Zabban, Giorgina, née Pardo-Roques, writer, pseudonym: Giorgia Pisani, 227, 249 Zabban, Giulio, 227n

Place Index

A Alassio, 305, 331 Alessandria, town in Piedmont , 271n, 294n, 302 Alexandria, 198 Ancona, 196n Argentina, 291 Ariccia, 303, 331 Auschwitz, labor and extermination camp, 2, 25, 302n, 303n, 304n, 331 Australia, 291 Austria, 81–85, 103, 104, 114f, 128, 182, 182n, 185, 189–191, 206n, 213, 214f, 217, 224n, 319 Monarchy. See Habsburg Empire Republic, 9 Austria-Hungary, 30, 190, 207n

B Baden, Grand Duchy, 111, 119 Barberino del Mugello, 306

Bavaria, 90 Belgium, 91, 187, 313 Berlin, 15, 92, 113n, 134, 148, 151n, 152, 254n, 255, 259n Bern, 119f Bologna, 25, 135, 200n, 246n, 271n, 293n, 294n Bozen, 213 Brazil, 291 Brenner, 214 Brussels, 74n

C Caporetto, 191f, 257n, 319 Carnia, 62, 195, 207 Casale Monferrato (near Alessandria in Piedmont), 302 Como, 304 Cormons, 194 Cortina d’Ampezzo, 207, 291 Cortona, 244 Cosenza, 296n

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Nattermann, Jewish Women in the Early Italian Women’s Movement, 1861–1945, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97789-4

383

384

PLACE INDEX

Cuba, 291

D Dachau, concentration camp, 252n Dalmatia, 222, 224

E Eastern Europe. See Europe England, 9, 40n, 67n, 69, 70f, 73n, 75, 98, 118, 121, 142n, 150, 150n, 151, 250, 256, 268n Ethiopia, 128, 272n Europe, 4, 8, 12n, 13, 15, 26, 28, 32, 41n, 42f, 69, 79, 89, 109, 114, 118f, 119, 121, 122, 128, 137, 148, 149f, 150, 157, 177, 183, 190, 206n, 268n, 270, 295, 305, 309–311, 314, 318, 321 Eastern Europe, 9, 106f, 251, 257, 297, 330

F Ferramonti, concentration camp, 296, 297, 298n Ferrara, 82, 167, 254n, 255, 263f, 264, 271n, 293, 294n, 302, 303n Fiume, 251n, 322 Florence, viii, 17–22, 25, 41n, 42, 54n, 55n, 56, 69n, 90, 93, 93n, 106, 159n, 163, 171, 173, 196n, 197f, 198, 199n, 205n, 207, 213, 215, 215n, 222, 222n, 226, 229, 230, 231n, 232, 232n, 235, 236, 241–245, 246n, 247, 248, 251, 251n, 252n, 254n, 255, 256n, 268n, 271n, 274, 291, 294n, 303n, 304, 304n, 306, 320, 323, 325f, 328, 331 Borgo Santi Apostoli, 243

Via dei della Robbia, 251n Via Giusti, 243, 245 Fossoli, concentration camp in the province of Modena, 302, 305 France, 40n, 45n, 84, 98, 99, 119, 121, 128, 142n, 172n, 176n, 189n, 244, 295 Frankfurt am Main, 8n, 70 Freiburg, 82 Friuli, 30n, 57, 163

G Geneva, 44n, 119, 119n, 249, 305, 306 Genoa, 35, 39n, 45, 107n, 153n, 175, 181, 199, 257, 264, 271n, 276n, 305 Germany, 8f, 9f, 9, 11, 20, 40n, 45n, 60, 70f, 91, 105, 115, 118, 119, 128, 133, 151, 186, 190, 217, 255n, 295, 296n, 310, 313–315, 332 Givat Brenner, Kibbutz, 252n, 271n Gorizia, 102n, 103, 185 Great Britain, 154n, 189f, 190, 268, 295, 295n, 299, 314, 330

H Habsburg Empire, 9n, 102, 184, 189, 190, 206n Habsburg Monarchy. See Habsburg Empire Hanau, 111 Hungary, 187, 296n, 304n

I India, 291 Israel, 50n, 184n, 254, 256n, 301 Istria, 214, 224n, 258n

PLACE INDEX

Italy, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 5n, 6, 8–11, 12n, 15, 17, 20, 21, 23–25, 27, 28, 30n, 31f, 33, 36, 37, 41, 45, 48, 57f, 63, 65, 67–69, 74f, 75–77, 80, 81, 84, 86, 89f, 90–92, 94, 97, 99, 101, 103–105, 109, 112, 114–116, 119, 121–123, 125, 128, 130, 135–137, 150, 151, 153, 155–158, 160, 162–166, 169–172, 174, 176f, 177f, 179f, 181–184, 184f, 185–187, 188, 189, 189n, 190, 191, 191n, 192, 193, 199, 200, 200n, 201n, 203, 205–207, 209, 211, 211n, 212, 214, 216, 218f, 218n, 219, 220, 221–223, 230, 233f, 247, 249, 250, 253–257, 260, 262–266, 269, 270f, 271–273, 281, 285, 291, 292, 295, 296, 298, 299, 301, 303, 304, 306, 309f, 310–319, 321, 324, 325f, 327f, 331 Central Italy, 17, 221, 269, 301, 331 Northern Italy, 2, 96, 102, 103, 108, 221, 269, 301, 331 Southern Italy, 17n, 96, 301 J Jerusalem, 252n, 271 Julia-Venetia, 221 L Latin America, 268n Leipzig, 91 Libya, 170, 174, 223, 226, 260 Liguria, 287, 290, 304, 305, 329 Lipari, 248 Livorno, 17n, 50, 67, 68, 70, 144, 252f, 252, 253, 253n, 254n, 255n, 264, 266, 271

385

Lombardy, 102, 114, 123, 143 Lombardy-Venetia, kingdom, 82 London, 65, 67n, 69f, 69, 70, 73, 73n, 74, 78f, 79f, 117, 118n, 129n, 134, 150, 153f, 153, 153n, 256, 268n Greville Street, 75

M Madrid, 153 Mannheim, 20, 109, 111, 112, 114, 137, 314 Mantua, 24, 102n, 276f, 284f Milan, 2, 8, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25, 32, 33, 80, 82, 105, 110, 112f, 114, 117, 118, 124, 125, 125n, 127, 128, 128n, 129–131, 131n, 132, 135, 135n, 137, 138n, 139, 139n, 140, 140n, 142–144, 144n, 146, 155n, 160f, 169f, 181n, 188, 188n, 191, 192, 192–194n, 201, 201, 217, 218, 218n, 220, 221, 224, 227–229, 235, 238, 251, 256, 257, 259, 264, 268, 269, 271, 286–288, 291, 293, 297, 299, 301–303, 305, 317f, 326, 329 Corso di Porta Nuova, 260 Via Ruffini, 265 Modena, 67f, 70, 74, 98n, 251n, 264, 264n, 269, 271n, 302 Monza, 221

N Naples, 90, 257 Near East, 268 Neu-Isenburg, 152 New York, 166f, 306 North Africa, 268 North America. See USA

386

PLACE INDEX

O Odessa, 89n, 214n Offenbach, 70 P Padua, 27, 39, 93f, 95, 100, 102, 160, 199n, 210n, 246n, 251, 260, 263, 271n, 294n, 313 Palermo, 217n Palestine, 165n, 250, 251, 251n, 252, 252n, 253, 254n, 257, 258n, 259, 260, 261n, 264, 265, 267, 268, 270, 270n, 271, 271n, 272, 279n, 291, 293, 295n, 296, 299, 303, 327, 330 Pal Grande, 207n Paris, 45n, 55n, 61, 67n, 70, 82, 84n, 99, 99f, 123, 134f, 153, 177f, 243, 256n, 292n Pavia, 19f, 20f, 104, 114f, 125n, 131, 135f, 138n, 206 Pesaro, 41, 67, 70, 75, 80, 82 Piedmont, 41, 84, 102, 165, 185, 262, 271, 276, 276n, 279, 280f, 302, 328 Pisa, 78n, 214n, 227n, 271n, 294n Pola, 224n Poland, 217, 254n, 295, 298 Portogruaro, 195 Portugal, 120 Prussia, 119, 151, 152 R Rehovot, 271 Rignano sull’Arno (near Florence), 244f Rödelheim (near Frankfurt am Main), 70 Romania, 296n Rome, 4, 17, 17n, 19–23, 32, 35, 48, 68f, 69n, 73n, 75, 78, 79, 82,

83n, 90f, 91, 93, 100n, 101, 115n, 125, 128, 131, 134, 142, 153n, 161, 162, 164, 166, 166n, 169, 170, 181n, 187, 191, 199, 199n, 217n, 224, 227f, 228, 229, 232n, 233, 235–237, 239, 239f, 242, 244, 264, 266, 271n, 277n, 281, 294n, 298–300, 300n, 301–303, 303n, 316f, 317f, 323f, 331 Lungotevere Sanzio, 300n Trastevere, 75, 78, 159, 278n Rovigo, 294n Russia, 40n, 98, 117, 188, 190, 214n, 217

S Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 214 Salò, Repubblica di, 301 Sardinia-Piedmont, kingdom, 4, 114, 115 Solingen, 279n South America, 257, 295n South Tyrol, 214 Soviet Union, 296n Spain, 40n, 45n, 53 Split, 90 Strada in Chianti (near Florence), 243 Switzerland, 90, 91, 119, 121, 250, 256n, 274n, 301, 301n, 304–306, 307n, 313, 314, 331

T Tarsia, 296n Tel Aviv, 258, 270, 271, 289 The Hague, 187 Trento, 184, 189, 319 Trieste, 17n, 23, 82, 102, 108, 113, 113n, 114, 117, 159n, 182, 184f, 188, 189, 205, 214, 251n,

PLACE INDEX

257, 271n, 294n, 295, 304n, 313f, 314f, 319 Tripolis, 261n, 271n, 298n Turin, 17, 19, 20, 44n, 57, 99n, 102, 131, 135, 144n, 165, 167, 168, 170, 170n, 171, 199, 227, 242, 262, 264, 271n, 279n, 279, 280, 280n, 281, 286, 294n, 305n, 329 Tuscany, 162n, 163, 199, 227f, 228, 229, 232, 236, 237, 242, 274n U Udine, 57, 194, 208, 249 USA, 40n, 83n, 98, 120, 150, 250, 262n, 295n Ustica, 248 V Varese, 304 Venetia. See Veneto Veneto, 82n, 102, 155n, 176, 195 Venice, 19f, 41, 48, 55, 56, 81–85, 87–89, 92, 101, 105, 106f, 111n, 143, 143n, 158f, 159n,

387

166n, 176, 181n, 207, 223, 224f, 256n, 257, 258, 264, 266, 268, 271n, 294n, 300n, 308, 312 Ca’ Boldù, 55 Ca’ d’Oro, 55 Canal Grande, 56, 83, 207 Lido, 55 Rio di Noale, 83 Santi Apostoli, 81, 91n Vercelli, 294n Verona, 53, 54, 59n, 93, 160f, 161, 161n, 164, 167, 167n, 169n, 273n, 294n, 303n Viareggio, 248 Vienna, 111 Vigevano (near Pavia), 206

Y Yad Vashem, 25, 303n

Z Zara, 222n, 258n Zurich, 214n, 262n