Today we celebrate for the 26th time the ‘Holocaust memorial day’, which, according to the law establishing the anniversary, has the purpose of ‘preserving in the future of Italy the memory of a tragic and dark period of history in our country and in Europe, and so that similar events may never happen again’.

The call for a shared and pacified memory on the tragedies of national history lends itself to exploitations and misunderstandings that are as recurrent as they are inevitable, because the memory of the events of the Italian civil war, which did not begin with the Resistance but with Fascism, is a divided memory and its divisions have spanned the entire post-war period and have dragged on until today. Italy has never made peace with itself because it has always spared itself the saddest truths, even with regard to anti-Semitism.

Even in Germany, where the question of guilt was tackled with far greater rigour and Nazism was not dismissed as an unfortunate accident, but on the contrary was recognised as a monstrous but far from accidental fruit of German identity, memories tend to drift apart with the passage of time, instead of coming closer together, and divisions tend to re-emerge and hybridise in unexpected ways. One thinks of the resounding revival of neo-Nazi positions in post-communist Germany in particular.

Imagine if mass anti-Semitic regurgitations could be absent in Italy, where the historical responsibilities of Italians – of individual Italians – have never been the focus of a demanding and truthful reflection and fascism, with all that it brought with it, has never been considered, as it was, theautobiography of the nation, but a plot hatched against the nation, suffered by millions of Italians as a disgraceful spell, a coup d’état of destiny against a history that would have deserved a completely different development.

Even in the post-democratic post-war period, the racial laws were therefore considered a consequence of the alliance with Hitler’s Germany and a very serious responsibility of the regime and its hierarchs, starting with Mussolini, but not a very serious responsibility of Italy and the Italians, who with minor, politically irrelevant exceptions, partly enthusiastically espoused and partly willingly accepted the decree to wipe the Jews from society and watched impassively as they were, fortunately incompletely, wiped off the face of the earth.

This stubborn refusal to consider the racial laws and the national contribution to the extermination of the Jews as the fruit of a deep-rooted and, so to speak, ‘natural’ anti-Semitism is what prevents – today particularly on the left, with only an apparent paradox, as we shall see – its new manifestations, including that of using the very memory of the extermination as an anti-Semitic device, turning the question of the guilt of yesterday’s Shoah into the question of the guilt of today’s Jews.

Today we celebrate the Day of Remembrance in a country where being Jewish has once again become dangerous and where incidents of denigration, discrimination and violence are a daily occurrence; where wearing the yarmulke is a provocation that does not go unnoticed and entails, practically always, unpleasant consequences, unless one is ‘among Jews’; where Jews have reverted to being ‘you Jews ‘ – i.e. the demonic collective Jew of anti-Semitic propaganda – even in the discourses of the good democratic society and where each Jew is held accountable for each and every other for any act done by the government of the State of Israel; where Jews have a very conditional right to individual responsibility and collective dignity and have a special burden to deserve it.

Given that in the widespread vulgate anti-Semitism in Italy was only a fascist epiphenomenon and fascism … no longer exists, Italians were victims and not perpetrators of fascism and in any case anti-fascists cannot be anti-Semitic, the result is that the scruples to be or appear anti-Semitic are now fewer on the left than on the right and theexclusion of non-‘self-critical’ Jews and their symbolism from so-called anti-fascist squares, be it those of 25 April or Gay Pride, is considered anti-colonial intransigence and legitimate anti-imperialist defence and where it is not appreciated and supported it is at least tolerated and justified as the price to pay for democratic unity against the right.

The day of ‘never again’ has become the day of ‘again’ and we Italianly pretend not to notice.

Read also:

27 January 2025: Day of hypocrisy, not just memory; F.Rigonat- L’Europeista