That there is a new flare-up of hatred against Jews in Italy, causing constant attacks and forcing many of them to hide the visible signs of their identity, is a fact.

That Netanyahu’s crimes are just a pretext is another fact: today only a lunatic would feel authorised to attack a Syrian, a Libyan, a Turk, an Ethiopian or a Russian in the street or at university to punish the misdeeds of those who govern his country.

That the main perpetrators of these attacks now have political affiliations other than fascism is a third fact.

The strange hypothesis of Roccella

This fact did not escape the notice of Family Minister Eugenia Roccella, who took the opportunity to attack the Left as the new home of anti-Jewish hatred.
At a conference of the Union of Jewish Communities, in a clumsy attempt to win the sympathy of the audience, she formulated a bizarre theory about how left-wing culture has distorted the memory of the Holocaust.

In Italy, ‘we have not fully come to terms with anti-Semitism’, she claimed: and so far no one can blame her.
But why haven’t we?

She explains it like this:

“All the school trips to Auschwitz were what? Were they field trips? Were they really field trips? What were they for? They served, and were encouraged and valued, because they served exactly the opposite purpose: to tell us that anti-Semitism was something about a time in history, a distant time…and placed in a specific area: fascism”.

This assertion rests on the implicit assumption that high school teachers, and cultural workers in general, tend to be left-wing, and that they had the power to reduce the Holocaust narrative to ‘bad fascists – good communists’.
(A hypothesis that, paradoxically, is disproved precisely in memory travel, in which other actors, from survivors to Polish guides, have always played a decisive role).

“The trips to Auschwitz” therefore, according to the minister, “were a way of reaffirming that anti-Semitism was a fascist issue and that the problem was to be anti-fascist, not to be anti-Semitic”.
It would be for this reason that ‘we did not come to terms with anti-Semitism to the end’.

The killer is known. The motive is not

Now, to Roccella’s credit, the Holocaust was an extermination of Jews planned and carried out by the Nazis, together with the other Axis regimes and the galaxy of willing helpers they found in every corner of Europe (from Serbia to Norway and from France to Russia).
In commemorating that episode, one insists on the faults of the right because the faults were of the right.

Moreover, the modern right, for decades, instead of engaging in a deeper discourse on the roots of anti-Jewish hatred, has chosen as its defensive strategy “So what about the Foibe?”.
Now it is too late to complain.

This does not detract from the fact that in the recounting of those events, the way it has been done by cultural insiders (who are in fact mostly left-wing), there is a dangerous gap.
One has rightly insisted on the identity of the executioner (the Nazis and their allies), but not enough thought has been given to the identity of the victim.
In a word: why the Jews?

What convinced tens of millions of people throughout Europe that Jews deserved to be annihilated?
What was the motive of the murderer?

Anti-Jewish hatred is social hatred

We know the answer. According to the script of the fake Protocols of the Bishops of Zion, a century ago Jews were portrayed as an international capitalist elite plotting world domination.
In post-World War I Germany, the propaganda of the extreme right accused Jews of being the puppeteers of the British Empire and the USA, the internal traitors of the Second Reich and the creators of the Bolshevik threat.

Mein Kampf, touching chords that had already been well stretched by the Nietzschean and irrationalist fashions of the turn of the century, then added a racist varnish to this myth: an ‘inferior race’ was hatching revenge against the ‘superior’ one.
In the climate exasperated by the crisis of ’29 and mass unemployment, the idea of having to free oneself from the oppression of a greedy and stateless race had immense mobilising potential.

Mussolini’s Italy, as we know, was equally comfortable disqualifying the liberal democracies as ‘Jewish plutocracies’ and fanning the flames of the ‘Jewish-Masonic conspiracy’.

In short, hatred of the Jews was first and foremost a social hatred. Hiding this reality behind vague and generic formulas (‘Fear of difference’ and the like) does not erase it.

Marx had already told us so

After all, Karl Marx had already, in unsuspected times (1844), written chilling pages in which he regarded capitalist greed as the very essence of Judaism:

“We do not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we seek the secret of religion in the real Jew.
What is the worldly foundation of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness.
What is the worldly worship of the Jew? Commerce.
What is his worldly God? Money.
Well. Emancipation from commerce and money, hence from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organisation of society that eliminated the presuppositions of commerce, hence the possibility of commerce, would make the Jew impossible. (…) The emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of humanity from Judaism’.

A short circuit for the hardcore

The short-circuit that this awareness causes in the maximalist left is evident: that is, the one that has not yet given up dividing the world into dominant social (or even racial) groups and oppressed social (or even racial) groups, justifying any revolt of the latter against the former.

The proletarian has a duty to fight the bourgeois. But what if the proletarian is Aryan and the bourgeois is Jewish? What if the proletarian is Turkish and the bourgeois is Armenian?
In that case the rule no longer applies?
Then why should it apply in other cases?

Let’s not beat about the bush: in the major genocides of the 20th century, the perpetrators always felt that they were the oppressed eliminating their oppressors, that they were the poor class liquidating the wealthy.
Ukrainians, before theHolodomor, were the wealthiest peasants in the Soviet Union.
It is a truism, but to the maximalist left it causes enormous embarrassment.

An incomplete memory

Hence, in the school canon on the Holocaust, passages and comments were chosen that only refer to a generic cruelty of human beings against other human beings, avoiding the thorny analysis of social hatred against Jews.

This was not a conscious choice: it was an unconscious defensive reflex. But it has insensibly distorted, generation after generation, our perception of those terrible events.

It has prevented us, that is, from ‘coming to terms with it’.
And not with ‘anti-Semitism‘ (a concept already encrusted with that racial varnish that greatly narrows its application).
But with anti-Judaism, i.e. with resentment, artfully whetted by propaganda, against an imaginary enemy, bourgeois and cosmopolitan, who created ‘the system’ to subjugate us.