Judith Roumani
Jews in Southern Tuscany during the Holocaust: Ambiguous Refuge
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021, ISBN: 978-1-7936-2979-1
Reviewed by K.E. Bättig von Wittelsbach*
In anticipation of the 2022 centenary of Mussolini's rise to power, many remarkable book-length studies of the ventennio have been added to the already substantial list of works that examine the Fascist period in Italy. This rich, nuanced, and superbly documented study, where Judith Roumani’s focus is on the Tuscan town of Pitigliano (often referred to as "the little Jerusalem"), is an outstanding and most welcome addition to this list, and one that distinguishes itself both by the subtlety of the author's analysis and the originality and wealth of sources. Of particular note are Roumani’s interviews with pitiglianesi survivors of World War II, conducted over the years in Italy, U.S., and Israel. Indeed, this volume represents the culmination of Roumani’s long-term project devoted to making sense of what was arguably the most challenging period in the history of the small Tuscan town. The author examines with a great sense for nuance the context of competing regional, national, and international forces that have shaped the destiny of the book's subjects: the Jews of Pitigliano, and how they were caught, on the one hand in the feeling of belonging to the town that had been for many their home for centuries, and on the other by Mussolini's 1938 racial laws and the Second World War.
Roumani’s work is the very first in the new Lexington Books series Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies, of which she is also a co-editor. A series such as this one represents a timely and appropriate response to the climate in North American academic publishing where modern-day Sephardic Studies have often taken second place to other fields of Jewish Studies. The definition of Sephardic continues to evolve, not least depending on where on the globe, or from what niche of the academic universe one is speaking from and at what point in history, as the co-editors in the introduction to the series write about the term: “What may not have fitted in the past may actually fit today.” The palimpsest of the two thousand and more years of Jewish life in Italy, from the first Italkim to the twentieth-century immigration waves of Central European, Russian, German, and later Libyan, Iraqi, and Egyptian Jews, as well as the more recent and smaller-scale presence of North American Jewry (including American Haredi Jews), have all contributed to making the mosaic of Italian Jewish life all the more complex and fascinating, equally to scholars in the field and to simple observers.
The core of this volume is divided into eight sections, with the first one devoted to a historical overview of Jewish presence in Southern Tuscany. The remaining seven cover the period between the racial laws of 1938 and the post-war and contemporary period that Roumani defines as the time of “the search for a return to normal.” This post-war stability has also meant that the Jewish presence in Pitigliano is today tragically reduced to what she terms “virtual Judaism.” With the descendants of the local Jews scattered around Italy and the globe, the town now attracts Italian and foreign Jews buying vacation properties there or Israeli couples keen on celebrating a wedding.
Starting from its introductory list of sources and personalities, central protagonists of this volume, most of whom belong to the almost extinct generation of pitiglianesi survivors of World War II who found new homes elsewhere, Roumani’s study distinguishes itself by being a scholarly work that is rich in human detail in a way that readers will find quite moving. The “Notes” that follow each chapter are not only remarkably meticulous and comprehensive, but are equally rich as much in their strictly scholarly as in their human dimension, generous and inviting to further research. They could, indeed, constitute a volume in themselves, It is worth pointing out that the “Notes” contain the original Italian transcript of the interviews quoted in the text, a feature especially useful to a researcher. An extensive ten-page bibliography and an index conclude the volume.
The title of Roumani’s volume is certain to bring to mind a well-known 1992 work by Alexander Stille: Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism. Like Stille, Roumani does not shy away from taking a microscopic look at the ambiguity and the contrapuntal, indeed, the subtitle of her work, “Ambiguous Refuge,” represents, in fact, a fil rouge connecting every event analyzed in this volume. Also, like Stille, she is as interested in the rescuers as in the rescued, in the local Jews as in the foreign ones that found temporary refuge in the area. The Jewish subjects of Roumani’s inquiry are grouped into families, as are most of the rescuers and foreign Jews or Jews from out of the area of Pitigliano. Among the six local Jewish families, one that stands out is that of Azeglio Servi, Assistant Rabbi of Pitigliano who kept a careful diary of events during the time spent in the local internment camp of Roccataderighi. Fascists and men of the Church form separate categories, and although they are fewer than the Jews and the rescuers. One of the most remarkably detailed chapters of the book is the one in which Roumani painstakingly examines the many contradictory reports and testimonies regarding the figure and role of Bishop Galeazzi. Galeazzi helped establish the internment camp of Roccatederighi, the only one in Italy set up on a Church property at Galeazzi's residence. It was rented at a considerable price to the Fascist government instead of being claimed for this purpose as was the norm, by the government itself. Equally painstaking is Roumani’s analysis of the “networks of solidarity” that ran through the area of Pitigliano, where organized rescue activities did not reach, such as, by the DELASEM. Pitigliano’s Jews, isolated from national or international networks of assistance had to rely on their relationship with the farmers from the area, often the same families of farmers with whom they had maintained relationships for centuries. Local doctors hid several elderly Jews at the Pitigliano hospital; the grocers took the Jews’ ration cards when they were no longer valid; some of Pitigliano’s Fascist officials would meet the local Jews on the street and feign not to recognize them. As Roumani points out, of all the local Jews who went into hiding, none perished, many of them thanks to the early warnings of their non-Jewish pitiglianesi neighbors. The ones who paid a much higher price were among those who turned themselves in for internment and the foreign Jews who were not able to rely on the long-standing local networks of solidarity. These networks often continued to exist, Roumani tells us, also thanks to the visceral sense of defiance that existed among local farmers both towards the local Fascists, and later, the Nazi occupiers, in contrast to the situation in towns where Fascism could establish itself on the firmer ground of middle-class conformity.
This fine gem of a study in local history by Judith Roumani is certain to be of great interest to a wide range of scholars in Italian and Jewish Studies, historians of World War II, and anthropologists. Anyone conducting research on the role of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy in the Holocaust will also find it of value, as will the general reading public.
* K.E. Bättig von Wittelsbach teaches in the Department of Romance Studies and the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She also directs Cornell’s Summer Program in social sciences at the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin, Italy.