Just two months after the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, in fact, Mussolini published a series of anonymous pronouncements in his newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, that set the tone for the dictatorship’s new attitude toward Italian Jews. Dismissing centuries of historical and theological debate, the Duce explained that “anti-Semitism is inevitable wherever there is exaggerated Semitic visibility, interference, and arrogance. The excessive Jew gives rise to the anti-Jew [Il troppo ebreo fa nascere l’antiebreo].”3 Mussolini’s remarks anticipated the different attitudes and aims that separated the Italian and the German racial campaigns. The Italians sought less to eradicate Jews entirely from society than to coerce changes in those Jewish behaviors and customs that had long frustrated Italians and Catholics.

Although anti-Jewish policies were modeled on the Nazi Nuremberg laws, they also built on and responded to national issues and traditions. In service of the fascist intent to cure national traits that had supposedly contributed in the past to Italian “backwardness” and national fragmentation, the Jew emerged after 1938 as a primary symbol of the forces that had consigned Italy to a position on the margins of modernity. The fascist anti-Semitic campaign shared images and legal provisions with other countries, but it also offered an occasion for the articulation of specifically Italian grievances and goals.

The “Manifesto of Racial Scientists,” which appeared in the fascist press on Bastille Day 1938, signaled the start of the official anti-Semitic campaign. Written by the Duce in collaboration with a group of scholars, the manifesto established an irremediable divide between Jews and Italians. The former were now defined as an “unassimilable population composed of non-European racial elements” and the latter as a “pure” people of Aryan origin and civilization. While the document warned that Italian racism recognized only racial differences, as against German ideals of racial superiority, it legitimized anti-Semitic prejudice by inviting Italians to “proclaim themselves openly racist.” In subsequent communications, the Duce proclaimed his intention to “adjust” Jewish participation in the state to reflect Jews’ minority status, even as he admonished his audience that “discrimination does not mean persecution.”

A September decree marked the start of this discrimination process. It forbade Jews to teach or attend schools and universities (those currently enrolled in postsecondary schools were allowed to finish their degrees) and expelled them from academies and cultural institutions. The minister of education Giuseppe Bottai, writing in a ministerial bulletin, Vita universitaria, publicized the names of Jewish professors who had been terminated and expressed “unconditional admiration” for a measure that would “liberate us from a treacherous people, rejuvenate the University, and purify the race.”6 To underscore the primacy of nation over race in Italian doctrine, exceptions were granted for proven patriots and others Jews of “exceptional merit,” and the juridical category of “Aryanized Jew” exempted politically meritorious and appropriately “non-Jewish” Jews.

Woodward writes, for example, that the president “scared the daylights” out of Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford in January—around the time Trump was engaged in a nuclear button–measuring contest with Kim Jong Un—by proposing that he declare on Twitter that he would be evacuating all family members of U.S. troops from South Korea, which North Korean leaders would likely have interpreted as a clear sign that war was imminent. The tweet was never sent.