Five years ago 500,000 Jews made up 7/10 of 1% of Germany's population. The 48,000 Jews now in Italy are only ⅛ of 1% of the population and compared to German Jews they have been lucky. Fascists have always boasted that in Italy there is no Jewish Problem. Jews have enjoyed equal legal rights. They have been writers, bankers, businessmen, even conspicuous Fascists. But for two years there have been unofficial indications that the luck of Italian Jews may be running out.
Jews in Tripoli have been beaten up. Preferment in the army has been quietly given to non-Jews. Anti-Jewish editorials have been more and more frequent in such Fascist organs as Regime Fascista, II Tevere. When Hitler visited Rome in May hundreds of Jews were temporarily imprisoned. Jews are being frozen out of the theatre, out of literature. Last fortnight booksellers were officially forbidden to display books by Italian Jews, publishers to print translations of books by foreign Jews.
Reasons for the swelling anti-Semitism in Italy are obvious: 1) the firming friendship with Nazi Germany; 2) the suspicion in the mind of Sig. Mussolini that rich Jews have been skimping recently on their contributions to the Empire; 3) Sig. Mussolini's opposition to Freemasonry. Bolshevism, speculation in foreign exchange, in all three of which he suspects Jews of being active; 4) his fear that a Jewish national home in Palestine (see p. 18) would make the Mediterranean less Roman. He would like to solve the Zionist question by transferring the Zionists from Palestine to Ethiopia. Then the Arabs in Palestine would be let alone and international capital would be brought in to develop the Empire.
Pope Pius XI, since the Lateran Treaties of 1929, has been on good terms with Benito Mussolini. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano has almost never spoken openly against the Government. Last week, however, it spoke sharply against antiSemitism: "Toward the Israelites we are not only extremely anti-Christian and anti-civil but inhuman. . . . Propaganda against Jews assumes, wherever it is organized and led, proportions unworthy of 20 centuries of Christian civilization!" That, at a time when semi-official Government newspapers had been indulging in anti-Semitic propaganda, was strong talk.