In order to better approach your question – on the antisemitism of Fascist Italy and the Italian people – I think we should keep in mind that there is a distinction to be made between antisemitism as a popular, intellectual, cultural phenomenon, whether “artistic” and elitarian or coarse expression of base instincts; and “institutional” antisemitism, that is antisemitism elevated to a legal, and even to a fundamental part of the institutions of the State. While the latter can certainly receive impulse from the former, and by converse encourage and facilitate the persistence of widespread racist and antisemitic convictions, a racial legislation does uphold or aspire to uphold discrimination as a fundamental trait of the State, not merely to protect antisemitism and racism within those institutions but to establish them as an unquestionable and manifest facts of nature.

Those who belong to the Jewish race are foreigners. - explained the “Chart of Verona”, of November 1943 – During the present war, they belong to an enemy nationality.

Elevated to an institutional fact, antisemitism is no longer an “opinion” or a feeling which can be disputed or rejected, but an actual law of the State. And here arising to a part of the future “Constitution” of the Fascist Republic.

Which is to say nothing of the actual extermination of Italian Jews (and non-Italian Jews), which represents another, certainly not unrelated, but distinct portion of the matter.

 

Given that I am not an expert on antisemitism – whether in Italy or outside of it – throughout the centuries, and that I am only passingly familiar with the specific context of antisemitism at the turn of the XX Century, I'll do my best to limit my excursions to a minimum.

The limited amount of literature on the issue of antisemitism – and racism – in Italy does in general maintain that the situation of the Italian Jews within post-unitary Italy was a relatively good one; that antisemitism was either a limited phenomenon, or sufficiently subdued not to manifest itself in excessive or violent ways. De Felice – who penned a first attempt to investigate the issue (Storia degli Ebrei Italiani sotto il Fascismo, 1961) – explained this state of things in part with the limited number of Italian Jews (that would be “practicing” Jews – the Italian authorities later concerned with the extermination of the Jews could claim larger numbers on “racial” grounds), somewhere around 50,000 according to 1921 records, and with their significant degree of integration (which is to say that, even from a less than sympathetic perspective, the image of the Italian Jews wasn't that of the Eastern “filthy Jews and lousy Mugiks” suffering under the oppressive Czarist and Bolshevik regimes).

Enzo Collotti, in his more recent Il Fascismo e gli Ebrei. Le leggi razziali in Italia, 2006, points out, on the grounds of certain new contributions to historiography, that the general situation of the Jews had benefited from the eversion of traditional restrictive and oppressive legislation provoked by the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic regimes in Italy. Many of these specific antisemitic dispositions were not reintroduced even during the restoration period, in part at least due to the opposition of the liberal forces, and consequently the reluctance of the Governments to appear excessively accommodating with what was largely perceived among the rising urban bourgeoisie as a “religious” imposition, tied to the nefarious influences of “Jesuitism”. This would also contribute to explain the relative importance of Jews and people of Jewish ancestry in the Risorgimento process and their representation in the liberal establishment, as well as the distaste of a large portion of this same liberal establishment for a certain form of “Catholic” antisemitism.

That said, this is very far from providing a conclusive answer to the extent and character of prejudice and “covert” antisemitism in Italy during the early years of the XX Century, as covert and “popular” phenomenons are, due to their very nature, difficult to measure in an accurate way. The persistence of stereotypes - “the greedy Jew”, the “profiteer”, “Jewish bankers”, etc. - as well as a certain recurrent iconography assimilated to the “image of the Jew”, do not seem to allow a reading of popular antisemitism as a necessarily marginal force.

There is also the issue that ascribing a Jewish identity to someone is not an obvious nor a straightforward process. A man like liberal-conservative Sidney Sonnino – who certainly embodied many traits of traditional Italian liberalism of late XIX Century – is often cited as a Jew, despite being a Protestant; but the assimilation of public figures and personalities with an “ideal Jew” is a trait of late XIX and early XX Century public discourse which is difficult to reduce to unquestionable identities even in historical context. What does the accusation of “acting like a Jew” exactly mean? What are the “obscure Jewish influences” doing on the influenced institutions? Stereotypes do not mean anything unless you are familiar with their use. Which would suggest that people were able to understand them, at least in the context in which they were used.

 

These considerations also should illustrate to a degree why it would be incorrect to see in the antisemitic turn of the Regime – with the introduction of the Leggi Razziali in 1938 – a fundamental factor in how the Italian people, by and large, saw the relations between the Italian and German Regimes. It was, no doubt, a serious matter for those more or less directly affected by it; but both the somewhat mitigated execution of those measures and the limited number of citizens affected, meant that it could remain a marginal issue.

In general – and somewhat generalizing – the crucial point for the popular perception of the alignment between the two Regimes seems to have been the perspective of a new European conflict, with Mussolini's personal prestige seeing a considerable boost after his apparent triumph of Munich and episodes of popular unrest rising and subduing in direct correlation to the events of the war until the collapse of late 1942 and early 1943.

Additionally, as a general rule, there is a distinction between sharing broad stereotypes about a certain group and supporting, enforcing or partaking to their systematic spoliation, deportation and murder. So that there were, of course, Italian who – regardless of their personal views and beliefs – opposed both the discrimination, and the extermination of the Jews, some taking direct steps to protect and hide them. And there were others who did the opposite, denouncing them, either for personal interests, in observance to the law of the State, or due to racial and religious hatred.

 

It is also – at least from my perspective – incorrect to see the introduction of a racial legislation in Italy only as a consequence of the developments in the Italian-German relations. We know in fact that a new approach to “race matters” was already under examination due to the Italian acquisition of Ethiopia in 1935-36 and that, while the speed up of this process and its more antisemitic slant may have served to facilitate an ideological convergence with Nazism, the conceit of adopting “racial segregation” policies may have stemmed from the Regime's need to “integrate” the new lands within its somewhat rigid system.

As Mussolini explained in his private speech to the Grand Council of October 25^th 1938

The racial problem is to me an achievement of the greatest importance and most important is its introduction into the history of Italy. The ancient Romans were unbelievably racist. The great struggle of the Roman Republic was indeed to know whether the Roman race could aggregate with the other races.

[…] here [in Italy] we have become persuaded that we are not a people but a mixture of races.

Now when a people takes conscience of its race, it does so in opposition to every other race – not to one alone. But we did so only in opposition to the Camites, which is to say the Africans. The lack of a racial conscience had severe consequences in the Amara [a region of northern Ethiopia] When they saw that the Italians went more raggedly than themselves, that they lived in tuculs, that they took their women; they said: this is not a race which can bring us civilization!

To preserve the Empire it is necessary that the natives have absolute, undisputed understanding of our superiority.

This not to dispute the fact that antisemitism – and to a degree a popular antisemitic sentiment – played a role in the introduction of a “racial legislation”; but merely to highlight that one should not necessarily envision an exclusive relation of causality between antisemitic tendency and the “racist turn” of 1938.

 

I have been extremely concise here, due to reason of time. But I'll gladly answer any follow up question – if I can – later during the day, or tomorrow.