Between pride and despair. Letters from Jewish Italian teachers to the Jewish. Communities after the 1938 expulsion

Abstract

The 1938 Italian anti-Jewish laws hit the school with particular hardness and intensity. The Jewish communities had to organize the future of thousands of expelled students in a short time, but they also faced the problem of hundreds of teachers who had lost their jobs. Just a small portion of them found a school job at the Jewish community schools or at State sections for Jewish students. The Union of Italian Jewish Communities and local communities received letters from many teachers asking to be taken into consideration for a job. The different arguments used give us a glimpse of the complexity of Italian Judaism, and allow some reflexion on the varied effects of the Fascist persecution on a social group far from homogeneous.