No distinction of race or religion. Rotary in Italy, Jews, and the Antisemitic Persecution (1923-1938)

Among the Jewish members of Rotary clubs in Italy in the '20s and '30s probably the most important and well-known is Emilio Gino Segré, one of the "via Panisperna boys" who worked during the war period in the Manhattan Project, and eventually received the award Nobel Prize for Physics in 1959. In this book we didn’t want to include his biography because his figure remains somewhat anomalous compared to the Jews who we found enrolled in Rotary in Italy between the two world wars. Belonging to the Club of Palermo since 1936, he did not have time to really get into the spirit of the Association because in 1938 the Racial Laws struck him while he was on a study trip in Berkeley, from where he wisely decided not to return. Interesting what he writes in his diary about the Rotary in Sicily: In the meantime I had been asked to join the Rotary Club in Palermo. Italian Rotary Clubs are very different from their American counterparts. At Palermo, the club's membership was restricted to important local civic leaders. Furthermore, the club was definitely not Fascist. My father urged me to join, and knowing me well, strengthened his arguments by offering to pay the substantial monthly fee. At the Rotary Club I met several interesting and important persons, both visitors and local residents. I remember especially the inspired face of the composer Don Lorenzo Perosi, which could have served as a model for a sculptor representing "Genius." My election to the club was another sign that Sicilians liked and accepted me. One of the members was the excellent rector of the university, scion of an illustrious family of lawyers. We were friends, but not intimates. One day, however, at the Rotary Club, when I went to greet him with a handshake, he surprised me by embracing me with open arms, whispering in my ear: "Watch out. You have behind you the secretary of the Fascio"—the highest local Fascist authority. Mussolini had just forbidden shaking hands as an un-Fascist gesture. A beautiful testimony, which should certainly be reported but that does not help to define the substance of the matter which I intend to discuss in this study. The major changes that characterized the Italian society in the years between the two world wars were accompanied, as we know, by the success of the first Fascist regime in Europe. The first experience of the Italian Rotary (1923-1938) was born in this context. And in the same context matured through several steps, the path that led to the traumatic end of the emancipation of Italian Jews. These two human itineraries would have remained strangers to each other without ever really cross. However, things went differently. On the one hand it is known that some of the Rotary clubs welcomed among their members many Jews (especially in Trieste and Milan, as well in Turin, Rome, Naples, Palermo, Genoa, Bergamo). And on the other hand it is known that the end of the first experience of Italian Rotary matured in the autumn of 1938, in striking coincidence with the enactment of anti-Jewish legislation. Scholars have begun to discuss this coincidence, trying to advance hypotheses and interpretations about a possible connection between the two events. The answers are not clear-cut, and documentation in this regard does not help in a particular way, in order to clarify definitively the core of the matter. Sources in Rotary are too reticent, and we found only few interesting documents on the topic. I was therefore forced to broaden the historical vision, trying to experiment with new perspectives, convinced that only a proper contextualization can help to identify the underlying causes of a dynamic still somewhat unclear. Who were the Jews who participated in the life of Italian Rotary? What kind of relationship they had with their own religious tradition? In what economic or professional activities they were engaged? And what relationship they had with the political and economic Italian establishment? And - on the other hand - what kind of attention the International and the Italian Rotary devoted to the religious question? What kind of interest was manifested toward the Jewish component? To try to give at least partial answers to these questions I designed an agile path that starts from the deep dynamics of the Jewish emancipation and integration into European society after the age of ghettos, from the nineteenth century. A journey in which we shall understand how natural was for a sector of the Jewish social elite to adhere to the model of Service proposed by Rotary clubs and how they felt it as part of their concept of emancipation. This way we will find out that the Jews who entered Rotary were part of a professional and cultural well defined area. They were professionals, industrial or financial entrepreneurs who maintained only a weak contact with their religious tradition (many of them decided to convert, perhaps living the illusion to buy in that way a final ticket in order to be admitted into high society). People who were born feeling themselves as part of the Italian “Risorgimento” dream, demonstrating for this reason a deep loyalty to the institutions of the state (regardless of the Fascist or Liberal nature of it). In this context seems a little bit surprising the great indifference with which these Rotarians of Jewish faith look in general to their religious affiliation: virtually none of them maintains structural links with the Jewish communities, and the direct consequence of it seems to be that the very substance of the study presented here is a paradox. Actually, the fact of being or not being Jewish seems to have no direct relationship to the process of accession to the Rotary club. And in fact, one of the consequences of this evidence seems to be the lacking in the Rotarian documentation of direct references to religious affiliation of its members. And yet it is a story to tell, because the people we are going to deal with are really very important for the history of Italy. Deputies, ministers, owners of industries, men who have contributed in no small way to the government of Italian society in the years of Fascism. We therefore decided to add to the reflections typical of a historical path, some of the biographies that we consider most relevant. What emerged was an impressive fresco of an entire ruling class, and reading the biographies of the personalities of Jewish origin who have had a role in the Rotary Clubs of the peninsula, inevitably raises the most important question, linked both to the temporary closure of the Association in Italy, both to the promulgation and implementation of the Racial Laws: How was it possible that a so important ruling class, structurally related to the state apparatus and its economic, financial and industrial structures, has shown to be essentially voiceless when facing the events of 1938, choosing silence and succubus acceptance without trying in any visible way to propose alternative routes to the Fascist regime, which - if nothing else - would endanger with its political choices the national interests? As we know, we cannot write the history proposing hypothetical paths: “if..., then...”. Nevertheless I’m sure that, in front of a different reaction to the Racial Laws and to the instructions that led to the dissolution of Rotary in Italy, probably Emilio Gino Segré, our "anomalous" Rotarian, could return to Palermo from Berkley, and perhaps the story would follow a different path.