“The past is an immense field of stones that many would like to cross as if it were a motorway, while others, patiently, go from stone to stone and lift them, because they need to know what lies beneath”

José Saramago, The Elephant’s Journey

Thus, patiently from stone to stone, to follow Saramago’s metaphor placed as an epigraph, went the authors of the book I have in my hands: Sapere ed essere nella Roma razzista. Silvia Haia Antonucci and Giuliana Piperno Beer divided the writing of this work equally between them, a work made precious by the exacting care with which it reconstructs in detail a part of our past, that dark part which many, too many, would like to forget. Antonucci and Beer’s research focuses on one portion of that darkness, a small portion if you will, brief in time and limited in space, but important for understanding what those who lived through those years went through, and how. An archivist, Haia Antonucci directs the Historical Archive of the Jewish Community of Rome; hers is the first part of the book, which reconstructs, with a great wealth of documents and a careful apparatus of notes, what happened in the aftermath of the promulgation of the racial laws.
The analysis starts from the measures that foreshadowed the laws (a concise chronology is provided in an appendix), and we are reminded that among the first provisions were those concerning the schools. From the school year 1938/1939 students and teachers of the Jewish race were in effect expelled from all the schools of the Kingdom. From primary school to university, an enormous number of children, adolescents and young people found themselves overnight with nowhere to go. The trauma was violent, and to appreciate how sharply it cut it should be remembered that for the Jewish people (for all Jews, or better: for the Jew as such) study has been, from time immemorial, one of the fundamental precepts. Many Talmudic passages stand there to remind us of it, so much so that one might almost say there is no faith without study. The Beth ha-Midrash, literally the House of Study, is an institution a thousand years old. To take from the Jew the possibility of studying is almost as grave as taking away the possibility of eating and drinking and breathing.

Haia Antonucci’s work describes point by point the reaction of the Roman community, which, after a first brief period of bewilderment, organized itself to face the event. To use a word much in vogue today, we could say that this was an emblematic case of resilience, that is, a form of active resistance; or, put in plainer terms, we are told how the community managed to make a virtue of necessity. Schools of every order and level were organized, partly by exploiting the loopholes in the law and in the related controls, which were less iron-clad than the regime wished them to appear, and partly by drawing on the great number of teachers who had unfortunately found themselves suddenly without a post and without a salary. A sort of clandestine university was also organized, in collaboration with the Institut Technique Supérieur of Fribourg. It should be stressed that the school that took shape was by no means a confessional school (in the Jewish tradition, a yeshivah), but precisely an ordinary school whose syllabuses reflected exactly the ministerial syllabuses of the other schools. So much for the first part of the book, exhaustive and documented; but, as a great historian of Judaism, Y.H. Yerushalmi[1], says, “for those who are alienated from the past, explanations are not enough: one must also know how to evoke that past.” Hence the second part of the book, edited by Giuliana Piperno Beer, a teacher of history with several studies to her name on the condition of the Jews, in particular in the Napoleonic era and during the period of the racial laws; this second part, as I was saying, opens up an entirely different perspective.
Piperno Beer carried out a series of interviews which, following the techniques of oral history, she then transcribed, taking care to respect the exact wording of each interlocutor. That is, preserving any grammatical slips, inevitable in spoken discourse, as well as logical and/or temporal leaps, which take nothing away from the truth value of the testimonies gathered but, on the contrary, lend a strong sense of reality to the whole part, historically documentary so to speak, that precedes them. At times curious, at times surprising, the accounts of the protagonists of the period (the survivors are by now few, and they too are well on in years) are very often moving. The story of how they lived through that experience, between daze and euphoria: the daze, which one of them compares to the stunned state that follows a heavy blow to the head, met with the will to go on studying, to lead a life that was, as far as possible, “normal.” In most cases, and this should come as no surprise, with little awareness of the immense tragedy that was descending upon the whole of European Jewry. The work, the concrete commitment of the community, and thus of the families, though with difficulty and by calling on every available energy, succeeded in raising a sort of protective barrier for all those children, adolescents and young people who had to bear the consequences of one of the most stupidly cruel laws issued by the regime.
May the knowing and the being placed in the title of the book, to be understood as an inseparable dyad in the life of the Jew, if the Ciceronian historia magistra vitae still holds, also be an invitation to reflect on what is happening today in the schools and, more generally, in society.

Notes

[1] Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, Storia ebraica e memoria ebraica, Parma, Pratiche ed., 1983.

Giorgio Pangaro, an editor of Studi Umbri, edits with L. Cimmino the “Corpo a corpo” series of books on literature and cinema for Rubbettino Editore.