(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 27, 2015

(MAHWAH, NJ) – Professor Michael Livingston examined the legal framework, case-level operation and ominous consequences of Fascist Italy’s racial laws from their introduction to the regime’s destruction in a discussion at Ramapo College on March 26. The program was co-sponsored by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Italian Club of Ramapo College. The Morton and Clara Richmond Endowment supported the event. Professor Livingston’s talk was based on his recent book, The Fascists and the Jews of Italy: Mussolini’s Race Laws, 1938–1943, published last year by Cambridge University Press.

From 1938 until 1943 – before the German occupation and accompanying Holocaust – Fascist Italy drafted and implemented a comprehensive set of anti-Semitic laws. The laws were enforced and administered with a high degree of severity and resulted in serious, and in some cases permanent, damage to the Italian Jewish community. Professor Livingston’s research constitutes the first truly comprehensive survey of the Race Laws in the English language. His research is based on an exhaustive review of Italian legal, administrative, and judicial sources, together with material from the archives of the Italian Jewish community.

In end effect, Livingston concluded that the Race Laws, while not always uniformly enforced, were rooted in an Italian blend of Italian Fascism and Catholic religious ideology and in many respects were as exclusionist, harsh and restrictive as Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. While not inherently genocidal, according to Livingston’s assessment, by weakening the fabric of Jewish life and by gathering detailed information about individual Jews, the legal measures that were introduced paved the way for the Italian stage of the Holocaust after 1943, when the overthrow of Mussolini was followed by the German occupation of Northern Italy.

Livingston is Professor of Law at the Rutgers School of Law, Camden. He has published extensively on tax law, comparative law and other subjects, including articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Cornell Law Review, the Texas Law Review, and the American Journal of Comparative Law. He has taught at Tel Aviv University, Bar Ilan University, the University of Graz and Cornell University, and has lectured at various universities in Italy, Israel, and the United States. Professor Livingston’s course on Law and the Holocaust, which he has taught in three countries, is one of the few of its kind in American law schools. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 1987, Professor Livingston served as an attorney at Proskauer & Rose and as legislation attorney for the Joint Committee on Taxation of the United States Congress.

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