Article by Simone Disegni

What exactly do Giorgia Meloni’s right-wingers mean by Homeland and Nation? What kind of Italy is it dreaming of when it hammers home these two concepts today? Simone Disegni explores this question by looking back at two stories of Italian Jewish children: that of Edgardo Mortara, taken from his family by the Vatican in 1858, and that of Franco Cesana, a partisan who died in combat in 1944 at the age of 13.

The Italian elections that have just taken place mark a first. Not only because never before had a woman become Prime Minister in Italy, but above all because never before had the party that won the relative majority been a political force that had inherited – more or less directly – the fascist tradition. Therefore, the question arises: does the consecration of Fratelli d’Italia represent a danger for Italian Jews?

On the 9th of October 1982, a Palestinian commando group targeted a crowd of Roman Jews leaving the synagogue, injuring dozens of people and killing a two-year-old boy. On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the attack, new documents show that the secret service had informed the Italian authorities of the impending danger but that no security arrangements for the synagogue had been put in place. A forthcoming book would confirm the existence of a secret agreement between the Italian state and Palestinian factions during the Years of Lead, but its link to the synagogue of Roma has yet to be proven.

A century after the death of Ernesto Nathan, Rome’s historic mayor (1907-1913), another Jewish politician had entered earlier this year the battle to lead the Italian capital: Tobia Zevi, who…