ABSTRACT
Does it follow, therefore, that Germans hated Jews and Italians did not? There does seem to have been remarkably little Italian anti-semitism. Jewish communities on Italian soil had, of course, an ancient lineage. The Roman Jewish community can trace its continuous existence with some certainty to the days of the Roman Republic when Jews were called ‘liberti’, the ‘freed’, because they were so difficult to enslave.144 In the ensuing 1,800 years they had suffered all the persecutions, forced conversions, exclusions and deprivations which are common to Jewish history everywhere. What made Italian Jews different from co-religionists elsewhere was not the Jews but the environment in which they lived.
