This fine gem of a study in local history by Judith Roumani is certain to be of great interest to a wide range of scholars in Italian and Jewish Studies, historians of World War II, and anthropologists. Anyone conducting research on the role of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy in the Holocaust will also find it of value, as will the general reading public.
— Sephardic Horizons
Dr. Roumani is not only the director and founder of the Jewish Institute of Pitigliano, but she is also a member of a prominent Sephardic family. With her background, she brings to light with vivid expression the complex social condition of the region’s Jews through an examination of archival documents, published memoirs, and scholarly works from Italian sources not readily known to western researchers. So little is recognized of Italian Jewry that this segment, situated in the trauma of World War II, is worthy of wide attention.
— Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews
‘Not very much happened in the province of Grosseto […] and yet everything happened in this corner of Italy.’ This is the tantalising micro-historical premise of Judith Roumani’s important new book, which navigates the stories of Southern Tuscany’s Jews with sensitivity and scholarly rigour. With subtlety and an almost literary eye for detail, gesture, emotion, Roumani recaptures the voices of a community somewhat neglected in the study of Italian Jewry. In the pages of this book, the ‘exceptional’ story of the Jews of the Maremma illuminates the ‘ordinary’ ambivalence of the Holocaust in Italy, defined by acts of courage and cowardice, discrimination and defiance.
— Giacomo Lichtner, author of Fascism in Italian Cinema: the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory
Judith Roumani’s impressively researched and beautifully crafted microhistory of the Italian Province of Grosseto—a place and time where, as she says, “Not very much happened...and yet everything happened”—will be of great interest not only to scholars of the Holocaust but also to a broad reading public. Her attention to telling detail, her gift of recounting stories, and her focus on far-reaching issues marries scholarship with a sense of the human.
— Sara Horowitz, The Centre for Jewish Studies, York University
A rich micro-history of the Jews of Grosseto, in southern Tuscany, during the Holocaust, this book sheds light on the larger question of how the Holocaust was experienced in Italy. Based on a wide variety of sources, from oral histories, to archival documents, to published memoirs and scholarly works, it confronts many of the major unanswered questions of the degree and nature of Italian collaboration in the attempt to exterminate Italy’s Jews, including the complex role played by the Roman Catholic Church. Not least, the book offers a good example of the postwar efforts in Italy to whitewash this history and turn Fascist collaborators in the roundup of Jews into heroic resisters.
— David I. Kertzer, Brown University
Jews in Southern Tuscany During the Holocaust: Ambiguous Refuge is a necessary, detailed overturning of the official narratives of Italian treatment of the Jewish population during the Holocaust. Roumani’s research is comprehensive and well documented, and the volume will not only make a significant contribution to scholarship in the humanities, but also provide corrective history that is essential.
— Sandra Messinger Cypess, University of Maryland
History needs multiple sources, the historian reconstructs and interprets thanks to the encounter between sources, in order to create his or her theses. The specific nature and thus the value of Judith Roumani’s study stems from her patient and broad research into the sources. Documents drawn from archives and oral sources are the basis of courageous research into a very complex theme: the persecution of the Jews in southern Tuscany. The difficulty of this research is due to the disappearance of archival sources. The entire documentation about the Camp of Roccatederighi produced by the Grosseto Prefect’s office was destroyed or made to disappear when the Fascists of Grosseto fled. It has not been possible to trace the personal archive of Paolo Galeazzi, the bishop of Grosseto, one of the several protagonists of this series of events. The merit of Judith Roumani’s study lies in its enriching the field with new sources. The complexity of the story is defined by an appropriate term: ambiguous. It is difficult, after so much time has passed, to explain the behavior of individuals, in such a context as Italian responsibility during the Holocaust. This study also benefits from being put in a more general context: while examining the events in southern Tuscany, the author bases her research on the historiography that has contributed to defining interpretations of persecution, deportation, the relations between Italian and German racism and antisemitism.
We are looking forward to the publication of the Italian translation, but we are grateful for this promising initiative which brings an important piece of history to people’s attention in the United States, in a language that will allow for broader circulation. It is as important as any contribution to historical knowledge, but even more so today because of a return of racist and antisemitic impulses. This book will also help us Italians come to terms with a past that will not pass until we look deeply into it, without timidity, taking on the responsibility to not obscure the merits of those who have become ‘righteous gentiles’, but to recognize that these form part of a complicated mosaic. For this we are deeply grateful to Judith Roumani.
— Luciana Rocchi, Director, Grosseto Institute for Studies of the Resistance and the Modern Age
In this invaluable book on the history of Jews in Tuscany, Dr. Judith Roumani provides a real sweeping overview of a period little or hardly known. More than seventy years after those dramatic times, this book discloses how Italian Fascists and possible Nazi sympathizers betrayed the idea of ‘good Italian people` by advertently or inadvertently sending their former Jewish neighbors to the ovens of Auschwitz. It also unveils the ambiguous story of a bishop who, the legend claims, helped Jews by hiding them from the Fascists and Nazis, while this author gathers witnesses` accounts of his behavior, showing him more than willing to help Fascists to intern his own fellow Italians, because they were Jews, in his seminary, then refurbished as an internment/transit camp. The pages of this book are magnetic.
— Regina Igel, professor of Portuguese, University of Maryland, College Park