Simon Levis Sullam, who teaches modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, has written a well-researched book that shatters the widely-held belief that Italians were brava gente, “good people,” who protected their Jewish fellow citizens from the horrors of the Holocaust.

The postwar government in Rome nurtured the false belief that the inherent “tolerance” of Italians rendered them incapable of collaborating in “the genocide” of the nation’s Jews. Not surprisingly, this characterization struck a responsive public chord among Italians. Western societies, too, were receptive to the benign, almost comedic image of Italians. The fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, was often portrayed as a strutting buffoon, a farcical refugee of the operatic stage. 
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In fact, on November 17, 1938, (a week after Kristallnacht took place in Germany and Austria), the Mussolini regime adopted a series of harsh laws that denied Italian Jews their civil rights and removed them from public office and institutions of higher education. Other Fascist laws deprived Jews of their assets, limited their travel, and forbade sexual relations and marriages between Jews and “racially pure” Italians. 
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Manoel Dias Soeiro was born in Lisbon in 1604 into an outwardly Roman Catholic family that had been forced by the Inquisition to abandon its Jewish faith and practices.

A half century later at the time of his death in Holland, Soeiro was the world’s most famous Jewish personality of his time, widely known to Jews and Christians as Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel.

In his excellent new book, Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam(Yale University Press), Professor Steven Nadler of the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes this remarkable transition. 
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Desperate to escape Portugal (the Inquisition authorities physically tortured Manoel’s father), the family escaped to Amsterdam in 1610, where refugees could reclaim their Jewish names and identities.