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this emblematic role never protected them from the opprobrium of the popes (see
Kertzer 2001) or from petty harassment at the local level, although it provides a
template (“we were never anti-semitic, unlike the Germans”) for today's global-
ized expressions of politically correct tolerance.7 while it is not uncommon for
modern rightists to praise the Jewish community as the last of the true Romans,
we should not forget that under mussolini, too, an initial willingness to tolerate
the Jewish presence (and a concomitant support for mussolini on the part of mer-
cantile segments of italian Jewry in particular) gave way to active persecution,
whether primarily because of Nazi pressure or because the new circumstances
that pressure created enabled (and for some also alibied) the emergence of a hith-
erto latent racism in its most overt and vicious form. here, indeed, we see exem-
plified in especially dramatic form the actual processes through which an ap-
parently welcoming social ideology always contains within itself the capacity to
become, instead, the expression and instrument of repression and even genocide.
it is certainly not the case today that Romans have suddenly become racists
and bigots. even among those who embrace explicitly fascist attitudes, open ex-
pressions of intolerance create embarrassment. many Romans, especially those
of more determinedly progressive views, are actively engaged in fighting against
racism, often supporting the immigrants' desire to achieve acceptance at a dis-
tinctively local level. This way of framing their position has deep historical roots
and is connected to the powerful forms of localism for which italy is famous.
most dramatically, perhaps, a well-known monument in the Roman Ghetto
inclusively describes the local Jewish holocaust victims as “Roman citizens”
(rather than as italians). within an expanded notion of racism that for italians
includes
all
forms of intolerance and prejudice, and thus homophobia as much
as racism based on skin color, many heterosexual Romans joined in the world
Gay pride demonstrations of the 2000 Jubilee and thus braved the hostile glare of
the Vatican and of the Rutelli municipal administration now strangely, given its
leader's initial and perhaps equally opportunistic (or accommodating?) displays
of anticlericalism, fawning on the church and its prelates. and many see close
parallels between the circumstances of the immigrant poor and those of their
own compatriots who, in earlier ages, ventured abroad in search of a decent liv-
ing they could not find in the poverty-stricken cities and towns of italy.
Nonetheless, the discourse of tolerance that a now-globalized liberalism has
promulgated provides cover for acts and attitudes that are unquestionably in-
tolerant. Romans are experts at using courtesy as menace, and the new political
correctness—itself a form of “civilized politeness” (
civiltà,
the practice of being
civili
8)—afords ample play to such inversions. semi-underworld operators, for
example, are known to make unctuous offers of help with moving out of apart-
ments in a gentrifying area—offers that conveyed, in a more sinister way than
mere threats would achieve, that refusal would have unspecified but unpleasant
consequences (herzfeld 2009, 256-258). in this matrix, tolerance talk paved the
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