Fascismo e persecuzione razziale dei medici nelle università e nei sindacati fascisti di categoria in Italia

The present work is part of the broad landscape of studies related to Jewish racial persecution during the period of the Fascist Regime, circumscribing it to a specific category of professionals: the physicians on whom there are no systematic studies or specific literature. The primary objective was to identify in a selected sample of Italian provinces the physicians disbarred from the professional registers as welĺ as those expelled or removed from university clinics, filling the gap in the existing literature concerning the expulsions of physicians of Jewish origin from the Faculties of Medicine and Surgery in the Universities on which there are still no specific studies (Ferrara, Parma, Rome, Naples). Through the analysis of unpublished sources from the Archives of the Orders of Surgeons and Dentists and other sources from the State Archives, I identified the professionals who were expelled by the local Fascist trade unions in the North provinces (Turin, Milan, Trieste and Pola, Bolzano, Brescia, Venice, Belluno, Mantua, Bologna Genoa), in the Center (Pisa, Florence, Livorno, Grosseto, Forlì and Ancona, Rome), and in the South (Naples). The names of the expelled, as well as the doctors of Jewish origin who were involved in the persecution, have been transcribed in the Directory of Doctors of Jewish Origin Involved in Racial Persecution, which, in addition to being one of the objectives of this research, is the first of its kind, and was a starting point for identifying the most interesting biographical profiles on which to further research, particularly from the perspective of the theme of emigration and the history of salvation within the persecution. I have proceeded to take stock of the few victims of the Holocaust among physicians and to present the salvation routes by which the majority of medical professionals managed to get to safety, tracing in particular the vicissitudes of the expelled and those of their reintegration into the Medical Faculties, successful or not. A paragraph is devoted to the reconstitution processes of the Medical Orders and how those dealt with the reenrollment of the expelled. I devoted a chapter to an analysis of the discrimination requests submitted by numerous doctors to the General Directorate for Demography and Race, focusing mainly on the reasons on which some obtained the benefit and especially on those obtained for Fascist Merit, which allow us to question or add new elements regarding the category of pro-fascist Jews, which is far less explored than that of anti-fascists ones. A further objective was to make up for the lack of studies concerning the issue of readmission to service through a comparative analysis of those expelled for racial reasons and their reintegration into academia in the early post-World War II years. By bringing these events to light, I have attempted to restore a more complete picture of the entire process of persecution and a balance of the huge losses of intellectual and qualified resources in the medical-scientific field that the Italian state and society actually suffered as a result of the Regime's racial policies. These events allow the reconstruction of a long chapter that, inaugurated with the rise of Fascism, cast its shadows far beyond its end. Bringing them to light restores a more complete picture of the entire process of persecution and a balance of the massive loss of intellectual resources for Italy, which remains to this day a highly topical issue.