The Secret Inquisition

Based on never-before-examined Fascist and Vatican archives, a shocking, groundbreaking history of Italy’s 1938 racial laws and the desperate measures thousands of Jewish families took to save themselves before and during World War II, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and bestselling author of The Pope at War

“Kertzer has spent decades excavating the Vatican’s hidden history . . . [he is] the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II.”—The New York Times

In 1938, Benito Mussolini shocked Italy and the world by announcing a campaign against the country’s small but ancient Jewish minority. As an ally of Hitler and the Nazi regime, Mussolini implemented strict “race laws,” requiring Jews to register their existence, while throwing all Jewish children out of the country’s school and many of the adults out of their jobs. What followed, David I. Kertzer argues, was nothing short of a twentieth century inquisition as the Fascist authorities, often aided by the Vatican, determined who was and was not subject to persecution and, ultimately, arrest and deportation to Europe’s death camps. These designations, however, were often arbitrary, bureaucratic, and contradictory, leading many Jews to apply to change their identities and claim Christian, “Aryan” status in a desperate attempt to save their families and themselves.

Based on thousands of previously unexamined archival files, The Secret Inquisition focuses on eleven stunning, dramatic cases, including Mussolini’s longtime Jewish lover, Margherita Sarfatti; Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi and his Jewish wife; a young man who befriends Primo Levi at Auschwitz; and the pope’s dentist, who misguidedly believed his closeness to the Vatican and Mussolini’s inner circle would protect him.

In this unprecedented work, Kertzer, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his history of the rise of fascism in Italy, brings his subjects’ untold stories to life, shining a light on their hopes, fears, and human dignity, while reminding us of the dangers of fascism and the inevitable debasement of life under dictatorship, lessons all too relevant for today.