Language:
English
Year of publication:
2021
Titel der Quelle:
The European Left and the Jewish Question, 1848-1992
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2021) 197-210
Keywords:
Terracini, Umberto,
;
Terracini, Umberto, Political and social views
;
Communists Biography
;
Antisemitism History 20th century
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the commitment of Umberto Terracini (1895–1983), one of the protagonists of Italian Communism, to the Jewish issues. My aim is not so much to highlight the exceptionality of his contribution, but rather to restore depth to a peculiar political dedication, and to recall little-known aspects of this interesting Italian personality. In his youth, Terracini joined the Socialist Party, becoming a close collaborator of Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, and alongside them in 1921 he was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party. Due to his independence of judgment, and his courageous claims to the right to dissent, he was called the “uncomfortable communist”. Contrary to positions that uncritically supported the USSR, Terracini did not feel constrained by the myth of Soviet Russia, always having the courage to claim his own autonomy from Moscow’s directives. Because of this, he paid a price both at a human and political level. Elected Member of Parliament in 1921 and 1924, he was arrested in 1926 following the Fascist victory, and sentenced by the Special Court to twenty-two years and nine months of imprisonment. After having served eleven years of his sentence in Rome, in 1937 he was sent to confinement first to the Island of Ponza, and then to Santo Stefano, where he was finally freed in 1943. During his imprisonment, he criticised the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which led to a period of marginalisation and isolation from the Party, to then be expelled while he was in exile. These penalties caused him “moral sufferings far superior to those inflicted by his imprisonment”, as he wrote personally to Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of PCI, on 5 January 1944. Despite this, Terracini during his long political career never stopped to put himself on the line for causes in which he believed, even at the cost of having to face hard clashes and judgments. His conduct, that often diverged from Party lines, has been the object of studies, but it is Terracini himself who offered an assessment of his long experience as a communist in a statement to journalist Mario Pendinelli, curator of Terracini’s book When we became Communists:
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