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Mussolini’s Jewess


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The American Interest
Margherita Grassini Sarfatti claimed she was to blame for fascism. It’s not so; not that she didn’t try.
Michael McDonald
October 11, 2014

July 29 each year marks one of the principal anniversaries of fascism: Benito Mussolini’s birth on that date in 1883. To celebrate the occasion, thousands of his contemporary supporters assemble in Predappio (the village in which he was born) to pay tribute to the man who coined the term fascismo, launched the Fascist political movement in 1919, and ruled Italy as dictator from 1925 to 1943.

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Who was Margherita Sarfatti? My Fault’s introduction provides a lucid overview of her life. She was born in Venice in 1880, the fourth and last child of Amedeo Grassini and Emma Levi. The Sarfattis were wealthy (among other things, her father established the city’s water taxi system of vaporetti to capitalize on the tourist trade), and his daughter grew up in highly privileged circumstances.

 

Her parents were Orthodox Jews, but Sarfatti received an outstanding secular education. Well read, fluent in several languages, including English, she became active in Socialist and feminist causes while still in her teens—hence her sobriquet in Venice as la vergine rossa, “the red virgin.” Around the turn of the past century, she married a much older Socialist lawyer and moved to Milan to become the art critic for the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti!. It was there she first met Benito Mussolini, the paper’s new editor, in 1912.

 

Sarfatti and Mussolini were inseparable for the next two decades, both in and out of the bedroom. Mussolini went so far as to refer to Sarfatti as his mascotte. She paid for his clothes, his car, his apartment, and much more. She joined with him as he broke with the Socialists over Italy’s participation in the World War. When Mussolini founded his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, to advocate intervention, she went with him. When at the end of the war he organized his followers in the Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan (where the first Fasci italiani di combatimento, or combat bands, were formed), she was there, too.

 

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My Fault: Mussolini As I Knew Him

by Margherita Grassini Sarfatti

edited, annotated, and with commentary by Brian R. Sullivan

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