Editorial

The memory of the Shoa is mainly connected to the horrors of the genocide. However, the massive murder of millions of people didn’t start abruptly, it was anticipated by a progressive series of legal measures and hate propaganda. Several European states adopted laws with the purpose of emargination and limitations of rights for the Jews. In Hungary, already in 1920 there was a numerus clausus for access to the University. More clear and direct racial laws were issued some years after to expel Jews from public offices and careers, studies and professional activities. All this may appear less important in comparison with the massacres, but the impact of these laws on the lives of the victims was devastating, from the moral effect to the economic consequences, since people lost any sort of income to support their families.

People who devoted all their lives and intellectual activities to their profession in the service of the institutions lost their dignity and the possibility to survive; emigration appeared the only possible way of escape, but the main doors of hospitality were very narrowly open.

This tragedy involved Italy too, starting in 1938. The racial laws hit, among others, the professional orders who expelled quickly all their Jewish members, and Universities fired Jewish professors. Medicine was a common activity among Jews, with an important list of excellences in clinical practice and research, absolutely incomparable to their numeric presence in the general population. After the war, two Italian Jewish doctors, Salvator Luria and Rita Levi Montalcini, from the Turin school of Giuseppe Levi were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Jewish doctors and professors were distributed in all the fields of medicine, pathology being only one of these, with recognized personalities. The biographies published here show that their contributions were not only scientific, but they were also life models. To this list the name of Attilio Ascarelli (1875-1962) could be added, pathologist and professor in the affine specialty of legal medicine, who is remembered for his act of identification of the 335 victims of the Nazi massacre of Fosse Ardeatine, in Rome, the 24th March 1944.

The suicidal impact of these laws is also evident on the future development of scientific research in the countries which adopted them, Italy included. But this is only a side effect. The main consideration must be given to the degeneration of values and to the offense to humanity, as an unavoidable consequence of dictatorial systems, the beginning of a sliding slope toward more tragical effects.