October 7 & today · Italy · 2023–present
Italy’s Catholic, Fascist and communist inheritances meet Islamist mobilization in the surge after October 7.
Explore ItalyPublished by WTJPublication updated
2023–present
October 7 & today · October 7 & today
Italy’s Catholic, Fascist and communist inheritances meet Islamist mobilization in the surge after October 7.
The old accusations do not disappear
Italy’s Jews had lived behind papal ghetto walls and under teaching that blamed Jews collectively for Jesus’s death. The Catholic Church rejected that collective blame in 1965, but a formal repudiation could not instantly erase centuries of cultural suspicion.
Fascism supplied a different accusation: Jews as a racial danger to the nation. Mussolini’s 1938 laws turned it into exclusion from work and public life. Before October 7, BOND researchers still found neo-Fascist antisemitism alongside conspiracy about Jewish power. These inheritances made images of the dangerous or secretly powerful Jew available long after the institutions that first enforced them had changed.
When communist and Islamist causes meet
Parts of Italy’s communist left see Israel as an arm of American power. Hamas can then become resistance against a shared enemy. Giovanni Giacalone’s contribution to CDEC’s 2025 report describes Islamist supporters and Palestinian organizations demonstrating alongside CARC, NPCI and Rete dei Comunisti: practical red–green cooperation.
CDEC also records Jews, including Holocaust survivors, denounced as Zionist accomplices in genocide. The accusation demanded that Jews answer as Jews. Images of Jews as bloodthirsty child killers revived the older blood libel; far-right conspiracy could likewise replace Jew with Zionist while keeping its imagined hidden controller. Government criticism is legitimate. Selective attention can raise a double-standard question; collective guilt, demonization and demands that Jews prove political innocence reveal the older prejudice.
Old hatred, new violence
After October 7, CDEC researchers described a sharp rise in incidents. The conflict gave older Catholic and Fascist stereotypes, radical-left enemy stories and Islamist hostility a shared focus. Their circulation could reinforce one another without all the actors belonging to one organization.
Migration is part of the contemporary setting, but recent arrivals are not the whole story. In twelve of eighteen assault cases in 2025, CDEC described perpetrators as North African, Muslim and/or second-generation Italian. Those are overlapping descriptions of particular cases. Together with the mobilizations above, they show how local inheritances and transnational hostility reach Italian Jews, increasingly through physical attacks as well as exclusion and abuse.