Abstract

Over the last twenty years, Italian legal historiography has begun to assign a central role to the matter of law in the racial policies conducted by the Fascist government, passing from a long period of embarrassed silence to an ever increasing number of legal-historical studies of racial and, in particular, anti-Semitic policies. How did this gradual awakening take shape with regard to the central role played by the legal side in setting in motion new racial identities brought into being over the course of the 1930s? What relationship is there between historical and legal-historical studies in the reconstruction of this delicate matter? This work sets out to reflect upon the manner in which legal historians have joined in the study of the relationship between law and state-sponsored racism, highlighting the main turning-points in its historiography and taking into consideration the establishment and alteration of the main interpretative patterns.