Dr. Roumani is not only the director and founder of the Jewish Institute of Pitigliano, but she is also a member of a prominent Sephardic family. With her background, she brings to light with vivid expression the complex social condition of the region’s Jews through an examination of archival documents, published memoirs, and scholarly works from Italian sources not readily known to western researchers. So little is recognized of Italian Jewry that this segment, situated in the trauma of World War II, is worthy of wide attention.

Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews

This fine gem of a study in local history by Judith Roumani is certain to be of great interest to a wide range of scholars in Italian and Jewish Studies, historians of World War II, and anthropologists. Anyone conducting research on the role of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy in the Holocaust will also find it of value, as will the general reading public.

Sephardic Horizons

‘Not very much happened in the province of Grosseto […] and yet everything happened in this corner of Italy.’ This is the tantalising micro-historical premise of Judith Roumani’s important new book, which navigates the stories of Southern Tuscany’s Jews with sensitivity and scholarly rigour. With subtlety and an almost literary eye for detail, gesture, emotion, Roumani recaptures the voices of a community somewhat neglected in the study of Italian Jewry. In the pages of this book, the ‘exceptional’ story of the Jews of the Maremma illuminates the ‘ordinary’ ambivalence of the Holocaust in Italy, defined by acts of courage and cowardice, discrimination and defiance.

Giacomo Lichtner, author of Fascism in Italian Cinema: the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory

Judith Roumani’s impressively researched and beautifully crafted microhistory of the Italian Province of Grosseto—a place and time where, as she says, “Not very much happened...and yet everything happened”—will be of great interest not only to scholars of the Holocaust but also to a broad reading public. Her attention to telling detail, her gift of recounting stories, and her focus on far-reaching issues marries scholarship with a sense of the human.

Sara Horowitz, The Centre for Jewish Studies, York University

A rich micro-history of the Jews of Grosseto, in southern Tuscany, during the Holocaust, this book sheds light on the larger question of how the Holocaust was experienced in Italy. Based on a wide variety of sources, from oral histories, to archival documents, to published memoirs and scholarly works, it confronts many of the major unanswered questions of the degree and nature of Italian collaboration in the attempt to exterminate Italy’s Jews, including the complex role played by the Roman Catholic Church. Not least, the book offers a good example of the postwar efforts in Italy to whitewash this history and turn Fascist collaborators in the roundup of Jews into heroic resisters.

David I. Kertzer, Brown University

Jews in Southern Tuscany During the Holocaust: Ambiguous Refuge is a necessary, detailed overturning of the official narratives of Italian treatment of the Jewish population during the Holocaust. Roumani’s research is comprehensive and well documented, and the volume will not only make a significant contribution to scholarship in the humanities, but also provide corrective history that is essential.

Sandra Messinger Cypess, University of Maryland