and shops, and arrested and beat Jews. Church authorities hardly could mount a full-throated defense of Jewry from persecution because they had so long advocated and indeed enforced forms of it. As Mussolini pointed out when he inaugurated Italy’s first antisemitic laws in 1938—which excluded Jews from the Fascist Party, the military, and public education, ejected them from honorary societies, revoked grants of citizenship to them since 1919, and limited the size of businesses or estates they could own—these restrictions were not as severe as the ones the popes had imposed in the lands they
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