In 1938, Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni shocked Italy and the world by announc­ing a cam­paign against the country’s small but ancient Jew­ish minor­i­ty. As an ally of Hitler and the Nazi regime, Mus­soli­ni imple­ment­ed strict ​“race laws,” requir­ing Jews to reg­is­ter their exis­tence, while throw­ing all Jew­ish chil­dren out of the country’s school and many of the adults out of their jobs. What fol­lowed, David I. Kertzer argues, was noth­ing short of a twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry inqui­si­tion as the Fas­cist author­i­ties, often aid­ed by the Vat­i­can, deter­mined who was and was not sub­ject to per­se­cu­tion and, ulti­mate­ly, arrest and depor­ta­tion to Europe’s death camps. These des­ig­na­tions, how­ev­er, were often arbi­trary, bureau­crat­ic, and con­tra­dic­to­ry, lead­ing many Jews to apply to change their iden­ti­ties and claim Chris­t­ian, ​“Aryan” sta­tus in a des­per­ate attempt to save their fam­i­lies and them­selves.

Based on thou­sands of pre­vi­ous­ly unex­am­ined archival files, The Secret Inqui­si­tion focus­es on eleven stun­ning, dra­mat­ic cas­es, includ­ing Mus­solin­i’s long­time Jew­ish lover, Margheri­ta Sar­fat­ti; Nobel Prize-win­ning physi­cist Enri­co Fer­mi and his Jew­ish wife; a young man who befriends Pri­mo Levi at Auschwitz; and the pope’s den­tist, who mis­guid­ed­ly believed his close­ness to the Vat­i­can and Mussolini’s inner cir­cle would pro­tect him.

In this unprece­dent­ed work, Kertzer, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his his­to­ry of the rise of fas­cism in Italy, brings his sub­jects’ untold sto­ries to life, shin­ing a light on their hopes, fears, and human dig­ni­ty, while remind­ing us of the dan­gers of fas­cism and the inevitable debase­ment of life under dic­ta­tor­ship, lessons all too rel­e­vant for today.