Chapter 1: Racial ideology in Europe and Italy before the twentieth century.

The article discusses racial ideology in Europe and Italy before the twentieth century. In many respects, the history of Italian racial identity begins with the cultural conflict engendered by the Germanic conquest of much of the western Roman Empire of late antiquity. To some extent, the Latin peoples, and particularly the Italians, retained a certain historical and cultural antagonism toward the Germanic peoples. Certainly, as an Italian and German consciousness emerged over the course of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, writers reached back to this mythical period of heroic struggle to borrow images that might enable them to support their nascent concepts of national identity. To accomplish this, it often proved convenient to highlight the perceived defects of the historical adversary, the better to emphasize the virtues of the writer's own ancestors. A noted historian of anti-Semitism believes that the Germans have suffered from delusions of persecution mania, centering on a foreign non-German threat, and leading them to "close their ranks." This delusion included plans to attack and destroy antagonists who might be at the same time both imagined and real.