The first Italian translator of Mein Kampf was Jewish

by Bruno Maida

Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography and Nazism’s political manifesto, was translated into Italian as specifically requested by Mussolini and published by Bompiani in 1934. Angelo Treves, the translator, was a Jew, but he died in 1936, thus escaping the worst implications of Nazi ideology. The subsequent Italian editions of the book almost invariably followed the first one, with two recent exceptions: the translation by Marco Linguardo and Monica Mainardi, which was published by Thule, a neo-Nazi publishing house based in Rome, and the translation by Alessandra Cambatzu and Vincenzo Pinto, which was released by Free Ebrei, a Turin-based publishing house, together with a worthy volume of critical essays by various authors.