Racial Ideology between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Julius Evola and the Aryan Myth,1933–43

As scholarly debates about the convoluted relations between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany become increasingly sophisticated, the role of racial ideology in the Rome–Berlin Axis remains a contested topic. An older historical tradition held that the fascist racial laws, adopted in 1938, were primarily a product of the alliance with Nazi Germany. Recent research, in contrast, emphasizes autonomous Italian currents of racism and antisemitism that culminated in the official targeting of Jews from 1938 onward. ¹ If the Nazi regime has usually been viewed as the chief advocate of an aggressively racist Axis program before and during the Second World War, with Italy at best a junior partner, there are signs of that consensus currently being called into question. ² Yet a recent overview underscores ‘the need for more empirical research on various facets of racism within the Axis alliance’. ³ A case study of Italian initiatives on race, led by fascist thinkers but meant to incorporate and influence German viewpoints as well, can shed new light on this disputed history.

The controversial writer Julius Evola makes an improbable subject for such an analysis. An unorthodox figure within fascist ranks, Evola (1898–1974) had a combative relationship with other supporters of Benito Mussolini's regime. He was not a member of the Fascist Party and was openly critical of what he saw as its needless concessions. His own political views were often much more radical than the fascist mainstream. ⁴ But Evola's extensive contacts in Germany, along with his idiosyncratic version of the Aryan myth, offered a potential bridge linking fascist and Nazi racial theories. He was one of the early Italian proponents of an uncompromising antisemitic stance, publishing a stream of articles, pamphlets, and books on race from the early 1930s onward. In addition to his publications, Evola's work behind the scenes with Nazi as well as fascist officials reveals the tangled racial politics that both united and divided the Axis powers.

Though key details remain obscure, the story of this ideological convergence and its eventual undoing provides crucial insights into the vicissitudes of cross-border cooperation between different strands of racist thought. Whether under fascist or Nazi auspices, a shared commitment to Aryan solidarity could not mask the conflicting expectations and incompatible standards brought to the project. But the temporary success that Evola and his entourage enjoyed in the early 1940s, when racial ideology was anything but an academic exercise, points to an under-appreciated dimension of the uneasy German-Italian alliance. Tracing the development of Evola's interactions with the fascist and Nazi bureaucracies through archival sources as well as published texts, this study offers a transnational perspective on the deployment of racial myths in the charged political context of persecution, war, and destruction.

When the Rome–Berlin Axis was proclaimed in 1936, it seemed to augur a new era of cooperation between the fascist and Nazi regimes. Several basic differences nonetheless remained unresolved. Perhaps the most conspicuous concerned racial policy: while Nazi Germany had pursued an antisemitic program from the beginning, Fascist Italy did not follow suit until years later. The contrast was a source of chagrin for Nazi officials, who sometimes viewed their ally as timid and unreliable regarding the ‘Jewish question.’ ⁵ But there were voices within the fascist movement calling for antisemitic measures all along, in an intricate dynamic of both collaboration and competition with their German counterparts. Among the most distinctive of those voices was Julius Evola.

An artist and author with diverse cultural interests, Evola espoused a worldview known as Traditionalism that combined occultist and neo-pagan influences in an aristocratic rejection of modernity. Evola's ‘revolt against the modern world’ aimed to restore a primeval hierarchical order. ⁶ His beliefs about a common Aryan heritage shaped his perspective on Germany. Even before the advent of the Nazi regime, Evola had a longstanding relationship with thinkers on the German right, especially those affiliated with the so-called ‘conservative revolution’ tendency. ⁷ Fluent in German, he published in Nazi venues as early as 1930. ⁸ He continued to cultivate a German audience throughout the decade with repeated speaking tours in the Third Reich. Two of his major works appeared in German translation in 1933 and 1935. ⁹ His wide-ranging analysis of the ‘Jewish problem’ was published in Italy in 1936, two years before the regime's official antisemitic turn. ¹⁰

This background gave Evola unique stature in Nazi eyes. He published articles on race, the Aryan tradition, and the Jewish threat in German periodicals into the 1940s. ¹¹ Evola maintained friendly contacts with Nazi race ideologues Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß and Johann von Leers. As his appreciation for Nazi visions of Aryan glory grew, Evola came to admire the SS as an elite order representing superior values. ¹² An increasing kinship with Nazism, which had supposedly restored Germany to its original majesty and reclaimed the inheritance of Nordic paganism, counterbalanced his doubts about its all too modern political character.

Despite sympathy for the achievements of Adolf Hitler, however, Evola never fully embraced Nazi racial precepts. Indeed his early assessments could be harshly critical. When the Nazi regime was established in 1933, Mussolini had been in power for a decade, and fascist thinkers sometimes looked down on their upstart northern neighbors. Evola's evolving attitudes toward Nazi racial thinking generally followed the vagaries of fascist policy regarding the new German government. Mussolini and Hitler were often rivals, and tensions over Austria and other points of Italian-German contention left relations between the two dictators particularly strained during the early years of Nazi rule. In this fraught context, Mussolini encouraged public denunciations of Nazi racial doctrine. ¹³ Evola's two major contributions to this campaign appeared with prominent placement in late 1933 and early 1934.

The first article was a brief disquisition offering ‘critical observations’ on the excessively ‘naturalistic’ components of Nazi racial ideology. Here Evola outlined his philosophy of ‘spiritual’ racism and contrasted it to the ‘materialist’ racism that predominated within National Socialism, warning that a materialist outlook failed to take heed of the ‘metabiological’ aspects of race. Fascism, he concluded, had already shown the way toward the ‘higher reality’ proper to the ‘Aryan peoples’. ¹⁴ The second article applauded Nazism's revival of ‘Aryanism’ and its salutary contrast between ‘superior races and inferior races’, but cautioned that biological theories of race were not aristocratic enough and did not grasp true racial nobility. ¹⁵ Notwithstanding their respectful tone toward Hitler and the Nazi ‘revolution’, both essays asserted fascism's primacy in regard to racial questions.

At its core, the ‘spiritual racism’ championed by Evola posited a fundamental dichotomy between the Jewish spirit and the Aryan spirit, expressed in cultural, intellectual, and physiological terms. ¹⁶ Its proponents drew on an eclectic mix of religious and scientific elements, proposing a vision of Aryan supremacy adapted to an Italian context. Evola insisted that standard forms of ‘materialist’ racism were not up to the task of confronting the ‘Jewish menace’ in its full depth and breadth. Since race was ‘not merely physical’, biological racism was a necessary starting point, but ‘insufficient’ by itself. Focusing only on superficial traits would leave the racist program ‘severely crippled’. ¹⁷ Spiritual racists thus demanded more radical measures than their fellow fascists.

For all his eccentricities, Evola was hardly alone in promoting such views. He received institutional support from journalist Giovanni Preziosi (1881–1945) and fascist hard-liner Roberto Farinacci (1892–1945). Preziosi was publisher of the periodical La Vita Italiana, while Farinacci, former Secretary of the Fascist Party, sponsored the newspaper Regime Fascista. Both organs served as a platform for militant racist currents within the fascist milieu. In 1937 Preziosi and Evola published an Italian version of the infamous antisemitic forgery, the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. ¹⁸ Other members of their circle had ties to Germany. Alberto Luchini (1897–1973), director of the Institute of Fascist Culture in Florence, was an early interlocutor for Nazi intellectuals before 1933 and portrayed National Socialism as the fulfillment of the spiritual yearnings of the German people. ¹⁹ Luchini participated in antisemitic congresses in Germany in 1937 and 1938. ²⁰ His antisemitic writings appeared in Gerarchia, ‘the monthly journal of the fascist revolution’, proclaiming a ‘spiritualist-fascist conception’ of race as a bulwark against the ‘anti-race’ of the Jews. ²¹

Perhaps the most prolific exponent of this standpoint was Massimo Scaligero (1906–80), whose writings exemplified spiritual racism in its purest form. Considered Evola's ‘loyal popularizer’, Scaligero combined esoteric and pagan motifs into an elaborate racial worldview. ²² His publications teemed with references to Atlantis and Thule, the Eddas and the Holy Grail, ancient Indian deities and Greek mythology. Like his mentor Evola, Scaligero maintained that biological forms of racial purity did not go far enough: ‘eugenics alone is not sufficient for a totalitarian racist praxis’. ²³ More rigorous scrutiny was necessary in order to detect the perfidious traces of Jewish influence, as it was always possible for a ‘non-Roman, non-Aryan, non-Italian’ soul to be concealed within an Italian body. ²⁴

Jews were not, of course, the only target of spiritual racism. Against the backdrop of fascist colonial policy, Evola and his followers were equally disdainful toward Africans. In a September 1935 letter to Scaligero, with war in Ethiopia approaching, Evola referred contemptuously to ‘Negroes and other colonial insects’. ²⁵ Scaligero's articles combined multiple strands of racism, denigrating the ‘Negroid races’ as bearers of ‘Asiatic-Semitic contamination’ and a constant threat to ‘the white race’. The rightful role of the ‘Aryan peoples’ was ‘world conquest and the consolidation of colonial hegemony’. ²⁶ Evola traced the rise of fascist racial consciousness to Mussolini's military campaigns in Africa, which brought Italians into contact with ‘inferior peoples’ and revealed the gulf separating Europeans from ‘Negroes’, ‘Mongols’, ‘Redskins’ and so forth. ²⁷ But the ‘Jewish problem’ remained the central obsession. For Evola, Jews embodied all of the destructive forces of modernity, from democracy to humanitarianism to racial mixing. Aryan victory required their elimination.

Claims like these offered potential points of contact with Nazi racial thinking, but simultaneously provoked intense opposition from rival fascist camps. Within the remarkably variegated spectrum of racial theories current in Italy at the time, Evola's version of spiritual racism constituted a minority strand. ²⁸ Representatives of traditional Catholic anti-Judaism objected to its occult and pagan connotations, while scientific racists disapproved of its woolly philosophical categories and took umbrage at Evola's critique of biological approaches. When Mussolini's regime promulgated the racial laws, the scientific faction initially won the upper hand. The new policy was announced in July 1938 with the publication of the ‘Manifesto of Racial Scientists’, premised on a ‘purely biological’ understanding of race. ²⁹ It declared Italians ‘Aryans’ and Jews a foreign racial group. The Manifesto was followed by a wave of antisemitic publications and increasingly severe legislation aimed against Italy's Jews. ³⁰

Though temporarily sidelined by the larger bloc of biological racists, Evola and his companions continued to promote their austere racism through a vigorous campaign in the fascist press. Evola did not conceal his contempt for Italian intellectuals who suddenly discovered they were antisemites in the summer of 1938. As he pointedly noted in early 1939, he had been trying ‘to give an antisemitic orientation to fascist spirituality’ since 1926. ³¹ In a high-profile article published in December 1938, Evola called for a ‘totalitarian racism’ that would do away with half-hearted gestures and ‘confront the Jewish problem’ in its entirety. It was essential to face the danger of Jewish contamination at both the biological and the spiritual level in order to mount ‘a defense that is not only external but internal as well’. Only this ‘comprehensive’ racism could do justice to ‘the tripartite nature of the human being – body, soul, and spirit’. The future of the ‘Aryan race’ depended on it. ³²

Over the next several months Evola spelled out this racial vision in a series of articles on ‘the Aryan worldview’ and ‘the Aryan-Nordic tradition’. He explained that Aryan peoples like the Italians and Germans must be especially vigilant against ‘the Semitic spirit’ with its secularism, egalitarianism, and rationalism. By cultivating an ‘integral racism’, the Aryans could protect themselves against corruption by ‘inferior races’. ³³ Since pre-historic times, Evola warned, the great Aryan civilizations had been vulnerable to ‘Oriental-Semitic decomposition’ and the dilution of noble Aryan blood. Ancient Rome was built on Nordic-Aryan foundations, and its decline was due to racial debasement. Fascism, having revived the original Aryan spirit of the Roman Empire, must defend itself anew against the perennial Jewish threat. ³⁴

In a far-reaching review of the ‘Jewish problem’ published just before the start of the Second World War, Evola summarized his position. Like Nazism, fascism could not allow ‘Jewish blood’ to infect the Italian people. But the mixed ethnic character of the Italians demanded a more painstaking approach. Merely biological racism could never succeed in ‘eliminating’ the ‘Semitic racial components’ that had infiltrated the peninsula across the centuries. Italian culture itself had fallen prey to ‘the Jewish virus’, and physical markers of race did not register the danger from within. In the face of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ against Aryan civilization, many so-called ‘Aryans’ had ‘abandoned their posts’, and some had even ‘joined the enemy’. To overcome the baleful impact of the Jewish spirit, the racial campaign could not be left in the hands of those who ‘woke up one morning as antisemites’. It needed guidance from committed advocates of the Aryan cause. ³⁵

Conjoining spiritual and biological factors into a ‘totalitarian racism’, Evola's principles reflected familiar features of the Aryan myth. The idea of an Aryan race, emerging in the nineteenth century, was based on a conflation of anthropology and philology that highlighted spiritual characteristics while claiming biological status. Aryans were said to be the originators of all the great civilizations of antiquity and the carriers of humankind's noblest ideals. ³⁶ In Evola's eyes, the essentially mythical nature of this construct was no hindrance. As he explained in a foundational text on race, a ‘myth’ was not ‘simply fiction’, but a powerfully creative concept built on ‘non-rational elements’. ³⁷ Evola did not shy away from the more arcane corollaries of the Aryan myth. He held that the ‘Olympian’ and ‘solar’ Aryan race came from ‘Hyperborean’ origins in the far north, bearing a divine lineage in a benighted world. ³⁸

Aside from the aura of historical grandeur it imparted, the Aryan myth was crucial to uniting Germans and Italians under a common racial banner. That project took on special urgency with the outbreak of war in September 1939. The conflict changed the basic conditions for any effort to bring fascism and Nazism closer together. In December 1939 Evola applied to join the Fascist Party, evidently seeing it as his duty to support the military efforts of the Axis even though Italy did not enter the war until June 1940. He sent letters through 1942 to contacts in the fascist apparatus boasting of his contributions to the cause. His application was rejected by the local party organization in Rome, which considered him an ‘undesirable element’. ³⁹ Evola appealed the decision, but it was upheld by the party's high court, an indication of the level of resistance he faced from his own compatriots.

He fared better with German audiences. Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s Evola made frequent trips to Nazi Germany, giving speaking tours, meeting with SS officials, and attending conferences. In 1937 he took part in an international antisemitic convention in Erfurt and wrote a report for Italian readers. ⁴⁰ A lecture tour in spring 1941 took Evola to Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Berlin. These public talks, delivered in German, garnered extensive coverage in the Nazi press. His April 1942 lectures on race in Hamburg and Berlin, depicting a shared Aryan heritage that bound Italians and Germans together, received particular praise. ⁴¹ In December 1940 Evola gave a presentation in German at a Nazi research institute in Rome, offering a spiritual glorification of war as a heroic Aryan value. It was published as a pamphlet in Vienna the following year. ⁴² At home, Evola remained a polarizing figure who aroused staunch opposition from fascist quarters. His long sojourns in Germany provoked contrary assessments: Some saw him as an unreliable fascist due to his strongly pro-German stance, while others cast him as excessively critical of Nazi policy and an irritant to the Axis partnership. ⁴³ Undaunted, Evola continued to call loudly for Italy and Germany to ‘move forward on the racist front’. ⁴⁴

For the Italian contingent of spiritual racists, a long awaited opening came in May 1941, when Evola's associate Luchini was appointed head of the ‘Race Office’ in the Ministry of Popular Culture. In a major victory over the biological racists, Luchini held the position for more than two years, until Mussolini was deposed in July 1943. ⁴⁵ The group around Evola seized the chance to shape formal policy. Among their most important initiatives was the establishment of a series of antisemitic institutes in cities across Italy. These ‘Centers for the Study of the Jewish Problem’ published a journal titled Il Problema Ebraico (‘The Jewish Problem’). It was edited by Aniceto del Massa (1898–1975), another supporter of radicalized spiritual racism. ⁴⁶

Evola's own fortunes also took an upward turn. His voluminous antisemitic writings culminated in the 1941 magnum opus Summary of Racial Doctrine. ⁴⁷ Mussolini read the book in Germany in late August 1941. Impressed by its arguments, he underlined passages emphasizing the link between spiritual dynamism and physical heredity. ⁴⁸ Two weeks later, after returning to Italy, the Duce met with Evola and enthusiastically endorsed the querulous theorist's racial views. With official recognition at last, Evola was granted a monthly stipend of 2,000 Lira from the Ministry of Popular Culture. ⁴⁹ For a time it seemed that the spiritual faction had attained predominant influence over fascist racial policy.

Emboldened by this new status, Evola embarked on an energetic attempt to bring together Nazi and fascist viewpoints on race and enable a frank discussion of differences. The goal, according to his follower Scaligero, was to erect a ‘united Aryan front’ between the two Axis powers. ⁵⁰ At his September 1941 audience with Mussolini, Evola proposed a bilingual journal on racial questions, and the Duce agreed to support it. Reflecting Evola's amalgam of biological and spiritual themes, the journal was to be titled ‘Blood and Spirit’: Sangue e Spirito in Italian, Blut und Geist in German. ⁵¹ The fate of the project revealed both the ambitions and the limitations of spiritual racism as a ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ while indicating the difficulties involved in efforts toward ideological collaboration between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Its transitory lifespan coincided with a new period of tensions in Mussolini's imbalanced relationship with Hitler, and unfolded just as the opening stages of the Holocaust were underway. ⁵²

Initial planning for the journal began at the Rome headquarters of the Race Office in November 1941. To expand its reach, Evola invited representatives from different currents of fascist racial thought to participate, including prominent biological racist Telesio Interlandi. Preziosi and Scaligero were involved from the beginning. As Evola explained to Mussolini, it was ‘an essentially Italian initiative’. ⁵³ German endorsement, however, proved elusive. In some respects Evola seemed an ideal interlocutor from a Nazi perspective: an outspoken antisemite who was thoroughly familiar with German culture and had Mussolini's ear.

But Nazi appraisals of Evola were divided. A January 1938 SS evaluation remarked on his ‘astonishing knowledge of Aryan matters’, while a June 1938 report from a different SS department concluded that Evola's confused teachings amounted to ‘neither National Socialism nor Fascism’. ⁵⁴ Assessments from Heinrich Himmler's Ahnenerbe organization, an SS institute devoted to the ‘ancestral heritage’ of the Aryans, similarly veered between praise and criticism. The organization's president, Orientalist Walther Wüst, held Evola in ‘high esteem’. ⁵⁵ An Ahnenerbe report from July 1938 offered a basically positive judgement of Evola's work but noted several points of disagreement, while observing that Evola seemed removed from current political realities in his own country. ⁵⁶ These divergent perceptions came into sharper relief as plans for the ‘Blood and Spirit’ project moved forward.

Evola set the stage with a May 1941 speech in Berlin on Italian racism, declaring that ‘the fascist turn toward the racial idea’ was ‘the logical development of our movement’. Italian racial policy represented fascism's commitment to the ‘Nordic-Aryan’ race alongside its German brother nation. Deriding the ‘intellectuals and literary aesthetes’ who had no understanding of the ‘heroic, sacred, manly’ Aryan heritage, Evola insisted that Nazism and fascism offered fully compatible and complementary racial programs, united in their common Aryan origins. ⁵⁷ A few months later, Evola assured his Nazi contacts that he had met with Mussolini to discuss the bilingual journal on race and that the Duce fully supported the endeavor. He returned to Berlin in early 1942 to discuss the matter with German officials. ⁵⁸

Although initial Nazi evaluations of Evola's journal proposal were often positive, a predominant skepticism persisted. The concerns were ideological as well as strategic: on the one hand, Evola's theories accorded only a ‘secondary role’ to ‘racial biology’, and on the other hand, it remained unclear whether such a divisive figure was the ‘most suitable partner’ in coordinating Axis perspectives on this decisive topic. ⁵⁹ Plans for the journal nonetheless reached an advanced stage. It was to be published monthly, with approximately 40 pages per issue. The Italian and German editions were to have their own editorial staffs, with Evola as editor in chief. Joint editorial meetings were to be held every three months. ⁶⁰ Evola hoped the inaugural issue would appear by summer 1942. He secured a promise of financial support from the Fascist Party, while German state and party agencies were to purchase 7,000 copies of each issue. ⁶¹

Detailed preparations on the Italian side, however, met with delays and dissension on the German side. Evola put forward a list of 16 Italian collaborators approved by Mussolini, including Preziosi, Luchini, Scaligero, del Massa, and several other proponents of spiritual racism. ⁶² Nazi officials, in contrast, were unable to agree on an editor for the German half of the journal. Evola's favorite, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, had fallen afoul of rival Nazi racial theorists. ⁶³ Evola instead proposed Johann von Leers, who was living in Rome at the time, as German editor. But the nomination of Leers was opposed by representatives of the so-called Amt Rosenberg, which claimed a voice in all ideological and cultural questions facing the Nazi party. ⁶⁴ The dispute among Nazi officials over a German editor for the journal was never resolved, and the February 1942 Berlin meetings remained inconclusive.

Several different Nazi agencies were involved in negotiations over the ‘Blood and Spirit’ publication. The primary figure was Walter Groß, director of the Nazi party's Office of Racial Policy, who hosted the 1942 meetings. Groß was cautiously supportive of the project in spite of his doubts about Evola. Other German officials in attendance included Alfred Baeumler from the Amt Rosenberg; SS officer Franz Rademacher, head of the department of Jewish affairs in the Foreign Ministry; SS officer Albert Prinzing, an Italian specialist for the Foreign Ministry; and Werner Hüttig from Groß's Office of Racial Policy. Rademacher endorsed the project as an opportunity for ‘comradely cooperation’ with the Italian ally and a chance to spread German perspectives on race, while Baeumler remained skeptical ‘from a biological point of view.’ ⁶⁵ The harshest assessment came from Hüttig, who submitted a detailed critique of Evola's racial theories in September 1942. Hüttig faulted Evola's treatment of scientific issues and his obscure mixture of incongruous sources, from ancient Aryan tradition to modern esoteric lore. ⁶⁶

Such disagreements reflected a larger split in Nazi viewpoints, one which went beyond Evola as an individual and indicated the contested status of Italian racism in German eyes. Some Nazi agencies were positively disposed toward Evola and his allies as ‘Italian pioneers of the racial idea and the anti-Jewish movement’. ⁶⁷ German officials stationed in Italy praised Preziosi, Luchini, and other spiritual racists for their intransigent antisemitism. ⁶⁸ The German ambassador to Italy described Preziosi in early 1943 as ‘the driving force behind the fascist regime's measures against the Jews’. ⁶⁹

The attitude of Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was much more hostile. Rosenberg ‘harbored pronounced antipathies against the Italians’. ⁷⁰ His racial theories had been subjected to severe criticism in the pages of Preziosi's journal in the mid-1930s, and despite efforts toward reconciliation by Evola and others, it proved difficult to overcome the accumulated mutual resentments. Historical prejudices played a part. As an early study of the Rome–Berlin Axis notes, it was an ‘intellectual fashion’ among many Germans ‘to attribute the collapse of the Roman Empire to an excess of racial interbreeding, and to despise the Italians as its hybrid descendents’. ⁷¹ This animosity had practical consequences; when a German translation of Preziosi's 1940 book How Jewry planned the War was proposed as part of the official Nazi party publication series, it was abandoned due to opposition from Rosenberg. ⁷²

It was not German antagonism, however, that brought the ‘Blood and Spirit’ project to a halt. According to the available documentation, Italian objections led to the cancellation of plans for the journal. Regardless of the preparations already made, by March 1942 Mussolini's support had begun to waver. Fascist officials inquired whether to ‘support the initiative fully, delay it, or cancel it’. ⁷³ Evola requested another audience with the Duce, but was asked to wait. In May 1942 the German ambassador relayed a report from Rome that Mussolini had revoked his support for the project. ⁷⁴ The decision reportedly came at a tense meeting with the Duce that included Evola and two of his chief rivals: Interlandi, spokesman for the biological racists, and the Jesuit priest Pietro Tacchi Venturi, unofficial representative of Pope Pius XII.

In an unusual alliance, both Interlandi and Tacchi Venturi spoke against the journal project. The occult aspects of Evola's spiritual racism were a source of particular controversy. Anonymous denunciations sent to the fascist leadership had warned for years of ‘an epidemic of esotericism’ afflicting Italy. ⁷⁵ Interlandi angrily protested ‘occultist’ perversions of the racist idea in a March 1942 letter to Mussolini. ⁷⁶ Later that year Interlandi's journal published a harsh attack on Evola's ‘nebulous spiritualism’ by anthropologist Guido Landra. ⁷⁷ For its scientific opponents, spiritual racism simply wasn't biological enough. Tacchi Venturi, for his part, insisted that Evola's project would lead to problems with the church, which viewed spiritual matters as its rightful territory and frowned on the pagan overtones of Evola's approach. The longstanding mutual hostility between Evola and the Catholic hierarchy helped doom the ‘Blood and Spirit’ program. ⁷⁸

Faced with the combined opposition of scientists and clergy at the May 1942 meeting, Mussolini decided that their concerns outweighed his own ‘sympathy for Evola's work’. ⁷⁹ Thus the aspirations for a dual Italian-German journal on racial questions remained unfulfilled. The fact that the project nonetheless progressed so far in the midst of war indicates the potential usefulness that various fascists and Nazis saw in it. Whatever doubts the ideology of spiritual racism may have aroused, a common racial agenda for the Axis powers retained substantial appeal. But it also revealed the limitations of any attempt to formulate a coherent foundation for the increasingly radical forms of antisemitism that prevailed in both Germany and Italy.

Evola's simultaneously spiritual and biological methodology, presented to his Nazi partners as a basis for negotiations over the ‘Blood and Spirit’ proposal, offered elaborate theoretical justification for a multi-pronged attack on the ostensible racial enemy. This line of attack would not only target physical characteristics but penetrate to the ‘racial soul’ as well. While race was based on ‘heritable’ factors and ‘principally genetic’, genuine racism could not be ‘confined’ to ‘materialistic science’. For Evola, ‘protecting biological purity’ was just a first step; averting ‘spiritual bastardization’ was equally urgent. It was therefore crucial to extend racial vigilance to the spiritual dimension because ‘despite their bodily race’, even those who appeared physically Aryan ‘could be Jewish in soul and in life’. ⁸⁰

Though Evola's racism represented an extreme version of such views, the fear of a potential Jew lurking inside every gentile had a lengthy history within anti-Jewish thought. ⁸¹ Nor was the notion of a ‘racial soul’ a new invention. Evola shared this concept with his Nazi associate Clauß, but its derivation was considerably older. Tracing the religious roots of Western racial thought, George Mosse's classic study Toward the Final Solution noted that the emergence of modern racism was based in part on a growing emphasis on ‘the “inner man” which would eventually lead to racial judgments about man's soul’. ⁸² This was the legacy upon which Evola's racial theory built. Putting it into practice was no easy task when powerful Nazis considered Italians themselves of dubious Aryan provenance.

Nevertheless, Nazi and fascist conceptions of the Jewish enemy were not as far apart as they sometimes seemed. Many of the disputes that occupied Evola were an expression of rivalry and cross-cultural misunderstanding rather than fundamental ideological incompatibility. Rosenberg himself held a spiritual view of race, pondering the mysteries of the ‘racial soul’ at length in his tome The Myth of the Twentieth Century. According to Rosenberg, race was ‘a mystical synthesis’ of soul and body. ⁸³ Hitler's own diatribes against the ‘Jewish spirit’ echoed similar themes:

It is important to understand that to Hitler, ‘Jewishness’ was not confined to ‘racial Jews’; non-Jews who sympathized with ‘Jewish’ inventions (democracy, socialism, internationalism, etc.) were also classified as Jews – not ‘racial Jews,’ but ‘spiritual Jews.’ This made Hitler's anti-Semitism far more flexible and destructive than the purely racial anti-Semitism of his radical predecessors and contemporary followers. ⁸⁴

Evola's core assumptions were shared across ideological boundaries: Jews routinely appeared as the personification of materialism, rationalism, and abstract thought, the antithesis of the creative Aryan life force, in fascist as well as Nazi contexts, in Christian as well as pagan forms of antisemitism, in spiritual as well as scientific currents of race thinking.

These findings offer an occasion to re-assess both Italian and German racial ideology. While the divisions over race theory among competing fascist factions reflected a number of specifically Italian factors, there were comparable disagreements within Nazism. Far from a monolithic or unified force, Nazi racism comprised a tangle of contending strands scattered across an array of party and state offices. This internally contradictory historical record awaits adequate scholarly analysis. ⁸⁵ In light of the unresolved issues, historians caution against the widespread tendency to ‘reduce the race concepts of National Socialism to a biological materialism’. ⁸⁶ Nazi propaganda itself offered confirmation. ‘The racial principles of National Socialism’, the party's race expert Walter Groß wrote in 1938, held that ‘races are not only physically but especially spiritually and intellectually different from each other’. ⁸⁷ Even notorious SS perpetrators affirmed the composite nature of the ideology underlying the Holocaust. In a 1946 affidavit, SS functionary Dieter Wisliceny, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews, explained that Nazi antisemitism stemmed from two sources, a ‘pseudo-scientific biological’ component and a ‘mystical-religious’ component. ⁸⁸

Evola accentuated the mystical side of this ideological fusion while upholding its biological correlate; his works consistently focused on both ‘blood’ and ‘spirit’. ⁸⁹ He demanded an antisemitism ‘without compromise’ and a ‘deeper alliance’ with Nazi Germany. ⁹⁰ His ideas provided an unconventional chance for Italian-German accord on racial questions. But the rivalries and intrigues that characterized both regimes made it difficult to turn such commonalities into sustained practical assistance. The ambivalence that marked relations between fascism and Nazism ended up frustrating hopes for a closer partnership. Evola's proposed synthesis of racial worldviews was unable to overcome the challenges of wartime cooperation and failed to transform the vexed alliance between the two dictatorships. ⁹¹

With his efforts on behalf of the abortive ‘Blood and Spirit’ undertaking, Evola cast the racial politics of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany in an unexpected light: the Italian side overeager, the German side indecisive. A quixotic attempt to put the Aryan myth into practice, the episode formed part of a larger initiative, spanning a decade, to assert fascist priorities on race. Exacerbated by ideological differences and internal rifts, the questions it raised remain unresolved. Yet this ambiguous history can serve to dispel a number of myths that have arisen regarding racial ideology and the Rome–Berlin Axis. In the context of recent research, it counters the ‘fallacious judgement’ that fascist racial policies were ‘less deserving of opprobrium’ than their Nazi counterparts. ⁹² It helps explain why significant numbers of Italians, contrary to popular perception, actively participated in genocidal campaigns against Jews. ⁹³ Last, it highlights the importance of ideological disputes and contributes to the ongoing revision of previous appraisals of spiritual racism as a supposedly more benign variant of antisemitic thought, preferable in some way to purely biological versions of racism.

Closer attention to cases like this can illuminate the enigmatic historical dynamics surrounding the political impact of seemingly abstruse beliefs about race. With the help of patrons in both Italy and Germany, Evola fought for ‘totalitarian racism’ in the name of a closer union between fascism and Nazism. Though his teachings along these lines were peculiar, the limits they faced were not; his endeavors followed the same troubled trajectory as other instances of Axis affiliation. ⁹⁴ Still, Evola's doctrines resonated in Italy and Germany alike. His syncretic re-working of the Aryan myth lent a grandiose sense of urgency to familiar antisemitic clichés while pressing for an intensification of concrete racial policies. He borrowed freely from disparate traditions, from religious anti-Judaism to scientific racism, from anthropology and archeology to modern antisemitic conspiracy theories, from any source that could help construct a compelling image of the fearsome Jewish peril.

In a time when Evola's ideas are undergoing a revival, topics like these take on more than academic significance. ⁹⁵ The entwinement of biological and spiritual beliefs about race is not a thing of the past, no minor concern in light of the porous boundary between putatively extremist ideologies and the cultural mainstream. ⁹⁶ Evola's project may have failed in its era, but the resentments that animated it have by no means disappeared. Critical scholarship on allegedly ancient racial myths and their modern implementation can help clarify our understanding of a history that has lost little of its relevance. Opaque as they may seem to contemporary observers, the theories that Evola espoused in fateful interchange between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy deserve renewed attention today.