What is currently happening with immigration in Europe leads me to rephrase Hilbert’s famous statement “We must know; we shall know” as “We must remember, we shall remember.”
The flood of statements issued and actions taken by various European leaders should remind us that this year marks the 80th anniversary of the enactment of anti-Semitic racial laws in Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy and other European countries. The documentary 1938-Diversi, about the Italian case, has just premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival (Mostra) in September, “to not forget it, just when it is 80 years since that shameful event; and as a warning, because the shadow of racism is once again lengthening over Italy”, writes Tommaso Koch in El País.
In order to relieve the situation of refugees who had escaped from Nazi Germany, Roosevelt convened the Évian Conference, which was attended by a number of international delegations. The conference had very poor results; most countries refused to receive Jewish refugees, and only a few (Costa Rica, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela) in very small numbers. Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel’s first president, told The Guardian: ‘The world seems to be divided into two parts: one where Jews cannot live and the other where they cannot enter’. Mutatis mutandis, 2018.
The journal Lettera Matematica has published an issue devoted to the Italian case, which resulted in the expulsion from university of several mathematicians whose names are buried in our memories of long nights of studying mathematical analysis to learn the “theorems with names”, namely: Guido Ascoli (son of Giulio Ascoli, half of the Arzelá-Ascoli theorem), Guido Fubini (yes, the one of the innocent equality of the figure below) y Beppo Levi (yes, the one of the monotone convergence theorem).
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