Despite their common descent, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim were, I am sad to say, not natural‐born allies, and their cultures differ more than you might expect (hence why I typically say ‘Jewish cultures’; to remind you that only some cultural phenomena are truly pan‐Jewish). Even in the concentration camp, a shared destiny between siblings did not guarantee solidarity, and unfortunately some Ashkenazi prisoners still treated their Sephardic siblings with ethnocentrism:

As these witnesses testify, among the Jewish community of the East (Ashkenazi Judaism) the spoken language is very often Yiddish, conveying a certain sense of common belonging and common destiny. The chemist, Primo Levi, analyses the isolation and stigmatization of Italian Jewish deportees, through the prism of the Yiddish language, in an interview of 1982:

We were rejected, we Sephardic Jews or Italians anyway, because we did not speak Yiddish, we were foreigners […] at first to the Germans as Jews, and [then] also to the Eastern Jews because we weren’t like them, because we didn’t have—they had no idea that [another form of] Judaism existed… Many, many Polish Jews of low extraction were annoyed by this fact: ‘But you’re a Jew? Redest keyn jiddisch, bist ni keyn jid’ they say, I don’t know if you understand.

Redest keyn jiddisch, bist nit keyn jid,⁵⁹ as Yiddish is the adjective that derives from jid, and jid meaning Jude, which means Jewish, it is almost a syllogism, it means a Frenchman who does not speak French. A Frenchman who doesn’t speak French is not French. A Jid who doesn’t speak Yiddish is no Jid.

[…]

We Italian Jews, we felt particularly defenseless, we and the Greeks were the last among the last; I would say we were in even worse conditions than the Greeks, because the Greeks were in large part accustomed to discrimination, there was anti‐Semitism in Thessaloniki, they had built their weapons […]. But the Italians, the Italian Jews so used to being considered on equal terms with all the others, were truly without shells, naked as an egg without shell.⁶⁰

In her testimony, published in 1947, Liana Millul⁶¹ accentuates the same idea: “The Italian Jewish deportee was in a position of inferiority and isolation, not only because of the hatred of the SS and the Kapos, but also because he/she was unable to communicate with the other Jews. In the camp, at once, a strong feeling of solitude grew in all of us.”⁶²

Language therefore does convey, more than a mere coded statement, relations of dominance. A Jew of the East, who found himself being part of a majority or who has arrived previously in the camps, demonstrated through the exchanges of speeches that he dominated over his interlocutors. This goes hand in hand with a sense of legitimacy to dominate.

In the case of the quotation of Primo Levi, the eastern deportees did not speak only in Yiddish to their interlocutors, but in a mixture of Yiddish and a language in which the interlocutor is able to grasp the meaning of the discourse. In this way, the relation of dominance is more concealed from a linguistic point of view (the one who feels himself dominant descends at the level of the one he thinks he’s dominating).

By denying this relationship of domination, the dominant emerges only reinforced in his position. This is an example of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the “strategy of condescension.”⁶³

The other quoted examples demonstrate, on the contrary, that the deportees able to speak in Yiddish did not necessarily make an effort to be understood and thus exclude the minority of deportees incapable of understanding. This means they obliged the latter to adapt.

The language spoken by the Italian deportees, or rather their lack (in general) of linguistic knowledge placed them therefore automatically below prisoners from other nationalities or Jewish traditions: having had to succeed in an effort of acculturation to maximize their chances of survival (which equals not being isolated), the Italians necessarily underwent a stronger selection.⁶⁴

This is what we find as well in the testimony of Alberto Sed in particular, where the deportee receives the punches intended for another prisoner who, by his knowledge of German, knew how to put the blame on Alberto instead of him.⁶⁵

[…]

The isolation of the Italian minority of Jews in the camps (6,806 deported individuals⁶⁶), was soon accompanied by stereotypical images or abusive language coming from other Jewish deportees. In the Italian testimonies these stereotypes return many times and isolate the witnesses further. Leonella Jona Bellinzona recalls:

The Italian woman, who entered the camp between the end of 1943 and 1944, when she entered the camp, found herself even below the subproletariat, if it’s possible to express it this way, because she arrived in the camp being considered with an evil eye by the Germans, who were calling us Badoglio and who spitted when we passed. Considered with an evil eye by the other inmates and surrounded by their terrible mistrust; they called us Mussolini fascist and, besides, a complete ignorance of the language.⁶⁷

This resembles an attitude that antiziganist Jews had: while it is undeniable that some Jewish and Romani prisoners showed solidarity towards one another, it is unfortunately also true that some Jewish prisoners took their frustrations out on Romani ones (& vice versa). I’m no psychologist, so I can only speculate when I cynically say that maybe many of us adults have a childish instinct to subject others to our mistreatment in order to make the situation ‘fairer’ and therefore make ourselves feel better.

Continuing:

The insults that the Italians have most endured are undoubtedly those referring to the contemporary political situation in Italy: the use of the names Badoglio⁶⁸ and Mussolini were indeed very frequent. It is interesting to note here that in the ADP corpus, looking for co‐occurring words with the word “Germans,” the word “Badoglio” emerges three times.⁶⁹ The oral testimony of Elena Recanati Foà,⁷⁰ who was interned in Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Braunschweig and Ravensbrück, is particularly explicit on the matter:

And then I have to say, perhaps because I was used to being persecuted, persecuted as a Jew, persecuted also during the captivity… when I was in the hands of the Germans […] the Germans persecuted me because I was Jewish, but the Poles, with whom we were, also hated us, because we — Italians — were not Jews like them, we did not understand Yiddish, we had a different mentality, we didn’t feel equal; so we were already detested by the other Jews who considered us different.

And in addition, the Germans hated us because we were Italians. Among the Germans they said: ‘Italienen, ah Badoglio.’ When I was liberated by the Russians: ‘Italianska, ah Mussolini.’ It was never ok, I had always been persecuted for one reason or another, for being Jewish, for being Italian, for being a woman.⁷¹

Apart from the insults related to the Italian political situation, there are also much more “common” insults to be found in Italian testimonies, such as Macaroni, and its variants Maccheroni, Macarrone (litt. “pasta eaters”). This is the case in particular in the testimony of Bruno Piazza:⁷²

I had already experienced during the day how the Italians (and also the Greeks) were treated worse than all the others by the Poles. We were a small minority and they despised us. ‘’Taliano?’ they asked with a sarcastic smile. ‘Maccaroni?’ and they softened the “r” so that they seemed to say ‘Maccagioni.’

‘Spaghetti,’ I replied without losing my composure, ‘Tagliatelli in sauce and tortellini from Bologna, quite the opposite of your dishwater,’ they didn’t understand all of it, but they realized that I laughed at them and repeated seriously: ‘Taliani maccaroni, greco bandito.⁷³’ The company of these stupid and wicked people, scum of the backstreets of Cracow, Warsaw, Lviv, and Lublin, was indeed one of the innumerable torments of the camp.⁷⁴

These elements are present in testimonies of deportees interned in different [Axis] concentration and extermination camps (in particular Ravensbrück, Bergen Belsen and various Auschwitz camps), which means that they were reproduced independently in different places. The fact that common insults of all times like Maccaroni did find their way into the extreme living conditions of the [Axis] concentration camps, goes to show that a sort of normality does find its way within these particular social spaces.

For further examples, see Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt’s The Sephardim in the Holocaust: A Forgotten People, chapter two. Just to leave this on a less depressing note, though, here is an example of Ashkenazi–Sephardi coordination from chapter three, pages 61 & 69:

The contributions of the Sephardim in the planning and execution of the Revolt of October 7, 1944, in Auschwitz‐Birkenau have been scarcely mentioned in the accounts of the Ashkenazim, or in the diaries left buried in the grounds of Auschwitz, except the one written by the Sephardi Marcel Nadjari. This revolt involved intricate planning, sequestering of gunpowder, and complex coordination and communication between Ashkenazi and Sephardi inmates—all done in the strictest of secrecy.

[…]

The heroism of the Ashkenazim in their participation in the Revolt of October 7, 1944, is recognized by both scholars and survivors. So must the participation of the Greek Jews, heretofore scarcely recognized, receive praise. For instance, the Sephardim have hardly been mentioned in the collecting of gunpowder, yet they directly obtained it for the Sonderkommandos. They played a great part in leading the revolt, manifested unselfishness and heroism, and lost hundreds of their brothers and sisters of faith in the October revolt.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)