Nina Valbousquet

Research Fellow (05/2026 – 07/2026)

Jewish-Catholic Odysseys: “Non-Aryan” Refugees, the Holocaust, and Pius XII’s Vatican (1930s-1950s)

This project examines categories of Shoah victims often overlooked in scholarship: Jewish-Catholic mixed families, converts, and Catholics of Jewish origin persecuted as “non-Aryans” by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Vichy France. At the intersection of Jewish studies, Holocaust history, and Church history, it traces the migration of Jewish-Catholic refugees from 1938—marked by the ‘Anschluss’ and racial laws in Fascist Italy—to 1950 and the closure of the Cinecittà DP camp in Rome.

Drawing on untapped Vatican sources alongside European, American, and Israeli archives, it reconstructs their journeys before, during, and after the Holocaust. The study highlights the agency and negotiated identity of victims facing imposed racial, religious, and political categorisation, revealing diverse individual and family experiences beyond the label “non-Aryan.” During the VWI fellowship, research will include the archive of the Jewish Community of Vienna and testimonies on intermarriage, mixed families, and conversion from the Fortunoff Video Archive and the Refugee Voices London project.

Nina Valbousquet is an internationally recognised expert on Catholic antisemitism and Christian responses to the Holocaust, with deep knowledge of Vatican archives. She is the author of Les âmes tièdes. Le Vatican face à la Shoah (La Découverte, 2024) and Catholique et antisémite (CNRS, 2020), and co-editor of The Global Pontificate of Pius XII (Berghahn, 2024) and a special issue of Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah (2023). She curated the “Churches and the Holocaust” exhibition at the Shoah Memorial in Paris (2022–2023) and co-organises the Ecole Française de Rome’s Pius XII archives programme. In 2023–2025, she holds fellowships from the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv and Yad Vashem, and since 2024 has been research associate at the French Research Center in Jerusalem.

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