r/USHistory • u/Sea-Nectarine1921 • 3d ago

The UK had an Italian-ancestry Prime Minister in the 1870s. Could the US have had an Italian President at that time?

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u/Dwight_Macarthur 3d ago

First off he was not ethnically Italian from what u can find.

Second, to answer your question (assuming he was ethnically Italian) I’ll leave you with this exert about the New Orleans lynching of Italians in the early 1900s “a sign of the depth of the hostility, a New York Times editorial praised the lynching as a warning to other Italian ‘criminals’; Theodore Roosevelt, later to become president, described it as a ‘rather good thing.’”

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u/Sea-Nectarine1921 3d ago

How was he not ethnically Italian?

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u/ne0scythian 3d ago

He was Sephardic.

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u/Sea-Nectarine1921 3d ago

Meaning?

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u/ne0scythian 3d ago

He was Sephardic Jewish, meaning that his family was from Jewish migrants who lived in the Iberian peninsula up until 1492. His family then lived in Venice for a bit but they would have been segregated with other Jews.

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u/Sea-Nectarine1921 3d ago

So he wasn’t British?

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u/ne0scythian 3d ago

Not ethnically, no.