‘Ero stato uno dei primi professori medi d’Italia, divenni l’ultimo’. Emilio Artom (1888-1952)

After having hinted at the consequences of racial laws (1938) on the milieu of mathematical instruction in Turin, we will focus on the biographical and professional trajectory of Emilio Artom. A former disciple of Segre and Peano, at the beginning of the twentieth century Artom was among the most outstanding Italian researchers in mathematics education. For this scholar, who belonged to the emancipated Piedmont Jewry, persecution determined a dramatic awareness of his identity but also a sort of return to his roots. To reconstruct the scientific biography of Artom does not therefore mean to indulge in hagiography, but rather to put history at the service of memory with the aim to illustrate, through the existential path of a single individual, the fate of an entire community of Jewish mathematics teachers, devastated from racial persecution.