A mechanism to generate mass: the case of fermions

In a recent paper \cite{novello} we have presented a mechanism to generate mass from gravitational interaction, based on the Mach principle, according to which the inertia of a body is a property of matter as well as of the background provided by the rest-of-the-universe. In \cite{novello} we realized such an idea for a scalar field treating the rest-of-the-universe in its vacuum state. In the present paper we describe a similar mechanism for fermions.