ABSTRACT In 1894, Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) published L’antisemitismo e le scienze moderne (Anti-Semitism in the Light of Modern Science), the most important among the few thematic books released in fin-de-siècle Italy. Himself an Italian Jew, the renowned criminologist tried to build an authoritative defense of Jewish emancipation challenged by European anti-Semitism, by adopting the tools of his social science. The alarming political phenomenon was interpreted through the lenses of his Darwinian psycho-sociological thought, and anti-Semitic racist ideology was rejected in the name of a scientifically ‘correct’ solution of the anthropological problem of Jewish racial status. This essay focuses on Lombroso’s L’antisemitismo through an intellectual-biographical approach, which is also attentive to the criminologist’s subjective Jewishness. I will regard it as the climax of a decades-long Lombroso’s scientific engagement with the Jewish question, by reconstructing the genesis of his ideas on Jewish racial status and on the origins of anti-Jewish hatred well before the 1893 project of the book. Then, I will reconstruct its publication process, its contents and its reception by Italian public opinion, both Gentile as Jewish.

issue 27 / n.1 (2025) by Emanuele D'Antonio

ABSTRACT
In 1855, the Badia affair, the sequel to a blood libel against a Jewish businessman in a Veneto town, temporarily put in question relations between state, society and the Jewish minority in the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom. After reconstructing the stages of the episode, the present article analyzes the strategies of response to the crisis resorted by the Jewry of Hapsburg Italy, then in the process of emancipation nearly achieved. With the support of state authorities, community leaders and Jewish intellectuals together with some Catholics, Venetian liberalism urged in favor of an apologetic explication to undermine majority prejudice. The effort led to the creation of a text, published as a supplement in the authoritative Eco dei Tribunali, which used the trial minutes against the slanderer, making the legal proceedings into a refutation of the ritual murder stereotype.

issue 14 / December 2018 by Emanuele D'Antonio