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)
