Cesare Lombroso

Born in the Italian city of Verona (then part of the Austrian Empire) to a middle-class family, Cesare Lombroso studied Semitics, linguistics, and philology at universities in Padua, Vienna, and Paris before finishing his medical studies in Pavia, where he was appointed professor and director of a mental asylum. A pioneer in the field of psychiatry and criminology, Lombroso developed evolutionary theories of criminal anthropology, imagining that impulses to criminality were biologically heritable and also manifested visibly in one’s facial features. Now wholly discredited, his theories unfortunately proved influential in the developing eugenics movement. Ironically, it was no doubt in part because of his significance as a putative leading scholar of the heritability of social and ethical tendencies that Lombroso was called upon to combat antisemitic attacks; among other things, he could invoke the authority of his own “scientific” method to dismiss racial antisemitism’s claim that Jews were biologically inclined to evil and perversity. Notably two of the scholars he references in Antisemitism and Modern Science—the non-Jewish Felix von Luschan and the British Jew Joseph Jacobs—were physical anthropologists interested in reconstructing the Jewish racial “type” or “mix” through “scientific” photography. Lombroso also made important observations about the connection of pellagra to the grain maize that led later scientists to discover a cure for the disease.