Antisemitism, misogyny, & the logic of cultural difference: Cesare Lombroso & Matilde Serao

About this book

Discusses the effects of 19th-century antisemitism and misogyny on the views of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), a Jewish Italian criminologist and prison reformer, and Matilde Serao (1856-1927), a non-Jewish Italian journalist and novelist. Lombroso, in his book "Antisemitism and Modern Science" (1894), does not reveal his Jewish identity. He offers a logical solution to antisemitism - total assimilation, which would obliterate differences and lead to the end of Judaism. He compares the faults of Jews to those of women, expressing his prejudices against both. Serao, on the other hand, occasionally uses antisemitic stereotypes to express her prejudices against women's suffrage, divorce, and female autonomy. States that the common denominator of antisemitism and misogyny in the 19th century was a "biologically fortified prejudice", and that Lombroso and Serao share similar reactions to their own marginalization - the former as a self-hating Jew and the latter as a woman who was unable "to identify with the economic and social situation of other women".

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