Anti-Semitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao

Professor Harrowitz has written what is in numerous ways a significant and highly interesting monograph. The core of her study is a close, critical, and comparative analysis of the writings of Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao, respectively the most prominent “criminal anthropologist” and the leading woman of letters and journalism in turn-of-the-century Italy. What interests Harrowitz in particular is the complex and manifold ways in which Lombroso’s and Serao’s writings functioned covertly as discourses of racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism and thereby served to marginalize the Jew and the Woman, as well as a series of collective others, in late nineteenth-century European society.

Written in a lucid and fluent prose style, Harrowitz’s book is deeply indebted to the recent scholarship of Sander Gilman, who, in one study after another, has established authoritatively the intricate linkages between the distinctively fin-de-siècle commentaries of race, religion, ethnicity, and sexual identity. In a similar vein, Harrowitz highlights in Lombroso and Serao the recurrent cultural homologies between the woman, the prostitute, the criminal, and the Jew, each of whom were configured as pathological variations and intensifications of one another. Her contrast of the theoretical and rhetorical devices employed by a sociologist and fiction writer, with their differing rhetorics of scientific objectivity and artistic subjectivity, is highly engaging. Another point to emerge is the great contemporary intellectual authority of Lombroso’s work, cast in the new languages of psychiatry and anthropology, at a time when the idea of a “social science” was taken far more literally than today. The fact that Lombroso was himself Jewish and Serao an antifeminist also raises complex issues of authorial self-identity and self-hatred. Along the way, Harrowitz extensively summarizes and sensitively analyses selections of several novels from Serao’s corpus (consisting of over forty volumes) in a way that for many nonspecialists will no doubt provide a welcome introduction to this fascinating figure.

Despite these many admirable qualities of the study, I found myself finally frustrated by Anti-Semitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference and in a way that has become specifically symptomatic of a certain category of recent scholarship in cultural studies. First, I wonder at this point if other humanist scholars are as exasperated as the present reviewer with usage of the terms “difference,” “marginalization,” and “the Other” in contemporary Anglophonic academic writing. Originating in Derridean literary theory, difference/différence in particular has surely become a fetishized term and category meant to impart a kind of immediate profundity to any discussion and employed so loosely and indiscriminately as to approach the meaningless.

A second and more substantive issue is interpretative. Confronted as we routinely are with the undeniable and reprehensible racism of earlier texts such as those of Lombroso and Serao, how are late twentieth-century scholars to respond? How do we balance the requirements of intellectual analysis and moral evaluation? Harrowitz is far from unaware of the challenge:

It is important to avoid the pitfall of reading a text such as Lombroso’s or Weininger’s from a modern perspective that ignores contextualizing and understanding the historical period that produced such texts—but it is equally important not to be blinded by the god of contextualization to the point where the pernicious content and influence of such a text are ignored or explained away.

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However, having articulated the issue in a balanced and intelligent way in general programmatic terms, Harrowitz’s book goes on to pursue the first approach much too singlemindedly. In a manner that has become common in a good deal of recent scholarly commentary, Harrowitz is centrally concerned simply to lay bare the gender and racial biases of late Victorian texts. To be sure, she accomplishes this in a way that is wholly persuasive. But the main conclusion of this sort of exercise is predictable: Lombroso and Serao most essentially expressed...