Lombroso's Jewish identity and its implications for criminology

The Jews of Italy

In 1840, about the time of Lombroso's birth, there were some 33,000 Jews in (what would become) Italy. They lived in small communities, a third or so containing 200 persons or less, scattered across northern and central areas. The Jews of southern Italy had been expelled in the sixteenth century during the Spanish occupation (Schächter, 2001: 31–32). Lombroso's father, Aronne, came from a Venetian family that originated in North Africa. For centuries, Jews of North Africa had traded with Livorno, Genoa and Venice, and members of the Lombroso family settled in these ports. The Jewish Encyclopedia contains entries for a number of rabbis and scholars in and around Venice with the surname ‘Lumbroso’. Lombroso's mother, Zefora Levi, came from the Piedmont. TheLevi family had established themselves as bankers and manufacturers in Chieri, a little town not far from Turin (Lolli, 1904). The Levis of Chieri brought the cotton industry to the Piedmont, and, in return, the government offered them many concessions so that they enjoyed excellent social status. While annexed to the French empire, the Jews of Piedmont had done well. Lombroso's great grandfather, David Levi, served as mayor of Chieri and represented Piedmontese Jews at the great Sanhedrin in Paris called by Napoleon Bonaparte (Zimmern, 1897: 363–364).

Lombroso's working life overlapped the Risorgimento, the unification of states on the Italian peninsula. Pick (1989: 110–119) explains how Lombroso volunteered for the ‘new national army’, how he carried out anthropometric research to ‘investigate the ethnic diversity of the Italian people’, and how ‘the problem of criminality was part of the problematic of “making Italy”’. Dario Melossi also points to the importance of Italian unification and the position of the lower classes in this period. The ‘Piedmontese (‘Italian’) army’ sought to incorporate the south through a bloody repression of bandits and social attitudes in the north that racialized cultural differences. He shows how the elitist orientation of public intellectuals in the north, of which Lombroso was one, shaped their views of brigandage and the ‘Southern Question’. Many of the physical characteristics Lombroso found in the criminal type had been ascribed to southerners (Melossi, 2008: 52–55). Melossi provides an essential understanding, to which we might add the issue of Jewish identity.

Italian unification had special meaning for Jews, and if we are to grasp the political context that framed Lombroso's ideas, it is necessary to recover these meanings. Lombroso was from Verona, where, until a few decades before he was born, Jews had been confined to a ghetto. The army of Napoleon Bonaparte captured the town in 1796; French troops removed the gates of the ghetto and burned them in the public square. Under French rule, Jews were allowed to take part in public life: they could own land, engage in some professions and enter public service. In 1814, Bonaparte surrendered control of the Lombardy-Venetia region to the Austrians, and while Austrian rule alienated the masses and angered property-owners, the Jews of Verona continued to enjoy relatively more civil rights. In the Piedmont, under King Carlo Alberto, Jews were still expected to live in ghettos. They were prohibited from attending government schools, from exercising certain professions and from owning land. Jews fared even worse under Catholic control. Until 1870, the Jews of Rome were confined to the ghetto and locked in at night. In his famous pamphlet on ‘Emancipation of the Jews’, Massimo d’Azeglio described the narrow streets and crowded dwellings of the ghetto of Rome. Nearly 4000 people filled this quarter, compressed into a space capable of housing half this number. Roman Jews could not own property or operate shops beyond the walls. Miserable conditions prevailed inside with nearly half described as ‘shamefully poor’ (Roth, 1946: 432–437).

Verona was one of the few places in the Austrian territories in which Jews could attend the gymnasium. Lombroso entered the gymnasium, but he did not feel privileged or grateful for the opportunity to study under the Jesuits. He returned home to work with a private tutor. Looking back, Lombroso said that his school days amounted to ‘persistent medievalism’. He had been thrust back into ‘conditions that prevailed prior to 1789, literally restored by the might of bayonets in 1814’ (Kurella, 1911: 5). In the mid-nineteenth century, the Jesuits began their campaign against the Jews. Their journal, La Civiltà Cattolica, presented Judaism as a false sect and derived from an obscene text, the Talmud. Talmud Judaism, in their view, ordered hatred of all Christians and obligated rabbis to daily curse the Church. In 1859, when the Italian war of independence began, the Vatican claimed the conflict had been promoted, with the exception of a few brave soldiers, by Jewish bankers. The first outcome would be to reduce the Church of Rome to that of ‘Judaic superstition’. Jews were not regarded as Italians, but traitors who pretended to be patriots and who secretly exploited Italian soldiers (Lebovitch Dahl, 2003).

For Jews, formation of the Italian state meant escape from centuries-old restrictions. Emancipation came first to Jews in the Piedmont and was gradually extended to Jews in other areas as Piedmont became the basis of the emerging Italian state. In 1848, King Carlo Alberto issued the Edict of Emancipation which allowed Jews to enter university, and weeks later, he added military service as an option. By 1861, emancipation had occurred throughout the Italian peninsula except for Venice, Mantua, Trieste, Padua, Verona and Rome. By 1866, the Jews had been liberated in all the territories under Austrian rule, including those in Padua, Verona and Mantua. In 1870, the process was complete, with the liberation of Jews in Rome from the ghetto. Essentially, the Italian state freed the Jews and they in turn fought in wars of independence to unite Italy. TheJewish contribution to the Italian nation was out of proportion to their small number (Schächter, 2001).

We get some idea of how the Jewish Lombroso might have felt about these events with alook at the life of David Levi, his mother's cousin. Known as ‘uncle’ David, Levi had a significant role in the young Lombroso's education and they enjoyed a close relationship as adults. Levi, who lived in Turin from 1850, introduced Lombroso to the woman he would marry in 1869 (Forgacs, 2003: 99). Levi was born in 1816 at a time when public schools in the Piedmont were closed to non-Catholics. He received his education from a rabbi who conducted a small private school and at home from tutors. The Levi house maintained an extensive library and attracted a small intellectual coterie. After trying hishand at the family business, Levi studied law at the universities in Parma and Siena, the University of Turin being closed to him because of his Jewish birth. For Jews, Levi wrote, it was ‘the Middle Ages’. To maintain their hold, the rulers divided people into religious castes. The separation of Catholic from Protestant and Jew was state policy: ‘to excite rancour, to feed fierce superstitions and ferocious hatred, to divide, in order to reign with greater security’. The kingdom denied to Jews the ability to own land, to know civil rights and to learn in schools. ‘As a child born of a family proud of old and exalted tradition, of great wealth and high character, I felt my blood boil at the accumulation of injustice’. At Siena, Levi joined Giovine Italia, Mazzini's secret society, and allied his cause with the cause of Italy (Zimmern, 1897: 368–371).

Lombroso's life mirrored Levi's in some interesting ways. Like Lombroso, who joined the army as a doctor, Levi welcomed the outbreak of war against Austria in 1859. In fact, he published a collection of patriotic songs, which he dedicated to Garibaldi, and one ofthese songs was sung by the redshirts as they marched into battle. After the battle of Magenta, he entered the Italian parliament, and joined the council for unification of public debt and reorganisation of the chamber of commerce. He presented a project forforming agrarian colonies; a project he insisted was the only efficient means of combating brigandage (Zimmern, 1897: 385). Like Lombroso, Levi wrote books on women, evolution and anti-Semitism. In Demeter, Levi revealed his ideal of womanhood, and in Il simbolismo dell’antico Egitto e le idee ebraiche (The Symbolism of Ancient Egyptand the Hebrew Ideas), he discussed evolution. Specifically, he suggested the symbol of the sphinx prefigured Darwin's claim about the origin of human beings in the evolution of animals. In response to the rise of anti-Semitism and the agitation of Stoecker in Germany, Levi wrote a book called Il Semitismo nella civiltà dei popoli (roughly, Semitism in people's civilization). He argued that, in all times, anti-Semitism represented the forerunner of moral decay, the end of the nation. ‘Italy to-day’, he wrote in 1897, ‘is free politically, but from the spiritual point of view she is still enslaved by thepriest, the Jesuit, and the Madonna’. He looked to a new generation to continue the struggle, to an army that advanced in the name of ‘liberty, labour and science’ (Zimmern, 1897: 391, 402).

Lombroso's professional career, and secular outlook, represented a route to social success familiar to Italian Jews in the late nineteenth century. From 1870, Jews became prominent in politics, civil service, the armed forces and universities. There were 15 Jewish members of parliament by 1874 and eight senators by 1900 (Schächter, 2001: 34). Disassociation from Judaism occurred in reaction to the restrictions of the ghetto. Asone Italian Jew recalled later, ‘everybody was intoxicated with the new freedom’. Jewish schools fell into neglect. Synagogues formerly open for service twice a day had trouble assembling a minyan (quorum) once a week (Bettin, 2010). Marriage between Jews and non-Jews took place at a high rate, as high as one Jew in three by the start of the twentieth century (Roth, 1946: 505). Lombroso welcomed assimilation into Italian life. Heshared with other Jews of his generation the vision of an acculturated and secular future. He declared himself to be a positivist scientist dedicated to turning back the obscurantism of religion, not only Catholicism but also Judaism. In Italy, there was no reform tradition in Judaism as there was in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Great Britain and the United States. In Britain, the Jewish Religious Union advocated amendments to synagogue practices including the singing of hymns in English, embellishing traditional prayers with universalism and seating men and women together. In the Italian context, the only serious proposal for reform of Judaism in the nineteenth century came from the chief rabbi of Turin, Salomone Oper, who proposed modifications to mourning that were rejected by other rabbis (Caron, 2009: 300).

Nevertheless, in summing up Lombroso's lifetime project, Guglielmo Ferrero, his colleague, co-author and son-in-law, said that Lombroso was not so much a naturalist, anthropologist or sociologist as ‘a Jewish prophet in the garb of a modern philosopher’. Ferrero says that Lombroso embodied the characteristics of the Jewish race, that of an ‘ethical spirit and passion for social reform’; Lombroso pursued ‘that which is so dear to the Jew – justice’ (Ferrero, 1908: 925). Ferrero was writing a eulogy, but even allowing for exaggeration, it is significant that a man who knew Lombroso well chose to explain Lombroso's commitments in terms of Jewish, rather than Italian, identity.

Lombroso's contemporaries

Although we are accustomed to seeing Lombroso's name alongside that of Enrico Ferriand Raffaele Garofalo – the ‘positivist school’ – Lombroso participated in a network of Jewish intellectuals. He did not, by any means, confine himself to Jewish colleagues, buthe did make important and lasting friendships with Jewish writers and social critics, not all of whom shared his views of criminality.

Gibson (2002) provides an insightful discussion of Salvatore Ottolenghi. Born into a Jewish family at Asti in 1861, Ottolenghi completed his medical degree at Turin and served for 10 years or so as Lombroso's assistant. In 1888 he became professor of medicine and chief of the medico-forensic department at the University of Siena, and later he became professor of legal medicine at the University of Rome and director of the School ofScientific Police at Regina Coeli. Lombroso coined the term ‘scientific police’ but Ottolenghi put this idea into practice. Gibson characterizes Ottolenghi as less an intellectual than a bureaucrat who institutionalized criminal anthropology into government administration. He simplified and stretched Lombrosian science to make it teachable and practical for the national police (Gibson, 2002: 135–137). Another student and colleague, Pauline Tarnowsky (Tarnovskaya), was probably Jewish. Her surname derives from Tarnow, in Galicia, the site of a Jewish community from the sixteenth century. Tarnowsky, who was based in St Petersburg, applied Lombroso's methods in her studies of Russian prostitutes, thieves and murderers. The anthropometric records she made onprostitutes furnished source material for the study Lombroso co-authored with Ferrero, La donna delinquente (1903). Tarnowksy made frequent trips to Italy for consultation with Lombroso and dedicated her final work Les femmes homicides (1908) to him (Wigmore, 1911: 270–271).

Lombroso's relationships with Helen Zimmern and Max Nordau best reveal his involvement in European intellectual life through a network of Jewish intellectuals. Recalling Zimmern's relationship to Lombroso is useful because she seems such an unlikely colleague given what we know about him. Despite his attitude toward women and dissociation from the Jewish community, he appreciated her views of ‘the Jewish question’, the present position and future of Jews in Europe. Zimmern was born in 1846 into a Jewish family in Hamburg and emigrated to England; first to Nottingham and then London where she attended school. In adulthood, Zimmern earned her living asa writer, making translations of European novels and others works into English, including several volumes of Nietzsche. Zimmern met Nietzsche at the first performance of Wagner's Bayreuth festival. In the 1880s, she relocated to Italy, settled in Florence, and brought a stream of Italian works into English. She condemned Germany for persecution of Jews and sought a stronger commercial alliance between Britain and Italy as a counter-weight to the rising cultural and economic expansion of the German Empire (Creffield, 2004). Not too many years after settling in Italy, she met Lombroso, who called on her when he was in Florence. They shared a knowledge of German language and literature, as well as the experience of making a living as a writer and translator. Before his appointment as a salaried professor at the University of Pavia, Lombroso translated works from German to generate an income.

Zimmern believed that Darwinist theory and the popularity of scientific thinking hadled to ‘a great revival in race feeling’. It encouraged politicians to examine claims related to race in general and the persecution of Jews in Germany in particular. Writers ignorant of Jewish home life and religious practices had circulated many mistaken ideasand she welcomed Jewish authors who offered novels or other stories from an insider's view as a corrective. She was prepared to accept some of the blame for this persecution. She felt that Jews had attracted anti-Jewish feeling because they had chosen to remain ‘an exclusive people’ with ‘pride of race and contempt for the Gentiles’. But this current state of Jewish life was, she emphasised, a period of transition. The emancipation of Jews hadmeant that they would successfully assimilate into the societies around them. Theobservance of the Sabbath, feasts, and other observances amounted to ‘the last flicker of a dying religion’. She wanted Jews to keep their ‘lofty ethics, which are identical to Christianity’, but set aside ‘the foolish rabbinical traditions, and restrictive rites with which they have been overlaid’. She deflected suggestion of racial characteristics in favour of social circumstances. Eighteen centuries of persecution had produced ‘distinctive physical and mental features of the Jews’ such that ‘not only their good but also bad qualities’ had become accentuated. It was not that Jews had become immoral, ‘immorality is foreign to their nature’, but that they had grown to look at things from a coarse, materialistic outlook (Zimmern, 1881: 482, 489).

Lombroso echoed these themes in his own writing. In his essay ‘Concerning the Anti-Semitic Movement’ from 1897, Lombroso urged ‘the anti-Semitic countries’ of Germany and Russia to grant the Jews full political equality. The experience of France and Italy hadshown that where Jews had been allowed to enter any profession they chose, their ‘usurious customs and capitalistic excesses disappear’. In return for equality, Jews should acknowledge that ‘many of their rites appertain to past epochs and are no longer useful ordesirable’ (Lombroso, 1897a: 10). In an article the following year dealing with ‘Regressive phenomena and evolution’, he offered Judaism as a prime example of regression in human evolution. Evolution, Lombroso said, passed through contradictory stages. For every progressive movement there was regressive action; for every organ that moved closer to regression, there was an organ with total or partial atrophy. This took place across all animal species, including humanity, and could be observed in the history of the Jewish people. ‘In the progress of civilisation we see them very far advanced’. In commerce, politics and the press, Jews contributed to the vanguard of progressive change: they formed the bourgeoisie, edited leading newspapers and produced socialism. But in religion, Jews displayed ‘marked characteristics of regression’. Having settled a country for a time, they preserved its customs, including its manner of dress long after it disappeared from the people who invented it. They used ‘stone instruments for the rite of circumcision – a rite which is itself a survival of cannibalism’ (Lombroso, 1898: 379).

Zimmern introduced English readers to Lombroso's ideas on prisoner writings, womencriminals, reformatory prisons and political crime (Zimmern, 1891a, 1891b, 1893, 1894, 1906). ‘The influence of Lombroso's books in Italy, France, and Germany has been as immediate and decisive as that of “The Origin of Species”’ she wrote in 1891, ‘It is not to our honour that in England as yet he is so little known’ (Zimmern, 1891b: 202). She explained the principles of criminal anthropology, ‘essentially an Italian study’, for readers in Great Britain and the United States. Habitual offenders are a class apart, marked by physical degradations and psychic peculiarities, and must be judged by special standards. Lombroso did not advocate the death sentence so much as prevention because he believed criminality might be cured before it became chronic. The criminal amounted to a microbe which only flourished in suitable soil; without the cultivation medium, the microbe was powerless to germinate into crime. (Zimmern seems unaware that this metaphor originated with Alexandre Lacassage in 1885 at the first congress of criminal anthropology in Rome.) She says the Italian school triumphed over sceptics at the 1896 international congress of criminal anthropologists at Geneva, but Lombroso's students (like Ottolenghi) strayed from the paths laid down by their teacher, exaggerated his conclusions, and carried them to absurd excesses (Zimmern, 1898).

Zimmern may be one reason for Lombroso's disagreement with another Jewish colleague, Max Nordau. Lombroso shared with Nordau a fascination with the promise of positivism, but Nordau's positivism took him politically to very different places than Lombroso. Nordau was born, the son of a rabbi, in Budapest (Pest), where he attended the university. He completed the medical degree, fulfilled military conscription duties in Vienna, and returned home. He attempted to establish a medical practice before deciding to settle in Paris. Even while he was a student, he pursued literary studies, and began to write plays, poems and essays. His first literary success, Conventionelle Lügen der Kulturmenschheit (The Conventional Lies of our Civilisation), assaulted organised religion, both Catholicism and Judaism. Austrian authorities prohibited sale of the work for insulting the imperial family, arousing hatred of the emperor, and inciting hostility to religious communities. Several years later, he produced Entartung, which generated an even greater furore. The book became one of the best selling titles of the 1890s in Europe and was immediately translated into Italian, French and English (asDegeneration). In this work, Nordau labelled a surfeit of authors and artists as degenerates because they revealed through their writings the same mental characteristics as insane criminals. He savaged works by the literary glitterati of Europe and they responded with fierce denunciations of his own mental characteristics (Lipkind, 1905). Nordau said that he owed his great insight into degenerate literature, the source of his wealth and fame, to Lombroso. Lombroso pointed to the significance of physical stigmata but had limited this to the bodies of born criminals, and criminals represented merely one sub-category of degenerates. Nordau (1895: 17) expanded this theme to include mental characteristics as revealed by creative output: ‘It is not necessary to measure the cranium of an author, or to see the lobe of a painter's ear, in order to recognise the fact that he belongs to the class of degenerates’.

Nordau met Lombroso in the 1880s, in the years when Lombroso's house on the piazzaof Turin attracted intellectual visitors from across Europe. In the press and novels, their names were often linked, even though they disagreed publicly. ‘Lombroso and I are great friends’ Nordau told an interviewer in 1896, ‘though we do not agree on all points’ (Sherard, 1896: 14). Nordau centred the origins of crime in his doctrine of degeneration. He rejected atavism, Lombroso's idea about how crime amounted to reversion to a savage state in which crime is normal behaviour, as an explanation. Nordau could not accept this, because judging from modern savages, anti-social crime was rare and met with punishment. Theft and murder were sanctioned only against other tribes, not unlike the custom of civilised nations at war. The primitive man was not a habitual criminal but was, in more than one way, more of a ‘political animal’ than modern man (Nordau, 1902: 501). Nordau detested Wagner, one of Lombroso's champions. Wagner revealed his anti-Semitism in an essay ‘Jewishness in Music’, published anonymously in 1850 and again, under his own name, in 1869. Jews, Wagner said, ruined musical theatre because they lacked artistic talent; they ought to be excluded because they were only interested in making money. Lombroso admitted that Wagner was ‘a megalomaniac and crazy’ and was ‘often obscure and contradictory’, but he could not bring himself to say ‘atavistic’. When Wagner wrote his essay, ‘he had a sort of delirium of persecution against the Jews’ but still ‘we must regard Wagner as a great musician only’ (Lombroso, 1895a: 939). Nordau regarded the Wagner-cult developing around Bayreuth as the best means of diagnosing ‘the whole breadth and depth of the degeneration and hysteria of our time’ (Nordau, 1895: 213).

Zionism produced the greatest disagreement. Nordau believed Jews had no future in Europe. He joined Theodor Herzl in the Zionist movement and became a speaker at Zionist conferences beginning with the first congress at Basle in 1897. Nordau used positivist social science to argue for resettlement in the land of Israel. Essentially, Zionists welcomed studies revealing the weakened bodies of Jews because they regarded this as proof that centuries of life in the ghettos of European cities threatened the physical survival of Jews as a people (Hart, 2000). Lombroso sided with Zimmern who rejected Zionist aspirations for a Jewish homeland. ‘The proposal that the Jews should retire to Palestine is impractical for many reasons’ Lombroso said. Emigration should take place to Australia or the United States, with the ‘pseudo-idyllic colonies of Palestine’ reserved for ‘those old fanatics of the Slavonic lands who are impenetrable to modern ideas and who still dream of a reign of Zion upon earth’ (Lombroso, 1897a: 10). In his comments about persecution leading to progress in Jewish civilisation, Lombroso said that in warm climates, Jews had ‘not progressed a step beyond their fellow-countrymen’. This was true of Jews in Abyssinia, as well as in Judea, despite having been ‘objects of peculiar care from their devout coreligionists of all Europe’ (Lombroso, 1897b: 205–207).

Whether or not Lombroso saw himself as a Jewish intellectual, the extent to which Lombroso was seen as a Jewish intellectual raises an issue about whether Lombroso was a victim of anti-Jewish prejudice. During his lifetime, Lombroso received accolades from some and the scorn of many. To what extent some of the criticism of his ideas reflected anti-Jewish prejudice is difficult to say. It could be argued that, given his worldwide fame, anti-Semitism explains little. And yet, Augusto Bianchi, legal editor at the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera, declared that anti-Semitism did have some significance: ‘the fact that he was a Jew caused him to be suspected of avarice’ in the pursuit of his career (Bianchi, 1922: 349).

The anti-Semitic element of British reaction is evident in Hilaire Belloc's review of Criminal Man. Belloc, author, editor and MP, pointed to the book as a prime example of charlatanism: ‘To begin with, you have the name. He [Lombroso] is no more of an Italian than Disraeli …’. Disraeli, the Jewish-born prime minister, faced repeated anti-Semitic slurs the more successful he became. Belloc compared Lombroso as a methodologist to ‘the purveyor of cheap jewellery in Whitechapel’, a reference to Jewish immigrants there, and added that ‘Lombroso was true to type in this regard’. He went on to interpret the materialist philosophy in the book to ‘an attack [on] Christian morals in the shape of denying man's power of choice between good and evil’. Lombroso could have produced something valuable, Belloc suggested, if he had offered insight into his own kind, the Jewish criminal: ‘if he would have told us how physically to distinguish the cosmopolitan and treasonable financier, the fraudulent company promoter, the traitor, the tyrant, the pornographer, and the coward’ (Belloc, 1912). Belloc, notorious for his anti-Semitism, represents a unique case in that few others could have managed to squeeze as many anti-Jewish slurs into a single book review. But there were a significant number of intellectuals in Britain who shared his dislike of Jews. Anti-Jewish prejudice does suggest one reason for why Lombroso was met with rejection from critics who themselves advanced positivist and eugenicist approaches and otherwise supported an elitist, imperialist, racist and sexist outlook (Davie, 2005).

Jews and crime

Beginning with his first publication, Lombroso helped build the tradition of scientific racism, and in arguing for the extension of state control over supposedly inferior populations, he fortified the rationale for colonialism and imperialism. He was, as Rafter (2008b: 72) puts it, ‘unquestionably biologistic, racist and crudely deterministic’. At the same time, Lombroso had an intellectual habit of trying to argue for all sides at once,which led him to make contradictory statements and take inconsistent positions on various points, including race (Goode, 2005). As can be seen in his discussion of Jews and crime, he was inconsistent and contradictory in his racist outlook.

Lombroso's work, which had been translated into German in the late nineteenth century, exercised a leading influence on German criminology during the Weimar period. His work framed the structure of the emerging pseudo-science of criminal biology, and Nazi psychiatrists developed the conception of the criminal as a biologically and mentally abnormal category of person that posed a danger to the state (Rafter, 2008a, 2008b; Wetzell, 2000, 2009). Gibson (2002: 119) observes that the racialist vocabulary constructed by Lombroso and the criminal anthropologists contributed to Mussolini's racial laws of 1938. A number of Lombroso's colleagues and students, such as Ferri, rushed to join the fascist party. Ottolenghi became ‘a Jewish fascist’. He published an article in 1928 that praised Mussolini for grasping Lombroso's teaching that ‘one cannot understand crime if one does not study the criminal’ (Gibson, 2002: 141). That said, Lombroso's responsibility for the industrialised murder of Jews is indirect because during his lifetime, he defended Jews from anti-Semitic attacks. Indeed, Rafter (2008b: 194) remarks that Lombroso's Jewish identity ‘served as a brake’ which kept the Italian fascists from the Nazis enthusiastic approach to racial hygiene.

When explaining Jewish behaviour, Lombroso relied more on environmental termsthan racial terms (Gibson, 2002; Vyleta, 2005). In the second edition of L’uomo delinquente, Lombroso contrasted the criminality of Jews and of gypsies. Race influenced crime among the two populations, but in opposite directions. Statistics revealed the levelof Jewish criminality in several countries to be lower than other residents of these countries, and this level would have been even lower but for the tendency of Jews to gravitate towards the professions of shop-keeping and manufacturing which had higher rates of crime among all groups. Lombroso acknowledged ‘generations of swindlers and thieves’ among Jews based on the prevalence of Jewish names among those charged with such crimes in France and the Yiddish vocabulary of receivers of stolen property used in England and Germany. But, he goes on to claim that Jewish involvement in these crimes represented an acquired behaviour learned over the centuries in reaction to systematic persecution: desperate poverty, exclusion from public jobs and a hedge against violence. ‘Perhaps it was to avoid being massacred that Jews decided to become accomplices to feudal lords as receivers of stolen goods’. If so, Lombroso reasoned, it was surprising thatJewish crime rates were not even higher. Instead, these rates declined with emancipation and the entry of Jews into public life (Lombroso, 2006: 118–119). Lombroso not only avoided the suggestion of atavistic criminality on the part of Jews, he proposed that atavism explained the conduct of anti-Semites. ‘Anti-Semitism is an atavistic phenomenon,’ Lombroso wrote in 1897, ‘which has its basis in the lowest passions of mankind’ (Lombroso, 1897a: 10).

In his approach to Jews and crime, Lombroso harmonized with the German-Jewish criminologist Gustav Aschaffenburg. Aschaffenburg produced the first work of German criminology that was neither a defence nor refutation of Lombroso. He ignored the atavistic theory of crime, presumably because he decided it was wrong or simply irrelevant to explaining crime (Wetzell, 2000: 63–64). But both criminologists followed the same pathway to explaining statistical patterns of crime by Jews. Drawing on conviction rates in Germany for Evangelicals, Catholics and Jews from 1892 to 1901, Aschaffenburg showed the ‘criminality of the Jews … is far below that of the Christians’. This could be seen in a lower rate of convictions for aggravated assault. Because Jews infrequently attended public houses, they seldom became involved in these offences. As for the greater numbers of Jews involved in financial crimes, such as fraudulent bankruptcy, this was explained in part by the prevalence of Jews in commercial occupations. It was also explained by the ‘voluntary and involuntary social seclusion’ of Jewish communities. ‘Members of small religious communities’ Aschaffenburg proposed, ‘or of a scattered race that is surrounded by other races are less inclined to deviate from the straightway’. The scrutiny of the majority committed the minority to an ‘artificial raising of the moral plane’ (Aschaffenburg, 1913: 52–57).

Sometime in the 1890s, Ferrero introduced Lombroso to Jean Finot, editor of La Revue des Revues. A Polish Jew who became a French citizen, Finot wrote articles against theexistence of biologically-based character traits, and the two must have had an interesting exchange. Finot convinced Lombroso to write a short book in defence of Jews, which appeared as L’antisemtismo e le Scienze Moderne (Anti-Semitism and Modern Sciences). In Europe, including Britain, in the 1870s and 1880s anti-Semitic organisations issued a barrage of pamphlets containing a catalogue of grievances against Jews: control of banks, manipulation of the press and influence over politics. This literature included frequent characterizations of Jews as swindlers, thieves, anarchists, socialists, prostitutes, perjurers and forgers. One German writer claimed that owing to a conscious Jewish design to inflict harm on Gentiles, Jews supplied 90 per cent of prostitutes in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Budapest (Schuster, 1881: 377). Lombroso began his analysis of ‘the Jewish problem’ by describing Jews as a race of mixed Aryan and Semitic blood. Based on his anthropometric studies in Venice and Piedmont, he reported that Jews appeared in all body types, with various complexions and hair colour. Because Jews mixed with non-Jews over the centuries, they took on the characteristics of the surrounding people. Lombroso did say that despite this mixture, Jews exhibited a suiteof distinct traits. But he stopped short of suggesting this distinctive Jewish character was responsible for crime. The environment had driven Jews into particular pursuits, which accounted for the appearance of typical Jewish crimes when compared to non-Jews (Lombroso, 1894). Anti-Semitism remained a focus of sustained attack for Lombroso until the very end of his life (Wyrwa, 2007).

While Lombroso did not see Jews within the context of atavistic criminality, he didthink there was a characteristic form of dangerous behaviour. The physical and psychological make-up of Jews fitted them for anarchist violence. Based on his study of ancient Hebrew skulls, and the representations of Hebrews in the Egyptian pyramids, it appeared the characteristics of modern Jews, such as thickness of eyebrows and fullness of lips, had been inherited over thousands of years. ‘In regard to the psychical characteristics’, Lombroso (1979b: 204) wrote, ‘we find tenacity of purpose, even to the point of obstinacy, religious credulity, clannishness, intolerance, and a spirit of rebellion that carried often as far as anarchy. These traits have led to the greatest religious and social rebellions’. He added ‘ethical passion’, supported by the claim that ‘almost all apostles of moral reform [have] risen from the Hebrews’. He identified the ‘commercial instinct’ as a Semitic trait, rather than an exclusively Hebrew trait. The Semitic peoples included the Phoenicians, who invented money and weights; the Sidonians, great manufacturers of glass; and the Hebrews, ‘the greatest financiers of the Assyrian world’. But owing to climatic changes and race mixture, many of the physical characteristics had all but disappeared (Lombroso, 1897b; see also Lombroso, 1890).

The mixture of progressive and retrogressive features within the Jewish race positioned them for leadership in politics and commerce. ‘In politics, they [Hebrews] are always found leading the most extreme parties. The very founders of the commercial classes and of usury, they take up the most exaggerated anarchism, and publish German-Jewish newspapers devoted to the anarchist propaganda’. The intermixture of races and climates over the centuries urged the Jews toward the ‘Semitic core’ of their constitution that hated novelty and bound them to the ‘most antique roots of thought’ (Lombroso, 1895b: 42–43). Lombroso viewed Emma Goldman as the embodiment of the Jewish tendency toward anarchism. Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated US President William McKinley in 1901, claimed that he was incited to carry out his crime after reading Goldman's anti-government speeches, and this was, Lombroso said, very likely true.

At the same time, Lombroso refused to label anarchists criminals, and one reason for this was that he regarded himself as someone very close to their situation. Zimmern explains this in her discussion of Lombroso's two-volume analysis, Delitto politico e la rivoluzione (Political Crime and Revolution). In every society, misoneism, or hatred of novelty, prevails; political, religious and social institutions resist change. For social change to occur, this must be challenged by rebellions and revolutions. Rebellions represent retrogressive change, marked by criminality, and revolutions progressive change, marked by genius among leaders. Anarchist criminals contribute to rebellions through mistaken attempts at rapid social change. But it is not always easy to tell, at the time, true genius from insane criminality; misoneism means that all will be resisted. ‘Lombroso himself is an interesting case in point’ Zimmern observed:

Lombroso consistently criticised governments intent on responding to anarchist outrages and political assassinations with the death penalty for offenders. Anarchists should be transported to a colony where under positive circumstances they could channel their energy into positive social change.

Conclusions

Paul Rock (2007) proposes that Lombroso's contribution to criminology has been to serveas a counter-example. Throughout the past century, Lombroso has been a foil, the starting point for each new generation to announce advances in method, theory and policy. Rock furnishes a useful argument with reference to Lombroso's Jewish identity because it helps explain why it has never really been an issue. Lombroso's leading role in criminology has been as an advocate of ‘the Lombrosian project’ – the idea that criminals can be distinguished scientifically from non-criminals, and much of the critical examination of his work has been connected with the empirical, legal, political and cultural implications of this (Garland, 1997). The Jewish Lombroso is incidental to this narrative; there is no obvious reason to build it into the story criminologists have wanted to tell. YetJewish identity is important for understanding Lombroso's own story and the bigger story of the emergence of criminology as a field of inquiry.

Jewish identity contributed to the context in which Lombroso lived and worked. Hiscommitments to the Italian state and to positivist science can be better appreciated when taking into account what these meant relative to Jewish emancipation. Lombroso's Jewish identity is also significant because in discussing Jews and crime, he attempted a measure of critical analysis that he failed to pursue in other areas. In denying atavism, and emphasising instead economic, political and cultural factors, his work on Jews and crime represents an early critique of the ‘criminal man’. His counter-attack in response to anti-Semitic claims also demonstrates some awareness of the use of knowledge in society and of the political use to which ‘objective scientific analyses’ could be put. At the same time, it is clear that he misread the situation for Jews. He mistakenly believed anti-Semitism could be appeased by assimilation. And, although he perceived the significance of social milieu in explaining patterns of crime among Jews, he failed to reconcile this argument with commitment to atavistic criminality. His refutation of anti-Semitic claims about Jewish criminality did not dislodge the scientific racism at the centre of his overall outlook.

What critical faculties Lombroso managed to bring to the defence of Jews came from his interaction with Jewish colleagues. He dismissed Judaism and disassociated himself from Jewish tradition, yet he encountered Jewish influences throughout his life. His ‘circle’ included students, such as Ottolenghi and Tarnowsky, who extended his work in the criminal sciences, but also those like Nordau and Zimmern, who confronted him with the ‘the Jewish question’. Including members of his family, such as David Levi (not to mention his daughter Gina), Lombroso's Jewish network shaped his research agenda, challenged his assumptions, forced him to declare his loyalties, magnified his mistakes, added to his reputation and otherwise shaped his experience of life as an educated, professional, secular Jew in the late nineteenth century. The significance of Lombroso's Jewish identity is to be found in these recovering these relationships and in investigating their contribution to the context in which criminology emerged as a field of inquiry.