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The Southern Israelite
My Father,; Cesare Lombroso
The Human Aspects of a Great Scientist
By GINA LOMBROSO
(As Told to Joseph Brainin)
The late Cesare Lombroso
was one of the greatest Jew
ish figures in the world of
science. His theories on
criminology and on the de
linquent human type and his
pioneer work in legal medi
cine made him immortal. His
daughter, herself an author
of distinction, and the wife
of the eminent Italian histor
ian Guglielmo Ferrero, is
now visiting the UnitedStates
She has gracefully consented
to tell the Editor of the Seven
Arts Feature Syndicate of her
father. Thus we present
herewith the unusual feature
of a daughter’s estimate of
her own father. THE EDITOR
Our family came originally from
Spain, whence our ancestors were
driven out at the time of the Expul
sion of the Jews. They settled in Tunis,
where they took on the name Solotubo
—which, in Arabic, signifies the bright
ness of the sun; this later was trans
formed into Lombroso. Now the name
occurs not only in Italy, but in France,
Germany, and Russia as well; 1 believe
that a certain Lombroso also emigrated
to the American colony of Virginia in
the seventeenth century and there came
near being burnt at the stake because
he protested against belief in witch
craft, which he regarded as a hysteri
cal phenomenon.
The Italian branch of the family first
settled in Leghorn; some members later
went on to Florence. A scion of the
Florence family was the famous Rabbi
Juda Jacopo Lombroso, a man of great
erudition and Biblical learning, who
attained distinction in the Council of
the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In 1639
he moved to Venice, where he long
held a position of leadership among
the rabbis and physicians of the city.
There he published his great Bible,
which both Christians and Jews held
in high esteem. A descendant of this
Jacopo, one Sansone Lombroso, estab
lished himself at Verona a century and
a half later. He died while still a young
man, leaving a little son, Aronne, who
was to become the father of Cesare
Lombroso.
The family of Lombroso’s mother, the
Levis of Chieri, were energetic indus
trialists, merchants and large property-
owners, possessing candle and cotton
cloth factories at Chieri; these they
acquired before the French Revolution
(Chieri, which lies in Piedmont, then
having been a part of France). The
founder of the weaving works, Davide
Levi, was acting mayor of the town for
about two years during the revolution
ary period, and later was appointed a
delegate to Napoleon’s religious San
hedrin, held at Lyons.
I am giving the details of the family
tree because Lombroso was always
proud of this long and distinguished
line of Jewish ancestors. The families
of both his father and mother were
among the finest of the Jewish aris
tocracy.
My father, Cesare Lombroso, was
born at Verona, Italy, ninety-six years
ago. Thus he lived in the finest period
of human history. The shock and de
struction of the French Revolution
were over, and reconstruction had be
gun. Italy, free at last after four cen
turies of enslavement, was a land
united. For his impetuous, imaginative,
ardent soul, for his quick, logical, intui
tive mind this period of reconstruction
was ideal.
lie loved the world about him, the
earth and the sea and the sky, the sun
set and the sunrise, wind and storm;
he loved the. city and the country, all
the beauty, natural and artificial, with
which God and man have invested the
earth. But even more than nature he
loved man.
lie loved mankind in the truest and
deepest sense of the word. The fusion
of his own soul with that of another
was his joy; free of all self-interest or
conceit he none the less wanted to be
loved and esteemed.
Lombroso like culture in men and
loved to see intelligence; but most of
all he loved goodness of heart. Because
of this he preferred the company of
women to that of men, for he regarded
women as more altruistic and kindly.
Weaklings or slow, phlegmatic people
annoyed him, as did, to an even greater
degree, the cold, the despotic, and the
cynical; untruthfulness he could not
bear at all.
This perhaps explains his great at
tachment to Max Nordau, although the
latter was considerably younger. Lom
broso liked the mercurial, dynamic tem
perament of the great Jewish thinker,
felt him to be a brother-in-arms. Two
knights they were, intoxicated with
truth, fighting for it regardless of con
sequences.
As a thousand mountain streams will
flow together to form a great lake in
the plain, so the problems and passions
and currents that agitated the nine
teenth century commingled in the long
life of Lombroso: First classicism, with
its chaste love of poetry, art, philoso
phy, and historical research; then, by
way of reaction, positivism, mistrustful
of theory, intent only upon examining
facts and discovering the reasons be
hind these facts; next a glorious, tem
pestuous wave of patriotism, seeking
liberty and prestige for Italy; this fol
lowed by a scientific idealism that
sought to reshape the old juridical,
medical, and social values; by an eco
nomic idealism that sought to give the
people new economic and moral princi
ples ; and, finally, by a spiritual ideal
ism that went even to the Beyond in
its earch for a solution of the problems
of mankind.
Though he loved men he cherished
few illusions regarding them. Experi
ence, youthful emotional disappoint-
Signora Gina Lombroso Fcrreo
ments had taught him that contact
with the world can dull the splendor of
even the finest qualities. Yet he kept
his mind perfectly independent of his
emotions, did not permit these to in
fluence his thinking.
This odd dualism that kept his heart
and brain entirely separate, this curi
ous dualism which permitted him to
appreciate and hold in contempt to an
equal degree those whom he loved and
those whom he despised—this was the
source of many other contradictions in
him, the chief of them being his un
usual and simultaneous audacity and
timidity.
Thus he, who before he founded the
Archivio, needed to consult a hundred
people, who sought the advice of his
entire family before he could put to
gether an article, did not hesitate a
moment to declare, in the course of a
lecture before the Instituto Lombardo:
“The discovery I have now laid before
you is one of the most important in
the history of the world.”
The great tragedy of his life was the
ruthless campaign carried on against
him at the time of his investigation of
the disease pellagra. His adversaries
did not stop at the basest insinuations
and calumnies. But Lombroso calmly
stood his ground. There was in him the
strength of the Hebrew prophets,
which goes on in search of truth re
gardless of personal comfort or glory.
He was indeed a dual personality—
impetuous and soberly scientific, intui
tive and matter-of-fact, a man of pa
tience and ruthlessness. All in one. But
nature was always his guide, his
teacher, his love. He followed her
ways, even when she brought Li; to
rough, difficult and contradictory
confident that she would lead hi to
his goal. His entire work bears tli
press of this blind faith in natur*
Some have asked: How can you
the title of a scientist to a man like
that, a man of impulse and intuitive
decisions, one who worked disconnect
edly and almost blindly, who invariably
followed his instinct rather than the
beaten path?
Certain it is that if by “scientist”
you mean a bookworm, one patiently
glued to his desk, one who calculates in
advance the value of his work to him
self and others and who conscientiously
produces exactly what, quantitatively
and qualitatively, he is expected to pro
duce; if by “scientist” you mean an
abstract thinker who seeks to evolve
the laws of nature out of his own head,
who spends day and night in silent,
complex meditation on the destiny of
man and who seeks to arrange it as one
arranges the board in a chess game; if
by “scientist” you mean a Herr Pro
fessor, a solemn academician of lim
ited ideas, entrenched in theory he
considers immutable, intent upon dem
onstrating little truths which to him arc
unshakable—then Lombroso was no
scientist.
Nature, which equipped him with so
much tenderness and so great a sense
of joy, which endowed him with so
vivid an imagination and such enor
mous literary facility, fashioned him to
be a poet; and a poet he would have
been had he been born in another age.
But his time, essentially practical,
loved not poetry, but prose; not songs,
but material and social welfare; not
pure art, but science, which sought to
bring more enjoyment and less suffer
ing. Thus it was precisely because he
was a poet that he became a scientist.
Because the suffering of the world wa?
so vividly reflected in his soul he was
driven to assuage it.
It is because he was a poet that his
discoveries will live; for he did not
make them by using the methods of
one science or another, but reached
his deductions from the great, eternal
phenomena of nature, seeking proof and
counter-proof in every natural, social,
psychological, and moral realm.
And it is because he was a poet, be
cause he sought to inform the most
prosaic scientific facts with the fire o
the poetry that burned within him that
he was able, despite the
world, to make his contemporaries ac
cept his conclusions. Because In did net
disdain those qualities of artist e ta^-
and tact which served to in fv.-e l' c
into the most abstract science, t ga
for it the love and apprecia a, not
only of his colleagues, but of d men.
to whom he felt himself bou: ’>' * ‘
strongest tie of all—love.
(Copyright, 1931, S.A.F.S