Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

Page 8 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