Antisemitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao

In the early days, Marxist historians argued that the unconscious was universal, ahistorical and unchanging, and thus not relevant to historical enquiry. Feminists argued that sexual difference is rooted in the uncon scious, and that the arrangements of sexual/social ordering are prompted by unconscious drives and desires. Appropriately, then, the 'I' here, having travelled that journey, is a confessedly uncertain one by the second half of the volume: unsure, as many of us are, where the emphasis on subjectivities will take a feminism no longer attached to political activism, and busily proliferating into hybrid forms in the wider world as well as in the academy. Norma Clarke Antisemitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao Nancy A. Harrovvitz University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London, 1994 ISBN 8032 2374 9, £13.99 This book is less about 'the logic of cultural difference' replayed through misogyny and antisemitism than a dose historical account of its exhibi tion through the work of two key writers. The setting is late nineteenth century Italy, and the analysis primarily concerns Cesare Lombroso, founding father of modern criminology, and Matilde Serao, prolific novelist, journalist and (apparent, though Harrowitz suggests not uni formly) vociferous anti-feminist. The analytical starting point is that anti semitism and misogyny are bound together in these nineteenth-century discourses through the effort to contain and control difference, and Lombroso and Serao both not only theorize these differences but also exemplify prevalent strategies for dealing with them. As well as considering the influence of their ideas, at issue is how these authors collude with antisemitism and misogyny to address their own social marginalization. That is, not only how they indulge in a 'betrayal of self-identity' (p. 13) by derogating their own group (Lombroso as a Jew, Serao as a woman), but conversely, how vilification of the other (misogyny for Lombroso, antisemitism for Serao) works to secure their participation within the dominant group. In the penultimate chapter, through a dose reading of Serao's novels, it is suggested that this is no mere substitution of category of oppression, but rather that representa- tions of gender, culture and religion have to be understood as mutually 111 Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Feminist Review. ® www.jstor.org ... elaborated. Thus Serao's texts offer a cnttque of patriarchy only by :!! a: portraying its evils as associated with the male Jew, while the difference :E ::E ::> of Jewish women is safely secured by the (characteristic) plot device of ....,"' having them convert to Christianity and therefore qualify as sexually 0z available. ~ ~ Such specificity lends the analysis a strength sometimes lacking in a:... "'z accounts of the relations between racism and sexism. Moreover, the parti ~ cular attention to the reciprocal dynamics of antisemitism and misogyny through the writings of these authors clarifies the role of historical and cultural context in their forms. However, the danger of this focus on the particular is that the dynamics of anxiety, fear and derision can become too closely interpreted in terms of the personal histories of the figures concerned. Tendencies towards such reductionism from text to author are at moments discernible in the middle chapters of the book (as in the speculations about Lombroso's fixation on circumcision, or the claim that he 'makes the connection between Jews and prostitutes just as often as he can' (p. 57)). More generally, though, this is warded off by the framing of the book within an account of the emergence of modern scien tific discourse as central to biologically based accounts of racial and female inferiority. The fable of 'the taint of the quagga', with which the book opens, nicely portrays the interconnections between these accounts. This mythical theory, which Darwin briefly subscribed to but which was developed further by his younger cousin and architect of eugenics, Francis Galton, claimed that the progeny of a female is inevitably influ enced by her first breeding. This thus combined anxieties around pater nity and the sexual control of women with the racialist discourse of miscegenation. That both, as Harrowitz suggests, arise from a similar source at the founding moment of modern western science is worth remembering in the light of subsequent rhetorics of science in the service of racism (including antisemitism) and misogyny. A valuable feature of the book is its explicit refusal of the deterministic and monolithic designations of 'self-hatred' which, as the author points out, have been particularly applied to Jews. These not only invite indivi dualized accounts in terms of personal pathology that abstract anti semitism and misogyny from cultural-political conditions, but thereby also lapse into victim-blaming. Rather, Harrowitz prefers the term 'self abnegation' to cover a variety of stances of devaluation or distancing, and distinguishes between 'Jewish antisemitism' and 'Jewish self-hatred'. She explores some well-known candidates, including Karl Marx and cultural anthropologist Franz Boas before considering Otto Weininger (Jewish convert to Protestantism, and author of the antisemitic and 112 misogynist Sex and Character), and usefully situates these within an account of the circulation of ideas to show how 'Lombroso's ideas about difference in women, criminals and Jews contributed to an atmosphere in Italy that at the turn of the century was receptive to Weininger and hostile to Freud' (p. 74). While generally well-structured and clearly argued, there is an asymmetry in the treatment of Lombroso in relation to the influence of his ideas on women and Jews respectively. Further, the analysis of his complicity with antisemitism lacks a class analysis which intersects also with existing cultural tensions between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. In terms of the role of science in naturalizing both antisemitism and misogyny, the narra tive at times lapses into charges of false claims to science rather than consistently portraying science as central to the regulation and produc tion of difference, as in, for example, Lombroso 'derails outright the scientific methodology employed in his work' (p. 58). Ultimately, while fascinating in its juxtapositions and specificities, these are at the expense of consideration of broader questions. The reader is left no clearer about what commonalities and relations there might be between antisemitism and misogyny in the premodern period, or outside Europe. But what we do gain is a closer understanding of their particular intertwinings and conditions inside, and a thoughtful exploration of the production of racialized and gendered identities. Erica Burman New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain 1968-1990 Anna Marie Smith Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1994 ISBN 0 S21 45921 4,£12.95/$17.95 Pbk ISBN 1 521 45297 X, £37.50/$59.95 Hbk This book's cover proclaims New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality as 'a groundbreaking study of racism and homophobia in British politics, which demonstrates the demonization of blacks, lesbians and gays in New Right Discourse'. Focusing primarily on the emergence and 'hege monization' of Thatcherism throughout the 1980s, Anna Marie Smith seeks to demonstrate the centrality of issues of 'race' and (homo)sexuality to the success of the Thatcherite project through theoretical analysis of what she argues are two key moments: the immigration debates of the late 1960s, notably the infamous speeches of Enoch Powell, and the debates about the promotion of homosexuality articulated around the Section 28 legislation of 1987-88. m .

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