SOURCE: "Weininger and Lombroso: A Question of Influence," in Jews & Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, edited by Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, Temple University Press, 1995, pp. 73-90.

In the following essay, Harrowitz examines possible cultural and literary influences on Weininger, particularly Cesare Lombroso.

To better understand Otto Weininger and the influence of his Sex and Character, we need to better comprehend both the cultural context in which Weininger and his book appeared and other texts that may have influenced him. This may seem to be an obvious and clear task, but the issues surrounding Weininger's text are anything but obvious and clear, and so the task becomes fraught with difficulties. The concerns that a reading of Weininger raises—the dynamics of self-hatred, the question of the importance of milieu and historical context, the relations between different kinds of prejudice, for example—are not only polemical but diabolically...