Degeneration was a hugely influential book that built upon the ideas of Cesare Lombroso who was the founder of criminal anthropology. This was the study of links between the nature of a crime that a person has committed and their personality or physical appearance. It was believed that some people were hereditary criminals because of the way they looked and because of the way they behaved. This is also a part of Social Darwinism which applied Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection to human society, believing some races and cultures were more evolved than others.
The book was translated into English around the same time that Oscar Wilde was imprisoned from homosexual acts. In Degeneration, Nordau attacks Wilde, denouncing his dress sense the ‘pathological aberration of a racial instinct’ and saying that his actions were determined by his ‘hysterical craving to be noticed’. His book was well received by the British as parts searched for explanations for social decline in Imperial failures with a decadent cult reducing English manliness.
These ideas would be countered by English writer Alfred Egmont Hake who argued that the English had made moral civilising achievements in comparison to Nordau’s defence of a militaristic Germany.
Most of Nordau’s ideas in this book and others would help part of his Zionist belief that the Jews needed their own State to escape the antisemitism and degeneration of Europe. Throughout the early 20th Century until his death, he argued against the changes in Europe, seeing them as creating an air of antisemitism
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/degeneration-by-max nordau