Italian Fascism strongly rejected the common Nordicist conception of the Aryan Race that idealized "pure" Aryans as having certain physical traits that were defined as Nordic such as blond hair and blue eyes. Nordicism was divisive because Italians – and especially southern Italians - had faced discrimination from Nordicist proponents in countries like the United States out of the view that non-Nordic southern Europeans were inferior to Nordics. In Italy, the influence of Nordicism had a divisive effect in which the influence resulted in Northern Italians who regarded themselves to have Nordic racial heritage considered themselves a civilized people while negatively regarding Southern Italians as biologically inferior. At least some of the stereotypes about Southern Italians were created by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian Jewish criminologist and anthropologist of Sephardic descent. For his controversial theories, Lombroso was expelled from the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology in 1882 and the Lombrosian doctrine is currently considered pseudoscientific.