Cesare Tedeschi was born in Ferrara on 14 August 1904 to Guido and Ines; he graduated on 9 July 1928 from the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Ferrara with a thesis entitled "Statistics and anatomical-pathological considerations as a contribution to the study of stomach cancer". He was married to Pierina Forti (born in Prato on 8 November 1904) and they had two children, Guido (born in Modena on 17 July 1931) and Luca (born in Modena on 1 November 1934). He was appointed teacher of Anatomy and Pathological Histology at the University of Ferrara in the academic year 1936-1937 and confirmed in the year 1937-1938.

He, like professors Angelo Piero Sereni, Aldo Augusto Luisada and Vittorio Neppi, was first dismissed in November 1938, then definitively expelled the following month. At the beginning of the academic year 1938-1939, Tedeschi was among those appointed by the rector of the University as one of those "dispensed" from service in compliance with Decree-Law no. 1779 of 15 November 1938, integrating and coordinating in a single text the rules already issued for the defence of the race in the Italian School, in which the provisional "suspension" was replaced with the definitive "dispensation from service". Deciding to leave Italy, he asked for a visa from the American consul in Naples and embarked on the steamer "Vulcania" from the port of Genoa, bound for the United States, to Yale, New Haven. Here he restarted his career again thanks to a scholarship from the Medical School. He did not return to Europe.

Testimony of son John Tedeschi: "Perhaps for me there was also a personal reason for being attracted to these scientists and writers of past centuries forced to leave their homeland and who, despite the need to fit into new, not always welcoming environments and to learn a new language, were able to give considerable impulses to their respective fields of work. As a child I too participated in a great exodus of exiles religionis causa when my father, a young, early professor of medicine, was expelled from his post at the University of Ferrara at the time of the promulgation of the racial laws in September 1938 and was forced to take the path of exile. The parallel between the two situations, the two emigrations, distant in time and but with similar consequences, perhaps helps to clarify how I embarked on this strand of sixteenth-century studies and how I was led in recent years to shift my attention from the first to the second emigration, with research on the careers in exile of refugees in the thirties". (Tedeschi 2012, pages 197-198)