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NOTES 1. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Celestial Encounters, by F. Diacu and P. Holmes (Princeton, 1996, p. 191). 2. In Eye of the Hurricane: An Autobiography (World Scientific, Singapore, 1984, Chapter 1), Bellman indicates that his maternal grandmother was Jewish, but states that he suspects that his Polish-born, maternal grandfather, Samuel Saffian, was of Catholic origin, although he practiced no religion. "Saffian" is, in fact, most commonly a Jewish name and a "Samuel Saffian" from Poland, married to a Jewish woman, would most likely have been of Jewish origin. (Spelled "Safian," the name is almost exclusively Jewish. Spelled with a double "f," the name can also be German, but it is not Armenian, as Bellman implies that it may have been.) A few sentences later, he states that "I suspect also that my father was also only one-half Jewish" (emphasis added). This seems to be saying that his father was nominally Jewish. Genealogical evidence indicates that all four of Bellman's grandparents were Jewish. 3. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father. 4. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Raoul Bott: Collected Papers, Vol. 1 (Birkhäuser, Boston, 1994, pp. 11-12). 5. Jewish mother (née Raissa Berkmann), non-Jewish father. See Earl Browder, by James Ryan (University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1997, p. 29). 6. In Men of Mathematics, Eric Temple Bell described Cantor as being "of pure Jewish descent on both sides," although both parents were baptized. In a 1971 article entitled "Towards a Biography of Georg Cantor," the British historian of mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness claimed (Annals of Science 27, pp. 345-391, 1971) to be unable to find any evidence of Jewish ancestry (although he conceded that Cantor's wife, Vally Guttmann, was Jewish). However, a letter written by Georg Cantor to Paul Tannery in 1896 (Paul Tannery, Memoires Scientifique 13 Correspondance, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1934, p. 306) explicitly acknowledges that Cantor's paternal grandparents were members of the Sephardic Jewish community of Copenhagen. Specifically, Cantor states in describing his father: "Er ist aber in Kopenhagen geboren, von israelitischen Eltern, die der dortigen portugisischen Judengemeinde..." In a recent book, The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity (Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 2000, pp. 94, 144), Amir Aczel provides new evidence concerning the ancestry of Cantor's mother in the form of an excerpt from a letter that was written by Georg Cantor's brother Ludwig to their mother [reproduced in its entirety, but in French translation from the original German, by Nathalie Charraud in her book Infini et Inconscient: Essai sur Georg Cantor (Anthropos - Economica, Paris, 1994, p. 8)]. This letter begins [in the original German, a fragment of which appears in Georg Cantor: 1845-1918, by Walter Purkert and Hans Joachim Ilgauds (Birkhäuser, Basel, 1987, p. 15)]: "Mögen wir zehnmal von Juden abstammen und ich im Princip noch so sehr für Gleichberechtigung der Hebräer sein, im socialen Leben sind mir Christen lieber ..." The translation of this sentence is: "We may be descended from Jews ten times over and I (may be) in principle ever so much for the equal rights of the Hebrews, (but) in social life I prefer Christians...," or equivalently: "Even though we are descended from Jews ten times over and I am in principle ever so much for the equal rights of the Hebrews, in social life I still prefer Christians..." Charraud renders the (complete) sentence in a slightly different manner as follows: "Même si c'est dix fois vrai que nous descendons de juifs et si je suis en principe entièrement pour l'égalité des droits avec les Hébreux, dans la vie sociale je préfère les chrétiens et je ne me sentirai jamais à l'aise dans une société exclusivement juive." (Later on in the same letter, Ludwig states: "Mais nous sommes, bien que je possède moi-même un nez juif, dans nos principes et nos habitudes tellement non-juifs...," which translates as: "But we are - even though I myself possess Jewish features - so non-Jewish in our principles and customs..." In other words, Ludwig is arguing that even though the family is ethnically Jewish, it is culturally non-Jewish. What is significant about this letter, as Aczel first pointed out, is that it was written to the mother of Georg Cantor and would, therefore, have made little sense if she hadn't herself been of Jewish descent. According to Ismerjük''oket?: zsidó származású nevezetes magyarok arcképcsarnoka, by István Reményi Gyenes (Ex Libris, Budapest, 1997, pp. 132-133), Cantor's maternal great uncle (i.e., the brother of his maternal grandfather), the great violin pedagogue Josef Böhm, was a Jew by birth. [N.B.: There are now erroneous translations of the sentence: "Mögen wir zehnmal von Juden abstammen..." appearing elsewhere on the Internet. The sentence has the basic structure "even if A and B, nevertheless C," where the enumeration of A and B is clearly intended to mitigate the expression of prejudice in C, i.e., the term "even if" is employed in the sense of "even though." These other translations attempt to render the sentence: "Even if it were the case A and even though it is the case B, nevertheless C." Since the term "Mögen" (which generates the "even if" expression) appears only once in the original German, it must assume the same meaning in both cases if it is distributed over A and B in translation (i.e., if the sentence is rendered: "Even if A and even if B, nevertheless C."). Furthermore, in our translations (above) of the sentence, we gave the word "zehnmal" its literal meaning, viz., "ten times," which, of course, does not make literal sense when used to modify the term "descended from." It is fairly clear that the word is employed in this context to signify "overwhelmingly" or "completely." From that standpoint, even if the "we" in the sentence was somehow intended to refer to the Cantor children only (and not to their mother, to whom the letter is addressed), it would still imply that she was "descended from Jews."] 7. Jewish mother (née Syma Meyerowitz). 8. According to the obituary notice for Jesse Douglas published in the October 8, 1965 edition of The New York Herald Tribune, he died at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and his funeral was held the following day at the "The Riverside" (the largest exclusively Jewish funeral chapel in New York City). Douglas, who was the first recipient of a Fields Medal, was born in New York City and educated at the City College of New York and at Columbia University. His entry in the 1964-1965 edition of Marquis Who's Who in America indicates that his mother's maiden name was Sarah Kommel. The name "Kommel" is most frequently found among Jews originating in the Pale of Settlement; see A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire, by Alexander Beider (Avotaynu, Inc., Teaneck NJ, 1993, p. 326). Both parents were, in fact, Jewish immigrants from Russia. The death notice lists a brother, Dr. Harold Douglas, and a sister, Pearl Schweizer, among his survivors. Dr. Harold Douglas maintained medical offices at Beth Israel Medical Center in lower Manhattan. 9. Jewish father. 10. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother. 11. According to a recent memoir in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (Vol. 38, No. 4, 2001, pp. 389-408: http://modular.fas.harvard.edu/sga/from_grothendieck.pdf) written by the prominent mathematician Pierre Cartier, Grothendieck's father was a Russian Jew surnamed Shapiro and his mother a German Jewish women named Hanka Grothendieck. Cartier, a close acquaintance of Grothendieck, states: "what I know of his life comes from Grothendieck himself." Thomas Drucker's earlier account in Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists, edited by Emily McMurray (Gale Research, Detroit, 1995, pp. 821-823) states that Grothendieck's father was a Russian Jew named Morris Shapiro and that the name "Grothendieck" was not that of his mother, but rather that of a governess who cared for him in Germany between 1929 and 1939. "In the latter year, his mother took him to France, where he learned for the first time that he was Jewish by ancestry." The source of this account is the mathematician and Grothendieck biographer Colin McLarty, who has described it as "one version that Grothendieck has given." The most recent account, by Allyn Jackson in Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Vol. 51, No. 9, 2004, pp. 1039-1040: http://www.ams.org/notices/200409/fea-grothendieck-part1.pdf), states that Grothendieck's father was a Russian Jew whose original name may have been Alexander Shapiro, but who later assumed the name Alexander (Sascha) Tanaroff, and that his mother was Johanna (Hanka) Grothendieck, a German Lutheran from Hamburg. This information is attributed to another Grothendieck biographer, Winfried Scharlau of the Universität Münster. As Jackson notes: "many of the details about Grothendieck's family background and early life are sketchy or unknown." According to all three accounts, however, Grothendieck's father was Jewish, and was deported and murdered at Auschwitz, and Grothendieck himself was sheltered (along with several thousand other Jews) in the French Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in southern France. (According to Yad Vashem records, an Alexandre Tanaroff was indeed deported from Drancy to Auschwitz on 14 August 1942.) 12. See Ismerjük''oket?: zsidó származású nevezetes magyarok arcképcsarnoka, by István Reményi Gyenes (Ex Libris, Budapest, 1997, p. 105). See also http://www.kfki.hu/~cheminfo/polanyi/9702/frank2.html. 13. Jewish father, Protestant mother. See http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hopf.html. 14. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Courant, by Constance Reid (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1976, p. 153). 15. See http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/rje_k.htm. 16. Private communication from a longtime, close personal acquaintance of Kuratowski, subsequently confirmed in Polish-Jewish genealogical records, which contain the record of Kuratowski's parents' marriage. See 1889 Warsaw marriage record of Marek Kuratow and Regina Keiserstein (Kajzersztajn) (whose family names were later polonized to "Kuratowski" and "Karzewska") in JRI-Poland (Jewish Records Indexing - Poland): http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Poland. 17. Alfred Lotka was born in 1880 in Lemberg, Austria-Poland to parents who were missionaries associated with the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. Many of these missionaries, including Lotka's father, were converted Jews themselves. In his History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews (London, 1908), W. T. Gidney describes Jacob Lotka (the father of Alfred Lotka) as a "Polish Israelite" (p. 354) and as a "Hebrew Christian" (p. 614). Jacob (also known as Jacques) Lotka headed the Society's station in Lemberg in the years 1873-1881 and later undertook missions to Jewish communities in Persia, Russia, and Hungary. No information is available to us currently concerning the mother of Alfred Lotka. 18. See History of Mathematics, Vol. 6: Golden Years of Moscow Mathematics, edited by Smilka Zdravkovska and Peter L. Duren (American Mathematical Society and London Mathematical Society, 1993, p. 214). See also http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/rje_m.htm. The first reference lists Manin among "some ten Jews (or half-Jews) who entered [Mekh-Mat at Moscow State University] in 1953." According to knowledgeable informants, Manin's father was not Jewish . 19. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother. See "Max Newman: Mathematician, Codebreaker and Computer Pioneer," by William Newman in Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, edited by B. Jack Copeland (Oxford, Oxford and New York, 2006, p. 180). A longer (unpublished) version of this article describes the father of Max Newman as "a Jewish immigrant." 20. See http://www.ifispan.waw.pl/StudiaLogica/PL.Logic.html. 21. See A Certain People, by Charles E. Silberman (Summit Books, New York, 1985, pp. 247-248). 22. See http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Renyi.html. See also Ismerjük''oket?: zsidó származású nevezetes magyarok arcképcsarnoka, by István Reményi Gyenes (Ex Libris, Budapest, 1997, p. 106). 23. See http://www.kfki.hu/~cheminfo/polanyi/9702/frank2.html. See also "A Visit to Hungarian Mathematics," by Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steiner, in The Mathematical Intelligencer (Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, p. 21). See also Ismerjük''oket?: zsidó származású nevezetes magyarok arcképcsarnoka, by István Reményi Gyenes (Ex Libris, Budapest, 1997, p. 106). 24. See My Brain is Open: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdös, by Bruce Schechter (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998, pp. 57-58). See also Ismerjük''oket?: zsidó származású nevezetes magyarok arcképcsarnoka, by István Reményi Gyenes (Ex Libris, Budapest, 1997, p. 107). 25. Jewish mother (née Fanya Koriman). |
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