Profiles of genius and persecution
Against the odds
Lise Meitner faced the
dual prejudices of
being both Jewish and
a woman.
Driven to Innovate:
A Century of Jewish
Mathematicians
and Physicists
Ioan James
2009 Peter Lang
£ 25.00hb 288pp
It is no secret that Jewish scholars
have made enormous contributions to
science, achieving far more than one
might expect given their relatively
small numbers. They have also faced
a staggering array of obstacles, culminating in the near-total destruction of
European Jewry under the Nazis in
the Second World War. These two
themes – genius and persecution – are
the twin currents that flow through
Ioan James’ compelling Driven to
Innovate, uniting a series of profiles
that might otherwise be of interest primarily to a more specialized audience.
The book profiles 35 physicists and
mathematicians whose lives span the
period from the mid-1800s to about
1950. Many of those featured, like
Max Born and Albert Michelson, are
relatively well known, while Albert
Einstein is, of course, a household
name. Many others, however, are
more obscure: the Prussian mathematician Gottfried Eisenstein, for
example, whose intellect was described by Carl Friedrich Gauss as
being on a par with that of Archimedes and Newton; or the German
physicist Franz Simon, whose stellar
career at Oxford in the 1930s and
1940s made the university’s Clarendon Laboratories into the leading
centre for low-temperature physics.
Yet obscure or otherwise, none of
the 35 had an easy life. Many had to
flee the countries of their birth to
escape persecution. One of the most
tragic figures is German mathematician Felix Hausdorff, who, together
with his wife, committed suicide in
1942 to avoid the inevitability of
capture by the Nazis. But the hardships began long before Hitler came
to power. Five decades earlier, Tsar
Alexander III instigated waves of persecution, known as pogroms, against
Russia’s Jews; in the 1930s and 1940s
Jews faced the horror of Stalin’s
“purges”. The fascists who seized
power in Hungary in 1919 were also
rabidly antisemitic. The list goes on.
Even in Britain and the US – surely
safe havens by comparison – anti-semitism was never far below the
surface, as highlighted by the plight of
mathematician James Joseph Sylvester. As a student in Liverpool in
the 1820s, a classmate recalled, he was
“hunted by his schoolfellows, in the
open street, for no worse reason than
that he was a Jew, and very much clev-
Emilio Segrè Visual Archives/AIP/Science Photo Library
erer, especially in mathematics, than
they were”. Sylvester left England for
the US in 1841, at one point attempting to secure a position at Columbia
College (now Columbia University)
in New York, an institution with a
charter explicitly forbidding religious
discrimination. Even so, James writes,
he was told that “the election of a Jew
would be repugnant to the feelings
of every member of the board”. A
college spokesman pointed out that
the sentiment “was not at all on the
grounds of him being a foreigner; it
would have been the same had he
been born of Jewish parentage in the
United States”.
Women, of course, faced obstacles
of their own. James has included
three Jewish women in the collection:
Hertha Ayrton (born Phoebe Sarah
Marks), who studied maths at Cambridge University and was the first
woman to read a paper before the
Royal Society; Emmy Noether, described by Einstein as “the most significant mathematical genius since
the higher education of women began”; and Lise Meitner, whose work
on nuclear fission, many historians
believe, ought to have earned her a
Nobel prize.
Meitner’s case illustrates just how
formidable were the obstacles facing
a scholar who was not only Jewish
but also a woman. When she earned
her doctorate from the University of
Vienna in 1905, she was only the second woman to do so; at that time a
female student was “regarded as a
freak”, James writes bluntly. Later,
Meitner was told she could not work
in the lab run by Nobel laureate Emil
Fischer; women were banned because
“they might set fire to their hair”. (She
was later permitted to work in an old
carpenter’s workshop.) Years later,
when she was working at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, a talk she
gave on “cosmic physics” was reported in the press as “cosmetic physics”.
Though raised as a Protestant, Meitner was too honest to keep her Jewish
ancestry a secret. When Germany
annexed Austria, the country of her
birth, in 1938, she fled to Sweden.
James does not try to find the root
causes of the seemingly endless tide of
hostility directed at Jewish thinkers.
He does, however, do an admirable
job of outlining the recent history of
