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NOTES 1. 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. 2. 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..." ("He was born in Copenhagen of Jewish parents from the local Portuguese-Jewish community.") 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: "Męme si c'est dix fois vrai que nous descendons de juifs et si je suis en principe entičrement pour l'égalité des droits avec les Hébreux, dans la vie sociale je préfčre les chrétiens et je ne me sentirai jamais ŕ l'aise dans une société exclusivement juive." Later on in the same letter, Ludwig states: "Mais nous sommes, bien que je possčde moi-męme 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 beliefs and customs..." In other words, Ludwig is arguing that even though the family is ethnically Jewish, it is culturally and religiously 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 translation 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"; perhaps the best translation of the word in this context is "one thousand percent." 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."] 3. Jewish, or mostly Jewish, father, non-Jewish mother. At least three of Vinton Cerf's four paternal great grandparents were Jews. Bennett Cerf, the (Jewish) co-founder of publishing giant Random House, was a cousin. 4. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists, by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere (Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, New York, 1995, p. 23). 5. 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." 6. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see The Google Story, by David Vise and Mark Malseed (Delta, New York, 2006, p. 23). 7. See A Certain People, by Charles E. Silberman (Summit Books, New York, 1985, pp. 247-248). Putnam has described himself as a "practicing Jew." See also Hilary Putnam's Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2002, p. 2). 8. Jewish father, mother of partial Jewish ancestry; see Models of My Life by Herbert A. Simon, BasicBooks, New York,NY, 1991, pp. 3, 17, 112, 262. 9. Jewish mother (née Esther Kaplan), non-Jewish father. See http://biography.jrank.org/pages/1688/Sleator-William-Warner-III-1945.html and the fifth paragraph of the third chapter of Oddballs ("Frank's Mother), by brother William Sleator: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sleator/oddballs/oddballs-web/oddballs.html. 10. Son of Dr. George Tarjan, 112th President of the American Psychiatric Association, who "was raised in an intellectual, liberal Jewish family" in Hungary, where his parents and younger brother Endre perished in the Holocaust; see obituary in the American Journal of Psychiatry (150:5, May 1993, pp. 691-694). 11. Son of Sybil and Hugo Wolfram, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, who immigrated to England as children in 1933. The Oxford University philosopher and social anthropologist Sybil Wolfram was the daughter of the Jewish child psychiatrist Kate (née Frankl) Friedlaender, an associate of Anna Freud; see the obituary for Sybil Wolfram in Anthropology Today (Vol. 9, No. 6, December 1993, p. 22) and the article on Kate Friedländer in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, Vol. 7, p. 185). On Hugo Wolfram, a writer whose novels Into a Neutral Country and Root and Branch deal with the plight of Central European refugees, see http://www.juedischeliteraturwestfalen.de/index.php?valex=101&vArticle=1&author_id=00000308&id=1. 12. Jewish mother (née Fanya Koriman). |
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