Emigration of mathematicians from outside German-speaking academia 1933-1963, supported by the society for the protection of science and learning (Q656712)

Racial and political persecution of German-speaking scholars from 1933 onward has already been extensively studied. The archives of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), which are deposited in the Western Manuscripts Collection at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is a rich source of information about the emigration of European scientists, also those who did not come from German-speaking institutions. This is an account of the support given by the SPSL to the persecuted mathematicians among them. The challenges faced by these emigrants included, in addition to anti-Semitism and xenophobia in their countries both of origin and of destination, the restricted financial means of the SPSL, and the sometimes arbitrary assessment of academic merits. The author investigates the 32 files of non-German speaking mathematicians, i.e. of those who had their mathematical training and first publications in a language other than German. These files have not been analyzed so far. Among them are extensive ones kept on prominent refugees such as Beniamino Segre, Alfred Tarski, and Antoni Zygmund. In addition, one file on a prominent German-speaking applied mathematician is considered, which had escaped attention by historians before. Although Hungarian by birth, Arthur Erdelyi started his career in a German speaking environment at the German Technical University Brünn and was saved by support of the SPSL and E. T. Whittaker in Edinburgh. Nossum finds commonalities and differences in the problems and the chances for jobs abroad of the various refugees, most of them Jewish and most of them finally escaping annihilation by the Nazis. The paper is a good basis for further studies on emigration from various countries under Nazi occupation or Fascist domination, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Italy.