From Exclusion to Acceptance, from Acceptance to Persecution

Abstract

The exhibition “Transcending Tradition: Jewish Mathematicians in the German- Speaking Academic Culture” illustrates the personal and professional lives of Jewish mathematicians, presenting typical places where they lived and worked and familiarizing visitors with their mathematical achievements, their books and publications, and their participation in professional organizations like the German Mathematical Society. Because of the long history of exclusion of Jewish scientists and mathematicians from the academic world, our overview does not begin until about 1820. Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804-1851) was the first Jewish mathematician to be granted a professorship at a German-speaking university. In 1827 he was appointed Extraordinarius and in 1832 full professor at the University of Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He had, however, already converted to Christianity by the time these appointments were made. This essay will illustrate why conversion seemed to be necessary, why Jewish mathematicians did not begin to appear at German universities until after 1820, and what the general circumstances were for them in the German-speaking academic world. The essay will also describe the ongoing discrimination of Jewish university students. German universities were slow to open their doors to Jewish students, who even then remained confronted by the negative attitudes of Christian students, professors and officials and by the omnipresence of stereotypes and discrimination. Looking back, these decades of the mid-nineteenth century can be described as a period of transition from exclusion to acceptance, but nevertheless as a period in which discrimination never fully disappeared.