Georg Cantor - Cantor's Ancestry

Cantor's Ancestry

"Very little is known for sure about the origin and education of George Woldemar Cantor." Cantor's paternal grandparents were from Copenhagen, and fled to Russia from the disruption of the Napoleonic Wars. There is very little direct information on his grandparents. Cantor was sometimes called Jewish in his lifetime, but has also variously been called Russian, German, and Danish as well.

Jakob Cantor, Cantor's grandfather, gave his children Christian saints' names. Further, several of his grandmother's relatives were in the Czarist civil service, which would not welcome Jews, unless they converted to Christianity. Cantor's father, Georg Waldemar Cantor, was educated in the Lutheran mission in Saint Petersburg, and his correspondence with his son shows both of them as devout Lutherans. His mother, Maria Anna Böhm, was an Austro-Hungarian born in Saint Petersburg and baptized Roman Catholic; she converted to Protestantism upon marriage. However, there is a letter from Cantor's brother Louis to their mother, stating:

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 ...

("Even if we were descended from Jews ten times over, and even though I may be, in principle, completely in favour of equal rights for Hebrews, in social life I prefer Christians...") which could be read to imply that she was of Jewish ancestry.

There were documented statements, during the 1930s, that called this Jewish ancestry into question:

More often the question has been discussed of whether Georg Cantor was of Jewish origin. About this it is reported in a notice of the Danish genealogical Institute in Copenhagen from the year 1937 concerning his father: "It is hereby testified that Georg Woldemar Cantor, born 1809 or 1814, is not present in the registers of the Jewish community, and that he completely without doubt was not a Jew ..."

It is also later said in the same document:

Also efforts for a long time by the librarian Josef Fischer, one of the best experts on Jewish genealogy in Denmark, charged with identifying Jewish professors, that Georg Cantor was of Jewish descent, finished without result. In Cantor's published works and also in his Nachlass there are no statements by himself which relate to a Jewish origin of his ancestors. There is to be sure in the Nachlass a copy of a letter of his brother Ludwig from 18 November 1869 to their mother with some unpleasant antisemitic statements, in which it is said among other things:&nbsp...

(the rest of the quote is finished by the very first quote above). 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 mentions (Annals of Science 27, pp. 345–391, 1971) that he was unable to find evidence of Jewish ancestry. (He also states that Cantor's wife, Vally Guttmann, was Jewish).

In a letter written by Georg Cantor to Paul Tannery in 1896 (Paul Tannery, Memoires Scientifique 13 Correspondence, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1934, p. 306), Cantor states that his 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 (lit: "Israelite") parents from the local Portuguese-Jewish community.") In addition, Cantor's maternal great uncle, a Hungarian violinist Josef Böhm, has been described as Jewish, which may imply that Cantor's mother was at least partly descended from the Hungarian Jewish community.

In a letter to Bertrand Russell, Cantor described his ancestry and self-perception as follows:

Neither my father nor my mother were of german blood, the first being a Dane, borne in Kopenhagen, my mother of Austrian Hungar descension. You must know, Sir, that I am not a regular just Germain, for I am born 3 March 1845 at Saint Peterborough, Capital of Russia, but I went with my father and mother and brothers and sister, eleven years old in the year 1856, into Germany.