Saturday, January 22, 2011

On Rudolf Samuel

Rudolf Samuel (1897-1949)

In July 1933, Selig Bodetsky, an active Zionist in England, mathematician and a future president of the Hebrew University, received a letter from Rudolf Samuel, professor of experimental physics at the Islamic University of Aligarh in India requesting a position in the physics department in Jerusalem. Samuel (b.1897) had been an active Zionist in Germany and had studied in Berlin and in Gottingen with James Frank. In 1931 Samuel was appointed to head the physics department at Aligarh, which he developed into one of the best and most modern in India.He regarded this position, however, only as a stepping stone to Palestine; he already had sent his wife Erna and son John to Haifa to grow up and be educated in Palestine.

Brodetsky declined Samuel’s request, stating, ‘‘It will not be fair to offer a post to a Jew who already has a good one outside Germany, when there are so many good scientists who desperately need appointments as a result of the state of affairs in Germany.’’ Brodetsky also reported his refusal to Ornstein, commenting at the same time on Ornstein’s recommendations regarding the appointments of Felix Bloch and Ernst Alexander, an experimentalist from Freiburg. We will discuss these two cases below. Samuel did not despair; as we will see, he tried again for an appointment two years later.

Issachar Unna, The Genesis of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Physics in Perspective, 2 (2000) 336–380, Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, 2000