A Demographer in Spite of Himself

The Migrant's Destiny of Miron Kantorowicz (Myron K. Gordon)

This paper is devoted to the scholarly career of Miron Kantorowicz (1895 - after 1977), the German-educated Russian-Jewish refugee. Kantorowicz spent fifteen years, from 1919 to 1934, in Berlin. He is best known in contemporary Germany as “Alfred Grotjahn’s librarian”, as he was a long-time assistant to Grotjahn, the founder of social hygiene, and his name is often mentioned among scholars expelled by the Nazis from Berlin University. However, Kantorowicz’s scholarly career and contributions to demography after his flight from Germany to England and his subsequent emigration to the United States are much less studied and understood. One of the reasons is that he changed his name several times. In June 1934 he immigrated to Great Britain with a provisional visa. The spelling of his family name in this country was changed to Kantorowitsch and his publications were accordingly credited. In London, he found temporary work as a statistician at the Jewish Health Organisation of Great Britain (JHOGB), where his good knowledge of general British population statistics and his previous interest in Jewish demography were combined and properly utilized. In 1936, Kantorowicz published two seminal articles resulting from the reports he had prepared for JHOGB. His findings were highly acclaimed by later generations of demographers of Anglo-Jewry. Later, in the course of his migrations, he became a co-founder of American demographic Sovietology. When he became a U.S. citizen, he finally settled on the name Myron K. Gordon. The paper shows how Kantorowitz’s scholarly career was re-molded in the course of successive migrations.