The Migrant’s Destiny of Miron Kantorowicz

A Demographer in Spite of Himself

Mark Tolts Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry E-mail: mark.tolts@mail.huji.ac.il

Miron Kantorowicz spent the fifteen years from 1919 to 1934 in Berlin, and later, in the course of his migrations became a recognized expert of Anglo-Jewish demography and co-founder of American demographic Sovietology. He is best known in contemporary Germany as “Alfred Grotjahn’s librarian”, as he was Grotjahn’s longtime assistant, and his name is often mentioned among the scholars expelled by the Nazis from the Berlin University. However, Kantorowicz’s scholarly career and his valued input to demography after his flight in 1934 from Germany to England and his subsequent emigration in 1938 to the United States are much less studied and understood. One of the reasons is that he changed his name several times; on his acquisition of American citizenship, he finally settled on the surname of Gordon. Therefore, the aim of my paper is to show a noteworthy example of a scholarly career which was remoulded in the course of successive migrations.