[FOM] Brouwer's notebooks 1905-1907

[Mark van Atten]

To follow up on Alice ter Meulen's comment:

There are also a handful remarks in which Brouwer, then in his
mid-twenties, uses the words `Jewish' and `Jew(s)' (`joodsch', `jood',
`joden') in a wrong way for which there is no excuse.

In most cases these are used as synonyms for `crook(s)'. That  form of
antisemitism at the time was conventional in the language, a
codification of a common prejudice, which is bad enough.

There are two consecutive remarks that go further, because they
explicitly draw a contrast with Germanic people (as the Dutch, by and
large, are). On pages 11 and 12 of notebook 2 (page 42 in the
transcription), Brouwer writes (in my translation): `Mathematics is
not something a Germanic person does out of himself, but out of being
forced to go along with the fly-by-nights and the Jews, who brought it
into the world'. The next remark states that for `us free Germanic
people' the notion that we live in 3 dimensions is `a frivolity', the
introduction of which into our understanding `made the world, in its
partitioning into 3 dimensions, vulnerable to being attacked by the
Jews, and thereby to being forced from then on also to live in 3
dimensions'.

To the best of my knowledge, no other remarks by Brouwer of either
type are known from any period of his life, and in particular there
are none in his booklet of 1905, Life, Art, and Mysticism. (That work
does contain denigrating remarks about women.)

To my  mind, (a) these remarks of about 1905 indicate a short phase of
genuine antisemitism in young Brouwer, and (b) do not affect his
account of the foundations of mathematics such as he set it out in his
dissertation and developed over the rest of his life. (It does not
seem to me, for example, that there is a parallel with Heidegger,
where the question whether a relation exists between his philosophical
work and his antisemitism is a very meaningful one (and which various
experts answer affirmatively).)

Two later but relevant events in this connection (for further details
and references see Dirk van Dalen's biography):

When in 1935 Bieberbach, who was a member of the editorial board of
Brouwer's journal Compositio Mathematica, and who had become a Nazi,
asked Brouwer to remove Jews from the editorial board, Brouwer
refused.

During  the German Occupation of the Netherlands in World War II,
Brouwer assisted the resistance and tried to help his Jewish friends
and his students. In 1943, he advised the students to sign the
declaration of loyalty demanded by the Germans. Part of his
explanation, after the war, is that signing would provide the students
with the relative peace needed to build up and carry out resistance
activities. He was met with skepticism (but was supported by
Mannoury). Because of this and some similar perhaps unfortunate
attempts at shrewdness during the occupation, after the liberation he
was suspended for a few months. Deeply offended, Brouwer considered
emigration to South Africa or the USA.

(I thank Dirk van Dalen, Albert Visser and Marcus Düwell for
discussion of these issues.)