Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Iranian Schindler

If the news and pop "news" the past week has left a bad taste, refresh yourself with the BBC's story about Abdol-Hossein Sardari. A sample:

The story he spinned to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes.

However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive - and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed "Djuguten," were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer's skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis' ideology to gain special treatment for the "Djuguten", as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari's new book shows.

High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with "experts" on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect - which the book suggests may well have been Sardari's own invention - were Jewish or not.

The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

I love that last sentence, btw.

3 comments:

Texan99 said...

More funding needed: yes, always!

My dad told me a story about a Dutch mathematician who was forced to work for the Nazis. He persuaded them that a particularly arcane pet project of his, involving the complex primes, was somehow critical to the war effort (perhaps something to do with encryption). He got them to give him lots of assistants, who cheerfully spent the war soaking up Nazi resources and developing a huge graph of the complex primes on a Cartesian coordinate system. More funding always was needed, and a militarily useful breakthrough always was imminent.

After the war, he sold the attractive, radially symmetric pattern to a linen manufacturer, who made tablecloths out of it. I've always wanted to find one. Supposedly a math professor in my hometown (Houston) built the pattern into his floor tiles, but I've never been able to confirm that, or even to find the name of the Dutch mathematician.

james said...

I like. You'd think it wouldn't be hard to find out who that would have been.

Texan99 said...

I've tried in several ways to run the story down, with no luck. I haven't any good contacts in the math world. My father, who was born in 1920, is long gone, as are nearly all of his colleagues. He did some sabbatical work at the University of Leiden in the 1950s, but I'm thinking that he heard the story in Houston (Rice U.), rather than in Leiden, because of the extra detail of the suburban Houston home and its floor pattern.

I did once find a website with a rendition of the graph of the complex primes. It's not really radially symmetric in the strict sense, of course; it's just that it starts out thick in the center and thins out in all directions. At the small scale it looks random. Rendered in black and white squares, it looks flashy and modern in a 1950s way.