Scholarly Exiles

Abstract

On a trip to Vienna to plan an international research project on the history of wages and prices in April 1933, William Beveridge, economist, social reformer and intellectual architect of the British welfare state, was inspired to set up the Academic Assistance Council – later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning and since 1998 the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) (hereafter CARA). Shortly before Beveridge met with Viennese colleagues for dinner, many German academics had received official notification of their dismissal by the newly-elected Nazi regime – a move which spotlighted the urgent predicament of leftist and Jewish academics in Germany.1 Refugees from Nazism received aid from a number of British organizations, including the Jewish Refugee Committee, the Central British Fund for German Jewry and the Society of Friends German Emergency Committee.2 CARA played a specialized role in this aid provision, focusing on placements for threatened scientists and researchers.3 Some of the leading lights of twentieth-century thought, including physicist Max Born and sociologist Karl Mannheim, received assistance from CARA and subsequently re-established themselves in British universities.