Was Marie Curie Jewish?
Marie Curie – the famous Franco-Polish physicist who discovered radiation – has long been subject to rumours that she was jewish. Since it is important to understand whether there is any truth to these rumours let’s begin at the beginning.
Marie Curie was born Maria Salomea Sklodowska on 7th November 1867 in the city of Warsaw in the then Russian Empire. (1) Her parents were Wladyslaw Sklodowski and Bronislawa Sklodowski. (2)
Her father Wladyslaw was a religious sceptic-cum-atheist, (3) while her mother Bronislawa was a pious Roman Catholic. (4) Both were strident Polish nationalists who participated in the Polish Uprising of January 1863 till April 1864 against the Russian Empire. (5)
This is partly because both were descendants of Polish landed gentry/aristocracy so were intimately tied to the Polish national cause from their childhood. (6)
Clearly then Marie Curie wasn’t actually jewish: so where does the claim come from?
It turns out it came about because of the jealous aggrieved wife of Paul Langevin – one of her husband’s former students with whom she was having an affair after her husband’s death – as the ‘Library of Congress’ entry on Marie Curie explains:
‘After the death of her beloved husband she fell in love with one of his former students, Paul Langevin. Unfortunately Langevin was married and his wife eventually obtained letters between the two and used them as leverage to separate them. She leaked the letters to the press and Madame Curie was painted as a foreigner, a Jew and a homewrecker.’ (7)
The principal proponent of this claim was the French journalist Gustave Tery writing in ‘l’Oeuvre’ who claimed that her father was a converted jew and used the fact that her middle name was Salome as ‘evidence’ of his claim that she was in fact a jewess. (8)
This simply wasn’t true however and more a figment of Tery’s imagination caused by the false denunciation of Curie as a jewess by Langevin’s wife than anything else.
Since as Wired points out it all rested on false assumptions which have no factual base:
‘Her "liabilities," however — Curie was Polish, rumored to be Jewish (an erroneous assumption; actually, her mother was Catholic and her father an atheist), and a woman — outweighed her qualifications, at least among those who counted.’ (9)
So no: Marie Curie was not jewish but rather a Polish gentile of aristocratic origins.
References
(1) Susan Quinn, 1995, ‘Marie Curie: A Life’, 1st Edition, Simon & Schuster: New York, p. 17
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid., pp. 17; 28
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid., pp. 17-19; Marilyn Bailey Oglilvie, 2004, ‘Marie Curie: A Biography’, 1st Edition, Greenwood Press: Westport, pp. 1-3
(6) Quinn, Op. Cit., pp. 20-21; Bailey Oglilvie, Op. Cit., p. 3
(7) https://guides.loc.gov/feminism-french-women-history/famous/marie-curie
(8) Quinn, Op. Cit., p. 330
(9) https://www.wired.com/2009/01/dayintech-0123/