Hausdorff’s Childhood and Youth

Felix Hausdorff was born on November 8, 1868 in Breslau in Silesia, today the city of Wroclaw in western Poland. His father, Louis Hausdorff, was a Jewish merchant, whereas his mother Hedwig (Johanna) descended from the Tietz family in Breslau. The ancestors on the father’s side can be traced back to Felix Hausdorff’s great grandfather, Michoel Shoul Hausdorff. He lived in the town of Rawitsch, which was only 60 kilometers from Breslau, but in the Prussian province of Posen rather than Silesia. Rawitsch was a regional center for cloth weaving with a large Jewish population. A Torah school was founded there in the 1770s, and some members of its Jewish community undertook Talmudic studies diligently.