Isaac Aronovich Hourwich was born April 26, 1860, in Vilna, Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire. The Hourwich family was of the middle class, his father Aaron Hourwich was a well-educated employee in a bank who provided a quality secular education to his children.[1]
Hourwich graduated from a classical gymnasium in the Belarusian city of Minsk in 1877.[1] Upon graduation he first tried to study medicine at the St. Petersburg Academy of Medicine and Surgery but did not find that conducive.[2] Thereafter he attended the University of St. Petersburg, where he studied mathematics.[2] It was during this interval that Hourwich first became involved in the Russian revolutionary movement, with his first arrest for revolutionary activity coming in 1879.[2] Hourwich sat in jail in St. Petersburg for an extended period of time before being exiled without trial to Siberia in 1881.[2]
Subsequent events are unclear in the historical record, but it is known that by 1886 he was back in Minsk coordinating a Jewish Workers' Circle there.[2] Hourwich then moved to Yaroslavl where in 1887 he passed the examination at the Demidov Law Institute and was admitted to the Russian bar.[1] During this interlude Hourwich also studied the economy and social relations of the Siberian peasantry and wrote a book on the topic, The Peasant Immigration to Siberia, published in 1888.[1]
Hourwich remained active in the underground revolutionary movement even as a lawyer and was instrumental in establishing radical study circles among Jewish workers.[1]
Emigration to America
In 1890 Hourwich was forced to flee Russia to avoid arrest, leaving behind his first wife and their four children.[1] On 30 September 1890, he sailed from the Port of Goteborg, Sweden, and arrived at the Port of Hull, England, in the month of October; he next departed from the Port of Liverpool on a ship bound for New York. Hourwich settled in New York City, where he successfully made a return to academia when he was awarded an academic fellowship to attend Columbia College in New York City.[3] Hourwich earned his doctorate from Columbia after successfully defending a pioneering dissertation on the economics of the Russian village.[3] This dissertation was published in book form in 1893 by Columbia College and in Russian translation in Moscow in 1896.[1]
In 1900 Hourwich began a career working in the American government. He was initially employed as a translator at the Bureau of the Mint until 1902, before moving to the Bureau of the Census as a specialist on mining.[1] Hourwich remained with the Census Bureau compiling statistical material relating to American mines and quarries until 1906.[1]
Following the annulment of the election and the defeat of the revolution Hourwich returned to America, working once again for the Bureau of the Census in compiling a massive volume on mine statistics in association with the 1910 census.[3]
Back in America, Hourwich continued to stand outside the Socialist movement, supporting the Progressive Party ("Bull Moose") ticket of Theodore Roosevelt in the Presidential election of 1912.[3] In 1913 Hourwich himself became a candidate of the Bull Moose Party, running for an open seat in Congress to fill a vacancy.[3] Although personally respected for his independence, honesty, and intelligence in the Russian colony in America, this alignment with the capitalists proved a bridge too far for the Russian-language Marxists of New York, who accused him of "instability" and of having gone over to the capitalists in the pages of the weekly newspaper Novyi Mir (New World).[5] Moreover, as was the case in his earlier run for the Russian Duma, Hourwich was unsuccessful in his effort to win a seat in Congress.[3]
Hourwich learned to write in Yiddish only at the age of 35.[3] Thereafter he became a prolific writer in that language, writing for a variety of publications under various pseudonyms, including "Isaac Halevy" and "Yitzchok Isaac."[3]
In his later years Hourwich became involved in the Zionist movement and in 1917 he was among those who helped to organize the American Jewish Congress.[1] He remained active in the socialist movement as well, publishing a Yiddish translation of Das Kapital by Karl Marx in 1919 and publishing fragments of his uncompleted Yiddish autobiography, Memoirs of a Heretic, in the Socialist The Jewish Daily Forward and the anarchistFraye Arbeter Shtimme (Free Worker's Voice).[1]
In 1919 Hourwich became involved with the semi-official mission of Soviet Russia in America, the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, as its legal advisor.[1] Hourwich would visit briefly Soviet Russia in 1922 but he was thoroughly disillusioned by the experience, and he emerged as a critic of the tactics of the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin.[1]
Death
Isaac Hourwich died of pneumonia on July 9, 1924.[1] He was 64 years old at the time of his death.
Hourwich was remembered by his friend, journalist William M. Feigenbaum, as "a man of charm and genuine brilliance" with a tendency to intentionally hold contrarian opinions.[3] "People disagreed with him but he made them think to justify their position," Feigenbaum recalled.[3]
The Russian Judiciary," Political Science Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4 (Dec. 1892), pp. 673-707. In JSTOR.
The Economics of the Russian Village. Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, vol. 2, no. 1. New York: University Faculty of Political Science of Columbia College, 1892.
"Russia in the International Market," Journal of Political Economy, vol. 2, no. 2 (March 1894), pp. 284–290. In JSTOR.
"The Rate of Profits Under the Law of Labor-Value," Journal of Political Economy, vol. 2, no. 2 (March 1894), pp. 235–250. In JSTOR.
Trade Unions and the Law. n.c.: n.p., n.d. [1900s].
"The Jewish Laborer in London," Journal of Political Economy, vol. 13, no. 1 (Dec. 1904), pp. 89–98. In JSTOR.
"The Social-Economic Classes of the Population of the United States," In two parts. Journal of Political Economy, vol. 19, No. 4 (April 1911), pp. 309–337.
Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910: Volume XI: Mines and Quarries, 1909: General Report and Analysis. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913.
"The Evolution of Commercial Law," American Bar Association Journal, vol. 1, no. 2 (April 1915), pp. 70–76. In JSTOR.
Oysgevehlṭe shrifṭen (Selected Writings in 4 volumes, In Yiddish). New York: Yitsḥaḳ Ayziḳ Hurviṭsh's Publiḳatsyons Ḳomiṭeṭ, 1917.
Melech Epstein, Profiles of Eleven: Biographical Sketches of Eleven Men Who Guided the Destiny of an Immigrant Jewish Society. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965; pp. 255–268.
