ABSTRACT
Alan Gewirth was born in Union City, New Jersey, on November 28, 1912, as Isidore Gewirtz. His parents, Hyman Gewirtz and Rose Lees Gewirtz, were immigrants from what was then Tsarist Russia, where the anti-semitic pogroms of the early twentieth century forced many people to cross the Atlantic in the hopes of a new beginning and a better life for themselves. Gewirth was later to dedicate his 1982 book Human Rights, ‘To the memory of my Mother and Father and to Aunt Rebecca and Cousin Libby who as young emigrants from Czarist Russia knew the importance of human rights’. 2 At age eleven, after having been teased by playmates on the school-yard as ‘Dizzy Izzy’, he announced to his parents that from now on, his first name was to be Alan. The source of inspiration here was a character in Robert Louis Stevenson's historical adventure novel Kidnapped, Alan Breck Stewart, an eighteenth-century Scottish Jacobite, whom the young boy Gewirtz admired as a fearless man of the people. Later, in 1942, at the time of his first marriage, he changed his last name from Gewirtz to Gewirth. At a time when anti-semitism was rife also in the US, many Jewish Americans found it necessary to anglicize their names. In this way, Isidore Gewirtz became Alan Gewirth.
