Jean van Heijenoort
From Philosopedia
van Heijenoort, Jean (23 July 1912 - 29 March 1986)
When eighteen, van Heijenoort arrived on a state scholarship in Paris, the son of an humble Dutch restaurant worker. Besides his major studies in mathematics and philosophy, according to Anita Burdman Feferman’s Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort (1993), “he had taken chemistry and physics, seven years of Latin, four of Greek, four of German, as well as French history, literature, and language. Independently, he had read widely, and he had even taught himself Russian, because he had a vague notion that, one day soon, he might go to the Soviet Union for a visit.”
In 1932, van Heijenoort sailed to Prinkipo Island, where for seven years he served as fellow atheist Leon Trotsky’s additional bodyguard and amanuensis. Totally devoted to the man hunted by Stalin’s agents, van Heijenoort sided with Trotsky and served as his translator, secretary, and courier. In Mexico, when Trotsky and Diego Rivera began their acrimonious disputes, van Heijenoort tended to favor the painter.
Upon divorcing his distant French wife and marrying Loretta (Bunny) Guyer, a New Yorker, van Heijenoort was sent in 1939 to New York to try to reconcile factions among the North American Trotskyites. Upon Trotsky’s assassination the following year, van Heijenoort lamented that he might have saved Trotsky’s life had he stayed in Mexico, that with his native French he could have detected the fake accent of the assassin, Ramón Mercader.
van Heijenoort obtained his Ph. D. in New York University’s mathematics department, carefully disguising his past. He then taught at Brandeis, wrote forty-three reviews in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, and for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy wrote an analysis of Bertrand Russell’s famous paradox of 1901. His classic work is From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931 (1967).
Meanwhile, New York Trotskyites began exposing his past and accusing him of treason. At the same time, rumors spread that he had obtained U.S. citizenship because the F.B.I. had helped him. A consultant to the Trotsky Archive at the Harvard College Library, van Heijenoort in his move from dialectical materialism questioned, according to critic George Steiner, whether a Trotskyite victory over Stalin “would have guaranteed a humane regime for the Soviet Union.”
In 1969 van Heijenoort married Anne-Marie Zamora in Mexico City, then divorced her, remarrying her in 1984. In 1986, his unbalanced wife shot three 3.8-caliber bullets into the head of her sleeping husband, then fired one into her own mouth.
