Isaac Hourwich

Isaac Aronovich Hourwich (April 26, 1860 – July 9, 1924) (Russian: Исаак Аронович Гурвич) was a Jewish-American economist, statistician, lawyer, and political activist. Hourwich is best remembered as a pioneer in the development of labor statistics for the American mining industry and as a prominent public intellectual among the Yiddish-language community in the United States.

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.

Hourwich graduated from a classical gymnasium in the Belorussian city of Minsk in 1877. Upon graduation he first tried to study medicine at the St. Petersburg Academy of Medicine and Surgery but did not find that conducive. Thereafter he attended the University of St. Petersburg, where he studied mathematics. 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. Hourwich sat in jail in St. Petersburg for an extended period of time before being exiled without trial to Siberia in 1881.

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. Hourwich then moved to Yaroslavl where in 1887 he passed the examination at the Demidov Law Institute and was admitted to the Russian bar. 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.

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