Recently I came across the claim by Pam Karp that the nineteenth century Scottish mathematician and physicist William Rankine was a ‘jewish inventor’ (1) but links to the Wikipedia article on Rankine which makes no mention whatsoever that Rankine was jewish. (2)
Indeed, it lists Rankine as having been the son of Lt. David Rankin(e) – later a civilian railway engineer - and Barbara Grahame who was from a prominent Scottish family of bankers and lawyers. (3)
I can find no evidence whatsoever that anyone has ever claimed Rankine was jewish let alone evidence for it; in fact, when you check the surname ‘Rankine’ you’ll find it is an ancient Scottish one primarily from the Hebrides (4) and there is no evidence the ‘Grahame’ family of Scotland were jewish either that I can find.
The truth is that ‘Rankin’ is/was sometimes a surname adopted by jews – for example the communist lawyer Harry Rankin in Canada – but this is unusual and there is no evidence whatsoever William Rankine was jewish.
Although it is understandable for jews like Karp to want to claim Rankine as a jew given he was a key figure in the history of the first law of thermodynamics and invented – among other things – the Rankine Scale which is a rival to the Kelvin Scale in studying temperature, Rankine’s Method for laying out railway curves and co-created the Rankine–Hugoniot Conditions which describes and predicts the shock/combustion wave of fluids.
He was also noted as a polymath and wrote quite a lot of poetry such as his 1845 poem ‘The Mathematician in Love’. (5)
So no William Rankine was not jewish although it is understandable why jews would want to lie and claim him as their own when he was in fact decidedly Scottish.
References
(1) https://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Inventors/12388
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rankine
(3) Ibid.
(4) For example: https://www.houseofnames.com/uk/rankine-family-crest; https://heraldicjewelry.com/pages/rankine-family-crest
(5) On this see: https://www.eoht.info/page/The%20Mathematician%20in%20Love