The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (12 page)

Mendelssohn’s secular view was always tempered by deep respect for customary religious practice. In the tradition of Maimonides, he sought out reason in all human endeavors. For Moses Mendelssohn, the Christianity of the Immaculate Conception and Resurrection was far more irrational than rule-guided Judaism. The leap of faith must always be accompanied by reasoned thought.

Mendelssohn’s influence on the development of Jewish life remains vital. His philosophy permanently severed Eastern European Jews from a village culture that had kept them together during the long years of Diaspora. He hoped for a merging of Jews and Christians into a reasoning, emancipated society. However, Mendelssohn rejected conversion, pleading for tolerance and mutual respect. Jews should be Jews and Christians Christian. There was so much in common. The great lights of German literature, Goethe and Schiller, later acknowledged their debt to Mendelssohn for his liberation of the German language and rationalist universal philosophy.

His efforts led positively to the creation of schools to teach young German Jews with modern curricula. The Jewish Free School, founded in Berlin in 1781, was a model of its kind. Joseph II of Austria rejected the hatred of his mother, Maria Theresa, and issued edicts calling for the civil emancipation of his Jewish subjects.

Moses could not foresee the results of his liberating philosophy. On a personal level, all of his children (including his composer grandson, Felix) except one would become Protestants. Almost ten percent of German Jews in the late 1700s converted to Christianity (some of their descendants became Nazis). Secularism led in many cases to total assimilation (an issue that still troubles Jews in Europe and America).

The followers of the Vilna Gaon and the Baal Shem Tov reacted to Mendelssohn’s Haskalah with virulence. Out of the turmoil of the period, the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements developed, dividing Jewish sacred observance for generations.

Mendelssohn’s life and work raise disturbing questions, but also provide paths of resolution. Jews are still faced with reconciling modern existence and religious tradition. Since the Holocaust, ecumenical gestures by Christians are met with warmth by Jews, but hesitantly, with some suspicion. On the other side, Jewish concern for civil rights started with Mendelssohn. For him, Judaism guides mankind’s behavior with reasonable rules of living, a beacon of hope and challenge to the world.

P
aul Ehrlich was the most renowned, successful, and influential medical scientist of his generation. Ehrlich’s research led to the development of important medical disciplines—immunology, chemotherapy, and hematology (the study of blood and blood-forming organs). Although he received the Nobel Prize in 1908 for work in immunity, Ehrlich’s most famous contribution was his creation of the cure for syphilis, the synthetic drug Salvarsan, commonly known as the “magic bullet.”

Central Europe in the late nineteenth century was fertile ground for creative thinkers. The number of influential scientists and musicians born during this era in the German-speaking countries was disproportionately higher than in other areas of the world. The effects of migration, culture, industrialization, improved education, political movements, religious emancipation, and nationalism gave rise to seminal minds whose work still marks our lives today. Ehrlich’s early years were indeed similar in many respects to those of Mahler and Freud.

Raised in a small town in the Silesian countryside (now part of Poland), Ehrlich was the only son of an eccentric innkeeper and distiller and a likable mother of considerable intellect. Ehrlich inherited many of his parents’ good qualities. He was well liked as an adult, known for his crotchety good spirits and liveliness, sprinkling his speech with Latin sayings to make a point, the archetype of the German professor.

His early education in German school or gymnasium was typical of the age. He enjoyed mathematics and classical training in Latin, but was burdened by rote training in German composition. Ehrlich’s intellectual curiosity was not completely triggered until his exposure at eighteen to natural sciences and chemistry.

During subsequent medical studies he became fascinated with the use of dyes in researching cells and tissues. It was during his early twenties at leading universities that Ehrlich gained the knowledge and skills required for the remarkable chemical experiments of his maturity.

After graduation in 1878, Ehrlich went to Berlin to practice medicine at a prominent hospital. His research there soon produced breakthroughs in the methods of recognizing leukemia’s and anemia. His medical training combined with a unique gift for chemistry led quickly to the discovery that chemical relationships control biological functions. This simple axiom underlies much of the unbelievably broad research Ehrlich would develop.

Some of Ehrlich’s most unusual discoveries over the next fifteen years until 1900 included the categorization of bodily organs into classes according to their reaction to oxygen, the use of dye to relieve pain and diagnose acute infections, the building up of immunity in mice and their offspring (the so-called “wet nurse” experiments) by injection of mother mice with small doses of antigens and the consequent suckling and immunizing of their babies, the investigation of poisons in bacteria, and the use of serum to counteract potent infections such as diphtheria and tetanus.

Ehrlich’s discoveries through the turn of the century would have been sufficient to mark his treasured place in medical history. However, in his final years he displayed an even greater scientific mastery. Although many of these last years were spent in fruitless cancer research, Ehrlich’s international fame was established by his prophecy of chemicals, which seek and destroy parasitic targets within bodily organisms. In 1910 he announced to the scientific world the creation of a synthetic drug called Salvarsan, a magic bullet, which rid the body of the spirochete causing syphilis.

Before Ehrlich’s discovery of Salvarsan, he had been a respected doctor, winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on immunity, and director of prestigious research institutes. The controversy over his cure for syphilis raged, however, until his death five years later during the second year of the First World War. Demand for Salvarsan could not be satisfied. Ehrlich personally checked the testing and production techniques of the new drug. His notoriety led to vicious accusations of fraud, risky experimentation, and profiteering. Although he was exonerated by the German Reichstag, these falsehoods and the onset of the war troubled him greatly, leading to illness, stroke, and death at sixty-one.

T
he commentaries on the Babylonian Talmud and the Bible of Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki, commonly know by the acronym Rashi, place him at the core of Jewish rabbinical thought. Very little is known about Rashi’s life. There are many fables about him, wondrous tales invented to accentuate his importance, but they are really unnecessary (except for enjoyment). Rashi is primarily remembered for his magnificent and massive writings. What we know about him is gleaned from his lively thought and clear guidance. It was Rashi whose commentaries opened the window for countless readers to the often obscure and mostly difficult words of the Talmud, written largely in ancient Aramaic. Rashi’s guide, expressed in transparent, easy-to-understand prose, made even the lowliest woodchopper in the smallest forgotten village a master of the Word, of God’s law.

He was born and died in the Champagne region of northeast France, living most of his life in a town called Troyes. His maternal uncle was a well-respected rabbi who had studied with Rabbenu Gershom of Mainz (dubbed the “Light of the Diaspora”), the leading Talmudist of the tenth century and a forerunner of Rashi. He studied for a time in Worms and at Mainz under Isaac ben Judah, a rabbi dubbed the “Frenchman,” whom Rashi always considered his master. Rashi’s study at various Talmud schools reflected his aim first to absorb the disciplines of several traditions and then to incorporate them into a new vision.

Rashi stressed that the truly learned man must support himself with work “of the hands,” and to prove his point he labored in his family’s vineyard. Failing to till and irrigate the soil would surely leave it barren—and so the mind. To be a rabbi was an honor.

When he was about thirty, Rashi founded a school in Troyes. It became the center of Talmudic studies for the region and served as a catalyst in reviving Jewish learning and scholarship (especially after the devastation and massacres brought about by the Crusaders during 1096 in Central Europe). Rashi’s brilliant teaching and extraordinary example contributed greatly toward the reinvigoration of Jewish culture and morale during a time of extreme religious persecution. His
Responsa
or answers to questions on the law served as models for generations of students. The revival of scholarship inspired by Rashi was also in many ways comparable to the rise of Christian literary movements led nearby by Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux.

Rashi’s commentaries on the Talmud and the Bible are glosses, usually short discussions on individual words or small phrases from the holy text. Rashi was the perfect commentator, never a gigantic, universal thinker like Philo or Maimonides, never seeking to compose a grand compendium of all philosophy and logic or reconcile his conclusions with natural science. Rashi’s goals were simple. He wished to explain the law in clear, comprehensible terms. “To write like Rashi” came to mean to write intelligibly, similar to the modern computer jargon term WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”).

Rashi was a master grammarian and lexicographer. He established the correct text of the Talmud, then a confusing jumble of conflicting scrolls. His biblical commentaries, while more subjective in presentation than those on the Talmud, were for hundreds of years devotional best sellers, accessible to the general reader. The commentaries on the Talmud, on the other hand, were academic texts comprehensible to both the interested student and the learned rabbi. The more you knew, the more meaningful they were, Rashi’s clear descriptions coming into sharper focus with expanding knowledge.

Rashi’s work exerted lasting influence on almost nine centuries of rabbinical thought. How many other writers (perhaps other than the great Greek philosophers) have exerted such influence for so long? After Rashi’s death, his sons-in-law and then his grandsons established a kind of Rashi dynasty, earning the honored acronyms of Rashbam, Rabbenu Tam, and Ribam, contributing
tossafot,
additional glosses on his commentary and further enriching the Talmud.

But the institutionalized prejudice of the Church kept this great thought out of view, away from the mainstream of the world’s intellectual development. Copies of the Talmud were burned in bonfires of hate. However, until the Enlightenment and emancipation in the 1700s, in little Jewish villages all across the Diaspora, geniuses and simpletons toiled together, hidden from the fires of Inquisition, quietly and patiently studying Talmud, Rashi’s wondrous commentaries always leading the way.