The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (27 page)

Most historians believe that Halevy in his final years journeyed to Erez Israel only to die on route in Egypt. A tale persists however that Judah Halevy, the bard of the Diaspora, on the last day of life did finally make his way to Jerusalem, bent to kiss its sacred stones, only to be trampled to death by an Arab horseman.

H
e died penniless at the age of forty-five. Several years after Haym Salomon’s death in 1785, his son Haym Moses claimed that the government owed his family restitution. Indeed, Haym Moses urged, his father had loaned General Washington, the Continental Army, and several Founding Fathers more than $354,000, had in fact financed the Revolution. The U.S. government has never recognized the Salomon claim.

Many in the Sephardic community, however, have long claimed Haym Salomon, Revolutionary War patriot, as one of their own, for Salomon had married into the Franks family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a distinguished and prominent group of Sephardis. Yet Haym was Ashkenazic, born in Lissa, Poland.

Other legend has it that Salomon was a kind of American Rothschild, skilled in the financial complexities of European commerce. It was said that Salomon, the financier of American freedom, was as rich as Midas, with a bottomless well of fortune. In reality, Salomon, skilled in over a half dozen languages, worked first selling dry goods in New York, then at the request of Philip Schuyler, peddled supplies to the troops upstate at Lake George, and later worked as a broker selling war bonds, employed by the Philadelphia financier Robert Morris.

It has also been promoted that Salomon, as a personal lender to Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Randolph, and the Polish patriots Kosciusko and Pulaski, had saved these Founding Fathers from penury. James Madison (who for most of his career had difficulty making ends meet) was truly one of Salomon’s most famous debtors. Madison initially referred to Salomon as a “Jew broker.” However, when his creditor did not call the loan, Madison softened, recognizing Salomon’s kindness and unwillingness to be usurious.

Whether he was “just a broker,” although an extraordinary one at that, there can be no dispute that Salomon was a patriot. Before he displayed patriotism through financial prowess, Salomon was arrested as a spy by the British for attempting to blow up the royal fleet in New York Harbor, then escaped for a better-paying job with Morris.

Many other Jews left their patriotic mark on the American Revolution (although there were also some Tories among them), despite the fact that during the eighteenth century their population in the British colonies in America was small. David Salisbury Frank, a relative of Salomon’s wife, was implicated in the notorious Benedict Arnold matter (and later vindicated). Francis Salvador, a plantation owner from South Carolina, was the first person of Jewish origin to die during the rebellion (scalped by Indians after an ambush near Charleston). Barnard Gratz, an immigrant from Upper Silesia, frequently ran the British blockade, providing much-needed materials to the continental forces. Lastly, Benjamin Nones, a French Jew, came to America, volunteered for Washington’s army, and was dubbed the “Jewish Lafayette” for his brave service in Pulaski’s regiment.

Yet, when people think of Jewish patriots of the American Revolution, they most often speak of Haym Salomon and for good reason. Whether or not he “financed” the Revolution is beside the point. As Robert Morris’s most able broker trading in government notes, Salomon raised fabulous sums for the cause while making himself huge profits. Some say he became (next to Morris) the richest man in the emerging nation. Salomon traded not only in securities but also in commodities. His trading network was so extensive that he became in his words “generally known to the mercantile part of North America.”

The most persistent tale of his largesse took place on Kol Nidre, 1779, when a messenger from General Washington arrived with a plea for Salomon at the Mikveh Israel Congregation in Philadelphia. The troops, it was related, had not received their pay for many months, the army was about to disband, and the British were coming. Responding with mighty spirit and holy intention on this most sacred night of Jewish observance, Salomon organized a loan of $400,000 from his fellow congregants. Legend has it too that Haym put $240,000 of his own money into the kitty. Washington was then able to pay his soldiers their back wages and take the field.

Who knows if Washington would have won the war without Salomon’s loan? However, it is clear that Haym Salomon, self-proclaimed Broker to the Office of Finance, was “useful to the public interest” in a time of desperate need in American history.

L
egend has it that during the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E. he was smuggled out in a coffin by students. The Jewish rebels, the Zealots, had sealed the city and were not letting anyone pass. The name of the students’ master was the deputy head of the Sanhedrin, the Rabban, Johanan ben Zakkai.

Johanan ben Zakkai had opposed the rebellion. He did not believe in messianism, but in learning. He is justly credited with the preservation of Judaism, not grounded in sacrificial worship at the Temple in Jerusalem (destroyed by the Roman legions) but in the fortress of the Torah, of Jewish law.

This student of Hillel was considered by many Jews of his time to be a traitor. Upon his escape from Jerusalem, Johanan ben Zakkai ventured into the military camp of the Roman general Vespasian. Pleased at the capture of so prominent a Jewish leader, Vespasian gave him an audience. The rabbi pleaded for asylum from the Zealots and predicted that Vespasian would become Caesar. “Give me Yavneh and its sages,” said the rabbi. The Roman general (soon indeed to be declared emperor by his troops) granted the Rabban’s request for the town near the coast west of Jerusalem called Yavneh (near modern-day Jaffa).

Under the auspices of the Roman authority, in a vineyard and on an upper story of a house, Johanan ben Zakkai established an academy in Yavneh for the study of Jewish law. Yavneh became for the first time in hundreds of years the center of Jewish thinking, one not located in Jerusalem. The initial codification of Jewish law and, most important in the history of western civilization, the putting of the Old Testament into final form, took place in Yavneh. The events of the Jewish calendar, including its wondrous festivals (Passover, Purim, and the like) and sacred holy days, were marked forever. The rabbinical court at Yavneh was for its people a house of judgment
(bet din)
and model for governance in the difficult dark ages that followed.

This retreat into the core of Judaism, away from futile battles with superior military powers, from the control of a central Temple in Jerusalem, and from the zealous yearning for a Messiah, gave the religion a new beginning. Johanan ben Zakkai, in the style of Hillel, urged simply that Jews not rush to tear down pagan altars. If you are planting a tree and someone rushes up to you and tells you the Messiah has arrived, continue planting, then go see. No more battles, no more sacrificial ritual, no more state, he urged—only study. Countless cultures would rise and be lost in the black centuries before the Renaissance. The Jews would survive, and it was because of this perspective, the example of Johanan ben Zakkai.

After the disastrous revolt of Simon Bar Kokhba in the next century, the academy ceased to exist at Yavneh, first transferred to the western Galilee, passed generation by generation through families of imposing patriarchs, then disappeared in the sandstorms of war and disruption. But its form of rabbinical government and its focus on study and the writing down and thus preservation of what had been a largely oral tradition, ensured the continuing development of Jewish life and influence on the world.

T
he Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg thought of himself as a kind of musical Moses. Schoenberg preached to his disciples musical laws achieved almost through divine inspiration. He brought forth out of the past only those musical techniques necessary for future creations. Schoenberg dictated that solely through strict obedience to his instruction would the faithful reach a promised land of perfectly ordered harmonies, melodies, and dissonances.

In the early 1920s, feeling he had exhausted traditional melodic and harmonic concepts, Schoenberg developed a method of musical composition later called twelve-tone, serial, or dodecaphonic music. His new system changed forever how composers think about composing.

Schoenberg’s compositions and the works of many of his successors reflected his teachings. He believed that each tone possesses an expressive weight of its own, not reliant on traditional scales or melodic patterns. Rather, heightened expression was reachable only through a complex awareness of how musical lines interplay horizontally and vertically in the context always of a unified whole. Schoenberg sought an intellectual method of musical control, regulating with the utmost precision musical decision-making—what form a piece would take. Only through this rigorous technique could the most intense expression be accomplished.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Paris and Vienna were the two rival capitals of Europe. Vienna was a hotbed of new ideas, cultural clashes, and political unrest. Arnold Schoenberg was born there in 1874 and grew up in the city of Arthur Schnitzler’s novellas, the great golden paintings of Gustav Klimt, the practical utility of the Secessionists (an artistic, architectural, and design movement that ignored Victorian sentimentality for rich pattern and color), Dr. Sigmund Freud’s probing of the subconscious, and the titanic orchestrations of Gustav Mahler.

Vienna had been home to the composers Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Johann Strauss, creators of many of the greatest works of classical tonality. Always interested in the study and teaching of their works, Schoenberg was intent on understanding and imparting just how their music worked. Like many of his generation, he was overwhelmed by the sorcery of the Richard Wagner of the operas
Tristan and Isolde
and
Parsifal.
Wagner’s music in these works is highly chromatic, using chords that slip away from each other in a rich, harmonically liberated idiom. Wagnerian chromaticism provided a jumping-off place for Schoenberg’s musical explorations. He sought a musical language that would impart extreme emotional states. Mahler’s compositions also investigated similar feelings, but his sense of nature, love, death and resurrection were more lyrical than the younger Schoenberg’s. However, although posterity has claimed Mahler as a greater composer, Schoenberg’s tough brand of musical expressionism has had more lasting influence (at least in the short term).

The breakdown of classical tonality mirrored a corresponding breakdown of society. Listeners could find their way in works of the past. It was most often easy to understand, even on a superficial level, what the classic composers were saying. Beethoven’s musical language was not far from common folk song; his expressions were a recognizable part of his culture. Schoenberg’s music, on the other hand, seemed to most of his contemporaries separate and apart. Today’s audience can recognize that he was putting into music the innermost feelings of his age; he was in essence recreating in sounds the tormented pulsing of a world about to go insane. Schoenberg’s music to this day is disturbing and has not achieved popular success. It is as if he exposed in music a side of us we want to ignore. We hate him for writing with so much pain.