The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (32 page)

Many critics have noted (and some have demeaned) Gershwin’s merger of popular and classical music. What he did, however, was not atypical of many of the great composers. The music of common people has its place in symphonic music along with grandiose utterances. The use by Aaron Copland and Elie Siegmeister of cowboy songs, Benjamin Britten of sea chanties, Sergei Prokofiev’s Russian peasant music, Mexican folk tunes in orchestral works by Carlos Chavez and Silvestre Reveltuas, all find their roots in Gershwin’s unique mixture.

The harmonies and rhythmic patterns of swing and jazz were also influenced by Gershwin’s music. Notwithstanding the beautifully lyrical melodies and ingenious rhythms, his music seems to rise up first out of its harmonic structure. The development of jazz since Gershwin can largely be traced to the expansion and complication of harmony. Also, even before Benny Goodman’s historic Carnegie Hall concert, Gershwin, along with Paul Whiteman, had shown the importance and artistic strength of jazz. For like Modest Mussorgsky (whose music is close to his black Russian soil) and George’s great contemporary, Duke Ellington, Gershwin forever symbolizes the music of real American folks, expressed with sophistication, laughter, zest, and love.

F
irst president of Israel, architect of the Balfour Declaration and the recognition of the Jewish homeland by President Truman, leading Zionist figure after Herzl, and distinguished scientist, Chaim Weizmann was one of the most influential Jews in history. As the third of a most disparate trio with David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin, Weizmann made use of his unique diplomatic skills to help bring about the birth of the Jewish state. He had modest beginnings under tsarist rule. His father was a timber merchant with a taste for good literature. Despite Russian limitations on Jews securing a higher education, he journeyed to Berlin and Switzerland to study chemistry and earned a doctorate. While in school at Berlin Polytechnic, he learned of the efforts of Theodor Herzl. Herzl’s brand of Zionism hit him “like a bolt out of the blue.” At the age of twenty-four, in 1898, Weizmann attended the second Zionist congress.

At the turn of the century, Weizmann came to Edwardian England to teach biochemistry at Manchester University. In these years before the First World War, the British Empire was at its most powerful. Weizmann became enamored of English manners, aristocracy, and democratic form of government, becoming a citizen of the Crown in 1910.

After Herzl’s death in 1904, Weizmann gradually became the leading voice of world Zionism. Unlike Herzl, who had talent only for world leaders but no sense for ordinary people, Weizmann was at ease in both worlds. Before the war, he sought the friendships of a dynamic generation of English statesmen, including the Conservatives David Lloyd-George, Arthur Balfour, and Winston Churchill, as well as Liberal member of Parliament Herbert Samuel. Weizmann also helped build grass roots support of the Zionist movement in the poor Jewish neighborhoods of London.

Weizmann also gained the trust of the British authorities with his production at the Admiralty’s request of large quantities of a flammable ingredient of ammunition. This liquid acetone would greatly assist the British munitions effort during the war.

With the entry of Turkey on the side of Germany and Austria, Samuel and Weizmann saw an opening for British support of a Jewish homeland. They urged that France and England divide up a Middle East soon to be liberated from centuries of Ottoman domination.

On November 2, 1917, in a letter from Foreign Secretary Balfour to Lord Rothschild, president of the British Zionist Federation, His Majesty’s Government viewed “with favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people” and promised to “use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”

Later in the 1930s, in reaction to Arab and French objections, and frightened that Middle Eastern rulers would back Nazi Germany in the coming war, English officials gradually retreated from the Balfour Declaration, culminating in the notorious White Paper of 1939 in which the British withdrew their support. Nevertheless, the theme of the Declaration was endorsed in 1922 by the League of Nations as a basis for the British Mandate over Palestine and led to the partitioning of the region by the United Nations after the Holocaust and the Second World War.

Between and for a short time even after the wars, Weizmann was the international voice of Zionism. In Palestine, however, Ben-Gurion, and later Begin, became the leaders of the Jewish national movement. However, it was Weizmann who secured the recognition of the United States of the birth of Israel in his secret meetings with Harry Truman.

Truman was incensed by the often rude and insistent demands of American Jewish organizations in 1948 that the United States support the creation of the Jewish state. The president’s old friend and former business partner, Eddie Jacobson, a Jew from Kansas City, convinced Truman to talk with Weizmann. Jacobson’s arranging for Truman to speak to Weizmann led directly to American recognition of Israel, the first country to do so (immediately followed by the Soviet Union). Weizmann left a profound impression on Truman, who quickly overrode powerful objections from Secretary of State George Marshall and his State Department that recognition would upset the Arabs and America’s influence in the oil-rich Middle East. For the second time (thirty-one years after the Balfour Declaration), the old professor whom Truman called “Cham” had gained support for Israel from the world’s greatest power.

Ben-Gurion asked Weizmann to become Israel’s first president. Weizmann accepted the position, not realizing that it was a ceremonial post. When he died suddenly in 1952, Chaim Weizmann was remembered as one of the most influential fathers of modern Zion.

T
he development of anthropology or the study of man as a modern science was begun, largely in the United States, by the German-born Franz Boas. Before Boas, anthropology was guided by theories of evolution and deductive reasoning. Nineteenth-century anthropologists thought cultures could be understood by first observing, then making certain assumptions based on limited facts and a good deal of pseudoscientific guessing, couched in colorful myth and fairy tales.

Boas urged instead that cultural scientists be more critical and observant. They must note variations of behavior, peeling the external away layer by layer to reveal the inner core of truth. Boas’s approach reflected the natural scientists of his day who assumed that behind real things lies structure. Only the outer shape of things change in relation to conditions in life. Boas combined these methods of “induction” (rather than deduction) to already developed evolutionary methods and thereby established anthropology as a contemporary science^

Born in Germany to a middle-class family, Franz showed interest at a young age in studying the customs of people from foreign lands. He concentrated at school first, however, in mathematics and physics, building his education on the abstract sciences. Influenced later by the eminent geographers and naturalists of his day, Boas the young scientist felt compelled to comprehend nature in the real world and the peoples who inhabit it.

His first expedition at the age of twenty-six was to the Arctic to study not only the peoples commonly known as Eskimos but also the geography of their lands. At great personal risk, Boas charted several hundred miles of coastline. He returned from the trip an anthropologist, convinced that geography was not the overriding force behind the evolution of a people that scientists then assumed it was. Rather, he asserted that the inner thoughts and mental development of peoples determined their behavior, not Darwinian theory.

When Boas returned to Germany, he was offered positions at a prominent museum and university in Berlin. However, he was disgusted with the unending anti-Semitism of German society. An opportunity arose to return to the peace of the Pacific Northwest and live with coastal Indian and Eskimo cultures, and he left quickly for the first of thirteen visits to the region.

After a series of poorly paying jobs in the United States, lecturing at Clark University and editing scientific journals, Boas became a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and a professor at Columbia University, both in New York. He remained at the museum for nine years and at Columbia for forty-two, training many of the preeminent anthropologists of the twentieth century, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.

In addition to teaching at the university, where he influenced generations of students, Boas continued throughout his career in countless texts, commentaries, monographs, and public lectures to urge the development of anthropology as a precise and vibrant science. He rigorously attacked the quasi-scientific assumptions of his day, insisting that research be conducted and conclusions reached only after strict adherence to careful analysis and controls. His approach, concerned with how societies change, not how they might have “evolved” up to a certain point, gave anthropologists a scientific basis upon which they could conduct their research. Boas asserted that scientists must observe what actually happens in cultures without imposing preconceived notions or prejudices. Do not bring yourself to others, but bring others to yourself, he repeatedly urged.

Research must be data intensive. The massive collection of facts is the only way of discovering how cultures are shaped and progress. The lives of peoples and the development of their cultures could not be explained by one grand evolutionary theory or urban psychology, but only by attention to the exact facts of their history.

Identifying variations in human behavior, Boas made clear, was the sure, systematic method of achieving an accurate understanding of culture. By reconstructing history and carefully analyzing each facet of a people’s language, biological traits and social behavior, Boas’s method of anthropology could give scientific answers to the questions of life.

F
or a brief period in the mid-seventeenth century, almost half of world Jewry believed that at long last the Messiah had come. His name was Sabbatai Zevi.

Born and raised by a prosperous merchant family in Smyrna, this Turkish Jew was trained as a rabbi in the Sephardic tradition. He maniacally studied Jewish mystical writings and was known as a peculiar reclusive youth, given to swimming alone in the sea in cold weather, self-flagellation, and constant mood swings. But he had a certain charisma, handsome looks, an elegant, almost regal, bearing. At age twenty-eight, he was banished from Smyrna by its rabbis after uttering the phonetic name of God prohibited by the Bible from speech and declaring himself the Messiah.

Zevi wandered through Greece. In Salonika he decided to marry. There in the synagogue, he took the Torah as his bride. The Greek rabbis threw him out.

Journeying to Constantinople, he again caused controversy. In an odd ritual he mixed up the texts of several Jewish festivals in a blasphemous wild chant, blessing abominable acts forbidden by Jewish law. He was again cast out and returned to his home in Smyrna in a state of severe depression.