Jewish Contributions
The record of what a civilization made, in law, philosophy, science, and commerce, shown through the people who made it.
Jewish history includes what Jews built as well as what was done to them. The record runs through law, philosophy, medicine, science, literature, music, labor, commerce, and public life. It also runs through subjects already taught in schools: the Crusades, the Enlightenment, the Gold Rush, the labor movement, modern physics, and the polio vaccine.
Chapters in this Unit
Twelve Chapters: a survey across whole fields, then the people whose work reshaped religion, law, philosophy, politics, commerce, labor, science, film, and medicine. The figures chosen are examples, not the full roll. Full Table of Contents →
Across the Fields
Jewish contribution across science and medicine, scholarship, the arts, music, law, computing, and commerce, set against the size of the community that produced it.
Read the Chapter →Rashi
Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki of Troyes, in northern France. Among the most-read Jewish commentators of the last thousand years. His Bible commentary is traditionally the first commentary Jewish children study, and his Talmud commentary sits in the margin of every standard printed Talmud to this day.
Read the Chapter →Maimonides
Moses ben Maimon was born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1138 and died in Egypt in 1204. He was one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the medieval world: philosopher, codifier of Jewish law, and physician in the court circle of the Muslim ruler Saladin. His work is still studied daily.
Read the Chapter →Joseph Karo
Born in Iberia, died in Safed, in the Galilee region of Ottoman-ruled Palestine. He wrote the Shulchan Aruch (1565), a single practical code that organized Jewish practice across scattered communities and remains the standard reference for traditional Jewish practice.
Read the Chapter →Moses Mendelssohn
The Talmud student who entered Berlin under the Jew tax and became the “German Socrates.” The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, the Torah in German, Europe's emancipation debates, and the Reform, Neo-Orthodox, and Conservative movements that answered the question he opened.
Read the Chapter →Levi Strauss
The Bavarian peddler’s son who sailed for Gold Rush San Francisco and, with tailor Jacob Davis, patented the riveted work pant in 1873. The blue jean, the Berkeley scholarships still awarded today, and a pair of his company’s pants in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Read the Chapter →Emma Lazarus
“Give me your tired, your poor.” The American Jewish poet who answered the Russian pogroms by teaching refugees, argued for a Jewish homeland before Herzl, and gave the Statue of Liberty its voice.
Read the Chapter →Samuel Gompers
Born in a London tenement, schooled in a cigar shop where the workers chose one of their number to read aloud, he helped found the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and led it for thirty-seven years. The eight-hour day and the written union contract were among its central demands.
Read the Chapter →Theodor Herzl
The Vienna journalist and playwright who wrote Der Judenstaat in 1896 and convened the First Zionist Congress at Basel in 1897, founding modern political Zionism. His place in the history of the State of Israel is also covered in The Modern State of Israel, in Unit 2.
Read the Chapter →Albert Einstein
Born in Ulm, Germany, and died in Princeton, New Jersey. His 1905 and 1915 work remade modern physics. A refugee from Nazi Germany in 1933, he spent the rest of his life in the United States, and used his fame in the service of refugees and civil rights.
Read the Chapter →The Founders of Hollywood
Universal, Paramount, Fox, MGM, Warner Bros., Columbia: six studios, each founded or led by Jewish immigrants or their children, shut out of older industries. Since 2024 their story has been the subject of a permanent exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
Read the Chapter →Jonas Salk
The son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, he led the work on the first effective polio vaccine and gave it away. “Could you patent the sun?”
Read the Chapter →Last updated: November 2026.