Across the Fields

Why this Chapter exists

Whole fields rather than single lives.

The eleven Chapters that follow this one each go deep on a single figure or group: Rashi, Maimonides, Joseph Karo, Moses Mendelssohn, Levi Strauss, Emma Lazarus, Samuel Gompers, Theodor Herzl, Albert Einstein, the founders of Hollywood, and Jonas Salk.

Across whole fields (science and medicine, scholarship, the arts, music, law, computing, and commerce), what did the work add up to, and how does it compare to the size of the community that produced it?

Object Spotlight

A medal that is also a list.

A Nobel Prize medal is a gold disc about the width of a coaster, heavy in the hand. One side shows the bearded profile of a man looking left. The other shows two robed figures and a line of Latin. The prizes were first awarded in 1901 under the will of the Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and left his fortune to reward work of the greatest benefit to humanity.

Each medal is given to one person for one piece of work: a discovery in physics, a breakthrough in medicine, a body of literature. So a single medal is not a statement about any group. The Nobel Foundation has kept public records of every prize since 1901, and those records can be counted. Counted, they show Jewish laureates far more often than the size of the Jewish population would predict. How much more often depends on how “Jewish” is defined, by religion, ancestry, or self-identification, so published estimates give a range rather than a single figure.

On the back of the Physics and Chemistry medals, a veiled woman, Nature, stands holding a cornucopia while a second figure, the Genius of Science, gently lifts her veil. The Latin around the rim reads, in translation, that it is good to have improved human life through discovered arts.

The number behind the page

A question of scale.

On the eve of the Second World War there were about 16.5 million Jews in the world. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered about six million of them, more than a third. The population has still not returned to its prewar size.

Today, the world’s Jewish population is estimated at roughly 15 to 16 million people, about 0.2 percent of humanity. That figure is not a measure of historical importance, but it is part of the context.

Field one

Science and medicine.

Albert Einstein, who has his own Chapter in this Unit, is the best-known case. A few other examples, each checkable:

In medicine, Jonas Salk (born New York, 1914) developed the first effective polio vaccine, announced in 1955. He did not patent it, and when asked who owned it, he answered, “Could you patent the sun?” Gertrude Elion (born New York, 1918), who never earned a doctorate, developed drugs used against leukemia and to prevent the rejection of transplanted organs, and she shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Rita Levi-Montalcini (born Turin, Italy, 1909) did her early research in a makeshift home laboratory after Mussolini’s 1938 racial laws barred her, as a Jew, from the university. She lived to 103 and shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for discovering nerve growth factor.

In physics and chemistry, the names run through the century. Niels Bohr (born Copenhagen, 1885, to a Jewish mother) built an early model of the atom. In 1943 he fled German-occupied Denmark and pressed neutral Sweden to shelter the Danish Jews escaping behind him. Lise Meitner (born Vienna, 1878) helped explain nuclear fission and declined to work on the atomic bomb. Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (born Constantine, Algeria, 1933) came from a Jewish family that, by his own account, had settled in North Africa after fleeing Spain. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

Some of the everyday words of medicine were put into the language by people on this list. Selman Waksman (born in present-day Ukraine, 1888) led the Rutgers laboratory where streptomycin, the first drug effective against tuberculosis, was isolated (his graduate student Albert Schatz later won legal recognition as co-discoverer), and coined the word antibiotic. Paul Ehrlich (born in Strehlen, Silesia, 1854) founded chemotherapy and gave it its name, developing the first effective treatment for syphilis. Casimir Funk (born Warsaw, 1884) coined the word vitamine and advanced the idea that some diseases are caused by what a diet lacks.

The founding discoveries run the same way. Karl Landsteiner (born Vienna, 1868) discovered the ABO blood groups, which made safe blood transfusion possible, though Landsteiner himself, as the cautions at the end of this page explain, is a complicated case. Baruch Blumberg (born New York, 1925) identified the hepatitis B virus and developed its vaccine, the first vaccine shown to prevent a human cancer.

Field two

Scholarship and ideas.

This field is the oldest. Long before there were Nobel Prizes, Jewish tradition was built around close reading, argument, and the preservation of text, the world of the medieval scholars Rashi and Maimonides, covered in the Chapters that follow. That tradition of study long predates the modern university.

A few examples: Sigmund Freud (born Freiberg, Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic, 1856), whose ideas about the unconscious mind reshaped how the twentieth century talked about itself, whether or not later science upheld them. Hannah Arendt (born in Linden, now part of Hanover, Germany, 1906), the political thinker who fled the Nazis and later wrote about how ordinary people take part in great crimes. She has her own Chapter in Unit 6. Emmy Noether (born Erlangen, Germany, 1882), a mathematician whose theorem became one of the foundations of modern physics, and who was barred from a paid professorship first for being a woman and then, in 1933, for being Jewish.

Several of the modern fields that study how human beings live were founded, or refounded, by Jewish scholars. Émile Durkheim (born in Épinal, France, 1858, the son of a rabbi) was one of the founders of sociology. Franz Boas (born Minden, in present-day Germany, 1858) is often called the founder of American anthropology. He spent his career using it to take apart “race science,” the claim that human groups form a biological ranking, described in Unit 3. In the same decades that racial theories were being aimed at Jews, he assembled evidence against them. Claude Lévi-Strauss (born Brussels, 1908) and Noam Chomsky (born Philadelphia, 1928) played founding roles in structural anthropology and in modern linguistics.

Field three

The arts.

In literature, a few names show the range. Sholem Aleichem (born Pereiaslav, Russian Empire, 1859) wrote the Tevye stories that became Fiddler on the Roof. Franz Kafka (born Prague, 1883) described the modern condition so precisely that his name became an adjective in many languages. Three Nobel Prizes in Literature show the range of languages. S. Y. Agnon (1966) was the first laureate writing in Hebrew, Saul Bellow (1976) wrote in English, and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) remains the only laureate writing in Yiddish. Elie Wiesel (Nobel Peace Prize, 1986) wrote Night, his memoir of the Holocaust, widely assigned in American schools. One of the most widely read books of the twentieth century is the diary of a teenage girl hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic: Anne Frank’s diary has been translated into some seventy languages.

In painting, Marc Chagall (born Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus, 1887) carried the look of the Eastern European Jewish village (fiddlers, floating brides, wooden synagogues) into modern art. He fled France for the United States in 1941 and returned after the war. Camille Pissarro (born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, 1830), one of the founders of Impressionism, was the only painter to show in all eight Impressionist exhibitions in Paris.

The Russian-born Mark Rothko (born in Dvinsk, in present-day Latvia, 1903) helped invent color-field painting, and he also appears on the Museum page. Amedeo Modigliani (born Livorno, Italy, 1884) came from an old Italian Sephardic family (Jews of Spanish origin). Livorno had been home to one of Italy’s most important Jewish communities since the sixteenth century.

In film, the American movie industry was built in large part by Jewish immigrants and their children, a story told in Unit 5 · Ch. 11 · The Founders of Hollywood. Warner Bros. was founded by the Warner brothers, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack, sons of a Jewish cobbler from Poland. Paramount grew from the company of Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, and Universal from that of Carl Laemmle, a German Jewish immigrant. MGM was assembled in 1924 by Marcus Loew and run by Louis B. Mayer. Most of them started with little money. A widely cited history of the founders is Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988).

Broadcasting had similar beginnings. David Sarnoff (born in Uzlyany, in the Russian Empire, 1891) came to New York at nine and started as an office boy at the Marconi wireless company. He rose to lead RCA and pressed for the creation of NBC, which RCA incorporated in 1926 as the first American radio network (a network links stations across the country to one shared broadcast). He then pushed the development of television. William S. Paley (born Chicago, 1901), the son of a Ukrainian Jewish cigar maker, bought a struggling chain of radio stations in 1928 and built it into CBS. As in film, these were new industries, and Sarnoff’s NBC and Paley’s CBS were rival networks that competed for decades.

Field four

Music.

In music, much of the work has become so familiar in popular culture that its makers’ names are often forgotten. A few examples: Felix Mendelssohn (born Hamburg, 1809), the composer of music still played at weddings worldwide, came from a famous Jewish family. His grandfather was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and Felix himself was baptized as a child. Leonard Bernstein (born Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1918), the conductor and composer of West Side Story, was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants and spoke openly about his heritage.

The American popular songbook is a case of its own. Many of the songs that became the United States’ unofficial standards were written by the children of Jewish immigrants. Irving Berlin (born in the Russian Empire, 1888) wrote “White Christmas” and “God Bless America.” George Gershwin (born Brooklyn, 1898), the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, wrote Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess. Aaron Copland (born Brooklyn, 1900), often called the dean of American composers, wrote Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man, music that many Americans associate with the country itself.

Arnold Schoenberg (born Vienna, 1874), who reshaped twentieth-century music by inventing twelve-tone composition, had been baptized a Lutheran as a young man. In 1933, as the Nazis took power, he formally returned to Judaism. He fled to the United States and never went back.

Field five

Law and human rights.

Raphaël Lemkin (born in 1900 in what is now Belarus) lost most of his family in the Holocaust. In 1944 he coined a word for the crime that had no name: genocide. He then spent the rest of his life pushing the United Nations to outlaw it, and in 1948 it did. René Cassin (born Bayonne, France, 1887) was one of the principal drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, three years after the camps were liberated.

In the United States, eight Jewish justices have sat on the Supreme Court. Three examples: Louis Brandeis (born Louisville, Kentucky, 1856) was the first Jewish justice, confirmed in 1916 over open antisemitic opposition. Benjamin Cardozo (born New York, 1870) came from a Sephardic family (Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin) rooted in New York since colonial times, a community described in the American Jewry Chapter. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (born Brooklyn, 1933) built much of American gender-equality law as an advocate before she ever joined the Court.

Field six

Computing and high tech.

This is the field where lists are easiest to inflate, so what follows stays close to the foundations, where the record is clearest. John von Neumann (born Budapest, 1903) described, in a 1945 report, the basic architecture (a stored program, run step by step) that most computers still use. The report drew on the work of the team building the ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania, but the design is known by his name. He was one of several Hungarian Jewish scientists who moved to the United States in the 1930s.

The later industry includes a similar immigrant story. Andy Grove (born Budapest, 1936) survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary as a child and fled after the Soviet crushing of Hungary’s 1956 uprising. He arrived in America barely speaking English, joined Intel at its founding in 1968, and later became its chief executive.

Field seven

Commerce, labor, and philanthropy.

This field has three connected strands: building businesses, organizing the people who work in them, and giving to public causes.

The immigrant generations built at scale. Levi Strauss (born in Bavaria, 1829) went west in 1853 to sell dry goods to Gold Rush California. In 1873 his firm and the tailor Jacob Davis received a joint patent on riveted work trousers (a patent gives an inventor the sole legal right to an invention for a set time), the start of the blue jean. Their story is told in Unit 5 · Ch. 06 · Levi Strauss. Samuel Gompers (born London, 1850), a cigar maker from a Dutch Jewish family, helped found the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and led it, except for one year, until his death in 1924. The Federation made the labor union (workers joining together to bargain over pay and conditions) a lasting force in American life. His story is told in Unit 5 · Ch. 08 · Samuel Gompers. Rose Schneiderman (born in Russian Poland, 1882), a cap maker, organized garment workers, spoke out after the Triangle fire of 1911, and helped push through the workplace-safety laws that followed.

Philanthropy (organized giving to public causes) is the third strand. Julius Rosenwald (born in Springfield, Illinois, 1862), the president of Sears, Roebuck, partnered with Booker T. Washington from 1912 to build schools for Black children across the segregated South. By 1932 the program had built more than five thousand schools, shops, and teachers’ homes, and by the late 1920s roughly one rural Black schoolchild in three in the South was studying in a Rosenwald school. He asked that his fund spend itself out of existence within a generation of his death, and it did.

Two shorter fields

Chess, and sport.

Two smaller fields, both easy to check. In chess, two names stand for many: Emanuel Lasker, world champion for twenty-seven years (1894–1921), and Mikhail Botvinnik, champion for most of the years from 1948 to 1963. Both came from Jewish families.

In sport, the presence is smaller. The baseball players Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax are both remembered for sitting out games that fell on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish year, a choice that drew wide public notice.

Reading the list

How to read a list like this.

Three cautions.

First, “Jewish” is not a single category here. Some of the people on this page were religious, and many were secular. Some were baptized or had only one Jewish parent. Some wanted nothing to do with the label and were assigned it anyway, often by people who meant them harm. Sources that count descent and identification broadly give ranges, not single figures. The hard cases show why. Karl Landsteiner, who discovered blood groups, converted to Catholicism and late in life reportedly tried to keep his Jewish ancestry quiet. The composer Gustav Mahler was baptized in 1897 in order to be allowed to run the Vienna Opera. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had three Jewish grandparents and a lifelong, unsettled relationship to the fact. Set against them is Arnold Schoenberg, in the music section, who did the opposite and returned to Judaism in 1933, as the Nazis took power. Treating all of them as the same kind of “Jewish” would inflate the list.

Second, no field belongs to any people. In every field here, the great majority of scientists, artists, and thinkers were not Jewish. The comparison is between a small population and a large body of work. It is not a claim of ownership over any discipline. The commerce field above names makers and what they verifiably made: a work pant, a labor federation, five thousand schoolhouses. Finance is not treated as a field here, and wealth is not counted as a contribution. The myth of “Jewish money” is one of the oldest antisemitic lies. It recast medieval Jewish moneylending, a licensed trade that rulers taxed and one of the few left open to Jews, as proof of Jewish character and Jewish power. It also runs through the forged text known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claims a “secret Jewish plan” and is documented in Unit 3. Film and broadcasting are treated the same way: founders are named and their work documented. The myth of Jewish “control” that grew up around those industries is addressed on the Misconceptions page.

Third, the achievement and the persecution share a century. Many of the people on this page did their work as refugees, or after being expelled from a university, or under the persecution described in Units 3 and 4. Noether, Levi-Montalcini, Einstein, Chagall, Meitner, Schoenberg, Grove, and Lemkin all did major work in the same decades in which they were barred, expelled, or hunted.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Each question is anchored in a fact this Chapter documents. Answer from the evidence on the page.

• The world’s Jewish population is about 0.2 percent of humanity. Why does a body of work look different when you know how small the group that produced it is? (C3 D2.His.1)
• Many of the people on this page did their most important work after being forced to leave their home countries. How might persecution and migration affect what a community produces, and what it loses? (C3 D2.His.5)
• The “How to read a list like this” section warns that lists like this can be misused. Who might want to inflate such a list, and who might want to deny it? How does naming sources protect against both? (C3 D2.His.11)
• The page counts “Jewish” broadly, by religion, ancestry, and self-identification, and notes that sources give ranges, not single numbers. Why is a range sometimes more honest than a single figure? (C3 D2.His.10)

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. As a synthesis, this Chapter spans world history, from the place of minority communities across civilizations through the modern era, and the broader question of how a small population shaped fields far beyond its size.
• Classroom Applications. Possible activities:
  • evaluate how historians measure a civilization’s influence
  • weigh cultural and intellectual contribution against population size
  • distinguish representative case studies from a complete catalogue
  • test claims of cumulative influence against documented evidence
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because it concerns the measurement of cultural and intellectual influence, this Chapter supports world history, comparative civilizations, and source-based inquiry internationally.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: Social Studies Practices A (Gathering, Interpreting, and Using Evidence) and C (Comparison and Contextualization), applied across the modern era.
• Common Core RH.9–10 & RH.11–12. Learners assess purpose and point of view (RH.9–10.6, RH.11–12.6), integrate quantitative data with qualitative analysis (RH.9–10.7), and corroborate evidence across sources (RH.9–10.9, RH.11–12.9), working from biographies, primary documents, demographic data, and historical scholarship.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 & D2.His.3. Learners investigate historical context and assess how the significance of individuals and groups is shaped by the time in which they lived.

Learn more · take this further

• Notable Jewish Americans (lesson plan). The Anti-Defamation League’s Celebrating Jewish American Heritage: Lessons to Reflect and Connect includes a ready-to-teach lesson built around researching an accomplished Jewish American, with handouts and an activity built in.
• Six figures across fields (video + guide). The Jewish American Heritage Month educator hub, run by the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, hosts classroom-ready lesson plans. They include “Stories That Shaped a Nation,” a video and educator’s guide on six influential Jewish American figures across law, business, media, and sport. The hub’s lessons can be filtered by grade and subject, and take in popular song and Broadway as well.
• Profiles to research (reading). The American Jewish Committee’s Amazing Jewish Americans gathers short profiles of figures across law, literature, music, and civil rights, from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Irving Berlin to Emma Lazarus and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. A good source for a research-a-figure assignment.