Across the Fields

Why this Chapter exists

The work, not just the worker.

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. That is one way to tell the story of a people's contribution: through the figures big enough to carry a page on their own.

This page does the opposite. Instead of one life at a time, it looks across whole fields (science and medicine, scholarship, the arts, music, law, computing, and commerce) and asks a plainer question: what did the work add up to, and how does that compare to the size of the community that produced it? The figures on the other pages are the peaks. This page is about the range of the mountain.

A warning first: lists of "great people from group X" are easy to inflate and easy to misuse. This one is built the other way: fewer claims, each tied to a name, a date, and a record you can check. Where a field is deep, the page picks two or three concrete examples rather than reaching for a total that cannot be sourced.

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. On one side, the bearded profile of a man looking left; on the other, 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, the man who invented dynamite and, troubled by what it was used for, left his fortune to reward those who had "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind."

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. But the Nobel committees have kept careful, public records since 1901, and those records can be counted. When they are counted, the same names recur far more often than the size of the Jewish population would lead you to expect. How much more often depends on how "Jewish" is defined (by religion, by ancestry, by self-identification), and serious sources give a range rather than a single figure. The page comes back to the size of that population in a moment; for now, the medal is the object, and the pattern in the records is the point to hold.

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 those who improve life through the arts and sciences make it worth living. The image says something simple: the point of knowledge is to better human life.

The number behind the page

A question of scale.

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, by itself, a measure of historical importance, but it is an essential part of historical context. Historians measure the influence of civilizations in many ways: through ideas, institutions, discoveries, literature, law, science, and works that continue to shape later societies. This Chapter places the documented historical record alongside the size of the population from which it emerged. The examples that follow are representative case studies rather than a complete catalogue.

That number was also, within living memory, much reduced. On the eve of the Second World War there were about 16.5 million Jews in the world; the Holocaust killed roughly a third of them. The population today has still not returned to its pre-war size. So the community whose work this page surveys is not only small. It is a community that was cut by a third within living memory.

Field one

Science and medicine.

The Einstein page covers the most famous case. But he was one of many. A few concrete examples, each checkable:

In medicine, Jonas Salk (born New York, 1914) developed the first effective polio vaccine, announced in 1955; he declined to patent it, reportedly asking whether one could patent the sun. Gertrude Elion (born New York, 1918), who never earned a doctorate, designed drugs that made organ transplants and leukemia treatment possible and 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 (Copenhagen, 1885; his mother was Jewish) built the 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 (Vienna, 1878) explained nuclear fission and refused to work on the bomb.

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, then Germany, 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. Anyone who says antibiotic, chemo, or vitamin is using words a handful of these people set down.

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. The pattern is not that every great scientist was Jewish; most were not. It is that the same names keep surfacing in the founding work of modern science and medicine, often attached to people who were being driven out of their own countries while they did it.

Field two

Scholarship and ideas.

This field runs deepest, because it is the oldest. Long before there were Nobel Prizes, the Jewish tradition was built around close reading, argument, and the preservation of text, the world of Rashi and Maimonides, covered in the Chapters that follow. That habit of mind carried into the modern university.

A few examples anyone can picture: 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 near 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.

There is a sharper way to see it. 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, Germany, 1858) founded American anthropology and spent his career using it to take apart the "race science" that Unit 3 describes, a Jewish scholar assembling, in the same decades, the evidence that refuted the racial theories then being aimed at his own people. Claude Lévi-Strauss (born Brussels, 1908) and Noam Chomsky (born Philadelphia, 1928) did the same for structural anthropology and for modern linguistics.

The through-line is not that Jews invented modern thought. It is that a people raised for centuries on textual argument, and then forced repeatedly across borders, turned up in disproportionate numbers wherever ideas were being tested, and that the same century which honored some of them also tried to expel or kill them.

Field three

The arts.

In literature, the modern contribution can be measured on one shelf. 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 most languages. Three Nobel Prizes mark the range: S. Y. Agnon (1966), the first awarded to literature in Hebrew; Saul Bellow (1976), in English; Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), the only Nobel ever awarded to Yiddish. Elie Wiesel (Nobel Peace Prize, 1986) wrote Night, his Holocaust memoir, assigned in classrooms across America, where this Unit meets Unit 4. And the most widely read book by any twentieth-century author may be 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 the center of modern art, and lived long enough to flee France for the United States in 1941 and return 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; he also appears on the Makor 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 now told in full in The Founders of Hollywood, Chapter 11 of this Unit. The founders of the studios that became Warner Bros. (the Warner brothers: Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack, sons of Polish Jewish immigrants), Paramount (Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant), Universal (Carl Laemmle, German Jewish), and MGM (Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn) arrived with little and built the century's dominant art form. The standard history is Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988).

Broadcasting has the same origin story. David Sarnoff (born in Uzlyany, in the Russian Empire, 1891) came to New York at nine, started as a telegraph messenger boy, and rose to lead RCA and to drive the creation of NBC, incorporated by RCA in 1926 as the first American radio network (a network links stations across the country to one shared broadcast); he then drove 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, before his twenty-seventh birthday, and built it into CBS. The pattern is the film story again: new industries, open to newcomers because the established ones were not, built by fierce competitors rather than partners.

Field four

Music.

Music is where the contribution is loudest and hardest to count, because so much of it is woven into popular culture that the names have come loose from their origins. A few anchors: Felix Mendelssohn (born Hamburg, Germany, 1809), the composer of music still played at weddings worldwide, came from a famous Jewish family. His grandfather was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, though he 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 the music, Appalachian Spring, Fanfare for the Common Man, that many Americans hear as the sound of the country itself. A people that had been outsiders in Europe helped write the songs America sang to itself.

One life holds the whole page in miniature. 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, choosing the identity he was about to be persecuted for, at the moment it became most dangerous to hold. He fled to the United States and never went back.

Field five

Law and human rights.

In law, the record is at its most direct. 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. The people the century had tried to exterminate wrote the laws the next century would use to forbid extermination.

In the United States, three Jewish justices sat on the Supreme Court across the long arc of the same story. 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 the same colonial Sephardic community that opens the American Jewry page. 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) designed the basic architecture (a stored program, run step by step) that nearly every computer in the world still uses; the design carries his name. He was one of a remarkable group of Hungarian Jewish scientists who fled to the United States in the 1930s.

The modern industry has the same thread running through its origins. Andy Grove (born Budapest, 1936) survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary as a child, fled after the Soviet crushing of Hungary's 1956 uprising, arrived in America barely speaking English, and rose to lead Intel, the company whose chips made the personal computer possible: a hunted child in 1944, the head of the world's dominant chipmaker by the 1990s.

Field seven

Commerce, labor, and philanthropy.

Three connected strands: building businesses, organizing the people who work in them, and giving the profits away. The pattern is oldest here. In 1781 the Polish-born broker Haym Salomon (a broker buys and sells for others for a fee) turned the near-bankrupt American Revolution’s foreign loans into usable cash, selling the bills for Robert Morris’s Office of Finance. He died insolvent in 1785.

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 backed the tailor Jacob Davis’s patent on riveted work trousers (a patent gives an inventor the sole legal right to an invention for a set time), and the blue jean was born, a story now told in full in Levi Strauss, Chapter 6 of this Unit. Samuel Gompers (born London, 1850), a cigar maker from a Dutch Jewish family, founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and led it for nearly forty years, making the labor union (workers joining together to bargain over pay and conditions) a fixture of American life, a story now told in full in Samuel Gompers, Chapter 8 of this Unit. Rose Schneiderman (born in Russian Poland, 1882), a cap maker, organized garment workers after the Triangle fire of 1911 and helped push through the workplace-safety laws that followed.

Philanthropy (organized giving to public causes) closed the circle. 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 fields where the pattern is striking and easy to check. In chess, two names stand for many: Emanuel Lasker, world champion for twenty-seven years (1894–1921), and Mikhail Botvinnik, champion across the late 1940s and 1950s. Both came from Jewish families; the game’s own histories tell the wider story.

In sport, the presence is smaller but real, and well documented in the resources below: Olympic champions, and baseball figures like Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, both of whom famously sat out games on the holiest day of the Jewish year and, in doing so, taught a wide American public what that day meant.

The honest accounting

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; 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. The page counts descent and identification broadly, which is why honest sources give ranges, not single figures. The hard cases are the honest ones. 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 exactly when it became dangerous. A list that pretended these were all the same kind of "Jewish" would be the inflated kind.

Second, no field belongs to any people. For every name here, the great majority of scientists, artists, and thinkers were not Jewish. The point of the page is a comparison: a small population set beside a large body of work, not a claim of ownership over any discipline. One restraint is deliberate. The commerce field above names makers and what they verifiably made: a work pant, a labor federation, five thousand schoolhouses. What this page will not do is treat “finance” as a field or count wealth as a contribution, because “Jewish money” is itself one of the oldest antisemitic lies, the reading of medieval Jewish lending, a documented and licensed occupation, as Jewish character and Jewish power, a lie Unit 3 traces through the Protocols, the forged “secret Jewish plan” Unit 3 documents. The same discipline governs film and broadcasting above: founders named, works documented, and the “control” myth that grew around those industries answered where myths are answered, 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 in the shadow of the events Units 3 and 4 describe. Noether, Levi-Montalcini, Einstein, Chagall, Meitner, Schoenberg, Grove, Lemkin: the same decades that produced the work also tried to destroy the people who made it. That is not a footnote to the contribution. It is the condition under which much of it was made.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

• World History, NY Global History. As a synthesis, this Chapter spans world history (the place of belief systems, ideas, and minority communities across civilizations (9.2) through the modern era) and the broader question of how a small population shaped fields far beyond its size.
• Common Core RH.9–10 & RH.11–12. Students assess purpose and point of view (RH.9–10.6, RH.11–12.6) 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 and D2.His.14 (grades 9–12). Students investigate chronology, historical context, continuity and change, and the evaluation of evidence.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • 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.

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 that has students research an accomplished Jewish American of their choice, with handouts and a student-facing 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, including "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.