The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (11 page)

Maimonides’ rise to political power as a leader and judge as well as the eras most acclaimed and desired physician brought him endless days and nights of work in service to his community and sovereign. In his final years he became a figure of international importance. Maimonides declined the offer of the “Fran-kish king” (some think it was Richard, the Lion Heart, king of England) to leave Egypt and return to a European court. Ram-bam declined the offer, preferring to remain in Africa to guide his people to physical and spiritual health.

Despite his public dedication to the commonweal, Maimonides’ rise to political power and his blend of classical logic with Jewish law angered many prominent rabbis. He became a target. His sources were questioned, his focus on thought ridiculed. After his death even his tomb was desecrated by those who viewed a literal interpretation of religion law as mandatory.

Although observant people to this day are more aware of rules of behavior prescribed by teachings such as the Talmud and religious parables, Maimonides guides us still to a higher path. He understood that how we think and what we know is what we are—and what we can be.

N
iels Henrik David Bohr, son of a Christian father and Jewish mother, was, next to Albert Einstein, the most influential physicist of the twentieth century. Bohr is universally thought of as the father of modern quantum theory. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922 “for his series in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them.”

Bohr was the founder of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen (now known as the Bohr Institute) and acted as a guiding light to three generations of physicists. His theories on the surface tensions of liquids (resulting later in the liquid drop model of the nucleus), spectra, energy loss of alpha particles, periodic system, complementarity principle, quantum electrodynamics, measurement of electromagnetic fields, compound nucleus in nuclear reactions, fission, and superconductivity, are the basis of modern nuclear science.

Bohr’s most famous and imaginative theory on the constitution of atoms and molecules, expressed in his essay dubbed the “Trilogy,” although largely refuted today, remains physics’ most recognized symbol. Celebrated worldwide on dozens of stamps and other memorabilia, the Bohr atom resembles a solar system with electrons in orbit around a central nucleus. The Bohr atom has also symbolized the use of atomic energy by nations united in peace.

In war, however, Bohr contributed his knowledge of the atom to develop the most destructive weapon yet devised by man. During the Second World War he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, assisting the American effort in creating the bomb. Even before Hiroshima, Bohr realized the awesome and horrific effect of this force of mass destruction. In 1950, fearful of the improper use of nuclear energy for the wrong political purposes, Bohr in an open letter petitioned the United Nations in what was to become the most personal manifesto of his ideals. Of course, the great powers ignored his pleas, entering into an arms race that lasted over forty years.

Bohr, the philosopher of peace and almost godlike atomic power, came from a liberal and intellectual background. He was born in Copenhagen. His father was a respected physiologist and university professor. Niels’s gentle, caring nature was derived, it was said, from his Jewish mother, Ellen Adler. He and his brother Harald (later a well-regarded mathematician) were when young star soccer players, sports heroes throughout Denmark (Harald played on the 1908 Danish Olympic team).

After studies at the University of Copenhagen and work on the surface tensions of liquids and the electron theory of metals, Bohr traveled to England. Studies at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory under JJ. Thomson were disappointing. But the trip proved worthwhile when Bohr journeyed to Manchester and at the university met Ernest Rutherford, the great physicist and professor. Until his death in 1937, Rutherford was almost a second father to Bohr.

Professor Rutherford’s ideas about the structure of atoms and his discovery of the nucleus laid the foundation upon which Bohr built his own atomic theory (stated in the Trilogy). The Rutherford model set forth a theory, in Bohr’s words, that “atoms consist of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by a series of electrons kept together by attractive forces from the nucleus: the total negative charge of the electrons is equal to the positive charge of the nucleus.” Rutherford also assumed the nucleus to be “the seat of the essential part of the mass of the atom” with “linear dimensions exceedingly small compared with linear dimensions of the whole atom.”

The “Bohr atom” improved on the Rutherford model in significant ways. In its original form, Bohr’s atomic model consisted of electrons orbiting in circular paths around a nucleus in the center. Bohr further theorized that electrons move in elliptical orbits of limited range. Each range produces a certain energy. Light is produced when electrons shift orbit.

Bohr’s theory of atomic structure opened up entirely new approaches to traditional physics research. For example, his ideas, so elegantly expressed in articles such as the Trilogy, were applied to define the precise measurements of colors or spectra radiated by the hydrogen atom. His conceptual model demonstrated how atomic particles are shaped and why they are a certain size.

Bohr used the establishment of his Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1920 as a forum for distinguished young physicists to probe deeper into the theories he first conceived. The Institute fostered the so-called Copenhagen School of physicists. Eminent (some future Nobel Prize winners) young physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli worked with Bohr at the Institute. Although some would surpass him in certain areas and others would further elucidate theories Bohr could not, for whatever reason, complete, he was their ethical master, a source of inspiration for decades and the person who synthesized their findings often into something greater than they may have intended. Bohr’s many dialogues with Einstein, such as those at the famous conferences at the Solvay Institute, stimulated a generation of young scientists with their profundity and what C.P. Snow called “noble feeling.”

Bohr resisted the Nazi occupation of Denmark until he was forced to flee to Sweden or be made to work on the German bomb effort. He was directly responsible for influencing the Swedish king to accept five thousand Danish Jews (almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark) who facing sure death in 1943 at the hands of the Nazis fled into safe and neutral Sweden. At great personal risk, Bohr later flew to Britain in the bay of a British bomber. His work on the Manhattan Project in America followed.

With the war won, he returned to Denmark. His remaining years were spent fruitlessly trying to make the world powers face up to the responsibility of harnessing and controlling nuclear energy.

Bohr’s perhaps most permanent theory has been his principle of complementarity. He posited that a physical system may possess differing and opposing conditions that nevertheless are all necessary to formulate its description. The complementarity principle has been used to explain seemingly unrelated ways of life, from Eastern religious philosophy to Marxist-Leninist dogma.

Bohr’s personal legacy also extended to his talented son, Aage, who also won the Nobel Prize in 1975 for physics.

F
or over 1,500 years from the destruction of ancient Judea by the Romans and the dispersion of Jews throughout the empire, world Jewry lived and prayed in medieval seclusion. Small communities were organized around powerful rabbinic councils. Always careful to preserve spiritual values, the rabbis guided their people through the tribulations of an often hostile Gentile culture.

Moses, the son of Mendel the Torah scribe, was born in 1729 at Dessau, Germany. Jews in the Germany of that time did not have last names. Instead, they followed the biblical tradition of listing their first name followed by their father’s. Only later would German authorities demand that Jews become more secular and take last names (often chosen for each Jew by an unsympathetic German civil servant).

Moses suffered from curvature of the spine, was soft-spoken and rather diffident. Growing up in medieval surroundings, he studied traditional Jewish law and bookkeeping, learned to trade silk.

In 1749 the German playwright and poet Gotthold Lessing introduced a one-act play,
Die Juden (The Jews)
that depicted Jewish people not as horrid bloodsucking stereotypes, but as rational, kind human beings. Unlike their French counterparts (such as Voltaire, who was virulently anti-Semitic), many German Enlightenment figures sought to “rescue” the Jewish population from medieval confines. These moderate German thinkers sought to understand the religious spirit of man and to bring about a reconciliation of Christian and Jewish cultures.

Mendelssohn met Lessing, who introduced him to literary society. To prove his philosophical worth, Moses entered a writing contest, competing against (and beating!) the great philosopher Immanuel Kant. Lessing encouraged Mendelssohn to continue writing philosophy, and helped the mild-mannered trader to get his works published.

Mendelssohn’s early text
Phaedon,
written in German, explored Platonic philosophy and the immortality of the soul, using classical (not Hebraic) imagery to illuminate his argument. Following Lessing’s revolutionary example in not writing in more fashionable French or Latin, Mendelssohn chose everyday German as his language of discourse. He desired a national German audience for his writings.

This contemporary of the Baal Shem Tov and the Vilna Gaon (see later chapters) sought through his philosophy to bring Jewish society out of the ghetto and into the modern secular world (as his friend Lessing had made the son of Mendel into a “Mendelssohn”). The Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah was the outgrowth of the attachment of many Jews of the era to German culture. “Germans first, Jews second,” became the motto of those who mistakenly viewed the relaxing of medieval restrictions on movement and dress as the softening of Teutonic hatreds. This fatal delusion continued during 150 years of artistic and economic triumph, ending in the fires of the Third Reich.

Mendelssohn’s great goal was to reconcile exposure to secular life with religious thought. Attendance at synagogue was voluntary, not mandatory, said Moses. The political dominance of the rabbis was over. Their power of excommunication was no longer legal. But the state, as in Jefferson’s America, should allow its citizens to choose their house of worship freely. Reason would overwhelm hatred and persecution.

Jews must remain Jews at home and in their temples, but be loyal citizens of the state, active in public life. When God revealed His law to Moses on Sinai, it was to impose only on His people a system of internal rules personal to the Jews and no one else. Yet Jews did not have a mission to improve humanity.

Mendelssohn urged the study of Hebrew and the silencing of Yiddish, which he considered vulgar ghetto slang. He translated the Old Testament into German. Millions of copies were sold although their purchase was banned by the traditional rabbis.

He met many important rulers and thinkers. In a famous encounter with Frederick the Great, Mendelssohn criticized the monarch for writing in French (a bold move at a time of government-sanctioned Jew baiting). A Protestant theologian, Johann Lavater, questioned in public why, if Mendelssohn thought Jews and Christians should come together, he did not convert to Christianity? Moses retreated into a rationalist defense of Judaism.

At the time of the American Revolution, he became concerned with the civil rights of Jews. Returning to visit his birthplace, Dessau, Mendelssohn was required, before entering the city, to pay the head tax reserved for cattle—and Jews. A lifetime of struggle, culminating in the conflict with Lavater and the head-tax incident, convinced Mendelssohn of the superiority of the American model separating church and state.