The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (18 page)

Schooled in traditional Jewish education, Waksman as a young man showed his dedication to public causes. In his early teens he organized with friends a school for poor children, cared for the ill, and formed a youth group to defend his little town against threats of persecution.

Like so many of his generation, Waksman sought opportunity in America, settling at age twenty-two in New Jersey. His undergraduate and graduate studies at Rutgers University exposed him to agricultural and bacteriological disciplines. His first paper at twenty-seven was on soil bacteria and fungi. After a short stay in California, Waksman with his young wife put down his roots in New Brunswick, near Rutgers, where in the 1920s and 1930s he became a full professor and examined with associates and students the world of microorganisms in the soil. During this period he also began consultations with industry, aiding in the production of nutritional substances and enzymes derived from bacteria and fungi. During the summers, Waksman worked at a laboratory involved in the study of marine microbiology he founded at Woods Hole on Cape Cod.

Faced with the oncoming surge of the Second World War and armed with his immense knowledge of many kinds of soil microbes, especially the actinomycetes, Waksman attempted with his colleagues in 1939 to isolate products that would destroy bacteria and thus control infection. With meager resources, Waksman developed during the 1940s simple techniques, which served to identify many antibiotics. Later, with the support of the pharmaceutical giant Merck and Company and the collaboration of the Mayo Clinic, Waksman’s laboratory established the efficacy of these wonder products. Waksman was touched in particular by their application to childhood disease, his memory of his sister always with him.

Some scientists who make great discoveries do not live to see the benefits of their research. Waksman fortunately enjoyed the accolades of the political and religious leaders of his time, culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize in 1952. The Merck royalties from the sale of antibiotics led to the development of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, a world center of research in microbiology.

His influence has been worldwide. Waksman research institutes operate in Asia and Europe. Antibiotics have saved countless millions of lives. To organize international efforts to bring these crucial substances into remote regions and poor cultures continues to be a world priority. Waksman carefully noted the helpful application of microorganisms in producing foodstuffs such as cheese, wine, and vinegar; but, most important, in the chemical warfare of antibiotics he made real his apocryphal statement that “out of the earth shall come thy salvation.”

B
orn Jakob Liebmann Beer near Berlin into a family of wealthy bankers and traders, Giacomo Meyerbeer is largely credited with creating grand opera. His influence, first felt strongly in the operas of Verdi, Wagner, and Bizet, reached into the twentieth century. The lavish productions of Florenz Ziegfeld and Andrew Lloyd Webber owe their sense of opulence and splendor to Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer’s musical style was the antithesis of that of his younger colleague the gentle Mendelssohn, choosing rather than reflection, grandiose gestures, spectacular effects, overripe melodrama, unending sentimentality, and great length. No composer until Richard Strauss was as popular and made as much money.

Exposed (like Mendelssohn) at an early age to a rich cultural milieu, Meyerbeer studied piano with the great Muzio Clementi and composition and theory with Carl Friedrich Zelter (teacher also to Mendelssohn) and with the famed theoretician Abbé Vogler in Darmstadt. Meyerbeer’s fellow student in Darmstadt was Carl Maria von Weber, composer of
Der Freischütz,
later recognized as the first great German Romantic opera. Vogler secured a position for Meyerbeer as a court composer. He also began to be known in his mid-twenties as a virtuoso pianist.

Antonio Salieri, the famed rival (and alleged assassin) of Mozart, encouraged Meyerbeer to study Italian melody. He traveled to Italy, which became his home until 1825 when he was thirty-four. Meyerbeer wrote operas in Italian that were marvelously successful, rivaling even the great Rossini. Yet it was not until his move to Paris and the production of
Robert le Diable
and
Les Huguenots
that Meyerbeer’s international fame and lasting influence was secured. These works (and the massive
Le Prophète
and
L’Africaine
which followed) established the style commonly known as grand opera, employing enormous spectacle and heroic imagery.

Grand opera was a much Meyerbeer’s invention as that of his extraordinary librettist, Eugene Scribe. It was a form, which appealed to the vulgar tastes of a new ruling class of bourgeoisie rising out of the trades and industries of developing Europe. Great operas before Meyerbeer are not numerous. The Renaissance masterpieces of Monteverdi were followed by the baroque dramas of Handel, then the classical theater of Mozart and Beethoven and the wonderfully witty works of Rossini. Meyerbeer’s invention of grand opera transformed the way composers viewed the stage. The ten great operas of Wagner and the over twenty important operas of Verdi were directly influenced by Meyerbeer in subject matter as well as form. Meyerbeer experimented with orchestral color, and each of his compositions was serviced by an increasingly larger orchestra. The listener is often hard-pressed to identify which composer he is listening to when first exposed to a Meyerbeer opera—is it early Wagner or early Verdi?

Meyerbeer’s borrowing of French, German, and Italian musical models is reflected in his name. Jakob became Giacomo, Beer was merged with his maternal grandfather’s last name, Meyer, and the Italian first name was combined with a new German last name, both worn by a composer who wrote his operas mostly in French.

Meyerbeer the internationalist also incorporated historical elements from many countries into his works. His choice of subject matter would influence the historically correct works of Verdi
(Joan of Arc
and
Aida)
and Wagner
(Rienzi
and
Die Meistersinger).
Meyerbeer was also the inventor of the modern-day press conference, bringing groups of journalist into his splendid home for extended interviews.

Although he was not a prolific composer, Meyerbeer’s operas were the most popular of his day, eclipsing Rossini and the other Bel Canto composers, particularly in France and Germany. Yet his work does not, after all, contain much great music; rather it is a pastiche of French, German, and Italian styles patched together in a bright, flashy quilt. After their very strong initial commercial success, and amazing influence on younger composers, Meyerbeer’s operas slipped away, forgotten by the public (except for infrequent revival).

His influence also had an unintended but historically tragic effect. The young Richard Wagner sought Meyerbeer’s help. Meyerbeer aided the younger composer with money and letters of recommendations, which helped Wagner secure important positions and early productions of his Meyerbeer-influenced operas. Then when Wagner criticized Meyerbeer to mutual acquaintances and in the press, the older man cut off all support. Wagner followed with a lengthy diatribe called
Judaism in Music,
which attacked what he termed the pernicious and degrading effect of Jews on German music. Wagner’s pamphlet, which espoused racial theories masked by hollow reasoning, would have enormous influence on the fascist anti-Semites who followed and served as one model for Adolf Hitler’s
Mein Kampf.

W
e owe much of what we know of the sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac ben Solomon Luria to the writings of Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem, childhood friend of the philosopher Walter Benjamin and later professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In a series of books and lectures revealing the mysteries of the Kabbalah, Scholem examined the remarkable lives and works of Jewish mystics and magicians, heretics and saints. Of all the Kabbalists, Scholem rated Luria the most influential in Jewish history. For Scholem, Lurianic Kabbalah was the last great rabbinical movement to affect Jews everywhere.

Luria was known to his followers by the acronym Ha-Ari (“sacred lion”) from the initials in Hebrew for “the divine Rabbi Isaac.” Out of a European, rather than Middle Eastern or Spanish, background, he was known to his followers in the Galilee as Rabbi Isaac Ashkenazi.

Unlike many great figures in Jewish religious history, Luria left few written works of importance. Similar in curious ways to Jesus of Nazareth, Luria is remembered largely from the remembrances of his disciples. Like Jesus, Luria was a visionary, professing to confer with the souls of dead holy men, pointing out their forgotten graves to his students during their walks through and about the city of Safed.

Very little is known about his early life. His father immigrated to Jerusalem from Poland or Germany, married into a Sephardic family, and died when Isaac was young. Isaac was raised by his widowed mother in Cairo at the home of her brother, a farmer. In Egypt, Luria studied Jewish law with prominent masters, became highly proficient in its intricacies, and sold pepper and grain.

Sometime in his twenties he retreated from trade and his young wife (his uncle’s daughter) to an island on the Nile for seven years of seclusion and study. Luria pored over the sacred book of the Kabbalah, the Zohar, as well as the mystical writings of his contemporaries, including the highly influential Moses Cordovero. During this period Luria wrote his only important work, a commentary on a section of the Zohar. Little of the work, Scholem related, reveals the mystical universe of Luria’s maturity.

After a short period of study with Cordovero, Luria attracted a group of disciples to his new home in Safed. In Luria’s time, the Galilee was once more a center of revelation. Luria preached and his followers recorded what he preached. Hayyim Vital became his most famous student, preserving for future generations the treasures of Luria’s mind in a book called
The Tree of Life.
Lurianic thought could only be understood by passing through “gates” of knowledge.

Luria’s mysticism was based on a principle he called “Tsimtsum” (“withdrawal”). For Luria, our universe came into being when God shrank Himself—the “big bang” theory explained centuries before twentieth-century scientists in Kabbalistic terms.

When God created the cosmos, divine light shone about, caught by God for his special purposes in the creation of orbs, things, and beings in magical bowls or vessels. When the vessels were broken, the turmoil of life was unleashed.

Scholem noted that Luria’s mystical philosophy was “permeated with messianic tension.” Unlike Cordovero, who viewed life as riddled with confusion, Luria taught that we live in a “world of restitution” or “Tikkun.” Only by restoring the inward and outward worlds of our universe through prayer and moral behavior (making our existence ideal and perfect) will we be redeemed, made ready for the inevitable coming of the Messiah. Every Jew’s redemption is necessary for the redemption of all.

When Luria died at age thirty-eight in an epidemic, his followers, most notably Vital, spread his contemplations in what Scholem dubbed “saint’s biographies.” Lurianic Kabbalah invigorated Sephardic worship in particular, but also lent visionary fervor to the messianic claims of the false messiahs Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank. Luria’s most lasting influence however has been the resonant philosophical framework he gave Judaism. For underneath all the Talmudic reasoning, legalisms, and rituals lie visions of light eternally seeking their return to the beginning of creation.