Jew life

JEWS LISTED AMONG THE CREATORS OF THE GREATEST
LIFESAVING MEDICAL & SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES IN HISTORY
(25% of listees, accounting for at least 50% of an estimated total of 5.6 billion lives saved)
JINFO.ORG

The following data is based on the ScienceHeroes.com website,1 which attempts to estimate the number of human lives saved by the most important lifesaving advances in the history of science, medicine, and technology, and to identify the individuals most responsible for those advances. The website appears to be the most comprehensive and well-researched work of its kind. Listed below are the twenty-six Jewish scientists, physicians, and engineers who are listed among the 105 principal developers of the roughly forty-three lifesaving breakthroughs that are identified. (The bracketed number preceding each name below is the position of that individual on the overall list, which is rank-ordered according to the estimated number of lives saved per advance, beginning with those advances credited with the greatest number of lives saved.)

If we enumerate the total number of lives saved by the twenty-six Jewish individuals listed below using a pro rata scheme according to which each of the individuals associated with a given development is credited with an equal share of the total lives saved by that development (see computations below), then the resulting number comes to about 2.8 billion lives, which is 50% of the estimated total of about 5.6 billion lives saved by all 105 individuals listed. If, on the other hand, we simply enumerate the total number of lives saved by advances for which at least 50% of the principal developers were Jewish, the number comes to about 4.3 billion lives, or roughly 77% of the total number of lives saved.2
[1] Fritz Haber, Synthetic Fertilizer (Haber-Bosch process): (1/2) x 2.72 Billion = 1.36 Billion Lives Saved
[3] Karl Landsteiner, Blood Transfusions (identification of blood groups): (1/2) x 1.16 Billion = 580 Million Lives Saved
[4] Richard Lewisohn, Blood Transfusions (sodium citrate blood preservation method): (1/2) x 1.16 Billion = 580 Million Lives Saved
[8] Abel Wolman, Chlorination of Drinking Water: (1/2) x 182 Million = 91 Million Lives Saved
[11] Benjamin Rubin, Smallpox Eradication (bifurcated inoculation needle): (1/4) x 142 Million = 35.5 Million Lives Saved
[12] Aaron Ismach, Smallpox Eradication (jet injector gun): (1/4) x 142 Million = 35.5 Million Lives Saved
[16] Samuel Katz, Measles Vaccine: (1/8) x 124 Million = 15.5 Million Lives Saved
[22] Sir Ernst Chain, Penicillin: (1/4) x 86 Million = 21.5 Million Lives Saved
[26] David Nalin, Oral Rehydration Therapy for Cholera: (1/5) x 59 Million = 11.8 Million Lives Saved
[28] Norbert Hirschhorn, Oral Rehydration Therapy for Cholera: (1/5) x 59 Million = 11.8 Million Lives Saved
[30] David Sachar, Oral Rehydration Therapy for Cholera: (1/5) x 59 Million = 11.8 Million Lives Saved
[32] Paul Ehrlich, Diphtheria and Tetanus Antitoxin: (1/3) x 42 Million = 14 Million Lives Saved
[47] Alfred Sommer, Vitamin A Therapy: 8.5 Million Lives Saved
[48] Baruch Blumberg, Hepatitis B Vaccine: (1/3) x 6.7 Million = 2.2 Million Lives Saved
[49] Irving Millman, Hepatitis B Vaccine: (1/3) x 6.7 Million = 2.2 Million Lives Saved
[55] Gertrude Elion, Rational Drug Design: (1/2) x 5.5 Million = 2.8 Million Lives Saved
[73] Jacob Gershon-Cohen, Mammogram: (1/6) x 1.7 Million = 0.3 Million Lives Saved
[77] Albert Salomon, Mammogram: (1/6) x 1.7 Million = 0.3 Million Lives Saved
[83] Jonas Salk, Polio Vaccine: (1/4) x 1.1 Million = 0.3 Million Lives Saved
[84] Albert Sabin, Polio Vaccine: (1/4) x 1.1 Million = 0.3 Million Lives Saved
[93] John Robbins, Hib Vaccine for Bacterial Meningitis: (1/4) x 0.74 Million = 0.2 Million Lives Saved
[94] Rachel Schneerson, Hib Vaccine for Bacterial Meningitis: (1/4) x 0.74 Million = 0.2 Million Lives Saved
[95] Alexander Wiener, Rh Factor Discovery and Infant Exchange Transfusion for Rh Haemolytic Disease: (1/2) x 0.55 Million = 0.3 Million Lives Saved
[96] Ronald Finn, Serum for Prevention of Rh Haemolytic Disease: (1/2) x 0.55 Million = 0.3 Million Lives Saved
[101] Brian Druker, Gleevec Anti-Leukemia Drug: (1/2) x 0.18 Million = 0.1 Million Lives Saved
[103] Henry Heimlich, Heimlich Maneuver: (1/2) x 0.05 Million = 0.03 Million Lives Saved
NOTES
1. Material used with the permission of ScienceHeroes.com. There is also a book associated with the website entitled Scientists Greater than Einstein: The Biggest Lifesavers of the Twentieth Century, by Billy Woodward et al. (Linden, Chicago, 2009), which profiles ten of the "lifesavers," who are collectively credited with having saved nearly 1.7 billion lives. Of these, three were, or are, Jews: Karl Landsteiner, David Nalin, and Alfred Sommer, whose advances together account for nearly three-fourths of the roughly 1.7 billion lives saved.
2. In formulating this analysis, we have used the continuously updated figures on lives saved that appear on the ScienceHeroes.com webpages profiling the individual scientists involved. These are generally somewhat higher than the figures appearing on the website's homepage. The figures used were those given in January 2014.
QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS: CONTACT US
JEWS IN BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE
JINFO HOME
Copyright © 2014-2016 JINFO.ORG. All rights reserved.
Reproduction of any part of this website
without the express, prior written permission of JINFO.ORG is prohibited.

JEWS AMONG THE 250 MOST FREQUENTLY CITED SCHOLARS & WRITERS

JEWS AMONG THE 250 MOST FREQUENTLY CITED SCHOLARS & WRITERS
IN THE ARTS & HUMANITIES LITERATURE
(22% of total)
JINFO.ORG

What follows is a list of Jews and persons of half- or three-quarters-Jewish descent who are among the 250 most frequently cited scholars and writers (from antiquity to the present) in the arts and humanities literature, according to the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1976-1983. The ranking of each in terms of relative citation frequency is indicated in square brackets. For more information concerning the methodology employed in the formulation of this list, see http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v9p381y1986.pdf. The individuals appearing on the list are primarily from the fields of philosophy, criticism, history, and literature.
[1] Karl Marx
[5] Biblical Authors
[7] Sigmund Freud
[8] Noam Chomsky
[23] Jacques Derrida
[28] Roman Jakobson
[29] Claude Lévi-Strauss
[31] Ludwig Wittgenstein 1
[35] Sir Karl Popper
[51] Gyorgy Lukács
[56] Theodor Adorno 2
[58] Edmund Husserl
[71] Thomas Kuhn
[76] Walter Benjamin
[81] Erwin Panofsky
[82] Franz Kafka
[101] Harold Bloom
[112] Sir Ernst Gombrich
[115] Ernst Cassirer
[129] Herbert Marcuse
[134] Yuriy Lotman
[136] Émile Benveniste
[139] Peter Berger 3
[142] Marcel Proust 4
[144] Hilary Putnam
[147] Hannah Arendt
[170] Josephus
[175] Nelson Goodman 5
[178] Martin Buber
[182] Erik Erikson 6
[186] Erich Auerbach
[192] William Labov
[194] Clifford Geertz 7
[197] Meyer Abrams
[201] Émile Durkheim
[202] Stanley Fish
[205] Lionel Trilling
[210] Saul Kripke
[211] Eric Hobsbawm
[214] Miguel de Cervantes 8
[217] Richard Ellmann
[219] Geoffrey Hartman
[221] George Steiner
[223] Leo Spitzer
[228] Jean Starobinski
[230] E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
[231] Imre Lakatos
[233] Henri Bergson
[239] Erving Goffman
[241] Sir Isaiah Berlin
[244] Susan Sontag
[247] Richard Hofstadter
[248] Irving Howe
[250] Harry Levin
NOTES
1. Jewish father, half-Jewish mother; see, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, by Ray Monk (Penguin, New York and London, 1990, pp. 4-7).
2. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
3. Berger was born to Viennese-Jewish parents who converted to Christianity in 1938. The family found refuge from the Nazis during World War II in British Mandate Palestine. See Im Morgenlicht der Erinnerung: Eine Kindheit in turbulenter Zeit, by Peter L. Berger (Molden, Cologne, Germany, 2008).
4. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
5. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
6. Son of a Danish-Jewish mother, Karla Abrahamsen, and a German-Jewish step-father, Dr. Theodor Homburger. Prior to her marriage to Homburger, Erikson's mother was briefly married to a Danish Jew, Valdemar Isidor Salomonson. Erikson claimed, however, that his real biological father was an unknown, non-Jewish Dane. See Erik Erikson: a detailed evaluation and genogram study, by Monica McGoldrick.
7. Jewish mother (née Lois Brieger), non-Jewish father.
8. See, e.g., The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, edited by Anthony Cascardi (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2008, p. 4). Writing of Cervantes' parents, Cascardi states in the Introduction: "While the family might have had some claim to nobility they often found themselves in financial straits. Moreover, they were almost certainly of converso origin, that is, converts to Catholicism of Jewish ancestry."

Jewish Philosophers

JEWISH PHILOSOPHERS & THINKERS
JINFO.ORG

SHORT LIST
Sir Alfred (A. J.) Ayer 2
Henri Bergson
Sir Isaiah Berlin
Niels Bohr 3
Georg Cantor 5
Noam Chomsky
Jacques Derrida
Albert Einstein
Sigmund Freud
Edmund Husserl
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Moses Maimonides
Karl Marx
Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus)
Sir Karl Popper
Hilary Putnam
Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza
Alfred Tarski
Ludwig Wittgenstein 19
LONG LIST
Isaac Abravanel
Judah Abravanel (Leone Ebreo)
Alfred Adler
Felix Adler
Mortimer Adler
Theodor Adorno 1
Samuel Alexander
Günther Anders
Hannah Arendt
Aristobulus of Paneas
Raymond Aron
Sir Alfred (A. J.) Ayer 2
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
David Baumgardt
Paul Benacerraf
Julien Benda
Walter Benjamin
Gustav Bergmann
Henri Bergson
Eliezer Berkovits
Sir Isaiah Berlin
Paul Bernays
Max Black
Ernst Bloch
Ned Block
Leonard Bloomfield
Franz Boas
George Boas
David Bohm
Niels Bohr 3
George Boolos 4
Leon Brunschvicg
Martin Buber
Georg Cantor 5
Ernst Cassirer
Stanley Cavell
Noam Chomsky
Hermann Cohen
Morris Raphael Cohen
Jonas Cohn
Hasdai Crescas
Arthur C. Danto
Jacques Derrida
Hubert Dreyfus
Emile Durkheim
Ronald Dworkin
Paul Edwards
Albert Einstein
Solomon Feferman
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
Alain Finkielkraut
Ludwik Fleck
Jerry Fodor
Abraham A. Fraenkel
Adolphe Franck
Philipp Frank
Semyon Frank
Sigmund Freud
Erich Fromm
Solomon Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron)
Ernest Gellner
Gersonides
André Glucksmann
Alvin Goldman
Sir Ernst Gombrich
Theodor Gomperz
Nelson Goodman 7
Kurt Grelling 8
Adolf Grünbaum
Hans Hahn
Judah Halevi
Gilbert Harman
Zellig Harris
Herbert L. A. Hart
Jeanne Hersch
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Douglas Hoftstadter
Sidney Hook
Max Horkheimer
Edmund Husserl
Isaac b. Solomon Israeli
Edmond Jabès
Roman Jakobson
Vladimir Jankélévitch
Richard Jeffrey
Hans Jonas
Horace Kallen
Jerrold Katz
Felix Kaufmann
Walter Kaufmann
Hans Kelsen
Raymond Klibansky
Kurt Koffka
Aurel Kolnai
Alexandre Koyré
Georg Kreisel
Saul Kripke
Paul Kristeller
Leopold Kronecker
Richard Kroner
Thomas Kuhn
Imre Lakatos
Emmanuel Levinas
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
Adolf Lindenbaum
Karl Löwith
Gyorgy Lukács
Isaac Luria
Moses Maimonides
Karl Mannheim
Gabriel Marcel 9
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Herbert Marcuse
Karl Marx
Fritz Mauthner
Alexander Men
Moses Mendelssohn
Emile Meyerson
Marvin Minsky
Ludwig von Mises
Richard von Mises
Michel de Montaigne 10
Sidney Morgenbesser
Ernest Nagel
Thomas Nagel
Leonhard Nelson
John von Neumann
Otto Neurath 11
Robert Nozick
Martha Nussbaum 12
Arthur Pap
Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus)
Michael Polanyi
Richard Popkin
Sir Karl Popper
Emil Post
Moritz Presburger
Ilya Prigogine
Hilary Putnam 13
Ayn Rand
Wilhelm Reich
Hans Reichenbach 14
Abraham Robinson
Franz Rosenzweig
Saadiah Gaon
Edward Sapir
Israel Scheffler
Max Scheler 15
Alfred Schutz
Lev Shestov
Abner Shimony
Georg Simmel
Herbert Simon 16
Peter Singer
Joseph Soloveitchik
Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza
Edith Stein
William Stern
Leo Strauss
Alfred Tarski
Teresa of Ávila, Saint 17
Ernst Tugendhat
Juan Luis Vives 18
Jean Wahl
Friedrich Waismann
Éric Weil
Simone Weil
Paul Weiss
Max Wertheimer
Morton White
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
Ludwig Wittgenstein 19
NOTES
1. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
2. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer.
3. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
4. Half-Jewish, according to a private communication from a distinguished former colleague of the late Prof. Boolos.

5. In Men of Mathematics, Eric Temple Bell described Cantor as being "of pure Jewish descent on both sides," although both parents were baptized. In a 1971 article entitled "Towards a Biography of Georg Cantor," the British historian of mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness claimed (Annals of Science 27, pp. 345-391, 1971) to be unable to find any evidence of Jewish ancestry (although he conceded that Cantor's wife, Vally Guttmann, was Jewish). However, a letter written by Georg Cantor to Paul Tannery in 1896 (Paul Tannery, Memoires Scientifique 13 Correspondance, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1934, p. 306) explicitly acknowledges that Cantor's paternal grandparents were members of the Sephardic Jewish community of Copenhagen. Specifically, Cantor states in describing his father: "Er ist aber in Kopenhagen geboren, von israelitischen Eltern, die der dortigen portugisischen Judengemeinde..." ("He was born in Copenhagen of Jewish parents from the local Portuguese-Jewish community.") In a recent book, The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity (Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 2000, pp. 94, 144), Amir Aczel provides new evidence concerning the ancestry of Cantor's mother in the form of an excerpt from a letter that was written by Georg Cantor's brother Ludwig to their mother [reproduced in its entirety, but in French translation from the original German, by Nathalie Charraud in her book Infini et Inconscient: Essai sur Georg Cantor (Anthropos - Economica, Paris, 1994, p. 8)]. This letter begins [in the original German, a fragment of which appears in Georg Cantor: 1845-1918, by Walter Purkert and Hans Joachim Ilgauds (Birkhäuser, Basel, 1987, p. 15)]: "Mögen wir zehnmal von Juden abstammen und ich im Princip noch so sehr für Gleichberechtigung der Hebräer sein, im socialen Leben sind mir Christen lieber ..." The translation of this sentence is: "We may be descended from Jews ten times over and I (may be) in principle ever so much for the equal rights of the Hebrews, (but) in social life I prefer Christians...," or equivalently: "Even though we are descended from Jews ten times over and I am in principle ever so much for the equal rights of the Hebrews, in social life I still prefer Christians..." Charraud renders the (complete) sentence in a slightly different manner as follows: "Même si c'est dix fois vrai que nous descendons de juifs et si je suis en principe entièrement pour l'égalité des droits avec les Hébreux, dans la vie sociale je préfère les chrétiens et je ne me sentirai jamais à l'aise dans une société exclusivement juive." Later on in the same letter, Ludwig states: "Mais nous sommes, bien que je possède moi-même un nez juif, dans nos principes et nos habitudes tellement non-juifs...," which translates as: "But we are - even though I myself possess Jewish features - so non-Jewish in our beliefs and customs..." In other words, Ludwig is arguing that even though the family is ethnically Jewish, it is culturally non-Jewish. What is significant about this letter, as Aczel first pointed out, is that it was written to the mother of Georg Cantor and would, therefore, have made little sense if she hadn't herself been of Jewish descent. According to Ismerjük''oket?: zsidó származású nevezetes magyarok arcképcsarnoka, by István Reményi Gyenes (Ex Libris, Budapest, 1997, pp. 132-133), Cantor's maternal great uncle (i.e., the brother of his maternal grandfather), the great violin pedagogue Josef Böhm, was a Jew by birth. [N.B.: There are now erroneous translations of the sentence: "Mögen wir zehnmal von Juden abstammen..." appearing elsewhere on the Internet. The sentence has the basic structure "even if A and B, nevertheless C," where the enumeration of A and B is clearly intended to mitigate the expression of prejudice in C, i.e., the term "even if" is employed in the sense of "even though." These other translations attempt to render the sentence: "Even if it were the case A and even though it is the case B, nevertheless C." Since the term "Mögen" (which generates the "even if" expression) appears only once in the original German, it must assume the same meaning in both cases if it is distributed over A and B in translation (i.e., if the sentence is rendered: "Even if A and even if B, nevertheless C."). Furthermore, in our translations of the sentence, we gave the word "zehnmal" its literal meaning, viz., "ten times," which, of course, does not make literal sense when used to modify the term "descended from." It is fairly clear that the word is employed in this context to signify "overwhelmingly" or "completely"; perhaps the best translation of the word in this context is "one thousand percent." From that standpoint, even if the "we" in the sentence was somehow intended to refer to the Cantor children only (and not to their mother, to whom the letter is addressed), it would still imply that she was "descended from Jews."]


7. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
8. See http://gestalttheory.net/archive/kgbio.html.
9. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father. See Metzler Philosophen Lexikon, edited by Bernd Lutz (Metzler, Stuttgart, 1989, p. 503).

10. Mother of Spanish-Jewish descent, non-Jewish father; see Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, by Harold Bloom (Warner, 2002, New York, p.44) or http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10512c.htm.

11. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother; see Vienna and the Jews: 1867-1938, by Steven Beller (Cambridge, 1990, pp. 15-16).
12. Convert to Judaism; see http://www.arlindo-correia.com/080702.html.
13. See A Certain People, by Charles E. Silberman (Summit Books, New York, 1985, pp. 247-248). Putnam has described himself as a "practicing Jew." See also Hilary Putnam's Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2002, p. 2).
14. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother; see http://faculty.oxy.edu/traiger/publications/reichenbach.html.
15. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 14 (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, p. 952).
16. Jewish father, mother of partial Jewish ancestry; see Models of My Life by Herbert A. Simon (BasicBooks, New York,NY, 1991, pp. 3, 17, 112, 262).
17. Father and grandfather were both tried and convicted by the Inquisition for secretly practicing Judaism; see "Teresa's Jewish Roots": http://www.helpfellowship.org/Articles%20of%20Interest/teresa_of_avila_by_raymond_helmick_SJ.htm.
18. See Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 16 (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, p. 197).
19. Jewish father, half-Jewish mother; see, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, by Ray Monk (Penguin, New York and London, 1990, pp. 4-7).