The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (14 page)

He dutifully attended law school, never to practice law. Instead, Kafka was content to work as an administrator in a workmen’s compensation firm. This menial job left his afternoons and evenings free for what he called his night work—writing. This dual existence, the bureaucrat-artist, produced enormous tensions within him, leading to suicidal thoughts and the darkest visions.

Leading Kafka away from death were wonderful friendships with talented young men and women, including Max Brod (who was to become his literary executor and most admired biographer), and a series of fiancées and liaisons. He kept a diary, wrote countless letters to his friends and lovers, reveled in performances by visiting Yiddish theater troupes, and studied Hebrew and Jewish history with insatiable curiosity. Three engagements were ended either by fright at his own perceived inability to share his life or by his father’s disapproving glare. In 1917 tuberculosis began its relentless attack on his health, ending in death at forty-one years of age.

While on his deathbed, Kafka instructed Brod to destroy all his works, correspondence, and diaries. Few of Kafka’s books had been published during his lifetime. He was unknown. He may likely have felt that it was better for the world that he remain so. But for Brod’s unwillingness to destroy Kafka’s writings, the modern world would not have been revealed through his special lens.

Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s slowed German literary attention to Kafka’s masterpieces. After the war, largely through Brod’s prodding, most of Kafka’s books and letters were published, translated into several languages, and popularly read. The French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus discovered in Kafka a rich source of inspiration. Isaac Bashevis Singer, the great Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize winner, thought Kafka an immense influence of revelation and terror.

Franz Kafka’s cold night world of isolation and enigma is both the recounting of modern history and his autobiography. In Kafka the cosmos is found in the most minute, the insect, a symbol of humanity laid bare to its most horrid self.

B
orn in Plonsk, Poland as David Green, he chose as his own the name of one of the last defenders of ancient Jerusalem against the Roman army. Ben-Gurion or “Son of the Lion Cub” was the man most responsible for the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 after almost two thousand years of dispersion. Ben-Gurion, or “B-G” as he was known to many, transformed Theodor Herzl’s vision of a revived Jewish Zion into reality.

The world remembers him as the symbol of his people’s will to fight to survive, to water the desert sand until it bloomed into a land of rich bounty, quoting biblical text to prove a point, and always talking with overwhelming authority. His plain-speaking wife, Paula, said that he should be called Ben-Gurion, not prime minister, because anyone could be prime minister, but only he could be Ben-Gurion.

The son of an unlicensed lawyer, at age ten David lost his mother during her eleventh childbirth. His schooling was primitive; he was largely self-taught, reading constantly and teaching himself over a half dozen languages. His interest in languages remained a lifelong obsession. Consumed during his later years in reading the Septuagint, the Hellenic version of the Old Testament, and the lessons of Buddha, Ben-Gurion taught himself ancient Greek and Sanskrit.

His intellectual pursuits and admiration for his father’s legal interests led to socialist and Zionist activities. When he was twenty, pogroms were launched against Jewish settlements with tsarist support. Repulsed by the carnage and the futility of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and inspired by Herzl’s example, David immigrated to Palestine. In 1906 only sixty thousand Jews lived there, under the rule of the Turks. Frustrated also by the apathy of the Palestinian Jews to self-determination, the activist Ben-Gurion joined the Zionist movement in Palestine to make the Jewish Zion a reality.

Writing articles for the Zionist press under a nom de plume, “Ben-Gurion” urged (as early as 1907) the creation of an independent Jewish country. For the next forty-one years his constant goal was its creation. He journeyed to Turkey in the attempt to convince the rulers of the Ottoman Empire to cooperate in the institution of a loyal Jewish state. The Turks expelled him as a subversive. He fled to New York (where he met and married his Paula, a young nursing student from Brooklyn). Recognizing that England would control Palestine after the fall of the Turks in the First World War, he helped create two Jewish battalions to fight in the British army. There would be many other examples of his joining in with the powers that were to get what he wanted on
his
timetable.

Chaim Weizmann, the brilliant leader of the World Zionist Organization, had been the prime architect behind the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which called for the creation of the Jewish state. But the intellectual Weizmann did not possess the personal drive and charisma to mold a fractured Jewish populace into a cohesive force for change. Returning after the war to a Palestine controlled by the British, Ben-Gurion became Zionism’s voice of the working people. He formed a labor party called Histadrut and as its Secretary General established his party and himself as a powerful force in the union movement. Later, in the 1930s, he founded a political party called Mapai and became chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War and the almost complete annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis, the British issued their official instrument of Palestinian policy. The infamous and shameful White Paper was an apologia to the Arabs, seeking their support in the coming conflict against Germany. Just as Hitler’s demons began the systematic murder of over six million Jews, British policy sought to ensure a Jewish minority in Palestine by severely limiting Jewish immigration and land ownership.

Ben-Gurion urged opposition to Hitler and the White Paper concurrently. His movement also faced the challenge of civil war from the violent Jabotinsky movement led by the young, secretive Polish-born immigrant Menachem Begin. After the war Ben-Gurion sought to bring the survivors of the Holocaust to the Middle East. He pronounced that Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, was the only refuge for the European Jew. Ben-Gurion transformed the illegal Jewish defense force, the Haganah, into what would become the Israeli Defense Forces, led by young generals named Dayan, Yadin, and Allon, and recruited Jewish American and European veterans of the Allied armies to man war surplus equipment purchased with donated funds.

When Begin’s terrorist Irgun faction sought during a United Nations truce to deliver a secret cache of arms to Palestine aboard the ship
Altalena,
Ben-Gurion dispatched the Haganah in opposition. Jew battled Jew in what became for Ben-Gurion a test of wills, the imposition of his authority, and a demonstration to the British and the world of the Israeli rule of law.

When independence was declared on May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion became the de facto premier and minister of defense of his beleaguered nation. Arab armies attacked Israel from all sides, seeking to eradicate the Jewish state. Supported by his able young officers and volunteers, Ben-Gurion organized a rout of the inefficient Arab forces. For the first time since Judas Maccabeus had defeated the Syrians over more than two thousand years before, a Jewish army had defended its homeland.

Except for a brief retirement to his beloved kibbutz in the Negev in the early 1950s, Ben-Gurion would lead his country as prime minister through 1963. In those years he never failed to inspire, cajole, and stir controversy.

Ben-Gurion recognized that the borders of partitioned Israel could hold as many of the world Jews as wished to come (always asserting however that a unified Jerusalem and control of the Golan Heights were essential). He flatly stated that a Jew was not a true Zionist unless settled in Israel. This stand caused great upset in America, alienating many of his former supporters. He also envisioned opening Israel’s borders to millions of oppressed Soviet Jews who could start afresh in a democratic state where socialism was made to work. Judaism, to Ben-Gurion, was viewed not just as a religion, but also as a clarion call to nationalism.

Although the Soviet Union had been among the first countries to support Israeli independence at the United Nations, Ben-Gurion in 1951 took steps to align his country with the United States. He rejoiced in the shared values of the two nations. The U.S.-Israel partnership has had its troubles over the decades, yet remains an essential link in the brotherhood of democratic nations.

To Arab attacks on Israeli settlements, Ben-Gurion responded with swift retaliation, a practice that has been official Israeli policy ever since. When Egypt’s president Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, Ben-Gurion ordered the Israeli army (with the aid of the French and British) to invade the Sinai Peninsula. The Sinai crisis in 1956 was halted when President Eisenhower, wishing to assert American moral capital in light of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, threatened U.S. intervention. The war led to U.N. control of the Gaza strip and the opening of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli allowing international navigation without Egyptian interference.

When the Mossad, Israel’s CIA, was ordered by Ben-Gurion to kidnap the former Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann from his hiding place in Argentina for trial in Israel for war crimes, a great outcry of protest was heard throughout the world. When it became obvious that Eichmann was receiving a fair trial and when the enormity of his involvement in the Holocaust was made clear, the protests subsided. Ben-Gurion made it clear that Jews would never again be slaughtered without retribution.

His final years were spent on the kibbutz and at official gatherings, his large head framed in wild white hair, an icon of his country’s birth and proud future.

A
pagan asked the sage Hillel to explain Judaism while standing on one foot. If Hillel succeeded, the non-Jew would convert and become a true believer. Hillel replied, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the entire Torah. All the rest is commentary—now go and study it.”

Mark relates that the teacher Joshua, known to his followers through the centuries as Jesus, preached around 29 C.E.: “And the second
is
like, namely
this,
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”

Some believe Hillel was Jesus’ teacher.

Hillel the Elder, or the Babylonian, is regarded by many rabbis as the most perfect Jew, comparable in character to Confucius or Lincoln. Like them, he brought himself up out of overwhelming poverty. He spoke in proverbs. Speaking simply great truths, Hillel condensed centuries of Jewish learning in aphorisms, which people could easily grasp. Many of his short sayings are remarkably similar to those of Jesus.

Little is known of Hillel’s life. He is known more for his words and his presence as an influential teacher. Hillel is credited with the founding of a classical Judaism based less on temple ritual and more on biblical teachings and ethical precepts. His concentration on learning, the search to comprehend the essence of Jewish law, the creation of a portable religion (thought can be taken anywhere), enabled his people to remain together in the Diaspora to come, and for that great storehouse of Jewish law, the Talmud, to be written. His ethical yet loving embrace of
tikkun olam
(the improvement of the world through moral values) formed the basis of postbiblical Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity.

Hillel was zealous in his pursuit of knowledge. He left his home in Babylon to venture to study in Judea. It is related in a popular tale that one snowy Sabbath, he was too poor to pay a fee to enter the study house in Jerusalem. Not wanting to miss even one day of learning, he climbed to the roof and listened through a skylight. The teachers soon noticed that the study room was unusually dark. Looking up, they saw a snow-covered figure blocking the sun. Violating Sabbath restrictions against work, the students climbed the roof to rescue the frozen Hillel. The teachers and students then bathed, dried, and clothed him. Anyone so interested in learning, they remarked, must be taken care of, even to the extent of disobeying the law. A precedent was set.