The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (15 page)

Hillel would return to his home in Babylon for a time, only to come back to Jerusalem to assume the leadership of the Sanhedrin, the high court of ancient Judea, presided over by rabbis. Hillel found the members of the Sanhedrin of his day inadequately trained in Jewish law. The oral tradition had weakened under the Roman occupation and the vicious tyranny of King Herod.

Hillel appointed the severe, tough, arrogant, and legalistic Shammai as second in command of the Sanhedrin. For hundreds of years their followers would be known as the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai. They were the optimist and the pessimist, one content with just being, the other sure not being would have been much better. Hillel never got angry; Shammai always seemed mad. Hillel would compromise any point; Shammai never quit from a position taken. Although it is also said that God when asked preferred Hillel’s life view, the visions of both formed the basis of Talmudic thought and debate, thus molding the mind of the Jewish people.

Both Hillel and Shammai were Pharisees, the precursors of modern Jewry. Many Christians view the Pharisees of Jesus’ day as rigid and crippled by blind obedience to the law. Yet Jesus practiced Pharisaic Judaism and made it clear that he did not come to abolish the law. His admonition that many obey every dot and every stroke of Jewish law paralleled the teachings of Hillel and Shammai.

J
ohn Von Neumann, a Hungarian Jew, was perhaps the last example of what is now a vanishing breed, the mathematician comfortable in both pure and applied mathematics (as well as other branches of science and the arts). Of an extraordinary generation of Hungarian scientists, mathematicians, and artists including Leo Szilard, Fritz Reiner, Dennis Gabor, Eugene Ormandy, Edward Teller, George Szell, and Eugene Wigner, Von Neumann was perhaps the most brilliant and facile. He is credited with enriching, or even creating, whole areas of mathematical research, including logic and set theory, lie groups, measure theory, rings of operators (now known as “Von Neumann algebras”), the theory of games (most particularly his famous minimax theorem), and concepts of automata. While serving as the inspiration for Abraham Wald’s statistical theories of the 1940s, game theory was also applied in the 1950s most prominently in American economic, military, and political decision-making. Von Neumann’s most lasting influence, however, lies in his development of new procedures of programing and the development of mechanical devices, which form the basis of computing machines. After Charles Babbage, Von Neumann is rightly dubbed the “father of the computer.”

Von Neumann’s father was a prosperous banker who purchased the royal “Von” from the Hungarian government. The oldest of three boys, John, born Johann, at a very early age displayed a remarkable talent for math. He was so proficient at the subject that his grade school teachers brought in university professors to tutor him. John showed an almost Mozartean ability to synthesize widely disparate concepts with uncanny accuracy and lightning speed. By the age of nineteen, he was teaching advanced mathematics in Berlin (where he attended Albert Einstein’s lectures). John also took the time to visit in Göttingen the great mathematician David Hubert, whose personality and work became perhaps Von Neumann’s greatest inspiration.

After engineering studies in Zurich and teaching posts in Berlin and Hamburg, at thirty Von Neumann joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey as its youngest member. During the Second World War he worked in Los Alamos on the secret construction of the atomic bomb. After the war, he served on the Atomic Energy Commission. He died in 1957 from cancer.

Enormously influential and brilliant in their own right, many of Von Neumann’s illustrious contemporaries were astounded by his ability to process with extraordinary rapidity complex data into axiomatic language. Almost every branch of mathematics and physics during the era was touched by his original thought and wit.

Frustrated by the computers available during the bomb-making years of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, Von Neumann studied how the machines worked and then developed new methods of computing. He specially designed codes that triggered a wiring system to provide answers to a multitude of questions. This apparatus and the programing he invented in its service are the models upon which modern computer devices are based.

Unlike Szilard and Bohr, who sought to control the spread of nuclear weapons, Von Neumann, an ardent anti-Communist, supplied much of the intellectual justification for the American military’s arms buildup during the Eisenhower administration. Although he opposed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on J. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists (which reminded him of Fascist persecution), Von Neumann in his last years vigorously assisted the defense establishment, adapting his theory of games and mathematical wizardry to more deadly schemes of warlike strategy.

S
imon Bar Kokhba, Simon “son of the Star,” led the last Jewish revolt against the Romans, an immeasurably bloody rebellion that resulted in the final destruction of ancient Judean civilization. Bar Kokhba is an enigma, still a person of great controversy. Opinions differ on whether he was a grand freedom fighter in the mold of Judas Maccabeus or an irresponsible tyrant as brutal to his own people as he was to their oppressors. The Roman historian Dio Cassius is the main source for our knowledge of the period. According to Dio, 580,000 Jews perished in the war. With the Great Revolt of 70 C.E., the Bar Kokhba rebellion ranks as the most catastrophic event in Jewish history before the seventeenth-century Chmielnicki massacres and the Holocaust.

After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. to Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, the land of Judea was like an armed camp. The Romans had suffered heavy losses during the revolt. Whole legions had been wiped out by the rebels. The emperors who succeeded Vespasian did not want another uncontrollable conflict with the Jews. Martial law and persecution were preferred to rein in the populace under firm Roman control. During this period the officially approved writings of the important Roman historian Tacitus provided the beginnings of state-supported anti-Semitism.

Although initially a sympathizer with Jewish religious values, the Emperor Hadrian in 128-32 C.E., while stationed in the east, initiated policies aimed at unifying the disparate cultures of the empire. His most controversial idea was to build a Roman temple with a statue of Jupiter on the ruins of the destroyed Second Temple in Jerusalem. While Hadrian was still in the east with his two legions, the Jews were afraid to strike back, but began to rearm in secret under the single leadership of the man who would become known as Bar Kokhba. However, it is unclear whether the Romans were seeking to eradicate Judaism totally. Many Jews in the Galilee did not support the revolt, and after the war was over were allowed to practice and develop their religion.

The particular force of the Bar Kokhba rebellion came not only from its charismatic leader but also from the support provided by the most prominent rabbi of the period, Akiba (ca. 60—135). Rabbi Akiba was perhaps the greatest scholar in the history of the Jewish religion. Unlike many of the other important scholars in Jewish history, Akiba grew up in poverty. It was said that he was the son or grandson of converts. He began as a shepherd and did not receive an education until the age of forty. By the time of the revolt in 132 C.E., he was the leading Torah scholar in Judea, with dozens of followers.

When Hadrian returned to Rome, Bar Kokhba’s army struck at once. He seized Jerusalem, forcing the Roman legion encamped in the capital to retreat to Caesarea. It is said that Akiba joined in the rebellion and proclaimed Bar Kokhba the Messiah. Plans were made to rebuild the Temple. Sacrifices were re-instituted there in the ancient tradition. Coins were struck (they can still be seen today), and a new calendar dedicated. Bar Kokhba ruled by edict (many of his original edicts were found centuries later in the desert near Qumran). Out of Egypt a Roman legion advanced into the center of Judea. Bar Kokhba’s men eliminated the Roman forces to a man.

The emperor pulled twelve legions from as far away as Britain to crush the revolt. However, no forces were rushed into the center of the country. In a brutal war of attrition each fortification was taken separately. Conventional strategies were adapted to guerilla warfare. The Romans were forced to hunt each rebel down. At their last stronghold in Betar, Bar Kokhba’s army was defeated, and he was slain. Rabbi Akiba was captured, tortured to death, his skin ripped from his body by iron combs. Tradition relates that he died smiling in the realization that he was loving God with all his might. The religious center of Yavneh was destroyed, most of its students dead in the fight. In all, Dio relates, fifty forts and 985 towns or settlements were laid waste. The entire land of Judea was scorched clean.

For 1,800 years the Jews would have no home of their own. For those eighteen centuries, they would be a minority wherever they went, with no army to protect them, and only their thought and religious culture to guide the way.

The destruction of ancient Judea would also spur the early Jewish Christians to action. Before the revolt, they had coexisted quietly with other Jews as just another sect. Many Jewish Christians however saw the failure of the Bar Kokhba rebellion as a sign of the failure of orthodox Judaism and a confirmation of the righteousness of their own beliefs. Thereafter, they became more aggressive in their proselytizing.

The Galilean Jews were allowed to continue practicing their faith—though not without some persecution. Less than a century after the fall of Betar, the Mishnah, the systematic codification of the oral law, was composed in the Galilee under the guidance of Rabbi Judah the Prince. Over the next four hundred years scholars would comment on the Mishnah. Their commentaries became known as the Talmud, which would serve after the Bar Kokhba revolt as the rule of law for a people dispersed into the centuries.

M
arcel Proust, the son of a Jewish mother and Catholic father, was, with James Joyce and Franz Kafka, one of the three most influential novelists during the first half of the twentieth century. His masterwork,
A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past),
is a set of seven novels without conventional plot or traditional structure. Proust was a peculiar, reclusive man who spent his early years dawdling in fashionable drawing rooms in an almost ritual observance of upper-class gossip and pitter-patter. For the final thirteen years of his life, sequestered in a cork-lined room, he wrote and continually revised in strange, narrow notebooks an immense seven-part opus, incorporating his experiences of high society into a fictional universe of extraordinary power and beauty.