The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (17 page)

S
olomon “in all his glory” ruled for over forty years the greatest and most powerful kingdom in the history of Israel. A master at achieving peace through artful negotiation, Solomon often married to forge alliances and to avoid war. Aided by heavy taxation and vigorous trade policies, the royal treasury swelled under his rule. His wise guidance was sought by other leaders who respected his proverbs and feared his chariot army. Not innately religious and pious like his father, David, Solomon was a man of the world consumed with temporal power and earthly pleasures.

On the backs of his people, he built a great Temple to house the Ark of the Covenant, at the same time constructing shrines to display the idols of his foreign queens. He is credited with inspiring the composition of the biblical
Song of Songs,
the
Proverbs,
and
Ecclesiastes,
expressions of a literary renaissance sheltered by his wealthy and powerful regime.

Of all the major figures of Jewish religious history, Solomon (in the traditional sense) was the least God-filled. His methods of statecraft and poetic impulse were closer to Middle Eastern or Oriental values than Hebraic. Not able or willing to follow his father’s more obedient example, Solomon used his seemingly infinite wisdom to rule absolutely. Throughout the Middle Ages, European nobility pointed to Solomon as an exemplar of the purest king, absolute monarchy at its peak, intentionally forgetting the negative results of his governance.

He may have been the most polygamous Jew in history. The royal harem was said to number in the thousands. Marriage to foreign princesses bought peace. Through nuptials with Pharaoh’s daughter, a close alliance was forged with Egypt. His affair with the Queen of Sheba benefited the Hebrew spice trade.

Whether or not Solomon wrote the
Song of Songs
is unclear, yet its author surely knew a great deal about erotic love. The
Song of Songs
served as the model for medieval French and Spanish love poetry, a Biblical source poets could safely emulate, free from official repression (although there were Christian attempts to suppress it).

Ecclesiastes
is the words of an old man, experienced and exhausted with the trials of life. It is the first literary statement of world weariness, thousands of years before the
Weltschmerz
of German Romantic poetry. Ironically,
Ecclesiastes
would later find perhaps its most perfect expression in the monologue “Wahn! Wahn!” of Hans Sachs in
Die Meistersinger,
the folk opera by the anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner. A very different sort, contemporary minstrel Pete Seeger, found inspiration in
Ecclesiastes
for his moving antiwar song, “For every season, turn, turn, turn.”

Although Solomon ruled in peace for so many years, his legacy was one of division and chaos. Immediately after his death, his son so antagonized the tribes in the north that they split away, forming the separate kingdom of Israel centered in Samaria. This schism would last for almost four hundred years.

Solomon and the Queen of Sheba from a painting by the Swiss artist, Konrad Witz.

Jews and Christians today remember the wise Solomon, his gift of judgment most colorfully displayed in the famous incident of the two prostitutes and a baby. A mother distraught at the death of her baby steals a neighbor’s infant. Both mothers ask the king for custody of the living child. When Solomon threatens to split the live baby with a sword and give one half to each woman, the real mother rushes forward, pleading with her sovereign to spare the child. The other whore insists that the baby is neither of theirs, but should be cut in two. Solomon awards the child to its real mother. This Judeo-Christian image of Solomon the judge exercising divine wisdom over two anguished women has had a lasting influence on the development of civilization and its jurisprudence.

B
orn Chaim, in his early adulthood called Harry, finally assimilated as Heinrich, he was the greatest lyrical poet of the Romantic period and the first literary modernist in the German language. To German readers, Heinrich Heine is acclaimed as their most beloved poetic voice, a close, intimate friend, never distant like the Olympian Goethe, almost as if Keats, Byron, and Shelley had been rolled into one.

Heine is known to English-speaking audiences today mostly through the musical settings of his poems by great composers such as Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann (especially), Liszt, and even Wagner. A kind of literary Chopin, Heine, the German poet exiled to France, influenced generations of writers and composers. Wagner’s operas
The Flying Dutchman
and
Tannhauser,
as well as the novels, poetry, and prose of Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Longfellow, Tennyson, Shaw, and Nietzsche, were directly inspired by Heine’s masterpieces.

Heine’s life is also tragically representative of the problem of the Jewish artist creating in a largely Christian society. Like many of the German Jews of his time, Heine was influenced by the example of Moses Mendelssohn and the German Enlightenment. Napoleon’s conquest of Europe led to the emancipation of Jews out of the feudal restrictions of ghetto life. After more than a thousand years of degradation, Jews had their first opportunity to improve their well being in the open. When Heine changed his first name (his grandfather’s name was Chaim Bückeburg; Chaim was made Heymann, Heinemann, and then finally Heine), it was more than just a recognition of a German equivalent. The young Heine thought of Judaism as a “calamity.” He viewed its ritual as an unenlightened sickness. Heine believed that conversion to Protestantism would serve as his “admission ticket” to the greater world. (Later in the century, the Bohemian Jewish composer and conductor Gustav Mahler converted to Catholicism to win a post as head of the Court Opera in Vienna). Rather, conversion brought Heine, in his own words, “misfortune.”

Despite his conversion, Heine remained for the rest of his days obsessed with his Jewishness. He was bitterly sarcastic of those German Jews who had become holier than their most Christian thou. Heine made vicious fun not only of bearded Talmudists but also of the newly Reform worshipers, whose services in the vernacular required the flavoring of organ music to be socially acceptable. Yet, in his final years, when a venereal spinal disease confined him to what he sarcastically called a “mattress grave,” Heine dubbed himself a “mortally ill Jew” and wrote the most Judaic poetry. His Jewish self-hatred was emblematic of many other Jewish artists and thinkers of the period, including, most prominently, his acquaintance Karl Marx.

Heine’s poetic works include dream pictures, songs, romances, sonnets, lyrical intermezzos, paeans to the North Sea, romantic histories, lamentations, epics, and Hebrew melodies (inspired by the example of the medieval Jewish poet Halevy). He is credited with creating a new literary form, the
feuilleton
or short essay, which he regularly contributed to French and German newspapers and reviews. While his early poems represent a culmination of German romanticism (and he effectively supplanted Byron in the 1820s as the public’s favorite Romantic), his last works predict the experiments later in the century of Verlaine and the Symbolists (many of whom acknowledged his influence).

Although in many ways a conservative, Heine became a symbol of freedom. Supported most of his life by his rich uncle Solomon Heine, a banker and philanthropist (and later, somewhat notoriously, by the reactionary French government), Heine was something of a professional
schnorrer
, living most of the time far beyond each handout. Unable to secure a teaching post in Germany (despite his conversion), his publications suspended by a repressive local government, he fled his homeland in 1831 for Paris and the liberal atmosphere of the “citizen king” Louis Philippe. Dubbed the “German Apollo,” Heine became a staple of an incredibly rich Parisian culture of Hugo, Sand, Delacroix, Balzac, Berlioz, and Meyerbeer. For a time he allied himself with a group of German expatriates nicknamed
“Jungdeutschland”
(“Young Germany”). Later, Heine also found in the quasi-socialist teachings of Saint-Simon a welcome respite from the petty bourgeois. The French were the first to recognize Heine’s special genius. German adulation only followed France’s infatuation. The public perception of Heine was that he was a radical, his life perpetually viewed as a symbol of liberation.

In brief quatrains Heine was capable of instantly conjuring his own uniquely poetic worlds. He has been compared to Chopin for a parallel ability to evoke in just a few sounds any desired lyrical imagery. For all their economy of expression, Heine’s poems elicit unbounded expression.

Many of his poetic works are so widely known in Germany and Austria that they have become a part of the vernacular. Even the Nazis could not deny his importance to German culture. Heine’s popular poem
Lorelei
was included in Nazi poetry collections, identified as a “folk song.” Yet, Fascism had much to fear from Heine’s deeply emotional, personal, and Hebraic legacy. Hitler even ordered Heine’s grave in Montmartre destroyed.

Initially attracted to Napoleon’s revolution, Heine, like Beethoven, saw the tyranny behind the “liberator.” Although romantic in his choice of pastoral themes, Heine was a brutal realist. Not content to sigh, like so many of his contemporaries, with nostalgia for a greater pan-German past, Heine, “citizen of the world,” warned the French to remain vigilant against a future Teutonic threat. No less worried by the violent dreams of Karl Marx, Heine foresaw the rise of a communism more interested in brutal control than in helping people. Shocked by the Damascus blood libel of 1841, he retreated in his last years to a personalized Judaism. Only when the Christians were fully liberated by their Messiah, he argued, that is, stayed true to his message of peace, would all humanity, and not only the Jews, forever end its suffering.

W
inner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, Selman Abraham Waksman is generally credited with the development of antibiotics as the most effective means (along with penicillin and sulfur drugs) of eliminating bacterial infections (and the first efficient method of curing tuberculosis). Waksman’s lifelong obsession with the study of microorganisms led to the isolation of the “mycin” drugs (streptomycin, actinomycin, and neomycin), antibiotics that have been clinically applied with great success.

Waksman’s remarkable discovery of these antibiotics (and several others) was an outgrowth of his studies of soil organisms. He identified minute organisms active in the earth, which produced soluble substances containing antimicrobial properties. Indeed, before he became widely known for his work on antibiotics, Waksman had achieved an international scientific reputation for his work as a soil microbiologist.

Often people with major influence on the world can trace the reasons for their work to experiences in their youth. Waksman spent his early years near Kiev in a small Jewish town or
Shtetl
. Under the watchful eye of the aristocracy, the rich black soil of the Ukrainian steppe yielded bountiful harvests of grains. Yet the Jews of this area in Poland and Russia, referred to as the Pale of Settlement, lived a simple but difficult and poor existence. Threatened by pogroms and sickness, Jewish culture turned inward into Bible and Talmud studies. At a time when antitoxins were readily available in more developed areas, Waksman’s little sister died of diphtheria, an unnecessary death not to be forgotten.