The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (23 page)

Before Hemingway, Pablo Picasso had found spiritual and intellectual support in the Stein living room at 27, rue de Fleuris (as well as in the delicious cuisine and warm hospitality of her lover, Alice B. Toklas). Surrounded by walls crowded with his paintings and those of his contemporaries or just predecessors, Picasso sought Stein’s guidance at a crucial period. While he was leaving the Italianate lyricism of his rose, blue, and harlequin paintings for abstract cubism, she was separating words from conventional usage, making them live the life “they have to live,” in what became an almost exact science of literature without subject, a word being what it is it is. As Picasso painted his
Portrait of Gertrude Stein
(filling in her face well after the weighty body was painted) and the
Demoiselles d’Avignon
with their African heads and multi-angled features, in such early works as
Three Lives
(years before James Joyce’s comparable experiments with language) Stein was tearing sentences apart, reducing words to their essential meanings, separating substance from form, making form substance, “composition as explanation.”

Composer Virgil Thomson also found in Stein’s wordplay a parallel universe to his “white note” music (plain Jane melodies set in hymn-like chords). These two Americans in Paris created profoundly Yankee songs and operas together. It was a strange irony that somehow being physically separated from the United States inspired them to part from traditional European operatic and song forms.
Four Saints in Three Acts
(1929) premiered in New Haven, Connecticut with an all-black cast (Toscanini attended and liked it). More about the visions of saints than about any plot or story, the piece was fresh and lively. Word patterns like “pigeons on the grass alas” were meaningful primarily as a ballet of consonants and vowels, precise improvisations. Their last work,
The Mother of Us All,
about Susan B. Anthony and assorted friends, presented historical characters in amusing juxtapositions with alarming vibrancy.

Her life with Alice B. Toklas, another Jewish woman from the United States, is best remembered in the
Autobiography
Stein wrote for her (which is actually more Gertrude’s story). Their rich love for each other survived the Nazi occupation (amazingly they sat the war out in a Vichy French village) and Stein’s death (Alice died twenty-one years after Gertrude, cherishing her memory more with each passing day). The image of Gertrude Stein, shorthaired, strong, plump, and dominant, accompanied always by her soft, kind Alice B., set a proud example for now three generations of lesbian women.

A
lbert Abraham Michelson was the first American scientist to win a Nobel Prize (the first American to win any Nobel was President Theodore Roosevelt, awarded for his role during 1905 in settling the war then raging between Russia and Japan). Honored by the Nobel Prize committee in 1907 “for his precision optical instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations conducted therewith,” Michelson is widely recognized as the father of modern theoretical physics. Although there is some controversy over his direct role, many have claimed that Michelson’s collaboration with chemist Edward Morley (in the famous Michelson-Morley experiments) provided the basis upon which Albert Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity.

The focus of largely all of Michelson’s life’s work was his desire to measure with precision instruments the physical properties of light. He is credited with proving that light travels at a constant speed no matter the direction it is heading, in any and all conditions. Michelson’s development of the spectroscope afforded proof of the movement of molecules. He was the first to measure the diameter of a star. His determination of the speed of light was the most accurate of the era.

Michelson was born in western Poland. In 1856 his family emigrated to America, settling in San Francisco. During the waning days of the gold rush in California and Nevada, his father labored as a merchant to miners. Albert was sent to San Francisco to attend public school. At Boys’ High School the principal, noticing Michelson’s aptitude for science, encouraged the young student. After being rejected initially for admission to Annapolis (and despite an unsuccessful petition to President Grant), Michelson convinced the commandant of his merit and was accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1869.

Two years after graduation he returned to Annapolis to teach physics and chemistry classes. While there, using simple devices, Michelson measured the speed of light closer to what became the accepted figure of 186,508 miles per second than any scientist before him.

After studies in Europe in the 1880s, he was appointed professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1885 Michelson began his now celebrated association with Morley of Western Reserve, who as senior researcher had at his disposal a large laboratory with up-to-date equipment.

The Michelson-Morley experiments of 1887 proved a negative. Their so-called null result profoundly affected the way physicists viewed the world. Physicists in the 1880s assumed that light was created by unequal changes in an amorphous substance that filled up all space. They called that substance “ether.” The widely accepted theory was that ether was stationary. Light moved through ether at different speeds, depending on the direction from which it came. In their experiments, Michelson and Morley shot out two beams of light, reflecting them off each other at a ninety-degree angle. Their instruments were able to show that both beams had traveled at the same speed. The experiment rendered the theory of ether unacceptable and obsolete.

The ramifications of their experiments were overwhelming to many scientists. Was it possible that the earth stood still, and Copernicus had been mistaken? Physicists had already proven that ether was not brought along by the earth in its travel through the cosmos. Most of Michelson’s contemporaries (and to a certain extent Michelson himself) could not bring themselves to believe that ether itself did not exist. Many scientists reacted to the Michelson-Morley experiments, attempting to work out its implications. Finally, Einstein’s special theory of relativity solved the questions first posed by Michelson’s experiments.

Despite the immense influence of his work on subsequent generations of physicists, Michelson was never totally comfortable with their mathematically derived science. He considered the true mission of physics to be the development of new instruments to measure physical properties with total accuracy.

In 1892 Michelson became professor of physics at the University of Chicago, where he remained until 1929. In 1920 at a dinner held in Pasadena, California honoring Einstein and himself, his esteemed German colleague recognized that Michelson had “uncovered an insidious defect in the ether theory of light, as it then existed, and stimulated the ideas of H.A. Lorentz and Fitzgerald, out of which the special theory of relativity developed.”

W
e know little about his life, other than that in his last year he traveled to Rome at the behest of the Jewish community of Alexandria to seek the aid of the emperor Caligula in protecting Egypt’s Jews from religious persecution.

A contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth and his early followers, Philo had ideas of God, creation, history, nature, soul, knowledge, virtue, and government which served as the basis for the philosophical thought of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam for seventeen centuries until Spinoza’s great revolution of thought in the 1600s.

Philo was the first philosopher of major influence to attempt to understand biblical teachings in light of Greek metaphysics. His work also aimed to rewrite Hellenistic philosophy in scriptural terms. To justify his conclusions, Philo often quoted various Greek philosophers backed up by Jewish law. He rejected Greek philosophy opposite to biblical teaching, accepting Hellenism only when it could be bent to his metaphysical will.

Influenced by the Bible, Philo was also the first philosopher to refer to God as unknowable, incomprehensible to humanity. Plato and Aristotle had asserted that man was capable of knowing and describing God. Philo rejected their view, making the distinction that God is unique, is the most generic of beings, and being
sui generis,
cannot be described.

For Philo, all human knowledge and activity was directed by God. Prophecy, a special kind of knowledge, may only be achieved by divine intervention or what the Christians would later call revelation. He also organized man’s ideas of life, the earth, and the cosmos into what the intellect could comprehend. Philo named this intelligible sphere “Logos,” a word derived from Scripture and new to philosophy.

Plato had alleged that the soul is immortal, incapable of being destroyed by God and natural causes. Philo disagreed. God grants immortality as a gift, only if the soul, empowered by God’s will, has been worth of its heavenly birth.

Contrary to most of the Greek philosophers before him, Philo believed in free will. God can do whatever God chooses, and so could mankind. Man could work with and oppose nature absolutely.

One of Philo’s greatest influences is his attention to democracy. He is one of the first major philosophers to urge that all people are equal before the law. This is a concept of justice which did not enter American life, we must remember, until after the Civil War and in practice, has not completely yet.

Attempting to pull together all of his philosophic ideas, Philo believed, in his
Allegories,
that the tides of historical change are controlled by a divine Logos; God has intended that the world is to become a perfect democracy

With the decline of the vibrant Jewish community in Alexandra, Philo’s influence on Judaism waned. The influence of Greek philosophy on Jewish thought would only arise again in the work 1,200 years later of Moses Maimonides. Talmudic teachings would venture into a wholly new direction, urging a more Hebraic notion of law and philosophy. However, Philo’s philosophy exerted important and crucial influence on the early Christian fathers (Saint John) and Muslim scholars who viewed his thoughts as the intellectual basis and justification for their preaching.

H
er earliest memories were of her father nailing wooden boards across the front door of their house in Russia. A pogrom was rumored, a state- and church-endorsed massacre of Jews. Golda later remarked that it was typical of her father not to think of hiding his family.

Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel for five years, was among the most beloved leaders and admired women of the twentieth century. Although criticized by Israelis for her late response to Egypt’s sneak attack that commenced the 1973 war, she is remembered by the world as the mother of her nation and its symbol of peace.

Golda’s early life is crucial to an understanding of her actions and to the difficulties this extraordinarily humane woman faced. Born Golda Mabovitz on May 3, 1898 in Kiev, at eight years of age she emigrated with her family to Milwaukee. The father had preceded the family to America by three years, seeking to bring a fortune back to Russia. Her parents had had eight children, four boys and four girls. Golda and her two sisters were the only to survive past infancy, and one of the other five lived to two years of age, two small ones having died in the same week. Life in Russia was severe, poverty overwhelming,
“essen teg und trinken trehen”
(“to eat days and swallow tears”). In Pinsk (the family’s hometown to which they had returned after a short stay in Kiev), her elder sister, Sheyna, engaged in illegal political activities as a Zionist socialist. Surrounded by cold, lack of food, marauding Cossacks, police persecution, and lack of opportunity, the women of the family fled to their father in free America.