The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (24 page)

In Milwaukee the family eked out a living. Father found carpentry jobs, mother operated a grocery, and Sheyna labored during the day as a seamstress and at night as a Zionist, then ran away to Denver. Golda helped her mother in the grocery, opening the store early each morning and arriving late at school, her eyes full of tears. She still managed to get good grades, but as her teenage years approached, resentment of her parents grew for their opposition to her desires to become a teacher and marry a man of her own choice. At fourteen Golda ran away to her sister in Colorado where she met her future husband, Morris Meyer-son, a refugee from Russia, a kind intellectual who painted signs for a living.

Molded by her sister and the freedom of living on her own, she returned home at eighteen to teach school and preach Zionism. Her father initially opposed her speaking in public on the grounds that such activity was not ladylike—that is, until he heard her powerfully orate on a street corner. After meeting David Ben-Gurion, who had visited Milwaukee seeking followers, she left for Palestine, followed reluctantly by her new husband, Morris.

Morris and Golda were invited to live in a small kibbutz called Merhavia (meaning “God’s wide spaces”) largely due to Morris’s phonograph and record collection. Golda adapted herself quickly to pioneer kibbutz life, caring for the livestock, working in the fields, washing clothes, baking bread. Recognized by her comrades as a hard and innovative worker, Golda was chosen to represent the kibbutz at the General Federation of Labor, the Histadrut. Even in these harsh rural circumstances her leadership qualities stood out.

Morris, however, could not stand the pioneering life. They moved to the cities, finally settling in a dusty quarter of Jerusalem. Golda soon gave birth to her two children, Menachem and Sarah. Their life in these years was to Golda “poverty, drudgery and worry.”

Her parents, however, had settled in Herzliya on the sea-coast, and Golda grew to adore her father’s local involvement in security and Histadrut affairs. Golda rose quickly in the labor federation, first in 1928 becoming secretary of its council, then in 1934 a member of its executive committee. Her political activities, however, kept her away from her family, and her marriage deteriorated. She separated from Morris and moved with the children to a small apartment in Tel Aviv. Golda later often described what women’s liberation meant in 1930s Palestine. She felt recurring pain over the looks of reproach from her little ones when she had to go away to work and leave them with strangers. Working mothers had to suffer for their chosen activities.

Attending a French conference on Jewish refugees in 1938, she witnessed firsthand the disinterest of European governmental officials in granting asylum to victims of Nazi persecution. During the war that soon followed, Golda organized opposition to oppressive British colonial rule. In 1939 the British had halted Jewish immigration into Palestine for fear that the influx of refugees would cause the Arabs to support Hitler (some did, including the Mufti of Jerusalem). Zionist leaders managed to smuggle in a small number of refugees. However, the British restrictions led to countless unnecessary deaths at the hands of the Nazi butchers at a time when Zionists like Golda could have saved many lives.

The indifference of British rule hardened the Zionists, preparing them for their great postwar endeavors. In 1946 many of the Zionist leaders were arrested for their secret political actions. The British authorities, however, left “that woman,” Golda, alone. She quickly started running the affairs of the opposition, networking with underground military units and attempting to negotiate with the British.

When the United Nations recommended the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state, Golda was on hand to attempt difficult negotiations with the king of Transjordan and to sign the Israeli declaration of independence. When Israel was threatened by Arab attack, it was Golda who traveled to the United States to raise money for weapons. Her extraordinary speech to a Jewish group in Chicago led to an equally extraordinary fund-raising effort by American Jewry in support of the fledgling state. Golda returned home with fifty million dollars. Ben-Gurion later remarked that “someday when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the State possible.”

After a brief stint in Moscow as Israel’s first minister to the Soviet Union (the Russian refugee had returned “home” representing the Jewish homeland), she was elected to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, where she served from 1949 to 1974. In addition, between 1949 and 1956, as minister of labor, Golda drew on her wealth of experience in the Histadrut to lead her country in what were times of rationing and enormous economic hardship. She helped develop housing for immigrants then living in tents, worked against sexual harassment of women in a male-driven Mediterranean society, and introduced social programs for the elderly, needy, infirm, and unemployed.

In the mid-1950s, on Ben-Gurion’s urging, she changed her name to the more Hebrew-sounding Meir. She did not look back much to Russia (other than with bitterness) or to America (always in gratitude). Israel was home right from the first days on the kibbutz.

During the 1956 Suez war she was appointed foreign minister. Her defense of Israel at the United Nations during the crisis received worldwide press coverage. During the same period she developed technical and economic assistance programs for emerging African nations.

In 1966 she retired from the cabinet to be a full-time grandmother. She was almost seventy years old and tired of public service and politics. During Prime Minister Eshkol’s tenure in the late 1960s, she remained in public view, however lobbying American Jewish groups for support and making clear that Israel wanted peace, not war. Nasser, Egypt’s leader, however, failed to hear her and others’ calls for peace, and the Six Day War of 1967 soon erupted. Under Moshe Dayan’s dynamic leadership the Arab forces were routed, Jerusalem unified under Israeli rule, and the Sinai, Gaza, and Golan Heights secured.

When the wise Eshkol died suddenly in 1969, the ruling Labor party turned to its secretary-general, Golda. Although tired of government life and already burdened by the leukemia that would end her life nine years later, Golda became Israel’s first female prime minister.

The years until the Yom Kippur War in 1973 were spent in building up the armed forces with more sophisticated weaponry but also with continuing attempts to find avenues for a more lasting peace. During the summer of 1973, intelligence reports indicated a buildup of Arab troops and the withdrawal of Soviet advisers from Syria. Golda thought to put the troops on alert, but held back on her cabinet’s advice. She was to regret following her instincts, as shortly thereafter, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, Anwar Sadat’s forces broke through the supposedly impregnable Bar-Lev line at the Suez and threatened Israel with extinction. Only with massive American supplies and the loss of 2,500 Israeli lives was the country saved.

Golda was castigated by her countrymen for reacting too late to the Arab threat, and for ending the war too soon before conclusive victory. She would retire one year after the war, exhausted from the fray. But her instincts to save lives and seek peace would bear fruit three years later when the emboldened Sadat came to Israel in search of peace.

When cancer ended her life in 1978, Golda Meir was remembered by the world as the lioness of her people and an example for women and men everywhere. Her country had demanded that she lead it through difficult times. First as a pioneer in its early years, then in her dedicated efforts for social justice, she personified the best qualities of Jewish life. Like the biblical Prophetess Deborah, Golda showed all women how to lead an army of fierce fighters in defense of a country’s life, never forgetting her humanity and always pointing the way to lasting tranquility.

E
lijah ben Solomon Zalman, known as the Vilna Gaon, or genius scholar of Vilna, Lithuania, was without question the greatest mind in the long intellectual history of Jewish sages. Contemporary rabbinical scholars liken his power of thought to the RAM (Random-Access Memory) of modern computers.

His influence on the development of Jewish intellectual and religious thought is undeniable, but his effect on the non-Jewish world is negligible. Why then include a cloistered ghetto cleric in the list of the most influential Jews in world history? The Vilna Gaon is the last of the great rabbis of what has been called the heroic age. With his contemporaries Moses Mendelssohn, the secular philosopher of the German Enlightenment, and Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the ecstatic Hasidic movement, the Vilna Gaon represents the third course of Jewish religious development of the era, the pinnacle of rabbinical study of the Torah and its teachings. These three great eternal thinkers shaped modern Judaism at the dawn of the industrial age and made the religion what it is now.

The Gaon was one of the most remarkable prodigies in Jewish history. It is said that he began dedicated study of the Talmud, the commentaries on Jewish law, at age six, and was lecturing on its tractates (legal and moral expositions) at Vilna’s main synagogue a year later. At eighteen he married a wealthy woman. They produced sons, and she provided him with comfort, no necessity to work to make a living, only to study Talmud eighteen hours a day, every day, year after year, until his death at seventy-eight. He never accepted any official positions. He did not have to; he only studied, wrote, declared. He became the undisputed leader of the traditional Eastern European Jews or Mitnagdim.

This ascetic genius, like Maimonides, appreciated the value of scientific learning to amplify one’s understanding of Jewish law. He urged students to study Hebrew translations of science and mathematics texts. This was revolutionary and brought Talmudic study into touch with the mainstream of society. However, he insisted that such study must always be at the service, never defiant, of the law.

He revised the Jewish prayer book, discarding thousands of years of poetry and introduced singing into religious services. Much of the Ashkenazic music pious Jews know today dates from the time of the Vilna Gaon.

Why did this genius demand of himself such rigorous and lengthy daily study? It was said that if the Gaon did not study eighteen hours a day, then other rabbis in the rest of Europe would study less—and forget what would happen to the assimilated Jew!

His piety was matched by a brutal, cold logic and an unparalleled memory of Scripture and commentary. He was never afraid to point out inconsistencies in the Talmud and suggest his own rational solutions. His analytic method anticipated by two centuries today’s academic approach to the understanding of Jewish law.

He barely ever slept. His sons said he needed only two hours a day. The Gaon often put his feet in cold water to stay awake while he studied and wrote.

When faced with the almost fanatic enthusiasm of the Hasidic movement and its tradition of wandering teachers, wild in their ecstasy of prayer, he urged persecution. The Gaon thought the Hasidic stress on praying to God with fervor, an almost mad passion, menaced traditional study of religious law. The Hasidic movement, however, brought the common man into the fold in a way that the reclusive Vilna Gaon could not and would not accept. He issued documents of excommunication, insisting that it was not proper to have anything to do with the Hasidim.

This schism in religious thought would only be healed after his death (there is a well-known tale that the Hasidim danced on his grave) when the threat of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment threatened orthodoxy.

B
orn in Paris of a Polish musician father and an Irish-English mother, Henri Bergson was one of the most influential philosophers of his era. The Bergsonian worldviews of time, evolution, memory, freedom, perception, mind and body, intuition, intellect, mysticism, and society deeply affected the thought and writings of 20th century European politicians and authors. The Jewish novelist Marcel Proust, the Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw, the American philosopher William James, and the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead all acknowledged Bergson’s profound influence.