The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (26 page)

At the Berlin Singing Academy the boy Felix had been exposed not only to Beethoven but remarkably to older music, most notably that of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was then not widely known except to the most learned musicians. Exposure to Bach’s richly multilayered compositions enriched the free use of counterpoint in Mendelssohn’s rapidly developing style.

An important result was Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s great masterpiece the
Saint Matthew Passion
in 1829. This first performance of the work since Bach’s death seventy-nine years before permanently established the reputation of the great baroque composer and was the true beginning of an awareness and attention to music written earlier than the contemporary.

In Mendelssohn’s time, concerts usually consisted of variety programs consisting of short, light pieces, individual movements from larger works, and always new music written by the performer, rarely an interpretation of an older master’s work. When Mendelssohn took over the Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig at the age of twenty-six, he changed forever how concerts are presented. Complete works were offered, famed soloists (such as Liszt and the Russian Anton Rubinstein) were featured, and the great masters revered.

Mendelssohn the conductor also shaped the Gewandhaus orchestra into a precision unit, which played together and in tune, directed by him alone; one interpretative body, not several. He was the first modern conductor. Before Mendelssohn, conducting was largely limited to cues from the first violin. Mendelssohn used arm movements to mark beats, prodded dynamic reactions from his players, and supplied a continuing pulse and direction to the music.

He also organized the Leipzig Conservatory, the first great music academy. The faculty included the finest teachers including the immortal composer Robert Schumann and his great pianist wife, Clara Schumann. Mendelssohn traveled widely, celebrating his trips in Romantic works depicting his favorite places. The
Fingals Cave
or
Hebrides Overture, Scotch
and
Italian
symphonies, evoked colorful European geography and culture. These works are early examples of a kind of nationalistic music, which would dominate many of the emerging nations on the continent.

In addition, Mendelssohn championed the music of his contemporaries such as Chopin, Liszt, and always his dear friend Schumann. Mendelssohn also wrote extensive music for plays, elevating the incidental to the essential. With Bach and Handel as his guides, he composed oratorios on biblical subjects. His
Elijah
and
Saint Paul
generated such enthusiasm, in England particularly, that dozens of oratorio societies sprang up almost overnight, local communities competing with each other in quasi-religious celebrations of his music. The nineteenth-century oratorio, which definitely has its roots in Mendelssohn via Bach and Handel, dominated Victorian music making.

Mendelssohn’s religious life is emblematic of the nineteenth-century German Jew. Grandson of the most influential Jewish philosopher after Maimonides and Spinoza, Felix converted at age seven to the Lutheran Church. His father later urged him to add the Christian surname Bartholdy after Mendelssohn as a kind of badge of assimilation. Although many of his compositions bear the name Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and he considered himself a Protestant, his Jewish heritage was never forgotten. Mendelssohn considered Christianity a logical extension of his Judaism. Furthermore, virulent anti-Semitism was encountered in Berlin, and despite Prussian laws granting Jews political freedom, greater equality and acceptance lay through conversion. Assimilation and wealth opened many doors for Mendelssohn. However, not satisfied with an easy bourgeois life, he worked feverishly in many fields with astonishing success and influence. Despite a happy marriage to the daughter of a Calvinist pastor and being father to five children, Mendelssohn was shattered by the death of his beloved sister Fanny. He suffered a series of strokes, dying at age thirty-eight, the most acclaimed musician in Europe.

Z
ukor, Laemmle, Goldwyn, Cohn, Thalberg, Loew, Fox, Lasky, Schenck, Mayer—these are some of the names of the Jewish men who created the American motion-picture business. Of all of them, the most influential on U.S. and world culture was surely Louis B. Mayer, head of the Tiffany of studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or M-G-M.

Intense in everything he did, fiercely patriotic, paternalistic, excessive in his passions, both love and hate, Mayer ran his studio like an extended family in which he was a doting, overbearing, omnipresent Big Daddy.

Born in Russia, unsure of his birthday (like so many Eastern European refugees), each year Mayer chose July Fourth as his special day of celebration. Supporter of Republican right-wing causes and figures from William Randolph Hearst to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Mayer set the political stage for the acceptability of blacklists of suspected Communist sympathizers by the Hollywood establishment in the 1950s.

Mayer’s extreme rages led to a worldview in which men and women were either idealized or rarefied creatures like his mega-star Greta Garbo or down-home, American-as-apple-pie townsfolk like the juvenile Mickey Rooney (in the
Andy Hardy
movies). “L.B.,” as Mayer was affectionately known at M-G-M, lost his mother at an early age. It has been suggested that his fascination with having his films depict mothers as deeply feeling, caring matrons resulted from his loss of Sarah Mayer when he felt he needed her most. In Neil Gabler’s words, the Jewish immigrants who headed the major film studios not only “invented Hollywood,” but before the touting of “family values” by politicians of recent vintage, the movies of M-G-M helped create in the national psyche a Utopian view of the home.

Mayer’s origins were humble. His father, Jacob, was a peddler, selling scrap metal in a small town in New Brunswick, Canada. Leaving Canada in his late teens, L.B. sought his fortune in Boston. At the age of nineteen he married the daughter of a respected cantor and then worked at several odd jobs until purchasing and renovating a small burlesque house in Haverhill, a village north of Boston. Mayer changed the name of the theater, introduced silent movies to the area, and with his profits, purchased other local theaters. Soon his chain of movie houses produced sufficient cash flow to enable him to become a distributor. When in 1915 he purchased the New England distribution rights to D.W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation,
Mayer had reached the big time, earning a return ten times his initial investment. This first stupendous movie hit gave him a financial base first to go into theatrical production (a false start), then to travel out west to Los Angeles to make movies.

Arriving in Hollywood in 1918 at the age of thirty-three, Mayer found a society wide open to entrepreneurs. Most of the world’s silent movies were made in the still rustic canyons of greater Los Angeles. Over seventy small film companies vied for the public’s attention. Production costs were low, and the post-World War I economy supplied the necessary capital and audience to support a new industry.

Mayer’s first great starlet, Anita Stewart, appeared in romantic features which brought Mayer’s small film company, Metro Pictures, wide attention. In 1924 the powerful theater owner Marcus Loew purchased Metro, and Mayer became its executive vice-president. Metro then merged with Goldwyn Pictures (named after Samuel Goldwyn, its founder and former owner—whose name, Goldwyn, was originally Goldfish). By 1926, the company became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Mayer its chief officer.

The studio chose as its motto
Ars Gratia Artis,
or art for art’s sake. Quality filmmaking with such stars as Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Robert Taylor, William Powell, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas, and the actor’s actor, Spencer Tracy (especially in the remarkable productions of Mayer’s wunderkind Irving Thalberg—the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Last Tycoon)
earned the highest regard of the movie going public. In the 1940s and 1950s the remarkable M-G-M musicals expanded Broadway theatrical forms into uniquely cinematic compositions of sound, dance, and color. Even Mayer’s personal life affected movie history. His daughter Edith married David O. Selznick, the son of L.B.’s former employer, Lewis Selznick and the creator of the most influential movie of all time,
Gone With the Wind.

Mayer’s Hollywood displayed to the world in simple and direct images the primacy of the home in the making of American culture and values. But it was a home idealized in a Mark Twain setting more Tom Sawyer than Huck Finn. His studio also recorded lush Art Deco escapism representing an urban, aggressive, yet stylized new America rushing into modernity. For millions all around the world, Mayer’s M-G-M made the dynamic American ethic desirable, respected, and envied.

J
udah Halevy, philosopher and poet, thought of himself as the harp for all the songs of Zion. Living during the turmoil of medieval Spain, Halevy was the greatest poet of what is now considered the golden age of Spanish Jewry. His
Songs of Zion
and his work of philosophy,
The Book of Argument and Proof in Defense of the Despised Faith,
known today as
The Book of the Kuzarì
(or Khazars), continue to influence Jewish, and in particular, Israeli thought. After King Solomon and the Spanish religious poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol, and before Heinrich Heine and Marcel Proust, Halevy was probably the most important of all Jewish literary figures.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Spain was mired in bloody religious wars. Christian armies slowly worked their way south as Muslim forces led by the fanatical Almohads out of Africa slashed northward, forcing Jews caught between to choose conversion, exile, or death. At the time of Halevy’s birth, Toledo fell to the Christians. Throughout his life, Spain was disrupted by sudden shifts in power, cities observing the Prophet’s precepts one day and the Gospel of Christ the next.

In the midst of all this turmoil, Halevy composed more than eight hundred poems. His subjects were those then most common in Spanish Jewish poetry: love, lament, lyricism, piety, and Zion. Possessing an extraordinary vitality, richness, and strength, they are unique treasures of European literature.

After a brief stay in Granada, Halevy wandered for twenty years (often accompanied by his friend the writer Abraham ibn Ezra). Halevy’s travels as a stranger in a strange land are reflected in his poetic longings to return to Erez Israel. He did not believe Jews could be safe anywhere in the Diaspora, and preached an immediate return to the Holy Land. If Jews were not safe in glorious Spain, having prospered for hundreds of years despite their relatively small numbers (with a success comparable in many ways to the Jewish communities of nineteenth-century Germany and today’s America), they were in danger everywhere but Israel. His call for a Return made him the first major Zionist. Poems of Zion, the so-called Zionides, reveal Halevy’s intense pain and dreams. Spanish life made Jews slaves and betrayers of God. Inner freedom and redemption could be found only by emigrating to their homeland.

Dating from his early years in Cordoba, spent in a milieu of art and lovemaking, Halevy’s paeans to love and drinking wine remain his most quoted works. Derived from forms prevalent in contemporary Arabic poetry, these erotic verses contain musically rich wordplays and imagery from nature.

He also composed just under two hundred eulogies to well-known people of his time, couched in elaborate language, grand and euphonious. Intellect and emotion were bundled together in powerfully poetic embraces of expression.

Halevy’s 350
piyyutim
or religious poems celebrated Jewish festivals, devotion to God, Judaism’s special place in civilization, its superiority and loneliness, and the tragedy of separation from and a gnawing desire for redemption in the Holy Land.

The Book of the Kuzari,
Halevy’s only book of philosophy, rages against Aristotelian logic, Christianity, and Islam. Set in a question-and-answer format, the work presents the king of the Khazars in discussion with a Hellenic philosopher and Jewish, Christian, and Muslim representatives, seeking to determine for his people the one true and proper faith. After exposing the spiritual vacuum beneath Greek logic (all the time admiring it), Halevy acknowledges the debt of Christianity and Islam to Jewish sources while declaring their subsequent history as invalid. Halevy’s views have been called racist by some. Yet the
Kuzari,
as it is commonly known, has exerted enormous influence on Jewish thinkers, from the Kabbalists and Hasidic masters to twentieth-century philosophers such as Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Isaac Kook.