Learn more about 100 Most Influential Jews of all times - from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to Albert Einstein and Woody Allen. Their life, views, and careers illustrated with drawings and photographs.
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Philosophers & Theologians Hillel (ca. 70 B.C.E.-10 C.E.) - theologian and religious leader, the founder of a dynasty of Sages. Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus) (20 B.C.E.-40 C.E.) - hellenized Jewish philosopher born in Alexandria, Egypt, included in his philosophy both Greek philosophy and Judaism. Flavius Josephus (ca.38-ca.100 C.E.) - historian, recorded the Destruction of Jerusalem. Rashi (1040-1105) - rabbinical commentator. Maimonides (1135-1204) - rabbi, physician, and philosopher in Spain, Morocco and Egypt during the Middle Ages. Isaac Luria (1534-1572) - kabbalist. Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) - Dutch philosopher of Jewish origin, considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy and one of the definitive ethicists. The Baal Shem Tov (1700-1790) - religious reformer, mystical rabbi considered to be the founder of Hasidic Judaism. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) - German Jewish philosopher attributed with the renaissance of European Jews. Karl Marx (1818-1883) - philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. Sigmund Freud (1856-1936) - neurologist and psychiatrist, commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis". Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941) - philosopher, interested in metaphysics, irrationality, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics. Martin Buber (1878-1965) - philosopher, theologian, social activist. Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) - a political philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the 20th century.
Scientists David Ricardo (1772-1823) - founder of classical school of economics. Ferdinand Cohn (1828-1898) - biologist and bacteriologist. Albert Michelson (1852-1931) - physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light, the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Science. Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) - medical scientist, won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Sigmund Freud (1856-1936) - neurologist and psychiatrist, commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis". Alfred Adler (1870-1937) - medical doctor and psychologist, founder of the school of individual psychology. Albert Einstein 1879-1955 - physicist, widely considered to be one of the greatest physicists of all time, best known for his theory of relativity. Max Born (1882-1970) - German mathematician and physicist. Nobel Prize Winner in Physics. Niels Bohr (1885-1962) - Danish physicist, made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, Nobel Prize Winner, worked on the Manhattan Project. Selman Waksman (1888-1973) - biochemist and microbiologist, discovered and developed of Streptomycin, and several other antibiotics. Anna Freud (1895-1982) - psychologist and psychoanalyst, daughter of Sigmund Freud. Leo Szilard (1898-1964) - physicist, conceived the nuclear chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project. Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (1900-1958) - theoretical physicist noted for his work on the theory of spin, and the discovery of the Exclusion principle. Erich Fromm (1900 - 1980) - Jewish-German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher. John Von Neumann (1903-1957) - Hungarian-born mathematician and polymath. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) - American physicist, known as the "father of the atomic bomb". Lev Landau (1908-1968) - physicist, Nobel Prize Winner, made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. Jonas Salk (1914-1995) - American physician and researcher, best known for the development of the first polio vaccine. Richard Feynman (1918-1988) - an American physicist, Nobel Prize Winner. Noam Chomsky (1928- ) linguist, psychologist, humanitarian, the eighth most cited scholar in any time period. Gregori Perelman (1966- )- mathematician, solved in the affirmative the famous Poincaré conjecture.
Writers Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) - greatest German romantic poet, remembered for selections of his lyric poetry. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) - a French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) - an American writer and catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) - an Austrian writer, author of Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) - one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century, has become amongst the most influential in Western literature. Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) - a Nobel Prize winner Russian poet, novelist best known in the West for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago. Isaak Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) - a Nobel Prize-winning Polish born American writer of both short stories and novels, wrote in Yiddish. Saul Bellow (1915-2005)- an acclaimed Canadian-born American writer, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was an American playwright and essayist, author of a wide variety of plays including A View from the Bridge, and Death of a Salesman, considered one of the greatest playwrights of all time. Anne Frank (1929-1945) - wrote a diary while in hiding in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Josef Brodsky (1940-1996) - Russian-born poet and essayist, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
