Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Great contributions by Jewish folk noted

The Spectator has a review of a book with the heading:

Is there no field in which the Jewish mindset doesn’t excel?

Norman Lebrecht celebrates the explosion of Jewish talent between 1847 and 1947 in music, literature, painting, film, politics, philosophy, science and invention

In the body of the review is this:
‘Between the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries,’ Genius & Anxiety opens,
a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. Some of their names are on our lips for all time. Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from our collective memory, but their importance endures in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusion or major surgery; without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy; without Siegfried Marcus no motor car; without Rosalind Franklin no model of DNA; without Fritz Haber there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth.
 I don’t know if Lebrecht actually buys into so simple a description of scientific progress, or whether it is just a good, combative kick-off to a book, but either way the main thrust of the argument is inescapable. For the best part of the past 200 years a small and threatened minority has exerted a creative influence out of all proportion to their numbers, and whether they flaunt it like a Disraeli or a Bernstein, or a convert like Mendelssohn, whether they hate it like Marx, are religious or atheist, Orthodox or Reform, assimilist or Zionist, the one thing they share is their ‘Jewishness’.
It's a good argument, even allowing for the later negative contributions to economics, climate change, and political discourse generally of Steve Kates and Sinclair Davidson.   (Is SD himself Jewish or just married to one?  He certainly notes their feasts on the blog.)

And for an added bonus - I get to delete probably scores of comments by Graeme - for whom this post will be like 100% irresistible clickbait. 

2 comments:

TimT said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
TimT said...

Oh, now you're just trolling the Bird!