While Jews account for 0.2 percent of the world's population and no more than 2.5 percent of any country except Israel, they have made some of the greatest contributions to Western Culture in diverse fields that range from physics and philosophy to music and art. One register of these contributions is Nobel Prizes: from its first recipients in 1917, 26 percent of awardees in the Nobel's six fields among them, physics, physiology/medicine, and economics have been Jews. What accounts for the extraordinary breadth of these achievements? This is a question that Diego Moldes examines in When Einstein Met Kafka.
Among his answers are the history of Jewish culture itself, whether Orthodox or secular, with its emphasis on literacy, learning, and especially inquiry and questioning. Until the European Enlightenment in the 18th century, Jews did not have full citizenship and civil rights they were barred from universities, from government, and from entire professions. The Enlightenment opened the doors!
Despite the outbreaks of violent anti-Semitism or what Diego Moldes calls Judeophobia and continuing discrimination in all western countries, Jews now had legal rights, and they persevered. In a near-encyclopedic fashion, he profiles just how thousands of individual Jews, by name, made original contributions to fields as diverse as medicine artificial intelligence, philosophy, history, economics, business, world finance, computing, sports, film, architecture, and more! The book itself is an extraordinary achievement of twenty years of intensive research, yet written in an immensely engaging style that has been translated and adapted for English readers from the Spanish by Steven Capsuto.
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