Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Bernhardt and Kafka. Between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. But many have vanished from our collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. These visionaries all have something in common – their Jewish origins and a gift for thinking outside the box. In 1847 the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How?
"Fantastic book. It provides a beautiful insight to a jewish leitmotif of anxiety and a sense of not-belonging, which is belonging itself, that drove creative and scientific genius, enabling our times to structure as they do. Humorous through smart jewish truisms, thought-provoking all along and well contextualized in a historicist approach which neither points at a singularity argument nor does it ignore the non-rational and mystical (not in a pejorative sense, but recognizing its inaccessibility to a single human mind) components of sacred scriptures. I absolutely recommend. "