Jews Among the 250 Most-Cited Authors: Antiquity to the Present

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What follows is a list of Jews and persons of half- or three-quarters-Jewish descent who are among the 250 most frequently cited scholars and writers (from antiquity to the present) in the arts and humanities literature, according to the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1976-1983. The ranking of each in terms of relative citation frequency is indicated in square brackets. For more information concerning the methodology employed in the formulation of this list, see http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v9p381y1986.pdf. The individuals appearing on the list are primarily from the fields of philosophy, criticism, history, and literature.

[1] Karl Marx
[5] Biblical Authors
[7] Sigmund Freud
[8] Noam Chomsky
[23] Jacques Derrida
[28] Roman Jakobson
[29] Claude Lévi-Strauss
[31] Ludwig Wittgenstein ¹
[35] Sir Karl Popper
[51] Gyorgy Lukács
[56] Theodor Adorno ²
[58] Edmund Husserl
[71] Thomas Kuhn ³
[76] Walter Benjamin
[81] Erwin Panofsky
[82] Franz Kafka
[101] Harold Bloom
[112] Sir Ernst Gombrich
[115] Ernst Cassirer
[129] Herbert Marcuse
[134] Yuriy Lotman ⁴
[136] Émile Benveniste ⁵
[142] Marcel Proust ⁶
[144] Hilary Putnam ⁷
[147] Hannah Arendt
[170] Josephus
[175] Nelson Goodman
[178] Martin Buber
[182] Erik Erikson ⁸
[186] Erich Auerbach ⁹
[192] William Labov
[197] Meyer Abrams
[201] Émile Durkheim
[202] Stanley Fish
[205] Lionel Trilling
[210] Saul Kripke
[211] Eric Hobsbawm
[214] Miguel de Cervantes ¹⁰
[217] Richard Ellmann
[219] Geoffrey Hartman
[221] George Steiner
[223] Leo Spitzer
[228] Jean Starobinski ¹¹
[230] E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
[231] Imre Lakatos
[233] Henri Bergson
[239] Erving Goffman
[241] Sir Isaiah Berlin
[244] Susan Sontag
[247] Richard Hofstadter
[248] Irving Howe
[250] Harry Levin

NOTES
1. Jewish father, half-Jewish mother; see, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, by Ray Monk (Penguin, New York and London, 1990, pp. 4-7).
2. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
3. See Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 10 (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, p. 1287).
4. See http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/rje_l.htm.
5. According to his profile in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, edited by Roland Turner (St. James Press, 1988, p. 63), Benveniste was a former rabbinical student.
6. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
7. See A Certain People, by Charles E. Silberman (Summit Books, New York, 1985, pp. 247-248). Putnam has described himself as a "practicing Jew"; see http://www.pragmatism.org/dmap/putnam.doc.
8. Son of a Danish-Jewish mother, Karla Abrahamsen, and a German-Jewish step-father, Dr. Theodor Homburger. Prior to her marriage to Homburger, Erikson's mother was briefly married to a Danish Jew, Valdemar Isidor Salomonson. Erikson claimed, however, that his real biological father was an unknown, non-Jewish Dane. See Erik Erikson: a detailed evaluation and genogram study, by Monica McGoldrick.
9. See The Concise Dictionary of American Jewish Biography: Volume One, edited by Jacob Rader Marcus and Judith M. Daniels (Carlson Publishing, Brooklyn, NY, 1994, p. 25).
10. The Jewish ancestry of the author of Don Quixote has never been definitively established, but the growing consensus among scholars is summarized by Stephen Gilman in The Spain of Fernando de Rojas (Princeton University Press, 1972, p. 154) as follows: "But what they [the conversos] contributed to the world was nothing less than the possibility of the major literary genre of modern times: the novel. Cervantes and the men that provided him with this tradition ... were all, although certain scholars fight rearguard battles in individual cases, conversos." See also The Cervantes Project website: http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes/biography/new_english_cerv_bio.html#further_info.
11. See The Jewish Lists, by Martin Greenberg (Schocken, New York, 1979, p. 144).

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