Ranked among the half-dozen or so founders of modern sociology are three Jews: Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Georg Simmel.  According to Ronald Fernandez's study Mappers of Society: The Lives, Times, and Legacies of the Great Sociologists,¹ Durkheim, Marx, and Simmel constitute three of the four individuals "indisputably at the core of sociology's birth and growth."  (The fourth of these individuals, according to Fernandez, was Max Weber.)  Of the fifty preeminent sociologists discussed in  Dirk Kaesler's Klassiker der Soziologie² (see also the companion website http://www.kfunigraz.ac.at/sozwww/agsoe/lexikon/klassiker), approximately thirty percent were, or are, Jews.  The following lists contain the names of influential Jewish sociologists and of other Jewish scholars who have impacted the field.  See also Jews in Anthropology and Jews in Psychology.

SHORT LIST

• Theodor Adorno ³
• Raymond Aron
• Daniel Bell
• Lewis Coser
• Émile Durkheim
• Norbert Elias
• Nathan Glazer
• Erving Goffman
• Mark Granovetter
  
• Philip Hauser
• Marie Jahoda
• Paul Lazarsfeld
• Seymour Martin Lipset
• Karl Mannheim
• Karl Marx
• Marcel Mauss
• Robert King Merton
• Stanley Milgram
• David Riesman
• Alfred Schutz
• Georg Simmel
• Louis Wirth

 LONG LIST

• Theodor Adorno ³
• Raymond Aron
• Zygmunt Bauman
  
• Gary Becker
• Howard Becker
• Daniel Bell
• Reinhard Bendix
• Basil Bernstein
  
• Peter Blau
• Alvin Boskoff
• Werner Cahnman
• Lewis Coser
• Émile Durkheim
• Shmuel Eisenstadt
• Norbert Elias
• Amitai Etzioni
• Lewis Feuer
• Ronald Freedman
• Georges Friedmann
• Herbert Gans
• Harold Garfinkel
• Morris Ginsberg
• Nathan Glazer
• Erving Goffman
• Rudolf Goldscheid
  
• Calvin Goldscheider
• Leo Goodman
• Alvin Gouldner
  
• Mark Granovetter
• Ludwig Gumplowicz
• Georges Gurvitch
• Louis Guttman
• Philip Hauser
• Robert Hauser
• Will Herberg
• Max Horkheimer
• Irving Louis Horovitz
• Alex Inkeles
• Marie Jahoda
• Morris Janowitz
• Nathan Keyfitz
• Siegfried Kracauer
• Paul Lazarsfeld
• Bernard Lazerwitz
• Oscar Lewis
• Stanley Lieberson
• Seymour Martin Lipset
• Karl Mannheim
• Herbert Marcuse
• Karl Marx
• Marcel Mauss
• Robert King Merton
• Stanley Milgram
• Franz Oppenheimer
• Philip Rieff
  
• David Riesman
• Sophia Robison
• Arnold Rose
• Alfred Schutz
• Edward Shils
• Georg Simmel
• Marshall Sklare
• Neil Smelser
• Ross Stolzenberg
  
• Albert Vorspan
• Immanuel Wallerstein
  
• Louis Wirth
• Kurt Wolff

NOTES
1. Mappers of Society: The Lives, Times, and Legacies of the Great Sociologists, by Ronald Fernandez (Praeger, Westport, CT and London, 2003, p. xvii).
2. Klassiker der Soziologie 1: Von Auguste Comte bis Alfred Schütz, by Dirk Kaesler (C.H. Beck, Munich, 2006) and Klassiker der Soziologie 2: Von Talcott Parsons bis Anthony Giddens, by Dirk Kaesler (C.H. Beck, Munich, 2003).
3. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.

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