JEWS PROFILED IN "THINKERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY"
(30% of those profiled)
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The following list contains the names of Jews and persons of half-Jewish descent found among the nearly five hundred preeminent figures in the humanities and in the physical, biological, and social sciences who are profiled in the standard reference work Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, edited by Roland Turner (St. James Press, 1988).


  • Alfred Adler
  • Theodor Adorno 1
  • Samuel Alexander
  • Hannah Arendt
  • Rudolf Arnheim 2
  • Raymond Aron
  • Kenneth Arrow
  • Erich Auerbach 3
  • Sir A. J. Ayer 4
  • Daniel Bell
  • Julien Benda
  • Walter Benjamin
  • Émile Benveniste 5
  • Bernard Berenson
  • Henri Bergson
  • Sir Isaiah Berlin
  • Basil Bernstein 6
  • Bruno Bettelheim
  • Max Black
  • Ernst Bloch
  • Marc Bloch
  • Leonard Bloomfield
  • Franz Boas
  • Niels Bohr 7
  • Max Born
  • Jacob Bronowski
  • Jerome Bruner
  • Léon Brunschvicg
  • Martin Buber
  • Benjamin Cardozo
  • Ernst Cassirer
  • Noam Chomsky
  • Morris Raphael Cohen
  • Jacques Derrida
  • Émile Durkheim
  • Ronald Dworkin
  • Albert Einstein
  • Sergei Eisenstein 8
  • Erik Erikson 9
  • Herbert Feigl
  • Richard Feynman
  • Stanley Fish
  • Meyer Fortes
  • Jerome Frank
  • Felix Frankfurter
  • Anna Freud
  • Sigmund Freud
  • Milton Friedman
  • Erich Fromm
  • Murray Gell-Mann
  • Ernest Gellner
  • Erving Goffman
  • Kurt Goldstein
  • Sir E. H. Gombrich
  • Nelson Goodman
  • Paul Goodman
  • Stephen Jay Gould
  • Oscar Handlin
  • H. L. A. Hart 10
  • Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
  • Richard Hofstadter
  • Sidney Hook
  • Max Horkheimer
  • Edmund Husserl
  • Ivan Illich 11
  • François Jacob
  • Roman Jakobson
  • Hans Kelsen
  • Lawrence Klein
  • Melanie Klein
  • Arthur Koestler
  • Kurt Koffka
  • Karl Kraus
  • Sir Hans Krebs
  • Saul Kripke
  • Thomas Kuhn 12
  • Simon Kuznets
  • Imre Lakatos
  • Harold Laski
  • Wassily Leontief 13
  • Claude Lévi-Strauss
  • Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
  • Kurt Lewin
  • Oscar Lewis
  • Walter Lippmann
  • Seymour Martin Lipset
  • Gyorgy Lukács
  • Alexander Luria
  • Salvador Luria
  • Rosa Luxemburg
  • Karl Mannheim
  • Gabriel Marcel 14
  • Herbert Marcuse
  • Abraham Maslow
  • Robert King Merton
  • Hermann Muller 15
  • Lewis Mumford 16
  • Ernest Nagel
  • Sir Lewis Namier
  • John von Neumann
  • Otto Neurath 17
  • Emmy Noether
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer
  • Erwin Panofsky
  • Wolfgang Pauli 18
  • Sir Max Perutz
  • Karl Polanyi
  • Michael Polanyi
  • Sir Karl Popper
  • Otto Rank
  • Wilhelm Reich
  • David Riesman
  • Harold Rosenberg
  • Marshall Sahlins 19
  • Paul Samuelson
  • Edward Sapir
  • Meyer Schapiro
  • Max Scheler 20
  • Heinrich Schenker 21
  • Arnold Schoenberg
  • Gershom Scholem
  • Julian Schwinger
  • Edward Shils 22
  • Georg Simmel
  • Herbert Simon
  • Susan Sontag
  • Leo Spitzer
  • William Stern
  • Leo Strauss
  • Alfred Tarski
  • Lionel Trilling
  • Leon Trotsky
  • Lev Vygotsky
  • Simone Weil
  • Max Wertheimer
  • Norbert Wiener
  • Eugene Wigner 23
  • Louis Wirth
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein 24
NOTES
1. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
2. See Who's Who in World Jewry: A Biographical Dictionary of Outstanding Jews, edited by Harry Schneiderman and I.J. Carmin Karpman (McKay, New York, 1965, p. 31).
3. 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).
4. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Part of My Life: The Memoirs of a Philosopher, by A. J. Ayer (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, 1977, p.13).
5. According to his profile in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, Benveniste was a former rabbinical student.
6. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0%2C3604%2C373772%2C00.html.
7. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
8. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
9. 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. 
10. See Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 7 (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, p. 1356).
11. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/12/05/db0501.xml.
12. See Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 10 (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, p. 1287).
13. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Genia and Wassily by Estelle Marks Leontief (Zephyr Press, Sommerville, MA, 1987, pp. 8 and 18).
14. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.  See Metzler Philosophen Lexikon, edited by Bernd Lutz (Metzler, Stuttgart, 1989, p. 503).
15. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
16. Jewish father (Lewis Mack), non-Jewish mother.  See Lewis Mumford: A Life, by Donald Miller (Grove, New York, 2002, pp.4, 11).
17. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother; see Vienna and the Jews: 1867-1938, by Steven Beller (Cambridge, 1990, pp. 15-16).
18. Pauli described himself as being three-quarters Jewish in a letter to the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Frank Aydelotte, quoted in the April 1995 issue of Physics Today (p. 86). See also http://www.ethbib.ethz.ch/exhibit/pauli/ausreise_e.html.  According to the family-authorized biography of Pauli by Charles Enz, No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli (Oxford, Oxford and New York, 2002, pp. 1-7), three of Pauli's four grandparents (all but his maternal grandmother) were Jewish.  Specifically, Pauli's father, Wolfgang Pauli, Sr. (originally Wolf Pascheles, whose parents came from the prominent Jewish Pascheles and Utitz families of Prague), converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism shortly before his marriage in 1899 to Bertha Camilla Schütz.  Bertha Schütz was raised in her mother's Roman Catholic religion, but her father was the Jewish writer Friedrich Schütz (whose biography can be found on p. 469 of Vol. 5 of S. Wininger's Grosse Jüdische National-Biographie).  Although Pauli was raised as a Roman Catholic, eventually he (and his parents) left the Church.
19. Brother of Second City founder Bernie Sahlins; see http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/jws/oralhistories2.cfm?trg6=S and the fifth paragraph from the bottom of  http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/021010/pricklypress.shtml.
20. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 14 (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, p. 952).
21. See Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 14 (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, p. 955).
22.  See My Friend Edward, by Joseph Epstein in Portraits: A Gallery of Intellectuals, by Edward Shils (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1995, p. 4).
23. See The Recollections of Eugene Wigner (Plenum, New York, 1992).
24. 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).


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