The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (19 page)

H
is name is not widely known. Yet his influence on our reproductive lives is immeasurable. In Boston in the early 1950s Gregory Goodwin Pincus and his associates developed the birth-control pill.

The pill is a pharmaceutical marvel. It contains a chemical agent that is almost 100 percent effective. The pill has changed family planning worldwide. Governments concerned with too rapid population growth have legislated its use. Gregory Pincus is largely credited with its development.

Pincus devoted his life to the study of mammalian reproduction. From his early seminal work
The Eggs of Mammals
to the more than 350 papers he wrote with colleagues on hormones, aging, metabolism, and rodent genetics and infertility, Pincus was at the center of twentieth-century reproductive research.

Born in New Jersey, Pincus studied at Ivy League colleges followed by advance research with well-known specialists in genetics, animal physiology, and reproductive biology at Cambridge and Berlin. After work during the Second World War for the U.S. Army on the effects of stress, he founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. The foundation became regarded as the international center for research on mammalian reproduction and steroid hormones. Pincus also initiated important annual conferences as well as editing valuable studies on hormones.

After the war, Margaret Sanger, the famed pioneer of planned parenthood, encouraged Pincus and his colleagues to reproduce in the laboratory synthetic compounds which, when administered orally, could prevent pregnancy. Although others were working at the same time in studying the effects of newly created hormones on reproduction, it was Pincus who coordinated and adapted these studies to human beings. The contraceptive pill, ingested orally, prevented pregnancy by inhibiting ovulation, leaving the female reproductive system intact yet dormant, until needed later for pregnancy.

Although its long-range effects have not yet been definitely settled, the pill when systematically used has been an extraordinarily effective family-planning device. Use of the birth-control pill has surged in the United States, for example. Many more women are taking it even later in their childbearing years, and fears of adverse effects have been subsiding. Contrasted with other methods of contraception, which are much less effective, the pill (other than sterilization) has become the most desired method.

Some observers of birth control such as the Population Council have reported that the use of contraceptives such as the pill has been as revolutionary as changes in agricultural development in Third World countries. Contraception in these developing nations has led to a decrease in the average number of births per mother from six children in 1965 to just under Four (3.9) today. If properly administered, this substantial decrease in births could lead to a stabilization of population growth in the next century, along with positive changes in food supply, education, and mortality.

The pill is also widely credited with being the most important reason for the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. Until the threat of AIDS cooled the ardor of free sexual behavior, liberation from the fear of unwanted pregnancy through the use of the pill enabled countless women to engage in premarital and even marital sex without inhibition. This sexual liberation presented difficult challenges to traditional Jewish ethics and values.

The use of oral contraception to avoid pregnancy has also raised moral questions, which challenge the basic tenets of organized religion. Orthodox Jews and observant Roman Catholics not only oppose abortion but also view the pill as morally repugnant. The official stance of the Vatican and Orthodox Jewry against contraception has had the unintended effect, however, of turning many away from religious practice.

The pill has also been noted by advocates of birth control as affording women the opportunity to have control of their own bodies. This freedom of choice will have as equally lasting a result as the sexual revolution on humanity, the relationships of women with men, and cultural development.

F
acilitator of the Russian Revolution, “genuine revolutionary leader,” right hand of Lenin, hated enemy of Stalin, Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein) was one of the most influential—and hated—political figures in modern history.

Without Trotsky, Lenin would most likely not have been able to succeed in imposing Marxism on Russia. The history of the world since October 1917 would have been markedly different had comrades Lenin and Trotsky not prevailed. Founder of the first
Pravda
(“Truth”) newspaper, Trotsky provided much of the intellectual basis for the rebellion, even though he came late to Bolshevism. He showed Lenin how to use a confederation of Soviets or elected councils to consolidate power. It was Trotsky, not Lenin, who led and organized the armed revolt that after the fall of the tsar overthrew Kerensky’s provisional government and established communist rule. As commissar of war, Trotsky founded the Red Army and used it to brutally suppress the massive civil unrest plaguing Russia after the revolution.

So talented and necessary in the progress of violent revolution and civil war, Trotsky was incapable of being an “apparatchik” or bureaucrat in the monolithic Soviet state that followed. Overwhelmingly vain and arrogant, Trotsky lacked Lenin’s political skills and Stalin’s deviousness. In the waning days of Lenin’s rule, Trotsky appeared bored with the proceedings of party meetings, openly reading novels while Stalin quietly consolidated his own power base. Trotsky’s underestimation of Stalin and proud reluctance to enter the political fray ensured his fall and exile from Russia.

During the 1930s, Stalin purged the party of almost all its founding fathers in a series of show trials and executions. In 1940, Stalin’s secret agents conspired to murder Trotsky in a frontal assault on his fortress like home in Mexico City with machine guns and bombs—and failed. Later, a sole assassin ingratiated himself with a friend of Trotsky, secured a private audience with the great man, and drove an ice pick into his brain. Trotsky fought back, but died the next day.

More than any other leftist figure, including Karl Marx, “the Jew Trotsky” came to symbolize revolution and communism. During the Russian civil war just after the revolution, the “evil” person of Trotsky spurring them forward, anti-Bolshevik troops massacred more than fifty thousand defenseless Jews in the Ukraine. Later, on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, Nazi soldiers were told that they were waging holy war culminating in the ultimate defeat of the Bolshevik Jewish Christ killers. The horrors of implementing the Final Solution came easier to Nazi death squads believing they were ridding the world forever of Trotsky’s image.

The great irony of the Trotsky symbol was that he was a self-hating Jew. Many of the important revolutionaries of the period were Jewish. Revolutionary leaders such as the German Rosa Luxemburg and Hungarian Béla Kun were non-Jewish Jews. They either denied their heritage or went out of their way to humiliate their brethren. At an early congress of Russian Marxists, the Bund or General Jewish Workers Union was ferociously beaten down by Trotsky. He also largely ignored the pogroms that ravaged his people during the Russian civil war.

Again, other than Lenin, Trotsky was the prime force behind the Communists’ success. He had spent most of his adult life fomenting revolution. The son of a prosperous farmer, Lev Davidovich Bronstein was sent to Siberia in his early twenties for subversive activities against the tsarist regime. In Siberia he married another revolutionary, fathered two daughters, escaped to England (with the blessing of his wife, but without his family), assumed the alias of his jailer, one “Leon Trotsky,” and became the personal propagandist of Lenin. Lenin sent Trotsky back to Russia to work undercover. Trotsky organized workers’ councils, and in the dress rehearsal for the 1917 revolt, led in 1905 an abortive attempt to overthrow the government. Tried, imprisoned, and again exiled to Siberia, he escaped once more, voyaging this time as far as America. In 1917, just after Lenin, Trotsky returned to Russia, leading the charge on the Winter Palace, the Communists seizing control over Russia that would last for over seventy years.

Trotsky’s vision of a perpetual revolution played out on an international stage almost came to pass. Both Trotsky and Lenin assumed that their idea of a workers’ revolution would spread to Germany, France, and England, painting Europe’s flag a deepest red. Their Russian revolution did serve as a model for successfully brutal rebellions in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Cuba. Third World, more agrarian states seemed to adapt more readily to communism than highly industrialized nations. However, Stalinism, that twisted outgrowth of Leninism, overwhelmed the more Utopian and intellectual niceties of the Trotskyites and became the favored example for developing leftist states.

In his dozen years in exile from Russia, Trotsky worked hard at exposing the terrors and hypocrisy of Stalin. Trotsky was of course no liberal democrat, believing in the total supremacy of the Communist party. The savagely uniform Soviet state he had helped found could not contain so independent a voice. When exile would not silence him, Stalin made sure an assassin’s blow to the head did.

M
uch of modern economic and political theory was first formulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by British thinkers such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, and the Sephardic Jew David Ricardo. Along with Smith, Ricardo, the author of
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
(first published in 1817), is credited with founding the “classical school” of economics.

Ricardo’s family were Dutch Jews who immigrated to England in 1760. Abraham Ricardo was a prominent member of the London Stock Exchange and an Orthodox Jew, who sent his son, David, to Holland to study Talmud. At age fourteen, David joined his father at the exchange, exhibiting an unusual talent for business. It is both fascinating and useful to note that David Ricardo was one of the few economists in history who was not just a theorist, but a successful businessman.

Despite his traditional upbringing, at the age of twenty-one, David left Judaism to join the Unitarian Church and married a Quaker’s daughter. Ricardo’s family disowned him (the separation would last eight years), and he was left to fend for himself. He won the support of a prominent banking house and, soon thereafter, financial independence.

While still working at the exchange, Ricardo dabbled in several intellectual pursuits, settling on economic theory in 1799 after an almost random encounter with Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations.
Ricardo’s first pamphlet on economics (published in 1810) was called
The High Price of Bullion, a Proof of the Depreciation of Bank Notes.
This writing, esoteric as it may seem today, was highly controversial in its time, leading to the formation of a committee in the House of Commons to investigate the issue and corrective legislation. The article also prescribed the method of valuing currency and the power of a central bank to regulate the money supply (issues which plague the Federal Reserve to this day).

Ricardo began a series of correspondence with the leading economic thinkers of his era. Many of his most influential theoretical ideas were first expressed in letters to Malthus, Bentham, and Mill Senior. In 1815, Ricardo presented an
Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock.
The basic tenets of Ricardo’s economics were first stated here. In rigorous theoretical language, he proposed the role of wages in price fluctuations (a rise in wages did not increase prices), how profits could be fattened (only by a drop in wages), and the importance of food production to the overall enrichment of society. A year later, Ricardo offered
Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency,
another writing exhibiting his concern to stabilize money supply.