The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (5 page)

H
e was a Jew, born at Tarsus in Cilicia (now Turkey), raised in Jerusalem, the great Rabbi Gamaliel’s pupil, called Pharisee of the Pharisees, a tentmaker, zealous all his life for God. Known through the centuries as Saint Paul, apostle to the Gentile world; without this remarkable Jewish man, it is unlikely that Christianity would have become a worldwide religion.

As this is a book about influence, not greatness, and people are ordered here in relation to the power of their influence, Paul must rank near Moses and Jesus as the most influential Jewish religious figure of all time. Paul, however, would not have existed were it not for Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was surely the greater man, his followers assert, the greatest spirit the world has ever known. Paul, however, may have been more influential in shaping his present and the future. For all the good and sorrow it would bring to the world, the universal religion of Christianity could not have been created out of Messianic Judaism without the unique genius of Saul of Tarsus.

During his lifetime, the grandiose Second Temple was built by Herod the Great in Jerusalem. At the same time, developing out of the compelling logic of its precepts and to some degree marked by overwhelming Roman persecution, Judaism became not a faith only of Temple rituals and sacrifices, but a religion of interior thoughts. Great rabbis such as Hillel, Shammai, Gamaliel (and later, Akiba and Johanan ben Zakkai), stressed the overwhelming importance and, more crucially, the meaning of the law, a temple of belief grounded in the Torah, not in a great edifice.

Paul’s huge leap was to guide non-Jews into Jewish monotheism without demanding they be circumcised or observe dietary laws or countless regulations of virtuous behavior. Paul indeed quotes the Torah in his Epistles some six dozen times, to deny the references each time. Only through faith in a man Paul considered the Messiah would salvation be reached.

Paul recognized that without belief in the Resurrection and in the history and divinity of Jesus, Christianity unravels. For Paul, Jesus’ death was a crucial event in world history. With the Resurrection, death itself is overcome. “Grave, where is thy triumph? Death, where is thy sting?” Rather than the appeasement of God in countless Temple sacrifices of birds and sheep, the “Lamb of God” died on the cross to set his children free. The sacrifice of one life for all, in Paul’s view, was a singular and essential act of atonement for humanity.

Like some of the early Jewish Christians, he was obsessed with the death on the Cross. Paul was much less concerned about the actual events of Jesus’ life. Many of the early Jewish Christians did not know how to deal with Jesus’ awful death. The Romans reserved death-by crucifixion, a shameful, horrifying form of execution, for those they considered the worst criminals, for rebellious slaves and terrorists against Rome.

Paul’s obsession with the Crucifixion arises directly from his novel theory of original sin. In contrast to the basic optimism of Judaism (that good works, virtue, morality, and righteousness count; God can be seen in all the minutiae of life, therefore most facets of daily living require regulation to ensure order and a religious spirit), Paul’s view was largely pessimistic. Jewish law, he argued, cannot be wholly followed. We are imperfect. We cannot obey every rule, every moment. The law’s very presence establishes how truly sinful people are. Jesus, unlike Paul, clearly stated that the law must be obeyed. For Paul, faith in Jesus supplanted the need for the law.

The aggregate sin of mankind is so overwhelming that one unique person had to pay for it. Paul saw Jesus’ death on the Cross as the cost of man’s sin. Indeed, in a literate attempt to explain Pauline theology, A.N. Wilson and others have dubbed Paul’s new religion “Cross-tianity.”

With the Resurrection, Paul was convinced that hope everlasting had brightened a dark world. Through Jesus’ love and forgiveness, sin was forgotten and heavenly grace opened the eternal kingdom to the weakest slave. The meek and the strong, rich and poor, girl and boy, can commune with God only through Jesus.

Paul was the product of a wealthy, cosmopolitan, Hellenized background. He spoke and wrote in Greek and was a Roman citizen. At first a strictly religious Jew, zealous in his defense of his faith, and a confessed persecutor of Christians, on a journey to Damascus he abruptly shifted to a belief in Jesus as the Messiah or Christ. Saul became Paul. His conversion to Christianity in a blaze of blinding light remains controversial. Recent studies of the early Jewish Christian church reveal that Paul opposed the Jerusalem church (led by Jesus’ brother James) in the most vehement terms. He viewed it as just another sect, though following “the Way,” too obsessed with traditional Jewish ritual, believing in Jesus only as a great prophet, and not open to Gentile converts.

This Pharisee of the first century was the greatest publicist and interpreter in human history. We know him from his own writings. In notable addition to the historian Josephus, Paul’s Epistles are the only extant written record of a first-century Pharisee we now possess. Like many of the other Pharisees of his era (contrary to biased custom, the Pharisees were devout men and the founders of Talmudic Judaism), he was a pious and God-filled man. But Paul was obsessed with the idea of Jesus.

Of course, the Christian religion is the result of the work and ideas of two men, Jesus and Paul. However, it was Paul who combined his Hellenic background and Diaspora Judaism (much more liberal in personal habits and not tied to worship in the Temple in Jerusalem) with the messianic solution, to create a new theology, a new religion—and to gather sufficient followers to ensure its survival. Paul was the first to understand that belief in Jesus of Nazareth had a cosmic importance. The changes basic to Jesus’ teachings demanded a break with Jewish practice (Paul’s conflict with the Jerusalem church of James may have contributed to this schism). While Jesus lived in a wholly Jewish country, preaching and seeking to influence Jews only, Paul proselytized in a largely Gentile empire. Most Jews would not naturally recognize any man as divine, but in the Gentile world men (especially royalty) were continually being made gods. It was easier therefore for non-Jews to commune with God through the symbol of a perfectly good man.

Perhaps Paul’s idea of grace was his most persuasive lesson. God, Paul argued, forgave everyone out of an infinite and divine love of humanity, without regard for morals or evil acts. To the downtrodden masses living without hope under Roman tyranny, such an idea, tied to life eternal in God’s kingdom, proved irresistible. Paul, the first Christian theologian and credited by many historians as the “creator” of a religion, expressed in his own dynamic prose a way for an ancient monotheistic religion to become a universal practice. He changed not only biblical law and history, but provided an alternative concept and purpose for people. For Paul, Jews were not the only people chosen specially for God’s grace.

The writings of Paul had a profound influence on his contemporaries in establishing early Christianity, as well as on generations of important figures such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. When Christian theologians have sought answers to essential questions, they have frequently turned to Paul’s letters for inspiration.

It is also clear that without Gentile acceptance of the Christian faith (a faith grounded in Jewish virtues and traditions) the future history of the world would have been radically different. Without Paul there would have been no shift to government-endorsed Christianity under the Emperor Constantine, no Church centered in Rome (the site of Peter’s and Paul’s deaths), no Greek culture tinted with Judeo-Christian ethics, no Crusades, no Catholic-Protestant European wars—in fact, no Christian religion.

D
uring the late 1980s, Communists ceased to dictate the affairs of Eastern Europe and Russia. Even China and Vietnam, once rigidly extreme examples of Marxism, adopted capitalist methods. Despite the retreat of much of the world from his teachings, Karl Heinrich Marx, a German Jew, descended on both sides from generations of rabbis, remains the most influential political philosopher in Jewish and indeed
world
history.

Marx was born in Trier, a small town in the Rhineland. His father, Heinrich was a prosperous lawyer, his uncle, the town’s rabbi. Seeking to improve his position by denying his heritage and over the rabbi’s objections, Heinrich converted his immediate family, including six-year-old Karl, to the Lutheran Church. Instead of the yeshiva, Karl went to a secular gymnasium. The conversion of Karl Marx would have the gravest consequences on the future of much of the world.

Marx was educated at universities in Bonn, Berlin, and Jena (the last, more a degree market than a school). He was particularly drawn to the philosophic teachings of G.W.F. Hegel. Marx first thought he would become a poet, then a philosopher, and finally a journalist. He met another young Jewish thinker, Moses Hess, who had founded the
Rhenish Gazette.
Hess initially used his journal to criticize the reactionary policies of the Prussian government. Marx overwhelmed Hess, taking on editorial control, attacking the local government, and after fifteen months was stripped of his German citizenship and deported to France for criticizing Berlin’s alliance with Moscow.

With his newly wed twenty-nine-year-old wife, Jenny von Westphalen (whom he married after seven years of courtship, the death of her objecting father, a baron, and wearing down her widowed mother), Marx settled in the Paris of Balzac, Chopin, and Sand and gained the acquaintance of another German expatriate, poet Heinrich Heine. During this period, Marx also met the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the French radical author Pierre Joseph Proudhon.

However, Marx’s most fortunate encounter was with Friedrich Engels, the impressionable son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer. Engels was a curious mixture of capitalist factory owner and revolutionary. Marx was impressed by Engels’s writings on the English working class and his ability to express himself clearly and simply. For nearly the next forty years, Engels would largely support his friend (often to his own detriment). Other than an occasional newspaper job, Marx never worked for a living, preferring to spend his days studying and writing articles and manifestos (all eagerly edited by Engels). To this day it is often impossible in Marxist literature to distinguish the ideas of Marx from the style of Engels.

Expelled again, this time from Paris to Brussels, Marx, living on Engels’ support, wrote his first important work,
The Poverty of Philosophy,
in 1847. One year later, Marx and Engels published their most important joint work,
The Communist Manifesto.
Only days after its publication (and having nothing to do with its radical ideas), workers in France and Germany rebelled against political oppression. It was as if Marx and Engels had predicted their revolt. Yet Marx’s class war was not on the revolutionaries’ minds, but rather progressive, liberal politics. During these unstable years, Marx predicted (almost forty times) that the era of class struggle would foster rebellion. He was mostly wrong about the near future but brutally accurate about the next century.

Throughout his life, Marx bitterly opposed the tsarist regime in Russia, identifying it as the most oppressive in the world. Ironically, Marxism would be responsible for Stalin’s massacre of millions of landed peasants and the frigid death of the Gulag.

Much more than his friend, the lyrical poet Heine, Karl Marx became a virulently self-hating Jew. His vicious temperament (whether a product of his miserable life or equally difficult self), loathing for Jewish culture, warping of his people’s history, and fiercely analytical mind, combined to form one of the most influential economic and political systems of any age (Marx’s well-known anti-Semitism strangely did not discourage young Jews of future generations from leaving behind their heritage to follow his example). Marx viewed his ideas as rooted in and compelled by history. It was imperative to him that people understand his interpretation of history and act accordingly. For him, his ideas were a new Gospel—Marxism as Torah and Talmud uttered by its only prophet.

Drawn to the revolutionary fires of 1848, Marx returned to Germany. He began to publish and distribute a new
Rhenish Gazette,
was quickly arrested and tried for sedition, and won an acquittal by his own eloquent defense. Although they lost in the courts, the authorities found another, more effective way of silencing Marx. He was expelled forever from his homeland as a subversive alien.

Refused admittance to France and Belgium, Marx and family traveled to England. For most of the rest of his life, Marx lived in abject poverty in London’s slums. Several of his children died in young childhood. Marx chose to work only on his research and writings, spending hours in the British Museum compiling statistics to justify his philosophic claims. A small allowance from Engels, some journalistic work for the
New York Tribune
of Charles A. Dana, and the remains of an inheritance from his wife’s mother sustained the family.