The Jewish Contribution to World Civilization

Although there are scores of websites that purport to characterize the Jews and their impact on the world, nearly all of them are sponsored by groups whose ultimate objectives vis-à-vis the Jews and the State of Israel range from defamation to outright elimination. Many of the classic works of the anti-Semitic canon, once confined to the fever swamps, have become widely available via the Internet. To this has been added a vast body of anti-Zionist propaganda that frequently traffics in anti-Semitic tropes and eliminationist rhetoric. The purpose of this website is to provide an online resource that accurately describes the Jewish contribution to the cultural, scientific, and technological evolution of civilization.

This contribution is multifaceted and includes Monotheism, the Bible, Judaism and Christianity, and thereby the moral foundations of Western civilization; the concept of linear (vs. cyclical) time, from which follows the possibilities of freedom, progress, and hope; medical advances that have saved the lives of more than 1.5 billion people; the Haber process, without which forty percent of the world’s population could not be fed; much of twentieth century physics, and thereby much of our understanding of the physical world and much of the scientific basis for the physical-layer technology underpinning the third and fourth industrial revolutions; the work of 200+ Nobel Prize winners (which absent the Holocaust and widespread numerus clausus restrictions on access to higher education and employment, would likely have been 300+ Nobel Prize winners); the $120 trillion international bond market; the Broadway musical; the American film industry; and the invention or co-invention of the radio antenna, nuclear power, the transistor, the laser, holography, the atomic clock, NMR spectroscopy (the basis of MRI), antibiotics, chemotherapy, monoclonal antibodies, genetic engineering, the artificial heart valve, the heart pacemaker and defibrillator, flexible endoscopy, phacoemulsification cataract surgery, cybernetics, the von Neumann computer architecture, the computer spreadsheet, the word processor, BASIC, COBOL, Ada, LISP, linear programming, public-key cryptography, blockchain, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cellular telephony, the Internet, Google, and ChatGPT, to name but a few.

JINFO.ORG has no outside organizational affiliation or sponsorship. Statistical metrics are extensively employed because they are the most efficient technique for objectively summarizing and conveying an overall view of the large quantities of data involved. Concerning Jewish identity, the vast majority (over 90%) of the individuals listed here as being Jewish are such by virtue of having had four Jewish grandparents. Also included, however, are individuals with two or three Jewish grandparents (or just one, in the case of a maternal Jewish grandmother, whose grandchildren are considered fully Jewish under traditional Jewish Law), as well as a number of Jews-by-choice, with the listings of individuals in the latter categories qualified as such. In adopting this criterion for inclusion, we have largely followed the general practice employed by the Jewish encyclopedias for more than a century.

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