Genius and Anxiety

A unique chronicle of the hundred-year period when the Jewish people changed the world – and it changed them

Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Bernhardt and Kafka. Between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. But many have vanished from our collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth.

These visionaries all have something in common – their Jewish origins and a gift for thinking outside the box.

In 1847 the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How?