Jewish scientists

Black and white portrait of chemist Richard Willstätter

Richard Willstätter's Chemical Discoveries and Jewish Barriers

  • No comments
Nobel Prize winner who studied chlorophyll and developed filters for gas masks resigned in protest of anti-Semitism, but saw assimilation as a solution to the Jewish question
Sir Ernest Boris Cheyne: Knight of the Harmony of Medicine

Sir Ernest Boris Cheyne: Knight of the Harmony of Medicine

  • No comments
Ernst Boris Chain, a Jewish scientist who fled Nazi Germany, was the central biochemical force in the team that transformed penicillin from an unstable laboratory discovery into a drug that transformed medicine and saved millions.
The Quantum Art of Otto Stern

The Quantum Art of Otto Stern

  • No comments
Otto Stern turned atomic beams into powerful experimental tools, was involved in one of the seminal experiments of quantum theory, left Germany with the rise of the Nazis, and won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the magnetic moment.
Fritz Haber and Albert Einstein standing together in Berlin in 1914

Fritz Haber and Albert Einstein: Friendship in Contradiction

  • No comments
Two of the greatest scientists of the 20th century were close friends, even though one was a pacifist and opposed to nationalism while the other put science at the service of chemical warfare and the German Empire.
The Murdered History of Mark Bloch

The Murdered History of Marc Bloch – the Jewish historian murdered by the Nazis and buried in the Pantheon in Paris

  • No comments
The Jewish-French historian Marc Bloch revolutionized the study of history, fought in two world wars and joined the French underground against the Nazis. In June 1944 he was tortured and murdered by the Gestapo; in June 2026 he was inducted into the Pantheon with his wife Simone
Karl Schwarzschild: The scientist who solved Einstein's equations from the front

Karl Schwarzschild: The scientist who solved Einstein's equations from the front

  • No comments
A few weeks after the publication of the general theory of relativity, German-Jewish astronomer Karl Schwarzschild found the first exact solution to Einstein's equations. The solution, sent from the front lines of World War I, later laid the foundation for the mathematical description of
The rise and fall of a great physicist: Semyon Shubin

The rise and fall of a great physicist: Semyon Shubin

  • No comments
Semyon Shubin graduated from university at the age of 19, made fundamental contributions to the physics of metals, and founded a school of theoretical physicists in the Urals. The Stalinist terror stopped his scientific work and sent him to his death in a labor camp.
The Double Life of Felix Hausdorff

The Double Life of Felix Hausdorff

  • No comments
One of the founders of modern topology was also a writer, poet, and philosopher who published under the name Paul Mongera. His life ranged between Germany's scientific and cultural elite and exclusion and persecution due to his Jewishness under the Nazi regime.
Joseph Rapoport – Hero of War and Science

Joseph Rapoport – Hero of War and Science

  • No comments
Joseph Rapoport was a decorated combat officer and pioneering geneticist. After refusing to submit to the pseudoscientific teachings of Trofim Lysenko, he was expelled from the Communist Party and from his scientific work. Years later, he returned to research and was one of the founders of the field of genetics.
Mathematician Amy Noether. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Glory and Persecution of a Dynasty of Mathematicians: Amy and Fritz Noether

  • No comments
My mother Noether transformed modern algebra and discovered the connection between symmetries and conservation laws, but for years she was denied a job because she was a woman. Her brother Fritz, an important mathematician in his own right, escaped from
Portrait of the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard, one of the central figures in the history of modern mathematics

Jacques Hadamard: The Mathematician Who Connected Scientific Genius with Moral Commitment

  • 6 תגובות
Jacques Hadamard was an extraordinary French mathematician who contributed to number theory, mathematical physics, and the study of mathematical thought. His life combined scientific achievements, family tragedies, and a deep commitment to justice and human rights.
Ferdinand Julius Cohen. From Wikimedia Commons

Ferdinand Cohen: The Jewish scientist from Breslau who laid the foundations of bacteriology

  • No comments
Cover of the book Intellectual Jews, Creators and Destroyers, Facing the "Jewish Question"

Professor Alex Gordon's book has been published: "Jewish Intellectuals, Creators and Destroyers, Facing the "Jewish Question""

  • No comments
Zalman Waxman in 1953 in his laboratory at Rutgers University. Wikimedia Commons

Zalman Waxman: From a small Jewish town in Ukraine to the Nobel Prize winner who discovered streptomycin against tuberculosis

  • No comments
Max Protz in 1962. From Wikimedia

Max Ferdinand Perutz: Father of Molecular Biology

  • One response
Edward Teller, 1958. From Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

Edward Teller: From Warning of a “Nazi Bomb” to Vision of the Hydrogen Bomb

  • 7 תגובות
How did exiled scientists from Europe accelerate the Manhattan Project, and why does the “father of the hydrogen bomb” remain a controversial figure to this day?
Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1929. From Wikimedia

The Logic of a Peculiar Genius: Ludwig Wittgenstein

  • 9 תגובות
The surprising life path of Ludwig Wittgenstein – a member of the wealthy Wittgenstein family from Vienna, a student at the Gymnasium in Linz alongside Hitler, an engineer influenced by Frege, a student and friend of Bertrand Russell, an officer on the fronts of World War I
Reconstruction of the image of the German mathematician David Hilbert. Illustration via IDOGRAM.AI

From Cultural Antisemitism to Scientific Racism: Wagner, “Aryan Physics,” and the Voice of Hilbert

  • One response
From Richard Wagner's article (1850) and Wilhelm Marr's coining of the term "anti-Semitism" (1879), through Lennard and Stark's "German physics" and Bieberbach and Jansch's psychological engineering—to Hilbert's counter-reaction: "Mathematics has no races"
Portrait photograph of Emanuel Lasker in his old age: silver print, black and white, 12X16.5. According to the stamp on the back of the photograph, it was produced by the German news agency Transocean, probably in the early 1920s. From Wikimedia

Emanuel Lasker: The Genius on the Chessboard and Among the Ideas of the Period

  • 2 תגובות
Vladimir Khabkin. Photo: WELCOME TRUST Foundation

Vladimir Khabkin: Fighter against cholera, speech and assimilation

  • One response
The Jewish-Russian bacteriologist and immunologist who developed vaccines for cholera and tuberculosis, led the fight against epidemics in India, and worked to preserve Jewish identity (although he recommended that the yeshivots he donated to teach students practical subjects) alongside extensive philanthropy.
A 2004 Russian stamp honoring the Jewish-Soviet scientist Yuli Khariton

Yuli Khariton – Creator of the Soviet Union's nuclear power

  • One response
After the American atomic bomb was revealed, Soviet scientist Yuli Khariton moved quickly to achieve deterrence parity for the Soviet Union. How did he become the classified face of the Soviet nuclear program, and what was the personal cost?
James Frank in 1925. Photo: Nobel Prize Foundation

James Frank – Creator of weapons of mass destruction and fighter against them

  • No comments
Jewish-German physicist, Nobel Prize winner, who helped develop chemical weapons in World War I – and resigned in protest against the Nazis and fought against the use of the atomic bomb
Leon Blum - Prime Minister of France before and after World War II and in between - a prisoner in Buchenwald. By Agence de presse Meurisse - This file is available in the Gallica Digital Library under the ID number: btv1b9039722x/f1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18334452

Leon Blum – the natural socialist of the French Republic

  • 2 תגובות
Leon Blum's political journey: from Dreyfus sympathy to a unity prime minister in France
A physicist researching quantum theory in Stalin's USSR. "Non-partisan theory." The image was prepared by DALEE in the absence of an original image of Semyon Semkovsky.

The clash between the theory of relativity and materialist dialectics – the story of the life and work of Semyon Semkovsky

  • 2 תגובות
In 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a decree banning philosophy and science that were not "party." The theory of relativity was among them. Semyon Bronstein-Semkovsky defended the theory of relativity and paid for it with his life.
Prof. Avraham Halevi Frankel in the 1940s. Photo from Wikimedia

Prof. Abraham Frankl: From the Munich Atrocities to the Zionist Revolution

  • One response
The father of mathematician Prof. Abraham Frankel foresaw the danger to Bavarian Jewry due to Jewish participation in the leadership of the communist republic – and from there began Frankel's path towards Zionism and the Hebrew University.
Matvey Bronstein. Public domain photo.

Murder of a physicist who destroyed an entire scientific field

  • 9 תגובות
Matvey Bronstein was one of the first scientists to study quantum theory. Being an expert in many fields of physics and knowing many languages ​​did not help him when he was executed in 1939 by the Soviet authorities.
Julius Gamble, 1931. From Wikimedia

Emil Julius Gumbel – Deadly Statistics

  • 2 תגובות
Leopold Infeld in a photograph from 1938. Public domain photo from Wikimedia

In Search of the Homeland: Leopold Infeld

  • No comments
Leopold Infeld's life journey: from the Krakow ghetto through collaboration with Einstein to protests against anti-Semitism and censorship in Poland
Prof. Paul Ehrlich. Credit: Library of Congress, via Wikimedia

Nobel Prize winner Paul Ehrlich - founder of immunology and chemotherapy

  • No comments
Paul Ehrlich, Nobel Prize, chemotherapy, syphilis, immunology, magic bullet, Judaism and science, medical history, pharmacology, Hebrew University
Nuclear bomb. Courtesy of Oranim College spokespersons

The Jews, the Nazis and the race for the atomic bomb

  • 6 תגובות
To what extent did refugee Jewish scientists contribute to the creation of the atomic bomb? And how close did the Nazi scientists in Germany come to creating such a bomb? Professor Alex Gordon from the Department of Mathematical Sciences - Physics and Computer Sciences at Oranim College
Prof. Nathan Rosen, founder of the Physics Department at the Technion. Photos courtesy of the Yehoshua Nessiah Historical Archives of the Technion

One Handshake to Albert Einstein: The Story of Professor Nathan Rosen and the Jewish Scientists in the Soviet Union

  • 6 תגובות
The author is Professor Alex Gordon, Oranim College tells about the anti-Semitism that accompanied the famous Jewish researchers, about Einstein's recommendation for Rosen to work in Kiev, about Podolsky's double loyalty, about Prof.
Science website logo
SEARCH