The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time by Michael Shapiro

1911 of heart failure brought on by a streptococcal infection.
    Apart from Mahler’s important contributions to musical practice and performance during his lifetime (and as did Toscanini, Mahler raised the standards of music making in his time to high levels of professionalism), his music challenges the listener, the instrumentalist, and the composer to dig deeper into their emotions, intellect, and subconscious for revelation. Audiences did not wholly understand Mahler’s works until quite recently. After his death, performances of his symphonies dwindled, kept mostly alive by his assistant, Bruno Walter. The Nazis banned his music (and murdered his niece in Auschwitz). Only after the Second World War in trailblazing performances by Jascha Horenstein and Bernstein did Mahler’s time come.
    Bernstein once remarked that Mahler’s music anticipated and predicted the Holocaust. This melodramatic declaration has some truth to it, but one cannot fail to notice that Mahler always avoided artificial musical expression. He hid behind nothing. His music preserves the emotional quandaries of his era, when Austrian society, largely through its Jewish artists, reached an apex of civilized life before the mechanized slaughter by the National Socialists. More than any other composer, Mahler’s innermost feelings and thoughts are laid plain to us. We are urged to swim in a chasm of swirling feelings, madly rushing past danger, to. the refuge of a heavenly life.

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Maimonides
(1135-1204)
    From Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses.
    S o reads the people’s epitaph to the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known to pious Jews by the acronym Rambam and to the world by the Greek name Maimonides. Born in Cordoba, Spain, buried in Tiberius in the Holy Land, Maimonides experienced the turmoil of the Crusades; perils at sea; the noble court of Saladin, the dynamic ruler of all Arabia; challenges to rabbinical authority; and developing trends in medieval medicine.
    Until their discovery in the late 1800s, hundreds of thousands of documents from the Middle Ages lay hidden in a storeroom attached to a synagogue in Fostat, a suburb of Cairo, preserved by the perfectly dry Egyptian climate. From this documentation we can recreate much of Maimonides’ life—often in his own words.
    Maimonides lived a life of privilege sustained first by his family and then, in his late years, by the skill of his medical arts. The level of intellectual and political authority he achieved could only be reached in this time by someone of high birth, commercial wealth, and great scholarship. Many of Maimonides’ ancestors were famed rabbis. His younger brother, David, successfully supported the family as an international trader. But it was Maimonides’ encyclopedic mind and consummate understanding and memory of Jewish law that set him apart. In his teens and early twenties he wrote important religious treatises. Indeed, all through his life he exhibited the need to codify and explain, to guide the faithful to a rational understanding of the infinite.
    Maimonides admired Aristotle above all ancient philosophers. The ancient Greek philosopher had written texts on logic as a means of understanding the world. With his unique knowledge of Jewish law and tradition, Maimonides applied Aristotelian logic to religious thought. Rambam asserted that one’s imagination could be used to lift the mind and spirit away from the restraints of thinking, ultimately toward divine prophecy. After his death, Maimonides’ philosophy influenced important Christian thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (who also interpreted and synthesized Aristotelian logic for religious purposes) and remarkably the excommunicated Jew, Baruch de Spinoza. Although beloved by most Jews as their greatest philosopher, ironically Maimonides has had less effect on Jewish life than, for example, the French commentator Rashi or the