And then there are the boxers. To name but a few of a rather long list: the American champions Benny Leonard, Barney Ross, and Jackie Fields; the British light heavyweight champion “Kid” Lewis; and the half-Jewish Max Baer, who wore a Star of David on his boxing shorts.

The list of omissions goes on. Leon Blum, leader of the French socialists and prime minister of France is barely mentioned and does not appear in the book’s rather incomplete index. Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist is nowhere to be found; nor is the French anthropologist Claude Levy-Strauss. Evidently, unless a Frenchman is an artist or author, he or she gave little to the world. Even the impressionist Camille Pissarro, whom many consider to be the greatest French-Jewish painter of them all, also finds no place in Lebrecht’s Franco-Jewish pantheon. Leading Italian Jews fare no better: Luigi Luzzatti, prime minister of Italy in 1910–11, gets nary a mention.

Russian and Polish Jews fare equally if not more poorly. The painter Marc Chagall merits but two cameo appearances. The Nobel Prize winning novelist and poet Boris Pasternak and the poet Osip Mandelstam occupy just under a page between them. At least they are mentioned. Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s foreign minister until 1939, fails to make it; nor does Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London during World War II or Yakov Malik, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations from 1948–52 and again from 1968–76.

LEBRECHT IS at his weakest when it comes to the history of American Jewry (composers, songwriters, singers, and conductors excepted), and, to some extent, of American history in general. In one of the many howlers that appear far too often in this volume, Lebrecht writes that it was due to the intervention of the banker Jesse Seligman that Ulysses S. Grant rescinded his order, known as General Order No. 11, to “expel Jews from territory under his control.” In fact, as any student of American Jewish history knows, it was Abraham Lincoln who, upon learning of the expulsion order, rescinded Grant’s decree one week after the Jews were expelled. Moreover, Seligman does not appear to have played a leading role in Lincoln’s decision. Several leading Jews, including Cesar Kaskel, a merchant whom the order directly affected, telegraphed the president to confirm that the order had been issued. Kaskel then travelled to Washington where he personally lobbied the president to rescind it. Grant did regret the order for the rest of his life, and when he served as president he went out of his way to promote Jews within the ranks of the federal government.

Lebrecht mishandles other aspects of American Jewish history. He confuses the Joint Distribution Committee with the American Jewish Committee. It was in fact the latter, created in 1906, which founded the Joint eight years later. He states that Emma Lazarus’ Jewish nationalism was opposed by “a member of the Sulzberger dynasty, owners of the New York Times.” Lazarus died in 1887; a Sulzberger did not marry the daughter of Arthur Ochs, owner of the Times, until 1917.

The list of quite famous American Jews that Lebrecht omits is both lengthy and surprising. Among those who did not make his cut: Judah P. Benjamin, secretary of state of the Confederacy; Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo; Henry Morgenthau Sr., American ambassador to the Sublime Porte and witness to the Armenian Massacre; Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Franklin Roosevelt’s influential secretary of the treasury who created the War Refugee Board; Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of American Reform Jewry and a major actor in the tragedy of American Jewry’s pusillanimity in responding to the Holocaust; Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik, the spiritual force behind Modern Orthodox Judaism; and Rabbi Aaron Kotler, who immigrated from Poland to create what has become the epicenter of the modern American ultra-Orthodox yeshiva movement in Lakewood, New Jersey.

Lebrecht’s limited grasp of American history extends beyond the Jewish community. When writing about the workings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he describes Richard Nixon as “counsel to the huac investigations.” It is true that Nixon had practiced law, but in fact he was a member of the committee, having been elected to Congress in 1946. Perhaps in all of these cases it is just sloppiness, either his own or that of his fact checker, if he had one.

Even when he gets his history right, the majority of Lebrecht’s “geniuses” are German speakers, whether German, Austrian, Czech, or Hungarian; or Americans who emigrated from German-speaking lands. Lebrecht goes so far as to lace his book with German phrases, some of which he doesn’t bother to translate. If the reader does not understand, that’s his or her problem.

MANY OF Lebrecht’s vignettes describe obscure individuals; indeed, Lebrecht delights in asserting that their obscurity masks their contributions to civilization. Thus, in addition to Einstein, Marx, Freud, or Wittgenstein, he includes the likes of scientist and Nobel Prize winner Karl Landsteiner, another converted Jew, who first identified blood types. Lebrecht writes that “nobody remembers Landsteiner.” There is also the engineer Siegfried Samuel Marcus, father of the automobile. A Viennese statue commemorates his accomplishment, but it was Ford, Daimler, and Benz, among others, who took Marcus’ invention and developed what became the modern auto. Lebrecht’s claim, however, that “without Siegfried Marcus [there would be] no motorcar,” stretches credulity. So too does his assertion that the scientist Leo Szilard, who campaigned against nuclear weapons, supposedly “saves the world.”

And then there is Emanuel Deutsch, a German Jew living in England, who Lebrecht claims inspired George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the novel that in turn inspired a generation of Zionists including Ben Gurion and Theodore Herzl. Deutsch is the subject of yet another of Lebrecht’s several hyperbolic assertions that appear throughout his book. Lebrecht calls Deutsch, who befriended and may have influenced George Eliot, “the scholarly spark that lit the Zionist flame.” If that were true, then Israeli cities would have named their streets for him, as they have done for Eliot, since Israelis never miss a chance to pay homage to anyone who contributed to Jewish history or the history of the Jewish state. Moreover, there already existed a proto-Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century called Hovevei Zion that encouraged emigration to Israel and founded Jewish towns with the help of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. 

Lebrecht also could have written more extensively about the political philosopher Moses Hess (a favorite subject of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s lectures on Zionism), whose Rome and Jerusalem, published in 1862, had a far more profound impact on Herzl and other Zionist leaders than any novel. To postulate that “without Emanuel Deutsch [there would be] no State of Israel” is, to put it mildly, rather a stretch.

Lebrecht also introduces obscure non-German speakers, especially if they are somehow connected to the world of music. Thus he writes of Genevieve Haley, who married Georges Bizet and who, according to Lebrecht, was the model for Carmen. He likewise devotes space to the French pianist and composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, who is so obscure that even Lebrecht is compelled to acknowledge that “his death ... is the most celebrated fact of his life.” Whether these individuals could be termed geniuses and how they changed the world are both open questions.

Lebrecht does include some prominent Englishmen, Frenchmen, Poles, and even a few Russians whom he simply cannot ignore—Trotsky, Chaim Weitzmann, and Ben Gurion, for example, and, as noted, Pasternak and Mandelstam. Often, however, “Ostjuden,” as the German Jews derisively have termed their Eastern European coreligionists, get little more than a mention, or, as with the Nobel Prize winning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, at best a few paragraphs, and not long ones at that. Even when writing about German-speaking Jews, however, Lebrecht still can get his facts wrong: Marcus Goldman did not marry the daughter of banker Joseph Sachs and start a bank. It was Samuel Sachs who married Goldman’s daughter.

Indeed, errors abound to an annoying degree; examples can be found across the decades. Lebrecht asserts that in May 1835 Benjamin Disraeli “delivers one of his great put-downs” to an anti-Semitic taunt by the Irish MP Daniel O’Connell: “I am a Jew. And when the ancestors of the Right Honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.” But Disraeli actually said, “while your ancestors were painting themselves blue, my ancestors were worshipping one God.” And the reply was neither verbal nor in parliament, as Lebrecht implies. Disraeli’s retort was in a letter to The Times; he did not become a member of the House of Commons until 1837.

Lebrecht writes that a Chinese diplomat named Feng-Shan Ho rescued “an entire yeshiva in Lithuania” from the oncoming Nazi juggernaut. Actually, it was a Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, vice consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, who issued Japanese visas to the entire Mir Yeshiva. The students (and their teachers) were then able to survive the war while pursuing their religious studies in Shanghai. Lebrecht goes on to accept, at face value, a plaque on the wall of Shanghai’s Ohel Moshe Synagogue that “states proudly that China is the only country in the world that knew no anti-Semitism.” The same could be said of India, whose forces, as noted, at one point were led by Major General Jack Jacob.