Jews Among the 250 Most-Cited Authors: Antiquity to the Present

JINFO.ORG

What follows is a list of Jews and persons of half- or three-quarters-Jewish descent who are among the 250 most frequently cited scholars and writers (from antiquity to the present) in the arts and humanities literature, according to the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1976-1983. The ranking of each in terms of relative citation frequency is indicated in square brackets. For more information concerning the methodology employed in the formulation of this list, see http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v9p381y1986.pdf. The individuals appearing on the list are primarily from the fields of philosophy, criticism, history, and literature.

[1] Karl Marx
[5] Biblical Authors
[7] Sigmund Freud
[8] Noam Chomsky
[23] Jacques Derrida
[28] Roman Jakobson
[29] Claude Lévi-Strauss
[31] Ludwig Wittgenstein ¹
[35] Sir Karl Popper
[51] Gyorgy Lukács
[56] Theodor Adorno ²
[58] Edmund Husserl
[71] Thomas Kuhn
[76] Walter Benjamin
[81] Erwin Panofsky
[82] Franz Kafka
[101] Harold Bloom
[112] Sir Ernst Gombrich
[115] Ernst Cassirer
[129] Herbert Marcuse
[134] Yuriy Lotman
[136] Émile Benveniste
[139] Peter Berger³
[142] Marcel Proust ⁴
[144] Hilary Putnam
[147] Hannah Arendt
[170] Josephus
[175] Nelson Goodman⁵
[178] Martin Buber
[182] Erik Erikson ⁶
[186] Erich Auerbach
[192] William Labov
[194] Clifford Geertz ⁷
[197] Meyer Abrams
[201] Émile Durkheim
[202] Stanley Fish
[205] Lionel Trilling
[210] Saul Kripke
[211] Eric Hobsbawm
[214] Miguel de Cervantes ⁸
[217] Richard Ellmann
[219] Geoffrey Hartman
[221] George Steiner
[223] Leo Spitzer
[228] Jean Starobinski
[230] E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
[231] Imre Lakatos
[233] Henri Bergson
[239] Erving Goffman
[241] Sir Isaiah Berlin
[244] Susan Sontag
[247] Richard Hofstadter
[248] Irving Howe
[250] Harry Levin

NOTES
1. Jewish father, half-Jewish mother; see, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, by Ray Monk (Penguin, New York and London, 1990, pp. 4-7).
2. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
3. Berger was born to Viennese-Jewish parents who converted to Christianity in 1938. The family found refuge from the Nazis during World War II in British Mandate Palestine. See Im Morgenlicht der Erinnerung: Eine Kindheit in turbulenter Zeit, by Peter L. Berger (Molden, Cologne, Germany, 2008).
4. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.
5. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
6. Son of a Danish-Jewish mother, Karla Abrahamsen, and a German-Jewish step-father, Dr. Theodor Homburger. Prior to her marriage to Homburger, Erikson's mother was briefly married to a Danish Jew, Valdemar Isidor Salomonson. Erikson claimed, however, that his real biological father was an unknown, non-Jewish Dane. See Erik Erikson: a detailed evaluation and genogram study, by Monica McGoldrick.
7. Jewish mother (née Lois Brieger), non-Jewish father.
8. See, e.g., The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, edited by Anthony Cascardi (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2008, p. 4). Writing of Cervantes' parents, Cascardi states in the Introduction: "While the family might have had some claim to nobility they often found themselves in financial straits. Moreover, they were almost certainly of converso origin, that is, converts to Catholicism of Jewish ancestry."

QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS: CONTACT US
JEWS IN LITERATURE
JEWS IN PHILOSOPHY
JINFO HOME