JEWS IN SOCIOLOGY
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Ranked among the half-dozen or so founders of modern sociology are three Jews: Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Georg Simmel.  According to Ronald Fernandez's study Mappers of Society: The Lives, Times, and Legacies of the Great Sociologists,1 Durkheim, Marx, and Simmel constitute three of the four individuals "indisputably at the core of sociology's birth and growth."  (The fourth of these individuals, according to Fernandez, was Max Weber.)  Of the fifty preeminent sociologists discussed in Dirk Kaesler's Klassiker der Soziologie2 (see also the companion website), approximately thirty percent were, or are, Jews.  The following lists contain the names of influential Jewish sociologists and of other Jewish scholars who have impacted the field.  See also Jews in Anthropology and Jews in Psychology.

SHORT LIST
 LONG LIST NOTES
1. Mappers of Society: The Lives, Times, and Legacies of the Great Sociologists, by Ronald Fernandez (Praeger, Westport, CT and London, 2003, p. xvii).
2. Klassiker der Soziologie 1: Von Auguste Comte bis Alfred Schütz, by Dirk Kaesler (C.H. Beck, Munich, 2006) and Klassiker der Soziologie 2: Von Talcott Parsons bis Anthony Giddens, by Dirk Kaesler (C.H. Beck, Munich, 2003).
3. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
4. Berger was born to Viennese-Jewish parents who converted to Christianity in 1938.  The family found refuge 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).
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