Jews are part of history and have made history, enriching the social, cultural, and scientific composition of mankind well out of proportion to their minuscule numbers.
The revolutionary Jewish innovation of monotheism, with its accompanying ethical principles, has contributed the highest values cherished by mankind: respect for life, justice, equality, peace, love, education, and social responsibility. From the beginning, the Jewish people have been improving the world and enriching lives at the forefront of virtually every major advance, cause, or social movement in world history.
Here are nine of them:
Lewis Gompertz and animal rights
Lewis Gompertz was an English writer and early animal rights advocate. He opposed animal suffering and argued it was morally wrong to kill animals or use them in ways (such as experimentation) that did not benefit the animals themselves. He avoided all animal products and even refused to travel by coach because of the exploitation of horses.
Gompertz set out his views in Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes, published in 1824, later characterized as the most important work on the subject until the late 20th century. He was a founding member of the English Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later the RSPCA), the world’s oldest animal welfare charity, and was appointed the society’s secretary.
He was forced to resign in 1832 as a resolution was adopted that “the proceedings of the Society were entirely based on the Christian faith and Christian principles.” He then co-founded the Animals’ Friend Society, which temporarily surpassed the RSPCA in membership. Many of Gompertz’s arguments remain relevant today to contemporary ethical debate.
Adolphe Cremieux, French defender of Jews
Adolphe Crémieux was a French lawyer, politician, and tireless defender of social justice and minority rights – above all, those of French Jews.
His first major struggle was to abolish the more Jewish oath that Jews were obliged to take since the Middle Ages in legal proceedings with non-Jews. Although equality of rights had been granted in 1791 to all French Jews, this humiliating discrimination had still been in force.
In 1840, Crémieux collaborated with Sir Moses Montefiore to successfully defend and liberate Jews falsely accused in the Damascus blood libel. Afterwards, fearful that accusations of ritual murder would be repeated, they convinced the Turkish Sultan to publish an edict protecting Jews of the Ottoman Empire against all manner of slander.
Crémieux served as justice minister in 1848 and again from 1870-1871. He secured decrees that instituted freedom of the press, association, and worship; abolished imprisonment for debt, ended punishment by public humiliation, reestablished the legality of divorce, abolished the death penalty for political crimes, granted French citizenship to the indigenous Jewish population of Algeria, and ended slavery in all French colonies, for which some have called him the “French Abraham Lincoln.”
Crémieux also founded the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which sought to protect the rights of Jews worldwide and established Jewish schools in countries of the Ottoman Empire. By 1900, it operated more than 100 schools in seven countries.
Baron de Rothschild and the right of Jews to a homeland
Baron Edmond de Rothschild, head of the French branch of the famed banking family, became known as the “Father of the Yishuv” due to his establishing and almost single-handedly financing the pre-state agricultural villages of Rishon Lezion, Zichron Ya’acov, Gedera, Rosh Pina, and 30 others.
He also played a pivotal role in establishing the Yishuv’s wine industry, when he helped Russian Jews fleeing pogroms in the 1880s immigrate to Israel, plant vineyards, and open major wineries in Rishon Lezion and Zichron Ya’acov (among the world’s largest at the time).
The Baron’s interest was by no means confined to agricultural settlement. Convinced that the growing Jewish community in the Land of Israel would ultimately become independent, he devoted financial resources and tireless energy to the Yishuv’s economic development.
With his assistance, the Yishuv’s first industries and basic infrastructure were established: a glass factory that would supply bottles for his wineries (the first Jewish-owned factory in pre-state Israel), factories for agricultural products, even the first electric generating station. In 1924, he established the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, which purchased more than 125,000 acres of land and set up additional business ventures.
In his eulogy for Rothschild, prime minister David Ben-Gurion said, “I doubt that, in the entire history of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, a period of 2,000 years, one could ever find a man comparable in stature to the incredible character that was the Baron Edmond de Rothschild – the builder of the Jewish Yishuv in our renewed homeland.”
Louis Brandeis and the rights of the individual
Louis Brandeis was a lawyer and the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, who fundamentally shaped American jurisprudence around individual rights, civil liberties, and privacy. He is best known for:
• Articulating the foundational legal concept of a right to privacy, defining it as the “right to be let alone.”
• His argument that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments protected citizens’ private thoughts, emotions, and communications against technological and governmental surveillance.
• Formulating the principle that the appropriate response to dangerous or offensive speech is “more speech, not enforced silence,” helping shift the Supreme Court toward stronger protections for political dissent and free expression.
• Pioneering the “Brandeis Brief,” which incorporated economic data, medical research, and social science – rather than purely abstract legal precedent – to defend labor protections like maximum-hour laws for women.
• His decisions, which curbed the excessive powers of insurance companies, railroads, and utilities, clashed with the rights of individuals.
• His close ties with president Woodrow Wilson, which helped win US support for the Balfour Declaration.
Lillian Wald and public health care
Lillian Wald was a “practical idealist who worked to create a more just society.” She fought for public health care and the rights of women, children, and minorities, all while accomplishing unprecedented tangible achievements. She founded the Henry Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1893, originally to help dislocated European immigrants adjust to the US.
After witnessing their crushing poverty and lack of any medical care, and guided by her belief that every New Yorker was entitled to equal and fair health care regardless of their socioeconomic status, race, gender, or age, she co-founded the world’s first visiting nurse service and was influential in developing the world’s first public school nursing system in 1902.
She emphasized the importance of community-based nursing, hygiene education, and disease prevention, which became fundamental principles in modern nursing and critical to steering New York through the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. She also suggested a national health insurance plan and helped to found the Columbia University School of Nursing.
Wald provided employment and a unique career opportunity for women through the Settlement. Out of her concern for other women’s working conditions, she helped found the Women’s Trade Union League in 1903. She also lobbied for federal child labor laws and promoted childhood education, eventually inspiring the establishment of the federal Children’s Bureau. In 1909, she became a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Samuel Gompers and the Labor Movement
Samuel Gompers founded and shaped the non-partisan American Federation of Labor (AFL) and later served as the organization’s president from 1886 to 1894, and from 1895 until he died in 1924. He organized the American labor movement and “business unionism,” and promoted collective bargaining, strikes, and boycotts to secure higher wages, shorter hours, and better work conditions for the member craft unions. Under his leadership, the AFL grew from a membership of 140,000 to three million by 1924.
Janusz Korczak and children’s rights
Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit) was a Polish pediatrician, educator, radio host, author, and early children’s rights advocate who developed an educational system based on love and respect for the child. He spoke against corporal punishment of children at a time when such treatment was considered a parental entitlement or even a duty.
In 1911, he founded a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw where he put his ideas into practice by creating a self-governing “children’s republic” with democratic and civic values, including their own parliament, a code of law, an independent court and a newspaper.
Korczak advocated a Declaration of Children’s Rights that demanded active societal obligations rather than passive goodwill or charity, long before any such document was drawn up by the Geneva Convention or the UN. Uncompleted at the time of his death, Betty Jean Lifton culled through his written works and compiled the rights that Korczak considered most essential:
• The right to love and respect as an individual.
• The right to optimal conditions for growth, free from hunger, neglect, and overcrowding.
• The right to live in the present (children are people today, not just “adults of tomorrow”).
• The right to make mistakes, have secrets, own property, and express grief.
During World War II, despite offers to secure his personal escape, Korczak moved in with his 192 orphans when forced to relocate to Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto. Together with his staff and pupils, they staged plays and concerts for the ghetto inhabitants. He was tragically murdered together with the entire population of the institution in the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942.
Betty Friedan and the women’s movement
Betty Friedan was a pioneering feminist activist before the modern women’s movement had fully formed. Her book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, launched the Women’s Liberation Movement in America.
As co-founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, which became one of the major organizations of the women’s movement, she led the battle for paid maternity leave, workplace equality, and other equal rights for women. Her central achievement was giving a public name and intellectual framework to questions many women experienced privately but didn’t yet understand as a political or social problem.
Natan Sharansky and the struggle for Soviet Jewry
Natan Sharansky was a founding member of the Helsinki Group, which monitored Soviet human rights, and also worked closely with Andrei Sakharov trying to secure the rights of Soviet Jews to emigrate. Arrested on false charges in 1977 and sentenced to 13 years of hard labor in the Soviet Gulag, he endured harsh conditions, long stretches in solitary confinement, and hunger strikes, refusing to compromise his conscience.
After an international campaign led by his wife Avital, he was released in February 1986 as part of a prisoner exchange, made aliyah on the day of his release, and continued leading the struggle for the release of Soviet Jews.
On December 7, 1987, he organized a rally in Washington, DC, attended by 250,000 people, which coincided with the first visit of Soviet president Gorbachev to the US, and was highly effective in pressuring him to ease the restriction on immigration.
In honor of his life’s work, he has received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the only living non-American citizen who is the recipient of these two highest American awards), the Israel Prize, and the Genesis Prize.
Sharansky has authored four books and remains a champion of the right of all people to live in freedom and the belief that the advancement of human rights is critical to peace and security around the world.■
The above has been compiled from the archives of Dust & Stars – Today in Jewish History, a day-by-day glance into 4,000 years of history, peopled by the remarkable Jews who have changed the world. Drawing from a total of over 1,800 entries, subscribers (free or paid) receive posts that combat ignorance, inspire pride, and integrate shared Jewish memory into the day-to-day: dustandstars.substack.com/subscribe
Follow us on GoogleSource: The Jerusalem Post · STEVEN DRUCKER
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