Useful Inventors: Science, Technology, and the Fight Against Antisemitism, 1880–1945

The presentation and the project

This project queries the place of Jewish inventors in the fight against antisemitism in German-speaking Europe between 1880 and 1945. Central to antisemitism in this period was the claim that Jews could not innovate, only imitate. To refute that claim, Jewish activists took it upon themselves to publicize the achievements of Jewish inventors. This emphasis on inventive genius in turn shaped Jewish senses of self and then Jewish fantasies of a technocratic nation-state in Palestine—developments that had ramifications beyond Europe and down to the present day. I hypothesize that Jewish inventors became crucial constituents of a form of achievement-based self-esteem that gave Jewishness new meaning and Zionism its cutting edge.

The presenter

ADAM BISNO is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Culture and Society, Linköping University. He received his PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University in 2018 and is the author of Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2024). As the first official historian of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (2020–2023), he created the agency’s public history program and contributed to the research outputs of the ERC-funded project “Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020.” His current project, “Useful Inventors: Science, Technology, and the Fight Against Antisemitism, 1880–1945” concerns the use of Jewish inventors as anti-antisemitic counterexamples – mobilized in media to refute the typical antisemitic aspersion that Jews could not innovate, only imitate.