Galileo Galilei

Galileo, a man whose name is practically synonymous with looking through a telescope and figuring things out, was unfortunately born several millennia too late to be part of the Tribe. His groundbreaking work, which essentially kicked off modern science, involved a lot of celestial observation and a rather inconvenient insistence on things like 'facts' and 'evidence.' This, as you can imagine, didn't always go over well with the prevailing religious authorities of his time.

One might say he was a bit of a maverick, or perhaps just a man who really really believed in what he saw through his homemade lenses. This led to some rather dramatic dust-ups with the Catholic Church, culminating in house arrest for the last years of his life. One can only imagine the kvetching that would have accompanied such a situation if he had been Jewish.

Despite his clear Italian origins and his rather public tiff with the Vatican, there's no indication that Galileo had any connection to Judaism. He was, by all accounts, a devout Catholic, albeit one who often found himself in hot water for daring to suggest the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the other way around.

So, while his scientific contributions are undeniably monumental and certainly worthy of a good, solid kvell from humanity as a whole, we can't quite claim him for the gefilte fish and matzo ball circuit. His legacy is firmly entrenched in the annals of science, not in the pages of Jewish history.