With this month’s announcement from Stockholm that Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Israel adds to its growing list of Nobel laureates. Since 2002, six Israelis have won Nobel prizes. Significantly, none of the Israeli laureates won the Peace Prize, which does not necessarily indicate any great intellectual achievement (or sometimes any achievement at all). Many vastly larger countries with highly educated populations have not outperformed tiny Israel. France has produced six Nobel laureates in the same span, Germany and Russia five, Canada two, and India only one.
Israel’s success in producing Nobel laureates is part of a larger trend that demands explanation. Continuing a century-old pattern, five of the thirteen winners this year are Jewish. Indeed, Jews have long been wildly over-represented in Nobel and similar prizes. In the words of the American Enterprise Institute’s political scientist Charles Murray, “In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent.”1 Jews constitute about 0.2 percent of the world’s population.
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