Jewish contributions to knowledge
Trish, who often comments here, sent me an interesting list:
The Jewish/Islamic Score Card
The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000, or 20% of the world population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature:
- 1988 – Najib Mahfooz
Peace:
- 1978 – Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
- 1994 – Yaser Arafat:
- 1990 – Elias James Corey
- 1999 – Ahmed Zewai
Economics:
(none)
Medicine:
- 1960 – Peter Brian Medawar
- 1998 – Ferid Mourad
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Meanwhile, the Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000, or about 0.02% of the world population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature:
- 1910 – Paul Heyse
- 1927 – Henri Bergson
- 1958 – Boris Pasternak
- 1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon
- 1966 – Nelly Sachs
- 1976 – Saul Bellow
- 1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
- 1981 – Elias Canetti
- 1987 – Joseph Brodsky
- 1991 – Nadine Gordimer World
Peace:
- 1911 – Alfred Fried
- 1911 – Tobias Michael Carel Asser
- 1968 – Rene Cassin
- 1973 – Henry Kissinger
- 1978 – Menachem Begin
- 1986 – Elie Wiesel
- 1994 – Shimon Peres
- 1994 – Yitzhak Rabin
Physics:
- 1905 – Adolph Von Baeyer
- 1906 – Henri Moissan
- 1907 – Albert Abraham Michelson
- 1908 – Gabriel Lippmann
- 1910 – Otto Wallach
- 1915 – Richard Willstaetter
- 1918 – Fritz Haber
- 1921 – Albert Einstein
- 1922 – Niels Bohr
- 1925 – James Franck
- 1925 – Gustav Hertz
- 1943 – Gustav Stern
- 1943 – George Charles de Hevesy
- 1944 – Isidor Issac Rabi
- 1952 – Felix Bloch
- 1954 – Max Born
- 1958 – Igor Tamm
- 1959 – Emilio Segre
- 1960 – Donald A. Glaser
- 1961 – Robert Hofstadter
- 1961 – Melvin Calvin
- 1962 – Lev Davidovich Landau
- 1962 – Max Ferdinand Perutz
- 1965 – Richard Phillips Feynman
- 1965 – Julian Schwinger
- 1969 – Murray Gell-Mann
- 1971 – Dennis Gabor
- 1972 – William Howard Stein
- 1973 – Brian David Josephson
- 1975 – Benjamin Mottleson
- 1976 – Burton Richter
- 1977 – Ilya Prigogine
- 1978 – Arno Allan Penzias
- 1978 – Peter L Kapitza
- 1979 – Stephen Weinberg
- 1979 – Sheldon Glashow
- 1979 – Herbert Charles Brown
- 1980 – Paul Berg
- 1980 – Walter Gilbert
- 1981 – Roald Hoffmann
- 1982 – Aaron Klug
- 1985 – Albert A. Hauptman
- 1985 – Jerome Karle
- 1986 – Dudley R. Herschbach
- 1988 – Robert Huber
- 1988 – Leon Lederman
- 1988 – Melvin Schwartz
- 1988 – Jack Steinberger
- 1989 – Sidney Altman
- 1990 – Jerome Friedman
- 1992 – Rudolph Marcus
- 1995 – Martin Perl
- 2000 – Alan J. Heeger
Economics:
- 1970 – Paul Anthony Samuelson
- 1971 – Simon Kuznets
- 1972 – Kenneth Joseph Arrow
- 1975 – Leonid Kantorovich
- 1976 – Milton Friedman
- 1978 – Herbert A. Simon
- 1980 – Lawrence Robert Klein
- 1985 – Franco Modigliani
- 1987 – Robert M. Solow
- 1990 – Harry Markowitz
- 1990 – Merton Miller
- 1992 – Gary Becker
- 1993 – Robert Fogel
Medicine:
-
- 1908 – Elie Metchnikoff
- 1908 – Paul Erlich
- 1914 – Robert Barany
- 1922 – Otto Meyerhof
- 1930 – Karl Landsteiner
- 1931 – Otto Warburg
- 1936 – Otto Loewi
- 1944 – Joseph Erlanger
- 1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser
- 1945 – Ernst Boris Chain
- 1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller
- 1950 – Tadeus Reichstein
- 1952 – Selman Abra ham Waksman
- 1953 – Hans Krebs
- 1953 – Fritz Albert Lipmann
- 1958 – Joshua Lederberg
- 1959 – Arthur Kornberg
- 1964 – Konrad Bloch
- 1965 – Francois Jacob
- 1965 – Andre Lwoff
- 1967 – George Wald
- 1968 – Marshall W. Nirenberg
- 1969 – Salvador Luria
- 1970 – Julius Axelrod
- 1970 – Sir Bernard Katz
- 1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman
- 1975 – Howard Martin Temin
- 1976 – Baruch S. Blumberg
- 1977 – Roselyn Sussman Yalow
- 1978 – Daniel Nathans
- 1980 – Baruj Benacerraf
- 1984 – Cesar Milstein
- 1985 – Michael Stuart Brown
- 1985 – Joseph L. Goldstein
- 1986 – Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
- 1988 – Gertrude Elion
- 1989 – Harold Varmus
- 1991 – Erwin Neher
- 1991 – Bert Sakmann
- 1993 – Richard J. Roberts
- 1993 – Phillip Sharp
- 1994 – Alfred Gilman
- 1995 – Edward B. Lewis
I think the paucity of Arabs on the list is sad. As for the high Jewish presence, I think that’s going to change. As American Jews become increasingly assimilated, they will take a less and less prominent position on that list. European Jews will vanish (they’ll emigrate or die), and Israeli Jews, who are still inventing and discovering wonderful things, will be barred from the list (assuming, God forbid, that they haven’t been destroyed entirely). The one thing I think we can bet on is that, as Jewish representation on the list declines in future, Arab representation will not correspondingly increase. But maybe I’m being unduly pessimistic.
I also wanted to comment on Trish’s nice suggestion in her email to me that we should have a “Jewish Pride Month.” My sense is that those of us Jews who do not fall into the pathetic “self-loathing Jew” category simply carry our pride around with us. And, indeed, I think it’s a much better way than forcing pride on everyone else. No matter what they say, I’m not glowing with pride personally during February’s Black Pride Month — and this is despite the fact that I feel great admiration for those blacks who have done things that should appropriately make people — any people — proud. In other words, acts, not legislative acts, create pride.
By the way, if my experience is any guide, all Jews grow up identifying who is Jewish. It used to be that every Jew knew that Leslie Howard (known nowadays for his role in Gone With the Wind) was a Hungarian Jew. We also all know that Leonard Nimoy is Jewish and are embarrassed that William Shatner is! No matter whether the person did something wonderful or something horrible, someone in a room of Jews will ask out loud (if it was wonderful) or sotto voce (if it was horrible), “Is he Jewish?” Or, perhaps, if it’s definitely wonderful, you’ll always hear “He’s Jewish, you know.”
