Why Jews Win So Many Nobel Prizes

Jews make up 0.2 percent of the world's population, but have won about 22 percent of Nobel Prizes. What explains this?

Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. (photo: Crisoforo Gaspar Hernandez/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Gary Ruvkun became the latest Jew to win a Nobel Prize (for Medicine), bringing to at least 217 the number of Jews who have won one, out of 967 people to do so.

This outperformance requires an explanation.

Let us start with the controversial explanation that Jews are smart as a race. Singapore’s founding father Lee Kwan Yew, who forged close ties between Singapore and Israel, wrote in his biography that Jews have “more brainpower per one thousand of population than any other race.”¹

As a lowly scribe, I find it hard to embrace this idea without feeling I lost the lottery.

Besides, while intelligence is heritable, genetics is far from the only contributing factor to it. Embryology, education, formative experiences, nurture, and upbringing are all in the mix, and maybe even dominant.

So, even if Jews win a disproportionate share of Nobel prizes out of sheer intelligence, that intelligence’s source would still need explaining. In any case, I am deeply suspicious of biological explanations for obvious reasons.

Furthermore, it is unlikely that all these Nobel Prize winners were geniuses who had amazing ideas just pop into their heads. More realistically, they achieved breakthroughs by having a solid education — and then applying discipline, work, the scientific method, and having open minds (but not so open that their brains fell out).

It might be useful to look at people winning Nobel Prizes due to these attributes, rather than innate brilliance. Studying and learning are processes and this is the interesting part. Jewish intellectual success comes partly from the foundational role that questioning plays in Judaism. The word Israel is often translated as: “to wrestle with God.”

People of all and no faith question things, but Judaism puts it front and center in a way that Islam does with “submitting,” or Christianity does with “repenting,” and both do with “professing” faith. In other words, Judaism sets up an approach to education that involves asking questions rather than accepting answers.

Layered on top of this is rabbinical Judaism’s Talmudic tradition. The Talmud is a book of Jewish law. To study the Talmud is, in some ways, to learn to think as a lawyer. This is very different from much religious education in that it is not memorizing holy texts, but questioning them without there necessarily being a definitive answer.

Talmudic study is often done in pairs with an emphasis on questioning, debating, and even dialectic, meaning it is in many ways Socratic. It differs from pure Socratism in that it is rooted in religion and law, rather than abstract philosophical objectives.

It is unsurprising that minds educated in this way should do well when applied to other topics, such as the sciences, medicine, and even literature. Indeed, many Talmudic scholars have traditionally balanced religious study with secular knowledge.

Crucially, this balance matters. These Talmud-trained minds do need to be exposed to and applied to these other topics. We have almost a natural experiment in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, where Talmudic study dominates their learning. Young ultra-Orthodox often lack the skills to cope outside of their communities and struggle to thrive in modern Israel.²

However, this tradition of Talmudic scholarship with its Socratic-style questioning created a way for Jews to think themselves out of the yeshiva³. This is where European emancipation comes into my explanation for Jewish Nobel Prize success. Jewish emancipation was the process through which European Jews gained civil rights and legal equality with non-Jews during the late 18th to 19th centuries.⁴

This allowed Jews to move out of the shtetl⁵ and into mainstream and sometimes secular European life, including access to university education and some professions. It began in France during the French Revolution, with a 1791 decree that granted Jews full citizenship rights, and this set an example for other states as the Napoleonic legal code spread across Europe.⁶

Once Jews had access to parts of the European society they had never had before, especially education, new opportunities opened up right when Enlightenment ideals and scientific thinking were gripping Europe.

There is no data on what percentage of Jewish Nobel Laureates are religious, but it is hard to read through many of their biographies without noting that many had Orthodox upbringings and became atheists in adulthood.

This raises the disconcerting hypothesis that maybe giving up Judaism’s religious beliefs is what lies behind many Nobel Prize winners’ success. That would certainly upset those who cite Jewish Nobel Prize success as one of Judaism’s virtues or even a point of pride.

However, there are confounding factors. A big one is that, while emancipation provided European Jews with enormous new opportunities, it also brought pressure to assimilate. It could be the desire or pressure to integrate that reduced their religiosity, rather than their scientific and academic enquiries. Emancipation also opened up migration opportunities, particularly to the United States, but also to elsewhere in Europe with leading universities.

So, now we have Talmud-primed minds for the first time mixing with and benefiting from Enlightenment values, secular education, and its empirical approach to truth and knowledge. The fact that the Enlightenment and emancipation happened in Europe may explain Ashkenazi success. They were in the right place at the right time.

A way of thinking about this is that Jewish emancipation led to an intellectual flourishing among Jews in Europe. This could be a source of great hope because a similar emancipation could be possible in the Muslim world. Islam might not have the Talmudic tradition, but there is a battle raging in Islam between modernity and the 7th century, and there is enormous potential for human flourishing should the forces of modernity keep advancing.

Consider the contrast between Dubai and Yemen; it may be that an emancipation of sorts is underway in some parts of the Muslim world, though it is no sure thing.

Jewish emancipation was not a one-step process. It happened at different speeds in different places, progress was not linear, and antisemitism continued to exclude Jews from many roles, jobs, and institutions, formally and informally.

Two common constraints that remained after emancipation were Jews being excluded from government and owning land, so they needed to find other paths. One path was business where they could trade their way to success, hence the Jewish moneylender and middleman trope.

Another approach was to pursue education aggressively to learn highly valuable skills, such as being a lawyer, an academic, or a doctor — and we all know the only thing better than a Jew being a doctor is a Jew being a specialist, ideally a pediatrician.

Jewish exclusion also meant Jews had to establish a strong community, networking, and mentoring systems to share knowledge and skills with those who did not yet have access. Thus, Jews had great motivation to learn, study, trade, or create, all of which required commitment, persistence, discipline, a willingness to learn and an open mind. These are traits for success.

But what about Jewish Nobel prize success in fields such as music, literature, and the arts?

This is a harder one to crack. One could argue that the Hebrew Bible is a book of Jewish history, mythology, law, literature, superstition, and allegory. It is the collective wisdom of a people. Reading the Hebrew Bible can be a form of literary criticism.

I like this idea, but it is flawed. If this hypothesis was true, then we should see this play out in religions such as Christianity which share these texts. Maybe, it does. I do not know.

There are two other factors that may be in play — Messianic thought and the Jewish notion of tikkun olam (Hebrew for “fixing the world”). Messianic thought is not a singular thing in Judaism, which is not big on telling its adherents what they should think (although it has plenty to say on what they should do).

Regular readers will know I have described some of Israel’s Jewish extremists as “Messianic maniacs,” but not all Messianic thinking is of the doomsday variety. Many Jews think of a Messianic Age as a utopia (for want of a better word, I know!) and that it is up to us to build it, or bring it about, or at least work to bring us closer to it.

If your religious view is that your role is to repair and improve the world, then working towards that goal is likely to bring success. It is the opposite of defeatism. It may explain why Jews were at the forefront of so many social movements, such as the U.S Civil Rights movement, socialism, and even communism. Socialism did not work out so well, but those advocating it certainly believed it was a way to make the world better.

Of course, this kind of thinking does not even need to be overtly religious or conscious; it can just seep into the culture as an approach to life. Consider someone such as Sigmund Freud — an atheist Jew who said religion would persist as long as humans feared death. He pioneered a different approach to treating psychological issues that he hoped would be better than his era’s ineffective treatments.

All told, Jewish Nobel Prize success probably results from a specific approach to religious belief, Socratic thinking being embedded into religious scholarship, a high-value on intellectual enquiry, culturally taught traits necessary to survive systemic oppression, and the unshackling from that oppression during the Enlightenment.

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1. Yew, Lee Kwan. “Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going.” Straits Times Press, 2011.

2. “The toxic ramifications of haredi education on Israeli society.” The Jerusalem Post.

3. A traditional Jewish educational institution focused on the study of Rabbinic literature

4. Strauss, H. and Moses, M (Eds). “The Jews of Modern Europe.” Indiana University Press, 1984.

5. A Yiddish term for small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust

6. Schwarzfuchs, S. “The Origins of Jewish Emancipation in France.” Hebrew Union College Press, 1981.