A newspaper article from Doar Hayom on May 28, 1936 reporting that 20 Jews have won the Nobel Prize in the last 35 years including Albert Einstein, Henri Bergson, and Otto Warburg. Although the article notes that Jews have won the Nobel Peace prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, it points out that the majority of prizes awarded to Jews were in the sciences.
The wording of this article is particularly interesting. The article uses the term “Jewish race” that was very common at the time, used even by Jews describing themselves. This is a term that, after the racist ideology of the Nazism resulted in the murder of more than six million Jews in the Holocaust, would no longer be used by Jews.
It is also interesting to note the interest in the number of Jewish Nobel Prize laurates, an interest that can also be seen today in the large number of internet pages dedicated to the Jewish prize winners. Indeed, to this day, more than 20 percent of the Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Jews, even though Jews comprise less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population. Various reasons have been given to explain phenomenon including the importance that Jews have always given to education, literacy, and intellectual pursuits.
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Nobel Prize – Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, was dismayed by the results of his invention and decided to bequeath his resultant wealth to the good of humanity. The original prize was given in the areas of chemistry, literature, peace, physics, physiology, or medicine. Later, in 1968, a prize for achievements in economy was also added. As of 2017, there have been 892 recipients of Nobel Prizes, of whom 201 (22.5%) were Jews. Well-known Jewish Nobel Prize laureates include Albert Einstein, Elie Wiesel, Shai Agnon, Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin.
Albert Einstein – Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879. He studied at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, earning his doctorate in physics in 1905. He published landmark papers, and his theories earned him the Nobel Prize in 1921. In 1916 Einstein published his theory of relativity which radically changed the previously accepted theories based on Newtonian mechanics. During the 1920s he lectured around the world, including a visit to Israel where he gave the first scientific lecture at the Hebrew University. Einstein was an outspoken supporter of pacifism, Zionism, and the League of Nations. Following the Nazi rise to power, Einstein was stripped of his academic positions in Germany, his books were burned, and his name could not be mentioned in lectures. He immigrated to the United States in 1933, renounced his German citizenship, and never returned to Germany. In 1939, Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him about the possibility of Nazi Germany building an atomic bomb. His letter sparked the Manhattan Project, which led to the United States producing the first nuclear weapons. In 1940 Einstein became an American citizen and a professor at Princeton. In 1952 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the position of president of the State of Israel, but he declined the offer, stating that he “lacked both the natural aptitude and experience...I would be unsuited fulfill the duties of that high office.” Albert Einstein died in Princeton, New Jersey on April 18, 1955. He bequeathed his archive and the copyright to his works to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Otto Heinrich Warburg – Otto Heinrich Warburg (1883–1970) was a German physiologist, medical doctor, and Nobel laureate. He served as an officer during the First World War and was awarded the Iron Cross (1st Class) for bravery. Warburg researched the metabolism of tumors and the respiration of cells, particularly cancer cells, and in 1931 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his “discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme.” When the Nazis came to power, Warburg was banned from teaching but allowed to carry on his research due to the fact that his mother was a Protestant Christian. He was one of the few scientists of Jewish ancestry who kept his post throughout the Nazi period. There is some controversy surrounding Warburg’s attitude toward the Nazi regime. He seems to have remained apolitical, a strict scientist ignoring the world surrounding him, and for this reason, he was shunned by many foreign scientists who rejected his acceptance or passivity towards the implementation of the anti-Jewish measures in Nazi Germany.
Henri Bergson – Henri Bergson received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.” Born in Paris in 1859, he is regarded an influential French philosopher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bergson’s theories caused much controversy, since they opposed the mainstream philosophical views of the time. He believed that intuition and direct experience are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality. Despite the fact that he did not identify with Jewish beliefs, he refused special exemption from the anti-Semitic laws in France during the Second World War, because, as he stated in his will, he did not want to appear to have abandoned the persecuted after the rise of Nazism.
Doar Hayom – Doar Hayom was a newspaper established by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his son, Itamar Ben-Avi in 1919. It was modeled after the British newspaper The Daily Mail (Doar Hayom is even a literal translation). The newspaper’s style was a combination of the sensationalist news popular in Europe and the more serious tradition of journalism in Eretz Yisrael. After changing ownership several times, the newspaper finally closed in June 1936.
