Jewish versus Muslim Nobel Prize Winners

In the course of doing research for a detailed article on the jews and the Nobel Prize: I became aware of a common argument made by the Counter Jihadi movement, which includes a large amount of jews. I thought that as it so manifestly stupid an argument that I would write a stand-alone article on the issue as opposed to including it in my wider analysis on the subject of the jews and the Nobel Prize.

Now unfortunately for the Counter Jihadists - and I am not unsympathetic to their general critique of Islam - they really don't know the first thing about Judaism and nor do they comprehend the categories they are using are meaningless.

What do I mean by that?

Well very simply: the argument that jews have won say 129 Nobel Prizes and the Muslims have won 4 (1) is an 'apples versus oranges' argument in so far as it is using ethnicity to work out the number of jews who have been awarded the Nobel Prize, but then uses religious confession to work out the number of Muslims who have won the Nobel Prize.

Why do I say that?

Well, if you look at the jewish Nobel Prize winners - who they explicitly include as jews - (2) like the first ever jewish winner Adolf von Bayer (for Chemistry in 1905) then you could be excused for thinking that von Bayer was born to jewish parents and worshipped in a synagogue his whole life. This is precisely what the jewish - and quite probably Israeli - (3) originators of this argument seem to want to push as an idea as one can see from their lists, which cite anybody and everybody who could conceivably be called jewish as being a proverbial synagogue-attending, matzoh-eating, Shabbos-observant jew. (4)

This is what would be required for a jews versus Muslims comparison to be valid, because it would then mean that the followers of Judaism as a religion have significantly out contributed the followers of Islam as a religion.

However, the inclusion of jews - like von Bayer who did not profess Judaism at all in his lifetime but rather was Christian but whose mother (in this case a member of the famous Itzig dynasty) was a jewess converted to Christianity - renders the argument completely invalid. Indeed, it was only after quite a lot of digging that I managed to confirm that von Bayer did actually have a jewish mother as he isn't even listed in academic reference works as being of jewish extraction! (5)

Indeed things get even weirder when we note that apostates from Judaism are included as jews as well as converts to Judaism in the form of Christian Anfinsen (6) who is included on some of these jewish Nobel Laureate lists as a winner of the Chemistry Nobel in 1972: however he wasn't born to a jewish family, but rather he converted to Judaism later in life and was actually from an American family of Norwegian origin!

Even odder is when we see jews who distanced themselves from Judaism such as Max Born and Albert Einstein included as if they had been kippah-wearing ultra-Orthodox!

Essentially the problem with the number of jews given in the Counter Jihadist lists is that there is no actual definition behind them as to the issue of just who is a jew. This is a thorny problem even for the best jewish intellectuals to address precisely because Judaism defines jewishness biologically and thus - in theory at least - any person with a jewish father who is a member of the Kohanim or a Levite or a mother who is halakhically jewish (regardless of whether she professes Judaism or not) can be counted as jewish.

Further the inclusion of Alfinson as a jew throws even this halakhic definition out of the window as although Alfinson would be a follower of Judaism: he could not be counted as a jew in Judaism because he would not be classed as an Israelite. Further one wonders just how many of the other jews in the list would stand up to a rigorous examination of the time of their conception to ascertain whether they were born of uncertain jewish parentage (foundlings) or were born of 'bad unions' (i.e., unmarried parents, born to a non-Kohanin/Levite jewish father and a gentile mother, the result of adultery or rape and so on) [Mamzers (lit 'Bastards'].

Any these instances would place a jew in the list outside of the pale of Halakhic jewishness (i.e., they would not be Israelites) and it would not be a surprise that if on inspection quite of lot of said jews would have to be excluded in order of the definition of 'who is a jew' to be coherent.

We can thus see that the Counter Jihadists have literally thrown every candidate they can possibly use as a jew into their list including the proverbial kitchen sink. This ironically enough renders their list invalid, because while they don't have a defined methodology for 'who is a jew' they seem to have adopted a more coherent methodology for 'who is a Muslim' (i.e., anyone who lists themselves as such and/or professes belief in the tenants of Islam) meaning that they are defining that status religiously as opposed to having any jewish ancestry at all or converting to Judaism in the comparative claim.

This then allows the Counter Jihadists to maximize the number of jews they can claim as Nobel Prize Laureates (because it is very easy to be classed as 'jewish' in their 'methodology' because of a very vague definition) while it minimizes the number of Muslims (because it is relatively difficult to be classed as 'Muslim' in their methodology because of the more precise definition).

In essence it is a false comparison because the two comparative elements are not parallel to each other in definition, but rather are being used to make a rhetorical and tautological argument about the implied 'superiority' of jews and/or Judaism. (7)

Now when we look at this list provided by the Counter Jihadist movement we can see there are three major things wrong with it aside from the issue around just 'who is jewish':

Firstly, it claims that there have only be 4 'Muslim' Nobel Laureates listing Ahmed Zewail (for Chemistry in 1999) as being the only science winner, which is untrue as they are not including Abdas Salam who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 along with two jews: Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg. Further the cited Counter Jihadist 'list' also excludes four other Muslim Nobel Laureates in Shrin Ebadi (for Peace in 2003), Mohamed ElBaradei (for Peace in 2005), Muhammad Yunus (for Peace in 2006) and Tawakkol Karman (for peace in 2011).

If you were to transpose 'Muslims' as 'Arabs' in the same way as the Counter Jihadists have done with 'followers of Judaism' and 'jews' then you would have to include Elias James Correy (for Chemistry in 1990) who is originally from Lebanon as well.

Now this is bad enough, but the second problem with it is even worse in that it lists the Chemistry Nobel Prize of Ahmed Zewa in 1999, but then inexplicably fails to list the - by my own manual re-count - 34 jews who won this prize. This then leads the Counter Jihadist author to make the hilariously stupid statement that only 129 jews have won the Nobel Prize, which anyone using google can quickly notice is not the case. (8)

The third problem is more subtle in that the author of the 'Europe News' piece cites the jews as having a population of roughly 14,000,000 for his percentage comparison: however this is completely disingenuous in that it takes its figure from the present estimated jewish population (which follows a minimalist methodology [i.e., defining jewishness by self-identification] and thus is incompatible with a maximalist methodology [i.e., defining jewishness by biological origin in addition to adding converts to Judaism to the list]) and seeks to apply it across 112 years of the Nobel Prize as if the jewish population was a constant at this time.

Hence the figure of 14 million which is given is nonsense, because it isn't an average over the time period that the prizes were awarded. If the author had used the median value as one might reasonably do then one would get approximately 12 million jews, but even then this is on a minimalist scale and I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that the median figure of jews from 1900 to 2012 has actually been something in the region of 20 million (if not more) if we include those jews who have married out and not retained their ties to their jewish heritage plus including converts to Judaism.

The author does the same thing with the population figures of Islam and cites the modern population figure of some 1.2 billion Muslims, but again fails to comprehend that this isn't applicable or even representative over 112 years! If we again use the median value then we get some 700 million Muslims, which is obviously significantly smaller.

However when comparing these statistically we need to be very careful, because we should be aware that a small population automatically magnifies the percentage contribution of a given group and as such the 'superiority by Nobel Prize' argument runs into issues precisely because even though jews have won a lot more Nobel Prizes then Muslims: it does not follow that this means it is anything to do with Judaism or even jews as these prizes are based on the opinions of a committee and as such cannot be taken to be representative of anything other than a level of originality, competency and successful marketing of an author's or individual's work in the eyes of a committee of their peers.

As Biro has pointed out in a noteworthy paper: (9) the Nobel Prize as an award is a function more of intellectual fashion and the good fortune of an intellectual/scientist to be 'in the right place at the right time' as opposed to being an objective identification of superior ability. Indeed, as Biro rightly points out: why hasn't the Human Genome Project been given a Nobel if it was an objective identification of achievement?

We can thus see that a Nobel Prize is more like a recognition from one's intellectual peers - and in the case of the Peace Prize by left-wing/liberal politicians and ideologues - and cannot be used as an identification of superiority, because it is fundamentally a subjective judgement.

This then means the lack of availability of Islamic Nobels - evidenced by the fact that have only begun appearing lately - much like how jews were under-represented among Nobel Prize Winners from 1901 to 1941 (indeed 21 Nobel Laureates - nearly all scientists - were supportive of the Third Reich [which the Counter Jihadists neglect to mention]), can be simply ascribed to a lack of knowledge of the Nobel committee (who after all do not have perfect knowledge of all scientific work and contributions around the world when making their decisions) of the work of intellectuals in Islamic countries.

Indeed, we can further see that 'jewish superiority' by the use of percentages is seriously misleading as if we use the (minimalist) median population as opposed to absolute numbers against country of origin (siphoning the jews off into their own category) then we get a figure of some 0.001 jewish Nobel Laureates per head of jewish population (i.e., 175/12014150*100). When we use my (maximalist) projected median jewish population figure (of 20 million) then we get a figure of some 0.0009 jewish Nobel Laureates per head of jewish population (i.e., 175/20000000*100).

Now compare that to the Swiss with 0.0003 (16/5550622*100), the Norwegians also with 0.0003 (11/3602000*100) and the Germans with 0.0001 (77/6806300*100) and the statistical trick the article is employing becomes obvious: in that they are using the minimalist jewish population alone with buttressing the numbers of jews with a maximalist definition to create the best statistical scenario possible.

However when it comes to countries with large historic populations such as Germany even though they are one of the largest winners of Nobel Prizes: they never-the-less seem to win at least 9 times less than the jews, but this is because the Counter Jihadist analysis has not taken into account the unique historical situation of the jews as being a 'nation within a nation' and that the jews have their own jewish state in the form of Israel.

If we look at the Israelis then we begin to see the misrepresentation inherent in the Counter Jihadist claim in so far as there are only 0.0002 Israeli Nobel Laureates per head of median population (9/4566600*100), which suggests that while jews have outperformed others when taken as an ethnic group: when you boil down the figure to the only jewish state in the world then the figures are substantially less than other comparably-sized countries such as Norway and Switzerland.

Thus we can see that the Counter Jihadist rhetorical and tautological argument about jews and/or Judaism being superior to Muslims and/or Islam is absurd and not based in fact in the slightest, but rather in the wilful - and probably deliberate - manipulation of the figures by using mismatching definitions, misrepresenting the number of Muslims Nobel Laureates and also use modern population figures as if they were representative historical average population figures.

References

(1) http://europenews.dk/en/node/13583

(2) Ibid.

(3) By this I mean that Israeli nationals brought this argument into the Counter Jihadist canon as opposed to the notion that there was a conspiracy to introduce it.

(4) For example: http://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html and http://judaism.about.com/od/culture/a/nobel.htm

(5) For example, Geoffrey Wigoder, 1991, 'Dictionary of Jewish Biography', 1st Edition, Simon and Schuster: New York (von Bayer does not appear and if he did then would be listed on pp. 50-51). His mother's maiden name Hitzig isn't a jewish surname either (not listed by Benzion Kaganoff, 1978, 'A Dictionary of Jewish Names and their History', 1st Edition, Routledge and Kegan Paul: London), but I discovered that her father had changed his surname from Itzig to Hitzig upon his conversion to Christianity.

(6) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1972/anfinsen.html

(7) http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2012/11/the_myth_of_jewish_literacy_maristella_botticini_and_zvi_eckstein_explain.html

(8) For example: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/nobels.html; http://www.jewishachievement.com/about/about.html; http://www.science.co.il/Prizes.asp

(9) http://www.janbiro.com/THE_JEWISH_BIAS_OF_THE_NOBEL_PRIZE.pdf