As part of my series of articles focusing on ‘jewish achievement’ and ‘jewish inventions’ as well as writing my forthcoming article on jews and the Nobel Prize; I have frequently come across the disingenuous argument made in relation to the number of jews who have won and the 'disproportionate' number of jews winning academic prizes. I decided that it would be of value to look at a range of different academic prizes and awards that are used in a similar way to the Nobel Prize in arguing that a 'disproportionate' jewish contribution to civilization exists.
An obvious place to start after completing the Nobels was the 'Nobel Prize of Mathematics' otherwise known as the Fields Medal. Now the Fields medal - unlike the Nobel Prizes - is not awarded annually, but rather every four years by the International Congress of Mathematicians. Now as mathematics in a sense transcends language - as it is in a sense an informal language of formal logic - some of the criticisms I made of the Nobel Prize selection procedure in relation to the language preferences and the problem of major contributions in non-European languages not carrying as much weight as those in European languages.
That isn't to say that linguistic issues will not have an impact on who is awarded the Fields Medal, but rather that because mathematics relies more on mathematical proofs that largely transcend linguistics per se than having to explain what you are doing/thinking in text then it enables a freer flow and the quicker understanding of specific ideas between contributors.
This is particularly so as the Fields Medal is only awarded to mathematicians under the age of forty and thus it helps to narrow the field of potential candidates down to those who have made a substantial contribution as opposed to those whose ideas are more in tune with current mathematical thinking.
Now when I looked into lists of jewish Fields Medal winners I could find only one, which was provided by J-Info. (1) I decided as there are only 64 Fields Medals that have ever been awarded it would be a relatively easy task - unlike the several hundred Nobel Laureates - to look into each winner of the Fields Medal and see if they were jewish or not.
In doing so I followed the maximalist methodology that I have explained the both the need for and application of in my forthcoming article on the jews and the Nobel Prizes, which involved manually going through every Fields Medallist and looking for any substantive evidence of a jewish or part-jewish origin. This again enabled me to go back over the data that is used by the J-Info list and check how accurate their claims of jewishness were.
As the astute reader may have already realised from my wording: the list created by J-Info is dubious at best as J-Info claims that fifteen out of 64 Fields Medal winners were of jewish or part-jewish origin.
They list the following individuals: (2)
Jesse Douglas (1936)
Laurent Schwartz (1950)
Klaus Roth (1958)
Paul Cohen (1966)
Alexander Grothendieck (1966)
Alan Baker (1970)
Charles Fefferman (1978)
Gregori Margulis (1978)
Michael Freedman (1986)
Vladimir Drinfeld (1990)
Edward Witten (1990)
Efim Zelmanov (1994)
Grigori Perelman (2006)
Wendelin Werner (2006)
Elon Lindenstrauss (2010)
This looks sound enough as some of these individuals are or were certainly of jewish origin, which I do not contest. However, I note that I have been unable to find any evidence what-so-ever from print or online sources that Wendelin Werner has any jewish ancestry whatsoever.
I can find nothing at all in his published work, biographical detail or online to make me think that he comes from a jewish or part-jewish origin, but rather the source link for all this claim leads straight back to the very same J-Info page!
Additionally, J-Info doesn't provide any citations or notes on these individuals in relation to their non-evidenced assertion of jewishness on their part so we must - in the absence of any evidence - dismiss these claims and remove Werner as a jewish medallist, but rather include him as a German or a Frenchman.
We should further note that the issue on which the admissibility of these lists of jewish achievements turn is the definition of 'what a jew is' that the compiler of a given list is utilizing. Now as I have explained elsewhere the simple fact is that those compiling these lists do not tend to use a coherent definition of jewishness. As they have an unfortunate tendency to throw anyone, they think they can label as jewish into them on the assumption that nobody knows enough about jews or has the temerity to question their veracity.
A good example in the list of jewish Fields Medallists is Alexander Grothendieck given that his father was from a Hasidic family but rejected Judaism at an early age, while his mother was a German woman who rejected Protestant Christianity at a similar age. Now this puts the compiler of the J-Info list in something of a conundrum given that Grothendieck doesn't fit either of the normal definitional requirements for jewishness in that he wasn't a follower of Judaism and nor was his mother jewish.
This means that the only way that Grothendieck could be considered jewish is in terms of pure hereditary and not by either religious confession or halakhah. This in effect means that J-Info are using a quasi-biological definition of jewishness and implicitly asserting that a jew is born not made.
Now if we consider that this definition of jewishness is completely at odds with the explicit claims of jews writing for gentile consumption. (3) Then we come to understand that this is not something the jews as a group wish to publicize. Although to further their own ends they will happily use a quasi-biological definition of jewishness while denying they are using it!
If we further understand that the explicit recognition of the biological nature of jewishness - and how jewish intellectual systems frequently explicitly draw on this foundation for their assumptions and arguments - draws attention to the fact that jews are - as a group - incapable of becoming one with their host cultures and accounts for their surprising level of genetic separation from their host cultures as Salter has observed. (4) This leads one - through a detailed study of jewish history - to the conclusion that the jews have historically been (and currently are) an ethnically alien and uniquely subversive group inside the nation states that they have resided in as a minority.
This, of course, is the opposite conclusion that J-Info would have us believe given that part of the raison d'etre of the site is to publicize details of jewish achievements, but as we can see from an inspection of their lists. Their claims are seriously flawed by a lack of a detailed methodology for defining just who is - and in what circumstances they can be said to be - jewish as well as including individuals as jewish with no supporting documentation what-so-ever.
Now having said all that we can re-write the J-Info list of jewish Fields Medallists as follows:
Jesse Douglas (1936)
Laurent Schwartz (1950)
Klaus Roth (1958)
Paul Cohen (1966)
Alexander Grothendieck (1966)
Alan Baker (1970)
Charles Fefferman (1978)
Gregori Margulis (1978)
Michael Freedman (1986)
Vladimir Drinfeld (1990)
Edward Witten (1990)
Efim Zelmanov (1994)
Grigori Perelman (2006)
Elon Lindenstrauss (2010)
That then cuts the J-Info list down slightly: reducing it from 15 jews to 14 jews. We should further note that Lindenstrauss is the only Israeli on the list and that none of the individuals concerned appear to have been - or be – active adherents to Judaism.
Once we begin to compare this list with other biological groupings (i.e., such as those whose biological origins lie in Europe and are not jewish) in order to mirror the different nationalities but single biological origin ascribed to jewish Fields Medallists. Then we can see that isn't quite so 'amazing' as J-Info wants people to believe.
Of the 64 Fields Medallists the biological group stratification is as follows:
Jewish - 14
European - 37
Pacific Asian - 7
Other Groups - 6
Or in other words:
Jews comprise 21.9 percent of Fields Medallists
Europeans comprise 57.8 percent of Fields Medallists
Pacific Asians comprise 10.9 percent of Fields Medallists
Other Groups comprise 9.4 percent of Fields Medallists
Now this means that Europeans are - as with the Nobel Prizes - out-competing jews by a factor of just less than three, which would thus have to mean - using J-Info's reasoning - that that the Europeans are significantly more intelligent and have contributed significantly more than the jews.
The method of claiming superiority of the jews among Fields Medallists is a simple rhetorical device is to cite the fact that jews are a quarter - actually just over a fifth - of all Fields Medallists and then to compare that statistic against the fact that the jews are a tiny population. (5)
Eliminating this argument from the equation is very simple as if we take an average of the population of the countries of origin of the winner (including the jewish Diaspora as a separate national entity and removing the lone Israeli winner into their own category) and then factor in population growth over the time that the Fields Medal has been awarded. This gives us a clear winner in New Zealand, which is the most over-represented country with a lone winner!
Lagging behind the New Zealanders: we have the Lebanese, Swedes, Belgians, Norwegians, Finns and the Israelis all with single winners of the Fields Medal. The jews on the other hand only come a paltry eighth when we rationalize their contribution against their population.
The problem of course is very simple: there are very few Fields Medallists - certainly when compared to the annual and longer running Nobel Prizes - and accordingly a single Medallist accounts for some 1.6 percent of the total. Therefore, claiming that a quarter or a fifth of all Fields Medallists have been jews is meaningless precisely because there have not been enough Fields Medals awarded for meaningful statistical inferences and conclusions to be drawn from them.
However, we should note that there is a surprising regularity in the lack of performance by jews when compared to Europeans given that - as before stated - jews have also been outperformed by Europeans in the Nobel Prizes by a general factor of three to four.
From this then we may conclude that there is no viable statistical or evidential case for significant jewish over-representation among Fields Medallists as well as that the single list that has been compiled is misleading in that it presents at least one individual (Wendelin Werner) as jewish who I can find no evidence whatsoever is jewish (and only J-Info claiming he is). This accordingly means that the argument in relation to the jewish 'contribution' to civilization in relation to Fields Medallists cannot be upheld on the basis of the evidence available as of this writing.
References
(1) http://www.jinfo.org/Fields_Mathematics.html
(2) Ibid.
(3) For example: Morris Kertzer, Lawrence Hoffman, 1993, 'What is a Jew?', 6th Edition, Simon and Schuster: New York, p. 7
(4) Frank Salter, 2007, 'On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration', 2nd Edition, Transaction: New Brunswick, pp. 102-103
(5) For example: http://www.jewishachievement.com/about/about.html