Contribution despite the odds

Evidence

• · Pew Research Center traces the norm to a decree issued around 65 CE, attributed to the high priest Joshua ben Gamla, that fathers send their young sons to school to learn to read the Torah; after the Temple's destruction in 70 CE it became a compulsory religious duty for all Jewish fathers.
• · Botticini and Eckstein argue that this literacy rule, rather than outside restrictions, explains why Jews moved out of farming into urban, skilled occupations in the eighth and ninth centuries.
• · Hungary's 1910 census recorded 87% of Jews as literate, a figure historian Mária Kovács says understates the reality because people who read only Hebrew were counted as illiterate; about 31% of all Hungarians over age six could not read.
• · Economist Carmel Chiswick, reviewing the book for the Economic History Association in 2013, called its quantitative economic-history analysis very convincing.
• · In Pew's 2016 global study, Jewish adults averaged 13.4 years of schooling, more than any other major religious group, and 61% held post-secondary degrees.

Caveats

• · Traditional study was overwhelmingly religious, not scientific. Pew notes that most education of Jewish boys stayed primarily religious until the early nineteenth century, when the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) began pressing to add secular subjects such as the natural sciences, and Veblen argued in 1919 that learning kept within the traditional curriculum had added little to modern science.
• · Historians including Robert Chazan and Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman criticized Botticini and Eckstein's reading of rabbinic sources and population figures, and questioned using one explanation for so many centuries.
• · The historical rule was about fathers educating sons, so for most of this history it did not give girls the same formal schooling.
• · Jews who share the same tradition differ widely in schooling (in Pew's 2016 study, about 14.7 years on average in the United States versus 12.0 in Israel), so present-day circumstances matter as well.

Evidence

• · Kuznets found that 95 to 99% of Jews in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States in the early twentieth century worked in urban, skilled occupations, as summarized by Botticini and Eckstein.
• · The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the guilds of medieval Europe as thoroughly Christian bodies in which Jews had no place; where Jewish crafts did flourish, as in Poland-Lithuania and Bohemia-Moravia, Jews often formed their own guilds in the face of opposition from Christian ones.
• · Earlier historians such as Cecil Roth and Israel Abrahams argued that exclusionary laws, including bans on owning land in many places, pushed Jews into towns and commerce.
• · In Hungary, Kovács notes, a ban on Jewish land ownership that lasted almost until emancipation steered Jewish businessmen toward retail trade, modern industry and banking.
• · In Hungary around 1920, three-quarters of Jews lived in towns while most non-Jews lived in villages. Kovács shows that, measured against the urban population (about 13% Jewish), the Jewish share of graduate professionals (13.4%) was not far out of line.
• · Sociologist Stephen Steinberg argued that Jewish immigrants to America did well partly because they arrived with urban and industrial skills; about three-quarters of Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement lived in urban areas.
• · Historian Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century describes Jews as a classic urban, literate minority whose skills became what modern economies demand of everyone.

Caveats

• · Botticini and Eckstein argue that restrictions cannot explain the original shift: Jews left farming in the eighth and ninth centuries in the Muslim world, where no laws stopped them from owning land.
• · Urban residence does not explain everything. Even compared with city dwellers, Jews in 1920 Hungary were heavily over-represented in some professions, making up about 46% of doctors and 49% of lawyers.
• · Reviewers have challenged both Steinberg and Slezkine: a 1981 Commentary review said Steinberg drew a false line between culture and skills, and Hillel Halkin argued Slezkine's framework is too broad to explain specific outcomes.

Evidence

• · The Library of Congress, describing Jewish immigration to America, says over 2.5 million East European Jews left their homelands between 1881 and 1924, driven by persecution and poverty; those who came settled mainly in cities.
• · After Germany's 1933 civil service law, an early study counted 1,111 dismissals from German universities and technical universities in 1933-34, about 15% of all university researchers, at a time when Jews were about 0.7% of Germany's population. In mathematics, an estimated 79% of those dismissed were Jewish; the law also removed political opponents.
• · Britain's Academic Assistance Council (today Cara), founded in 1933, helped about 2,000 refugee scholars between 1933 and 1939; 16 later won Nobel Prizes, among them Ernst Chain, Hans Krebs, Max Born, Max Perutz and Hans Bethe.
• · In the United States, patenting by American inventors rose by about 31% in the chemistry fields where German-Jewish émigrés worked, mainly because the émigrés drew new researchers into those fields.
• · Russia's 1887 quotas capped Jewish enrolment in secondary and higher education at 3-10% and sent thousands to universities in Switzerland, Germany and France. Hungary's 1920 law pushed several thousand more abroad; Kovács counts Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller among that generation of émigrés.

Caveats

• · Migration moved talent more than it created it. Waldinger notes that well-known German mathematicians found posts abroad most easily, while older and less famous scholars struggled, so those who landed well were a selected group.
• · The mass migration from Eastern Europe was not necessarily selective: Chad and Brym, citing earlier research, note that it was not only the most educated Jews who emigrated, and suggest that pressure to excel may help explain success among the children of less-educated immigrants.
• · Children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have had higher upward mobility in the United States than children of US-born parents, so the drive of immigrant families is not unique to Jews.
• · These migrations were driven by persecution, not opportunity. Waldinger records that most dismissed mathematicians who stayed in Germany died in concentration camps or took their own lives.

Evidence

• · In Hungary in 1910, 18.2% of Jewish men aged 19 or older had a secondary-school diploma, compared with 4.2% of Catholic and 3.9% of Protestant men.
• · The Christian Socialist politician Sándor Giesswein observed in 1917 that Hungarian Jewish children were sent to school whether their fathers were ragpickers or bankers, while among Christians it was mostly the sons of the upper classes; he attributed the gap mainly to urbanization and access, not to talent.
• · Before the First World War, in 1910, about 85% of Hungarian Jewish young people with a secondary-school diploma went on to higher education.
• · Pew's 2020 survey found nearly 60% of US Jewish adults were college graduates and 28% held a postgraduate degree, compared with about 30% and 11% of all US adults.
• · Economist Barry Chiswick found that across US racial and ethnic groups, those with more schooling also earned more from each year of it, a pattern he judged consistent with families investing heavily in each child rather than with discrimination or a simple taste for schooling.
• · A 2012 count found that 40 graduates of New York City public high schools had won Nobel Prizes, 35 of them Jewish, most the children or grandchildren of East European immigrants.
• · Sociologist Paul Burstein's review concluded that human-capital factors account for much of Jewish success but leave much unexplained.

Caveats

• · This describes what families did rather than why; Burstein notes that the other proposed causes, such as distinctive Jewish values, marginality and social capital, have hardly been tested.
• · The gap has narrowed. Chiswick found the Jewish share of new US PhDs falling among men from the 1950s onward, and Chad and Brym describe an apparent decline in Jewish intellectual attainment in Western societies.
• · Immigrant children in general out-perform children of US-born parents in upward mobility, so part of this pattern is shared by many immigrant groups.

Evidence

• · Veblen's 1919 essay credited the creative Jewish scholar's position as a 'hyphenate' member of the gentile world of learning, and the skepticism it fostered, for Jewish prominence in modern science.
• · Tiziana Foresti argues that Veblen's essay is a serious analytical argument consistent with his institutional economics, not merely a reflection of his own outsider status, and that Veblen turned antisemitic arguments about a 'Jewish type' in a pro-Jewish direction.
• · Volkov's study of 40 highly successful German Jewish scientists argued that their position at the margins, both geographically and in their specialties, made original breakthroughs possible.
• · Burstein lists marginality as one of four main families of explanation for Jewish success in the United States.

Caveats

• · Historian David Hollinger concluded that relatively little of Jewish pre-eminence can be explained by the Veblen thesis: Veblen ignored Jewish literacy and economic position, and the thesis fits poorly with the most intellectually successful Jewish community in diaspora history, that of the United States.
• · Volkov's own follow-up study, comparing 12 Jewish and 12 equally successful non-Jewish scientists, found some of her earlier conclusions needed qualifying.
• · Veblen's essay uses the racial vocabulary of its day and does not rule out inherited traits, even though its argument rests on social position.
• · Burstein notes that marginality has been discussed far more than it has been tested.

Evidence

• · Legal equality came in France in 1791, in Austria-Hungary with the constitution of 1867, and in the North German Confederation in 1869, extended to the whole German Empire in 1871. Britain lifted the Christian oath that barred Jews from Parliament in 1858. Tsarist Russia did not grant equality; Russian Jews received it only in 1917.
• · Pew notes that most education of Jewish boys stayed primarily religious until the early nineteenth century, when the Jewish Enlightenment began promoting secular subjects such as European literature and the natural sciences.
• · Jews were 24-25% of Hungary's university students in 1910-14; in 1920 they were 5.9% of the country's population. Kovács also notes that Jews were about 9% of Vienna's residents but about a quarter of its students, and about 5% of Berlin's residents but about 30% of its students.
• · The Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901, a generation after Central European emancipation.
• · Volkov found that antisemitism pushed German Jewish scientists toward subdisciplines that seemed marginal at the time, a position she argues helped them make breakthroughs.

Caveats

• · The argument rests mainly on chronology. Emancipation arrived together with urbanization and migration, and researchers note how little the non-economic explanations have been directly tested.
• · Equality was fragile and uneven: Tsarist Russia never granted it, new quotas followed in Russia in 1887 and Hungary in 1920, and Nazi Germany began reversing it in 1933.

Evidence

• · Zuckerman found that 48 of the 92 laureates who did their prize-winning work in the United States by 1972 had worked as students, postdoctoral fellows or junior colleagues of older laureates.
• · Economist Richard Tol traced 696 of 727 laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics to one academic family tree.
• · A study of nearly 40,000 scientists found that training under a mentor who later won a major prize was associated with a two- to four-fold higher chance of the protégé winning prizes, joining the National Academy of Sciences or becoming a superstar, compared with matched protégés.
• · Waldinger found that the 1933-34 dismissals hurt PhD students left behind: better faculty raised students' chances of publishing in top journals and of becoming full professors.
• · Physicist Melvin Schwartz, a Bronx High School of Science graduate, recalled that Columbia's physics department, largely built by I. I. Rabi, housed six pieces of Nobel-winning work in the thirteen years after he arrived in 1949 and hosted about half a dozen more future laureates as students or postdoctoral researchers.

Caveats

• · Mentorship effects apply to all laureates, so they amplify whatever brought a group into top laboratories rather than explaining the initial gap.
• · Networks also excluded Jews: Volkov found German Jewish scientists' careers often blocked, and elite American universities limited Jewish admissions for decades.
• · Tol finds that the concentration of laureates within academic family trees has fallen over time.

Evidence

• · Volkov found that antisemitism often blocked German Jewish scientists' careers, and that even equally distinguished Jewish scientists tended to end up in less prestigious, less powerful posts than their non-Jewish peers.
• · In 1920 Hungary, Jews held 4.9% of civil-service graduate posts but made up about 46% of doctors and 49% of lawyers.
• · Chiswick's analysis of US PhDs from 1950 to 2004 is consistent with discrimination against Jews easing earlier in college and university teaching than in other salaried professions.
• · From the 1920s, Harvard, Yale and Princeton adopted 'character'-based admissions largely to limit Jewish enrolment; Yale held Jews to about 10-12% of each entering class until the early 1960s.
• · Russia's 1887 rules limited Jewish students to 10% of places in the Pale of Settlement, 5% elsewhere and 3% in St Petersburg and Moscow.

Caveats

• · The same prejudice that closed other careers also closed many academic ones, through student quotas and blocked promotions, so the net push toward science is hard to measure.
• · Chiswick's evidence covers the United States after 1950 and identifies Jews by distinctive surnames, which is only an approximation.

Evidence

• · Nearly a quarter of Budapest's population was Jewish, 25-28% of its university students were Jewish, and about 85% of Hungary's university students studied in the capital.
• · Waldinger reports that the 1933-34 dismissals hit the best German mathematics departments hardest: Göttingen lost almost 60% of its mathematics faculty and Berlin almost 40%.
• · Of the 37 Jewish laureates educated in New York City (as of 2012), 10 earned bachelor's degrees at Columbia; the article attributes this clustering to Harvard, Princeton and Yale accepting only a small Jewish presence until the 1960s.
• · East European Jewish immigrants to the United States settled mainly in cities, clustering near downtown districts.
• · About 70% of the institutions that produced Nobel-winning work are universities, and North America and Europe each have more than 300 such institutions.

Caveats

• · Concentration in cities is largely a product of other factors on this list, such as urban history and migration, rather than a separate cause.
• · The clustering of prize-producing institutions has eased slightly over the past decade.
• · The New York figures come from a 2012 newspaper count, not a peer-reviewed tally.

Evidence

• · Chad and Brym examined a century of change in the ethnic make-up of University of Toronto medical graduates and presented the pattern as consistent with their opportunity theory and inconsistent with the genetic and cultural theories, whose causes change too slowly to explain rapid rises and declines.
• · Chiswick found the Jewish share of new US PhDs began falling among men in the 1950s, and among women after about 1979.
• · Harvard, Yale and Princeton moved toward more open admissions in the 1960s and 1970s, although parts of the older system survived.
• · In a 2008 essay, cultural historian Sander Gilman attributed the recent fall in Jewish applications to US medical schools to American Jews' middle-class career choices rather than to any change in ability.

Caveats

• · Chad and Brym say their evidence is consistent with the theory but that a rigorous test is beyond the scope of their study.
• · One Canadian medical school may not represent Nobel-level science as a whole.
• · Chad and Brym note that any decline would not yet show among Nobel laureates, who are usually honoured late in life for work done when young, so the theory's prediction for the prizes themselves cannot yet be checked.