How over-represented, and how sure can we be?

Naive ratio

117×

1. 1. Share of laureates: 223 ÷ 990 = 22.53%
2. 2. Share of the world today: 15.7 million ÷ 8.14 billion = 0.193%
3. 3. Ratio: 22.53% ÷ 0.193% = 117×

Time-weighted ratio (the one we use)

61×

1. 1. For each of the 995 individual awards, take the Jewish share of the world in that year (for example about 0.74% in 1930, 0.20% in 2020).
2. 2. Add them up: 3.7 expected Jewish laureates if prizes tracked population.
3. 3. Ratio: 223 observed ÷ 3.7 expected = 61×

Baruch Aba Shalev, 100 Years of Nobel Prizes (2003)

1901-2000

• Christian (all denominations)65.7% · 430
• Jewish21.1% · 138
• Atheist, agnostic or freethinker10.4% · 68
• Buddhist1.1% · 7
• Muslim0.8% · 5
• Hindu0.5% · 3
• Other (one each: Brahmin, Neo-Pagan, Shinto)0.5% · 3

Counts come from Shalev's Table 21A, which sorts the 654 laureates into 27 religious labels (the text speaks of 28 religions); shares are each count divided by 654. Shalev's total of 654 is lower than the Nobel Foundation's own record for 1901-2000, which lists 700 prizes to 696 individuals (by category: physics 162, chemistry 135, physiology or medicine 172, literature 97, peace 88, economics 46). His table is short by 46 awards. Every category has a gap, the biggest in physics (147 against 162) and, relative to size, in economics (38 against 46). The chapter does not explain it. The shares here are computed on his 654, not on the full list. The Christian figure adds every Christian denomination in the table, including 3 Quakers and 7 Unitarians, for 430 (65.7%); Shalev's text and pie chart say 65.4%. His text also gives 10.5% for atheists, agnostics and freethinkers, while those table rows add up to 68 (10.4%). The gaps are small inconsistencies within the book itself. 'Other' is one laureate each labelled Brahmin, Neo-Pagan and Shinto; Shalev lists 'Brahmin' separately from 'Hindu'. Shalev gives each person one label from biographical sources and does not explain his rules. The labels describe background or identity, not belief: Wikipedia's summary of the book notes that several laureates who called themselves atheists, such as Richard Feynman and Milton Friedman, appear under 'Jewish'. The book twice gives Jews as 0.02% of the world's population (in the text and in Table 21C). That figure is wrong by a factor of ten: Shalev's own numbers (14 million Jews, and 1.2 billion Muslims described as 20% of humanity) put the Jewish share at about 0.2%. The book also floats speculative explanations for the Jewish share, including a genetic one. This site uses only Shalev's counts, does not endorse those explanations, and makes no genetic claims.

Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States (1977)

1901-1972

• Protestant72.0%
• Jewish27.0% · 19
• Catholic1.0%

Science prizes only, and only laureates chosen by 1972 who did their prize-winning work in the United States. 'Religious origin' means the religion of the family a laureate grew up in, not personal belief. Adding the 21 laureates raised abroad (92 in all), Zuckerman reports about two-thirds from Protestant families, 28% from Jewish families and just under 5% from Catholic families. Her comparisons: about two-thirds of Americans were raised Protestant; the Catholic share among these laureates was about one twenty-fifth of the Catholic share of Americans; the Jewish share was about nine times the Jewish share of the US population, but about three times the Jewish share of American university faculty, a more comparable group.

Weijia Zhang and Robert G. Fuller, Physics Education (1998)

1901-1990

• Christian background60.0%
• Jewish or Jewish background24.0%
• No affiliation or another religion16.0%

Physics only. The paper gives rounded percentages, not counts. Religion was taken from a single reference book (Schlessinger and Schlessinger, The Who's Who of Nobel Prize Winners, 1990), and the authors describe religious belief as the hardest item in their database to judge. John Bardeen, who won the physics prize twice, is counted once among the 139.