List of Jewish Nobel laureates

 

 

Sign on Nobel Laureates Boulevard in Rishon LeZion saluting Jewish Nobel laureates

 

Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 900 individuals, of whom at least 20% were Jews although the Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world's population. Various theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, which has received considerable attention. Israeli academics Dr. Elay Ben-Gal and Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, curious about the phenomenon, started to form an encyclopedia of Jewish Nobel laureates and interview as many as possible about their life and work.

Jews have been recipients of all six awards. The first Jewish recipient, Adolf von Baeyer, was awarded the prize in Chemistry in 1905. As of 2019, the most recent Jewish recipient was economics laureate Michael Kremer.

Jewish laureates Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész survived the extermination camps during the Holocaust, while François Englert survived by being hidden in orphanages and children's homes. Others, such as Walter Kohn, Otto Stern, Albert Einstein, Hans Krebs and Martin Karplus had to flee Nazi Germany to avoid persecution. Still others, including Rita Levi-Montalcini, Herbert Hauptman, Robert Furchgott, Arthur Kornberg, and Jerome Karle experienced significant antisemitism in their careers.

Arthur Ashkin, a 96-year-old American Jew was, at the time of his award, the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize.

1. Robert John Aumann
   War and Peace
   

2. Hans Albrecht Bethe
   Energy Production in Stars
   

3. Konrad Emil Bloch
   The biological synthesis of cholesterol
   

4. Felix Bloch
   The Principle of Nuclear Induction
   

5. Niels Henrik David Bohr
   The structure of the atom
   

6. Max Born
   The Statistical Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics
   

7. Sir Ernst Boris Chain
   The chemical structure of the penicillins
   

8. Albert Einstein
   Fundamental ideas and problems of the theory of relativity
   

9. Richard Phillips "Dick" Feynman
   The development of the space-time view of quantum electrodynamics
   

10. James Franck
    Transformations of kinetic energy of free electrons into excitation energy of atoms by impacts
    

11. Vitaly Ginzburg
    On Superconductivity and Superfluidity
    

12. Fritz Haber
    The synthesis of ammonia from its elements
    

13. Bernard Katz
    On the quantal mechanism of neural transmitter release
    

14. Fritz Albert Lipmann
    Development of the acetylation problem: a personal account
    

15. Otto Fritz Meyerhof
    Energy conversions in muscle
    

16. Albert A. Michelson
    Recent advances in spectroscopy
    

17. Paul Ehrlich
    Partial cell functions
    

18. Wolfgang Ernst Pauli
    Exclusion principle and quantum mechanics
    

19. Otto Stern
    The method of molecular rays
    

20. Eugene Wigner
    Events, Laws of Nature, and Invariance Principles
    

21. Richard Martin Willstätter
    On plant pigments
    

22. Julius Axelrod
    Noradrenaline: fate and control of its biosynthesis
    

23. Gerty Theresa Cori
    Polysaccharide phosphorylase
    

24. George de Hevesy
    Some applications of isotopic indicators
    

25. Rita Levi-Montalcini
    The nerve growth factor: thirty-five years later
    

26. Emilio Gino Segrè
    Properties of antinucleons
    

27. Selman Abraham Waksman
    Streptomycin: background, isolation, properties, and utilization
    

28. Otto Wallach
    Alicyclic compounds