The website Algemeinor declares:
| “ | The usually self-assured biologist, author and atheist Richard Dawkins expressed his bewilderment at the disproportionate amount of Nobel prizes won by Jews in a recent interview with the New Republic, saying he is “intrigued by” the “phenomenally high” number of Jewish laureates...
Asked why he thought it is that Jews have won so many Nobel Prizes, Dawkins was forthright with his uncertainty. “I haven’t thought it through. I don’t know. But I don’t think it is a minor thing; it is colossal. I think more than 20 percent of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews.” According to the Jewish Virtual Library, since the Nobel was first awarded in 1901 approximately 193 of the 855 honorees have been Jewish (22%). Jews make up less than 0.2% of the global population. This year 6 of 12 laureates were Jewish. The 13th laureate, for the Nobel Peace Prize, was awarded to an organization and not an individual.[1] |
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Botticini and Eckstein on Jewish intellectual achievements
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch said relating to the history of the Jews: "The primacy of the Torah required literacy and learning of everyone. Henceforth, leadership would be determined by study rather than birth."[2]
According to Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein:
| “ | ...in the world of almost universal illiteracy back 2,000 years, the Jewish religious leadership — the rabbis and scholars in the academies in Judea and Galilee — required each Jewish individual, child or adult, rich or poor, farmer or merchant, to learn to read and study the Torah. Instead of restricting learning, study and knowledge to a small elite, the Jewish religious leadership of that time went exactly in the opposite direction: it pushed Judaism toward making literacy, education and knowledge universal among all Jews. Centuries later, this apparently odd choice of a religious norm became the lever of the economic prosperity and intellectual achievements of the Jews.[3] | ” |