Of the 965 individual recipients of the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences between 1901 and 2025, at least 220 have been Jews or people with at least one Jewish parent, representing 22% of all recipients. Jews constitute only 0.2% of the world's population, meaning their share of winners is 110 times their proportion of the world's population.
Jews have been awarded all six of the Nobel Foundation's awards:
Adolf von Baeyer, recipient of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was Jewish on his mother's side and is considered the first Jewish awardee.
Jewish laureates Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész survived the extermination camps during the Holocaust. François Englert survived by being hidden in orphanages and children's homes. Others, such as Hans Bethe, Walter Kohn, Otto Stern, Albert Einstein, Hans Krebs and Martin Karplus, fled 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.
Chemistry
Physiology or Medicine
Physics
Literature
Economics
Peace
Forced to decline prize
Jewish laureates per country
Below is a chart of all Jewish Nobel laureates per country, updated to include 2025 laureates.<br>
- <small>Some laureates are counted more than once if they are citizens of more than one country.</small>
- <small>The column labelled "Percent of laureates" is the percentage of a country's total number of Jewish Nobel prize winners, i.e. a value of 100% means that every person from that country who won a Nobel prize was a Jew. As of 2025, the value for Israel is 100% which is not surprising given that the population is approximately 80% Jewish. The value for Bulgaria is also 100% because there has been one person who won a Nobel prize (and that person was a Jew). In contrast, there was only one Jewish laureate from Argentina, but the percent of Jewish laureates is 20% because there were a total of five laureates from Argentina.</small>
Nobel Laureates Boulevard
The Israeli city of Rishon LeZion has an avenue dedicated to honoring all Jewish Nobel laureates. Tayelet Hatanei Pras Nobel ("Nobel Laureates Boulevard/Promenade") has a monument with attached plaque for each Nobel laureate. The scientific adviser of the project was Prof. Israel Hanukoglu.
See also
References
Further reading
- Charpa, Ulrich; Deichmann, Ute. (eds.) (2007). Jews and Sciences in German Contexts: Case Studies From the 19th and 20th Centuries, Mohr Siebeck, pp. 23âÂÂ25.
- Feldman, Burton (2001). The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige, Arcade Publishing, pp. 407âÂÂ10.
- Julius, Anthony (1995). T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, Cambridge University Press, p. 266.
- Lazarus, William P.; Sullivan, Mark. (2008). Comparative Religion For Dummies, Wiley Publishing, p. 45.
- Levitan, Tina (1960). The Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel prize, Twayne Publishers (New York).
- Patai, Raphael (1996). The Jewish Mind, Wayne State University Press, pp. 339âÂÂ42.
- Rubinstein, W. D. (1982). The Left, the Right and the Jews, Croom Helm, p. 63.
- Scharfstein, Sol (1999). Understanding Jewish Holidays and Customs: Historical and Contemporary, KTAV Publishing House, p. 168.
- Weiss, Mosheh (2004). A Brief History of the Jewish People, Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 216âÂÂ17.
- Zuckerman, Harriet (1996). Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States, Transaction Publishers, originally publishing in 1977, pp. 71âÂÂ78.
External links