The following essay about Jews and Science was written by Gabriel Brazil, a middle schooler, enrolled in City Congregation’s Bar/Bat Mitzvah program. Students spend a year and a half researching their heritage, values and beliefs, and write on a Jewish subject of their choice, their major project; an example of this last component can be seen below. The process improves both the student’s writing and critical thinking skills, as well as his/her self confidence and overall maturity.
What is a scientist? A scientist is someone who asks questions, makes observations, and thinks logically about the universe. In the big picture, 90% of all scientists who have ever lived are alive today. This is because experimental science is relatively new.
Many people have observed that Jews are overrepresented in science. I wanted to learn more about the work of Jewish scientists who have made important contributions to the world and explore the question of why Jews are attracted to and succeed in science. According to Wikipedia, Jews have won 23% of all Nobel prizes prior to 2020.
Is there an early link between Judaism and science? Often, the origin of science is linked to the ancient Greeks, but some Greek writers wrote that their science and philosophy stemmed from Jewish sources.
A Greek writer named Vettius, from the 2nd century, recognized Abraham as an astrological authority who taught the Egyptians and Phoenecians. Some scholars said that the biblical forefathers knew all that was worth knowing in every field; but after the destruction of the temple, all of that knowledge was lost. This opinion shows the importance of secular knowledge to early Judaism and proved the justification by some Jewish authorities for the study of science and philosophy.
Jews also played a role in linking science from the Islamic world to science in Europe.
Numerous Jewish scholars, translated geometry, physics, medicine and astronomy from Arabic into Latin, Spanish, and French. Jewish thought seemed less hostile to science and rationalism compared to other religions at the time.
An example of this rational approach is Maimonides, who rejected astrology and magic even though most of his contemporaries considered these to be part of the scientific body of knowledge. Maimonides, was born in 1138 in Cordoba and was a scholar, but also a physician working in Morocco and Egypt. He created the thirteen volume Mishneh Torah, but he also figured prominently in the history of Islamic science.
Many Jewish scholars accepted the Copernican model in 1630 that the sun is at the center of the universe, and the earth moves around the sun. An important Jewish scholar, Joseph Delmedigo, a student of Galileo, had accepted the Copernican model when the rest of the scientific world had not yet done so. In his book, Elim, he said that “the arguments of Copernicus are so strong, that only an imbecile will not accept them”. Still, some Jews, and most Christians rejected the model because it contradicted the bible.
Another example of a radical Jewish thinker was Baruch Spinoza, who was born in 1632, in Amsterdam, and was part of the 17th century Enlightenment. He developed controversial ideas about the bible and the nature of god. By the time he turned 22, the Jewish authorities had expelled and shunned him from the community. Despite this rejection, he was influential in western philosophy.
Now I’m going to tell you about three Jewish scientists, who I admire: Chaim Weizman, Albert Einstein, and Rosalind Franklin, who made important contributions to the world.
Chaim Weizmann was born in 1874 in Russia; he studied biochemistry in Germany and Switzerland and then emigrated to Manchester, England in 1905. He is considered to be the father of industrial fermentation and developed a process for producing acetone from bacteria. Weizmann’s process relied on the use of a bacteria, now known as the Weizmann organism, to ferment maize. In the early years of WW1, Britain faced a severe shortage of acetone, needed for arms manufacture. In 1915, Weizmann met Winston Churchill, who asked him to make 30,000 tons of acetone, and by 1917, his process was producing 3,000 tons of acetone a year.
However, maize was needed for food, so Weizmann came up with the idea of using horse chestnuts, also known as conkers, which are still used today by British kids in a playground game.
The importance of Weizmann’s work gave him favor in the eyes of the British Government. This standing allowed Weizmann to have access to senior Cabinet members and he used this opportunity to represent Zionist hopes. This ultimately led to the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in which the British Government favored, “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Weizmann loved Britain, but he relentlessly pursued Jewish freedom and the founding of the State of Israel.
Weizmann saw great promise in science as a means to bring peace and prosperity. “I trust and feel sure in my heart that science will bring to this land both peace and a renewal of its youth, creating here the springs of a new spiritual and material life. I speak of both science for its own sake and science as a means to an end.”
Weizmann founded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Sieff Research Institute in Rehovot, which later became the prestigious Weizmann Institute. He was elected the first president of Israel after its founding.
An even more famous Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein was born and raised in 1879 in Germany, but completed his schooling in Switzerland. He came from a non-religious Jewish family, who clearly valued science. His father knew of the tradition of inviting a yeshiva boCHuh for dinner every Friday night, but instead he invited a medical student every Thursday night to talk with his son. Einstein studied physics and maths, eventually becoming a patent examiner in Berlin. While at the Patent Office, Einstein began thinking about the inconsistencies in current physics theories, and it led him to develop the theory of relativity.
In 1905, his miracle year, he published four groundbreaking papers in various areas of fundamental physics, including the famous equation E = mc2, all of which gained the attention of the academic world. That year, at the age of 26, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. In 1916, Einstein extended his ideas to include gravity and in 1917, he applied these ideas to understanding the structure of the universe. He also worked on theories in particle physics and laid the foundations of the photon theory.
Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1921, and he received many other academic awards throughout his life. Initially, many established physicists had been skeptical of Einstein’s theories. While this doubt was based, in part, on the radical nature of his ideas, in Germany, there was also an anti-Jewish element to some of the criticism.
In particular, two German Nobel laureates in physics, Philip Lenard and Yohan Stark, claimed that Einstein’s ideas were linked to a Jewish way of thinking and doing science, which they named ‘Jewish Physics’. Lenard criticized the theory of relativity as early as 1910, but it was not until the 1920s that his attacks began to incorporate explicitly racial elements, probably fueled by personal resentment at Einstein’s success. He wrote a four-volume treatise in support of what he called “German Physics”, which shunned the sorts of more abstract thinking that Einstein and others had used to such great effect. During the 1930s, these ideas and the rising anti-Semitism that fueled them became a worry for Einstein, then living in Berlin.
In 1933, Einstein came to the United States, welcomed by large crowds when he arrived in New York. He took a job at Princeton University and became an American citizen in 1940.
At the outbreak of the second world war, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, in which he advocated for the US development of, “extremely powerful bombs of a new type”, which eventually led to the Manhattan Project. But ultimately, he signed what became known as the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, with British philosopher Bertrand Russell, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was a member of the NAACP, drawing comparisons between black people in America and Jewish people in Germany. He believed racism was a disease.
In 1952, after the death of Chaim Weizmann, Einstein was invited to become President of Israel, but he declined, saying that he was honored, but he only dealt with objective matters and had no experience in dealing with people and official functions. Einstein was a Jewish humanist and the father of modern physics.
The final scientist I have learned about is Rosalind Franklin who was born in 1920, in London, into an influential Jewish family, some of whom held British government positions.
Her Great Uncle, Herbert Samuel, was a Zionist and strong supporter of Chaim Weizmann. Her family took in two refugee children from the Kindertransport during WW2.
Franklin studied at Newnham College, Came-bridge, and graduated in 1941. She then worked for The British Coal Research Association researching the structure of coal and developing carbon fiber technology, earning a Ph.D. in 1945.
She went to Paris in 1947 as a post-doctoral researcher, to the lab of Jacques Mering, where she became an accomplished X-ray crystallographer.
X-ray crystallography is a way to see the three-dimensional structure of a molecule. The electron cloud of an atom bends the X-rays, creating a scattering pattern which is used to work out the arrangement of atoms inside a crystal.
She returned to King’s College London in 1951 and worked on X-ray diffraction studies, which would eventually facilitate the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. As a woman and a Jew, Franklin felt unwelcome at King’s College – for example, the women scientists were not allowed to eat lunch in the same common room as the men. Anti-Semitism and sexism were also factors in some criticism of her work.
In James Watson’s book, The Double Helix, Franklin is described as a difficult woman who was unwilling to share her research. She’s characterized as a complainer and her appearance and clothes are criticized.
After two years at King’s College, disagreements with her boss, John Randall, and with her colleague Maurice Wilkins, compelled her to move to Birkbeck College in London, bringing her work on DNA to an end.
But her work became crucial in understanding the structure of DNA, in particular, what became known as Photograph 51. Wilkins shared this photograph, with Cambridge researchers James Watson and Frances Crick, who realized from her clear evidence that DNA was a double helix. Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in 1962; Franklin was left out.
Franklin continued at Birkbeck, doing pioneering work on the molecular structures of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus and Poliovirus. She laid the foundation for the field of structural biology, and one of her lab members, Aaron Klug, continued her research, winning a Nobel Prize in 1982. Tragically, she died very young in 1958 at age 37 of ovarian cancer. Her work launched new fields of study and was directly responsible for two Nobel Prizes.
Franklin was a humanist. Her mother said that she refused to believe in the existence of God, and remarked, “Well, anyway, how do you know that He isn’t She?” In 1940 she wrote to her father telling him she did not believe in a creator. She told him: “Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated”. But despite not believing in god, she told her sister that she was “always consciously a Jew”.
Why are Jews overrepresented in science? Opinions divide into either being related to religious teaching or to Jewish culture. Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman argues that Judaism is based on studying and engaging in biblical texts but not stopping at face value. If there was a choice between something being a miracle or being the result of a thoughtful and reasoned argument, thought would always win. Critical thinking is deeply rooted in Jewish religious tradition.
We all know that Jews like to question. For example, a Jew would ask: “why is this bar mitzvah different from all other bar mitzvahs”?! Judaism is obsessed with questions, which naturally makes science an attractive field to Jews.
Jonathan Sacks, the former UK chief rabbi, said that another reason Judaism and science are connected, is Judaism’s profound sense that the universe is understandable.
According to Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, god wrote two books, one called Torah and one called Nature, therefore they can’t contradict each other. If one wants to learn about god, they first must study nature. He said it was a religious obligation for Jews to understand the world. Learning and innovation have always been important. Rabbis were encouraged to compete with each other to come up with new ideas.
But there are counter arguments. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Jewish society grew suspicious of scientific activity. Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret, known as Rashba, declared a ban on secular learning for anyone under 25. But even Rashba must have felt the pressure from Jewish parents to have a doctor in the family, and he allowed the study of medicine! Clearly the study of science is something that Jews started in more recent history. Perhaps there are cultural reasons rather than religious reasons that Jews study science.
Before the Jewish emancipation of the 18th century, Jews were prohibited from owning land. They often chose intellectual professions, but not all professions were open to them in the hostile world in which they lived. But science was permitted because it was a new area, there were not yet rules against Jewish participation. This may help explain why Jews were attracted to science.
The Jewish enlightenment also changed the way Jews lived and the knowledge that was accessible to Jewish society. Perhaps the limitations before this time led to an increase of passion for knowledge. A new secular Jewish elite developed a desire for science, challenging the traditional structure of Jewish society and culture.
The position of Jews in society also led to a sense of skepticism according to the great American sociologist Thor Stine Veb-lin. He said that being pariahs fostered skepticism of conventional wisdom, something that would serve them well as scientists.
Science, at its best, is a meritocracy, in which the most correct idea wins, and this in itself was attractive to Jews trying to make it as a minority group, in some cases as immigrants.
In conclusion, in my opinion, Jews have a cultural attachment to science, which my family holds, and has been passed down to me. A lot of my family members are involved in scientific fields, and I hope to pursue a career in this field also. Today, there are fewer barriers for Jews, making it easier to take a wider variety of jobs. Will Jews still continue to be interested in science?
Either way, the world has serious problems, so we need as many scientists as possible to solve them.
