21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

To summarize, although the Jewish emphasis on learning probably made an important contribution to the exceptional success of Jewish scientists, it was Gentile thinkers who laid the groundwork for the achievements of Einstein, Haber, and Freud. The Scientific Revolution wasn’t a Jewish project, and Jews found their place in it only when they moved from the yeshivas to the universities. Indeed, the Jewish habit of seeking the answers to all questions by reading ancient texts was a significant obstacle to Jewish integration into the world of modern science, where answers come from observations and experiments. If there was anything about the Jewish religion itself that necessarily leads to scientific breakthroughs, why is it that between 1905 and 1933 ten secular German Jews won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics, but during the same period not a single ultra-Orthodox Jew or a single Bulgarian or Yemenite Jew won any Nobel Prize? Lest I be suspected of being a “self-hating Jew” or an anti-Semite, I would like to emphasize that I am not saying Judaism is a particularly evil or benighted religion. All I am saying is that it wasn’t particularly important to the history of humankind.