Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

Late in the eighteenth century, the United States became a pioneer in granting Jews the same legal rights as everyone else, as a result of the Constitution’s general ban against federal laws that discriminate on the basis of religion. France followed suit after the revolution of 1789, and other nations began easing or eliminating various bans on Jews in various times and places during the nineteenth century. In the wake of these developments, Jews began to flow, and then to flood, into universities. By the 1880s, for example, Jews were 30 percent of all the students at Vienna University.41 The net result in the late nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century, was a relatively sudden proliferation of internationally renowned Jewish figures in many fields, including fields in which Jews were virtually non-existent among the leaders in earlier centuries. From 1870 to 1950, Jews were greatly over-represented among prominent figures in the arts and sciences, relative to their proportion of the population in various European countries and in the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century, with Jews being less than one percent of the world’s population, they received 22 percent of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, 32 percent in medicine and 32 percent in physics.