Small Country, Big Prizes: The Nobel Laureates of Israel
A nation of under ten million people has stacked up one of the highest Nobel-per-capita counts on Earth. Here is the full roll call.
Israel declared independence in 1948 with a population smaller than modern Berlin's. Within a single lifetime it accumulated roughly a dozen Nobel laureates — depending on how dual citizens are counted — one of the highest tallies per capita of any nation on Earth. Here is the complete roll call, and the pattern hiding inside it.
Literature and peace: the first wave
- Shmuel Yosef Agnon opened the account in 1966, sharing the Literature prize for fiction that carried the Hebrew language into modernism.
- Menachem Begin shared the 1978 Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat for the Camp David Accords — the treaty with Egypt that still holds.
- Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres shared the 1994 Peace Prize with Yasser Arafat for the Oslo Accords. Within fourteen months, Rabin had been assassinated by an Israeli extremist — the prize and the murder now inseparable in the country's memory.
The scientific golden age
Then the sciences erupted, in what Israelis call the "decade of chemistry":
- Daniel Kahneman (Economic Sciences, 2002) — the psychologist who never took an economics course, honoured for mapping the biases of human judgment; his book Thinking, Fast and Slow became a global phenomenon.
- Robert Aumann (Economic Sciences, 2005) — game theory and the mathematics of long-run cooperation.
- Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko (Chemistry, 2004) — the first Israeli science laureates, for discovering the ubiquitin system, the cell's protein-disposal service, at the Technion in Haifa.
- Ada Yonath (Chemistry, 2009) — the first Israeli woman laureate, for mapping the ribosome atom by atom after two decades of work that colleagues openly called impossible.
- Dan Shechtman (Chemistry, 2011) — for quasicrystals, a discovery so heretical that the chemistry establishment, led by double laureate Linus Pauling, ridiculed it for years. "There is no such thing as quasicrystals," Pauling had scoffed, "only quasi-scientists." The quasi-scientist got the last word.
- Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt (Chemistry, 2013, with Martin Karplus) — for putting chemistry inside computers; both hold Israeli citizenship among others, work begun at the Weizmann Institute.
"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."
— Daniel Kahneman
What the pattern says
Two things stand out. First, concentration: nearly all the science prizes trace to three institutions — the Technion, the Weizmann Institute and the Hebrew University — in a country one can drive across in a day. Second, stubbornness as a national research style: Yonath's ribosome, Shechtman's forbidden crystals and Kahneman's assault on economic rationality were all, at first, minority positions held against ridicule.
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A record still growing
The tally may not be finished. Israeli universities currently rank among the world leaders in per-capita scientific output, and the fields where the country concentrates — structural biology, computational chemistry, behavioural science — are exactly the ones the committees have rewarded before. For a nation whose entire history fits inside a single Nobel century, the roll call above reads less like a closed list than a running scoreboard.
The wider club
The list above counts citizens of the state; the larger story of Jewish scientists' outsized Nobel share — roughly a fifth of all science laureates — extends far beyond one country's borders and belongs to the global history of the twentieth century.
For another small nation punching far above its weight in the history of genius, see our companion tour of the most remarkable minds Portugal ever produced.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Nobel laureates does Israel have?
Roughly a dozen, depending on how dual citizens are counted — one of the highest per-capita tallies of any country.
Who was Israel's first Nobel laureate?
The writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who shared the 1966 Literature prize.
Which institutions produced Israel's science Nobels?
Nearly all trace to three: the Technion in Haifa, the Weizmann Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.