Tel Aviv, Israel, a 2007 night scene
I have a theory and formula about Jewish success (S). It goes like this: B+H x A=S. “B” stands for the blessing of God which has remained upon the Jews since Bible times. “H” stands for the thousands of years of Hebrew heritage with its great emphasis upon the Bible, learning, languages and community support. “A” stands for the ever-present danger of anti-Semitism. This has goaded the Jewish people, toughened them, given them a determination to gain success and to survive despite all obstacles. There can be no doubt that the constant pressure of anti-Semitism forced the Jews to excel in their chosen fields and caused them to concentrate on disciplines like medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics and other skills that would travel with them when they were suddenly persecuted and forced from one nation to another.
The Jewish understandings gleaned from the Bible no doubt helped them in these complex fields. Gilder says that the Jewish scientists came to reflect an understanding that “the universe rests on a logical coherence that cannot be proven but to which men must commit if they are to create.” (Gilder 81)
Jamie Glazov adds to all this: “Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that, in a world where one of the greatest human desires is to be fed lies, Jews adhere to reality. They have no choice. If they do not perceive and accept reality, then they disarm themselves in the face of the violent extinction which has consistently threatened them for thousands of years.”
THE JEWISH BLESSING
We see in the Bible that the Jewish people were, and continue to be, God’s “chosen people.” In Deuteronomy 7:6 God says of them: “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.” Along with God’s choice comes God’s blessing. In Genesis 12:2-3 God says of Abraham and his heirs: “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
Thus, the Jewish choice and blessing were never to be selfish things. The Jews were chosen for God’s worldwide redemptive purposes. Regarding their blessing, not only would the Jewish people be blessed by God, but they would become a great blessing to all people on the earth. In this short work it would be impossible to even begin to catalogue the blessings conveyed by the Jewish people throughout history. Most important of all, they gave to the nations the concept of the one true God. They gave to the world the Bible and they gave us Jesus our Savior.
In the practical realm the Jews have conveyed to all of us multitudes of blessings. Although the Jews made up less than one-half of one percent of the world’s population, from 1901-1990 they won an astonishing 22 percent of the Nobel Prize awards in science. In the latter part of the century as various prizes were awarded to people of many nations the Jews began to take 29 percent of them. In the 21st century so far the Jews have captured 32 percent or almost a third of all Nobel Prizes. (Gilder 34-35)
Just a quick summary of famous Jewish people on the American scene would include these well-known greats: In the fields of nuclear energy, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Hyman Rickover; in the fields of medicine, Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin; in the fields of music, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Jerome Kern, and Leonard Bernstein; in the fields of entertainment, Woody Allen, Jack Benny, George Burns, Cary Grant, Michael Landon, Steven Spielberg, Barbara Streisand; in the area of TV news, Ted Koppel and Barbara Walters; in the area of cyber achievements, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of the leading web-search site of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded the extremely popular social networking site of Facebook.
THE JEWISH HERITAGE
Obviously the Jewish people have been around a long time. They have survived the rise and fall of hundreds of governments and empires and have substantially participated in many of them. The American author, Mark Twain, once commented on the Jews saying, “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1899) Let’s face it. The Jews have had a several-thousand-year head start on the rest of us. They have had centuries and millennia to build a way of life, a culture that is far superior in many ways to that of most Gentile peoples.
It is likely that rabbinic Judaism from the third-century AD onward helped create a religious culture that was heavily centered upon reading and studying. This promoted both high rates of literacy and high levels of analytical thinking in a world that was mostly illiterate. (Social Perspectives 218-219) From the Bible the Jews had a built-in system of law, government and finance, parts of which were often bequeathed to their various host nations. This common biblical heritage plus customs and the common languages of Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) have bound Jewish people together on a worldwide basis.
In Judaism the family ties are strong and there is a great emphasis upon learning, personal development and success. There is the old story of a Jewish mother who introduced her two young sons in this way: “The doctor is three and the lawyer is two.” The great push toward education and success is clearly reflected in recent US statistics. By the 1970s, Jews had an average of 2.5 more years of education than non-Jews and that gap has persisted. Some 60 percent of Jews are college graduates as compared with 22.4 percent of others. This is reflected in household incomes which have ranged from 142 to 171 percent higher than that of the non-Jews. Jewish listings in Who’s Who run 468 percent higher than the national average. (Sociological Perspectives 209-212).
THE JEWISH ADVANTAGE AND ISRAEL
Until the early 1990s the State of Israel hardly reflected the Jewish potential that we have spoken of. Perhaps the nation was too busy establishing and defending itself for it to focus on other matters. After the financial reforms of the early 90s, and especially with the influx of a million new immigrants, mostly from the former USSR, Israel accelerated rapidly. It is notable that approximately one out of every three of the immigrants from the former USSR was a scientist, engineer, or technician of some sort. (Senor 165) No doubt this immigration wave made it possible for Israel to have more engineers and scientists per capita than any other country in the world. Israel also produces more scientific papers per capita than any other country. (Senor 212)
From what we have said previously, Israel had a great foundation for launching a technical revolution. Already the Jews had had much to do with the development of the quantum theory. Such eminent Jewish physicists as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born and Richard Feynman had already laid the foundations. From the quantum theory would later spring such enterprises as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Google, Sony, and Qualcomm. (Gilder 72)
The key Jewish thinker who would make much of this happen was John von Neumann. Gilder says of him, “Neumann epitomizes the role of the Jews in the twentieth century and foreshadows their role in the twenty-first… He successively imposed his synoptic mastery of abstraction in mathematics, quantum mechanics, nuclear weapons, computer science, game theory, and information theory – all through his charismatic powers of organization and persuasion.” (Gilder 73-74) Gilder calls Neumann “the most practically influential of all the great scientists of the twentieth century.” (Gilder 75)
Gilder points out how every practical computer in the world today bears the stamp of von Neumann, or the “von Neumann architecture” as it is called. His computer model was first built at Princeton and another of his first machines was built at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. (Gilder 84-89) It should have been no surprise that from all this background Israel would spring forward rapidly in computer and cyber development which would dwarf other nations.
“Today, on a per-capita basis, Israel far leads the world in research and technological creativity. Between the years 1991 and 2000, Israel’s annual venture-capital outlays, almost all private, rose nearly sixty fold, from $58 million to $3.3 billion…Israel’s revenues in information technology rose from $1.6 billion in 1991 to $12.5 billion in 2000. By 1999, Israel ranked second only to the United States in invested private equity capital as a share of GDP. With 70 percent of its growth attributable to high-tech ventures, by this measure, Israel went in twenty years from last among all industrial countries to lead the world.” (Gilder 109)
Israel, the tiny Jewish country in the Middle East, now supplies us with many electronic wonders. Much of the pioneering work for this began far back in the 80s when Intel’s branch in Haifa designed the 8088 computer chip. That advance allowed computers to finally fit into homes and offices. The advances continued as Gilder describes it: “Most of Intel’s key products could be stamped ‘Israel Inside’. So could leading routers from Cisco and Juniper Networks, leading disk-drive technologies from Seagate, leading FiOS broadband optics technologies from Verizon, leading Global Positioning Systems (GPS) navigators inside many automobiles, leading imagers in digital cameras, and leading solid state storage devices in iPods, cameras, and smartphones throughout the industry… From Intel’s Israeli design centers emerged several generations of the Pentium microprocessor and the Centrino low-power processor that integrated Wi-Fi wireless capabilities into portable PCs.” (Gilder 113-114 &120)
The researchers and writers Dan Senor and Saul Singer write: “Nothing excites Israelis so much as the idea that something is impossible.” (Gilder 180) These authors, as well as the technology researcher George Gilder, go on to list a number of Israeli distinctions in research, development and finance that are quite astounding. For instance, China’s third-largest social-networking site, used by twenty-five million people, is actually an Israeli start-up called Koolanoo, which means “all of us” in Hebrew. It was founded by an Iraqi immigrant in Israel. (Senor 62) Israel has now invented an ultra-wide-band device that enables its anti-terrorist fighters to actually see through walls and identify threats within. (Gilder101)
By 2005 Israel was the world’s tenth largest producer of nuclear patents.(Gilder 227) Due to its innovation Israel is now the only country in the world whose desert is receding (Senor 113) and the little nation now leads the world in recycling over 70 percent of its waste water. (Senor 111)
In a time of worldwide financial meltdown it is of note there are no bank failures in Israel. (Senor 216) In fact, she can boast of a healthy real estate market and a booming economy. After the US, Israel has more companies listed on the NASDAQ exchange than any other country in the world. (Senor 13)
The “wows!” about little Israel could go on and on in many areas of research, development, finances, and education. In the past the little nation sometimes has been called the “Miracle on the Mediterranean” and that title continues to be even more appropriate today.
When we look carefully at the Jewish people and especially at the people of Israel, it seems that we must resort to that biblical description of long ago found in Deuteronomy 33:29: “Blessed are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord?…”
-Jim Gerrish
George Gilder, The Israel Test, (US: Richard Vigilante Books, 2009)
Jamie Glazov, Why Jews Succeed, Front PageMagazine.com., December 03, 2001.
Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up-Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (NY: Twelve Hachette Book Group, 2009).
Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 50, Issue 2, pp. 209–228, 2007 by Pacific Sociological Association
http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/sop.2007.50.2.209.
Published 2010
Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license