I. I. Rabi's thoughts on the reasons why Jews are over represented among first rate scientists.

[NNadir]

I am an atheist of non-Jewish origins, although as a Long Islander I was very familiar with, and participated in Jewish culture through my best friends and a few of my former lovers. I hope it's OK for me to post here on the following basis (if not let me know):

I've been reading a biography of the nuclear physicist Edward Teller (who was of Jewish origins) and went off on a tangent thinking about I.I. Rabi, the Nobel Laureate physicist also of Jewish origins (but like me an atheist) who despised Teller to the point of saying that the world would be better if Teller had never been born.

Rabi, who in the Oppenheimer movie was played by David Krumholtz, grew up in a very Orthodox family, and was actually born in what was then part of the Russian Empire but is now part of Poland. His family brought him to the United States when he was two years old.

Anyway, I was poking around the internet for Rabi stuff since a part of my career involved (peripherally) nuclear magnetic spin (just NMR stuff) and I came across this piece from American Scholar:

Lunching With Rabi

Subtitle:

An afternoon spent in the company of an illustrious physicist

By Jay Neugeboren | March 22, 2024

A background excerpt, the story from how he came to spend the afternoon with Rabi:

On October 28, 1964, when I was 26 years old and in my first semester as an instructor in Columbia University’s English Department, my father called and asked if I’d read an article in The New York Times that morning about I. I. Rabi. I had not. “Well go and read it,” my father said, “because I. I. Rabi teaches at Columbia, and was born in the shtetl of Rymanow, which is where my parents—your grandparents!—and my six older brothers and sisters were born, so call him and tell him you come from the same shtetl—that you’re landsmen!”

I protested that Professor Rabi was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, and I was just a part-time instructor, but my father would have none of it. “You both went to Columbia,” he said, “and you both teach there, and he was born in Rymanow—where our family comes from—so I don’t see why you can’t call and get together with him.”

My father was a mild-mannered man who rarely insisted on anything. He had failed at several businesses, and it was my mother, a registered nurse, who—to my father’s embarrassment—had always supported our family. I was surprised by his call, and more surprised when he called the next day to urge me once again to contact Professor Rabi, and to express his disappointment in me for not doing what he’d asked...

He sent Rabi a letter through Columbia's inter-department mail and Rabi called him up and invited him to lunch where he asked to dispense with the "Professor stuff" and be called "Izzy."

...I said that my father was the second youngest of nine children from an Orthodox Jewish family, and when the family came to America, they’d lived on the Lower East Side before moving to Brooklyn. Professor Rabi said that, like my father, he’d grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family and had lived on the Lower East Side before moving to Brooklyn...

The conversation eventually went here:

...We discovered that although we both identified proudly as Jewish, were knowledgeable about Jewish history and culture, and valued the moral teachings of Judaism, neither of us believed in God, or held to any beliefs about prayer or ritual.

After we’d talked for a while about Jewish artists and scientists—about Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, George Gershwin and Yehudi Menuhin—he suddenly leaned across the table and, in a whisper, asked why I thought it was that despite centuries of persecution, Jews had excelled out of all proportion to our minuscule fraction of the world’s population.

“Survival of the fittest,” he said quickly in answer to his own question, and when I didn’t immediately agree with him, he said that one couldn’t say what he’d just said too loudly—that of course he didn’t believe Jews were genetically smarter than any other group of people, but because of the persecution we’d suffered, we’d honed what talents and brains we were given to finer points than we might otherwise have done. It was, he said, simple Mendelian arithmetic: Those within the Jewish community who were healthier, stronger, or more clever—or more useful to the rulers of nations we’d lived in because of particular talents—survived in larger number.

I protested, citing the millions of poor, uneducated Eastern European Jews who’d come to America without exceptional skills, yet had brought into being several generations of Jewish Americans who had excelled in remarkable ways. And what about luck? I asked. My points were well-taken, he said, and he quoted Louis Pasteur about chance favoring the prepared mind, and this led him to suggest another element that accounted for our achievements: that we’d always been a nomadic people with a history of being expelled from country after country, and thus had come to value things intangible—reading and study above all—that prepared us for the arrival of good fortune if and when it came, and that this was so because, unlike physical objects and property, our knowledge—what we read, studied, and thought—was transportable and could not be taken from us. “

I'm not Jewish, but the advice sounds very much like that which I gave my sons when they were small, which I put thus: "The secret of life is to be ready for your opportunity when it comes," by which I meant that one should undertake the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, but nonetheless it might prove useful and in any case could never be taken away.

I thought this account was interesting, and thought I'd post a link here.

[chouchou]

1. I've always thought that in plain words, Jewish people just seem to try harder.

I just went to AI.....From AI >>>Throughout history, Jewish people were often barred from owning land or joining trade guilds in Europe and the Middle East. Because they could not rely on physical property or institutional safety nets, they had to rely on education and portable skills. As the saying goes "no one can take your mind from you"

[biophile]

2. The value of education and knowledge

I grew up in WV where there were few Jewish families and I never had any interaction with them in any case, so I knew very little about their culture. But in my career, I worked several years at the Philadelphia Albert Einstein Medical Center and came to know many Jewish people. My biggest observation was that Jewish families valued education and encouraged their children- both male and female (which in my age group was unusual since women were to marry and didn’t need higher learning) to go to college.