On this day: the first Nobel Prizes are awarded

The novelist Saul Bellow won it in 1976, two years before Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. Five years after the peace prize was awarded to human rights activist Rene Cassin, it was given to President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for bringing about a ceasefire in Vietnam.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel won in 1986, while economists Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz won in 1976 and 2001 respectively.

Others who were known in their fields but less familiar to those outside them, have taken the accolade over the years. And although men have taken the majority of Nobel prizes, many Jewish women have been given them; the list includes the German Holocaust-poet Nelly Sachs, South African antiapartheid campaigner Nadine Gordimer and for chemistry, Ada Yonath of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science.

What the Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks wrote in the JC: A mere fifth of a per cent of the population of the world, Jews have produced 39 per cent of Nobel Prize winners in economics, 26 per cent in physics, 28 per cent in medicine, nine winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and 47 per cent of world chess champions. It is an unparalleled achievement, so much so that a former editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, wrote that "any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all".

See more from the JC archives here.