Established by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel in 1895, the Nobel Prize is a set of annual awards bestowed upon individuals in recognition of cultural and/or scientific advances in six categories – Literature, Chemistry, Economics, Physics, World Peace, and Medicine.

Between 1901 and 2024, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to more than 1000 individuals and organizations. At least 226 of them have been to people who are believed to be Jewish or raised Jewish.

Israel has produced a disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners. In August 2015, Times Higher Education ranked Israel the fifth best performer this century based on the number of Nobel Prizes won as well as the significance and prestige of each one. The publication also ranked global universities based on Nobel Prize winners and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology placed eighth, higher on the list than Harvard and every British University.

Adolf Hitler forbade any Germans to accept the Nobel Prize after the 1935 Peace Prize was awarded to one of his political enemies, the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky.

Literature

1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak ^
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon#
Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
2001 - Imre Kertesz
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek*
2005 - Harold Pinter
2016 - Bob Dylan
2020 - Louise Gluck

Yitzhak Rabin (right) and Shimon Peres accept the 1994 Nobel Prize in World Peace

Medicine and Physiology

Peace

1911 - Alfred Fried
Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin#
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres#
Yitzhak Rabin#
1995 - Joseph Rotblat

Israeli mathematician Robert Israel Aumann
(second from right) accepts the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics

Economics

1970 - Paul Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Arrow
1973 - Wassily Leontief
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Robert Fogel
1994 - John Harsanyi
Reinhard Selten *
1997 - Myron Scholes
Robert Merton *
2001 - Joseph Stiglitz
George A. Akerlof
2002 - Daniel Kahneman#
2005 - Robert Israel Aumann#
2007 - Leonid Hurwicz
Eric Maskin
Roger Myerson
2008 - Paul Krugman
2009 - Elinor Ostrom *
2010 - Peter Diamond
2012 - Alvin Roth
2016 - Oliver Hart
2018 - William Nordhaus
2019 - Michael Kremer
2020 - Paul Milgrom
2021 - Joshua Angrist#
2022 - Ben Bernanke
2023 - Claudia Goldin
2025 - Joel Mokyr

Chemistry

1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1910 - Otto Wallach *
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 - William Howard Stein
Christian Anfinsen °
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Herbert Hauptman
Jerome Karle
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
1994 - George Olah
1996 - Harold Kroto *
1998 - Walter Kohn
2000 - Alan Heeger
2004 - Avram Hershko#
Aaron Ciechanover#
Irwin Rose
2006 - Roger Kornberg
2008 - Martin Chalfie
2009 - Ada Yonath#
2011 - Daniel Schechtman#
2012 - Robert Lefkowitz
2013 - Michael Levitt#
Arieh Warshel#
Martin Karplus
2024 - David Baker

Israeli Dan Schechtman (left) accepts the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

American Saul Perlmutter poses with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

Physics

1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
Gustav Hertz
1943 - Otto Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1945 - Wolfgang Pauli
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
Il'ja Mikhailovich Frank
1959 - Emilio Segrè
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1963 - Eugene Wigner
1965 - Richard Feynman
Julian Schwinger
1967 - Hans Bethe
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1972 - Leon Cooper
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Penzias
Pyotr Kapitsa
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
Sheldon Glashow
1981 - Arthur Schawlow *
1987 - K. Alexander Muller
1988 - Leon Lederman
Melvin Schwartz
Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1992- Georges Charpak
1995 - Martin Perl
Fredrick Reines
1996 - Douglas D. Osheroff *
David M. Lee
1997 - Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
2000 - Zhores I. Alferov
2003 - Vitaly Ginzburg
Alexei A. Abrikosov
2004 - H. David Politzer
David Gross
2005 - Roy Glauber
2011 - Saul Perlmutter
Adam Riess
2012 - Serge Haroche
2013 - Francois Englert
2016 - J. Michael Kosterlitz
2017 - Rainer Weiss
Barry C. Barish
2018 - Arthur Ashkin
2020 - Roger Penrose**

Notes:
^ - Pasternak was forced to decline the prize by the Soviet Union.
* - Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
° - Anfinsen converted to Judaism later in life; Cori converted to Roman Catholicism.
** - Considers himself an atheist.
# - Israeli

Jewish Nobel Prize Laureates