Lord Snow Defends Remark on Jewish Success Against Criticism by Education Minister

Lord Snow, the British scientist and writer, has come under attack for a suggestion he made in New York earlier this month that Jews may have a genetically superior endowment than other people. Lord Snow delivered the remark at founders’ day exercises at the New York school of Hebrew Union-College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the seminary of Reform Judaism. British Education Minister Edward Short described it as "a completely spurious doctrine, reminiscent of Dr. Goebbels."

Lord Snow disclosed here Friday that he had received "a stack of paranoid and obscene letters from people accusing me of being in the pay of Jews." He said he resented any suggestion that he was racist and added, "I do say that certain groups of people have a higher average genetic endowment–the Jews, judged by the crude test of their number of Nobel Prize winners, are a case in point." Lord Snow added that he was prepared to go to an all-black seminary in Alabama "and say that if you look at the list of Olympic gold medallists, it is clear that the Negro race is disproportionately talented in…racing and the long jump."

Lord Snow’s controversial remark was in answer to a rhetorical question he posed in his address at the HUC-JIR gathering: "Why have the Jews been so successful?" He noted that at no time could the world’s Jewish population have exceeded 20 million and it may have been about 17 to 18 million before the Nazi Holocaust, less than the present populations of Canada, Ethiopia, Spain or Turkey. He added, "Take any test of achievement you like–in any branch of science, mathematics, literature, music, public life. The Jewish performance has been not only disproportionate, but almost ridiculously disproportionate…If we assume, as is probably sensible, that Nobel Prize winners are bound to be drawn from advanced societies, then the fair statistical distribution for Jewish people would be something less than one in 50…Run your eye down the lists of Nobel Prize winners for the last 25 years. You will find something between a third and a quarter have Jewish names.

Lord Snow said one answer might be that the Jewish environment and the pressure of generations of persecution has led to the utmost use of talent. "In that case, in countries like the U.S. or the United Kingdom, where the environment is presumably less oppressive than at any time since the Babylonian captivity–or perhaps short interludes in Moorish Spain–one would expect this explosion of talent in due course to lose its force. Will that happen? Or is there something in the Jewish gene-pool which produces talent on quite a different scale from say, the Anglo-Saxon gene-pool? I am prepared to believe that that may be so. One would like to know more about the Jewish gene-pool. In various places–certainly in Eastern Europe–it must have stayed pretty undiluted or unaltered for hundreds of years," Lord Snow said.