Serious Question:
A friend of mine asked me why the Jews seem to be hated by almost everyone all over the world. I never really thought about it....anyone have an answer??
Jews presently comprise 3.27% of the population of the United States, and about 2.25% of the population of the world. There are 13,523,591 Jews (roughly) in a world of six billion persons.
The Nobel Prizes are awarded by the Nobel Foundation of Sweden to men and women who have rendered the greatest service to humankind. Between 1901 and 1995, 663 Nobel Prizes were handed out. Of these, 140 are Jews or people of Jewish descent. That is 21.1%, or roughly Nine times the “expected” number based on population alone.
Literature
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
World Peace
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
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
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
Economics
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Robert Fogel
Medicine
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - David Baltimore
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward B. Lewis
Physics
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1995 - Martin Perl
Let me give it a try. The Jews are reviled for basically the same reason the US is hated. They are successful. Others are jealous.
Is there a legitimate answer? Assuming it's true, why do you think it is?
My take is that different societies have had different reasons for negative feelings about the Jews.
During medieval Christian times in Europe, the Jews were people who lived among them but said, in a way that 1) your food was not good enough for us 2) your children are not good enough for ours and 3) your G-d is also not good enough for us to replace ours (and BTW, it was our ancestors who orchestrated His death).
You want more? OK, here's some more. For the most part they could not own land nor be in a profession; they were thus businessmen, barterers, and moneylenders. Also, governments (notably the Poles) used them as tax collectors. And, they were good at it, acquiring wealth and other people's property when they defaulted on loans or taxes.
Edward I (Longshanks from the movie Braveheart ) fought the Welsh, Scots and Irish. He needed money for these wars of expansion. He borrowed heavily from the English Jews. Rather than repay, he had them all expelled from the country and seized their assets while defaulting on the loans. They did not re-enter until centuries later.
The Germans hated them partly because in some ways it seemed that they out-Germanned the Germans themselves as far as love for the Fatherland (e.g., German Jews had distinguished themselves in WWI) and their love for German Kultur. During the 1920s and early 1930s, German Jews had major positions throughout Germany in the arts, communications, science and academia.
So, in part, envy and jealosy played a role along with the Jews being The Other; i.e., alien, strange and mysterious. It's a complicated story, but at least this is a start. I hope this has been helpful.