Jews, Language and the Nobel Prize

The Forward excerpts from a new book by Ruth Wisse called Jews and Power. In a discussion of the linguistic adaptability of Jews, she recounts the number of Jews who have won the Nobel Prize, and the number of languages in which they won the Prize.

Since the inauguration of the Nobel Prizes at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews have received one-tenth of its awards for literature: in German, Paul Heyse (1910), Nellie Sachs (1966), and Elias Canetti (1981); in French, Henri Bergson (1927); in Russian, Boris Pasternak (1958) and Joseph Brodsky (1987); in English, Saul Bellow (1976), Nadine Gordimer (1991), and Harold Pinter (2005); in Hungarian, Imre Kertesz (2002); in Hebrew, Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1966); and in Yiddish, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978). This exceptional roster of Jewish Nobel laureates in so many different tongues powerfully contradicts the essentialist connection between nationhood and national language that was postulated by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, and it points to contrasting German and Jewish notions of identity.

– via Design Observer