Ken Spiro

The Jewish Atomic Empire

The little-known story of the Jewish impact on nuclear energy

By Ken Spiro

Unlike the ancient Greeks or Romans, the Jewish people have never been into building physical empires. Demographically they have always been one of the smallest peoples on the planet - stateless for much of their history. Yet despite being tiny, stateless, and powerless, the Jewish people have been remarkably impactful and transformative in so many ways.  The true Jewish influence has always been through ideas and innovation that have transformed the world.

This disproportionate impact started with Abraham, the founding father of the Jewish people, 3,700 years ago in what is today Iraq, when in a world full of idol worship, he chose to reconnect humanity to the idea of one God and an absolute God-given standard of morality.   Ethical monotheism, as it is often called, is certainly the first, most transformative and impactful of all ideas that the Jews brought to the world, but it’s hardly the last.  Since the time of Abraham onward, the Jewish people have continued to leave their mark on the world in so many areas besides just religion and morality.

A great, modern example of Jewish innovation is in the entertainment industry.  In the early 20^th century Jews were the driving force behind the creation of the motion picture industry. MGM. Warner Brothers, Paramount, Columbia Pictures, and 20^th Century Fox were all founded by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe-refugees from Czarist Russian persecution. (1) Hollywood may be one of the only Jewish Empires in history, but there is another modern example of a Jewish “empire,” less known, but certainly more impactful: nuclear fission.

For better or for worse, nuclear Fission (The process in nuclear physics in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two nuclei thus enabling both nuclear energy and the atomic bomb.) has been one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time unleashing immense power for both energy and destruction. The number of Jews involved in splitting the atom in the 20^th century is truly staggering. 

The term itself, “nuclear fission,” was coined in Germany in 1939 by a female physicist named Lise Meitner, but being both a woman and Jewish (She fled to Sweden to escape Nazi persecution and continued her research in Stockholm) she was denied credit for her research which was given solely to her fellow German researcher, Otto Hahn, who later received the Nobel prize for his work.

In the first half of the 20^th century, Germany was the world leader in science and innovation and once the Nazis came to power in 1933, they directed much of this German know-how toward their military-rocket technology and weapons of mass destruction.  It was precisely this fear that Germany would be the first country to get a nuclear weapon that led the Hungarian-Jewish physicist, Leo Szilard to convince the great Albert Einstein, who was a pacifist, (both were refugees from Nazi persecution living in the US) to co-write a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to start a nuclear research program in the U.S. and beat the Germans to the A-bomb.  This letter played a key role in convincing Roosevelt to launch “The Manhattan Project, ” America’s program to build an atomic bomb. (2)

The number of Jewish involved in the project was astounding-probably close to 90% of the scientist. Almost all of them were German, Hungarian, or Austrian scientist refugees from Nazi German persecution. The list included:  J. Robert Oppenheimer-Project director and nicknamed “The father of the atomic bomb,” Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Otto Frisch, Niels Bohr Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, John von Neuman, Rudolf Peierls, Franz Eugene Simon, Hans Halban, Joseph Rotblatt, Stanislav Ulam, Richard Feynman, Eugene Wigner, and the list goes on.  One of the few prominent non-Jews involved in the project, Enrico Fermi, left Italy to save his Jewish wife from fascist persecution. There is little doubt that had the Nazis been more tolerant of Jews, Germany would have had an atomic bomb first.

Chaim Weizmann, himself a prominent chemist and Israel’s first president later wrote:

“Very few people … have any notion of the role which Jews have played in modern science, and particularly of their astounding share in the development of nuclear physics. … I have heard Einstein speak of ninety percent. … I am continuously struck by the utter disproportion of the Jewish contribution.” (3)

The is no question that these scientists realized the profound implications of creating such a weapon of mass destruction.  As Oppenheimer witnessed the first test detonation of an atomic bomb on July 16^th, 1945, he quoted from Hindu Bhagavad Gita “Now I become death, the destroyer of all worlds,” yet he never expressed any regret about the Manhattan Project.  He like many others in the scientific and military communities recognized the urgency of getting the bomb before America’s enemies and realized that the war would have dragged on for far longer with far greater American casualties had the US military been forced to conquer Japan with conventional ground forces. 

In his farewell speech to Los Alamos scientists in November 1945, Oppenheimer summarized the necessity of the US creating the A-bomb: 

“…all over the world men would be particularly ripe and open for dealing with this problem because of the immediacy of the evils of war, because of the universal cry from everyone that one could not go through this thing again, even a war without atomic bombs. And there was finally, and I think rightly, the feeling that there was probably no place in the world where the development of atomic weapons would have a better chance of leading to a reasonable solution, and a smaller chance of leading to disaster, than within the United States.”

The Jewish people’s relationship with the atom didn’t end with the Manhattan project:

-David Lilienthal was appointed the first chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1946

-Edward Teller and Stanislav Ulam created the hydrogen bomb in 1952

-Admiral Hyman Rickover was the architect of the Polaris Nuclear Submarine fleet in 1954.

The innovative and transformative impact of the Jewish people extends well beyond the entertainment industry and the atom bomb.   The Jewish people are just .2% of the world’s population yet Jews have won 22% of all Nobel prizes since 1901 (4) and little Israel, the Jewish State, has the largest number of startups per capita in the world.  This disproportionate impact has been noticed by many, including British historian Paul Johnson:

  “For the Jewish impact on humanity has been protean.  In antiquity, they were the great innovators in religion and morals.  In the Dark Ages and early medieval Europe, they were still an advanced people transmitting scarce knowledge and technology…Breaking out of the ghettos, they once more transformed human thinking, this time in the secular sphere.  Much of the mental furniture of the modern world to is of Jewish fabrication.” (5)         

Jews do not have a monopoly on innovation and not all Jewish “contributions” have been positive, but given how small and how persecuted the Jewish people have been throughout history, it begs the question why?  American sociologist, Ernest van den Haag asked the same question:

“The Jews have invented more ideas, have made the world more intelligible, for a longer span and for more people than any other group.  They have done this indirectly, always unintentionally, and certainly not in concert, but never less comprehensibly...In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture?”

From Abraham onward, Jews have consistently manifested certain personality traits that have driven them to question and look at the world in a different way. They seem to possess traits in their collective “spiritual DNA” that have always driven them to challenge excepted norms, think outside the box, and create and innovate.  As strange as this may sound, it seems to be the most logical explanation especially since so many of the most innovative Jews, including most of the scientists who worked on The Manhattan Project, had little or no Jewish education and no substantial connection to Judaism.  Most were Jews by birth and nothing more yet “thou shalt innovate” was still deep in their core.

Perhaps, Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks said it the best:

“To be Jewish, to be a child of Abraham is to have the courage to be different, to challenge the idols of the age, whatever the idols and whichever the age.” (7)

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(1)     For more on this topic see:  An Empire of Their Own – How the Jews Invented Hollywood – Neal Gabler

(2)    In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life—when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification—the danger that the Germans would make them.” Clark, Ronald W. (1971). Einstein: The Life and Times. New York: Avon Books

(3)    Tablet Magazine, November 9, 2022. Imagining a Jewish Atom Bomb, Or Rabinowitz & Yehonaton Abramson

(4)    http://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html

(5)    -Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews

(6)    Ernest van den Haag, The Jewish Mystique

(7)    Covenant and Conversation-The Heroism of Ordinary Life, 5768