It is 2023 and the small town of Jičín’s square looks empty. Some Vietnamese people appear and they work all day to provide money for their compatriots in their home country. But they are not alone in being so distinct.
The others speak German and look kind of different. And they laugh at me. Such a loser. I was always a target of ridicule, no matter whether it came from Jews or Gentiles.
Sara Haddad and her husband Tobias are delicatessen shop owners. They are reform Jews. But the actual majority of their customers make up Czechs. Jacob and Eva are their children and both of them study at the local Jewish school. Their parents’ hard-working attitude and pushy culture make them excellent pupils. They are also pushed to study the Czech language because there are no German high schools in Jičín. Another option would be Prague but Sara insists they must stay close to the family. But a lot of Jičín Jewish families are bilingual or even Czech-speaking.
Their shop, apartment, and school appear to be in a small circle that comprises the old Jewish quarter. They attend local synagogue services with a progressive rabbi who is also an Israeli citizen.
While Sara is doing the laundry, Tobias is reading newspapers for the German-speaking population of the Czech Republic. Both of them agree that Prague (which has 50,000 Jewish people) would be a better option but they are tied to this place. The Jews are more progressive there with Jičín having two troubled Orthodox Jewish families. When talking about them, Tobias is nodding his head.
One would be surprised that meanwhile there are only hundreds of Jews in Jičín, but there is a lot of Jewish lawyers or medical doctor of Jewish origin in Jičín.
The Jičín’s Jewry always had its habits – whether it was Karl Kraus or Jacob Bassevi. The Jewish cemetery was always magical, though vandalized several times.
But wait! I have completely forgotten Franz Goldblum. He received Nobel Prize for physics for his large contribution to Particle Masses. He also solved the Collatz conjecture which gained him Fields Medal. He is now a Princeton professor and lives permanently in the USA.
As it appears, the Jews were always overachievers and very smart people. And the small town of Jičín is no exception. When a law threatening the Czech language was about to be passed during the Austro-Hungarian Empire rule the agile Czechs went and gone to broke windows of the Jewish houses. Because they were the only ones speaking German at the time (Jičín was half-Czech and half-German in the 1600’s).
There are 8 million of them in Europe. They are famous and their socioeconomic outcome is astounding. But the antisemitic spirit is, unfortunately, still alive.
Roughly 20 % of European patents are held by people of Jewish origin. They comprise 30 % of European Nobel prize laureates. The European GDP would be 7 % lower without them. 45 % of the richest Europeans are Jews. The chosen also have pretty high natality compared to the European average (2.23 children per woman).
But what about a list of European Jewish people who somehow contributed to humankind after The Second World War:
Jacek Cohen – Polish actor
István Goldman – Hungarian chemist (won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1975 – Feynmanium problem)
Ramunas Goldberg – Lithuanian politician
Adam Jung – German stand-up comedian
Jean-Paul Bernard – French economist (Nobel Prize for Equity premium puzzle in 1973; Nobel Prize for Tâtonnement in 1986)
Patrick Jellinek – Polish radio-host
Alois Friedberg – Slovakian prime minister
Vladimir Spiegel – one of the best hackers on this planet – from Russia
Enma Hoffman – German best-selling novelist (Nobel Prize for literature in 1961)
Radek Lévy – Czech stand-up comedian
Liam Horowitz – four times Oscar-winning Belgian film director
Franz Goldblum – Czech physicist and mathematician (Nobel Prize for physics for contribution to Particle Masses in 1998; Collatz conejcture awarded by the Fields Medal in 1990)
Bohusz Weinmann – Polish physicist
Lukas Leib – German singer and actor
Eva Kowalski – Polish actress
Adam Rosenstein – German novelist
Sylvie Hess – French singer
Michel Shabat – Romanian journalist
Asher Susi – Estonian nuclear scientist
Ben Rabinowitz – Polish professional cook
Tobias Leiberman – German politician and German chancellor
Sergei Kantor – Russian physicist (Nobel Prize for Alfvénic turbulence in 2006; Nobel Prize for Sonoluminescence in 2013)
Hannah Muller – German activist and humanist (Nobel Prize for peace in 1999)
Max Friedman – French Oscar-winning actor
Daniel Altmann – Romanian-American Hollywood-based actor
Eva Rubin – Belarusian medical doctor (Nobel Prize for medicine for preparation of vaccines that do not require refrigeration in 1989)
Emma Gross – Austrian actress
Jacek Geller – Polish three times Oscar-winning film director
Peter Rubin – Slovak venture capitalist, second richest person on this planet according to Forbes
Jonas Askhenazi – German physicist dubbed “The 21st century Einstein” (Nobel Prize for physics for Quantum Gravity in 2012; Nobel Prize for physics for Theory of everything in 2020; Nobel Prize for physics for Yang–Mills theory in 2019)
Walter Koffka – German sculptor
Ernits Goldblum – Estonian manager and self-made billionaire
Charlotte Friedmann – Austrian actress
Paul Arenberg – French entrepreneur and economist (10th richest person on this planet according to Forbes)
Jacob Jansone – Latvian mathematician and computer scientist
Noah Nowak – Polish economist
Bastien Gellner – French inventor and top engineer
Klaus Leibowitz – renowned German painter
Luis Fischer – French writer (Nobel Prize for literature in 1978)
Adam Goldberg – Austrian singer that sold 200 million of copies
Martin Aronow – Ukrainian chemist (Nobel Prize for chemistry for resolving the protein folding problem in 1954)
Denisa Bercow – Czech architect
Max Herz – Hungarian actor
Dieter Maazel – Austrian ethicist
Boleslaw Perlberg – Polish author
Sarah Berzina – Latvian linguist
Moze Hoffman – Lithunian experimental philosopher and evolutionary psychologist
Peter Baron-Cohen – Russian-American Oscar-winning actor
Alois Cohn – Czech economist (Nobel Prize for Cambridge capital controversy in 2000)
Ian Edelmann – German entertainer
Horst Bohm – German stand-up comedian and actor
Robert Edelmann – Hungarian chemist
Tomáš Levinsky – Czech professional wrestler
Ben Shapiro – renowned French architect
And the list is not complete!
But wait! No, no, no…
Leave a Reply