An afternoon spent in the company of an illustrious physicist

On October 28, 1964, when I was 26 years old and in my first semester as an instructor in Columbia University’s English Department, my father called and asked if I’d read an article in The New York Times that morning about I. I. Rabi. I had not. “Well go and read it,” my father said, “because I. I. Rabi teaches at Columbia, and was born in the shtetl of Rymanow, which is where my parents—your grandparents!—and my six older brothers and sisters were born, so call him and tell him you come from the same shtetl—that you’re landsmen!”

I protested that Professor Rabi was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, and I was just a part-time instructor, but my father would have none of it. “You both went to Columbia,” he said, “and you both teach there, and he was born in Rymanow—where our family comes from—so I don’t see why you can’t call and get together with him.”

My father was a mild-mannered man who rarely insisted on anything. He had failed at several businesses, and it was my mother, a registered nurse, who—to my father’s embarrassment—had always supported our family. I was surprised by his call, and more surprised when he called the next day to urge me once again to contact Professor Rabi, and to express his disappointment in me for not doing what he’d asked...

...I said that my father was the second youngest of nine children from an Orthodox Jewish family, and when the family came to America, they’d lived on the Lower East Side before moving to Brooklyn. Professor Rabi said that, like my father, he’d grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family and had lived on the Lower East Side before moving to Brooklyn...

...We discovered that although we both identified proudly as Jewish, were knowledgeable about Jewish history and culture, and valued the moral teachings of Judaism, neither of us believed in God, or held to any beliefs about prayer or ritual.

After we’d talked for a while about Jewish artists and scientists—about Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, George Gershwin and Yehudi Menuhin—he suddenly leaned across the table and, in a whisper, asked why I thought it was that despite centuries of persecution, Jews had excelled out of all proportion to our minuscule fraction of the world’s population.

“Survival of the fittest,” he said quickly in answer to his own question, and when I didn’t immediately agree with him, he said that one couldn’t say what he’d just said too loudly—that of course he didn’t believe Jews were genetically smarter than any other group of people, but because of the persecution we’d suffered, we’d honed what talents and brains we were given to finer points than we might otherwise have done. It was, he said, simple Mendelian arithmetic: Those within the Jewish community who were healthier, stronger, or more clever—or more useful to the rulers of nations we’d lived in because of particular talents—survived in larger number.

I protested, citing the millions of poor, uneducated Eastern European Jews who’d come to America without exceptional skills, yet had brought into being several generations of Jewish Americans who had excelled in remarkable ways. And what about luck? I asked. My points were well-taken, he said, and he quoted Louis Pasteur about chance favoring the prepared mind, and this led him to suggest another element that accounted for our achievements: that we’d always been a nomadic people with a history of being expelled from country after country, and thus had come to value things intangible—reading and study above all—that prepared us for the arrival of good fortune if and when it came, and that this was so because, unlike physical objects and property, our knowledge—what we read, studied, and thought—was transportable and could not be taken from us. “