Jews in The Royal Society: A Problem in Ecology
PROMPTED by a desire to explore a by-path of Anglo/Jewish history, I studied the incidence of members of the Jewish community within the fellowship of the Royal Society. It soon became obvious that one had uncovered a sociological problem of considerable interest. Indeed the original inquiry would have had but little value were it not for considerations peculiar to the Royal Society. I refer to the facts that entry to the ordinary Fellowship of the Royal Society has, since 1847, been confined to a small and strictly limited number of individuals, that the quality of the candidates’ scientific output has been the sole criterion for their election and, finally, that throughout the entire period the Society has eschewed all prejudice, political, religious or social. Election to the Society thus becomes a reliable yardstick by which to gauge the volume of output of scientists of high rank occurring in any group of the country’s citizens at any time during the last 100 years. To the Jewish community such a yard/stick is peculiarly welcome, even in England where anti-Semitic prejudice has never been highly developed, whilst its application to the national or racial composition of the body of foreign fellows, a group to which a limited number of eminent scientists the world over are eligible, assumes a unique value.