The Jewish names missing from a Guardian list of Nobel Prize winners

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama has unsurprisingly drawn a barrage of diverse comment in today’s press. For me the most interesting reaction came from Simon Rogers on the Guardian website. Not in anything he said about Obama, though. He published a list of all Peace Prize winners since 1901, under the perfectly reasonable question “How does Obama compare?”

Close examination of this revealed a few slips. In 1978, for instance, the laureate was named as President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Half accurate. Some of us may remember that Sadat shared the prize that year with another statesman, one Menachem Begin by name. But Begin’s name was conspicuous by its absence. Further down, the award in 1994 to Yasser Arafat was noted. But had he received the prize alone? I rather thought that Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had shared it with him. You wouldn’t have discovered that from Mr Rogers’s list.

I owe this fascinating discovery to the blog forum Harry’s Place. Within 40 minutes of posting, the no doubt vermilion-faced Rogers added his own comment. “Hi, I’m afraid rather than conspiracy, we’re also just capable of making a mistake in complicated data entry (which affected a number where there were two or more winners). This has been rectified [it has].” (He’s also capable of making a mistake in his grammar, eh?)

Data entry? OK, but no one has yet found any other mistakes in recording the many occasions on which multiple awards were made. I am not implying in any way that the Guardian or Simon Rogers are guilty of deliberate falsification. It was an oversight, no doubt under deadline pressure. Even so, what an odd business.