[Please read the Introduction to this book if you haven’t done so:
MUST READ: The Jewish Mystique by Ernest Van Den Haag
—Admin1]
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Are Jews Smarter Than Other People?
Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx, and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. 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? Are they, as both their friends and enemies seem to suspect, smarter than other people?
The ability to perceive new situations as new, and to find effective ways to meet them—the ability, further, to manipulate abstract concepts so as to discover principles and construct appropriate theories to connect them—this ability, as measured by I.Q. tests, is largely inherited. It can be trained. But what is trained is what has been inherited. (The success of training depends on motivation, too.) It is hard to distinguish the effect of training from the effect of inheritance, but not impossible; and the I.Q. test is far from a perfect measure. Still, when we find that genetically identical twins reared in different environments have nearly identical scores, while brothers or sisters reared in the same environment display greater I.Q. score differences, the conclusion that inheritance plays a major role is inescapable. And the average I.Q.’s of Jewish children are consistently higher than those of non-Jewish children.
Of course this does not mean that there are no stupid Jews or intelligent Gentiles. One meets plenty of both. It simply means that, all other things being equal, the chances of a Jewish child’s being intelligent are somewhat—we don’t know exactly how much—higher than the chances of a non-Jewish child. Is this the manner in which they were “chosen” by God?
Well, one doesn’t know how much God had to do with it. But the rabbis certainly did.
Among the Jews, literally for millennia, the brightest had the best chances to marry and produce children, and their children had the best chance to survive infancy. In contrast, in the Western world at least, the brightest non-Jews had the least chance to have children throughout the Middle Ages. (Outside the Western world, intelligence has been neither much of an advantage nor a hindrance in bringing children into the world and having them survive.)
Why did the most intelligent non-Jews, for nearly a thousand years, have the least chance in the Western world to produce offspring who would inherit their intelligence? Throughout the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastical career promised the greatest, fastest—indeed, nearly the only—advancement possible for those sons of the lowly born who were endowed with enough talent and intelligence to rise above the subservient position in which most peasants found themselves. The church offered the only career in which intellectual ability was rewarded, regardless of the origin of its bearer. No wonder the priesthood attracted the most ambitious, talented, and intelligent sons of the lower estates, and the most intellectual ones from the other estates.
But the priesthood exacted a price: celibacy. Which meant that the most intelligent portion of the population did not have offspring; their genes were siphoned off, generation after generation, into the church’s, genetic supply. The result was a reduction of the average intelligence level of the non-Jewish Western population to a level considerably below that which would have been achieved otherwise.
The church’s demand for ecclesiastical celibacy was based on at least three things. First, there was the general hostility of the church to sex. While the weakness of ordinary mortals might make it better to marry than to burn, priests were expected to have greater ability to resist temptation.
Secondly, a celibate priest would not be tempted to accumulate riches and power for children he does not have (at least he would be less tempted); he would love all Christians as a father without favoring his own offspring.
Finally, all medieval Christians believed in the salvation of their individual souls and the resurrection of their bodies. Such a specific belief in one’s own individual immortality made it unnecessary to attempt to secure an immortality of sorts by producing and shaping one’s own children. Yet Christians who were not priests were not quite willing to pin all their hopes on the promise of resurrection: faith was strong but not that strong. But priests, professional Christians as it were, were expected to set an example; they had to renounce immortality through offspring in favor of individual salvation—with the consequent unforeseen, unintended, and unfortunate result that the intellectual elite had no offspring.
Celibacy was not always strictly enforced. And some priests or monks might not have wanted to have children anyway. But even when all possible qualifications are taken into account, there is little doubt that the rule of celibacy reduced the average intelligence of the non-Jewish Western populations. Consider how many outstanding scholars (let alone those who made minor contributions) descended from married Protestant ministers or Jewish rabbis. Had they, too, been childless, the contributions of their proverbially numerous offspring would have been lost. The magnitude of the contributions of the non-Catholic clergy’s actual offspring suggests the size of the loss society suffered because of the celibacy of the Catholic clergy in the many centuries during which Catholicism dominated the Western world.
Today, while the abolition of clerical celibacy is being discussed in Catholic circles, celibacy no longer does much genetic damage. There are many opportunities other than the priesthood available to people who want to go beyond the status achieved by their parents. The church no longer offers the only nor the best chance for advancement of an intelligent but poor boy in most places, and there are many intellectual careers outside the church. It may be surmised that children of low-income families who enter the priesthood now do so more often because of an unworldly vocation; worldly ambition even among the poor can be achieved more easily in other ways—ways which do not preclude offspring.
Among the Jews, the most intelligent were encouraged to have the most children: they became rabbis, who could afford—indeed were expected—to have lots of children. Rabbinical study even more than the priesthood among Gentiles attracted the brightest and most ambitious Jews. After all, the rabbi was the leader of the Jewish community in every sense of the word.
Abstract philosophical issues, questions of ritual, commercial disputes, marital problems—whatever matters were of importance—ultimately were decided by interpretation of precedents, and the rabbi’s interpretation was the most authoritative. Hence the rabbis had the prestige, the power, and the prerogatives of leaders. Unlike their Christian colleagues, they did not have the competition of secular leaders, kings, and judges. The rabbi was the religious and the secular leader of the Jewish community. Thus, boys who today might become judges, lawyers, political leaders, physicians, teachers, scholars—all became rabbis.
Unlike priests, rabbis were enjoined to marry and have children. In turn, rich men were enjoined to marry and have children. In turn, rich men were enjoined to give their daughters in marriage to rabbinical scholars, the Jewish aristocracy. Both these injunctions were followed in practice; they were in the spirit that informed Judaism as a whole throughout the Middle Ages. The results were:
1. The most intelligent, ambitious, and intellectually inclined Jews became rabbis.
2. Rabbinical students and rabbis married earlier than other Jews—they were regarded as more eligible.
3. Rabbinical students were bale to marry the daughters of the most successful Jews and generally had the widest choice. These choices were not based on personal attraction but on the reputed health and wealth of the prospective bride. Some correlation is likely between intelligence and success; the daughters of rich men must often—by no means always—have inherited intelligence as well as money.
4. Rabbis, able to support more children more easily than other Jews, had more children.
5. More of their children survived because many rabbis had some knowledge of medicine; further, as leaders, they could give their families more protection than other Jews. (The selective process was compounded when high marriage taxes were imposed on Jews in Central Europe, as was often done into the nineteenth century. These taxes made marriage easier for the well-to-do who could better afford them.)
Above all, rabbis sedulously followed the Talmudic injunction to be fruitful. Altogether, if Jews had deliberately decided to breed children so as to maximize genetic intelligence, they could not have done much better. Of course, they had no such conscious purpose—any more than the Catholic rule of celibacy was intended to reduce the average intelligence of Christians. These results were incidental to other avowed and conscious purposes. Nevertheless they have profoundly affected the history of the Jews, and indeed, of the world.
“Intelligence” actually consists of a variety of mental abilities: e.g., verbal ability (retention and relations of words); reasoning (conceptualization, interpretation, and inference); mathematical ability (manipulation of numbers); space conceptualization (ability to relate, visualize, and manipulate sizes and shapes). Many other mental abilities are also involved. Some are hard to measure. The various tests give a specific weight to each tested ability and call “intelligence” some sort of compound—which in the nature of the matter is rather arbitrary and has a purely theoretical existence: only the components exist and operate separately.
Certainly one person may excel in, say, mathematics, but have little literary intelligence. Another may be a mathematical moron but extremely clever verbally. Yet both may test as equally “intelligent” if, say, the higher mathematical aptitude of the first offsets his lower verbal score and the higher verbal score of the second offsets his poor mathematical score. Whether or not this occurs depends on the relative weights assigned to the different aptitudes by the particular tests. Yet the better tests succeed fairly well in identifying and grading something that deserves the label “ability to reason abstractly or conceptually”. And this ability is highly important in a number of careers. Therefore these tests have significant predictive value.
Though these tests are useful, one must not conclude that they define fully an individual’s abilities, or measure adequately such human virtues as creativity, imagination, emotional predispositions, and ultimately character. (Other tests may help in evaluating such elements of “personally”)
For what it is worth, Jewish children generally do better than other groups on I.Q. tests. And the more weight that is given to verbal and reasoning abilities, the better they do. They do better on practically all scores except space conceptualization, where Chinese children are usually superior. These differences among ethnic groups are specifically ethnic—they remain, regardless of social class, status, or schooling.
“Ethnic” should no be confused, however, with “genetic.” We do not know how much of the greater intelligence found, on the average, among Jews as an ethnic group is inherited through the genes. In all likelihood the result is, in some unknown proportion, owed to cultural as well as genetic factors.
That cultural factors play a major role (and may, in time, have influenced genetic ones, since culture may cause the preferential selection of the possessors of the most highly valued traits for marriage and breeding) is clear to anyone even slightly familiar with the enormous emphasis on learning, intellectuality, articulateness, and argument—even argumentativeness—that is characteristic of Jews.
The emphasis on intellect within the home, the family, and the community is transmitted to children at an extremely early age and greatly intensifies their motivation toward the achievement of educational goals. According to the values of the community, this is the way to gain the approval of one’s elders, to the respected and, in the end, to be successful.
This certainly has been the case of the Ashkenazim, the Jewish group that lived in Western and Eastern Europe. That group, surrounded by a Christian world, not only preserved its religion but lived—partly voluntarily and partly of necessity—a separate life in which the Jewish ideas, the Jewish character, and the Jewish intellect were formed. While the majority of Christians lived on farms in the countryside, the majority of Jews, neither serfs nor allowed to own land, lived in the city. Thus Jews have long been accustomed to urban values, which are relatively new to most Gentiles.
Another Jewish group, the Sephardim, lived mainly along the North African perimeter, surrounded by an Islamic world. They were assimilated in all but religion. Even where not assimilated, the Sephardic Jews did not pursue separate Jewish ideals; in particular, their respect for the interest in scholarship did not compare to that of the Ashkenazim, but rather to that of the surrounding Moslems, who usually were more tolerant of Jews than were medieval Christians. (How things have changed)
The results of this difference can be seen easily, not only in Israel, where the Sephardim sometimes feel treated like a minority, but also in the United States. In both countries the scholastic achievement of Sephardic children is far below that of the Ashkenazim. In Israelthe Sephardic children come from a deprived background, from families with little education, income, and status. But recent tests in the United States have shown that this is not likely to be the cause of their low educational achievement. The United States’ tests compared two groups of Jewish children—one Sephardic and the other Ashkenazic—attending separate private schools. Both groups came from middle-class parents, were American born of American-born mothers, spoke English at home, and lived in the same middle-class neighborhood. Yet the Sephardic children scored, on the average, 17 points less on the I.Q. tests than the Ashkenazic—about the same difference as in Israel.
Oddly, the difference is about the same, on the average, as that between white and black children in the United States. One may speculate that the explanation is similar, particularly since recent research suggests that the differences between whites and blacks are ethnic far more than they are related to schooling, or even to segregation, or class.
The only possible explanation for the different tests results among Jewish groups—since differential opportunities or economic deprivations were excluded—is a difference in cultural ideals and emphases, internalized as difference in motivation. (Genetic differences are unlikely, since both groups are Jewish, although they have lived apart for thousands of years.) Unlike the Ashkenazim, the Sephardim have never focused on educational achievement. This result suggests that the difference in Jewish-Gentile achievement and intelligence, too, may be largely due to a difference in values cultivated at home, whatever additional role genetic factors may play.
The higher average Jewish intelligence and scholarly motivation lead to considerable scholarly achievement. Sixty-seven American scientists received Nobel Prizes between 1901 and 1965; eighteen of these—27 percent—were Jewish. Jews constitute about 3 percent of the population. Thus they produced about nine times as many Nobel Laureates in science as statistically could be expected. The overrepresentation would be reduced if Jewish Nobel Prize winners in science were taken as a proportion not of the Jewish population but of Jewish scientists. However, this would be useful only to the extent to which Jewish overrepresentation among scientists depends on factors other than intelligence and motivation. I don’t think it does.
Thirty percent of all high school students plant to go to college—but 75 percent of all Jewish high school students have these plans (both figures increase year by year). And their plans are carried out: Jews, as a proportion of the population, are overrepresented by about 260 percent in the college population and by 365 percent in the elite institutions.
Jewish students succeed well in college, as measured by future earnings—higher on the average than those of Gentile college graduates. They also enter professions more often: they are overrepresented by 231 percent in medicine, within medicine by 308 percent within the specialties, and among these by 478 percent in psychiatry, and 299 percent in dentistry. Outside medicine, Jews are overrepresented by 265 percent in law, by 283 percent in mathematics—but only by 70 percent in architecture (which is explainable in terms of their no more than average talent for space conceptualization) and 9 percent in engineering. The low overrepresentation in engineering might be explained by past employment discrimination in industry and by the comprehensiveness of the term “engineer”, which includes skilled workers as well as professionals. Despite the fact that relatively few Jews are engineers, they are 110 percent overrepresented in invention.
Jewish overrepresentation is partly a matter of motivation. Lewis M. Terman, who followed the careers of gifted children in California, found that of those who were Jewish, 57 percent entered professions, while only 44 percent of the gifted Gentile children did. Yet only 15 percent of the Jewish parents were professionals, while 35 percent of the Gentile ones were: a clear indication that Jewishness reinforced motivation toward professional careers independently of the professional or nonprofessional parental status. Terman also found that about twice as many gifted children were Jewish as would be expected on the basis of Jewish representation in the California population. This, once more, must be attributed to genetic and motivational factors in unknown proportions.
An increase in Jewish representation in the professions took place as soon as Jews became emancipated in theUnited States—as soon as purely religious careers lost their attractiveness for many, and barriers to college admission were lowered. Thus, in 1922, Jews were represented in the Phi Beta Kappa scholarly elite about in proportion to their representation in the population. But in 1962, the number of Jews in Phi Beta Kappa was 33 percent above what could be expected on the basis of their representation in the total population.
It might be worth mentioning that although by no means minorities display extraordinary gifts, the Jews are not the only minority that does. The Parsi, originally a Persian group, settles in India where they kept their religion and many cultural peculiarities. This group, too, has been disproportionately successful in business and in the professions. The fate and the environment of the Parsi, let alone their original cultural and religious customs and beliefs, are quite different from those of the Jews. Yet like the Jews they differ from the society in which they live, and feel, as Jews have, psychologically marginal to it.
It is possible, as some philosophers and sociologists have speculated, that this marginality contributes to the motivation and cultivation of achievement as an attempt to compensate and prove oneself. Yet it cannot be minority status alone that brings about this effect, for the motivation is more common than the supposed reaction to it. Thus minority status, however necessary, cannot be sufficient to bring about intellectual eminence.
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