"If you compare Ashkenazi Jews with other white ethnic groups in America, they seem less special. They don't top the charts in IQ, wealth, or any other "interesting" metric I can think of."
Wait which American white ethnic groups do you mean have comparable IQ, wealth, and other interesting metrics, as Jews?
Very interesting, thank you. If you have the statistics on WASP IQ and wealth on hand I would be grateful to get a link! I agree that it is kinda misleading to compare "Ashkenazi jews" to "non Ashkenazi white people" because the latter group is a vast and highly diverse group. Someone in these comments said something like all Ashkenazis share mitochondrial DNA with 4 women, or something to that effect, so it is almost like looking at a specific family tree rather than a race.
It's interesting that in the graph in the original post the ethnicity that does the best are Belarusians. I wonder what the average american-belarusian IQ is.
> as it would point out the intrinsic supremacy of one group over another, with no recourse given to individuals in either group to change this perceived disparity.
I think there are very few individuals in the world who can change any group disparity. A couple of kings and Bill Gates, maybe. For most of us, that's not a productive goal. It's probably more helpful to focus on how I can change individual (not group) circumstances, whether in my own life or lives of those around me.
I'm also not sure about the "intrinsic supremacy" part. If nation A defeats nation B in a war, we don't say it's because of intrinsic supremacy of the nation A. Same if athlete A defeats athlete B.
I do agree that such a piece would feel iffy. But I also feel it's often worth it to investigate and understand why something is iffy.
It's perhaps surprising that an alternative solution, that Jews are disproportionately successful because of the blessing of השם, is not mentioned in your post, and is mentioned in Noah's only to note that he will not be considering it.
Surely he means neither of these, but simply that the Holocaust proves that being the chosen people doesn't mean that you'll be materially successful or happy.
There are plenty of hints in the Hebrew Bible, and in history since then, that terms of the blessing are something like "you will be so improbably prosperous, given your resources, that your neighbors will constantly be tempted to kill, enslave, and oppress you."
It's a fairly common theme in the patriarchal narrative: see Gen 26:12-14; Gen 31:1-2; and mostly notably Ex 1:7-14.
Jahweh is expressly identified as a warrior in the Song of the Sea (aka the Song of Moses): Ex 1:3. Some believe this song to be very ancient. If correct, one might infer the warrior aspect to be original.
I think that's basically a conversation-ending theory. If one accept that as a theory, what more is there to say or talk about? So like, its technically valid, but can be ignored, the same way "we're all in a simulation" can be ignored
From the perspective of "truth-seeking" (in contrast to "entertainment-seeking") - conversation-ending is a great feature of theory, isn't it? Anyway, I would reserve this term to theories which are self-defiance (such as absolute solipsism etc).
And by the way, Scott - I don't know if you're aware - but the way you explicitly distinguish Ashkenazi from other Jews here would be considered highly racist in Israel. Probably similarly to how discussing the possibility that blacks have lower IQ than whites may be perceived in the USA.
Well, it ends the conversation before we reach any kind of understanding that would allow us to make predictions. One says "God did it" and shrugs, while other people say "no wait, I think physical reality might follow certain rules and equations..." and end up with greater predictive power later on.
The nature vs nurture argument (and more specifically, the IQ vs culture argument) has been going on for the past fifty or so years. Both sides have been unable to convince the extremists on other side of the rightness of their interpretation. With the advent of PCR techniques, The IQers have been able to point to specific alleles which are significantly correlated with IQ, and have said, "Aha! See intelligence is a heritable characteristic!" The Culturists point out that IQ tests are pretty one dimensional when it comes to measuring the full range of human talents and behavioral repertoires, and that the tests can (a) be culturally biased, and (b) different testers and testing regimes can significantly improve or depress the results of the testees. Most researchers now agree that it intelligence is heritable but that also can be affected by environment and cultural situation. Of course, there are the extremists on either side of this question that are still fighting the old wars. What has been achieved? Little really. If you're extremist on either side of this question, you will not be convinced by the evidence that other side marshals. If you're in the middle, you'll shrug your shoulders.
However, I will leave you with on tidbit. Lewis Terman did a long-term study of the life-outcomes of people who tested 3 sigma above the IQ mean (i.e. geniuses) — n was ~1200 if I recall correctly. The study continued to run after his death. The study showed that geniuses were not very exceptional achievers. Most of Terman's "Termites" ended up with middle-class to upper middle class incomes. A lot were very successful in professional careers, such as Drs and Lawyers. But a lot didn't achieve much of anything of note. No Nobel prizes. No great works of literature or art. A few millionaires, but none of them became super wealthy. Of course, most of the "Termites" were WASPs. I'm not sure what a similar study on the life outcomes of Ashkenazi Jews with +3 sigma IQs would show.
I think the Jewish people have always been disproportionately successful. That’s why there’s always been conspiracy theories about them. It’s just that the intellectual system changed in the 1800s. Measuring and rewarding academic achievement more fairly. Perhaps believing you are a unique and special people is sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I think the simple fact that Jewish people were often the only visible ethnic minority around has for more explanatory power than Jews being economically successful for why there are so many antisemetic conspiracy theories.
So you came to this substack, that clearly has an atheist bent, to comment on how strange it is to you that the author did not entertain this ill-defined, baseless, unfalsifiable hypothesis that has no explanatory power? If השם cannot be understood by humans, then השם is of no use as a hypothesis, and you are simply wasting people's time.
Sir, Madam, or Other: perhaps it may assist you in recognising the intent of the comment if it is explained that this is not meant absolutely seriously, but is an example of what is known commonly as a "joke", or jocular/humorous expression intended to evoke hilarity in the readers/listeners rather than an attempt to stick it to the atheists.
I will bet you $500 that the commenter Alex Power was not joking. Please for the love of השם tell me there is some actual confidence behind all that smug pedantry.
There was a hint of a joke there; if these two rationalists note they are Jewish yet aren't willing to consider the theory that השם has something to do with things on Earth, how Jewish are they?
Perhaps the societies in which the Sephardim existed were less amenable to such success by religious minorities or perhaps even the majority population. Spain and Portugal were deeply cursed by the resource trap, as I recall.
My impression is that, prior to the last century or two, it was the Sephardim who did well. David Ricardo was Sephardic. But the Rothschilds were Ashkenazi, so that would be an exception.
"Achievement" is some function of secularization (can't contribute productively to modern science if you're dissecting the Torah) * demographics (Jews were expanding as a share of the European population up until ~1900) * literacy rate.
Ashkenazi Jews tended to be affluent during the Middle Ages and Renaissance as they were invited to the Polish commonwealth to fill bourgeois jobs needing literacy and numeracy.. But their population boomed so much from, say, 1600 to 1900, that they filled up all the upscale jobs open to them, such as finance, and many were forced down the economic ladder to be tailors or milkmen or whatever.
The 2005 Cochran-Harpending paper on the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence is immensely informative on this topic:
The Russians, like Catharine the Great, invited the Germans in to do advanced stuff. Germany was far enough a way that this didn't see too much of a security risk.
The Polish aristocrats thought about inviting in numerate German after the Mongols massacred a lot of their indigenous urban bourgeoisie in the 1200s, but then they worried that the Germans lived right next door and might try to take over Poland. So, they chose Rhineland Jews to be their new bourgeois.
Medieval and early modern Poland used to accept any valuable refugees ejected by Europe's perennial conflicts, including wars of religion. E.g. it accepted quite a lot of Huguenots.
It's more like the Germans were invited and did in fact proceed to take over (often successfully, e.g. in Silesia). The put-down of Kraków's bourgeoisie uprising (and subsequent purge of german-speaking citizens) was a major turning point in reinstitution of a centralized Piast state.
"By analyzing the proliferation of long nucleotide sequences that are identical in the unrelated individuals in their sample, the researchers determined that a population bottleneck of approximately just 350 Ashkenazi Jewish individuals occurred in central Europe about 700 years ago, followed by an exponentially rapid population increase." https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/study-sheds-light-on-ashkenazi-jewish-genome-and-ancestry
These 350 individuals probably consisted largely of high-IQ lawyers, bankers and scholars. This genetic profile would have remained in the same population that exploded in Eastern Europe. Even if these Eastern Jews were mostly peasants (because there wasn't a huge division of labor in the High Middle Ages), they were obviously very smart peasants.
When the Industrial Revolution and capitalism opened up opportunities for intelligent people to achieve financial success after circa 1800, the Jews were naturally able to take advantage.
They weren't peasants. Eastern Europe already had a peasantry, and even hereditary serfdom well past its abolition in western Europe. Jews had middle-men occupations.
They were more likely to be in those positions, it's true. But there weren't enough middle-man positions in such an undeveloped economy for all Jews to have one (like tax collectors, merchants, landlords, licensed vodka dealers).
But having a high IQ leads to better productivity in almost any job. So I would imagine that Jews tended to be more successful as farmers as well. ("Peasant" was a poor choice of words because you are right they weren't really feudal peasants in the legal sense but just agrarian smallholders). Of course, back then, unlike today, having a consistently higher income meant lots more surviving children than a poor person (say, 8 vs. 1) and a correspondingly geometric increase in population percentage.
I am kind of surprised that essentially none of the comments mention IQ or genetics. I wonder if it's because people don't know the facts or if they're just afraid to mention them even in an anonymous comment.
My understanding is that they ran out of middlemen positions after their population exploded. Which reminds me of the downward mobility in Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms".
It's beyond doubt that IQ is important in this, with Ashkenazi jews probably averaging ten points higher than the mean of 100. IQ is the best predictor of future success in education, employment and financial stability. I am not for one moment saying it is the only thing we should value about people (finding ways for people who aren't gifted that way to be valued and successful in society is something we have failed to address in modern times), but it cannot be ignored as an embarrassing form of 'privilege' we pretend isn't there.
There is also the fascinating hypothesis that jews in the diaspora were selected for intelligence, often being restricted to the unchristian work of moneylending and working with figures, and perhaps doing all the bookkeeping mentally to avoid written records come the next tax collector. I can't speak to the American immigrant experience, but I did live in the east end of London many years ago, where poor jewish people were common. Even then, they didn't stay poor long as the work ethic shone through and they soon made the clockwise trek to the north London suburbs. And good for them. An example to the rest of us, especially considering the pretty horrible way the establishment spoke of them in those days.
Those were Sephardi, so it’s not relevant to Ashkenazi achievement. In Europe Jews were prohibited by law from owning land or many professions. Medicine and moneylending were not excluded. I don’t think a Jewish lawyer would have gotten a fair hearing for a client so most likely the lawyer stereotype emerged in the 19th Century. Culture matters, like Moses Mendelssohn walking hundreds of miles to be allowed to study, or Richard Feynman mentioning that a yeshiva student’s mother observed her day was made because she had met a General and a Professor the same day, and most would not put the two in the same esteem.
Yes, exactly. Scott claimed that Jewish intellectual success is limited to post 1800 Ashkenazim, which is obviously false. It is also present in pre 1800 Ashkenazim and pre 1800 Sephardim.
Maybe the key is mixing low income traditional Jews into a western society that tolerates them? Looking at French Jews, most of them nowadays are Sephardic and they're famous for all being doctors and lawyers. Might be difficult to have data on the phenomenon given ethnic statistics are forbidden on France, but maybe Israeli statistics on olim from France could be useful.
Read up on figures like Josef Nasi, the Sassoon family, or the success of Sephardim in England, the Netherlands, Ottoman lands, etc. There was plenty of success.
Plus there was the privileged status of many Ashkenazim in the Polish Commonwealth.
Ashkenazim in Central Europe and the East were some of the last to get emancipated and also happened to be where the bulk of Jewish population growth was following the reconquista; so the notion of them being the only ones to experience a sudden boom in well being and only following 1800 is probably a reflection of it being a relatively large phenomenon being observed in a particular time.
Surprising the Scottish Enlightenment is referenced, but there is no mention of the Haskalah -- the contemporaneous Jewish enlightenment -- that began in Germany in the 1800's then spread eastward. Prior to this event, European Jews were a backwards people, at least by Enlightenment Europe standards.
Modern-day Ultra Orthodox Jews provide the best glimpse of pre-enlightenment Jewish culture. It's also probably not a coincidence that one of the poorest towns in the US -- Kiryas Joel, NY -- is a modern-day Orthodox shtetl. The same pattern repeats itself in Israel today, with Ultra Orthodox communities resembling the third-world.
While there is genetic evidence for higher Ashkenazi IQ's, the most important historical factor was living in close proximity the European Enlightenment, much like the Scotts you mentioned. Without it, Jewish communities would have continued to live in relative poverty, with minimal cultural advancement.
Actually, on re-reading, I note that I missed that Noah does discuss this theory: "In addition, I think that a large part of whatever Jewish overachievement remains will probably be attributable to the fact that Judaism is a religious minority, and religious minorities tend to overachieve."
I heard a claim that at one time Jehovah's Witnesses were discouraged from pursuing higher education due to their prediction of the imminence of the end of the world (so it wouldn't be very useful to become an expert in worldly matters). I'm not sure if this is still the case, but there's something on the JW web site about higher education not being that important or valuable:
In Orthodox Judaism, secular higher education is often sometimes viewed with suspicion or not seen as very prestigious compared to religious study (although there are certainly many Orthodox and observant Jews in secular academia). But in more liberal and secularized forms of Judaism, it's *very* prestigious, and often more so than religious education. So that's kind of a complicated subject that also varies from Jewish community and denomination to Jewish community and denomination.
One other thing that seems different between the Witnesses and Judaism is that the Witnesses have a particular central authority that is supposed to study and interpret the scriptures for them, and then send out authoritative interpretations and teachings (which are often presented in very simple, straightforward language that can be understood without a lot of education). In Judaism, there is no such central authority, and, while the Orthodox definitely have a very strong emphasis on respecting spiritual authorities (like one's own community's rabbi), there's also commonly an idea that (1) any Jewish man is capable of aspiring to contribute to religious scholarship or to become a religious authority (although in Chassidic Judaism there can be a hereditary element to some forms of religious authority), and (2) all Torah study is inherently spiritually beneficial to any Jewish man or woman, and inherently makes the world better, and the more of it the better, in the world as a whole or in an individual's life.
On the latter point, I think I once heard someone claim that the very first verse read in translation by an idly but genuinely curious lapsed Jew pleases God just as much as the millionth verse re-read in Hebrew by an aged rabbi who immediately thinks of 100 connections and associations. Although I don't remember where that claim comes from at all, and I might have more or less made it up.
Yes, this is exactly correct. Note also that this also probably also applies to the Ashkenazim, and to many other groups such as the remaining Zoroastrians (i.e. Parsi).
There also seems to be a second effect in the Levant where the Christians holdouts didn't mix so much with later arrivals that might have had lower genotypic IQ.
Note that in the US, there is something of an inverse relationship between the average income of a Protestant denomination and the degree to which it is populated by more recent convert families. The highest income is seen in the Episcopal Church and the PCUSA, which are basically direct descendants of the Church of England and Church of Scotland, respectively, and neither has ever been very good at conversion and thus both of them mostly consist of families that have been in those churches a very long time. Meanwhile Baptists, who mostly represent families that abandoned those churches in the 19th century, are considerably poorer. A group like Jehovah's Witnesses seems to consist of people who then abandoned groups like the Baptists in the 20th century.
If its really helpful to continue in the racial success vein, what is the rate of success in America of all immigrant groups at the same time in the same regions?
You could compare with the Irish (mine), Italians, other Eastern Europeans such as the Poles, the Germans, the list goes on. My quick answer is all groups did well in America comparatively- depending on region and time.
Chosen professions of course affect income- which is not the only measure of success, but seems to be dominant in the world we’ve chosen. (We as in present day America). To explain that a bit; if your father was a firefighter or a cop being that might be more important than “income.”
If your father had a love of the soil and raised you the same, being a farmer might be more important than income (it had better be).
Maybe if we must take this path we compare the different groups? Instead of looking inward at a closed circle?
Scott doesn’t compare apples to oranges but by saying “America” certainly that’s the context.
Is this meant to be a direct reply to my comment above? I don't see the connection. But yes, for the most part there's not an obvious large disconnect in achievement between the various European groups that migrated to the US in the 19th century and early 20th century. Of course, for the most part these groups are more related to one another than any of them are to the Ashkenazim, and they've intermarried in the time since their arrival in the US to a much greater degree than the Ashkenazim have.
The obvious disconnect among white people is mostly between earlier arrivals -- the British who ended up in Appalachia vs. those who ended up in New England, say (later arrivals tended to avoid places that were already poor, i.e. the South). Albion's Seed would suggest the differences between British-descended populations are cultural, which probably makes sense, they mostly came from the same island. Though, while I'm not an expert on the current evidence here, I also have to think they started with some genetic differences, and the pattern of American migration (e.g. brain drain from poorer regions to richer ones) might have exacerbated those differences.
If they were orthodox jews I would fine it surprising, but of course they are not. I find this comment more surprising, because it suggests that God interferes in temporal matters, which, considering the sum of temporal matters currently, I find a very amusing suggestion.
This is to be fair, a rationalist blog. But if we were to countenance it then we would have to agree that it took about 2000 years for God to get going with that blessing. Longer, maybe.
If true, this hypothesis could be both tested empirically and exploited practically.
But if we admit theological explanations for the success of religious groups, I don’t think the overall evidence favors Jewish monotheism specifically.
This comment is on is the blog of the author of https://unsongbook.com/ . I'm sure the thought of testing the hypothesis has occurred to him. It has also occurred to me.
It's an easy hypothesis to test. We just have to create a different universe with a different God, and see how much money the Jews make then. The grant proposal writes itself.
I'm pretty sure that it was also written in Bible that blessing is conditional on following God and his Law and unless they do, they will be punished severely by God. And I think that most of American Jews are far from being Orthodox, they are mostly atheists now, I guess.
I'm not saying that your explanation is impossible but I would consider this as the another argument against
I was going to suggest that, it doesn't seem like Jewish piety correlates with economic success, which would be the only way to come close to testing this hypothesis.
Because it's an extremely unlikely theory, requiring far stronger evidence to be believed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If mundane solutions such as genetics and culture exist and are equally able to explain the data, they are to be vastly preferred.
I read aloud in my head, so it annoys me when people use scripts I can't pronounce in otherwise Latin text. It also comes across as a little smartassy - flaunting your knowledge of foreign scripts to signal learnedness. Please transliterate next time.
I once read that in early 20th century Budapest, Jews had an illegitimacy rate of 10%, compared to Christians who were around 30%. This was brought up as one of the many reasons why Jews had a higher population growth in that era compared to Christians: child mortality was significantly higher among ilegitimate children.
We are a people with a deep connection to Jewish sacred texts and at the same time a people who were persecuted for that connection. That persecution bound us closer to our books, The modern world is a world of words not muscle. That's my explanation.
Christian minorities also seemed to do better than average within the Ottoman empire. In "The Long Divergence" Timur Kuran (who is himself Turkish) explains it via Islamic law entrenching principles that made it difficult to form corporations.
perhaps. but the statement that sephardic and mizrahi jews don't seem as accomplished only holds up for the past couple hundred years, when sephardic and mizrahi jews were living in less developed countries than ashkenazic jews.
I think an interesting contrast between Ashkenazim and Sephardim is how their prayer services go. Sephardim (in my experience) do most of the prayer service out loud and in a communal way. Ashkenazim have far more long stretches where everyone reads to themselves quietly. I've always assumed it was because literacy levels were higher in Europe so the people could actually just read from their prayer books. But in communities where literacy wasn't the norm there's far greater focus on learning everything off by heart.
Admittedly I've never actually checked if this is accurate in any way.
My paternal grandparents were both Jews who emigrated to America separately before World War I. My grandfather was the son of a Polish cobbler (and the first person in his family who was taught to read). My grandmother was the daughter of a Russian rabbi who was killed in a pogrom and who walked out of Russia without any other family as part of a group of people emigrating to America via Hamburg. Both came from small villages and neither could have been considered anything but poor.
"But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural."
That seems the more plausible answer, if one is willing to consider that cultural norms can be embedded very deeply into individuals. The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.
My grandfather and some of his friends were discussing their children one day, and he finally responded to the many "my son the doctor" remarks with "my son TEACHES doctors." (Dad was on the faculty of Stanford Medical School at the time.) The story goes that the conversation changed topics after a long pause.
> The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.
I would be interested in seeing a survey about people's cultural attitudes toward physical books and how those relate to their cultural background. E.g., things like
* do you feel better in some way having more physical books present in a place where you live or work? (does it make you feel more comfortable or emotionally positive toward that location?)
* do you feel bad in some way when you or someone around you shows physical disrespect for a book? (e.g., throwing it in the trash or recycling; placing it on the ground; breaking or damaging the spine; physically throwing it across a room)
* do you find it emotionally pleasing to acquire books and emotionally difficult to part with them, in a way that feels subjectively different from acquiring and parting with possessions in general?
These things are all true for me, and I grew up in a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish household, but I also noticed that they were and are true of many of my middle-class friends from non-Jewish backgrounds.
It's an interesting cultural proxy I've anecdotally noticed myself. Whenever jewish friends would visit my home in the US the first thing they almost always noticed the above average number of books we had. In Israel it's very common for people to have decorative bookshelves for their most treasured (usually religious) books the same way many other cultures have special cases for their dining china.
Hmm, my parents (not Jewish, and only first generation intellectuals) had the same feelings about physical books; I grew up lovingly reading lots of books, but resented this sacred admiration of books as such. It was partly just teenage rebellion, but partly me living in a society where printing was already cheap, a lot of garbage got printed, and books were gradually moving into virtual reality anyway.
Cultural preferences and genetics are deeply interwoven in humans. The reason why the Dutch are so tall is that culturally they don’t have a preference for shorter women most societies have.
Of course, another plausible cause here is that Jews who couldn't hack it within that religious tradition left for other religions, so this ended up serving as a selective effect for high literacy, which probably meant higher IQ. So while it's a plausible cultural thing, it's also plausible that the culture eventually gave them a genetic advantage by selecting against lower IQ members.
I'm still confused, because the key says that the colors indicate geographic region. And then those colors are sorta... split up? Like all the Europe is on the left, but then there are Asian countries in the middle and on the right...? And if they were just spacing out the points for legibility then why are a bunch of them clustered on top of each other so as to not be legible?
if you click through to the source, there the axis also doesn't have a label but does at least have a title: "Age/Sex-Adjusted US-Born Median Personal Incomes in 2015-2019"
If the “groups should be represented according to their share of the population” (in college admissions, professions, etc.) standard were applied to Jews it would be devastating.
Luckily, Jews are “white” so for some reason it doesn’t count? And people decided Jewish quotas were immoral discrimination but Asian quotas (not explicit ones, admittedly) are somehow ok? This doesn’t make any sense on principle, and I don’t think it’s sustainable. I hope we end up with “discrimination is bad”.
The current situation is just begging for court cases where gentiles who are discriminated against because white people are over-represented, but who are in a situation where gentiles ares underrepresented, go to court to demand that Jews are treated as a separate ethnic group for discrimination purposes.
We have noticed the skulls wrt 'discrimination is bad.'
Quotas may not be the best solution (and they're not common), but we've certainly learned that discrimination exists in various forms even when it's not being intentionally implemented. And that if you think that's bad, you need to take active, sometimes counter-intuitive measures to oppose it.
Nah. We should crack down on discrimination where we can find it, but "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race"
Really my concern is that people are too quick to infer discrimination from weak evidence like "disparate outcomes", so we impose discriminatory rules to counter discrimination that doesn't exist.
For example, Jews have very good outcomes; should we infer massive pro-Jewish discrimination and impose massive anti-Jewish rules? (No)
Presumably, it refers to the phenomenon described in this article of Scott's (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/) where widely-known criticisms to a field are inapplicable because by the time the public is generally aware of them, they've already been taken to heart by insiders.
That said, I'm not sure what it would mean for *society* to have noticed the skulls, since my understanding of the phrase a Scott used it requires some sort of inner circle to have already learned from what the wider public still thinks of as valid criticisms. Who's the wider public if that inner circle is "society"?
Anecdotal, of course, but in my Jewish upbringing it was always said or implied that Jewish success was partly due to a culture considerably more education-focused than the norm. More educated people tend to be more successful and make more money, and we also see similar patterns among other immigrants with strong pro-education cultures; it can be joked that American Jews are basically the early 1900s equivalent of modern Asian Americans.
And this does make some sense: after all, the central text of Jewish life was not the Torah but the Talmud, which is the Torah plus the random comments, debates, and thoughts of a bunch of rabbis. And you can see it in other parts of Jewish culture, too: here's "If I Were A Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof:
If I were rich, I'd have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray.
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall.
And I'd discuss the holy books with the learned men, several hours every day.
That would be the sweetest thing of all.
Perhaps it's no surprise that people growing up in that cultural milieu tended to make a lot of academic discoveries.
^this. I'm not Jewish, but from my reading and observation, this is a huge part of it. No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem. Then over multiple generations, people who value education and have the skills to succeed at it marry people who value education & have the skills, and the process repeats, over and over.
Add to that persecution, which forced the community to build extremely strong internal trust networks. Sephardic Jews, though second class citizens, never faced the same level of persecution as Ashkenazi Jews.
Now take that community, remove the persecution, but keep the deep communal trust bonds (there is a massive literature on trust and economic growth) and the cultural emphasis on education and study. The recipe for success is complex, but trust and education are two major ingredients.
>No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem.
On the other hand, Augustine, Aquinas, and countless other Christian theologians were sainted. I think this counts as rewards and esteem.
One observation by my father (an Ashkenazi Jew) was that Christian theologians and priests didn't marry and have children, whilst Jewish equivalents were encouraged to have lots of children. Multiply that over the generations and you've got built-in eugenics.
As I understand it, Christian priests or monks (I don't know whether there were theologians who weren't priests or monks) were supposed to not marry and not have sex, but the rule against sex was hard to enforce. I suppose their children were less likely to have the advantages of being acknowledged members of families, but I await further information.
Cleric celibacy is not a Christian rule, but a Catholic rule mostly established during the 11th to 12th century period. It was strongly advocated by popes Gregory VII and Urban II during the 11th century, and afterwards "enshrined" in the 1st Lateran Council in 1123.
It is specific to Catholics; the Orthodox, Protestant and other Christian priests largely do marry. (in the Orthodox world, only the highest echelons of the church are expected to be celibate, and I'm not sure about the various Protestant denominations)
Christian monks are indeed celibate, but monks are different from priests in many religions, and I think they are celibate in most.
But interestingly there are no monks in Judaism. I think the whole idea of monkhood is pretty counter to Jewish ideals like "Tikkun Olam" which means fixing the world. Which is clearly not something you can do by withdrawing completely from the world.
My argument is cultural, not genetic, so the unacknowledged children of priests would not be in a position to benefit from their fathers' learning and study.
> No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem.
The Chinese case is particularly interesting, because their book learning was extremely specific in use. You learned poetry as the vast majority of the curriculum, with the goal of achieving a cushy government position. On the other hand, China as a nation was terribly poor and underperforming for most of the past 300 years or so.
On the other hand, Chinese emigrants tend to do really well wherever they go, becoming the successful merchant class of wherever they end up. (Thomas Sowell's book "Race and Culture" goes into this a lot.)
That together, to me, suggests a strong cultural story, where the cultural importance of education gets put to different uses, one productive and one not.
If you study hard and succeed in the test, you become a government official with low productivity, possibly even negative, despite your intellect.
If you study hard and fail the test, you leave your country seeking higher status elsewhere, and being blocked from government you become a merchant, applying your intellect in higher productivity areas.
If you don't study, you just remain a peasant in the home country.
> If you study hard and succeed in the test, you become a government official with low productivity, possibly even negative, despite your intellect.
You may also have more children than the average peasant, increasing the frequency of any genes that helped with passing the test (related to intelligence, or even just ability to sit down and focus on studying!)
That's true. It doesn't do much for the overall wealth of China, which was my point. The Chinese testing system seemed to not do much for the Chinese living in China, but the culture of educational attainment seemed to do them a lot of good once they left and got real jobs.
I don't think scott has done cochran's argument much justice...part of it is overdominance at alleles governing certain cognitive traits, but it also allows for frequency changes of alleles with additive effect under selection, which would be less conspicuous than the diseased homozygotes.
A related mystery about the Ashkenazim that I have not seen discussed: How come there are so damn many of us?
The notion of real genetic differences is rooted in the founder effect, which itself comes from a tremendous population bottleneck 600-800 years ago (probably the Crusades) which reduced the Ashkenazi Jewish population to about 350 people, and thanks to endogamy (marriage only within the clan) only 4 maternal groups account for 40-70% of the current Ashkenazi population. As a result, Jews have an unusual prevalence of Tay Sachs and Crohn's and other rare genetic diseases, and maybe(!) as a result have higher general intelligence as well. And these difference are mostly what we focus on when we talk about Ashkenazi exceptionalism.
But population is a mystery to me too. There are now maybe 10 million Ashkenazi in the world, an increase in population of 30,000-fold since the bottleneck. Meanwhile, since 1000 AD global population has increased by about 20X. European population has increased by maybe 15X. These differences are... not small. You can absolutely get to 30,000X with regular generational doublings over hundreds of years, but no one else seemed to. Maybe some of the reason that everyone's Jewish ancestors were so poor was because it was impossible to accumulate wealth with so many kids.
Anyway, I'd love to hear if anyone has any data on household size of Jews in Middle Age Europe, or similar. The explanation here is probably cultural, but it is as deserving of a rigorous explanation as the other phenomena, and I can't find one.
This is a really interesting question. Like you, I think it had to do with medieval demographics. Before the demographic transition, people like Greg Clark have pointed out that the wealthiest tended to be the most fecund (which makes sense given appalling child mortality rates in medieval times). We also know that European Jews occupied a white collar niche, which meant outsized wealth for Jewish elites.
Cities tended to be demographic sinks for European Christians, who didn't have the kind of public health engineering skills of Roman aqueduct builders until maybe the 19th Century. But Ashkenazis could grow their populations in urban settings.
Ashkenazis were particularly adept at surviving in cities. They had more hygienic habits and more money on average than Christians, which allowed them to have more rooms per person which cut down on infections spreading at home.
Genetic databases like ancestry.com or 23andme.com have to correct for Ashkenazi similarity when they tell you that they have found your "third cousin" or whatnot. The fifth cousins in my database can have a higher relatedness than my (non-Jewish) wife's third cousins because of so much inbreeding in the population over the years.
Thank you; those are all interesting. My understanding of the genetics is limited. However, none of those papers suggests a bottleneck in the 13th-15th century. The first suggests a bottleneck 100 generations ago, which I guess means roughly around 0 AD? The second suggests a bottleneck may be the best explanation for prevalence of certain diseases, but is silent on timing, and specifically suggests admixture may be a superior explanation to a bottleneck in explaining linkage disequilibrium. The third rejects bottleneck as an explanation for Crohn's disease, stating that preferential selection is a more likely explanation.
Certainly Ashkenazi relatedness is a phenomenon. But inbreeding/lack of interbreeding may be a sufficient explanation, rather than a specific low-population bottleneck in 1300.
Ashkenazi family trees probably have a bottleneck during Roman times when a fairly small number of Hebrews arrived in Europe (perhaps in Italy) and, apparently, took European wives. There may have been another bottleneck as Italy's population dropped until Jewish survivors of the barbarian invasions appeared in the Rhineland at least by Charlemagne's time. Then Rhineland Jews were invited to Poland after the Mongol pillaging of Polish cities in the 1200. There they grew dramatically in numbers over the centuries.
My understanding is that the exact timing has maybe ±100 year error bars, but 1300 is not a bad place to start. And the finding holds up across many different studies.
FWIW, there are plenty of south Asian populations that appear to have similar founder effects, but I do not think they are as well studied yet.
David Brooks took a DNA test and was very excited to be told that Steven Pinker was his third cousin. But most Ashkenazis are "cumulative cousins" of other Ashkenazis to a high degree (i.e., via multiple genealogical pathways, they end up about as genetically related to most other Ashkenazis in sum as an extremely outbred individual like Tiger Woods is to his cousins via a single genealogical pathway).
Well they don't correct very well, I've got 3rd cousins out the wazoo on 23andMe to the point that I've started ignoring their "you've got a new genetic relative!" notifications (I'm an Ashkenazi)
I think the population bottleneck might be an illusion caused by the existence of a hereditary priesthood who in the absence of any lasting Jewish secular structures since the Khazars loat thwir state were de facto almost always the highest-status group. High-status fathers have more children, both due to generally being wealthier and also being able to attract extramarital partners more easily (I'm not sure but I guess that lower-status men are likelier to knowingly bring up the higher-status father's children as well). This means that Jews are fairly unique in Europe and the Middle East at least in having a genetically consistent group with the most chance of passing on their own genes at the expense of others. Over time this will reduce genetic variation in a population as in each generation an increasing proportion of children are gathered by high-status individuals or descendents of high-status individuals.
This is true in the sense that this is the first commandment which appears in the text we have received (at Gen 1:22 and 28). In composition order, I think the first commandment is "You shall love Jahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" (Deut 6:5). Some (including but not only Jesus) have considered this also to be the first commandment in the sense of being primary.
Alternatively, if Deutronomy originally began at chapter 12, the first commandment would, less romantically, be "You must demolish completely all the places where the nations whom you are about to dispossess served their gods, on the mountain heights, on the hills, and under every leafy tree."
Obviously if the ten commandments were a pre-existing code, the first commandment was "You shall have no other gods before/besides me."
In terms of importance, Hillel summarizes the most important commandment for Judaism as the golden rule: "What is hateful to you, don't do to others"
But the thing about "Be fruitful and multiply" is that since it's commanded long before the Jewish people actually exist, it's not only directed at Jews. It's directed at every living thing. You could think of metaphorically as God kick-starting evolution ;-)
One of the pitfalls of your argument (potentially) is that many of the statistics that lend themselves to the conclusion that "Jews are outliers in success" include non-Ashkenazi Jews. If your hypothesis about the 4 maternal groups is correct, this would not apply to non-Ashkenazi populations. This begs the question - are non-Ashkenazi Jews similarly outliers according to success metrics?
The statistics about Jews (such as IQ or Nobelists) are usually specifically about Ashkenazi. Sephardic Jews score significantly lower than Ashkenazi in IQ, for example. But of course the Ashkenazi tend to be Western European or American, which means that you aren't truly holding culture constant with that comparison. Even in Israel, where both groups coexist, environmental factors between the two groups remain. So the differences are evocative, and might rule out some environmental hypotheses, but it's still not a slam dunk for genetics.
do you have citations for the overall diff in sephardic IQ and the difference between ashk/seph/mizrahi jews in israel. (Israel is also not a perfect example because of historical and ongoing cultural differences, but...)
It should be noted that the true outlier statistics such as the number of Nobel prize winners provide a mixed bag of support for a genetics hypothesis. The US has had many more Ashkenazi Nobelists than Israel despite having a similar number of Ashkenazi Jews. So clearly (and unsurprisingly) factors beyond genetics are profound.
Scott has analyzed this before ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/ ). The simplest comparision (all American Jewish vs Israeli Nobelists by present population) is somewhat misleading; if we use a more apples-to-apples comparison (Nobelists from the last few decades, Ashkenazi Jews only), Americans still have more, but "only" by a factor of ~1.8.
A small correction: while the US and Israel has a similar total number of Jews, the Americans are almost all Ashkenazi, while only about half of the Israeli Jews are.
Israel was a fairly poor country until recently. One of my Israeli colleagues explained their tech boom was fueled by immigration of well-educated Soviet Jews in the 80s and 90s.
You should probably be careful with some of the assumptions built into this understanding. As a further thread demonstrates, the exact dates and other information is not clearly understood and can be off significantly. To say that the population dropped to 350 may be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 pretty easily due to lack of records and proper classification. 35,000 people spread out over Europe is still a tiny population, but that has monumental implications for the 30,000-fold increase idea you presented. That would still be an outlier in terms of population increase, but far more believable and easier to explain.
As for how their population could increase significantly, I imagine large families is part of it, but you should also consider that they would not have been permitted (or likely as interested) to join the military and die in the hundreds of European wars during the relevant timeframe.
I'm sure a non-zero number died in wars, especially if civilian populations were killed (which is often the case). That said, they would have been pretty unwelcome in both Christian and Muslim armies, especially during the Crusades and in any war otherwise related to religion - which for a long time was most of them, even if the religious reasons were only symbolic or a cover for geopolitical concerns.
I don't know if it's actually true, but I grew up being told Jews had a lower death rate during the plague (not the current one) because passover cleaning made their homes less interesting to rats. If the lower death rate there is true, when European populations were absolutely obliterated, you'd jack up their prevalence and probably leave them particularly set up to succeed afterward.
Agreed, we should add large error bars and recognize that the data evolves. But it's hard to reconcile a founder population of 35,000 people with the independent data that 40-70% of Ashkenazi have mitochondrial DNA from just four women (or close female relatives). That is not nuts with a 350-person bottleneck. Given multiple strands of evidence, this seems less likely to be a simple data analysis error, but I'm open to pushback on the specifics.
Sure, a lower estimate may be more accurate, but the date is also unknown, so we could be talking about some much earlier time period - like 500 AD instead of 800 or 1200, and that makes a big difference on population growth as well.
Surely a lot of the answer is contained in the fact that a lot of time passed during which Europe's population barely increased. But by simple virtue of the fact that lots of time passed, a lot of population dynamics happened, and merely citing the change in total European population might falsely suggest things were more static than they were. Certain family lines exploded in their number of progeny and others went extinct. All of us, Jew or Gentile, are descended from winners in that contest. The difference is that the Jewish family lines are identifiable and the Gentile ones merged into the European whole.
> This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history;
In my experience self-made wealthy people (sample size of 3-8 depending on how confident I want to be in my assessment of others wealth) all want to play up how they and their family were poor or had really hard circumstances of some sort to overcome.
Obviously, this doesn't prove anything, but something to consider...
I think I undersold something in my comment. When I say "play up" it makes it sound like these people are deceiving us, but what I really meant is that they've convinced themselves.
Another anecdote to add to the pile: My grandfather's dog was killed by Russian soldiers during one of the various pogroms he lived through as a child in what's now Ukraine. The one photo I've seen if him as a boy, he looks gaunt to the point of malnourishment. When he came to the US he opened a shop selling window fixtures. So most definitely poor/working class, and yet all three of his first-generation children went to college, including one (my mother) to an Ivy League.
One more anecdote: the last members of my family to leave Germany, in 1938, were skilled professionals (medicine etc.).
This is consistent with Scott's picture in which economic pressure mostly causes emigration of the poor, while political pressure (as in late-1930s Germany) mostly causes emigration of the rich.
Surely it makes sense to consider several factors none of which explains all of a phenomenon and each of which adds a little. Some comments: 1. Surely the fact that travel to America was expensive kept out the poorest of the poor. The examples you give are mainly of people who were culturally middle class but had fallen on hard times. So what? The middle-class habitus was still there, together with the drive to move (back) upwards. And yes, all (voluntary) immigrants are self-selecting, though not necessarily quite in the same way. 2. Again, this is part of it. Obviously "such-and-such % of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, compared to % of the world population" is fallacious - what counts is the percentage of (not very poor) inhabitants of cities in wealthy countries. There's still a gap, but the ratio is what, the square root of what it would be otherwise? 3. Oh yes. See: Nobel Prize winners. (If anything, people of mixed ancestry and descendants of converts to Christianity are probably overrepresented in that list - vastly so up to the mid-20th century, once you consider that the rate of intermarriage anywhere pre-WWI was essentially nil, and conversion was always a trickle, relatively speaking.) 4 is a strong argument against racial explanations. It's also something that clarifies that, when we are talking about cultural explanations, we are not looking at anything intrinsic to the term "Jewish", or to Judaism (even if it may have had an effect in a refracted sort of way, or even by virtue of being left behind) but rather at the set of values and practices that immigrants from a particular class in particular parts of Europe had in 1880-1910. (In other words, part of what people still sometimes refer to as "Jewish", sometimes to the annoyance of some observant Jews; cultural images die hard.) None of this makes the matter less interesting - just less surprising. It also makes the phenomenon *more* relevant to discussions of other ethnic groups in the US and elsewhere; a unique or inexplicable phenomenon would be less relevant.
“ 1. Surely the fact that travel to America was expensive kept out the poorest of the poor. The examples you give are mainly of people who were culturally middle class but had fallen on hard times.”
Emigrating via steerage class was not expensive, and was subsidized by the incredibly high fares paid by passengers in 1st class.
Well, it would still be rather expensive for the poorest of the poor! Even for the merely poor, it would require the ability to save and plan well, which if anything is a more relevant characteristic than simply having money.
Oh, but it does. Voluntary immigration always imposes a filter, both in terms of wanting to go to the place you are going to and in the sense that there were always (even) poorer people who didn't make the trip. It's one factor among many.
My understanding of this issue is that Jews performed a "rural service minority" (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the-economic-ecology-of-jews-as-a-rural-service-minority.html) role in Europe that endowed them with commercial skills and values that ended up serving them very well in modernity relative to their Christian peasant counterparts. If your ancestors were a series of moneylenders and merchants and middlemen it makes a lot of sense to me that you'd be more likely to be drawn towards intellectual pursuits and high paying professional jobs compared to someone whose recent ancestors were in more traditional feudal roles.
My Ashkenazi ancestors were both rich and poor. One set (grandmother's family) were relatively well-off Russians from Minsk. They left in the late 1880s, presumably motivated by the recent pogroms, and my great-grandfather who arrived as a teenager was valedictorian at his American high school and went on to become a lawyer. They were fine. I have assumed that they had sufficient old country wealth to enable this good start in the new one.
The other set were poor Galicianers; that great-grandfather was the youngest of six and wandered around as a performer/beggar/probably thief until he married and left for the US for better prospects.
Also, avoiding compulsory military service shows up a LOT in my family's history. Not just for those coming to the US, but crossing from Russia to Austria-Hungary or vice versa, hiding out with relatives, etc. I don't think the Russian army in 1860 was a pleasant place to be Jewish (or a pleasant place, period).
"avoiding compulsory military service shows up a LOT in my family's history." Me too. A Jewish Great Grandfather of mine moved to America to not be drafted into the Czar's army. My parents had their first child (me) earlier than they otherwise would have to help my dad avoid the Vietnam War draft.
My Jewish great-grandfather came to America to avoid fighting for Austria-Hungary in WWI.
I was amused to read that Jewish immigrants claimed to be tailors; my great-grandfather was a genuine tailor. His pretext for leaving Hungary just before the war was that he was going to buy cloth in Hamburg.
So what you are saying is that there is some strong anecdotal evidence for the "dual loyalty" hypothesis often espoused by antisemites?
Hearing you it seems absolutely OK and common and nothing to be the least ashamed of that Jews are loyal first to their family and kin and sees themselves as having little or no duties to the country they reside in, and in this particular case the duty is the highest one can have toward his country (I write his here because women have never been expected to fight in conscripted armies before quite recently) - it is also the most dangerous, duty one can have towards the county who has granted one citizenship.
But then we have the particular fact that US jews often, at least compared to any other group of immigrants as far as I understand things, go to Israel to do their years of conscription in the Israeli army.
I am a gentile with some jewish friends, one which I would call a close friend, and have always assumed jews are as everybody else with a european heritage but belonging to a different religion and culture with different holidays and a heavy focus on studying and perhaps being of a higher intelligence than most other whites (I am not really that well read on this whole intelligence thing) but that differences between jew and gentile are not much else.
But hearing it from you, who present yourself as jewish, jews seem to have or at least had, in many historical times and places, at least very little loyalty towards the country which they had citizenship in. When jews were not allowed citizenship I fully understand it but since the early 1800s and the enlightenment I believe Jews were granted citiizenship and full rights in almost all countries in Europe except Russia (I am not that well read on jewish history).
This was interesting to hear. Have you guys got any other anecdotes you might want to share that points to support for the "dual loyalty" hypothesis? I am always interested in finding out the truth however labeled it my be.
PS: I mean no harm and Jews are obviously not in any position of being killed in pogroms today with Israel being one of the five states that possesses a solid nuclear triad that can inflict millions of casualties on any country that tries to exterminate jews.
In my ancestors' cases, there was a world of difference between the countries of the Old World and the USA. My great-grandfather is a (US) WW1 veteran, wounded in France, and my grandfather a US WW2 veteran, combat engineers. As far as I know, all of my relatives today in the US consider themselves citizens of our country first. My impression is that the decision to immigrate was usually accompanied by a decision to become American, and that Jews responded to the generally-welcoming environment of the New World with both gratitude and loyalty. Even prior to the peak immigration years, Twain's essay on Jews cites War Department statistics that suggest Jews served proportionally in the US Civil War.
You write: "since the early 1800s and the enlightenment I believe Jews were granted citizenship and full rights in almost all countries in Europe except Russia"
Not so much. Western Europe, this is sort of true; but Poland, Russia, and the rest of the East largely not. Even in the west, there were nasty exceptions to the equality laws, 'full citizenship' under the law often did not mean societal acceptance, and societal acceptance, even when granted, could be withdrawn. For examples, see the Edgardo Mortara case, the German 'Hep Hep' riots, or the French Dreyfuss affair, all of which took place post-emancipation in the 19th century. A poor, but not totally inaccurate analogy, is to Irish immigrants in the US 1840s-50s: certainly able to participate in society, and equal de jure under the law, but not seen as equal citizens by (many/most of) their peers.
Plus, the 19th century concept of nationality was rather more complicated than the 20th. Did a Czech or Serb in Austria-Hungary owe his loyalty to the Empire of which he was a 'full citizen', or to the project of independence for his co-linguists? In these fights the Jews were excluded on all sides, regardless of emancipation. The Serb saw the Jew as an agent of the Empire, who could never be fully Serb; the Empire saw a citizen whose loyalty was suspect and might easily be compromised. One common Jewish response was to adopt a position of personal political neutrality, an example of which is contained in the Twain essay, where his Jewish correspondent declares, proudly, that the Jews are apolitical: not out of national disloyalty, but because neither side would have them.
My impression is that the time and place mattered greatly. German Jews were often quite patriotic; German-Jewish WW1 veterans were common Holocaust victims. If you are interested in the subject, one place to start might be "The Pity of It All", by Amos Elon, which covers the societal place of German Jews from about 1750-1933.
Something I would like a demographer or historian much smarter than myself to investigate is a "creaming the top theory" to Jewish exceptionalism. Specifically that in addition to cultural norms like specializing in certain occupations and having high literacy and smart rabbis getting the girls and having more kids, there is also a negative selection pressure on the less successful Jews to remain Jewish over centuries of persecution, programs, holocaust etc. Maybe if you just want a normal, comfortable life you decide to convert and become a follower of orthodox Jesus in the 9th century or become Muslim in the 11th century and stop paying the dhimmi tax whereas only the truly exceptional people could afford to continue on their minority traditions. Or more negatively you get murdered or forced to convert during one of the many persecutions over the millennia and can't continue your line while the most successful among you managed to survive and continue your ancestors traditions.
What immediately makes me question this hypothesis though is the plight of the gypsies/Romani. They are similarly persecuted for a similar duration of history but on every social economic status dimension, they are near the bottom of European populations. Then again the Parsis in the indian subcontinent do mirror the Jews in achievement so that's another foil.
Maybe today's gypsies are really, really good at being gypsies and whatever that entails doesn't tend to produce high economic status while Jews got really, really good at being Jews and that does entail things that produce high economic status. Different selective pressures select for different things.
True or if both had persecutions. If I'm hearing you right, the skills/strategies that enabled gypsies to escape persecution and avoid being wiped out were equally successful at at it's primary goal but are maladapted to success in a 21st century society. Whereas whatever it is that allowed Jews to continue on, just happened to be suitable for high economic status professions today. Both strategies were equally successful at preservation albeit were wildly different.
The Roma are travelers, the Jews are a middleman minority. Middlemen minorities transition cleanly into finance, which currently basically runs our entire economy since we decided usury wasn't a sin any more. Travelers are really good at doing lots of petty crimes (since they move to another city before you can catch them for stealing stuff from you), which is increasingly less effective as the law enforcement apparatus becomes increasingly sophisticated.
I think that both gypsies and Jews tend(ed) to choose jobs that separated themselves from others, like musician, doctor, banker, beggar, salesman/shop owner, thief, etc. This is in contrast to jobs where you have to be embedded in a community on equal footing, need to hire people from outside, etc, like a farmer, factory worker, etc.
A difference seems to be that Jews managed to achieve a higher class of these kind of jobs, despite being mistrusted.
A hint as to why this was possible might be found in Hitler's lamentation that every Jew had a gentile speaking up for them. Perhaps Jews were distrusted collectively, but had cultural traits that made gentiles trust them individually sufficiently for them to be accepted as a doctor, banker, etc.
I get a sense that in places where they dislike gypsies a lot, few of those gypsies have non-gypsies who would speak out for them.
I haven't read an enormous amount of Jews, but I linked to my post where I host Thomas Sowell's essay "Are Jews Generic?" on middle-man minorities. Amy Chua's "World on Fire" is about a similar topic, though she uses the term "market-dominant minorities" and focuses on poorer countries. I mentioned Yuri Slezkine's "The Jewish Century" which labels both Jews & Gypsies as "Mercurians" who again have a specialized economic role with respect to a larger host population. He's Russian-Jewish and over the course of the book the focus on Russia increases, though he also notes how many (including his own relatives) moved to Israel during the later years of the USSR and contrasts them with the Jews who moved to America.
A lot of the comments on this page trying to compare the Romani and Jewish people show how little people know about the different types of Romani or the differences in how they were or are treated in different countries. These differences go all the way back to different waves of Romani leaving India centuries ago. In some areas they were held as slaves with proper 'for sale' signs until the 1850s and now these groups are unsurprisingly the poorest and most visible of Romani people in Europe. In fact, people often think that if a Romani person don't look or act like the poorest of the poor Romanian Romani, then they aren't 'real.' In other areas of Europe, such as Hungary, they were forced to give up their native Sanskrit-based language, take surnames and frankly this did help them get ahead Romani in other countries. This included having access to military service and education.
The thing about being Romani or part-Romani is that once one becomes successful or educated, non-Romani or even members of their own community might say you're not 'a real Gypsy.' They become 'White' with 'South Asian and West Asian DNA.' This feeds into the idea that there are no educated Romani people or "Good Gypsies", when 'Romani' is often not even an option on say, university entrance forms or HR forms. Oddly, you'll see Romani-Americans or Romani-British (not Irish Travellers) putting "White and Asian" on these forms.
As far as persecution goes, it depends on country. The European Roma Rights Centre covers segregated schooling, forced sterilisation, policing problems and lead poisoning issues (see all the crime / IQ / health issues that is hotly debated now) still happening today.
In terms of WWII, aside from the expected genocide, forced labour and medical experimentation (https://www.un.org/en/exhibits/forgotten-victims), there was different issues with Romani citizens of Germany losing their citizenship and property and not being able to get anything back, unlike (some) Jews. Of course, people made the excuse that Romani people don't ever own possessions and are 'travellers' so they couldn't possibly have been middle class people who had citizenship, businesses and property seized. See all the comments below saying that Romani people are 'travellers' despite the vast majority of Europe's largest minority being settled. A very good overview into the history and current situation of the Romani is I Met Lucky People by Yaron Matras.
Fitting with the topic of this post, many well educated Romani activists do also have mixed parentage and there's a few paragraphs on this in I Met Lucky People. There's quite a few Jewish-Romani activists, which is not an unusual combination in cities such as Budapest. I'm certainly not arguing that the Romani people overall are doing well or are anywhere as successful as the Jewish people or even a state's ethnic majority, but rather that when Romani people become middle-class or successful, they tend to become invisible and often actively hide their heritage to avoid discrimination. They certainly aren't good enough to be on My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/is-my-big-fat-american-gypsy-wedding-unfair-to-the-romani-community.html) Many actually explain their darker skin or dark eyes by saying they have Jewish heritage!
"My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding" is quite obviously confectionary TV that has little to do with the lives of most gypsies. Although they do draw the motives from that millieu.
Oksana Marafioti, the gypsy college graduate and classically trained pianist complaining about TLC's TV show in the Slate piece, has herself little to do with the lives of most gypsies. Although she is drawn from that millieu. I mean, will someone next start complaining that the reality-TV show "The Real Housewives of Wherever" does not *really* depict the reality of the real real-housewives-of-wherever?
TLC purveys the kind of confectionary entertainment that its viewers are looking for, and Slate purveys the kind of confectionary worldview that its readers are looking for. Whoever wishes to gain insight into the lives and customs of most gypsies, might want to look for it in other places than reality-TV entertainment and Slate.
Back to the original topic - the parallels between the Jewish and Romani minorities. The fate of Romani in WWII was about as horrendous as that of Jews, absolutely. But the societal outcomes of the two groups were worlds apart, both before and after WWII. Romani were frequently talented at music. Jews were talented at pretty much everything. Both were discriminated against by significant portions of the ethnic majority. And their outcomes - in the end - lined up quite well with their differences in talent.
P.S. About Romani traded as slaves "in some areas" until the 1850s, I take it you're referring to the Ottoman Empire? (the rest of this article is mostly focused on Europe)
I don't know much about jews and jewish history but the discrimination that Roma people have fared surely has a basis in that Roma people, the different kinds that exist of them, are quite the opposite of jews, being still a largely parasitic class having no second thoughts about stealing from or hustling a gadjo, as is their name for everybody that is non-romani.
As you say there is a frequent problem in that Roma people who want to leave the Roma lifestyle with it's paralell society with clans, a paralell legal system, an aversion to schooling or letting the gadjo get their grips into their children (because the children might possible leavve the Roma lifestile) and forced marriages complete with targeted criminal exploitation of the majority population (Roma people for instance specialize in stealing from elderly people (80+ years), most often women living alone, in all the Scandinavian countries because they feel they have no moral duties towards non-roma and the punishments are lenient in these countries) is no longer regarded as part of the Roma community which makes leaving the community and even semi-assimilating very hard.
I think it's quite unappropriate and possible anti-semitic comparing the situation of Roma people who obviously have no moral regard for the outgroup and who have no intention of even semi-assimilation and who's only contribution to the society they live in is the need for the employment of a lot of police officers, welfare care-takers and other such people, with the situation of jews who have frequently been among some of the most productively contributing citizens and who has semi-assimilated from being all ultra-orthodox before the 20th century, to being a well-liked minority in every western country.
Perhaps people are only responding rationally in their discrimination towards roma people - the easiest way of avoiding problems with a problematic group is avoiding any dealings with them and having no contact at all with them, ie avoiding them at a cost that is proportional to the problems they create. That is not to say there are some quite exceptional roma people, but bringing the situation of Roma people into the conversation when Jews as a group are talked about seems incredibly unfair to jews.
I've been inclined towards this sort of theory myself after reading the following about Armenians in the 19th century Ottoman Empire:
"Historian A. Tchamkerten writes 'Armenian achievements in the Empire was not only in trade, however. They were involved in almost all economic sectors and held the highest levels of responsibility. In the 19th century, various Armenian families became the Sultan's goldsmiths, Sultan's architects and took over the currency reserves and the reserves of gold and silver, including customs duty. Sixteen of the eighteen most important bankers in the Ottoman Empire were Armenian.'"
I think it's hard work combined with looking for ways to be well-paid for hard work.
"If you compare Ashkenazi Jews with other white ethnic groups in America, they seem less special. They don't top the charts in IQ, wealth, or any other "interesting" metric I can think of."
Wait which American white ethnic groups do you mean have comparable IQ, wealth, and other interesting metrics, as Jews?
Very interesting, thank you. If you have the statistics on WASP IQ and wealth on hand I would be grateful to get a link! I agree that it is kinda misleading to compare "Ashkenazi jews" to "non Ashkenazi white people" because the latter group is a vast and highly diverse group. Someone in these comments said something like all Ashkenazis share mitochondrial DNA with 4 women, or something to that effect, so it is almost like looking at a specific family tree rather than a race.
It's interesting that in the graph in the original post the ethnicity that does the best are Belarusians. I wonder what the average american-belarusian IQ is.
Have higher rates of depression or higher rates of seeking treatment? I am not aware of the data of which you speak
Being smarter is correlated with higher rates of depression. They think more and that depresses them. Ignorance is bliss.
Would you be willing to expand on how Jewish culture feels foreign to you?
it is definitely within rationalist thinking https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality
> as it would point out the intrinsic supremacy of one group over another, with no recourse given to individuals in either group to change this perceived disparity.
I think there are very few individuals in the world who can change any group disparity. A couple of kings and Bill Gates, maybe. For most of us, that's not a productive goal. It's probably more helpful to focus on how I can change individual (not group) circumstances, whether in my own life or lives of those around me.
I'm also not sure about the "intrinsic supremacy" part. If nation A defeats nation B in a war, we don't say it's because of intrinsic supremacy of the nation A. Same if athlete A defeats athlete B.
I do agree that such a piece would feel iffy. But I also feel it's often worth it to investigate and understand why something is iffy.
It's perhaps surprising that an alternative solution, that Jews are disproportionately successful because of the blessing of השם, is not mentioned in your post, and is mentioned in Noah's only to note that he will not be considering it.
I think the Holocaust is generally viewed as an argument against that.
Do you mean that the Holocaust was so awful השם cannot exist, or do you mean that the Holocaust proves the Jews are not השם's chosen people?
(depending on your answer, you may want to note that השם made a great people out of the Ishmaelites as well)
Surely he means neither of these, but simply that the Holocaust proves that being the chosen people doesn't mean that you'll be materially successful or happy.
Maybe that being the "chosen people" was not (and never was) equivalent to being "disproportionately successful."
There are plenty of hints in the Hebrew Bible, and in history since then, that terms of the blessing are something like "you will be so improbably prosperous, given your resources, that your neighbors will constantly be tempted to kill, enslave, and oppress you."
It's a fairly common theme in the patriarchal narrative: see Gen 26:12-14; Gen 31:1-2; and mostly notably Ex 1:7-14.
Jahweh is expressly identified as a warrior in the Song of the Sea (aka the Song of Moses): Ex 1:3. Some believe this song to be very ancient. If correct, one might infer the warrior aspect to be original.
I think you nailed it with middleman.
Which didn’t have to happen in America, but as of today has and did.
"tempted to" is hedging language. Makes the prophecy true even if nothing happens.
I don't think that's what's in the bible-- it's more like if you don't obey God, your neighbors will attack you, maybe even conquer you.
That is in the Bible, as well.
I think that's basically a conversation-ending theory. If one accept that as a theory, what more is there to say or talk about? So like, its technically valid, but can be ignored, the same way "we're all in a simulation" can be ignored
From the perspective of "truth-seeking" (in contrast to "entertainment-seeking") - conversation-ending is a great feature of theory, isn't it? Anyway, I would reserve this term to theories which are self-defiance (such as absolute solipsism etc).
And by the way, Scott - I don't know if you're aware - but the way you explicitly distinguish Ashkenazi from other Jews here would be considered highly racist in Israel. Probably similarly to how discussing the possibility that blacks have lower IQ than whites may be perceived in the USA.
Well, it ends the conversation before we reach any kind of understanding that would allow us to make predictions. One says "God did it" and shrugs, while other people say "no wait, I think physical reality might follow certain rules and equations..." and end up with greater predictive power later on.
The nature vs nurture argument (and more specifically, the IQ vs culture argument) has been going on for the past fifty or so years. Both sides have been unable to convince the extremists on other side of the rightness of their interpretation. With the advent of PCR techniques, The IQers have been able to point to specific alleles which are significantly correlated with IQ, and have said, "Aha! See intelligence is a heritable characteristic!" The Culturists point out that IQ tests are pretty one dimensional when it comes to measuring the full range of human talents and behavioral repertoires, and that the tests can (a) be culturally biased, and (b) different testers and testing regimes can significantly improve or depress the results of the testees. Most researchers now agree that it intelligence is heritable but that also can be affected by environment and cultural situation. Of course, there are the extremists on either side of this question that are still fighting the old wars. What has been achieved? Little really. If you're extremist on either side of this question, you will not be convinced by the evidence that other side marshals. If you're in the middle, you'll shrug your shoulders.
However, I will leave you with on tidbit. Lewis Terman did a long-term study of the life-outcomes of people who tested 3 sigma above the IQ mean (i.e. geniuses) — n was ~1200 if I recall correctly. The study continued to run after his death. The study showed that geniuses were not very exceptional achievers. Most of Terman's "Termites" ended up with middle-class to upper middle class incomes. A lot were very successful in professional careers, such as Drs and Lawyers. But a lot didn't achieve much of anything of note. No Nobel prizes. No great works of literature or art. A few millionaires, but none of them became super wealthy. Of course, most of the "Termites" were WASPs. I'm not sure what a similar study on the life outcomes of Ashkenazi Jews with +3 sigma IQs would show.
Hypotheses involving divine agency are notoriously difficult to falsify. I don't fault their exclusion here.
Why do only post-19th century Ashkenazim get this blessing? There's little sign of similar success among any other Jewish tradition or before 1800.
I think the Jewish people have always been disproportionately successful. That’s why there’s always been conspiracy theories about them. It’s just that the intellectual system changed in the 1800s. Measuring and rewarding academic achievement more fairly. Perhaps believing you are a unique and special people is sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I think the simple fact that Jewish people were often the only visible ethnic minority around has for more explanatory power than Jews being economically successful for why there are so many antisemetic conspiracy theories.
The Roma have been around as well in Europe for about 600 years. But, contra Yuri Slezkine, Ashkenazis and Roma have remarkably little in common.
Napoleon accidentally transferred God's blessing from the French to the Jewish people.
My only response on this substack is “השם works in mysterious ways”.
+1
my only response is your counting of responses works in mysterious ways
So you came to this substack, that clearly has an atheist bent, to comment on how strange it is to you that the author did not entertain this ill-defined, baseless, unfalsifiable hypothesis that has no explanatory power? If השם cannot be understood by humans, then השם is of no use as a hypothesis, and you are simply wasting people's time.
yeah what sort of a nutter links the Jews with God
Sir, Madam, or Other: perhaps it may assist you in recognising the intent of the comment if it is explained that this is not meant absolutely seriously, but is an example of what is known commonly as a "joke", or jocular/humorous expression intended to evoke hilarity in the readers/listeners rather than an attempt to stick it to the atheists.
I will bet you $500 that the commenter Alex Power was not joking. Please for the love of השם tell me there is some actual confidence behind all that smug pedantry.
There was a hint of a joke there; if these two rationalists note they are Jewish yet aren't willing to consider the theory that השם has something to do with things on Earth, how Jewish are they?
Perhaps the societies in which the Sephardim existed were less amenable to such success by religious minorities or perhaps even the majority population. Spain and Portugal were deeply cursed by the resource trap, as I recall.
My impression is that, prior to the last century or two, it was the Sephardim who did well. David Ricardo was Sephardic. But the Rothschilds were Ashkenazi, so that would be an exception.
It's quite simply IMO.
"Achievement" is some function of secularization (can't contribute productively to modern science if you're dissecting the Torah) * demographics (Jews were expanding as a share of the European population up until ~1900) * literacy rate.
Ashkenazi Jews tended to be affluent during the Middle Ages and Renaissance as they were invited to the Polish commonwealth to fill bourgeois jobs needing literacy and numeracy.. But their population boomed so much from, say, 1600 to 1900, that they filled up all the upscale jobs open to them, such as finance, and many were forced down the economic ladder to be tailors or milkmen or whatever.
The 2005 Cochran-Harpending paper on the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence is immensely informative on this topic:
https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
My recollection from Sowell is that Volkdeutsch filled many such roles in Russia proper, but they were purged in the world wars & revolution.
The Russians, like Catharine the Great, invited the Germans in to do advanced stuff. Germany was far enough a way that this didn't see too much of a security risk.
The Polish aristocrats thought about inviting in numerate German after the Mongols massacred a lot of their indigenous urban bourgeoisie in the 1200s, but then they worried that the Germans lived right next door and might try to take over Poland. So, they chose Rhineland Jews to be their new bourgeois.
Those were some prescient Polish nobles. Although there had already been Germans seizing territory in the east by then.
Actually, before XV century it was rather Polish princes, dukes and kings which did the inviting, and they did invite a lot of German settlers.
Medieval and early modern Poland used to accept any valuable refugees ejected by Europe's perennial conflicts, including wars of religion. E.g. it accepted quite a lot of Huguenots.
It's more like the Germans were invited and did in fact proceed to take over (often successfully, e.g. in Silesia). The put-down of Kraków's bourgeoisie uprising (and subsequent purge of german-speaking citizens) was a major turning point in reinstitution of a centralized Piast state.
"By analyzing the proliferation of long nucleotide sequences that are identical in the unrelated individuals in their sample, the researchers determined that a population bottleneck of approximately just 350 Ashkenazi Jewish individuals occurred in central Europe about 700 years ago, followed by an exponentially rapid population increase." https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/study-sheds-light-on-ashkenazi-jewish-genome-and-ancestry
These 350 individuals probably consisted largely of high-IQ lawyers, bankers and scholars. This genetic profile would have remained in the same population that exploded in Eastern Europe. Even if these Eastern Jews were mostly peasants (because there wasn't a huge division of labor in the High Middle Ages), they were obviously very smart peasants.
When the Industrial Revolution and capitalism opened up opportunities for intelligent people to achieve financial success after circa 1800, the Jews were naturally able to take advantage.
They weren't peasants. Eastern Europe already had a peasantry, and even hereditary serfdom well past its abolition in western Europe. Jews had middle-men occupations.
They were more likely to be in those positions, it's true. But there weren't enough middle-man positions in such an undeveloped economy for all Jews to have one (like tax collectors, merchants, landlords, licensed vodka dealers).
But having a high IQ leads to better productivity in almost any job. So I would imagine that Jews tended to be more successful as farmers as well. ("Peasant" was a poor choice of words because you are right they weren't really feudal peasants in the legal sense but just agrarian smallholders). Of course, back then, unlike today, having a consistently higher income meant lots more surviving children than a poor person (say, 8 vs. 1) and a correspondingly geometric increase in population percentage.
I am kind of surprised that essentially none of the comments mention IQ or genetics. I wonder if it's because people don't know the facts or if they're just afraid to mention them even in an anonymous comment.
My understanding is that they ran out of middlemen positions after their population exploded. Which reminds me of the downward mobility in Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms".
It's beyond doubt that IQ is important in this, with Ashkenazi jews probably averaging ten points higher than the mean of 100. IQ is the best predictor of future success in education, employment and financial stability. I am not for one moment saying it is the only thing we should value about people (finding ways for people who aren't gifted that way to be valued and successful in society is something we have failed to address in modern times), but it cannot be ignored as an embarrassing form of 'privilege' we pretend isn't there.
There is also the fascinating hypothesis that jews in the diaspora were selected for intelligence, often being restricted to the unchristian work of moneylending and working with figures, and perhaps doing all the bookkeeping mentally to avoid written records come the next tax collector. I can't speak to the American immigrant experience, but I did live in the east end of London many years ago, where poor jewish people were common. Even then, they didn't stay poor long as the work ethic shone through and they soon made the clockwise trek to the north London suburbs. And good for them. An example to the rest of us, especially considering the pretty horrible way the establishment spoke of them in those days.
Are you kidding???? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_in_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Court_Jews or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule. " For instance, Jews ... were invited to settle in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they would often form a prosperous model minority of merchants acting as intermediaries for their Muslim rulers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Baghdad. The list goes on and on. How could you possibly say that?
Those were Sephardi, so it’s not relevant to Ashkenazi achievement. In Europe Jews were prohibited by law from owning land or many professions. Medicine and moneylending were not excluded. I don’t think a Jewish lawyer would have gotten a fair hearing for a client so most likely the lawyer stereotype emerged in the 19th Century. Culture matters, like Moses Mendelssohn walking hundreds of miles to be allowed to study, or Richard Feynman mentioning that a yeshiva student’s mother observed her day was made because she had met a General and a Professor the same day, and most would not put the two in the same esteem.
Yes, exactly. Scott claimed that Jewish intellectual success is limited to post 1800 Ashkenazim, which is obviously false. It is also present in pre 1800 Ashkenazim and pre 1800 Sephardim.
Maybe the key is mixing low income traditional Jews into a western society that tolerates them? Looking at French Jews, most of them nowadays are Sephardic and they're famous for all being doctors and lawyers. Might be difficult to have data on the phenomenon given ethnic statistics are forbidden on France, but maybe Israeli statistics on olim from France could be useful.
If it's correct that there was no similar success before 1800, we could rule out a genetic explanation.
Yep. But that's the opposite of correct.
Scott has to know better. He also knows the data on Jewish IQ and the data on the genetic basis of IQ. So he's playing dumb for whatever reason.
Read up on figures like Josef Nasi, the Sassoon family, or the success of Sephardim in England, the Netherlands, Ottoman lands, etc. There was plenty of success.
Plus there was the privileged status of many Ashkenazim in the Polish Commonwealth.
Ashkenazim in Central Europe and the East were some of the last to get emancipated and also happened to be where the bulk of Jewish population growth was following the reconquista; so the notion of them being the only ones to experience a sudden boom in well being and only following 1800 is probably a reflection of it being a relatively large phenomenon being observed in a particular time.
Surprising the Scottish Enlightenment is referenced, but there is no mention of the Haskalah -- the contemporaneous Jewish enlightenment -- that began in Germany in the 1800's then spread eastward. Prior to this event, European Jews were a backwards people, at least by Enlightenment Europe standards.
Modern-day Ultra Orthodox Jews provide the best glimpse of pre-enlightenment Jewish culture. It's also probably not a coincidence that one of the poorest towns in the US -- Kiryas Joel, NY -- is a modern-day Orthodox shtetl. The same pattern repeats itself in Israel today, with Ultra Orthodox communities resembling the third-world.
While there is genetic evidence for higher Ashkenazi IQ's, the most important historical factor was living in close proximity the European Enlightenment, much like the Scotts you mentioned. Without it, Jewish communities would have continued to live in relative poverty, with minimal cultural advancement.
We did pretty well against Pharaoh that one time, admittedly after a bit of a losing streak
Because the Jews only discovered European culture (or greek wisdom as they used to call it) in the 18th century
And by a strange coincidence the jewish group that discovered european culture was the group of jews who lived among europeans
I find it hard to believe that the Ashkenazim took nearly two millennia to pick up the culture of the place where they lived.
They're not the only European Jews, either. There are also the Sephardim.
Actually, on re-reading, I note that I missed that Noah does discuss this theory: "In addition, I think that a large part of whatever Jewish overachievement remains will probably be attributable to the fact that Judaism is a religious minority, and religious minorities tend to overachieve."
I don't think Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah's Witnesses tend to overachieve.
Jehovah's Witnesses underachieve but I think part of that is that their religion
1) relies on converts, who are mostly poor to begin with
2) bans practitioners from public service, meaning the law will never be better-than-neutral in favor of the community
I heard a claim that at one time Jehovah's Witnesses were discouraged from pursuing higher education due to their prediction of the imminence of the end of the world (so it wouldn't be very useful to become an expert in worldly matters). I'm not sure if this is still the case, but there's something on the JW web site about higher education not being that important or valuable:
https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/jw-education-school/
In Orthodox Judaism, secular higher education is often sometimes viewed with suspicion or not seen as very prestigious compared to religious study (although there are certainly many Orthodox and observant Jews in secular academia). But in more liberal and secularized forms of Judaism, it's *very* prestigious, and often more so than religious education. So that's kind of a complicated subject that also varies from Jewish community and denomination to Jewish community and denomination.
One other thing that seems different between the Witnesses and Judaism is that the Witnesses have a particular central authority that is supposed to study and interpret the scriptures for them, and then send out authoritative interpretations and teachings (which are often presented in very simple, straightforward language that can be understood without a lot of education). In Judaism, there is no such central authority, and, while the Orthodox definitely have a very strong emphasis on respecting spiritual authorities (like one's own community's rabbi), there's also commonly an idea that (1) any Jewish man is capable of aspiring to contribute to religious scholarship or to become a religious authority (although in Chassidic Judaism there can be a hereditary element to some forms of religious authority), and (2) all Torah study is inherently spiritually beneficial to any Jewish man or woman, and inherently makes the world better, and the more of it the better, in the world as a whole or in an individual's life.
On the latter point, I think I once heard someone claim that the very first verse read in translation by an idly but genuinely curious lapsed Jew pleases God just as much as the millionth verse re-read in Hebrew by an aged rabbi who immediately thinks of 100 connections and associations. Although I don't remember where that claim comes from at all, and I might have more or less made it up.
A possible reason for this: The poor members of a religious minority leave for the majority faith. Coptic Christians in Egypt are an example for this.
Yes, this is exactly correct. Note also that this also probably also applies to the Ashkenazim, and to many other groups such as the remaining Zoroastrians (i.e. Parsi).
There also seems to be a second effect in the Levant where the Christians holdouts didn't mix so much with later arrivals that might have had lower genotypic IQ.
Note that in the US, there is something of an inverse relationship between the average income of a Protestant denomination and the degree to which it is populated by more recent convert families. The highest income is seen in the Episcopal Church and the PCUSA, which are basically direct descendants of the Church of England and Church of Scotland, respectively, and neither has ever been very good at conversion and thus both of them mostly consist of families that have been in those churches a very long time. Meanwhile Baptists, who mostly represent families that abandoned those churches in the 19th century, are considerably poorer. A group like Jehovah's Witnesses seems to consist of people who then abandoned groups like the Baptists in the 20th century.
If its really helpful to continue in the racial success vein, what is the rate of success in America of all immigrant groups at the same time in the same regions?
You could compare with the Irish (mine), Italians, other Eastern Europeans such as the Poles, the Germans, the list goes on. My quick answer is all groups did well in America comparatively- depending on region and time.
Chosen professions of course affect income- which is not the only measure of success, but seems to be dominant in the world we’ve chosen. (We as in present day America). To explain that a bit; if your father was a firefighter or a cop being that might be more important than “income.”
If your father had a love of the soil and raised you the same, being a farmer might be more important than income (it had better be).
Maybe if we must take this path we compare the different groups? Instead of looking inward at a closed circle?
Scott doesn’t compare apples to oranges but by saying “America” certainly that’s the context.
Is this meant to be a direct reply to my comment above? I don't see the connection. But yes, for the most part there's not an obvious large disconnect in achievement between the various European groups that migrated to the US in the 19th century and early 20th century. Of course, for the most part these groups are more related to one another than any of them are to the Ashkenazim, and they've intermarried in the time since their arrival in the US to a much greater degree than the Ashkenazim have.
The obvious disconnect among white people is mostly between earlier arrivals -- the British who ended up in Appalachia vs. those who ended up in New England, say (later arrivals tended to avoid places that were already poor, i.e. the South). Albion's Seed would suggest the differences between British-descended populations are cultural, which probably makes sense, they mostly came from the same island. Though, while I'm not an expert on the current evidence here, I also have to think they started with some genetic differences, and the pattern of American migration (e.g. brain drain from poorer regions to richer ones) might have exacerbated those differences.
how is that surprising?
If they were orthodox jews I would fine it surprising, but of course they are not. I find this comment more surprising, because it suggests that God interferes in temporal matters, which, considering the sum of temporal matters currently, I find a very amusing suggestion.
This is to be fair, a rationalist blog. But if we were to countenance it then we would have to agree that it took about 2000 years for God to get going with that blessing. Longer, maybe.
If true, this hypothesis could be both tested empirically and exploited practically.
But if we admit theological explanations for the success of religious groups, I don’t think the overall evidence favors Jewish monotheism specifically.
This comment is on is the blog of the author of https://unsongbook.com/ . I'm sure the thought of testing the hypothesis has occurred to him. It has also occurred to me.
It's an easy hypothesis to test. We just have to create a different universe with a different God, and see how much money the Jews make then. The grant proposal writes itself.
How can it be tested, if any apparent conflict between it and the facts is dismissed with "השם works in mysterious ways"?
I'm pretty sure that it was also written in Bible that blessing is conditional on following God and his Law and unless they do, they will be punished severely by God. And I think that most of American Jews are far from being Orthodox, they are mostly atheists now, I guess.
I'm not saying that your explanation is impossible but I would consider this as the another argument against
I was going to suggest that, it doesn't seem like Jewish piety correlates with economic success, which would be the only way to come close to testing this hypothesis.
Wouldn't that require the whole burden of proof of the existance of השם?
Because it's an extremely unlikely theory, requiring far stronger evidence to be believed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If mundane solutions such as genetics and culture exist and are equally able to explain the data, they are to be vastly preferred.
I read aloud in my head, so it annoys me when people use scripts I can't pronounce in otherwise Latin text. It also comes across as a little smartassy - flaunting your knowledge of foreign scripts to signal learnedness. Please transliterate next time.
השם transliterates to "hashem" literally meaning "the name", often used by Jews in lieu of writing/saying the creator's name.
Thanks!
Any chance anyone has data on the percentage of Jewish children born to married parents over time vs. other ethnicities?
I once read that in early 20th century Budapest, Jews had an illegitimacy rate of 10%, compared to Christians who were around 30%. This was brought up as one of the many reasons why Jews had a higher population growth in that era compared to Christians: child mortality was significantly higher among ilegitimate children.
We are a people with a deep connection to Jewish sacred texts and at the same time a people who were persecuted for that connection. That persecution bound us closer to our books, The modern world is a world of words not muscle. That's my explanation.
Wouldn't the same be true of Sephardic & Mizrahi Jews? They don't seem as accomplished.
they may not be accomplished recently, as they lived in countries that were poor in the 18th-20th centuries, but they certainly have been accomplished in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_in_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Court_Jews or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule. " For instance, Jews ... were invited to settle in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they would often form a prosperous model minority of merchants acting as intermediaries for their Muslim rulers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Baghdad
Christian minorities also seemed to do better than average within the Ottoman empire. In "The Long Divergence" Timur Kuran (who is himself Turkish) explains it via Islamic law entrenching principles that made it difficult to form corporations.
perhaps. but the statement that sephardic and mizrahi jews don't seem as accomplished only holds up for the past couple hundred years, when sephardic and mizrahi jews were living in less developed countries than ashkenazic jews.
I think an interesting contrast between Ashkenazim and Sephardim is how their prayer services go. Sephardim (in my experience) do most of the prayer service out loud and in a communal way. Ashkenazim have far more long stretches where everyone reads to themselves quietly. I've always assumed it was because literacy levels were higher in Europe so the people could actually just read from their prayer books. But in communities where literacy wasn't the norm there's far greater focus on learning everything off by heart.
Admittedly I've never actually checked if this is accurate in any way.
My paternal grandparents were both Jews who emigrated to America separately before World War I. My grandfather was the son of a Polish cobbler (and the first person in his family who was taught to read). My grandmother was the daughter of a Russian rabbi who was killed in a pogrom and who walked out of Russia without any other family as part of a group of people emigrating to America via Hamburg. Both came from small villages and neither could have been considered anything but poor.
"But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural."
That seems the more plausible answer, if one is willing to consider that cultural norms can be embedded very deeply into individuals. The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.
My grandfather and some of his friends were discussing their children one day, and he finally responded to the many "my son the doctor" remarks with "my son TEACHES doctors." (Dad was on the faculty of Stanford Medical School at the time.) The story goes that the conversation changed topics after a long pause.
No one made the obvious retort: “Those who can, do; those who can't, teach"?
Not part of Grandjoe’s story if they did.
> The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.
I would be interested in seeing a survey about people's cultural attitudes toward physical books and how those relate to their cultural background. E.g., things like
* do you feel better in some way having more physical books present in a place where you live or work? (does it make you feel more comfortable or emotionally positive toward that location?)
* do you feel bad in some way when you or someone around you shows physical disrespect for a book? (e.g., throwing it in the trash or recycling; placing it on the ground; breaking or damaging the spine; physically throwing it across a room)
* do you find it emotionally pleasing to acquire books and emotionally difficult to part with them, in a way that feels subjectively different from acquiring and parting with possessions in general?
These things are all true for me, and I grew up in a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish household, but I also noticed that they were and are true of many of my middle-class friends from non-Jewish backgrounds.
It's an interesting cultural proxy I've anecdotally noticed myself. Whenever jewish friends would visit my home in the US the first thing they almost always noticed the above average number of books we had. In Israel it's very common for people to have decorative bookshelves for their most treasured (usually religious) books the same way many other cultures have special cases for their dining china.
Hmm, my parents (not Jewish, and only first generation intellectuals) had the same feelings about physical books; I grew up lovingly reading lots of books, but resented this sacred admiration of books as such. It was partly just teenage rebellion, but partly me living in a society where printing was already cheap, a lot of garbage got printed, and books were gradually moving into virtual reality anyway.
Cultural preferences and genetics are deeply interwoven in humans. The reason why the Dutch are so tall is that culturally they don’t have a preference for shorter women most societies have.
Of course, another plausible cause here is that Jews who couldn't hack it within that religious tradition left for other religions, so this ended up serving as a selective effect for high literacy, which probably meant higher IQ. So while it's a plausible cultural thing, it's also plausible that the culture eventually gave them a genetic advantage by selecting against lower IQ members.
What does the horizontal scale on the chart represent?
Geography, but not very effectively. It's just added in so not everyone is in the same place.
Are you trying to say that the world is not one dimensional?
Don't be silly, it's two dimensional (provided you don't count the turtles)
Ah, thank you!
I'm still confused, because the key says that the colors indicate geographic region. And then those colors are sorta... split up? Like all the Europe is on the left, but then there are Asian countries in the middle and on the right...? And if they were just spacing out the points for legibility then why are a bunch of them clustered on top of each other so as to not be legible?
Agreed. I can't make sense of why groups are where they are.
Why are Greeks next to Luxemburgers but way off from Macedonians?
Why are Egyptians next to the Japanese but a world away from Moroccans?
Why are Nigerians so far from most Africans for instance Ghanians[sic]?
Why are Brazilians so far from Agentineans [sic]?
Why are French Canadians around Australians, Japanese, Nigerians and Pakistani?
There has got to be some rationale...
I assume the vertical axis is income? It doesn't seem to be labeled.
if you click through to the source, there the axis also doesn't have a label but does at least have a title: "Age/Sex-Adjusted US-Born Median Personal Incomes in 2015-2019"
So, yes, it does seem to be income. Sort of.
If the “groups should be represented according to their share of the population” (in college admissions, professions, etc.) standard were applied to Jews it would be devastating.
Luckily, Jews are “white” so for some reason it doesn’t count? And people decided Jewish quotas were immoral discrimination but Asian quotas (not explicit ones, admittedly) are somehow ok? This doesn’t make any sense on principle, and I don’t think it’s sustainable. I hope we end up with “discrimination is bad”.
Well said.
> This doesn’t make any sense on principle
Maybe the people doing it don't have principles, other than "do what benefits me / my group / my ideology".
LA Times had an editorial on Harvard admissions. Answer seemed to be that Asians should just suck it up.
The current situation is just begging for court cases where gentiles who are discriminated against because white people are over-represented, but who are in a situation where gentiles ares underrepresented, go to court to demand that Jews are treated as a separate ethnic group for discrimination purposes.
We have noticed the skulls wrt 'discrimination is bad.'
Quotas may not be the best solution (and they're not common), but we've certainly learned that discrimination exists in various forms even when it's not being intentionally implemented. And that if you think that's bad, you need to take active, sometimes counter-intuitive measures to oppose it.
Nah. We should crack down on discrimination where we can find it, but "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race"
Really my concern is that people are too quick to infer discrimination from weak evidence like "disparate outcomes", so we impose discriminatory rules to counter discrimination that doesn't exist.
For example, Jews have very good outcomes; should we infer massive pro-Jewish discrimination and impose massive anti-Jewish rules? (No)
Yeah, like I said, society has noticed the skulls regarding that type of simplistic formulation.
Anything that can be fully summarized in a single sentence, is probably wrong.
"society has noticed the skulls"
What is this supposed to mean?
That most people agree with you? But they don't (e.g. the recent failure of prop 22 in California).
That we've tried what I'm suggesting before and it's gone horribly wrong? But we haven't (AFAIK?).
Presumably, it refers to the phenomenon described in this article of Scott's (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/) where widely-known criticisms to a field are inapplicable because by the time the public is generally aware of them, they've already been taken to heart by insiders.
That said, I'm not sure what it would mean for *society* to have noticed the skulls, since my understanding of the phrase a Scott used it requires some sort of inner circle to have already learned from what the wider public still thinks of as valid criticisms. Who's the wider public if that inner circle is "society"?
Regarding the last paragraph:
Anecdotal, of course, but in my Jewish upbringing it was always said or implied that Jewish success was partly due to a culture considerably more education-focused than the norm. More educated people tend to be more successful and make more money, and we also see similar patterns among other immigrants with strong pro-education cultures; it can be joked that American Jews are basically the early 1900s equivalent of modern Asian Americans.
And this does make some sense: after all, the central text of Jewish life was not the Torah but the Talmud, which is the Torah plus the random comments, debates, and thoughts of a bunch of rabbis. And you can see it in other parts of Jewish culture, too: here's "If I Were A Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof:
If I were rich, I'd have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray.
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall.
And I'd discuss the holy books with the learned men, several hours every day.
That would be the sweetest thing of all.
Perhaps it's no surprise that people growing up in that cultural milieu tended to make a lot of academic discoveries.
^this. I'm not Jewish, but from my reading and observation, this is a huge part of it. No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem. Then over multiple generations, people who value education and have the skills to succeed at it marry people who value education & have the skills, and the process repeats, over and over.
Add to that persecution, which forced the community to build extremely strong internal trust networks. Sephardic Jews, though second class citizens, never faced the same level of persecution as Ashkenazi Jews.
Now take that community, remove the persecution, but keep the deep communal trust bonds (there is a massive literature on trust and economic growth) and the cultural emphasis on education and study. The recipe for success is complex, but trust and education are two major ingredients.
>No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem.
On the other hand, Augustine, Aquinas, and countless other Christian theologians were sainted. I think this counts as rewards and esteem.
One observation by my father (an Ashkenazi Jew) was that Christian theologians and priests didn't marry and have children, whilst Jewish equivalents were encouraged to have lots of children. Multiply that over the generations and you've got built-in eugenics.
As I understand it, Christian priests or monks (I don't know whether there were theologians who weren't priests or monks) were supposed to not marry and not have sex, but the rule against sex was hard to enforce. I suppose their children were less likely to have the advantages of being acknowledged members of families, but I await further information.
Cleric celibacy is not a Christian rule, but a Catholic rule mostly established during the 11th to 12th century period. It was strongly advocated by popes Gregory VII and Urban II during the 11th century, and afterwards "enshrined" in the 1st Lateran Council in 1123.
It is specific to Catholics; the Orthodox, Protestant and other Christian priests largely do marry. (in the Orthodox world, only the highest echelons of the church are expected to be celibate, and I'm not sure about the various Protestant denominations)
Christian monks are indeed celibate, but monks are different from priests in many religions, and I think they are celibate in most.
But interestingly there are no monks in Judaism. I think the whole idea of monkhood is pretty counter to Jewish ideals like "Tikkun Olam" which means fixing the world. Which is clearly not something you can do by withdrawing completely from the world.
@Clive Exactly!
My argument is cultural, not genetic, so the unacknowledged children of priests would not be in a position to benefit from their fathers' learning and study.
> No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem.
Have you heard of the Imperial exams in China, an attempt to pick candidates by merit for cushy imperial government jobs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
The Chinese seem to be as much a People of Books as the Jews. Overseas Chinese even occupied a similar Middle Man position in other countries.
And intermarriage between secular American Jews and Chinese Americans are surprisingly common.
The Chinese case is particularly interesting, because their book learning was extremely specific in use. You learned poetry as the vast majority of the curriculum, with the goal of achieving a cushy government position. On the other hand, China as a nation was terribly poor and underperforming for most of the past 300 years or so.
On the other hand, Chinese emigrants tend to do really well wherever they go, becoming the successful merchant class of wherever they end up. (Thomas Sowell's book "Race and Culture" goes into this a lot.)
That together, to me, suggests a strong cultural story, where the cultural importance of education gets put to different uses, one productive and one not.
If you study hard and succeed in the test, you become a government official with low productivity, possibly even negative, despite your intellect.
If you study hard and fail the test, you leave your country seeking higher status elsewhere, and being blocked from government you become a merchant, applying your intellect in higher productivity areas.
If you don't study, you just remain a peasant in the home country.
> If you study hard and succeed in the test, you become a government official with low productivity, possibly even negative, despite your intellect.
You may also have more children than the average peasant, increasing the frequency of any genes that helped with passing the test (related to intelligence, or even just ability to sit down and focus on studying!)
That's true. It doesn't do much for the overall wealth of China, which was my point. The Chinese testing system seemed to not do much for the Chinese living in China, but the culture of educational attainment seemed to do them a lot of good once they left and got real jobs.
I don't think scott has done cochran's argument much justice...part of it is overdominance at alleles governing certain cognitive traits, but it also allows for frequency changes of alleles with additive effect under selection, which would be less conspicuous than the diseased homozygotes.
A related mystery about the Ashkenazim that I have not seen discussed: How come there are so damn many of us?
The notion of real genetic differences is rooted in the founder effect, which itself comes from a tremendous population bottleneck 600-800 years ago (probably the Crusades) which reduced the Ashkenazi Jewish population to about 350 people, and thanks to endogamy (marriage only within the clan) only 4 maternal groups account for 40-70% of the current Ashkenazi population. As a result, Jews have an unusual prevalence of Tay Sachs and Crohn's and other rare genetic diseases, and maybe(!) as a result have higher general intelligence as well. And these difference are mostly what we focus on when we talk about Ashkenazi exceptionalism.
But population is a mystery to me too. There are now maybe 10 million Ashkenazi in the world, an increase in population of 30,000-fold since the bottleneck. Meanwhile, since 1000 AD global population has increased by about 20X. European population has increased by maybe 15X. These differences are... not small. You can absolutely get to 30,000X with regular generational doublings over hundreds of years, but no one else seemed to. Maybe some of the reason that everyone's Jewish ancestors were so poor was because it was impossible to accumulate wealth with so many kids.
Anyway, I'd love to hear if anyone has any data on household size of Jews in Middle Age Europe, or similar. The explanation here is probably cultural, but it is as deserving of a rigorous explanation as the other phenomena, and I can't find one.
This is a really interesting question. Like you, I think it had to do with medieval demographics. Before the demographic transition, people like Greg Clark have pointed out that the wealthiest tended to be the most fecund (which makes sense given appalling child mortality rates in medieval times). We also know that European Jews occupied a white collar niche, which meant outsized wealth for Jewish elites.
Cities tended to be demographic sinks for European Christians, who didn't have the kind of public health engineering skills of Roman aqueduct builders until maybe the 19th Century. But Ashkenazis could grow their populations in urban settings.
Ashkenazis were particularly adept at surviving in cities. They had more hygienic habits and more money on average than Christians, which allowed them to have more rooms per person which cut down on infections spreading at home.
I was unaware of the population bottleneck suggestion and I'd like to learn more. Can you recommend a source?
There are a bunch of studies that all point more or less in the same direction. Here are a selection:
"MtDNA evidence for a genetic bottleneck in the early history of the Ashkenazi Jewish population", https://www.nature.com/articles/5201156
"Signatures of founder effects, admixture, and selection in the Ashkenazi Jewish population", https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/107/37/16222.full.pdf
"Insights into the genetic epidemiology of Crohn's and rare diseases in the Ashkenazi Jewish population", https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1007329
Genetic databases like ancestry.com or 23andme.com have to correct for Ashkenazi similarity when they tell you that they have found your "third cousin" or whatnot. The fifth cousins in my database can have a higher relatedness than my (non-Jewish) wife's third cousins because of so much inbreeding in the population over the years.
Thank you; those are all interesting. My understanding of the genetics is limited. However, none of those papers suggests a bottleneck in the 13th-15th century. The first suggests a bottleneck 100 generations ago, which I guess means roughly around 0 AD? The second suggests a bottleneck may be the best explanation for prevalence of certain diseases, but is silent on timing, and specifically suggests admixture may be a superior explanation to a bottleneck in explaining linkage disequilibrium. The third rejects bottleneck as an explanation for Crohn's disease, stating that preferential selection is a more likely explanation.
Certainly Ashkenazi relatedness is a phenomenon. But inbreeding/lack of interbreeding may be a sufficient explanation, rather than a specific low-population bottleneck in 1300.
Ashkenazi family trees probably have a bottleneck during Roman times when a fairly small number of Hebrews arrived in Europe (perhaps in Italy) and, apparently, took European wives. There may have been another bottleneck as Italy's population dropped until Jewish survivors of the barbarian invasions appeared in the Rhineland at least by Charlemagne's time. Then Rhineland Jews were invited to Poland after the Mongol pillaging of Polish cities in the 1200. There they grew dramatically in numbers over the centuries.
My apologies for not getting you a cite for the c.a. 1300 bottleneck. You can find a summary here: https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/study-sheds-light-on-ashkenazi-jewish-genome-and-ancestry or here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1216062/.
My understanding is that the exact timing has maybe ±100 year error bars, but 1300 is not a bad place to start. And the finding holds up across many different studies.
FWIW, there are plenty of south Asian populations that appear to have similar founder effects, but I do not think they are as well studied yet.
David Brooks took a DNA test and was very excited to be told that Steven Pinker was his third cousin. But most Ashkenazis are "cumulative cousins" of other Ashkenazis to a high degree (i.e., via multiple genealogical pathways, they end up about as genetically related to most other Ashkenazis in sum as an extremely outbred individual like Tiger Woods is to his cousins via a single genealogical pathway).
Well they don't correct very well, I've got 3rd cousins out the wazoo on 23andMe to the point that I've started ignoring their "you've got a new genetic relative!" notifications (I'm an Ashkenazi)
If this really happened you shouldn't find just genetic evidence for this, is there no historical evidence for this bottleneck.
I think the population bottleneck might be an illusion caused by the existence of a hereditary priesthood who in the absence of any lasting Jewish secular structures since the Khazars loat thwir state were de facto almost always the highest-status group. High-status fathers have more children, both due to generally being wealthier and also being able to attract extramarital partners more easily (I'm not sure but I guess that lower-status men are likelier to knowingly bring up the higher-status father's children as well). This means that Jews are fairly unique in Europe and the Middle East at least in having a genetically consistent group with the most chance of passing on their own genes at the expense of others. Over time this will reduce genetic variation in a population as in each generation an increasing proportion of children are gathered by high-status individuals or descendents of high-status individuals.
I don’t know if this is true, but I was told that the first commandment (or mitzvah) in the Old Testament is “Be fruitful and multiply.”
This is true in the sense that this is the first commandment which appears in the text we have received (at Gen 1:22 and 28). In composition order, I think the first commandment is "You shall love Jahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" (Deut 6:5). Some (including but not only Jesus) have considered this also to be the first commandment in the sense of being primary.
Alternatively, if Deutronomy originally began at chapter 12, the first commandment would, less romantically, be "You must demolish completely all the places where the nations whom you are about to dispossess served their gods, on the mountain heights, on the hills, and under every leafy tree."
Obviously if the ten commandments were a pre-existing code, the first commandment was "You shall have no other gods before/besides me."
In terms of importance, Hillel summarizes the most important commandment for Judaism as the golden rule: "What is hateful to you, don't do to others"
But the thing about "Be fruitful and multiply" is that since it's commanded long before the Jewish people actually exist, it's not only directed at Jews. It's directed at every living thing. You could think of metaphorically as God kick-starting evolution ;-)
One of the pitfalls of your argument (potentially) is that many of the statistics that lend themselves to the conclusion that "Jews are outliers in success" include non-Ashkenazi Jews. If your hypothesis about the 4 maternal groups is correct, this would not apply to non-Ashkenazi populations. This begs the question - are non-Ashkenazi Jews similarly outliers according to success metrics?
The statistics about Jews (such as IQ or Nobelists) are usually specifically about Ashkenazi. Sephardic Jews score significantly lower than Ashkenazi in IQ, for example. But of course the Ashkenazi tend to be Western European or American, which means that you aren't truly holding culture constant with that comparison. Even in Israel, where both groups coexist, environmental factors between the two groups remain. So the differences are evocative, and might rule out some environmental hypotheses, but it's still not a slam dunk for genetics.
do you have citations for the overall diff in sephardic IQ and the difference between ashk/seph/mizrahi jews in israel. (Israel is also not a perfect example because of historical and ongoing cultural differences, but...)
This is one. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17052383/
I have not found much else.
It should be noted that the true outlier statistics such as the number of Nobel prize winners provide a mixed bag of support for a genetics hypothesis. The US has had many more Ashkenazi Nobelists than Israel despite having a similar number of Ashkenazi Jews. So clearly (and unsurprisingly) factors beyond genetics are profound.
Scott has analyzed this before ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/ ). The simplest comparision (all American Jewish vs Israeli Nobelists by present population) is somewhat misleading; if we use a more apples-to-apples comparison (Nobelists from the last few decades, Ashkenazi Jews only), Americans still have more, but "only" by a factor of ~1.8.
A small correction: while the US and Israel has a similar total number of Jews, the Americans are almost all Ashkenazi, while only about half of the Israeli Jews are.
Israel was a fairly poor country until recently. One of my Israeli colleagues explained their tech boom was fueled by immigration of well-educated Soviet Jews in the 80s and 90s.
You should probably be careful with some of the assumptions built into this understanding. As a further thread demonstrates, the exact dates and other information is not clearly understood and can be off significantly. To say that the population dropped to 350 may be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 pretty easily due to lack of records and proper classification. 35,000 people spread out over Europe is still a tiny population, but that has monumental implications for the 30,000-fold increase idea you presented. That would still be an outlier in terms of population increase, but far more believable and easier to explain.
As for how their population could increase significantly, I imagine large families is part of it, but you should also consider that they would not have been permitted (or likely as interested) to join the military and die in the hundreds of European wars during the relevant timeframe.
The idea that the Jews did not die in war is interesting!
I'm sure a non-zero number died in wars, especially if civilian populations were killed (which is often the case). That said, they would have been pretty unwelcome in both Christian and Muslim armies, especially during the Crusades and in any war otherwise related to religion - which for a long time was most of them, even if the religious reasons were only symbolic or a cover for geopolitical concerns.
I don't know if it's actually true, but I grew up being told Jews had a lower death rate during the plague (not the current one) because passover cleaning made their homes less interesting to rats. If the lower death rate there is true, when European populations were absolutely obliterated, you'd jack up their prevalence and probably leave them particularly set up to succeed afterward.
Agreed, we should add large error bars and recognize that the data evolves. But it's hard to reconcile a founder population of 35,000 people with the independent data that 40-70% of Ashkenazi have mitochondrial DNA from just four women (or close female relatives). That is not nuts with a 350-person bottleneck. Given multiple strands of evidence, this seems less likely to be a simple data analysis error, but I'm open to pushback on the specifics.
Sure, a lower estimate may be more accurate, but the date is also unknown, so we could be talking about some much earlier time period - like 500 AD instead of 800 or 1200, and that makes a big difference on population growth as well.
Surely a lot of the answer is contained in the fact that a lot of time passed during which Europe's population barely increased. But by simple virtue of the fact that lots of time passed, a lot of population dynamics happened, and merely citing the change in total European population might falsely suggest things were more static than they were. Certain family lines exploded in their number of progeny and others went extinct. All of us, Jew or Gentile, are descended from winners in that contest. The difference is that the Jewish family lines are identifiable and the Gentile ones merged into the European whole.
> This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history;
In my experience self-made wealthy people (sample size of 3-8 depending on how confident I want to be in my assessment of others wealth) all want to play up how they and their family were poor or had really hard circumstances of some sort to overcome.
Obviously, this doesn't prove anything, but something to consider...
My great-uncles invented a rich and successful ancestor, court jeweler to the tsar or some such. That was the story they wanted to tell.
I think I undersold something in my comment. When I say "play up" it makes it sound like these people are deceiving us, but what I really meant is that they've convinced themselves.
Another anecdote to add to the pile: My grandfather's dog was killed by Russian soldiers during one of the various pogroms he lived through as a child in what's now Ukraine. The one photo I've seen if him as a boy, he looks gaunt to the point of malnourishment. When he came to the US he opened a shop selling window fixtures. So most definitely poor/working class, and yet all three of his first-generation children went to college, including one (my mother) to an Ivy League.
One more anecdote: the last members of my family to leave Germany, in 1938, were skilled professionals (medicine etc.).
This is consistent with Scott's picture in which economic pressure mostly causes emigration of the poor, while political pressure (as in late-1930s Germany) mostly causes emigration of the rich.
Surely it makes sense to consider several factors none of which explains all of a phenomenon and each of which adds a little. Some comments: 1. Surely the fact that travel to America was expensive kept out the poorest of the poor. The examples you give are mainly of people who were culturally middle class but had fallen on hard times. So what? The middle-class habitus was still there, together with the drive to move (back) upwards. And yes, all (voluntary) immigrants are self-selecting, though not necessarily quite in the same way. 2. Again, this is part of it. Obviously "such-and-such % of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, compared to % of the world population" is fallacious - what counts is the percentage of (not very poor) inhabitants of cities in wealthy countries. There's still a gap, but the ratio is what, the square root of what it would be otherwise? 3. Oh yes. See: Nobel Prize winners. (If anything, people of mixed ancestry and descendants of converts to Christianity are probably overrepresented in that list - vastly so up to the mid-20th century, once you consider that the rate of intermarriage anywhere pre-WWI was essentially nil, and conversion was always a trickle, relatively speaking.) 4 is a strong argument against racial explanations. It's also something that clarifies that, when we are talking about cultural explanations, we are not looking at anything intrinsic to the term "Jewish", or to Judaism (even if it may have had an effect in a refracted sort of way, or even by virtue of being left behind) but rather at the set of values and practices that immigrants from a particular class in particular parts of Europe had in 1880-1910. (In other words, part of what people still sometimes refer to as "Jewish", sometimes to the annoyance of some observant Jews; cultural images die hard.) None of this makes the matter less interesting - just less surprising. It also makes the phenomenon *more* relevant to discussions of other ethnic groups in the US and elsewhere; a unique or inexplicable phenomenon would be less relevant.
“ 1. Surely the fact that travel to America was expensive kept out the poorest of the poor. The examples you give are mainly of people who were culturally middle class but had fallen on hard times.”
Emigrating via steerage class was not expensive, and was subsidized by the incredibly high fares paid by passengers in 1st class.
Well, it would still be rather expensive for the poorest of the poor! Even for the merely poor, it would require the ability to save and plan well, which if anything is a more relevant characteristic than simply having money.
Why wouldnt the same logic apply to Irish, Italian, Polish, German, etc. immigrants?
Oh, but it does. Voluntary immigration always imposes a filter, both in terms of wanting to go to the place you are going to and in the sense that there were always (even) poorer people who didn't make the trip. It's one factor among many.
My understanding of this issue is that Jews performed a "rural service minority" (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the-economic-ecology-of-jews-as-a-rural-service-minority.html) role in Europe that endowed them with commercial skills and values that ended up serving them very well in modernity relative to their Christian peasant counterparts. If your ancestors were a series of moneylenders and merchants and middlemen it makes a lot of sense to me that you'd be more likely to be drawn towards intellectual pursuits and high paying professional jobs compared to someone whose recent ancestors were in more traditional feudal roles.
My Ashkenazi ancestors were both rich and poor. One set (grandmother's family) were relatively well-off Russians from Minsk. They left in the late 1880s, presumably motivated by the recent pogroms, and my great-grandfather who arrived as a teenager was valedictorian at his American high school and went on to become a lawyer. They were fine. I have assumed that they had sufficient old country wealth to enable this good start in the new one.
The other set were poor Galicianers; that great-grandfather was the youngest of six and wandered around as a performer/beggar/probably thief until he married and left for the US for better prospects.
Also, avoiding compulsory military service shows up a LOT in my family's history. Not just for those coming to the US, but crossing from Russia to Austria-Hungary or vice versa, hiding out with relatives, etc. I don't think the Russian army in 1860 was a pleasant place to be Jewish (or a pleasant place, period).
"avoiding compulsory military service shows up a LOT in my family's history." Me too. A Jewish Great Grandfather of mine moved to America to not be drafted into the Czar's army. My parents had their first child (me) earlier than they otherwise would have to help my dad avoid the Vietnam War draft.
My Jewish great-grandfather came to America to avoid fighting for Austria-Hungary in WWI.
I was amused to read that Jewish immigrants claimed to be tailors; my great-grandfather was a genuine tailor. His pretext for leaving Hungary just before the war was that he was going to buy cloth in Hamburg.
The Russian Army's term of conscription was 25 years (e.g., age 18-43), so getting the hell out was a good idea.
So what you are saying is that there is some strong anecdotal evidence for the "dual loyalty" hypothesis often espoused by antisemites?
Hearing you it seems absolutely OK and common and nothing to be the least ashamed of that Jews are loyal first to their family and kin and sees themselves as having little or no duties to the country they reside in, and in this particular case the duty is the highest one can have toward his country (I write his here because women have never been expected to fight in conscripted armies before quite recently) - it is also the most dangerous, duty one can have towards the county who has granted one citizenship.
But then we have the particular fact that US jews often, at least compared to any other group of immigrants as far as I understand things, go to Israel to do their years of conscription in the Israeli army.
I am a gentile with some jewish friends, one which I would call a close friend, and have always assumed jews are as everybody else with a european heritage but belonging to a different religion and culture with different holidays and a heavy focus on studying and perhaps being of a higher intelligence than most other whites (I am not really that well read on this whole intelligence thing) but that differences between jew and gentile are not much else.
But hearing it from you, who present yourself as jewish, jews seem to have or at least had, in many historical times and places, at least very little loyalty towards the country which they had citizenship in. When jews were not allowed citizenship I fully understand it but since the early 1800s and the enlightenment I believe Jews were granted citiizenship and full rights in almost all countries in Europe except Russia (I am not that well read on jewish history).
This was interesting to hear. Have you guys got any other anecdotes you might want to share that points to support for the "dual loyalty" hypothesis? I am always interested in finding out the truth however labeled it my be.
PS: I mean no harm and Jews are obviously not in any position of being killed in pogroms today with Israel being one of the five states that possesses a solid nuclear triad that can inflict millions of casualties on any country that tries to exterminate jews.
In my ancestors' cases, there was a world of difference between the countries of the Old World and the USA. My great-grandfather is a (US) WW1 veteran, wounded in France, and my grandfather a US WW2 veteran, combat engineers. As far as I know, all of my relatives today in the US consider themselves citizens of our country first. My impression is that the decision to immigrate was usually accompanied by a decision to become American, and that Jews responded to the generally-welcoming environment of the New World with both gratitude and loyalty. Even prior to the peak immigration years, Twain's essay on Jews cites War Department statistics that suggest Jews served proportionally in the US Civil War.
You write: "since the early 1800s and the enlightenment I believe Jews were granted citizenship and full rights in almost all countries in Europe except Russia"
Not so much. Western Europe, this is sort of true; but Poland, Russia, and the rest of the East largely not. Even in the west, there were nasty exceptions to the equality laws, 'full citizenship' under the law often did not mean societal acceptance, and societal acceptance, even when granted, could be withdrawn. For examples, see the Edgardo Mortara case, the German 'Hep Hep' riots, or the French Dreyfuss affair, all of which took place post-emancipation in the 19th century. A poor, but not totally inaccurate analogy, is to Irish immigrants in the US 1840s-50s: certainly able to participate in society, and equal de jure under the law, but not seen as equal citizens by (many/most of) their peers.
Plus, the 19th century concept of nationality was rather more complicated than the 20th. Did a Czech or Serb in Austria-Hungary owe his loyalty to the Empire of which he was a 'full citizen', or to the project of independence for his co-linguists? In these fights the Jews were excluded on all sides, regardless of emancipation. The Serb saw the Jew as an agent of the Empire, who could never be fully Serb; the Empire saw a citizen whose loyalty was suspect and might easily be compromised. One common Jewish response was to adopt a position of personal political neutrality, an example of which is contained in the Twain essay, where his Jewish correspondent declares, proudly, that the Jews are apolitical: not out of national disloyalty, but because neither side would have them.
My impression is that the time and place mattered greatly. German Jews were often quite patriotic; German-Jewish WW1 veterans were common Holocaust victims. If you are interested in the subject, one place to start might be "The Pity of It All", by Amos Elon, which covers the societal place of German Jews from about 1750-1933.
Something I would like a demographer or historian much smarter than myself to investigate is a "creaming the top theory" to Jewish exceptionalism. Specifically that in addition to cultural norms like specializing in certain occupations and having high literacy and smart rabbis getting the girls and having more kids, there is also a negative selection pressure on the less successful Jews to remain Jewish over centuries of persecution, programs, holocaust etc. Maybe if you just want a normal, comfortable life you decide to convert and become a follower of orthodox Jesus in the 9th century or become Muslim in the 11th century and stop paying the dhimmi tax whereas only the truly exceptional people could afford to continue on their minority traditions. Or more negatively you get murdered or forced to convert during one of the many persecutions over the millennia and can't continue your line while the most successful among you managed to survive and continue your ancestors traditions.
What immediately makes me question this hypothesis though is the plight of the gypsies/Romani. They are similarly persecuted for a similar duration of history but on every social economic status dimension, they are near the bottom of European populations. Then again the Parsis in the indian subcontinent do mirror the Jews in achievement so that's another foil.
Maybe today's gypsies are really, really good at being gypsies and whatever that entails doesn't tend to produce high economic status while Jews got really, really good at being Jews and that does entail things that produce high economic status. Different selective pressures select for different things.
True or if both had persecutions. If I'm hearing you right, the skills/strategies that enabled gypsies to escape persecution and avoid being wiped out were equally successful at at it's primary goal but are maladapted to success in a 21st century society. Whereas whatever it is that allowed Jews to continue on, just happened to be suitable for high economic status professions today. Both strategies were equally successful at preservation albeit were wildly different.
The Roma are travelers, the Jews are a middleman minority. Middlemen minorities transition cleanly into finance, which currently basically runs our entire economy since we decided usury wasn't a sin any more. Travelers are really good at doing lots of petty crimes (since they move to another city before you can catch them for stealing stuff from you), which is increasingly less effective as the law enforcement apparatus becomes increasingly sophisticated.
They are also increasingly forced to stay put, which upsets the entire business model.
I think that both gypsies and Jews tend(ed) to choose jobs that separated themselves from others, like musician, doctor, banker, beggar, salesman/shop owner, thief, etc. This is in contrast to jobs where you have to be embedded in a community on equal footing, need to hire people from outside, etc, like a farmer, factory worker, etc.
A difference seems to be that Jews managed to achieve a higher class of these kind of jobs, despite being mistrusted.
A hint as to why this was possible might be found in Hitler's lamentation that every Jew had a gentile speaking up for them. Perhaps Jews were distrusted collectively, but had cultural traits that made gentiles trust them individually sufficiently for them to be accepted as a doctor, banker, etc.
I get a sense that in places where they dislike gypsies a lot, few of those gypsies have non-gypsies who would speak out for them.
That’s basically Cochran et al’s theory.
My understanding from reading Cochran was that there wasn't any such tendency toward conversion prior to Jewish Emancipation.
Seems like I should check out Cochran's work! Are there other seminal authors on this topic?
I haven't read an enormous amount of Jews, but I linked to my post where I host Thomas Sowell's essay "Are Jews Generic?" on middle-man minorities. Amy Chua's "World on Fire" is about a similar topic, though she uses the term "market-dominant minorities" and focuses on poorer countries. I mentioned Yuri Slezkine's "The Jewish Century" which labels both Jews & Gypsies as "Mercurians" who again have a specialized economic role with respect to a larger host population. He's Russian-Jewish and over the course of the book the focus on Russia increases, though he also notes how many (including his own relatives) moved to Israel during the later years of the USSR and contrasts them with the Jews who moved to America.
A lot of the comments on this page trying to compare the Romani and Jewish people show how little people know about the different types of Romani or the differences in how they were or are treated in different countries. These differences go all the way back to different waves of Romani leaving India centuries ago. In some areas they were held as slaves with proper 'for sale' signs until the 1850s and now these groups are unsurprisingly the poorest and most visible of Romani people in Europe. In fact, people often think that if a Romani person don't look or act like the poorest of the poor Romanian Romani, then they aren't 'real.' In other areas of Europe, such as Hungary, they were forced to give up their native Sanskrit-based language, take surnames and frankly this did help them get ahead Romani in other countries. This included having access to military service and education.
The thing about being Romani or part-Romani is that once one becomes successful or educated, non-Romani or even members of their own community might say you're not 'a real Gypsy.' They become 'White' with 'South Asian and West Asian DNA.' This feeds into the idea that there are no educated Romani people or "Good Gypsies", when 'Romani' is often not even an option on say, university entrance forms or HR forms. Oddly, you'll see Romani-Americans or Romani-British (not Irish Travellers) putting "White and Asian" on these forms.
As far as persecution goes, it depends on country. The European Roma Rights Centre covers segregated schooling, forced sterilisation, policing problems and lead poisoning issues (see all the crime / IQ / health issues that is hotly debated now) still happening today.
In terms of WWII, aside from the expected genocide, forced labour and medical experimentation (https://www.un.org/en/exhibits/forgotten-victims), there was different issues with Romani citizens of Germany losing their citizenship and property and not being able to get anything back, unlike (some) Jews. Of course, people made the excuse that Romani people don't ever own possessions and are 'travellers' so they couldn't possibly have been middle class people who had citizenship, businesses and property seized. See all the comments below saying that Romani people are 'travellers' despite the vast majority of Europe's largest minority being settled. A very good overview into the history and current situation of the Romani is I Met Lucky People by Yaron Matras.
Fitting with the topic of this post, many well educated Romani activists do also have mixed parentage and there's a few paragraphs on this in I Met Lucky People. There's quite a few Jewish-Romani activists, which is not an unusual combination in cities such as Budapest. I'm certainly not arguing that the Romani people overall are doing well or are anywhere as successful as the Jewish people or even a state's ethnic majority, but rather that when Romani people become middle-class or successful, they tend to become invisible and often actively hide their heritage to avoid discrimination. They certainly aren't good enough to be on My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/is-my-big-fat-american-gypsy-wedding-unfair-to-the-romani-community.html) Many actually explain their darker skin or dark eyes by saying they have Jewish heritage!
"My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding" is quite obviously confectionary TV that has little to do with the lives of most gypsies. Although they do draw the motives from that millieu.
Oksana Marafioti, the gypsy college graduate and classically trained pianist complaining about TLC's TV show in the Slate piece, has herself little to do with the lives of most gypsies. Although she is drawn from that millieu. I mean, will someone next start complaining that the reality-TV show "The Real Housewives of Wherever" does not *really* depict the reality of the real real-housewives-of-wherever?
TLC purveys the kind of confectionary entertainment that its viewers are looking for, and Slate purveys the kind of confectionary worldview that its readers are looking for. Whoever wishes to gain insight into the lives and customs of most gypsies, might want to look for it in other places than reality-TV entertainment and Slate.
Back to the original topic - the parallels between the Jewish and Romani minorities. The fate of Romani in WWII was about as horrendous as that of Jews, absolutely. But the societal outcomes of the two groups were worlds apart, both before and after WWII. Romani were frequently talented at music. Jews were talented at pretty much everything. Both were discriminated against by significant portions of the ethnic majority. And their outcomes - in the end - lined up quite well with their differences in talent.
P.S. About Romani traded as slaves "in some areas" until the 1850s, I take it you're referring to the Ottoman Empire? (the rest of this article is mostly focused on Europe)
I don't know much about jews and jewish history but the discrimination that Roma people have fared surely has a basis in that Roma people, the different kinds that exist of them, are quite the opposite of jews, being still a largely parasitic class having no second thoughts about stealing from or hustling a gadjo, as is their name for everybody that is non-romani.
As you say there is a frequent problem in that Roma people who want to leave the Roma lifestyle with it's paralell society with clans, a paralell legal system, an aversion to schooling or letting the gadjo get their grips into their children (because the children might possible leavve the Roma lifestile) and forced marriages complete with targeted criminal exploitation of the majority population (Roma people for instance specialize in stealing from elderly people (80+ years), most often women living alone, in all the Scandinavian countries because they feel they have no moral duties towards non-roma and the punishments are lenient in these countries) is no longer regarded as part of the Roma community which makes leaving the community and even semi-assimilating very hard.
I think it's quite unappropriate and possible anti-semitic comparing the situation of Roma people who obviously have no moral regard for the outgroup and who have no intention of even semi-assimilation and who's only contribution to the society they live in is the need for the employment of a lot of police officers, welfare care-takers and other such people, with the situation of jews who have frequently been among some of the most productively contributing citizens and who has semi-assimilated from being all ultra-orthodox before the 20th century, to being a well-liked minority in every western country.
Perhaps people are only responding rationally in their discrimination towards roma people - the easiest way of avoiding problems with a problematic group is avoiding any dealings with them and having no contact at all with them, ie avoiding them at a cost that is proportional to the problems they create. That is not to say there are some quite exceptional roma people, but bringing the situation of Roma people into the conversation when Jews as a group are talked about seems incredibly unfair to jews.
I've been inclined towards this sort of theory myself after reading the following about Armenians in the 19th century Ottoman Empire:
"Historian A. Tchamkerten writes 'Armenian achievements in the Empire was not only in trade, however. They were involved in almost all economic sectors and held the highest levels of responsibility. In the 19th century, various Armenian families became the Sultan's goldsmiths, Sultan's architects and took over the currency reserves and the reserves of gold and silver, including customs duty. Sixteen of the eighteen most important bankers in the Ottoman Empire were Armenian.'"