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There’s no doubt that Jews are smart. And I mean really smart – smart enough as a group to be candidates for being the brightest people on earth.
And it’s not because I’m a member of the tribe that I dare to suggest such a seemingly chauvinistic and sweeping generalization. It’s something that’s been acknowledged by countless people in the past and more recently even statistically verified in a host of studies.
Before political correctness probably would have prevented him from stating it so boldly, Mark Twain wrote this about the Jews in the 19th century:
[The Jews] are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual aristocracy… [Jewish] contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are.. way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world… and has done it with his hands tied behind him.
The 20th century list of Nobel Prize winners makes Twain’s words almost prophetic. Jews, more than any other minority, ethnic or cultural, have been recipients of the Nobel Prize, with almost one-fifth of all Nobel laureates being Jewish. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates. Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, and 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.
The Jewish IQ average is 40% higher thn the global average.
But it isn’t just geniuses who demonstrate Jewish intellectual exceptionalism. A remarkable study conducted by psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen, published in 2006 in IQ and Global Inequity, calculated that a Jewish average IQ of 115 is 8 points higher than the generally accepted IQ of their closest rivals – Northeast Asians – and approximately 40% higher than the global average IQ of 79.1.
So that’s the good news. And that’s what makes a winner of this past year’s Sidney Award – the journalism award given for the most important scholarly article of 2012 – so depressing.
Writing in The American Conservative, Ron Unz highlights what he calls “the strange collapse of Jewish academic achievement.” The gist of his winning essay is the remarkable revelation that Jews no longer excel in the areas in which they previously held such scholarly preeminence. Comparing the number of Jewish prizewinners of major nationwide competitions of the past decade in a host of academic and scientific areas to those of previous years, Unz finds a dramatic and unprecedented fall-off.
In his words: “The underwhelming percentage of Jewish students who today achieve high scores on academic aptitude tests was totally unexpected, and very different from the impressions I had formed during my own high school and college years a generation or so ago. An examination of other available statistics seems to support my recollections and provides evidence for a dramatic recent decline in the academic performance of American Jews.”
If Unz’s conclusion is correct, we need to ask the obvious question: What is it we’ve lost that in the past made us so smart? What was the source of our distinctive brainpower that we’ve allowed to become dormant? If we’re starting to cede the blue ribbon for intellectual achievement to others, what is it that made us so special in the first place?
To my mind the obvious answer is the one rooted in the most famous description of the Jewish people. We are known as “the people of the book.” We were the first people to mandate literacy for every child and lifelong study for every adult. In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for the incredible record of Jewish achievement and gives primacy to the cultural values that have their source in the Bible and the Jewish religion. Jews didn’t get the genius from their genes; they made study a central feature of their faith and passed on their love of learning to their children.
A few years ago the South Korean ambassador to Israel, Ma Young-Sam, revealed that Talmud study is now a mandatory part of the country’s school curriculum. In fact, he said almost every home in South Korea boasts a Korean version of the Talmud and parents commonly teach from it to their children. The reason? He explained:
“We were very curious about the high academic achievements of the Jews. We try to understand, what is the secret of the Jewish people? How are they, more than any other people, able to reach those impressive accomplishments? Why are you so intelligent? The conclusion we arrived at is that one of your secrets is that you study the Talmud. We believe that if we teach our children Talmud, they will also become geniuses. This is what stands behind the rationale of introducing Talmud study to our school curriculum.” (“Why Koreans Study Talmud, ynetnews.com)
I frankly doubt that a dose of Talmudic study will turn South Korean children into scholars. But I do know that creating a climate of respect for scholarship, of reverence for study, of preferring the accumulation of wisdom over any material possessions – all of the ideals that represent the distinctive contribution of Judaism to the world – were the keys not only to the spiritual but also to the intellectual uniqueness of our people.
“The people of the book” are becoming “the people of the buck.”
That’s why I think assimilation of Jews into the broader American culture is far more than a theological concern. My fear isn’t simply that of Jews losing their faith. What troubles me is that “the people of the book” are becoming “the people of the buck.” I’m afraid we are beginning to lose sight of what for ages made us deserving of being a light unto the nations.
As long as our children emulated the heroes of the mind and spirit, we maintained our place in the forefront of the world’s achievers. But as we watch Maimonides give way to Madonna, our goals shrink to the success of the marketplace and our bank accounts.
What a shame it would be if with all of our brainpower we weren’t smart enough to hold fast to the very traditions that insured our intellectual excellence.
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(76) Anonymous, May 5, 2013 11:24 PM
Utterly Flawed Study -- Comparing Apples to Oranges
Flawed study. Intelligence has at least some genetic basis. The intermarriage rates have risen to nearly 50% of American Jews by this generation. That means mixed genetics as well as mixed cultures and different accompanying values on the nurture end of things. The research is comparing apples to oranges.....an Ashkenazi genetic pool preserved from Europe with 2 Jewish parents instilling Jewish values and attitudes towards education and intellectualism in the home compared to a much more mixed pool a few generations later as assimilation caused unprecedented rates of intermarriage. Literally not the same pool of people both in nature and nurture.
(75) Anonymous, January 15, 2013 4:06 PM
drugs, fundamentalism
many of the brilliant Jews mentioned were not members of any fundamentalist group. (ie ultra orthodox) In order to use your intelligence your mind must not be commited to any rigid way of thought. also, the turn from liberalism to conservatism among many Jewish groups has been a turn off to many young Jews who are looking for a cultural identity. feeling alienated, lost, many young ones turn to drugs and other escapist routes.
(74) scott, January 13, 2013 11:20 AM
Assimiation=Reversion to Mean
In my opinion, mainstream American Jewry is doing the best that it can to assimilate. Gone are the days where parents demanded academic performance and focus on things like music, literature and sciences. Gone are the days when kashrut and vibrant shuls and Shabbat observant created vibrant, non-assimilated communities that produced great scholars because Jewish kids were less distracted by sports and cheerleading camp. They also tended to avoid the drugs and petty crime that are epidemic in suburban America. When you give up the culture that produces special people, you stop producing special people. Just like a match requires oxygen to burn, the divine spark in us requires Torah and Jewish values to continue burning. I’m not saying that assimilated Jews are less Jewish than others, I’m just saying they’re being less Jewish and getting less of the benefit of our special relationship with the divine. Without Torah, we disappear as a people and revert to the mean.
Emil Friedman, January 14, 2013 3:25 AM
It's not that simple.
The vast majority of the 20th century Jewish brains described above were not at all religious and did not have much of a Jewish education. Only a tiny fraction of the smart Jews in my cohort at MIT had a significant background in Jewish learning.
Nechama, January 15, 2013 6:13 PM
INSTILLED VALUES SURVIVE A FEW GENERATIONS
True, many were not religious, however their parents instilled a love of learning in them. That love of learning came from their grandparents/great grandparents. They still held on to some of the basic Jewish values which had been instilled in them. Little by little, that has been worn away. I remember as a child that even completely non religious Jews wouldn't think of intermarrying (except for a very few exceptions). That was also something that had been deeply instilled in them.