Richard Lynn: “Many studies have shown that crime is predominantly committed by the less intelligent. Probably the main reasons for this are that the more intelligent have a better understanding of the costs of crime, and since they generally have better jobs and higher social status, the cost of crime is usually greater for them. It is therefore interesting to note that Jews have tended to have lower crime rates than Gentiles.”
“During the early 20th century, the Jewish physician Martin Englander (1902, pp. 11-12) contended that Jews are on average more intelligent that Gentiles and have larger heads, though inferior
physique. During World War I, the suggestion that Jews are more intelligent than Gentiles appeared to be confirmed with the publication of a study by Ottokar Nemeck (1916) in which he analyzed the scholastic records of 1,549 15-18-year-old school students. He reported that Jewish students were on average superior in all academic subjects, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, languages, history, and geography.”
As for the Nazis:
As Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, one of his prime objectives was to rid Germany of the Jews. Hitler’s motives for doing this appear to have been that he believed that the Jews are exceptionally talented and could take control of the world. He may also have believed that the Jews were parasitical and had certain poor character qualities. Be
this as it may, he began to take measures against the Jews shortly after he acquired power. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their citizenship and prohibited them from marrying Gentiles, from attending public schools, engaging in business or the professions, and owning land. In 1938, a pogrom destroyed synagogues; the state confiscated most Jews’ financial assets; and all Jews were required to live in ghettos. In the 1930s, it seems that the Nazis thought the way to rid Germany of the Jews would be to encourage them to emigrate and between 1933 and 1945, approximately 300,000 Jews who had been robbed of their goods and property were allowed to leave the country. The Nazis also considered plans to resettle the Jews in other countries. Madagascar was considered as a possible place to send them (Gordon, 1984). It appears that it was not until late 1941 or early 1942 that the Nazis formulated and began to implement the plan of the extermination of the Jews. During the next three years, approximately 160,000 were killed in the gas chambers, while some 26,600 survived, a figure that includes those in mixed marriages.
“The Ethiopian Jews, sometimes known as the Black Jews or Falashas. Although they have no genetic affinity with other Jews, they were accepted as Jews by Israel in 1973 and hence acquired the right of abode in Israel. Most of them took advantage of this privilege, and by 2000, there were approximately 80,000 of them in Israel, about 1.3 percent of the population.”
“There have been six studies comparing the intelligence and related cognitive ability of Jews and Arabs in Israel. These have shown that Jews have a higher IQ than Arabs by about 14 points.”
More:
Jewish children scored much higher than the other three groups on verbal ability, about the same as the Chinese on reasoning and numerical abilities, but below the Chinese on spatial ability. It appears, therefore, that the European Jews have particularly strong verbal ability and somewhat less strong reasoning and numerical abilities, but their spatial ability is not nearly so good, not only compared with Oriental Jews but also with other racial groups, namely, Chinese, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans. This pattern of European Jewish abilities confirms the theory that these abilities evolved because they found a niche in Europe as money-lenders and tax farmers, for which verbal, reasoning, and numerical abilities were required, and were excluded from the craft occupations for which spatial ability is required…
The fertility difference between the Europeans and Orientals has been partly due to the more efficient use of contraception by the Europeans. A survey carried out in 1988 found that 38 percent of unmarried European young women born in Israel used contraception during their first sexual experience, compared with only 20 percent of Orientals (Wilder, 2000). This is itself partly
attributable to the difference in intelligence. The fertility of all three groups has declined over the 25 years and the differences have converged. The difference between the European and the Oriental Jews had virtually disappeared by the year 2000 for those born in Israel, although the fertility of those born in Asia and Africa was about 43 percent greater than of those born in Europe. By the year 2000, the fertility of the Arabs had also declined, but remained above that of the Jews.Jews enjoy better health than Arabs, as indexed by rates of infant mortality and life expectancy… Throughout the period, the rate of infant mortality of Arabs was more than double that of Jews. The Israeli National Health Insurance Act of 1995 gave free medical care to all Israeli residents, including Arabs, but this evidently did not reduce the different rates for Arabs and Jews…
In the early days after the foundation of the state of Israel, it was soon observed that European Jews did better than Orientals and Arabs in education, earnings, and occupational status. Virtually all Israelis believed that these differences would soon diminish and eventually disappear as the Orientals and Arabs became assimilated. The evidence has shown, however, that this
has not happened. In fact, the earnings gap has become greater in the period 1975-1992…We have seen that there is a gradient of intelligence in the four ethnic populations in Israel. Intelligence is highest in the European Jews (IQ=io6), lower in the Orientals (IQ=90), lower still in the Arabs (IQ=84), and lowest in the Ethiopian Jews (IQ= 69). These IQ differences predict and largely explain the differences in educational attainment, earnings, and socioeconomic status. However, Israeli social scientists have been very shy about acknowledging this. A number of Israeli social scientists attribute the poor performance o f the Orientals, the Arabs, and the Ethiopian Jews to “discrimination” by European Jews. For instance, Savit, Cohen, Steir and Bolotin (1999, p. 6) write that “the Israeli Arabs suffer from severe discrimination: Scholars agree that the social disadvantages of the Mizrahim have their roots in the way they were received by the Ashkenazim establishment during the early years of the state…inequality persists because the dominant ethnic group, the Ashkenazim, manages to perpetuate its privileges by excluding others from the higher and more selective educational tracks.”
In a similar, if opaque, vein, Friedlander, Okun, Eisenbach, and Elmakias, (2002, p. 135) assert, “ethnic gaps are functions of political and economic historical factors and contextual factors.” Two other social scientists who believe that the poor performance of the Orientals, the Arabs, and the Ethiopian Jews is attributable to “discrimination” by European Jews against the other groups are Vared Kraus, a sociologist at the University of Haifa, and Robert Hodge, a sociologist at the University of Southern California (Kraus and Hodge, 1990). They have concluded that Israel is meritocratic insofar as the racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic status are virtually wholly determined by the differences in education, so “the process of occupational attainment is basically egalitarian” (p. 179). Why, therefore, do the European Jews do so much better than the Orientals and the Arabs? Their explanation is that the Europeans
discriminate against the Orientals and the Arabs and keep them in a socially subordinate position. They do this to maintain their own position and are particularly motivated to do so because they are aware of their low fertility and the threat this poses to their dominance. Thus, “the dominant European-American Jewish elements in the Israeli population sought, by means of established institutions of education, to control the flow of other ethno-religious groups into positions of power and prestige.“Their scheme was ostensibly fair because it was meritocratically based; nevertheless, it effectively excluded Arabs and Asian-African Jews from the highest echelons of the nation’s social institutions and economy because of their lack of access to educational opportunities. Thus, what appears to be a meritocratic system may also be construed as a system of social control based on their educational credentials by the dominant elite (European-American Jews) in order to exclude the educationally disadvantaged (Asian-African Jews as well as Arabs).” (p. 175)
This is the standard sociological theory of racial and ethnic differences in educational attainment, earnings, and socioeconomic status. With few exceptions, it is axiomatic for sociologists that all groups are equal in intelligence, despite massive evidence to the contrary. Hence, ethnic differences in socioeconomic status must be caused by “discrimination” by the socially dominant group. But this explanation does not stand up to examination. How can the Europeans use their power to secure higher marks for their children than for the Oriental Jews and the Arabs in examinations at school and university? It is not suggested that the Europeans fake the marks, but how else can the better performance of the European children be explained? And if the Europeans used their power to exclude the Oriental Jews and the Arabs from higher education and higher socioeconomic status positions, they would surely have exercised this more strongly against the Arabs, who are widely perceived by Jews in Israel as enemies, than against their ethnic coreligionists, the Oriental Jews. Yet the Arabs do pretty much as well as the Oriental Jews in socioeconomic status, and even had higher percentages in the professional class in 1955 and 1974. Contrary to Kraus and Hodge’s conspiracy theory, there is nothing to stop Oriental Jews and Arabs from entering the universities and the professions, except that fewer of them are able to pass the entrance examinations, and the reason they cannot do this is that they have lower IQs.
Other Israeli social scientists, including Cohen and Haberfeld, have concluded that the poor performance of the Orientals, the Arabs, and the Ethiopian Jews cannot be explained by “discrimination.” Reviewing the studies, they write, “most previous research detected no differential labor market discrimination of Jews of Eastern origin” (1998, p. 510); their own studies have confirmed this conclusion. They believe much of the gap can be explained by “the increase of returns to college education” (p. 507), but they have no explanation to offer for why so many more European Jews have college education than Orientals and Arabs. It is difficult to believe that these social scientists are unaware of the higher intelligence of the European Jews and that this can explain their better achievements. It can only be presumed that they have chosen not to mention it.
[Re: Argentina:] By the beginning of the 20th century, the Jewish immigrants were prospering: “their children and grandchildren often became professionals-lawyers, teachers, artists, and doctors” (Elazar & Redding, 1983, p. 95). They even secured control of more than half of the prostitution trade, hitherto in the hands of the French…
Anti-Semitism has not been particularly strong in Argentina, although Jews have been by convention excluded from work in the government, the judiciary and the officer corps of the military…
According to Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Lenin claimed, “a smart Russian is almost always a Jew or somebody with an admixture of Jewish blood.” Lenin himself was a quarter Jewish through his maternal grandfather (Slezkine, 2004, p. 163)…
Partly as a result of the series of attacks on Jews from the 1870s on, and the failure of the Tsarist state to protect them, many Jews joined the Bolshevik Party. Its objective was to overthrow the Russian state and replace it with a new communist order based on the ideals of ethnic equality and universal brotherhood. Jews were prominent among the Bolsheviks during the Civil War between the Red and the White Russians of 1917-1921. The Red Army was led by Trotsky, who was Jewish, and Jews were 40 percent of the top elected officials in the Army. At the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in 1917, 31 percent of the Bolshevik delegates were Jews. In the Second Congress of Soviets, Jews were 37 percent of the Bolshevik delegates. The first two heads of the Soviet State-Lev Kamenev (born Rozenfeld, 18831936) and Yakov Sverdlov (i8 8 5 -i9 i9 )-w e re both Jews, and so also were the first Bolshevik bosses of Moscow and Petrograd-Kamenev and Zinoviev. From 1919 to 1921, Jews were approximately 25 percent of the Party’s Central Committee. When Cheka (the secret police) was set up in 1918, Jews were 19 percent of the investigators; they made up 50 percent of the investigators employed in the department for combating “counter-terrorism.” In 1923, Cheka was replaced by OGPU; Jews composed 15 percent of the senior officials and half (four out of eight) of the governing Secretariat. Put simply, Jews prospered in the Soviet Union in the period between the two World Wars: “there is no doubt that the Jews had a much higher proportion of elite members than any other ethnic group in the USSR” (Slezkine, 2004, p. 236). A higher percentage of Jews than Gentiles were literate: 85 percent in 1926, compared with 58 percent of Russians; 94 percent in 1939, compared with 83 percent of Russians. In 1939, 26.5 percent of Jews had a highschool education, compared with 7.8 percent of the population of the Soviet Union as a whole and 8.1 percent of Russians in the Russian Federation.
During the period 1917-1939, Jews were approximately 1.8 percent of the population. Row 1 shows that in 1926, nine percent of the officers in military academies were Jews. Row 2 shows that
at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Jews made up 19 percent of the delegates. Row 3 shows that in 1934, when the OGPU was transformed into the NKVD, Jews made up 63 percent of the
senior officials (37 out of 59)…Jews assimilated well with Gentiles in the years between the two World Wars. There was an acceleration of mixed marriages between Jews and Gentiles, which between 1924 and 1936, increased from 17.4 to 42.3 percent in the Russian Republic. There was little overt anti-Semitism, but nevertheless, the authorities were at pains to defuse a certain degree of resentment about Jewish prominence among the elite. When it was discovered that Lenin’s maternal grandfather was Jewish, Stalin decreed that this fact should be suppressed, lest it foster the notion that the
Revolution had been engineered by Jews…Between 1937 and 1938, what has come to be known as “The Great Terror” began: thousands of Army officers and professionals were executed or deported to the gulags. Jews, however, survived
the purges fairly well. Only about one percent of all Soviet Jews were arrested for supposed political crimes, as compared with 16 percent of Polish Jews and 30 percent of Latvian Jews. In 1939, the proportion of Jews in the gulags was about 16 percent lower than their proportion in the population. The explanation for this is that Jews were nearly all loyal to the Soviet Union and the Marxist ideology. This is shown by the high proportion of Jews among the professors of Marxism-Leninism in the universities and the research institutes. Jews were 20 percent of these, and 25 percent in the elite universities of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Kharkov.After the Second World War, Jews continued to be hugely overrepresented among the professional elite. Statistics showing this for 1949 are given in Table 15.10. At this time, Jews were about
1.8 percent of the population, yet they constituted 39 percent of the faculty at the Moscow Institute of Jurisprudence (row 1). Row 2 shows that Jews were 80 percent of the members of the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences. Rows 3 through 6 show that they were between 39 percent and 51 percent of the directors of Moscow theatres, art galleries, popular music shows, and circuses. Row 7 shows that Jews were 33 percent of the chief engineers at Soviet armaments plants. Row 8 shows that Jews were 23 percent of the top managers at the Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS)…In 1939, Joseph Stalin began to develop suspicions about the loyalty of the Jews. He put Molotov in charge of Soviet diplomacy and ordered him to remove the Jews from the Commissariat of External Affairs. The purge of the Jews increased during the war with Germany “and turned into an avalanche in 1949, when ideological contagion became the regime’s chief concern and Jews emerged as its principal agents” (Slezkine, 2004, p. 301). In January 1948, one of the best known and high profile Soviet Jews, Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948), was murdered on Stalin’s orders. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 increased Stalin’s growing paranoia about the Jews. Many Russian Jews welcomed the state of Israel; Stalin thought they would become more loyal to Israel than to the Soviet Union and that Jews and Jewish institutions were already subversive. During the years 1948-1952, all Jewish theatres and writers’ organizations were closed
and many Jewish writers were arrested. In 1952, 15 members of the former Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were put on trial as “bourgeois nationalists,” and all but one were shot. “By 1950 few Jews could make it to the top bureaucratic positions, though Jews continued to be widely represented in the Soviet academic, cultural and artistic elite” (Sacks, 1998, p. 249).Stalin died in 1953, and the purges of the Jews ceased. From 1953 onward, “Jews returned to the top of the Soviet professional hierarchy; they remained by far the most successful of all Soviet nationalities” (Slezkine, 2004, p. 331). In 1955, the Soviet physicists, in a largely Jewish team led by Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), successfully exploded the hydrogen bomb. Other brilliant Jewish scientists of this period included the physicists Igor Y. Tamm (1895-1971) and Lev Landau (1908-1968), the mathematicians Izrail Gelfand (1913-2009) and Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986), and the novelist Boris Pasternak (1890-1960). However, despite the ending of overt discrimination against Jews, covert discrimination continued: “in the 1970s, career advancement and job appointments were limited by something akin to percentage quotas.” Many Jews who found conventional careers blocked found new fields to work in: “When access to top research institutions was restricted, Jews poured into the burgeoning fields of computer science and information services. Jews had specialized knowledge and experience that remained in short supply and this assured their entry into high status positions.” (Sacks, 1998, p. 249)
Throughout the 1960s up to the 1990s, there remained a strong current of anti-Semitism throughout Russia, generated by resentment over the obvious and inescapable Jewish overrepresentation among the professional elite. By this time, Jews had so consolidated their positions to such an extent that they could be said to be “hereditary members of the cultural elite” (Slezkine, 2004, p. 335); these select lived in the affluent suburbs of Moscow and Leningrad and sent their children to the top schools and universities; their offspring who would, in turn, enter the elite. To combat this, the Soviet state put quotas on the numbers of Jews admitted to elite universities and prestigious professional positions. Many Jews, however, were able to overcome these “affirmative-action” programs directed against them. In some cases, the projects, such as the development of nuclear weapons, missiles, and space research, were too important,
and Jewish scientists were appointed simply because they were the best. Some Jews changed their names to make them sound Russian.Others took positions in less prestigious universities and research institutes and transformed them into first-rate institutions. Overall, the “anti-Jewish discrimination was not very successful (the enormous achievement gap between Jews and everyone else was narrowing very slowly)” (Slezkine, 2004, p. 337).
Nevertheless, despite the ability of many Jews to overcome the discrimination against them, many of them felt uncomfortable in the Soviet Union from the 1950s onward. The Jewish writer Mikhail
Agursky (1933-1991) described the widespread Jewish sentiments of this period:“Could one really expect that a nation [the Jews] that had given the Soviet state political leaders, diplomats, generals, and top economic managers would agree to become an estate whose
boldest dreams would be to a position as head of a laboratory at the Experimental Machine-Tool Research Institute or senior researcher at the Automatics and Telemechanics Institute? The
Jews were oppressed and humiliated to a much greater degree than the rest of the population.” (Slezkine, 2004, p. 338)Jews increasingly identified with Israel, especially after the victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, which established Israel in the eyes of Soviet Jews as a serious country of which they could be proud. The next year-1968-saw the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Many Soviet Jews disapproved of the brutal crushing of the incipient democracy and became further alienated from the Soviet Union.
The response of many Jews to this increasingly unfriendly and sometimes hostile atmosphere was to emigrate. Increasing numbers applied for exit visas. The government responded by further
discrimination against Jews in education and employment and by raising the fee for an emigration visa, which further alienated the Jews. Between 1968 and 1994, about 1.2 million left the USSR and its successor states. Officially they applied to go to Israel, but many treated this as a staging post en route to the United States. By 1988, 89 percent of emigrants were going to the United States. To stem this outflow, the U.S. reduced its quota for Soviet Jews. By 1994, 63 percent of Jewish emigres from the USSR had ended up in Israel and 27 percent in the United States (Slezkine, 2004, p. 358). The result of the extensive emigration of Jews in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s was that their numbers in the Soviet Union fell precipitously. In 1973, there were approximately 3.5 million Jews in the Soviet Union out of a total population of approximately 200 million; they comprised approximately 1.7 percent of the population, as compared with about four percent during the 19th century.Jews continued to be overrepresented among the professional elite during the post World War II years…
It is remarkable, though perhaps unsurprising, that of the seven top multimillionaires who made huge fortunes when Russia privatized its oil and natural gas industries in the Yeltsin era, six were Jews: Pyotr Aven (b.1955), Boris Berezovsky (b.1946), Mikhail Fridman (b.1964), Vladimir Gusinsky (b.1952), Mikhail Khodorkovsky (b.1963), and Alexander Smolensky (b.1954). Jews, who at this time were about 0.2 percent of the population, produced 86 percent of the new plutocracy…
Row 1 shows that Jews were 50 percent of top American intellectuals identified as those who published in the top twenty intellectual journals. Rows 2 and 3 show that Jews were 56 percent of
top social scientists and 61 percent of those in the humanities…Much has been made of the importance attached by Jews to education, but Boris Levinson and Zelick Block (1977) found that 400 Jewish 4-6-year- olds in the United States had an IQ of 111,about the same as that of Jewish adults. If education were a factor responsible for the high Ashkenazi IQ, their IQ advantage should become greater after several years in school. But it does not…
Fifth, a final pointer to a genetic basis for the high Ashkenazi IQ is their high prevalence of myopia (short-sightedness), an error of refraction in which near objects can be seen clearly but distant objects appear blurred. It has been shown in a number of twin studies that myopia is largely genetically determined (Post, 1962; Sorsby, 1951). There is a correlation of around 0.20 to 0.25 between myopia and intelligence. This correlation has been found in many studies reviewed by Sanford Cohn, Catherine Cohn, and Arthur Jensen (1988), who also show that this is an intrinsic correlation that is present within families, such that adolescents with high IQs have a greater prevalence of myopia than their siblings with lower IQs. Jensen proposes that the reason for this relationship is pleiotropy, i.e. a gene or genes that are responsible for myopia also increase intelligence. Consistent with this theory is the fact shown by Richard Post (1962) that the prevalence of myopia is highest in East Asians (Chinese and Japanese), intermediate in Europeans, and lowest in Blacks. Hence, the prevalence of myopia in these three major races runs parallel to the differences in intelligence…
There is no reason to suppose that the intelligence of the original Jews who lived in Palestine was any different from that of the other Arab peoples of the Near East. The high intelligence of the Ashkenazim and the lesser intelligence of the Sephardim and Mizrahim must have evolved as a result of their different experiences after the Diasporas…
The Persecution Hypothesis provides a reasonable explanation of why the Ashkenazim have acquired higher IQs than the Sephardim, Mizrahim, and Ethiopian Jews: the Sephardim, Mizrahim, and Ethiopian Jews were not persecuted as much as the Ashkenazim. During their sojourn in Spain and Portugal, and their five centuries in the Ottoman Empire, the Sephardic Jews were well treated. As we have seen in the chapter on the Balkans, “the fate of the Jews in the hands of Islam had on the whole been far more tolerable than in other parts of Europe” (Silvera, 1995, p. 56); and in the Ottoman Empire, the reign of Sultan Murad II (1421-1451) “began a period of prosperity that lasted for two centuries and which is unequalled in their history in any other country.” Jews had influential positions at court; they engaged in unrestricted trade and commerce; they dressed and lived as they pleased; and they traveled at their pleasure in all parts of the country.
“There are only two values in which Jews are significantly different from others. These are honesty, which Jews desire in their children less than do others, and judgment, which Jews desire in their children more than do others.” (RE: General Social Surveys)
There are eight values in which Jews are significantly different from others. Jews attach less importance to cleanliness, honesty, manners and obedience, but they attach more importance to considerateness, interest in how and why things happen, judgment and responsibility. (Fuller details of this study are given in Lynn and Kanazawa (2008).)
The results of all these studies suggest that Jews have stronger motivation for achievement than Gentiles. The high achievements of the Jews can be understood in terms of the formula IQ x Motivation x Opportunity = Achievement. It is the multiplicative interaction of IQ with motivation and opportunity that explains the huge overrepresentation of the Ashkenazim in all indices of high achievement. A Jewish advantage of around o.4d to o.5d in motivation interacting multiplicatively with a o.67d (10 IQ points) advantage in IQ is sufficient to explain the huge Jewish advantage in achievement. Notice also that if any of the terms in the equation is zero, there can be no achievement. This was the case with Jews before their emancipation in the 19th century. They must have possessed their high IQ and motivation because these will have evolved over centuries, but they generally achieved little because they were denied the opportunity, except in a few places like Britain and the Netherlands.
Once the Jews were emancipated, all three components of the equation for achievement were present and the Jews rapidly outperformed Gentiles in all areas. The high Jewish motivation for achievement, together with high intelligence, most likely has a genetic basis, brought about through having been selected for by eugenic customs, persecution, and discrimination.
…the high IQ of the Jews raises three awkward problems: (1) the high IQ of the Jews must have a genetic basis; (2) Jewish eugenic customs have contributed to the high Jewish IQ, and hence eugenic practices are effective in raising the intelligence of a people; and (3) a minority ethnic group with a high IQ succeeds despite discrimination.
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a significant factor in these Jewish achievements is their high IQ and that this must have a substantial genetic basis. Once this conclusion has been reached, it inevitably invites the question of why other ethnic and racial groups, notably Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics in the United States, Canada, and throughout Latin America, have failed to achieve equality with Whites, and why Blacks, North Africans, and South Asians have likewise failed to achieve equality with Whites in Britain and Continental Europe. If the Jews have done better than White Gentiles because they have a higher IQ, we are drawn to the conclusion that Blacks, American Indians, non-white Hispanics, and South Asians have failed to succeed because they have lower IQs. This was the conclusion drawn by Herrnstein and Murray (2004) in The Bell Curve, whose publication was met by a barrage of attacks. Most social scientists are reluctant to spell out this conclusion, either because they are ideologically committed equalitarians on race differences, or because they fear the criticisms they would be certain to incur. The second troubling conclusion that has to be drawn from the high IQ of the Jews is that it seems to have been a eugenics success story. We have seen that there is a strong case that the eugenic customs and practices of the Ashkenazim (according high status to intelligent rabbis and other scholars and promoting their marriage to the daughters of wealthy merchants) seem to have been a major factor responsible for the evolution of their high intelligence. But who wants to admit that eugenics works and has contributed to the high intelligence and achievements of this extraordinarily gifted people? Evidently not those who have written textbooks on psychology, sociology, and intelligence. The high IQ and achievements of the Jews lead to a third troubling conclusion. This is that an ethnic group with a high IQ succeeds despite discrimination, and this raises the question of why other ethnic groups have failed to succeed. The standard explanation of why Blacks, non-white Hispanics, and American Indians do poorly in IQ, education, earnings, and socioeconomic status is that Whites discriminate against them. The same explanation is routinely advanced to explain why Mestizos and indigenous peoples do poorly throughout Latin America, why Aborigines do poorly in Australia, and why Maoris do poorly in New Zealand. Yet, the Jews have suffered a great deal of discrimination over the last 2,000 years, and it has apparently not had an adverse effect on their intelligence or their achievements. How can this be explained? Jews have everywhere experienced anti-Semitism and discrimination, yet they have invariably done better in earnings, socioeconomic status, and intellectual achievement than Europeans. The only possible inference that can be drawn is that an ethnic group with a high IQ succeeds despite discrimination. This, in turn, discredits the theory that Blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians have failed to achieve equality with Whites because of discrimination. Those such as Sandra Scarr (1995), who maintain that racial discrimination is an important cause of Blacks’ low IQ, have a problem explaining the high IQ of the Jews. Why Jews have succeeded where Blacks, Hispanics, and Native American Indians have failed poses a problem that many social scientists find hard to explain, and thus prefer not to address. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is another of the reasons why a discreet veil of silence has been drawn over the high Jewish IQ.
… Jews as an ethnic group will continue to decline in numbers throughout Western countries up to the end of the 21st century. To estimate the extent of this decline in the United States, we can take Jewish fertility at 1.86 per woman, of whom half are born to Gentile partners of whom three quarters lose their Jewish identity. The effect of this is a replacement of 1.16 Jewish children per Jewish woman. This will result in an approximate halving of the Jewish population in each generation. Despite this reduction in numbers, Jews are likely to remain an influential force in the United States by virtue of their high IQs, power, and wealth; it is also likely there will be a sufficient number for them to retain their identity and remain a significant element in the population, at least until the end of the 21st century. Only in Israel is the number of Jews projected to increase. But the Jews in Israel face two problems. The first is the implacable hostility of their Arab neighbors. In the second half of the 20th century, the Jews in Israel did not have much difficulty in containing this by virtue of their higher intelligence, but whether they will be able to continue to do this if and when one or more of their neighbors secure nuclear weapons is questionable. A second problem lies in the differences in the fertility of the European Jews, the Mizrahim, and the Arabs. As we saw in Chapter 11, the European Jews are the elite with the highest IQs and educational achievement, and they form the majority of the professional and middle class. Yet, their numbers of children have been below those of the Mizrahim and the Arabs.
