The Israel Test. George Gilder
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were similar.
What matters in human accomplishment is not the average performance but the treatment of exceptional performance and the cultivation of genius. The commanding lesson of Jewish accomplishment is that genius trumps everything else. As Murray and Herrnstein write, “The key indicator for predicting exceptional accomplishment (like winning a Nobel Prize) is the incidence of exceptional intelligence. . .The proportion of Jews with IQs of 140 or higher is somewhere around six times the proportion of everyone else. . .” This proportion rises at still higher IQs. Murray and Herrnstein report a study taken in 1954 of IQs in the New York public school system that showed Jews with some 85 percent of the IQs over 170 (24 out of 28). This superiority in IQ also expressed itself in excellence in games that demand exceptional intelligence. Since the 1880s, nearly half of all the world chess champions have been of Jewish heritage.
Such stunning findings in The Bell Curve aroused little comment. Critics focused instead on a few provocative lines on the possible influence of genetic endowment in the IQs of blacks, although the margin of Jewish superiority over other whites was at least as large as the white edge over blacks and less amenable to sociological extenuation.
This reaction is typical of the great error of contemporary social thought: that poverty results not from the behavior or lesser capabilities of the poor, or the corruptions of failed cultures, but from “discrimination.” In the current era, Jews will always tend to be overrepresented at the pinnacles of intellectual excellence. Therefore an ideological belief that nature favors equal outcomes fosters hostility to capitalism and leads directly and inexorably to anti-Semitism. These egalitarian attitudes are the chief source of poverty in the world.
Poverty needs no explanation. It has been the usual condition of nearly all human beings throughout history. When poverty occurs in modern capitalist societies it is invariably a result of cultural collapse, typified by the American ghetto or Gaza or the West Bank or southern Lebanon, because young men are deprived of productive models of masculinity. What is precious and in need of explanation and nurture is the special configuration of cultural and intellectual aptitudes and practices – the differences, the inequalities – that under some rare and miraculous conditions have produced wealth for the world. Inequality is the answer, not the problem.
Murray’s later work, Human Accomplishment, focused on the fact that, as judged by Murray’s complex calculus fed by a database of historians, the Jewish three-tenths of one percent of the entire population of the world has contributed some 25 percent of recent notable intellectual accomplishment in the modern period. Murray cites the historical record: “In the first half of the twentieth century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology.” He then proceeds to more recent data: “In the second half of the twentieth century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure [of Jews awarded Nobel Prizes] rose to 29 percent. So far in the twenty-first century, it has been 32 percent.”
From the day Heinrich Hertz, whose father was a Jew, first demonstrated electromagnetic waves and Albert Michelson conducted the key experiments underlying Einstein’s theory of relativity, the achievements of modern science are largely the expression of Jewish genius and ingenuity. If 26 percent of Nobel Prizes do not suffice to make the case, it is confirmed by 51 percent of the Wolf Foundation Prizes in Physics, 2 8 percent of the Max Planck Medailles and 3 8 percent of the Dirac Medals for Theoretical Physics, 37 percent of the Heineman Prizes for Mathematical Physics, and 5 3 percent of the Enrico Fermi Awards.
Jews are not only superior in abstruse intellectual pursuits, such as quantum physics and nuclear science. They are also heavily overrepresented among entrepreneurs of the technological businesses that lead and expand the global economy. Social psychologist David McClelland, author of The Achieving Society, found that entrepreneurs are identified by a greater “need for achievement” than are other groups. There is little doubt, he concludes, explaining the disproportionate representation of Jews among entrepreneurs, that in the United States the average need for achievement is higher among Jews than in the general population.
“Need for achievement” alone, however, will not enable a person to start and run a successful technological company. That takes a combination of technological mastery, business prowess, and leadership skills that is not evenly distributed even among elite scientists and engineers. Edward B. Roberts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management compared MIT graduates who launched new technological companies with a control group of graduates who pursued other careers. The largest factor in predicting an entrepreneurial career in technology was an entrepreneurial father. Controlling for this factor, he discovered that Jews were five times more likely to start technological enterprises than other MIT graduates.
These remarkable facts and their powerful implications have evoked surprisingly little discussion. But a book such as Prager and Telushkin’s Why the Jews? on anti-Semitism that fails to come to terms with the raw facts of Jewish intellectual superiority will fail to persuade its readers, who will sense that the argument cannot bear the weight it is asked to carry. Yes, there is a religious component in anti-Semitism, but there is also a political and economic element, reflected in the objective anti-Semitism of Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky, Friedrich Engels, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and other Jewish leftists who above all abhor capitalism. Jews, amazingly, excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals even in the arena of anti-Semitism.
For all its special features and extreme manifestations, anti-Semitism is a reflection of the hatred toward successful middlemen, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, lenders, bankers, financiers, and other capitalists that is visible everywhere whenever an identifiable set of outsiders outperforms the rest of the population in the economy. This is true whether the offending excellence comes from the Kikuyu in Kenya, the Ibo and the Yoruba in Nigeria, the overseas Indians and whites in Uganda and Zimbabwe, the Lebanese in West Africa, South America, and around the world, the Parsis in India, the Indian Gujaratis in South and East Africa, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and above all – the more than 30 million overseas Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution reports that in Indonesia overseas Chinese constituted only five percent of the population, but they controlled 70 percent of private domestic capital and ran three-quarters of the nation’s top two hundred businesses. Their economic dominance – and their repeated victimization in ghastly massacres – prompts Sowell to comment: “Although the overseas Chinese have long been known as the ‘Jews of Southeast Asia,’ perhaps Jews might more aptly be called the overseas Chinese of Europe.”
Sowell has written several books that document this pattern of hostility toward “middleman minorities” in fascinating detail and has explained its causes and effects with convincing authority. The role of wealth-creation and trade, with its rigorous disciplines, linguistic virtuosity, and accounting prowess, means that “middleman minorities must be very different from their customers.” These groups, “their wealth inexplicable, their superiority intolerable,” typically arouse hatred from competing intellectuals. “It is not usually the masses of the people who most resent the more productive people in their midst. More commonly, it is the intelligentsia, who may with sufficiently sustained effort spread their own resentments to others.”
The culture of economic advance “and the social withdrawal needed to preserve this differentness in their children,” Sowell writes, “leave the middleman minorities vulnerable to charges of ‘clannishness’ by political and other demagogues. . . . These accusations can exploit racial, religious, or other differences, but this is not to say that such differences are the fundamental reason for the hostility.”
It is a mistake for Prager and Telushkin to ignore the persistence and universality of this phenomenon and to claim some special, more exalted, and elusive source of anti-Semitism, while half-denying the obvious and massively disproportionate representation of Jews in almost every index of human achievement. This evasive argument may reduce the number of available allies and divert attention from the real problem.
Prager