"Common Sense: Why Jews are So Smart"
by Pete Metzger
Why are Jews so smart? There are many explanations, some of which strain common sense. But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. It can all be explained quite clearly:
Through millenia of widsread illiteracy, Jewish culture valued the twin cultural ethics of learning and literacy above all else. This was true since Jesus' day, and long before. Pressures to become the most learned in the Jewish community were around forever. Many of the men were rabbis of some sort, and every one dreamed of becoming the chief rabbi. The competition for that job was stiff, and was entirely based upon mental abilities. It was not even important what was studied. Even if it had been the game of chess, it would still have produced the same result, just as long as the challenge was a hard mental contest.
Early on then, the smartest Jews rose to the highest level of their society. Moreover, the field of competition was among all men thanks to universal male literacy, and not just among a much smaller group, as it was elsewhere. So a very strong merit system was in place from the beginning, and for a very long time. This cultural accident alone can answer the question.
But there was another and even stronger pressure. As if to insure the result, the smartest men reproduced themselves moreso than ordinary males. That was because the most highly placed rabbis were freed from having to make a living. They were supported by the community so that they could study all day long. Even more significantly, the head rabbi went through wives like popcorn, a younger one each time. Culturally, it was a great honor for an ordinary father, not blessed with great intelligence but only the ability to become rich, to give up his young daughter to the Rabbis bed, once the rabbis previous wife died having her 20th child. There is even hard evidence for this gleaned from the detailed family records that Jews are well known for, even going back to Bible days. So the most intelligent men were selected not only for intelligence, but for their ability to reproduce a lot, too. This is an even surer recipe for the selection of smart genes, but the realtive smartness of the Jews was helped along from another, and most unexpected direction.
Consider how the culture of non-Jews effected their own special outcome. In the culture of Christendom, the best minds, indeed the cream of the crop, were recruited, prized, and sent into the priesthood. Thus, in a single stroke, the genes for the best minds were collected from the entire male population, every generation, and then simply sent off into the celibate priesthood, thus removing them from the gene pool forever. So while Christendom impoverished its own gene pool of intelligence, the Jews enriched theirs, thereby making the relative difference between the two populations even larger.
I can't emphasize enough the role of male universal literacy among the Jews. Not only did the Jews invent a system that produced smart men (without realizing it), but they forced their entire male population through it. That took care of all the unsung geniuses from poor families who were so often overlooked by every other system, even in lands very far away from Christendom. Indeed, who among the gentiles could read at all? Only a small part of the population, the clergy and the aristocrats. And as we all know, from the example of the colonization of South America, selecting managers solely from the aristocracy is a very bad idea.
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Post Script: The arguments above can also be used to explain negative outcomes, of course, such as the higher than average rates of certain inherited diseases among Jews. Also, when the arguments above are applied to other groups and races, many heretofore complex and thorny issues suddenly become clear and easily understood by all.
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