Jews make up a disproportionate percentage of scientists, physicians, researchers, mathematicians, etc. They make up about 25% of nobel prize winners and fields medal winners as well as a lot of entertainers.
Has anyone calculated how many potential fields medal winners, nobel prize winners, researchers, etc. humanity lost due to WW2? The world current has about 14 million Jews, and it lost 6 million about 70 years ago during the holocaust. I believe humanity still has fewer Jews than it did pre-ww2 when there were 15 million.
An Israeli professor has calculated that, had there been no attempt to murder all of Europe’s Jews, that their global population today would be somewhere between 26 million to 32 million (another Israeli professor puts it at 28-32 million), whereas their actual population is about 14 million.
If you take the lowest estimate, 26 is double 14, if you wanted to extrapolate from that you might say we only got half the Jewish Nobel prize winners and scientists that we would have had if the Final Solution had not happened, but that’s assuming that the ability to win Nobel prizes is equally distributed through the Jewish population.
It certainly can be estimated – see above – and I don’t really see any reason it shouldn’t be. It’s just one more measure of how horrific it was, and a way to show that the loss wasn’t just to Judaism (and the other persecuted categories) but a loss to humanity as a whole. Who can ever know what musical compositions, paintings, poems, novels, scientific discoveries, health-care innovations, etc. were denied to our civilization because of the madness.
This can also be applied to the war casualties among the younger generations of WWI and WWII, or to the depopulation of Germany in the Thirty Years War, or, almost as hellish as anything in our time, the rampage of the Mongols over India and Persia. Entire civilizations were annihilated.
If none of these things had happened…would we have colonies around Jupiter by now?
Unless you believe Jewish individuals are special in some way, it doesn’t stand to reason that more Jews means more Jewish laureates. Winning a Nobel is often not just about doing exceptional work, but also being lucky enough to be alive when your work is recognized, living in one of a handful of countries, working in a certain field, and just sheer luck.
There were a ton of forces that pushed Jews into the sciences, and there were often quotas that excluded many… No war probably means fewer Jews in the US which also probably means fewer Jewish laureates. That’s even putting aside the issue that the number of Jews in the world is not just based on demographics, but also choice and observance.
I think the flaw in the reasoning can be analogous to a parallel argument about Black Africa. If slavery had never occurred, and all Blacks were left in Africa, would Africa now have all the benefit of the intellectual achievement of Black Americans, who instead would have contributed their potential to the development of Africa’s culture and economy?
That Ashkenazi Jews have a higher innate baseline for talent compared to other groups and therefore make up a disproportionate % of people at the higher echelons of STEM fields, medicine, art, politics, etc? Yes I believe that.
In 1933 Jews made up 0.7% of the citizens of Germany. But they made up 11% of physicians, 16% of lawyers, about 30% of college professors. I believe 17 nobel prize winners from Germany from 1907-1930 were Jewish.
that’s just cultural. They encouraged their boys to go into those fields. Kind of like some sub-cultures in the US encourage boys to get into football or basketball, or join the military.
No…but they might have benefited from the security and comfort of not being hunted like animals. They might have spent more effort on arts and governance, and less on arming themselves against their neighbors. Slavery definitely held back the proper natural development of western Africa, perhaps not as profoundly as the Conquistadores slaughtered Inca civilization, but strongly.
Also, without colonialism, embassies from Europe might have been more educational than compulsory, and Africa might have been happier to learn the benefits of what Europe had to offer. If Europe had come to the Americas and Africa as peaceful partners, rather than as conquerors, the history of the world might be a lot rosier.
Saying “that’s just cultural” shows a facile understanding of the extent to which critical thinking and scholarship are fundamental to the traditional practice of Judaism. If scholarship, and thus intelligence, is truly revered in a population, it wouldn’t be surprising if over the centuries, that tendency caused the population to self-select for intelligence, and the intelligence level of the overall population to rise as a result.
That emphasis on scholarship cerainly did and does explain why Jewish kids are enouraged to go into such fields, but the underpinnings and results of that culture are complex.
I believe that it is impossible to objectively measure intelligence and/or success in a way that cuts through cultural biases and so forth. That said, given the typical metrics by which Americans and Europeans measure such things, Ashkenazi Jews are unusually successful.
(Is it just me that finds it awfully amusing that the two posters rejecting the idea of higher innate intelligence amongst the Askenazi have trayf user names?)
I remember hearing years ago from Fareed Z. that a study was done to calculate wasted productive man-hours spent playing Angry Birds. It was astronomical!
Therefor, I put forth that “Angry Birds = Hitler”.
I do believe that. However, excellence on the level of a Nobel winner is not just a byproduct of being really smart. Asia, Africa, the Mdddle East and South America have tons of smart people, but relatively few Nobel winners. Laureates disproportionately come from rich, Western countries. If there is no Holocaust, do as many Jews end up in the US? Does rampant antisemitism last longer? Who knows. I just don’t think you can just assume a greater number of smart Jewish people being alive means more will end up winning Nobel prizes.
Plus, you need to keep in mind that that 25% Jewish Nobel winner stat is greatly padded given they include non-practicing Jews and people with one Jewish grandparent.
Even when people like Harry Ostrer, the head of NYU’s human-genetics program, say, “It’s bad science—not because it’s provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology”? And he’s not alone for the record.
And roughly 10 years later, Jews dominated professional basketball in the US. Should we assume that Jews have an innate talent for basketball and similar sports?
Maybe, but being good looking and smart are revered in most societies today, and plenty of ugly, dumb people walking around procreating. You have hit on something, but I think you are missing the real salient effect here. You can choose to stop being Jewish. When the going got tough, people quit. Jews were roughly 10% of the population of the Roman Empire. Those numbers mean we should have roughly 200 million Jews today instead of just 14 million or so. Yes, mass killings had a huge effect, but a lot was just people deciding to stop being Jewish because the scholastic and cultural demands (among other things) were not something they wanted to do. Thus, the remaining pool is probably smarter. Not because people with “Jewish genes” are inherently smarter, but rather because the decision to live as a Jew tends to attract people who are smarter than average. Kinda like how Harvard grads, people from Shanghai, and Nigerian-Americans are smarter than average.
So are Mormons and Nigerian-Americans. Do you think there is something about Nigerian genes that makes them successful?
You’re assuming the pushing boys to go into scholarship had some effect on the reproductive success of said boys. Which seems unlikely considering the innate sexual preferences of women.