Why are Jewish people so disproportionately successful

Great Debates
41

Lets take the conversation in that direction, see how it turns out.

When europeans invaded North America, the Indians bodies couldn’t defend against smallpox. The reason was because after generation and generation of being culled by smallpox, the europeans who were left were those who were more able to fight the disease. The Indians never underwent the culling, and the disease was far more severe for them. There are other examples (whites are less lactose intolerant and alcohol intolerant than Asians, because of our middle ages environment) you could list of evolution over the last few thousand years selecting for certain traits.

Seeing how Jews have lived at the edges of society and still had to make a life for themselves, and because they could be targets of both individual and society wide violence (including having everything stolen, being relocated, being killed en mass) I wonder if generation after generation the Jews who had the ‘life skills’ (for lack of a better word) to survive, thrive, pick up and start over, rebuild, be creative, etc. were selected for since those would survive. The ones who could navigate and survive a social, political and economic system stacked against them may have selected for character traits that made them more adept at those areas.

Like I said in the OP, Jewish IQ is 1 standard deviation to the right of the average. I don’t know the cause, and I don’t know how much was selection pressure because of social stigma making it easier for the smartest Jews to survive. But perhaps Jews have been selected for various other important life skills to survive and function through centuries of oppression, being robbed and being bullied.

IQ has a correlation with some Jewish success (nobel prizes, academia) but doesn’t explain other things like higher % of billionaires, why such a large % of Russian oligarchs are Jewish, why such a large % of US politicians are Jewish (compared to their % of the population) or why Jewish people are over represented in other successful areas like the arts.

If you look at the stuff done against Israel just in the last 70 years (several wars of aggression, terrorism, attempts at international isolation) people who have the skills to survive and thrive when they are being ganged up on are going to do better. Maybe the Jews had a bigger selection pressure for that in their history.

If there is any truth to that hypothesis, I wonder what traits would be selected for. Granted, other minority groups have been persecuted in world history. But I think the persecution of the Jews has gone on longer, and been far wider (since it covered most christian and Islamic nations, which make up the bulk of the world’s power) so there were fewer places to escape to.

42

An even bigger factor in her relative lack of fame than her gender and religious background was her pacifism. Already probably one of the top 20 most important scientists of the 20th century, if she had worked on the Manhattan Project she would be in the top 3 easily. Still wouldn’t have won the Nobel though, sadly.

I do think that factors that helped her to achieve as much as she did were the previously mentioned Jewish emphasis on education and support from close family when times are tight. Her family could have pressured her to find a good paying job with her doctorate but supported her when she persisted in the endeavor of pure science.

43

Or they stop identifying as Jewish. While I don’t dismiss your hypothesis outright, I think you glossing over an important question- what is a Jew? Is it someone of the Jewish faith? Is it someone who shares certain genes or culture? If you go with the thinking that it’s a race of people, then self-identified Jews are likely a very small (and exceptional) portion of those who are actually Jewish. If you go by people who have a certain religion, then why would you assume a self-identified, self-selecting group has significant genetic overlap?

Or their country gets bombed to the stone age as it would have if they didn’t have powerful allies.

While I am sure this matters in a small way, I don’t think it makes much of a difference given that the pressures on Judaism come from within more so than from the outside. It costs a lot to be a religious Jew. To quote this article.

The article also says the average synagogue membership fee is $1100/year and that it’s over 3-4 times more in major cities. Of course people who identify as Jewish have to be doing moderately well in order to afford to live a Jewish lifestyle. That has little to do with genes, but rather a selective pressure put on the unsuccessful that encourages most to not live “Jewishly”. Now I suppose you may see some cumulative advantage amongst the remaining Jews, but I think little of that is due to genes, but rather inertia and redefining what it means and takes to be Jewish.

44

I’d put that as my #1 choice as well- from what I gather, in Jewish culture, education is emphasized, and intellectuals and other educated people are accorded great respect. Young Jewish boys and girls aren’t brought up in an anti-intellectual, crabs-in-a-pot environment; quite the opposite, and it shows in their success in intellectual endeavors.

However, I suspect if you compared any group of people of similar educational achievement and looked at their progeny for a few generations, the results would be similar.

45

Depends on the family.

Mine- white, Christian and Southern, has:

I’m an IT professional. 2 Master’s degrees.

Brother is a teacher, working on MS in history.

Father was a finance professional.

Mother was a teacher.

Grandfather was a banker.

Uncle owns his own construction company. Also has a Construction Science degree.

2 cousins have Construction Science Degrees & work for Uncle. 1 cousins’ husband is a mechanical engineer- owns his own mechanical (AC) company. Another got a finance degree and runs a bank in Waco, TX.

On the other side of the family, my cousins are a medical administrator (business degree), and a financial analyst (finance degree, MBA), my uncle is a retired paratrooper officer (82nd Airborne), and a financial guy for TRADOC splitting time between Kansas and the Pentagon, and my aunt is a former teacher & school counselor and now a school board member.

I think the difference is that my family’s not the norm for white middle class families, while suranyi’s is a lot more typical for Jewish ones.

46

This may be the most important question in this thread. It is relatively easy to compare the men, though Muslim and American men get cut, too, and I’m not interested in that study, not that there is anything wrong with it, but let’s start with Sarah Silverman and Tina Fey. Ladies, if you will step behind this screen…

47

Tina Fey isn’t Jewish, and while Sarah Silverman is ethnically Jewish, she was raised in a secular house, and is agnostic herself.

48

No. I started out describing the situation from before WW2. And while writing my post I ended up using the present tense.

I think that most of modern Jews in the US may still have some cultural vestiges, but on the whole are just as lukewarm in their religion as most modern Christians are. And that they differ not much in all other respects, either.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that Israel does not deliver more then the average number of Nobel prize winners. They are a country like any other, in that regard,although posessing much more of an intellectual and enterprising culture then the surroounding Arabic countries. The academic (and financial) success of Jews was, IMHO, a result of the unique cultural pressure of being in diaspora, interacting with their own penchant for learning and finances, and it had never anything to do with genetics.

49

Genetics - allow me to play this one a different way.

The neurotic Jew is a media trope to be sure, but not one without any basis. Jews do tend to have less alcoholism and more bipolar disease and depression than other groups. There is a general impression that OCD is more prevalent among Jews as well. Some of the most accomplished of our times have had mental illness: artists with bipolar disease and scientists with OCD most famously. Could the same genes that contribute to mental illness susceptibility also contribute to creating success outliers?

brickbacon, many in America who both are identified as and self-identify as Jews do not belong to congregations and are both secular and fairly areligious. While “Jewish” is a religious identity, it is not only a religious identity. The culture transcends the religion. Einstein was raised in a non-observant household and went to a Catholic school. He disparaged organized religion including Judaism as an adult but certainly self-identified as a Jew. He was clearly impacted by Jewish culture. To quote Doctor Who: “It’s complicated.” But if you only recognize as Jews those who are religiously observant I’d suspect that that list of accomplished Jews would be winnowed down by a *large *percent.

50

A family and communities expectations have more impact on educational attainment then socio-economic factors or “IQ”

The artificial construct of “race” and even ethnicity is only really a limiter due to how humans have used those containers to justify actions against said arbitrary groups. Children of families which push for educational attainment will score higher because the children have had more “practice”.

If you took a randomized selection of individuals across all possible backgrounds and could normalize the very real racial and gender barriers that exist you would find that those with family groups who value education, knowledge, networking and work and who tend to limit the value of artificial displays of “wealth” will tend to have more upward mobility.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/us/pew-study-tracks-success-of-children-of-immigrants.html?_r=0

Of course as a “successful” workaholic I also want to say that “successful” can be viewed several different ways.

Some groups tend to value happiness more, and thus may be as or more “successful” if that is what you value.

51

For the purposes of this discussion, it’s kinda unfair to treat Judaism as both a race and a religion given that we have no idea who is “genetically Jewish”. Let’s take some absurd hypothetical, and say some guy can trace his lineage back to Jesus. Is that guy Jewish? What if my Jewish ancestors 5 generations ago become secular. Are I Jewish? Is an Ethiopian Jew whose ancestors converted 3 generations ago Jewish?

All of these ambiguities greatly skew the results. It makes our denominator in the equation of the percentage of successful Jews very very fuzzy and leads people to include any successful person who even seems Jewish (eg. Tina Fey, Bill Koch). More importantly, it invalidates most hypotheses regarding genetics and cultural superiority. Many people like Sarah Silverman did not grow up in a Jewish household, and are not practicing Jews, yet they a held up as an example of Jewish success. Along those same lines, just look at Israel. They are not a particularly successful country by Western standards, especially if you account for the external support they are given.

My point is basically that Jews only seems smarter and more successful because the definition of Jewish is fuzzy enough, and because the self-identification requirements are such that it makes the former a self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s like wondering why Harvard grads are so rich and smart, then assuming it largely genetic, or something Harvard did rather than it being a case of Harvard accepting people who were those things already. Sure, literacy requirements and the like helped, but it’s even more helpful when you don’t have to include the poor and stupid in your numbers. They juked the stats.

It’s the same reason Nigerian, Chinese, Korean, and Indian immigrants to the US are smarter and richer than average. It’s a subset of the larger population that already demonstrated the skills needed to gain and education and become rich. Just as the average Indian or Nigerian is not much smarter or richer than the average American, the average “Jew” isn’t either; it’s just that we don’t see all the other “Jews” who are no longer part of the group.

52

Just to clarify. I am not saying genes and culture don’t matter. On an individual and societal level, they matter a lot. I am just saying circumstances, and the way we define terms in this case, matters a lot more. In this case, being Jewish is more like a club where the barriers of entry are high, and the ongoing demands require the attributes and skills that lead to the outcomes we are looking for. You are looking for causation to justify a likely inaccurate initial premise: that Jews are smarter/richer/more successful. That’s only true if you define the terms so to exclude all other suppositions.

53

Let’s see -

Israel - population 7.8M - 10 Nobels
Japan - population 128M - 20 Nobels
Italy - population 60M - 20 Nobels
Australia - population 22M - 13 Nobels
etc. etc.

And if you want to compare apples to apples - that is, since Israel was created in 1948, you only look at Nobel prize winners from 1948 and later, it is even more lopsided.

So - not really “like any other”, no.

54

Are you really going to claim that the Nobel prize is awarded in such a non-political, world-wide unbiased fashion that it is a valid measure of the educational and socioeconomic success of a nation?

You may want to go look into how they even decide who can nominate individuals.

0ne of the rarified groups who CAN nominate are individuals are previous winners and the organizations they were part of, so it is more likely that friends and co-workers will win than some random person who is outside that group.

55

For “peace prize” - definitely not. For literature - meh. For science - yes, it is somewhat valid.

But in any case, I was responding to someone who said that in terms of Nobel Prize winners, Israel is average. As I showed, that’s not true.

56

This list really highlights my point. Five of those people were not born in Israel, and a couple others like Daniel Kahenman are only Israeli by happenstance. He was born there while his mom was visiting relatives. Additionally, as a minor nitpick, a few others were born before Israel was a country. That’s a extremely padded list in nearly every respect. I don’t know if it completely invalidates the point you are making, bt it dramatically skews the results.

57

From Wiki:

Kahneman received his B. Sc. with a major in psychology and a minor in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954. After earning his undergraduate degree, he served in the psychology department of the Israeli Defense Forces. One of his responsibilities was to evaluate candidates for officer’s training school, and to develop tests and measures for this purpose.

Kahneman began his academic career as a lecturer in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1961. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1966.

He was at Hebrew University from 1961 to 1977. That’s a bit more than being “Israeli by happenstance” wouldn’t you say?

Why does it matter where you’re born? Is it the place of birth that somehow magically bestows its benefits on the person that affect his development that ultimately leads to the Nobel Prize, or is it the place where he is educated and spent most of your career?

A quarter of USA Nobel winners were not born in USA - do you think they don’t count as “American Nobel Prize winners”?

58

Which is good since no one is doing that. In specific no one is treating it as “a race.” I in particular was pointing out that treating it exclusively as a religion and restricting membership to those who are observant is imposing a group criteria that is imposed by neither those who self-identify as such or by the rest of the world.

The definition of “Jew” is indeed fuzzy but for purposes of these sorts of discussions must include those who identify as and are accepted by most as members of the group, or possibly, arguably, those who are identified by others as members of the group. Religious observance or even belief is not a key part of either of those functions. An apostate is still Jewish.

The barrier to entry is quite low: have a mother who is Jewish by Jewish law or be part of the Reform group and either parent counts if you are raised to so self-identify.

Those who so self-identify include many who are the products of a somewhat segregated population and have some genes over-represented in them - Tay-Sachs anyone? And some whose genetic heritage is quite disparate. My daughter, adopted from China, is 100% Jewish; if my sons (all bio kids born to two Jewish parents) all have children with non-Jewish women (and let’s assume the Reform tradition will not apply) then my Chinese daughter’s kids (if she has them someday) will be my Jewish grandchildren - by Jewish law - no matter who she marries. I’d count them for this thread’s purposes if they identify themselves as such. There are no other ongoing demands.

Those who so self-identify share some cultural commonalities. For the most part however discussions of Jewish culture and over-representation tend to dominated by one major sub-group: the Ashkenazim.

The question in these recurring threads is centered around how much the over-representation of Jews in certain areas is due to which cultural factors and if any genetic factors play a role. I tend to put more on cultural factors and feel that those factors are becoming more the norm in modern society - an emphasis on learning and a healthy questioning of authority and revealed truths. Jewish culture is no longer special in its encouraging the asking of the good question as being more important than having memorized a “correct” answer.

59

No. If his mom had been visiting someone in Japan, would he be Japanese? I suppose one might have a fair argument to call him Israeli given he spent much of his working life there, but the point was to highlight how an accident of birth is the deciding factor in many of these cases when one wants to support a specific argument.

Because that the general criteria for nationality. Obviously there are some exceptions, but I think when you say I am _____, people assume you were born or raised in that country.

You could make a good argument it’s the latter. Now given that that seems to be your argument now, go over your list to see where most of the people worked, were educated, and did their seminal work. Often times, it was not in Israel.

Many probably should not be. The point is that when national pride is a consideration, people bend the rules to boost their numbers.

60

Let’s do that, if you insist:

Shechtman - undergrad and PhD from Technion, in Israel, is a resident of Israel. At the time he discovered what he got awarded a Nobel for, he was on faculty at Technion
Ada Yonath - educated in and worked in Weitzmann Institute and Hebrew U, both in Israel
Robert Aumann - educated in MIT, since 1956 is faculty at Hebrew U.
Aaron Ciechanover - educated in Hadassah Med School and Technion. Is faculty at Technion
Avram Hershko - educated in Hadassah Med School and Technion. Is faculty at Technion.
Daniel Kahneman - we discussed above
Rabin, Peres, Begin - all lived most of their lives in Israel, all former Prime Ministers, and who cares about the Peace Prize anyway
Shmuel Yosef Agnon - lived most of his life in Israel, got Nobel Prize for literature for his works in Hebrew and Yiddish

I believe that’s all of them. Can you point out which ones you meant in your “oftentimes” remark?