As late as the mid 1970s I was advised that studying German would be helpful to a career in science because it was the language of Math, Chemistry and Physics, and I would be able to read the ground breaking work before it was translated. These fields are still full of terms like eigenvalue, and Bremstrahlung.
Even neglecting German Jews, and the recent German immigrants, Jews that spoke Yiddish in the home would have had a far easier time learning Hochdeutsch than the general population.
Really though, I think it is mostly cultural. In Jewish culture education is valued, and intelligence respected in pretty much the same way we see poverty and poor performance from cultures that eschew education and ridicule academia.
Many Asian cultures share this attitude toward education, and as education becomes available to their children we are seeing more and more scientific innovations coming from that quarter.
Also lets not forget that for many years the best educated came from a class that saw work as vulgar. When you combine education with hard work, you really increase your odds of coming up with something noteworthy.
Especially in that time period, people of German ancestry made up the largest ethnic group in the US. So maybe it was just a matter of numbers and/or the type of immigrants who came to the US from Germany.
The Asian countries where you see high academic achievement correspond roughly with countries that have a strong Confucian culture. The reverence for scholars led to a tradition of administering Imperial Exams to select the best minds in the country to populate the bureaucracy. Doing well on the exam conferred wealth and prestige to the entire family. There was also a procreative effect. These guys had lots of kids with lots of wives and concubines.
Found this on a site, they are pretty impressive:
“At least 181 Jews and people of half- or three-quarters-Jewish ancestry have been awarded the Nobel Prize, accounting for 22% of all individual recipients worldwide between 1901 and 2010, and constituting 36% of all US recipients2 during the same period.In the research fields of Chemistry, Economics, Physics, and Physiology/Medicine, the corresponding world and US percentages are 26% and 39%, respectively. Among women laureates in the four research fields, the Jewish percentages (world and US) are 38% and 50%, respectively. Of organizations awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, 25% were founded principally by Jews or by people of half-Jewish descent. (Jews currently make up approximately 0.2% of the world’s population and 2% of the US population.)”
But Masonry is something that you have to come to of your own accord. Judaism, however, you are born into. Obviously people also convert, but this is a small fraction of Jews and an even smaller fraction of the scientists being discussed here.
Also, nowadays there are not all that many Freemasons in high profile, important positions. But expect to see more in the next 20 years or so, as Freemasonry skipped a generation but is undergoing a resurgence.
One thing I have noticed as a teacher is that immigrant communities tend to push their kids into easily understandable professions: doctors and lawyers, because those are the professions that poor immigrants have contact with, and the sciences, because they are a clear progression from what you were doing in school. It’s the second generation that produces CPAs and MBAs and systems analysts and hedge fund managers–it’s that first generation of doctors and lawyers that finds out about those professions and pushes their kids into them.
I don’t know if that was at all the case with Jews that immigrated to America, but I really see it in the kids I teach today.
“Talent in the study of Torah traditionally contributed to one’s social success in Jewish communities; those more lacking in the capacity for such study were perhaps more prone to assimilate into general culture, thereby raising the average intelligence of the given Ashkenazi community…Botticini and Eckstein argue that from the end of the second century, Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring Jewish fathers to educate their sons. The high cost of this in subsistence farming communities caused voluntary conversions, explaining a large part of a reduction in the size of the Jewish population from 4.5 million to 1.2 million. As the Jews invested in education, they could then enter skilled occupations.”
“A plausible variant of the Talmudic scholarship model suggests that it was like a sexually selected marker and that rich families preferred to marry their daughters to males who excelled (Weyl & Possony, 1963; MacDonald, 1994) so that the payoff to intelligence was indirect rather than direct as we suggest. Without detailed historical demographic information it will be difficult to evaluate this hypothesis.”
On Jews who are not religious becoming scientists: Even Chomsky had a Yiddishe childhood. His father was a professor of Hebrew. Like others have noted, you can be atheist or ambivalent on God and still be very very much part of the Jewish culture.
On non-religious Jews hardly being represented in the scientific world: One possibly explanation is that to study Torah is of greater importance. To be a Jewish scholar is no easy task. I also remember reading an article about Talmudic scholars who ran classes for lawyers. It’s no surprise the number of Jewish attorneys you find in a synagogue.
On Jews and smartness as a quality: That’s the truth. Here - even in very easy breezy parts of Denver and Boulder - Jews are the “thinkers”, the professors, the attorneys, the businessmen. It just so happens that with good smarts can come some cash, but a man’s perceived intellectualism is a status symbol. Keeping kosher is optional.
Survival seems to be a natural Jewish mechanism. And I’m proud to say this is a culture in which it is considered a little meshuginah to not question the things you believe in.
It’s been a long six+ years but, rest assured, I have been tirelessly at work studying this phenomenon ever since NewHeart(Male) reported it. He can stop looking for a cite now. I, a doctor, have authored my controversial findings. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a hamentashen thread to post this into.
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you can’t be serious. German Americans may have been biggest immigrant group (not sure if they beat the Irish), but they were not the biggest ethnic group in the country. The biggest group were the “non ethnic” white people, descendants of previous waves of English, Scottish etc immigration that came long before 1848.
