found this story in the LA Times; http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-jewish-iq18-2009apr18,0,2228388.story (I heard this from my Jewish ex-roommate, who now dates whoever he wants) that there were 2 self-reinforcing events going on; 1. that after years of telling Jewish daughters to marry only doctors & lawyers, 2. Jewish boys had to go to college to marry the girls of their dreams end result, Jewish men have high degrees, are successful my question is; people wonder why?
Those two pressures are modern. It's only been in recent generations maybe the last 3 or so that Jewish girls were encouraged to marry like that. Fact of the matter is for the large majority of the history...no one anywhere really had much, including Jewish families. The difference is Jewish families were isolated and often not very large, so they bred amongst themselves quite more frequently which accounts for genetic diseases. Most likely the reason is that of how marriages were set up in history. Men and women were married based on the accomplishments of their parents...look back multiple generations almost all of the Jews today are descended from Jewish scholars passed. Those who are not often were lost due to cultural mixing... Jews alive today who will most likely have Jewish children in 3 generations are currently scholars. So the Jews alive today who know they are Jewish are descended from scholars. If you were able to somehow calculate the total of all of Jewish brethren whether they know they are Jewish or not...you'd probably find they are right on par with the rest of society.
I would think if a study was made that the same proportion of Jews go to college and become successful as does any other advanced society like the Chinese, Americans, Russians and on and on. To think that Jews are any different that anyone else is a very wrong thing to think. Humans have their strengths and weaknesses no matter who they are or what culture they came from.
It's a myth that Jews are smarter than other people. It's just that historically they have valued education more than the other Europeans. In the era before the invention of the printing press, when almost no Christians except the nobility could read the Bible, all Jews were encouraged to learn to read Hebrew (a dead language) so they could read the Torah and Talmud. Once they were literate in one language and one alphabet (technically an abjad, with no letters for vowels), it was easier to learn to read the national language of the country they lived in. And once they'd mastered literacy, it was a whole lot easier to learn everything else. This gap has obviously been closing in recent centuries. But not completely. In modern America there are a lot of people who have diplomas testifying to an education but still can't read worth shit. They have to offer classes in "Remedial English" to college freshmen, and the average American university graduate reads at what, in my generation, was called the sixth-grade level.
Average is consistently higher "It's a myth that Jews are smarter than other people." Ashkenazi average is 2/3 of a std deviation higher than the euro average. This has been documented since tests began (from the Cochran,Henry & Harpending paper): "This high IQ and corresponding high academic ability have been long known. In 1900 in London Jews took a disproportionate number of academic prizes and scholarships in spite of their poverty (Russell and Lewis, 1900). In the 1920s a survey of IQ scores in three London schools (Hughes, 1928) with mixed Jewish and non-Jewish student bodies showed that Jewish students had higher IQs than their schoolmates in each of three school, one prosperous, one poor, and one very poor. The differences between Jews and non-Jews were all slightly less than one standard deviation. The students at the poorest Jewish school in London had IQ scores equal to the overall city mean of non-Jewish children. The Hughes study is important because it contradicts a widely cited misrepresentation by Kamin (Kamin, 1974) of a paper by Henry Goddard (Goddard, 1917). Goddard gave IQ tests to people suspected of being retarded, and he found that the tests identified retarded Jews as well as retarded people of other groups. Kamin reported, instead, that Jews had low IQs, and this erroneous report was picked up by many authors including Stephen Jay Gould, who used it as evidence of the unreliability of the tests (Seligman, 1992). Ashkenazi Jews have an unusual ability profile as well as higher than average IQ. They have high verbal and mathematical scores, while their visuospatial abilities are typically somewhat lower, by about one half a standard deviation, than the European average (Levinson, 1977; Levinson and Block, 1977). Han Eysenck (Eysenck, 1995) noted “The correlation between verbal and performance tests is about 0.77 in the general population, but only 0.31 among Jewish children. Differences of 10-20 points have been found in samples of Jewish children; there is no other group that shows anything like this size difference.” The Ashkenazi pattern of success is what one would expect from this ability" Also, see: Lynn, Richard and Satoshi Kanazawa. 2008. “How to Explain High Jewish Achievement: The Role of Intelligence and Values.” Personality and Individual Differences. 44: 801-808.
i think it is a myth than any one group is smarter than another as well. IQ test are like any other test, if you spend hours with 'your nose in the books' then you test higher. not too hard to figure out.
