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To the Editor:
The survival of Judaism despite millennia of oppression continues to confound both the friends and the enemies of the Jews, as well as many Jews themselves, though for different reasons. For Jews and their friends, it is a sign of great good fortune or a confirmation of a special place in God’s universe. For their enemies, it is a problem to be solved. For Charles Murray, apparently, the staying power of the Jews is merely an example of natural selection [“Jewish Genius,” April].
Despite the facetious last sentence of his article (“The Jews are God’s chosen people”), there is no God in his analysis of Jewish survival, only the great secular solvent of Darwinian selection, the tautological insight that hereditable traits contributing to survival will themselves survive and increase over generations. Specifically, in Mr. Murray’s view, it is inherited Jewish intelligence, as selected by pog-roms, libels, quotas, and the Holocaust, that has permitted the survival of the Jews and their religion.
The power and novelty of this argument lie in its removal of the burden of understanding anything about what it means to be Jewish. Can there be a more insulting way to look at Jews—not at the content of their character or their tradition but at the fact of their having been genetically sculpted by outside forces? Fortunately for Jews, and for all others whose free will has mattered to them, Mr. Murray’s biology is as failed as his putative generosity.
No religion, after all, can be inherited; any brain can have any thought. Religion is perpetuated not by the transmission of DNA but by persons or groups who embrace a way of life and teach it to their children. For Judaism, moreover, achievement trumps biology. Consider this passage from the Mishnah (redacted in the 2nd century c.e.) discussing a hierarchy for certain privileges: “A Priest has precedence over a Levite; a Levite over an Israelite; an Israelite over a bastard. . . . When? When they are all equal [in learning]. But if the bastard is versed in the law and the High Priest ignorant, the bastard scholar has precedence over the ignorant High Priest.”
Mr. Murray betrays a childish longing for simple explanations, if one that is understandably seductive in an era when Jews have claimed so many of the mountaintops of achievement. It is tempting to tie a bow around Jewish accomplishment by willing it to the next generation as a “genetic inheritance.” But his syllogisms obscure the world as it really is.
Consider that women comprise some 50 percent of the world’s population, but fewer than 5 percent of Nobel Prize winners (one of Mr. Murray’s favorite metrics). Sweden, with only one tenth of a percent of the world’s population, has contributed approximately 5 percent of Nobel laureates. Are Swedes therefore smarter than women? The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population and 21 percent of Nobel winners. Are Americans smarter than Swedes but far less smart than Jews, who while constituting a fraction of a percent of the world’s population can boast of 30 percent of Nobel laureates since 1950?
If only life were this neat. But the fact is that a significant proportion of Jewish Nobel laureates have also been U.S. citizens, and that U.S. citizens of all racial, religious, and ethnic stripes enjoy more access to top research facilities and academic resources than the citizens of other countries. The second most-represented category of Nobel laureates, not surprisingly, is European academics, who have been similarly connected to well-endowed centers of learning.
We forget at our peril that it was not very long ago that basic courses in calculus and physics were not routinely offered to women. Higher math was the property of “male genius”—and white male genius at that. If one hypothesizes that neither “black” nor “female” genius exists, their emergent manifestations will be perpetually exceptionalized, held at bay, and shunted beyond the pale of the rest of the population. If we really “do the math” (as Mr. Murray advises) about past Nobel winners, nothing is as vulgarly simplistic as this Trojan Horse of his, so gaudily adorned to look like revelation.
Robert Pollack
Patricia Williams
Columbia University
New York City
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To the Editor:
We sympathize with the overall themes of Charles Murray’s essay, but we have reservations about some of his scenarios for the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence. Our own model of elevated Jewish intelligence posits that it is a consequence of Jews’ economic niche in medieval Europe north of the Alps (from around 800 c.e.). Before that period of rapid evolution there is no special sign of unusually high intelligence in the historical record of the Jews. Mr. Murray, following work by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, disagrees, and looks back to antiquity for the origins of this phenomenon. There is no obvious critical test to confirm his hypothesis over ours, and we are all reduced to arguing by anecdote.
Mr. Murray suggests that the creation of the Hebrew Bible and, later, of Christian theology as presented in the New Testament are signatures of a population with high intelligence. But while the Bible is indeed a cornerstone of our civilization, is it necessarily evidence of a population with high IQ? Revered documents have come from populations that did not stand out in terms of intelligence—take, as one example, the Book of Mormon and its followers. We would also be inclined to attribute the New Testament mostly to Greeks rather than to Jews.
Another piece of evidence adduced by Mr. Murray is Joshua ben Gamla’s ordinance in the year 64 c.e. mandating community schools for Palestinian Jewish males. But it is not so clear that this had much force. Some literature suggests that it was not widely implemented. (One thinks of our own “No Child Left Behind” law: an earnest statement of good intentions but of little actual consequence.) Certainly there were traditions of literacy among ancient Jews, and the responsibility for it fell more and more to the community over time. But literacy does not require high IQ.
There is a startling absence of any stereotype in classical writings that Jews were “smart.” In Menahem Stern’s comprehensive anthology of classical references to Jews by Greek and Latin authors, not a single one attributes unusual intelligence to them. Finally, the particular alleles (genetic forms) related to intelligence that we think were favored by selection are young, most of them around a thousand years old. By Mr. Murray’s reckoning, they should be much older.
Mr. Murray suggests that “boiling off” was a common phenomenon among the Jews in medieval times—those who were not good at being Jewish fell away and joined the outside community, leaving high intelligence concentrated within. But there is no historical documentation of this among Ashkenazi Jews. If it was a common occurrence, we should expect to find traces of Middle Eastern DNA among the Gentile populations in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. So far, none has been reported, so we are skeptical of the hypothesis. Within a decade or so, high-resolution genetic data from Eastern Europe and the Middle East should allow a proper test. Indeed, the only real resolution of our differences with Mr. Murray will come from data-driven quantitative models, not from swapping impressions.
There are hints that the selective process that we believe we identified among the Ashkenazim also occurred among the Sephardim of Spain and Portugal, though to a lesser degree. Certainly the experience and achievements of Spanish and Portuguese Jews in London and Amsterdam were similar to those of the Ashkenazim. But Sephardim from other lands show no sign at all of IQ elevation; indeed, this is a serious social and political issue in Israel today.
Gregory Cochran
Why the Jews?
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