The Israel Test

monotheism is a cherished contribution to humankind and a resented standard of unattainable righteousness. By evoking faith in the meaning and regularity of the cosmos, it is crucial to Jewish science and business and indeed to all human achievement. As Prager and Telushkin finally contend, it may be the solution to the problem of anti- Semitism. But it is not, as they also contend, its cause.

The world tolerates all sorts and conditions of religious observance, from the Amish to Jehovah’s Witnesses, from the Mormons to the Scientologists, and on and on. Many of these faiths include apocalyptic prophecies of the incineration of all their enemies and the survival of a chosen remnant. Some of these faiths evoke scorn, some laughter, most indifference.

Benzion Netanyahu, the historian father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has demonstrated in an awesome 500,000-word tome, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain, that the most vicious anti-Jewish acts of mass destruction and devastation not only preceded the emergence of Christianity but also represented a reaction against the secular power achieved by Jews. He vividly describes the ineffably horrific persecution in Alexandria that was conducted by Hellenistic Egyptians in 3 8 A.D. It was described contemporaneously by the Jewish historian Philo of Alexandria thusly: “the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants.” Some men, he says, were dragged to death, while “those who did these things, mimicked the sufferers, like people employed in the representation of theatrical farces.” Other Jews were crucified. Netanyahu concludes: “We agree with that clear-sighted scholar who said, unreservedly, in plain language: ‘Anti- Semitism was born in Egypt.’” His book shows that motivating the Inquisition in Spain was not hostility to Jewish religion but rage against the superior effectiveness and ascendancy of Jews outperforming established clerics as Christians. “New Christians,” mostly Jewish, were taking over the Spanish church by being more learned, eloquent, devout, resourceful, and charismatic than Christian leaders. As Netanyahu writes, “The struggle against the Jews was essentially motivated by social and economic, rather than religious considerations…”

For all their sage observations, Prager and Telushkin miss the heart of the matter, which is Jewish intellectual and entrepreneurial superiority. As the eminent Russian pro-Semite writer Maxim Gorky put it: “Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk, they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit, and more capable of work than they are.” Whether driven by culture or genes — or, like most behavior, an inextricable mix — the fact of Jewish genius is demonstrable. It can be gainsaid only by people who cannot expect to be believed. The source of anti-Semitism is Jewish superiority and excellence.

The entire debate over Israel currently rides on a tacit subtext of crucial matters too sensitive to be probed, such as the central contributions of Jews to global science, technology, art, and prosperity; proprieties that cannot be transgressed, such as pointing to the comparative brutality and barrenness of its adversaries; and immense realities that cannot be broached, such as the manifest supremacy of Jews over all other ethnic groups in nearly every intellectual, commercial, and cultural endeavor.

In The Bell Curve Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein pointed to the massive superiority in IQs of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews over all other genetically identifiable groups. The outlying region of the curve is massively Jewish.

As Murray later distilled the evidence in Commentary, the Jewish mean intelligence quotient is 110, ten points over the norm. This strikingly higher average intelligence, however, is not the decisive factor in overall Jewish achievement. As recently as 2008, Israelis of all ethnicities failed on average to outperform Americans in international tests of eighth-grade math and science skills. In math, Israelis ranked just behind Thailand and Moldova and one place ahead of Tunisia. Israel lagged nine places behind the United States, whose performance is usually deemed miserably far behind the leading Asian and European performers. In science, the numbers were similar.

What matters in human accomplishment is not the average performance but the treatment of exceptional performance and the cultivation of genius. The commanding lesson of Jewish accomplishment is that genius trumps everything else. As Murray and Herrnstein write, “The key indicator for predicting exceptional accomplishment (like winning a Nobel Prize) is the incidence of exceptional intelligence…The proportion of Jews with IQs of 140 or higher is somewhere around six times the proportion of everyone else…” This proportion rises at still higher IQs. Murray and Herrnstein report a study taken in 1954 of IQs in the New York public school system that showed Jews with some 85 percent of the IQs over 170 (24 out of 28). This superiority in IQ also expressed itself in excellence in games that demand exceptional intelligence. Since the 1880s, nearly half of all the world chess champions have been of Jewish heritage.

Such stunning findings in The Bell Curve aroused little comment. Critics focused instead on a few provocative lines on the possible influence of genetic endowment in the IQs of blacks, although the margin of Jewish superiority over other whites was at least as large as the white edge over blacks and less amenable to sociological extenuation.

This reaction is typical of the great error of contemporary social thought: that poverty results not from the behavior or lesser capabilities of the poor, or the corruptions of failed cultures, but from “discrimination.” In the current era, Jews will always tend to be overrepresented at the pinnacles of intellectual excellence. Therefore an ideological belief that nature favors equal outcomes fosters hostility to capitalism and leads directly and inexorably to anti-Semitism. These egalitarian attitudes are the chief source of poverty in the world.

Poverty needs no explanation. It has been the usual condition of nearly all human beings throughout history. When poverty occurs in modern capitalist societies it is invariably a result of cultural collapse, typified by the American ghetto or Gaza or the West Bank or southern Lebanon, because young men are deprived of productive models of masculinity. What is precious and in need of explanation and nurture is the special configuration of cultural and intellectual aptitudes and practices — the differences, the inequalities — that under some rare and miraculous conditions have produced wealth for the world. Inequality is the answer, not the problem.

Murray’s later work, Human Accomplishment, focused on the fact that, as judged by Murray’s complex calculus fed by a database of historians, the Jewish three-tenths of one percent of the entire population of the world has contributed some 25 percent of recent notable intellectual accomplishment in the modern period. Murray cites the historical record: “In the first half of the twentieth century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology.” He then proceeds to more recent data: “In the second half of the twentieth century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure [of Jews awarded Nobel Prizes] rose to 29 percent. So far in the twenty-first century, it has been 32 percent.”

From the day Heinrich Hertz, whose father was a Jew, first demonstrated electromagnetic waves and Albert Michelson conducted the key experiments underlying Einstein’s theory of relativity, the achievements of modern science are largely the expression of Jewish genius and ingenuity. If 26 percent of Nobel Prizes do not suffice to make the case, it is confirmed by 51 percent of the Wolf Foundation Prizes in Physics, 2 8 percent of the Max Planck Medailles and 38 percent of the Dirac Medals for Theoretical Physics, 37 percent of the Heineman Prizes for Mathematical Physics, and 5 3 percent of the Enrico Fermi Awards.

Jews are not only superior in abstruse intellectual pursuits, such as quantum physics and nuclear science. They are also heavily overrepresented among entrepreneurs of the technological businesses that lead and expand the global economy. Social psychologist David McClelland, author of The Achieving Society, found that entrepreneurs are identified by a greater “need for achievement” than are other groups. There is little doubt, he concludes, explaining the disproportionate representation of Jews among entrepreneurs, that in the United States the average need for achievement is higher among Jews than in the general population.

“Need for achievement” alone, however, will not enable a person to start and run a successful technological company. That takes a combination of technological mastery, business prowess, and leadership skills that is not evenly distributed even among elite scientists and engineers. Edward B. Roberts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management compared MIT graduates who launched new technological companies with a control group of graduates who pursued other careers. The largest factor in predicting an entrepreneurial career in technology was an entrepreneurial father. Controlling for this factor, he discovered that Jews were five times more likely to start technological enterprises than other MIT graduates.