Nadene Goldfoot
.jpg%20Einstein.jpg)
While our Arab cousins have been hateful of us and have described us as less than humans, facts are that Jews are very intelligent human beings. We're not just a religion but a people as well, we find out in this day and age, proven by DNA, making it a different situation from being a Christian or a Muslim besides the fact that of the 3 religions, our Judaism is the smallest group today.
Ashkenazi Jews for one, that is, are Jews who wound up in Germany after Jerusalem was taken by the Romans in 70 CE, Our Sephardic siblings earned that title by heading for Spain, probably in ships. Ashkenazis created Yiddish as their language from German and Hebrew while Sephardis created Ladino from Spanish and Hebrew.
"Ashkenazi Jews have been found to have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group, worldwide. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations about the general European average, which corresponds to an IQ score around 112-115."
"This fact has social significance, because natural intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) is a good predictor of success in academic subjects and many professions. Jews are just as successful in the professions that their tested IQ would predict, and are largely overrepresented in those professions and accomplishments with the highest cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made up about 2 to 3% of the US population, but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes.
Between 1901 and 2022, the Nobel Prize has been awarded to more than 900 individuals and organizations. At least 211 of them have been Jewish. Israel has produced a disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners. In August 2015, Times Higher Education ranked Israel the fifth best performer this century based on the number of Nobel Prizes won as well as the significance and prestige of each one. The publication also ranked global universities based on Nobel Prize winners and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology placed eighth, higher on the list than Harvard and every British University.
Israeli (left) accepts the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
American poses with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics
forbade any Germans to accept the Nobel Prize after the 1935 Peace Prize was awarded to one of his political enemies, the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky.
Jews are known to have been among the 1st in Europe to have cultivated the game of chess. They learned it from Arabs who learned it from the Persians (Iran). Sephardics produced best known players being Abraham Ibn Ezra who wrote a poem describing the game. Also, Rabbi Solomon ben Mazal-Tov, Bonsenior Ibn Yahya, and Jacob Eichenbaum were great chess players. Wilhelm Steinitz introduced a new concept of military strategy into chess. He won the world championship and retained his title for 28 years. His pupil, Emmanuel Lasker, won the world title from him and held it for 27 years.
Michael Botvinnik of the USSR held the world championship in recent years as did Mikhael Tal, Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer and Gary Kasparov. Other prominent Jewish players include David Bronstein, Samuel Reshevsky, Reuben Fine, and M. Neudorff of Argentina.
I might add that Jews have been conscious of who they marry, what kind of people, their values, since biblical days, and then always into a Jewish family. Non-Jews have not had this as a criteria, except possibly wealthier families such as royalty. Our genes have been guarded for several thousand years. Sexual attraction was at work, especially with Samson and his Delilah, but was expected to be less important.
"Ashkenazi Jews have an unusual cognitive ability profile, as well as higher-than-average IQ. They have high verbal and mathematical scores, while their visual-spatial abilities are typically somewhat-worse (by about half a standard deviation) than the European average. " (I wonder if this has anything to do with Jacob's wife, Leah having weak eyes, as is written about her.) She had 6 of Jacob's 12 sons.
What makes Jews an interesting subject for researchers is that very little gene flow happened between Jews and neighboring non-Jewish populations because of Jewish law and because of anti-Semitism. "The majority of Ashkenazi Y-Chromosomes (from father to son and on down the generations) are associated with Mideastern groups. Any connection from surrounding European men averaged less than 0.5% over many generations. " Jews come from the Middle East by history and by proof of genetics.
"During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals". 2nd class citizens, which Jews were thought of, have suffered from the same descriptions.
Thus, a person with a higher IQ should naturally be with people of like interests and have more surviving children than average intelligence people. In pre-modern Europe, wealthy people had quite a few more surviving children than average, so if high IQ increased income, there could have been selection for IQ in some situations. I might add that the level of mid-wives' accomplishments had a lot to do with it, too, as to how many babies made it to life.
However, Jews were kept in a 2nd class citizen level in Europe and the Middle East, with a few families only becoming wealthy. Most were poor, especially Ashkenazis in Eastern Europe. Jews were restricted in their career opportunities. Many were limited to money-lending as an occupation, the only one left that non-Jews kept out of as a vulgar and disliked occupation. Jews had to manage complex financial transactions, and those who did well made more money and had more children. To be left in a society with the only choice of making a living and eating was the most despicable profession of money-lending and making it successful is a feather in our ancestor's cap to those few it fell upon. That skill was sharpened by trying to sell things on the Silk Road to the Orient as a means to a living as trading was one of man's earliest social acts.
Now I find that there was a Wertheim Dynasty. The reason we have their genealogy tree is because rabbis thought well of having this genealogy and kept doing it. They felt it important to keep up the tradition of having rabbis in the family in these days of arranged marriages, and used it for arranged marriages. They wanted to their children to marry into another rabbinical family. It stems from history from biblical days of being a part of the 71 decision makers of the Sanhedrin. To be in the Sanhedrin, one needed proof of their genealogy. The head was usually a descendent of Hillel.
Prosperous Jews, a very small percent of the Jewish population, may have averaged twice as many surviving children than poor Jews, and they made their money with their wits, rather than by inheritance or fighting skills, as in most other European elites. Those usually were also rabbis who had loaned money to kings and had developed this type of reputation.
I myself have found a connection to such a wealthy family through DNA and history, and my father was from as poor a family as one can find, but he proved to be very intelligent, even without being able to graduate high school. Father on right standing. Brother on left sitting 2 yrs older. Boys on their porch in Portland, Oregon a few years after 1908, Dad's birthday. If he had known he had Wertheimer genes in his veins, he would have plotzed! Having that history isn't insurance of continuing good fortune, however in this changing world.
The Ashkenazim had low gene flow and a preponderance of occupations with high IQ elasticity for hundreds of years. This may have been enough to cause the IQ increase that we observe. The narrow-sense inheritability of IQ is at least 0.3; which means that if the parents of the next generation average 1 point above the current population average, the next generation (with equal environments) will average another 0.3 points higher. Continue this process for 40 generations (100 years=4 generations) of 25 X 40=1,000 years and you get an increase of 12 points, just about what we see today. King David lived 3,000 years ago born in 1010 BCE.
So by following a selected pattern of marriage, we should be getting smarter and smarter, but society has changed and select marriages are following in Samson's footsteps more than Jacob's. Einstein may be the last really smart Jewish person we've ever experienced.
Another theory suggests that there was selective breeding for Talmudic scholarship. The successful and wealthy sought out Talmudic scholars to father their grandchildren. And it is possible that increased wealthy contributed to increased fertility and survivability, which in turn may have led to selection for intellect. Torah scholars were introduced to selective breeding in the bible with their sheep. It was Jacob, our progenitor, who was clever and took all the speckled, black, and diverse-colored ones, and then managed to preferentially breed the remaining sheep and goats to produce predominantly spotted and black offspring, which he kept.
Abraham was born in 2nd millennium or 1948 BCE and he was the grandfather of Jacob who was born maybe in 1848 BCE. Moses was born in 1391 BCE. Jacob goes back a long ways. The first Egyptian pharaoh, Narmer, was born in about 3273–2987 BCE.) By the time Jacob was born, people were quite well advanced in their intellect skills.
Resource:
Book: DNA Tradition, the genetic link to the ancient Hebrews newly updated by Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman, 2004
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956180/criminals-see-their-victims-as-less-than-human
https://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2020/04/dna-connection-to-rabbi-samson.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmer
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-nobel-prize-laureates
No comments:
Post a Comment