A topic came up in my senior Bible class: Jewish superiority. We are studying the stories about Abraham, and one of the questions that the rabbis bring up in their commentaries, especially in Midrash, is why did God choose Abraham? When God created the world in chapter one of Genesis, everything was good. There was an order to the universe, all part of a divine plan. Was a moral universe also part of that plan? If God intended for mankind to be just and moral, and if we are created in the image of God, why is there injustice? If Abraham was chosen as an example of moral superiority through whom all the nations of the earth will be blessed, why did God just choose one man, later to become one people?
David Brooks, in a January 12 article in the NY Times noted that "Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates. Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction."
Yehuda Halevy, in his book The Kuzari, claims that Jews are racially superior, and when you combine them with the Hebrew language and the Land of Israel, the highest level of humanity is produced, the prophets. A recent You Tube video claims that the majority of male Jews can be genetically traced back to Middle Eastern (ancient Israelite?) ancestry, and as a group have a higher average IQ.
Maimonides, following Aristotle, believes that God is an intellectual force, and since we are created in the image of God, we share a divine intellect. As Brooks points out, since Jews were cut off from the land during the Middle Ages, they were put in a position of developing their brains. The ideal of the Jewish world up to the Holocaust was the scholar. One of the five obligations of a father is to educate his son (I wanted to say child, but I have to stay faithful to the text).
So, are we truly smarter because of genetics? Is it our emphasis on education? Yesterday one of my players asked for permission to miss a game because he had to study for a test. I emphasize academics above all else. We may not be the most physically talented team in our league, but I would venture to say that we may be the smartest (basketball IQ aside--see the previous blog).
As I pointed out in a previous blog, I am very competitive by nature. I see the classroom as competitive as well. The thrill of intellectual competition is as fulfilling to me as the thrill of coaching in a basketball game. Jews are competitive. We want to succeed. The Israelis changed the playing field, as David Brooks points out. I heard from another teacher that one of our students described the school as competitive, but not cut-throat. Is being competitive genetic as well?
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I think that Jews are competitive not because of gentics, but rather because of what they are taught in the home. Growing up, every Jew learns about the history of his people and all of the hardships Jews have overcome. Jews have endured so much since the beginning of time. Whether it be from Biblical disaster (enslavement, destruction, exile...) to modern day Anti-Semitism, Jews understand that in order to survive they must compete with the nations around them. This is especially hard considering we are so small in number.
ReplyDeleteJews are competitive because if we were not this way, there would be no more Jews. If Jews did not achieve such great things in society, we would simply disappear as so many other nations have. Our competitiveness is what has kept us around for so many years.
I don't know if it's hi IQ per se, or just a more scattered distribution. I read a study online that showed men and women to have equal average IQs, but there were more men at both the very top and the very bottom: This means that the very smartest people, who you tend to hear about, are male giving the public a false impression about men on average. Now, this is unscientific but in Hebrew school I remember quite a dichotemy between the intellectual and not-so-intellectual kids, with only a handful of exceptions.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is not to say that there are a lot of really smart and really dumb Jews walking around. There are lots of different ways to measure intelligence (people skills, common sense, abstract thinking, mathematics, etc), and we only notice someone as "intelligent" when they're above a certain threshold in at least one category. I won't buy that any group is racially superior, but I will buy that there could be some "intelligence randomization" genes out there in higher concentrations.
-ZT (again, my commenting account is failing)