Counter-Currents
Bobby Fischer plays Mikhail Tal in Leipzig, 1960
3,762 words
Some studies suggest that the Ashkenazi Jewish population is the most intelligent ethnic group in the world. This tends to create a mystique about them, as well as bolsters a certain Herrenvolk narrative. It supplements the aura of awe centered on the long preexisting notion that they are God’s chosen people.
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6 comments
From one smart blond to another, thank you for this illuminating and interesting article, Mr. Albrecht.
And no, they will not just “stop doing that” because that’s what they’ve been doing for thousands of years to great personal group advantage. But we can hope.
“90% of Jews in the USA are Ashkenazim. There’s much that can be said about their genetics — for one thing, they’re nearly half Italian — but all that’s another matter.”
Ashkenazi cluster near Italians on two-dimensional genetic maps. However, they do not share significant IBD segments with Italians, which is a difficulty the author fails to mention.
Personally, I suspect that the Ashkenazi (and Sephardics) descend from former Carthaginians, who were present throughout the Mediterranean world in what were essentially merchant ghettoes. After Carthage fell, they converted in large numbers to Judaism. A small fraction of these Jews coalesced to form the seed of the modern Ashkenazi around 800 AD and then moved north.
See in general https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006644
I think Jews are pretty smart from my personal experience. They have deeper minds, with greater future time horizons on average. In fact I would think the distance between Jews and whites is similar to that between blacks and other whites, although maybe a little less than a whole standard deviation. Many times I find there are white Europeans(meaning gentiles, I suppose ashkenazim are a European group) may equal some jews in a given activity, such as chess or math, the jews will nevertheless have a greater global intelligence, such as g I might hypothesize. For example, when I was in graduate school—it was in science not philosophy—there were gentiles who were the equal or the better of Jews in the field, but I noticed the Jews could lateralize to other skill sets, like if we did skits or a comedy for prospective students the Jews would take over and do something good. Intelligence is an amoral virtue of course. Smart groups tend to dehumanize lesser groups, much like the Japanese and the American pows in ww2.
Just from my lived experience, yes. Jews, as well as Asians, tend to be noticeably more intelligent than our people. Not only that, in both cases they’re cognitively very well adapted to the contemporary world: great capacity for abstraction, mental liquidity, multitasking.
The Backman (1972) analysis cited in this article found that Jews have an average verbal IQ of 107.8, half a standard deviation above average. It is misleading just to cite the overall IQ score, as this obscures exceptional performance in sub-domains. Similarly, Richard Lynn, in ‘The intelligence of American Jews’, finds that American Jews have a verbal IQ of 107.5:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~negisama/asdf2.pdf
I believe that Jews have a very impressive record of intellectual achievement that would be hard to fake which I have seen chronicled elsewhere. This would include excelling in world math competitions, a large number of Nobel science prizes and vast over representation among world chess masters. It is true that they have taken over many organizations and institutions that they did not create, but they have also founded a disproportionate number of modern technology companies – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, etc. Their influence in our institutions, perhaps most notably media and entertainment, has been generally pernicious, but I’m fairly convinced that they are on average a very intelligent group and it does us no good to delude ourselves.
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