Posted on August 15, 2021

For Whom the Bell Curves

Fred Reed, American Renaissance, August 11, 2021

President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany

Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, speaks at the ceremony marking the reopening of the Carlebach Synagogue. (Credit Image: © Christian Charisius / dpa via ZUMA Press)

A staple of the columnist’s life is mail embodying a weird obsession with Jews. It is a versatile obsession, suitable for any occasion. If I were to write a column on the economics of watermelon farming in rural Kansas for a conservative site, a high proportion of the comments would consist of angry denunciations of Jews, the Ziomedia, the ZOG, Jew bankers, Marx, the pernicious effects of Jews on watermelons, and the commie plot to destroy Western civilization, as if it were not competent to do it unaided. Given that Jews tend to prosper mightily in Western civilization, it is not clear why they should want to destroy it, but these are deep waters I will not endeavor to plumb. Further, it was not clear how a tiny group, most of whom seemed to be dentists, could destroy civilizations. Unless they were way smarter than the civilizations.

The hostility to Jews is grinding, bitter, and implacable, coming chiefly from conservatives, who by nature are tribal and tend to see existence in terms of threats and conflict. And often have a tendency to see everything whatever as consequent to Jewish plots. Why the rancor and, in particular, why the belief in the unlimited power of Jews?

At first I assumed that the daughters of the complainers must have been sold into Arab slavery by Jewish flesh merchants. Nothing else could explain it. Yet this turned out not to be true, at least in those cases I could investigate. (Two) The daughters were in place. The commenters never mentioned anything that Jews had actually done to them — poisoned their dogs, swindled them out of their inheritance. Most (though here I speculate) seemed not to know any Jews. So why this tedious fury?

The bitterness, I noted, resemble the hostility of many blacks toward whites. Blacks, at the bottom of society, apparently need someone to blame. Similarly the commenters appeared to resent the Jews for being much more successful that house-and-garden-variety whites (Hagvacas). Might the causes be the same: a resentment of a superior people accompanied by an unwillingness to admit the superiority? The infuriated seemed willing, indeed eager, to point to the inferiority of blacks to themselves but, mysteriously, not their own inferiority to Jews. An oversight, no doubt.

The Chosen People by Richard Lynn

I offer three helpful rules of racial resentment in gratitude for which an astounded world will doubtless send me their children’s college funds:

  • First, prosperity tends to be proportional to intelligence over statistically meaningful populations.
  • Second, resentment is proportional to IQ difference.
  • Third, equal differences of IQ produce equal differences of outcome.

These rules do not apply exclusively to Jews. South African whites, and in Malaysia and Indonesia, the Chinese (who have a large IQ advantage over the natives) are detested for owning things and having money. In Indonesia they have been attacked by mobs and killed. In general, a rich, powerful, and distinguishable group will draw hostility.

Psychometrists, who study intelligence, almost universally rank the races in order of intelligence as Ashkenazi Jews, East Asians, Whites, Latinos, and blacks. (Note that income, educational level, and academic performance closely track this ordering.) The psychometrists are mostly white men so are unlikely to be cooking the numbers against themselves.

Among IQists, it is doctrine that blacks have a mean IQ of 85, fifteen points below the Hagvaca average of 100, and this is held to account for the lack of success of blacks. Searching the literature reveals authorities asserting that Ashkenazi Jews have a mean IQ of 115, as far above ordinary or Hagvaca whites as whites are above blacks. Eureka, and all. Equal differences of input produce equal differences of outcome. N’est-ce pas?

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

Hagvacas don’t want, and Jews know better than, to emphasize this. Yet there it is.

One finds such as this, “Ashkenazi Jews, who make up 80 percent of the Jews in the world today, have, on average, the highest IQs of any ethnic group in the world. While Asians are often touted as the smartest people in the world, Ashkenazi Jews as a group average 115 on an IQ test — eight points higher than Asians and dramatically higher than the world average of 79.1. Ashkenazim skills in verbal reasoning, comprehension, working memory, and mathematics are simply astounding — the group averages 125 on an IQ test of verbal reasoning. Since 1950, 29 percent of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Ashkenazi Jews, who represent a mere 0.25 percent of the global population.”

Among IQ buffs, IQs tend to vary depending on polemic intent, and there will be much squawking to the effect that it isn’t, isn’t, ISN’T true, but observation suggests that it is. The foregoing plaudit tracks well with observable result. This sort of thing arouses shrieks of anguish amongst the Antis who grind their hair and pull their teeth, or maybe it’s the other way around. I can never remember. This engenders assertions that the IQ tests are biased, that Jewish success arises from collusion, that it’s culture, that it’s dishonesty and lack of principle — all of which closely parallel the assertions of blacks against whites.

After reading a great deal of this I began imagining Jews sitting among sacks of gold in darkened counting rooms, rubbing their hands together and saying, “Heh-heh-heh.”

Yet the disproportion in achievement is there. Neither Jews (wisely) nor Hagvacas want to recognize the fairly obvious reason.

The IQ difference if you do the numbers means that one Hagvaca in six is as smart as the average Jew, just as one black in six is as smart as the average white. It also means that if two percent of whites are at IQ 130, the cutoff for Mensa, then two percent of Jews have IQs of 145 or higher (which, according to some estimates is entry level for Wall Street, which is where money is. The nature of a bell-shaped distribution is such that at progressively higher IQs, the numerical advantage grows.

Marx

Karl Marx

For centuries Jews have been charged with greed, deviousness, arrogance, clannishness, selfishness, generic horribleness, and sacrificing Christian children. In my experience Jews have been no more devious and horrible than everyone else, though admittedly this leaves much room for deviousness and horribleness. The only people who want to sacrifice Christian children are, occasionally, Christian parents. Yet character defects alone, if any, cannot produce overwhelming influence in intellectual endeavor. People who sleep in bus stations have character defects, but do not run publishing houses.

Are Jews obsessed by money? Or just better at making it? Dentists, cardiac surgeons, IT managers, semiconductor designers and hedge-fund maestros make more than taxi drivers, midlevel bureaucrats, and people who sell fan belts at the NAPA outlet.

The problem with attributing Jewish achievement to deviousness or collusion is that there is just too, too, too damn much of it. A lot is unknown to the general public, but it is there. The disproportion in achievement is stark. Of the four founding titans of the internet, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Bill Gates of Microsoft, two are Jews. For that matter, of the three most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century, Freud, Marx, and Darwin, two were Jews. Check the personnel list for the Manhattan Project (for readers born after the end of education, this was the project that made the atomic bomb.) It reads like a Yeshiva yearbook. The fathers of modern physics were heavily Jewish — Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Max Born, Wolfgang Pauli, Hans Bethe, Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Michelson, on and on. More recently, figures like John von Neuman and Feynman. Similar lists could be made in publishing, journalism, finance, and film.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Credit Image: Ehud Kenan via Wikimedia)

This goes on today. There is the EPR paradox, basis of quantum communication (Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen). Commerce on the internet depends on public-key encryption RSA Security: Rivest, Shamir, Adelman.

Why the prominence? Does conspiracy account for this, or sheer brains? Fred’s Third Principle says never blame sneakiness when intelligence is both a sufficient and necessary explanation. Were the Jews who started the big internet outfits scheming and evil, or were they, like Gates, smart kids with good ideas and the push and moxie to make them work?

The Jewish influence on history borders on the eerie. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Jesus, Joseph, Mary were Jews. What explains this? Christians say that the Jews were chosen by God. I suspect they chose themselves and wrote a best-selling book about it, but that is a very Jewish approach. Both Christianity and communism, which have dominated much of the world, sprang from Jewish minds and Islam, which has dominated much of the rest of the world, is an offshoot of Judaism and Christianity.

This influence goes back to well before the Christian era. For example, ancient Egypt was ruled for years by an obese Jew. (Surely you have heard of Two-Ton Kamen?) And it is amusing that so many people who detest Jews worship one, and have built huge numbers of churches and cathedrals in which to do it. Which must astonish Jews, but I don’t know.

Of course members of a small, superior, self-aware group disliked by the surrounding population are going to help each other, this being regarded as group sneakiness. But how do you sneakily come up with General Relativity? Or sneakily win a world chess championship? Maybe with magnets secretly placed under the board to move the other guy’s pieces when he isn’t looking. That would work. But doesn’t this sound like complaints against systemic racism? People who sleep in bus stations can collude. Can they found megatech companies?

In a lifetime in Journalism, I have known a lot of Jews, and noticed that they respect intelligence. Their standards are high. A friend in Washington was Herb Berkowitz, a raucous Boston Jew and Head flack at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank. And also veteran of many memorable pub crawls with me and other reporters on the Scuzz and Suds circuit, but that is another story. Anyway the subject of SATs came up and Herb said, “You have to have 1400 just to have bragging rights.” In those pre-dumbing down days, 1300 got you into Mensa, so he was talking IQs well above 130. A Jewish friend, a former Harvard prof, assures me that young Jewish women carry a marry-a-doctor gene, which doubtless contributes to evolutionary proliferation of intelligence. (See? I can do silly pop-evo with the best of them)

Herb Berkowitz and Hugh Newton

Herb Berkowitz and Hugh Newton. (Credit Image: The Washington Times / ZUMAPRESS.com)

And now we have East Asians who at IQ 107, or half a standard deviation above whites, dominate American schools in math and engineering and, back home, are rapidly advancing in the sciences. But, see, it’s because they cheat, copy, and steal But not, of course, because they are smarter. Perish forfend.