Indeed.
Achievement
Ashkenazi Jews have a noted history of achievement. Though only 0.25% of the world population, Jewish scientists make up 28% of Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics, and have accounted for more than half of world chess champions.[18] In the United States, Ashkenazi Jews represent 2% of the population, but have won 40% of the US Nobel Prizes in science, and 25% of the ACM Turing Awards (the Nobel-equivalent in computer science). A significant decline in the number of Nobel prizes awarded to Europeans and a corresponding increase in the number of prizes awarded to US citizens occurred at the same time as Nazi persecutions of Jews during the 1930s and the Holocaust during the 1940s.[19]
Many studies show Ashkenazi Jews as having the highest average IQ of any ethnic group, eight to fifteen points higher than Europeans and leading East Asians, who also score as an outlying group.[20] These studies also indicate that this advantage is primarily in verbal and mathematical, but not spatial, areas.
It's been suggested that this difference in achievement may be due not only to a culture of study and vocational training, but partially to a difference in population history. One recent theory suggests European Jews' history of persecution and subsequent working in high proportion in some IQ-intensive jobs which were forbidden to gentiles by the church resulted in selective pressure for IQ-related genes, including genetic mutations that cause genetic disease when inherited from both parents (Cochran et al. 2005).[21] Another theory notes that for Jews to be socially successful in their peer group, expertise at Torah study has traditionally been an advantage, and since the Enlightenment, those Jews lacking the intellectual skills for this endeavour may have been more prone to assimilate into general culture, thus leaving the reproductively-isolated Jewish population. (Murray 2003, Shafran 2005)
en.wikipedia.org |
