Michael, it's indisputable that Jews, throughout history, have excelled far beyond what you'd expect from their small percentage of the world's population. What it is about being Jewish that has created so many amazing scientists, artists, authors and generally outstanding minds?
There's the "chosen people" rationale which, I suppose, imputes God's genetic blessing on Jewish people. But the old Testament was written by Jews so you'd expect something in there about being the chosen people and, besides, who can prove or disprove such things?
There are some analytical explanations that make sense.
Maybe it's their culture. The Jewish culture has historically placed a tremendously high value on intellectual achievement and many Jewish children were, and are, raised to question, analyze and debate esoteric issues. If you visited a Jewish home anywhere in the world you'd probably find much less television viewing or "playing" than the average and you'd probably see more children engaged in study, discussions and lessons with their parents. With so much emphasis on learning and being learned, the "rock star" emulated by some Jewish children might be a a person with a head full of ideas and knowledge.
But it may have its roots in Darwinism too. After the exodus of the Jews into Europe many Jews were brutally persecuted by Europeans and their lives were hard. Assuming that those with the best judgement or those valued most by their communities had a better chance of surviving to bear children, maybe the gene pool got a boost.
And then there's the effect of the arranged marriage aspect of the Jewish lineage. In a culture that valued achievement and being learned so highly, and in a culture where marriages were arranged, you can find a significant number of Jewish family histories where the children of Rabbis, physicians, lawyers, and other successful Jews were married almost exclusively to the children of similar families for many generations. I'm sure they weren't consciously attempting to breed a super race of Jews but when the best "catches" were often considered those with the highest ability to think, you'd expect to see, over many generations, some remarkable people popping up.
I watched a public television special on the German Jews a few years back. They focused on a Jewish town that was wiped out except for a handful of survivors and I couldn't help thinking that among the millions of Jews who perished there might well have been some amazing children with unique talents.
The Jews have given us much to admire and appreciate but I'm disgusted with the actions of the Israelis over the last half decade. Their policy of targeting entire populations to achieve their political and security goals has been immoral and counter productive. The fact that the Bush Administration followed the same path in Iraq after having seen first hand what happened in Israel, and with the same results, makes us even more foolish.
It seems that when a population gets scared stupid it doesn't matter if they're Jews, Christians or Muslims.
Too bad for all of us. Ed |
