My blog friend Anonymous doubts my assessment of Ashkenazi IQ and points to IQ test results of Ashkenazi boys in England two generations ago. While answering, it occured to me that we may be talking about different things. Maybe the whole category of Ashkenazim has lost its meaning a long time ago.
In the beginning of the 20th Century there was a compact, homogeneous, inbreeding, very religious Yiddish-speaking ethnic group making a living as middlemen on a large stretch of land from Lituania in the North to the Black Sea in the South. No one knows for certain how they appeared there in the Middle Ages, nor what is their genetic origin. In time, all those things will be studied and solved.
What is certain today, in the year 2009, is that these people cannot be found in the same vast geographic area. In fact, there are no visible signs that they ever were there, the local population does not remember them, and except some decaying cemeteries for ethnographers, they left nothing to witness they ever were there. If you ask for example the population of Gur (now Ucraine), a town that give origin to the most powerful Hassidic sect, there will be no one there who could say a word about the Jews, they have never seen one and they are not sure if it is true that they ever lived there. When visiting my hometown in provincial Hungary, I was unable to locate the synagogue (once the largest building in town) my grandparents prayed in, and the friendly natives were uncapable even to understand what I was looking for. The Ashkenazi ethnic group emigrated, was exterminated, was dispersed to Earth's furthest corners, went underground and was mixed and assimilated to myriad different populations. They were not transplanted in toto to some other place where you could find them intact, no, they are no more. Nothing is forever, and the Ashkenazi chapter of the history of the Jews has ended.
The people that calls itself Ashkenazi today has only a weak connection that original Ashkenazim. They speak different languages, they have different occupations, they have different religions, carry different names, and have different genetic makeups. With each year, the distance between the "original" Polish Jews and the peoples that today call themselves Ashkenazim grows, as does the distance among the different groups scattered all over the world. In fact, it would be appropiate to adopt the honest self-identification of Kaifeng Jews, who say they are Jewish descendants, not Jews. We should call the groups calling themselves Ashkenazim - descendants of Ashkenazim. Peoples are not static, and we Ashkenazim have had a more dynamic century than any. The Jewish people emerging in Israel, the USA, some centers of Europe and Australia, is a new ethnic group, not Ashkenazim. Regarding their average IQ, I already gave my opinion, which I emphasize, an opinion.
19 comments:
Let me re-assure you.
I have travelled widely in Afrioa, Europe, Asia, North America and Israel, and also lived in most of these places for extended periods.
I have moved extensively in professional, business, academic, and even political circles.
It is like I am meeting the same set of people over and over again repeatedly, in all these different settings.
They are without any question whatsoever derived from the same tightly interbreeding group of people in Middle Ages Europe, that you mention.
Your people are alive and well, and very coherent.
Just moving around a bit.
Relax.
Anon.
J. is more astute than you, Anon. I have watched the Ashkenazim of Los Angeles be slowly, slowly, pushed out by Persian Jews, some form of Mizrahim, whom they do not resemble or like much.
I have talked to sabras whose families came generations ago from Iraq, burly men with thick forearms and shiny black hair. They speak with equal disgust about Arabs and red-haired, pale, less-robust Ashkenazim descended from those who came from Poland.
I have watched close female Ashkenazim friends take goy husbands and have children with them, and I have watched close male Ashkenazim friends take attractive and intelligent goy wives. Some raise their children Jewish, others do not, but the fact is they are becoming something different.
You can stand on the train tracks and say all is fine because you don't see anything at the moment. But even the great Herzl knew that, if a physical homeland were to be founded, those who look like Netanyahu must somehow co-exist with those who look like Lev Leviev, because they were physically different types. Yitzhak Rabin is simply something different than Yigal Amir. If, as J. sees happening, the intermarriage of such types continues taking place, no matter the pace, then a demographic shift will happen - is happening - one that will be reflected not just in phenotypes, but mental characteristics as well.
Nowhere there is any ethnic group resembling the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the 19th Century. The ultra-ortodox Neture Karta in Jeusalem have been inthe Middle East for the last 300 years and they have little in common with their great-grandfathers. American Jews are a new thing, they have a new religion (Reform Judaism), they speak a different language (English), they have different profession and economic positions (there are no more middlemen or small tradesmen), they have mixed extensively, well, there are something new. I am not crying for the disapperance of the Ashkenazi group, that lasted 800 years, it had many bad things. Early Zionists hated the Galut-Judaism repreented by them, their lack of connection with the soil, their way of speaking, their lack of political or military manliness. Ben Gurion ordered all the military and civil service to adopt Hebrew names instead of Galutic names, and to marry out of the Ashkenazi group. They wanted a new Hebrew Man, and they succeeded in creating him. They also created a strong Israel, that is able to defend itself. Even if one does not like this new creature, onehas to recognize that the Israeli will not be massacred without armed opposition as the Ashkenazi were.
Nowhere there is any ethnic group resembling the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the 19th Century. The ultra-ortodox Neture Karta in Jeusalem have been inthe Middle East for the last 300 years and they have little in common with their great-grandfathers. American Jews are a new thing, they have a new religion (Reform Judaism), they speak a different language (English), they have different profession and economic positions (there are no more middlemen or small tradesmen), they have mixed extensively, well, there are something new. I am not crying for the disapperance of the Ashkenazi group, that lasted 800 years, it had many bad things. Early Zionists hated the Galut-Judaism repreented by them, their lack of connection with the soil, their way of speaking, their lack of political or military manliness. Ben Gurion ordered all the military and civil service to adopt Hebrew names instead of Galutic names, and to marry out of the Ashkenazi group. They wanted a new Hebrew Man, and they succeeded in creating him. They also created a strong Israel, that is able to defend itself. Even if one does not like this new creature, onehas to recognize that the Israeli will not be massacred without armed opposition as the Ashkenazi were.
Ben Gurion ordered all the military and civil service to...marry out of the Ashkenazi group..
Again, WTF? I understand the self hatred, but what the hell?
I understand that the early founders created a strong Israel, but that doesn't mean that they needed to target one group for liquidation.
There are times J when your country comes across as being almost as nuts as the US.
What is self-hatred to you is what is self-love to others. Two groups in the modern world assessed their people, found them lacking and set to work correcting this. Only one now remains.
Breeding out weakness is the goal of all those who seek health in an organism.
Breeding out weakness is the goal of all those who seek health in an organism.
I don't see how the Ashkenazic Jews were weak. Since the end of WW2 they've built a new country from scratch where many others have achieved nothing.
J. just gave you a quick rundown. Read any original Zionists, and they'll tell you why they were weak. The Zionists wanted the best specimens in Palestine.
Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Around 1900, large segments of the Jewish people in Europe realized that Emancipation has gone wrong, that the granting of civil rights to Jews a generation before had granted them equal rights nor made their life safer. Zionism was one of the solutions proposed (the Bund was another) and basically said: Europe is a lost case, we dont fit in, let us concentrate in rebuilding our own nation in our original homeland in the Middle East. From all the solutions proposed, only two are still in existence: one is Zionism, the building of the Jewish Nation in Israel, and Orthodoxy, a Jewish movement tht also considers the Emancipation has failed and rejected Europe, it says to limit Jewish contact with the Europe and its culture, and focus in building up closed religious communities everywhere. Except these two movements, the rest of the Jewish people is decaying and disappearing.
Zionism is the rejection of Jewish life in the Diaspora and the rejection of the human type it developed. It sees as the Jew of the Diaspora as weak, fearful, servile, mentally slave to Christian opinion, unable to defend itself. The horrible massacre that the Nazis perpetrated in Europe on the Jews, Ashkenazim as Sepharadim, and the utter helplessness of the Jews, demonstrated the correctness of this thesis. The Zionist project means therefore the creationof a new Jew, the hebrew Jew, that speaks Hebrew instead one to the languages of the Diaspora, who lives from productive work and not intermediation, who is not a weak intellectual like the Diaspora Jew but a fighting pioneer.
Zionism never developed a racial theory, but it can be said that tacitly saw Ashkenazi IQ as a weakness, and tries to develop a mixed Hebrew population that is "healthier". The project, which ws never formulated, treats traditional Jewish communties as "human material" and build ups mixed, coherent, compact, fighting national body.
I can lament the rapid disappearance of the high IQ Ashkenazi as such in Israel, but the Israeli project is very successful, we have built a very strong nation here. Zionism, in a sense, is an anti-IQ project, it pretends to transform the Jew into a creature that can militarily defend himself, which the Ashkenazi adventure has failed to do. It is all about physical survival.
If IQ is not about physical survival, I don't know what it is.
I understand by the way the correlations you are making between the Euro-Ashkenazim archetype and physical vulnerability (although I am not sure you don't exaggerate) but the very worst thing you could do
is to try to breed down your national IQ.
The world is too complex for you to be secure as a nation of muscular schmendricks. I just can't see it, anyway, much as I try.
Anon.
I do not exaggerate. Six million (Ashkenazi, mostly) Jews were massacred during a 3 - 4 year long campaign, and the only resistance we can show is the Warshaw ghetto rebellion (25 Germans killed) and a hundred or so Communist partisans supported by the Red Army. It is shocking. I reproached my dear Father how is that Hungarian Jewish men in the Hungarian Army (like him) accepted to be disarmed during the war, abandoning their womenfolk and children, and that in 1944 when the Polish Jewry was known to have been exterminated. He said that we Jews are a sick race. I agree and I think early Zionist leaders also saw this and 50 years before Hungarian Jews went voluntarily to Ucraine to fight the Red Army, leaving their families at the mercy of the beastly Hungarians. The Zionist project is to create a new Jew who will defend himself and his family. Excessive intelligence is not a requisite, character is.
What makes you think that there is a trade-off between IQ and physical robustness? Aren't the most elite IDF units frequently comprised of Technion students and the like?
J, you are taking your brains for granted.
I think it is arguable that some of Israel's strength comes from overseas support, financial, political, military, whatever. This would simply not be possible without a lot of very smart people both inside and outside Israel, on your team.
It is difficult for me, or any outsider, to say anything to you about your experience in Europe. I completely appreciate the psychological wound from what looks like a complete capitulation without resistance, to the Nazis. But this is not quite true; the Bomb was your creation, and it was intended for Hitler, as an act of revenge; in my opinion. And it came from the brains of Szilard, Feynman, Oppenheimer, Rabie, Teller, Einstein, etc, as an act of revenge. Oppenheimer, and the others, were much less enthusiastic about its use on Japan, with whom they has no personal squabble; then it suddenly became a moral issue.
And yes, there is a need to create a soldier-type, and perhaps there is some justification in the belief system that highly intelligent people are less likely to sacrifice themselves for a cause like nationalism.
But it is, in my humble opinion, a huge and catastrophic mistake to waste what has to be an indispensable component of your survival toolkit, the "Yiddische kopf", given the complexity of a hostile world, and the odds against your making it.
Anon.
Rashkov,
No one is talking about physical robustness. Ashkenazim are very robust, just see "my" picture in the last swimming competition in the Olympic Games. Or Mark Spitz's.
We are talking about a defect in our character.
Anonymous,
Yourself observed that among the Goyim (the peoples of the word), excessive intellectualism is considered a weakness, a defect, they dont like the bookish types. And they are right. History demonstrated that they are right.
Anyway, history cannot be stopped and the Ashkenazi type is disappearing through mixing with other types of Jews and with Goyim (here we have about 300,000 ethnic Russians rapidly assimilating) or by breeding dogs instead of babies. No one can stop or reverse it by now.
I would say that evolution is working overtime on us Ashkenazi Jews. Imagine how strong must have been the natural selection during the Holocaust. But in fact all ethnic goups are changing very fast. There is a study on English people that shows how much they have changed in the last 200 years, they became less aggressive, more sedentary, changes that can be measured in each generation. Evolution, we are evolving. Not only us, everybody and all the time.
J said...
Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Around 1900, large segments of the Jewish people in Europe realized that Emancipation has gone wrong, that the granting of civil rights to Jews a generation before had granted them equal rights nor made their life safer. Zionism was one of the solutions proposed and basically said: Europe is a lost case, we don't fit in, let us concentrate in rebuilding our own nation in our original homeland in the Middle East.
Pat Buchanan wrote a good column stating that at the end of WW2 Europe was the most segregated it had ever been. The Germans of eastern Europe had been expelled to their homeland, and the various other nationalities of Europe had also been granted their homelands, including the Jews. The creation of Israel was really the same process happening among the gentile nations of Europe. Each nation of Europe was given its own home, your nation in Europe just happened to have a home in a unique area.
some more J...
The Zionist project means therefore the creation of a new Jew, who is not a weak intellectual like the Diaspora Jew but a fighting pioneer.
J again...
Zionism never developed a racial theory, but it can be said that tacitly saw Ashkenazi IQ as a weakness, and tries to develop a mixed Hebrew population that is "healthier". The project, which was never formulated, treats traditional Jewish communities as "human material" and build ups mixed, coherent, compact, fighting national body.
J, part 3...
I can lament the rapid disappearance of the high IQ Ashkenazi as such in Israel, but the Israeli project is very successful, we have built a very strong nation here. Zionism, in a sense, is an anti-IQ project, it pretends to transform the Jew into a creature that can militarily defend himself, which the Ashkenazi adventure has failed to do.
J, I clipped these last three excerpts to point out something. Essentially you are endeavoring to become us. You have decided that the path to national survival is through a collective IQ of 105 and a territory of your own. You even have your own patriarch/national bishop the way the countries of Europe do. All you need to do now to follow the nations of Europe is to join the Eurocidal Union (please don't).
I don't know what position you as an individual will finally adopt, but thinking about your posts over the last few months you definitely are in a state of flux.
You know Ronduck I am from another generation. Americans were proud to be Americans. I cannot understand what happened that today's Americans are almost ashamed of being Americans. Objectively, you are stronger than ever and more advanced than ever. You have won the Cold War and defeated the Soviet Union. There are no rivals in sight. Three quarters of the human race dreams of living in America. I think America is the most successful nation in the world, ever.
It is then natural than we Jews, so oppressed and persecuted in Europe, want to resemble the most successful people on Earth. Israel has adopted democracy, an Anglo Saxon invention, and our youth is singing, dancing, dressing, etc. like Americans. In this we are like eveybody else. I dont know why you dont see from there. Look at me, even I am writing in English and following that goes on in America, because only that is interesting. India and China are four time more populous, but nothing new or exciting ever happens there. The whole debate about human evolutionary biology is taking place in America and on American papers and blogs. No one has anything to say, you dont hear Chinese or Indian opinions, nor Spanish or German ideas. Therefore I would like Israel to be like America, maybe like a Jewish Utah.
About being in flux, change is good. Means that I am alive and growing. That is not a given in any age, certainly not when you pass late middle age and enter in old age.
J, the problem I have is that my government has been in liberal hands since 1933, which leads to a couple of bad outcomes:
1. American prestige gets used to export liberalism abroad. A good example of this is the spread of sodomite marriage to Mexico, specifically northern Mexico and later Mexico city. Another example is the spread of environmentalism to Israel.
2. Even though America has a supposedely vibrant conservative movement, it hasn't achieved anything of note other than delaying the victories of liberalism. Back in the 1930's the Democrats under FDR proposed national health insurance, seven decades later their descendants are almost on the brink of victory. With every decade they have managed to expand the numbers of people receiving government aid for healthcare, so that now the feds pay 40% of all healthcare expenses. With Obama soon the amount may reach near 100%. The entire conservative opposition now amounts to emailing Congress.
3. Federal money is used to put greater sections of the economy, our professional societies, our education system and our local governments in liberal hands.
4. The US destroyed South Africa.
5. Because of the above, the US government is now one of the largest promoters of liberalism, abortion, miscegenation and environmentalism on the planet.
In addition, one of the goals of our liberal rulers is to use the media and education system to train our children to believe that everything Americans have ever done that is positive such as conquering the west is proof that the US is an evil exploitative monster. So whatever America has done that is positive either goes down the memory hole or is spun to make us look evil - like populating a nearly empty continent.
Going further, the Democratic party has mastered the art of turning every non-White or non-Protestant group against White Protestants, and then they use their control of the government to import more of these aliens. Even part of the White Protestant base of America votes Democratic (the Mainline Protestants). The only two groups of loyal Republicans left are small numbers of Orthodox Jews and the Evangelicals. If the Rapture is true and it were to happen what little passes for the American Right would disappear and America would become a leftist monster far worse than what Obama wants to do.
Or maybe I am wrong and this self hatred comes from the Puritans and has been passed down for generations. Whatever.
The whole debate about human evolutionary biology is taking place in America and on American papers and blogs.
One last point. The reality of racial differences has been self evident since Ham walked off the Ark. In the 20th century, at the height of American influence, most of this information went down the memory hole, partly as a reaction to its misuse by the Nazis, and partly because it was inconvenient to the Civil Rights movement. The entire human evolutionary movement is just rediscovering what used to be common knowledge.
This is an interesting series of comments.
The fundamental question is this: who is more in touch with reality?
The dismal fate of Africa, eg Zimbabwe, and the catastrophic mass immigration of the third world into Europe and the USA, are examples of Leftist egalitarianism. There are many others, including the Soviet Union and the whole stupid Political Correctness movement.
On the other hand, the excesses of the Right led to both World Wars, the Holocaust, the Scopes Trial, etc.
Both Left and Right are to blame for the current financial crisis.
So where do normality and progress come from? I used to think that normality arises as the vectorial result of the conflicting pull of Right and Left; but I don't think this is so true any more.
Rather, I think it exists as a consequence of a Silent Majority of educated people quietly going about their business and ignoring the hysteria around them. As I travel around Asia, I see these people quietly gaining influence; consumers, professionals, students, the legitimate and responsive governments deeply interested in the security and prosperity of their own people and region.
In Africa, one sees these people and values under dire threat. Certainly, there has been some sort of a gain with the emergence of a Black middle class; but it is small, and its success frankly depends on an increasingly nervous and demoralised white community who now face reverse discrimination, crime and corruption, and who do not have a friend in the world.
In the West, the Silent Majority is on the point of becoming a "Silenced Minority": overtaxed, their currency on the point of massive devaluation, and enslaved by a dictatorship of pseudo-liberal fascists manipulating a mass of free-riding voter-parasites continuously supplemented by the immigration-spigots.
We need to think very carefully, and regain control. Otherwise we are going down.
Anon.
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