The Myth of Jewish High IQ - by Neema Parvini

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The Myth of Jewish High IQ

Neema Parvini<br>Nov 26, 2023

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Before all other things, I study power and politics. Keen awareness of elite theory keeps one alert of Schmittian exceptions, which is to say when special allowances are made in one case but not in others. The vexed area of IQ research is one such case. For example, notorious race-denier Jordan Peterson, who believes that white collectivism is an unspeakable evil, in the next breath will happily repeat the claim that Jews have a mean IQ of 115. This same sleight of hand is played by Steven Pinker who dismisses The Bell Curve as it pertains to race, but in another context pulls out the same stat: ‘Their average IQ has been measured at 108 to 115, one-half to one standard deviation above the mean.’ In elite theory, we call a story that justifies the dominance of one group over others a political formula. The de facto hypothesis, as per Vilfredo Pareto, is that no political formulas are true and none can stand up to real scrutiny because they seldom if ever have any basis in fact; in effect, they are simply legitimacy myths used to post-hoc rationalise why this group is in power as opposed to any other group. Thus, before looking at any other information whatsoever, elite theory would look at 1. the over-indexing of Jewish people in positions of power in America, and 2. the reasons given for this by their apologists such as Peterson and Pinker, and conclude 3. the myth of Jewish high IQ is not a fact, but a political formula devised to legitimate power. Ah, but surely IQ statistics should be relatively easy to find and this claim – unlike other political formulas such as ‘I have been sent by God’ or ‘I speak for the will of the people’ – can be proven using hard data, no? Well, let’s have a look.<br>First, before I start, I will accept no proxies for actual IQ scores which are typically offered. By far the two most common examples are World Chess Champions and Nobel Prize Winners. The first can be dealt with very simply. It is pointed out that 44% of World Chess Champions are Jewish, it is less common to point out that 100% of chess champions come from just nine nations, and, until very recently when the Chinese have started to dominate, just six. Before 1948, it seems that London acted as the centre of chess and entrants had to raise a £10,000 wager just to take part. Unsurprisingly, in that earlier period a lot of the champions were British. After 1948, FIDE was established but from almost the moment of its inception, it was dominated by the Soviet Union and specifically the Russians. After this point, almost all the champions are Russian except for, notably, one American – Bobby Fischer, who you can read about in your own time – and more recently Indian and Chinese champions who have started to break through precisely at the moment China is emerging as a new superpower. Strange how that works. On the Nobel Prize all I will say is that elite theory can serve us well once more: Nobel Prizes are not a neutral institution; they are not selected in an open manner, but tightly controlled through a committee. They demonstrate nothing beyond what power selects. The claim that prizes from this body are an objective measure of anything, therefore, must be discarded. Nothing else needs to be said. I will now look for the objective standard most commonly cited: the measure of the IQ Test!<br>The Forbidden Texts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Let us turn to Charles Murray, who, in an astonishing passage in an article called ‘Jewish Genius’ in 2007, had this to say:<br>Insofar as I am suggesting that the Jews may have had some degree of unusual verbal skills going back to the time of Moses, I am naked before the evolutionary psychologists’ ultimate challenge. Why should one particular tribe at the time of Moses, living in the same environment as other nomadic and agricultural peoples of the Middle East, have already evolved elevated intelligence when the others did not?<br>At this point, I take sanctuary in my remaining hypothesis, uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable. The Jews are God’s chosen people.

In other words, he rearticulates an older political formula to justify the supposed superiority of these people. In fact, the historical record shows that Jews did not historically have this reputation for cleverness and it is a relatively recent claim which is easily dismantled as R. Brian Ferguson has done.<br>If we work backwards from the Ferguson paper, we find another article from 2005 called ‘The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence’ by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending. What is their evidence for the claim that Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is higher than everyone else’s? Let me quote them:<br>Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic...