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CHAPTER TWO

Tale of the Bell Curve

The Israel test begins with anti-Semitism, which remains a global plague as persistent and metastatic and multifarious, and as baffling in its etiology, as cancer.

The most compelling book on anti-Semitism that I have encountered is Why The Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin. I read the first edition when it was published in 1983 and later the new edition in 2003. It is lucidly written, intelligent, fervent, and historically sophisticated. It conveys the earnest, wise, and often ironical voice of its Los Angeles talk-radio-star coauthor, Prager. Although suffused with indignation and a tragic sense of life, it is clear-eyed and dispassionate on the critical issues. What’s not to like?

Prager and Telushkin emphasize that anti-Semitism is “unique:” it cannot be comprehended as a form of racism, neurosis, anti-nationalism, envy, ethnic hostility, religious bigotry, or resentment of success. They contend that “modern attempts to dejudaize Jew-hatred, to attribute it to economic, social, and political factors and universalize it into merely another instance of bigotry are as opposed to the facts of Jewish history as they are to the historical Jewish understanding of anti-Semitism . . .”

Prager and Telushkin recount many chilling and telling tales of anti-Semitic horror reaching far back into history, long before the modern forms of Jew-hatred emerged from current economic and political conditions. They also demonstrate that anti-Semitism has reached into the most refined centers of culture and the most learned redoubts of academic intellect – pantheons such as Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations, both old haunts of mine – where any other form of racism would be socially leprous and outré. The authors tout the universality of anti-Semitism, its persistence, its protean irrepressibility, its grisly shapes, its ghastly violence, its frequent respectability, its secular animus, and its religious fanaticism as evidence for its monstrous and inexorable uniqueness.

“Anti-Semites have not hated Jews,” they write, “because Jews are affluent – poor Jews have always been as hated; or strong – weak Jews have simply invited anti-Semitic bullies; or because Jews may have unpleasant personalities – genocide is not personality generated; or because ruling classes focus worker discontent onto Jews – precapitalist and noncapitalist societies, such as the former Soviet Union, other Communist states, and various third world countries, have been considerably more anti-Semitic than capitalist societies. . . ”

They conclude: “Anti-Semites have hated Jews because Jews are Jewish . . .” – essentially for the Jewish belief in their chosenness, in their own national identity, and in the universal reach of their monotheistic God and the moral law associated with the God of the Old Testament. Moreover, to salt the wound of anti-Semitic humiliation, practicing Jews enjoy the best revenge. They live well, leading “demonstrably higher-quality lives” than others who do not adhere to Jewish moral and religious tenets. According Prager and Telushkin, it is these specific characteristics of religious Jews that cause anti-Semitism, rather than the widespread human sins of racism, envy, nationalism, and ethnic hostility that inhere in all other examples of bigotry.

Opening the book is a quotation from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that sums up the Prager-Telushkin view: “It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world. . . . The Jew carries the burden of God in history [and] for this has never been forgiven.”

Jewish ethical monotheism is a basic gift and goad alike to gentiles and Jews who have accepted a relativist morality and philosophy that condones sexual immorality, abortion, and other convenient forms of hedonism. Ethical monotheism is a cherished contribution to humankind and a resented standard of unattainable righteousness. By evoking faith in the meaning and regularity of the cosmos, it is crucial to Jewish science and business and indeed to all human achievement. As Prager and Telushkin finally contend, it may be the solution to the problem of anti-Semitism. But it is not, as they also contend, its cause.

The world tolerates all sorts and conditions of religious observance, from the Amish to Jehovah’s Witnesses, from the Mormons to the Scientologists, and on and on. Many of these faiths include apocalyptic prophecies of the incineration of all their enemies and the survival of a chosen remnant. Some of these faiths evoke scorn, some laughter, most indifference.

Benzion Netanyahu, the historian father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has demonstrated in an awesome 500,000-word tome, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain, that the most vicious anti-Jewish acts of mass destruction and devastation not only preceded the emergence of Christianity but also represented a reaction against the secular power achieved by Jews. He vividly describes the ineffably horrific persecution in Alexandria that was conducted by Hellenistic Egyptians in 3 8 A.D. It was described contemporaneously by the Jewish historian Philo of Alexandria thusly: “the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants.” Some men, he says, were dragged to death, while “those who did these things, mimicked the sufferers, like people employed in the representation of theatrical farces.” Other Jews were crucified. Netanyahu concludes: “We agree with that clear-sighted scholar who said, unreservedly, in plain language: ‘Anti-Semitism was born in Egypt.’” His book shows that motivating the Inquisition in Spain was not hostility to Jewish religion but rage against the superior effectiveness and ascendancy of Jews outperforming established clerics as Christians. “New Christians,” mostly Jewish, were taking over the Spanish church by being more learned, eloquent, devout, resourceful, and charismatic than Christian leaders. As Netanyahu writes, “The struggle against the Jews was essentially motivated by social and economic, rather than religious considerations . . .”

For all their sage observations, Prager and Telushkin miss the heart of the matter, which is Jewish intellectual and entrepreneurial superiority. As the eminent Russian pro-Semite writer Maxim Gorky put it: “Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk, they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit, and more capable of work than they are.” Whether driven by culture or genes – or, like most behavior, an inextricable mix – the fact of Jewish genius is demonstrable. It can be gainsaid only by people who cannot expect to be believed. The source of anti-Semitism is Jewish superiority and excellence.

The entire debate over Israel currently rides on a tacit subtext of crucial matters too sensitive to be probed, such as the central contributions of Jews to global science, technology, art, and prosperity; proprieties that cannot be transgressed, such as pointing to the comparative brutality and barrenness of its adversaries; and immense realities that cannot be broached, such as the manifest supremacy of Jews over all other ethnic groups in nearly every intellectual, commercial, and cultural endeavor.

In The Bell Curve Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein pointed to the massive superiority in IQs of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews over all other genetically identifiable groups. The outlying region of the curve is massively Jewish.

As Murray later distilled the evidence in Commentary, the Jewish mean intelligence quotient is 110, ten points over the norm. This strikingly higher average intelligence, however, is not the decisive factor in overall Jewish achievement. As recently as 2008, Israelis of all ethnicities failed on average to outperform Americans in international tests of eighth-grade math and science skills. In math, Israelis ranked just behind Thailand and Moldova and one place ahead of Tunisia. Israel lagged nine places behind the United States, whose performance is usually deemed miserably far behind the leading Asian and European performers. In science, the numbers were similar.

What matters in human accomplishment is not the average performance but the treatment of exceptional performance and the cultivation of genius. The commanding lesson of Jewish accomplishment is that genius trumps everything else. As Murray and Herrnstein write, “The key indicator for predicting exceptional accomplishment (like winning a Nobel Prize) is the incidence of exceptional intelligence. . .The proportion of Jews with IQs of 140 or higher is somewhere around six times the proportion of everyone else. . .” This proportion rises at still higher IQs. Murray and Herrnstein report a study taken in 1954 of IQs in the New York public school system that showed Jews with some 85 percent of the IQs over 170 (24 out of 28). This superiority in IQ also expressed itself in excellence in games that demand exceptional intelligence. Since the 1880s, nearly half of all the world chess champions have been of Jewish heritage.

Such stunning findings in The Bell Curve aroused little comment. Critics focused instead on a few provocative lines on the possible influence of genetic endowment in the IQs of blacks, although the margin of Jewish superiority over other whites was at least as large as the white edge over blacks and less amenable to sociological extenuation.

This reaction is typical of the great error of contemporary social thought: that poverty results not from the behavior or lesser capabilities of the poor, or the corruptions of failed cultures, but from “discrimination.” In the current era, Jews will always tend to be overrepresented at the pinnacles of intellectual excellence. Therefore an ideological belief that nature favors equal outcomes fosters hostility to capitalism and leads directly and inexorably to anti-Semitism. These egalitarian attitudes are the chief source of poverty in the world.

Poverty needs no explanation. It has been the usual condition of nearly all human beings throughout history. When poverty occurs in modern capitalist societies it is invariably a result of cultural collapse, typified by the American ghetto or Gaza or the West Bank or southern Lebanon, because young men are deprived of productive models of masculinity. What is precious and in need of explanation and nurture is the special configuration of cultural and intellectual aptitudes and practices – the differences, the inequalities – that under some rare and miraculous conditions have produced wealth for the world. Inequality is the answer, not the problem.

Murray’s later work, Human Accomplishment, focused on the fact that, as judged by Murray’s complex calculus fed by a database of historians, the Jewish three-tenths of one percent of the entire population of the world has contributed some 25 percent of recent notable intellectual accomplishment in the modern period. Murray cites the historical record: “In the first half of the twentieth century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology.” He then proceeds to more recent data: “In the second half of the twentieth century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure [of Jews awarded Nobel Prizes] rose to 29 percent. So far in the twenty-first century, it has been 32 percent.”

From the day Heinrich Hertz, whose father was a Jew, first demonstrated electromagnetic waves and Albert Michelson conducted the key experiments underlying Einstein’s theory of relativity, the achievements of modern science are largely the expression of Jewish genius and ingenuity. If 26 percent of Nobel Prizes do not suffice to make the case, it is confirmed by 51 percent of the Wolf Foundation Prizes in Physics, 2 8 percent of the Max Planck Medailles and 3 8 percent of the Dirac Medals for Theoretical Physics, 37 percent of the Heineman Prizes for Mathematical Physics, and 5 3 percent of the Enrico Fermi Awards.

Jews are not only superior in abstruse intellectual pursuits, such as quantum physics and nuclear science. They are also heavily overrepresented among entrepreneurs of the technological businesses that lead and expand the global economy. Social psychologist David McClelland, author of The Achieving Society, found that entrepreneurs are identified by a greater “need for achievement” than are other groups. There is little doubt, he concludes, explaining the disproportionate representation of Jews among entrepreneurs, that in the United States the average need for achievement is higher among Jews than in the general population.

“Need for achievement” alone, however, will not enable a person to start and run a successful technological company. That takes a combination of technological mastery, business prowess, and leadership skills that is not evenly distributed even among elite scientists and engineers. Edward B. Roberts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management compared MIT graduates who launched new technological companies with a control group of graduates who pursued other careers. The largest factor in predicting an entrepreneurial career in technology was an entrepreneurial father. Controlling for this factor, he discovered that Jews were five times more likely to start technological enterprises than other MIT graduates.

These remarkable facts and their powerful implications have evoked surprisingly little discussion. But a book such as Prager and Telushkin’s Why the Jews? on anti-Semitism that fails to come to terms with the raw facts of Jewish intellectual superiority will fail to persuade its readers, who will sense that the argument cannot bear the weight it is asked to carry. Yes, there is a religious component in anti-Semitism, but there is also a political and economic element, reflected in the objective anti-Semitism of Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky, Friedrich Engels, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and other Jewish leftists who above all abhor capitalism. Jews, amazingly, excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals even in the arena of anti-Semitism.

For all its special features and extreme manifestations, anti-Semitism is a reflection of the hatred toward successful middlemen, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, lenders, bankers, financiers, and other capitalists that is visible everywhere whenever an identifiable set of outsiders outperforms the rest of the population in the economy. This is true whether the offending excellence comes from the Kikuyu in Kenya, the Ibo and the Yoruba in Nigeria, the overseas Indians and whites in Uganda and Zimbabwe, the Lebanese in West Africa, South America, and around the world, the Parsis in India, the Indian Gujaratis in South and East Africa, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and above all – the more than 30 million overseas Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution reports that in Indonesia overseas Chinese constituted only five percent of the population, but they controlled 70 percent of private domestic capital and ran three-quarters of the nation’s top two hundred businesses. Their economic dominance – and their repeated victimization in ghastly massacres – prompts Sowell to comment: “Although the overseas Chinese have long been known as the ‘Jews of Southeast Asia,’ perhaps Jews might more aptly be called the overseas Chinese of Europe.”

Sowell has written several books that document this pattern of hostility toward “middleman minorities” in fascinating detail and has explained its causes and effects with convincing authority. The role of wealth-creation and trade, with its rigorous disciplines, linguistic virtuosity, and accounting prowess, means that “middleman minorities must be very different from their customers.” These groups, “their wealth inexplicable, their superiority intolerable,” typically arouse hatred from competing intellectuals. “It is not usually the masses of the people who most resent the more productive people in their midst. More commonly, it is the intelligentsia, who may with sufficiently sustained effort spread their own resentments to others.”

The culture of economic advance “and the social withdrawal needed to preserve this differentness in their children,” Sowell writes, “leave the middleman minorities vulnerable to charges of ‘clannishness’ by political and other demagogues. . . . These accusations can exploit racial, religious, or other differences, but this is not to say that such differences are the fundamental reason for the hostility.”

It is a mistake for Prager and Telushkin to ignore the persistence and universality of this phenomenon and to claim some special, more exalted, and elusive source of anti-Semitism, while half-denying the obvious and massively disproportionate representation of Jews in almost every index of human achievement. This evasive argument may reduce the number of available allies and divert attention from the real problem.

Prager and Telushkin are so immersed in the world of the Left and its perspectives that their economic analysis treats wealth or capitalist prowess as negatives, as potential sources of anti-Semitism from labor movements and the poor and their advocates, rather than as the best remedies for anti-Semitism.

Capitalism overthrows theories of zero-sum economics and dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest. Thus, as in the United States (except for the Darwinian academic arena, where professors angle for grants from the outside), anti-Semitism withers in wealthy capitalist countries. It waxes in Socialist regimes where Jews may arouse resentment by their agility in finding economic niches among the interstices of bureaucracies, tax collections, political pork fests, and crony capitalism. As the elder Netanyahu’s great history shows, an oft-repeated pattern has the Jews serving as the most skilled and trusted servants of the central (or even absentee) government. Then, as the power of hated king or conqueror wanes, he abandons the Jews, who are left to the mercies of the enraged mob.

Static Socialist or feudalistic systems, particularly when oil-rich and politically controlled, favor a conspiratorial view of history and economics. Anti-Semitism is chiefly a zero-sum disease.

Christians may well gag at Prager and Telushkin’s accounts of the depraved anti-Semitism of Martin Luther, various miscreant cardinals, and rabid crusaders, as capitalists will retch at the views of Henry Ford. And all the charges are true. But, putting it as gently as I can, I would demur at the retrospective application of modern standards of morality to the long history of the human parade through the treacherous and bloodthirsty epochs of war, poverty, religious feuds, plagues, famines, and vicious ethnic struggles. The world has been at war for millennia, with hatred and death pandemic on all sides. During World War I, an entire generation comprising approximately 2 0 million young European men was lost. After World War I, an additional 29 million more Europeans died because of an influenza epidemic alone. Until the ascent of capitalism and trade, there was no alternative to joining in the zero-sum struggles for existence against enemies everywhere.

Feminists look back on that appalling panorama and see nothing but misogynist oppression, rape, and murder. Blacks look back and see virtually nothing but lynching and slavery. Native Americans see nothing but genocidal aggression by whites. Third Worlders everywhere see a history of colonialist and imperialist depredations. Armenians and Kurds give harrowing accounts of a history of murderous attacks that killed millions of their forbears. The Irish see an inexorable saga of predatory and vicious Englishmen, callously starving their ancestors to death. American Southerners tell of the loss of a generation of young men and the devastation of Dixie in the “War between the States.” The Muslims tell of rampant brutalities of the Crusades. All of them cherish their own acute grievances and sagas of victimization. All now have been taught to couch their historic suffering, whenever possible and often even when implausible, in the terms of “genocide.”

It is unseemly, as well as tactically questionable, for American Jews, the richest people on earth, to grapple with Armenians and Rwandan Tutsis, Palestinian Arabs and U.S. blacks, Sudanese and Native Americans to corner the trump cards of victimization. Although Jews are objectively correct that the Holocaust was unique in its diabolical details and genocidal reach, current-day Jews will get nowhere pointing to the suffering of their forebears. Every ethnic group has its own tale of woe, because the entire history of the world is woebegone. For most of human history, average longevity was under thirty years. For the vast majority of humans of all ethnic groups, nearly all previous history seemed essentially hopeless in any terms except the physical struggles for Darwinian group survival. You hated your enemies from other groups because most of the time they sought to kill you. You had no vision of the successes of others as your own opportunity.

Until the dominance of capitalism, with its positive spirals of mutual gain, the prevailing regime was a Darwinian zero-sum game in which groups fought for survival against their neighbors. As Walter Lippmann eloquently explained in The Good Society, capitalism for the first time opened a vista of mutually enriching enterprise, with the good fortune of others opening opportunities for all. The Golden Rule, he said, was transformed from an idealistic vision of heaven into a practical agenda. From Poor Richard’s Almanack to rich Andrew Carnegie’s autobiographical parables, all were rediscovering the edifying insights of the Author of Proverbs.

Yes, “Jew-hatred is unique,” as Prager and Telushkin’s first chapter proclaims. Jews are unique. Anti-Semitism subjects this uniquely gifted people to a crude and particularly incendiary manifestation of the immemorial hatreds that have afflicted the world for millennia. Judaism, however, perhaps more than any other religion, favors capitalist activity and provides a rigorous moral framework for it. It is based on a monotheistic affirmation that God is good and will prevail through transcending envy and hatred and zero-sum fantasies. Judaism can be plausibly interpreted as affirming the possibilities of creativity and collaboration on the frontiers of a capitalist economy.

The facts are clear. What makes Jews unique is their excellence. The solution is also clear. As Prager and Telushkin acknowledge, almost in passing, Jews do better under capitalism than under any other system. Anti-Semitism tends to wane under a growing and expanding creative economy. Other consequences of Jewish superiority are also evident. On a planet where human life subsists upon the achievements of human intellect and enterprise, Jews are crucial to the future of the race.

The Holocaust was not only an unspeakable catastrophe for Jews and an eternal source of shame upon all who collaborated with the Nazis’ “final solution.” It was incomparably more destructive than other modern genocidal acts not only because of the diabolical evil of the Nazis but because of the unique virtues and genius of its victims. It was an irretrievable loss and catastrophe for all humanity, depleting the entire species of intellectual resources that will be critical to survival on an ever-threatened planet. Imagine the wealth and culture that might have blessed the world from a population of 200 million Jews, the number that would live today if Jews retained their share of global population held at the time of the Roman Empire.

As irremediable and tragic the loss to the Jewish people and all Jewish families directly affected bv the Holocaust, one could argue that the rest of the world has suffered even more in absolute terms by the loss of the vast potential of the six million Jewish victims whose only sin was being Jewish on the European continent in the twentieth century.

The incontestable facts of Jewish excellence constitute a universal test not only for anti-Semitism but also for liberty and the justice of the civil order. The success or failure of any minority in a given country is the best index of its freedoms. In any free society, Jews will tend to be represented disproportionately in the highest ranks of both its culture and its commerce. Americans should not conceal the triumphs of Jews on our shores but celebrate them as evidence of the superior freedoms of the U.S. economy and culture.

The real case for Israel is incomparably more potent and important than the sentimental and self-serving mush usually mustered on its behalf. It has little or nothing to do with Israel’s murky politics, its frequently malfunctioning democracy, its extraordinary restraint in the face of constant provocations from its seething circle of demented neighbors, its treatment of gays or Palestinians or women or ethnic minorities, or its maddening indulgence of the Socialist sophistries of its critics and casuistically captious friends at Harvard, the Atlantic, and the New Republic.

The prevailing muddle of sentimentality and pettifoggery only obscures the actual eminently practical case for supporting Israel, for as long as it may take, without apology or deceit or waffles, without deception or obsequious self-denial. It is the case for Israel as the leader of human civilization, technological progress, and scientific advance. It is the case for Israel as a military spearhead of the culture of freedom and faith – the bastion of American progress and prosperity, and beyond America, for the progress and prosperity of all the people of the planet. The reason America should continue to “prop up” Israel is that Israel itself is a crucial prop of American wealth, freedom, and power.

In a dangerous world, faced with an array of perils, the Israel test asks whether the world can suppress envy and recognize its dependence on the outstanding performance of relatively few men and women. The world does not subsist on zero-sum legal niceties. It subsists on hard and possibly reversible accomplishments in medicine, technology, pharmacology, science, engineering, and enterprise. It thrives not on forcibly reallocating land and resources but on encouraging and giving freedom to human creativity in a way that exploits land and resources most productively. The survival of the human race depends on recognizing excellence wherever it appears and nurturing it until it prevails. It relies on a vanguard of visionary creators on the frontiers of knowledge and accomplishment. It depends on passing the Israel test.

Critics will call this a culpably Judeo-centric argument, missing lots of subtleties and complexities that shrewd, tough-loving critics of Israel cherish in their long catalog of its flaws. Former Prime Minister Olmert had the best answer, barking to writer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that he did not care about the flaws. Regardless of flaws – and Israel has fewer flaws than perhaps any other nation – Israel is the pivot, the axis, the litmus, the trial. Are you for civilization or barbarism, life or death, wealth or envy? Are you an exponent of excellence and accomplishment or of a leveling creed of troglodytic frenzy and hatred?