The 2011 Nobel Prize and the Debate over Jewish IQ
By
Lazar Berman, October 19, 2011
With this month’s announcement from Stockholm that Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Israel adds to its growing list of Nobel laureates. Since 2002, six Israelis have won Nobel prizes...
Many vastly larger countries with highly educated populations have not outperformed tiny Israel. France has produced six Nobel laureates in the same span, Germany and Russia five, Canada two, and India only one...
In the words of the American Enterprise Institute’s political scientist Charles Murray, “In the first half of the 20th 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. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent.”1 Jews constitute about 0.2 percent of the world’s population...
In Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending of the University of Utah conclude that “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ of 112-115 … This fact has social significance because IQ (as measured by IQ tests) is the best predictor we have of success in academic subjects and most jobs. Ashkenazi Jews are just as successful as their tested IQ would predict, and they are hugely overrepresented in occupations and fields with the highest cognitive demands.”5
With this month’s announcement from Stockholm that Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Israel adds to its growing list of Nobel laureates. Since 2002, six Israelis have won Nobel prizes. Significantly, none of the Israeli laureates won the Peace Prize, which does not...
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