Jews are a religion and a race. Woody Allen is an atheist and an Ashkenazi Jew. This book review that originally appeared on American Renaissance explains it well, while drawing attention to the racial superiority of the Ashkenazim.
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Richard Lynn, The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement, Washington Summit Publishers, 2011, 408 pp., book review by Philip Roth
The Chosen People: A study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement is the most recent work of Richard Lynn dealing with group differences in IQ and their ramifications. As in all of his previous work over the past decade, he substantiates his arguments with huge quantities of empirical data. He advances his positions dispassionately and lets the facts speak for themselves, which they do in impressive, nearly irrefutable fashion. In his previous books he examined racial and ethnic differences in IQ for many groups. The Chosen People is a case study of one distinct group that has shown remarkably similar patterns of achievement in a wide variety of settings...
The development of IQ tests confirmed the impression that Jews were unusually intelligent, and Professor Lynn’s extensive review of the literature indicates that Jews in the US have an average IQ of 110 compared to 100 for other Europeans. This would help account for their outstanding performance in a variety of fields. Though Jews are only about 0.2 percent of the world population, half the world’s chess grandmasters, for example, and 16 percent of Nobel Prize winners for science have been Jews. For Professor Lynn, the purpose of his book “is to document and explain such achievements.” It would be a mistake to think that these are the accomplishments of all Jews, however, as they are mainly the achievements of Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of Eastern Europe.
Professor Lynn explains that there are four major subpopulations of Jews, differentiated genetically by their different experiences following their expulsion from Israel in the first century AD. The most populous group, by far, are the Ashkenazi, who migrated to Western Europe...
A second group, the Sephardim, migrated to the Iberian Peninsula after the Roman expulsion, where they lived, largely under Muslim rule, until 1492...
A third Jewish group, the Mizrahim, settled in various lands in the Middle East and North Africa during various diasporas beginning about 600 BC...
A fourth group, the Falashas, “are Ethiopians who converted to Judaism at some uncertain time many centuries ago.”...
With the exception of the Ethiopians, the three Jewish subpopulations greatly resemble each other genetically and are distinguishable from Gentiles. Nevertheless, centuries of separation produced considerable differences among them, due in part to intermarriage with Gentiles...
The most notable difference among Jewish groups is average IQ. While the Ashkenazi average is 110, the Sephardic average is about 99, close to that of Europeans. The Mizrahim score about 91, markedly lower than Europeans, but higher than the Arabs with whom they have lived, whose average is about 84. The genetically distinct Falashas have IQs of about 70, typical of sub-Saharan people.
