PILTZENHOFFER wrote:
> Honest Aryan is an unrepentant white supremacist, yes.
No. Libruls are the White supremacists.
They believe that no matter how dumb Whites
behave, Big White Lefty will always be In Charge.
I am a racist. Let me introduce you to some of
my friends:
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/index.html
"Are Jews Smarter?
Did Jewish intelligence evolve in tandem with Jewish diseases
as a result of discrimination in the ghettos of medieval Europe?
That's the premise of a controversial new study that has some
preening and others plotzing. What genetic science can tell
us-and what it can't.
By Jennifer Senior
What's Larry David's evidence for his exceptional brainpower?
'To be paranoid, you need a very good imagination.' (Photo credit:
Jill Greenberg)
This story begins, as it inevitably must, in the Old Country.
At some point during the tenth century, a group of Jews abandoned
the lush hills of Lucca, Italy, and-at the invitation of
Charlemagne-headed for the severer climes of the Rhineland
and Northern France. These Jews didn't have a name for
themselves, at first. They were tied together mostly by
kinship. But ultimately, they became known as Ashkenazim,
a variation on the Hebrew word for one of Noah's grandsons.
In some ways, life was good for the Jews in this strange
new place. They'd been lured there on favorable terms, with
promises of physical protection, peaceful travel, and the
ability to adjudicate their own quarrels. (The charter of
Henry IV, dated 1090, includes this assurance: 'If anyone
shall wound a Jew, but not mortally, he shall pay one
pound of gold . . . If he is unable to pay the prescribed
amount . . . his eyes will be put out and his right hand
cut off.') But in other ways, life was difficult. The
Ashkenazim couldn't own land. They were banned from the
guilds. They were heavily taxed.
Yet the Ashkenazim did very well, in spite of these
constraints, because they found an ingenious way to adapt
to their new environment that didn't rely on physical labor.
What they noticed, as they set up their towns, located
mainly at the crossroads of trade routes, was that there
was no one around to lend money.
So there it was: a demand and a new supplier. Because of
the Christian prohibition against usury, Jews found
themselves a financially indispensable place in their new
home, extending loans to peasants, tradesmen, knights,
courtiers, even the occasional monastery. The records
from these days are scarce. But where they exist, they
are often startling. In 1270, for example, 80 percent of
the 228 adult Jewish males in Perpignan, France, made
their living lending money to their Gentile neighbors,
according to Marcus Arkin's Aspects of Jewish Economic
History. One of the most prolific was a rabbi. Two
others were identified, in the notarial records, as 'poets.'
Success at money-lending required a different set of
skills than farming or any of the traditional trades.
Some, surely, were social: cultivating connections,
winning over trust (or maybe bullying your way there,
Shylock's awful pound of flesh). It probably required
some aggression, because the field was competitive,
with Jews suffering so few professional options. But
it also required cognitive skills, or something my
generation would call numeracy-a fluency in mathematics,
a dexterity with numbers-and my grandmother's generation
would call 'a head for figures.' If you were Jewish in
Perpignan in 1270, and you didn't have a head for
figures, you didn't stand much of a chance.
Numeracy, literacy, critical reasoning: For millennia,
these have been the currency of Jewish culture, the
stuff of Talmudic study, immigrant success, and
Borscht Belt punch lines. Two Jews, three opinions
. . . Keep practicing, you'll thank me later . . .
Q: When does a Jewish fetus become a human? A: When
it graduates from medical school.
Of course, there's another side to this shining coin.
Jewish cleverness has also been an enduring feature of
anti-Semitic paranoia. In the sixteenth century, Martin
Luther said Jewish doctors were so smart they could
develop a poison that could kill Christians in a
single day-or any other time period of their choosing
(and four centuries later, Pravda suggested Jewish
doctors were spies sent to kill Stalin). After the
calamities of September 11, one of the creepier
conspiracy theories to whip through the Muslim world
was the idea that only Jews were cunning enough to
have pulled off the hijackings.
Last summer, Henry Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist
at the University of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, an
independent scholar with a flair for controversy,
skipped cheerfully into the center of this minefield.
The two shopped around a paper that tried to establish
a genetic argument for the fabled intelligence of Jews.
It contended that the diseases most commonly found in
Ashkenazim-particularly the lysosomal storage diseases,
like Tay-Sachs-were likely connected to and, indeed,
in some sense responsible for outsize intellectual
achievement in Ashkenazi Jews. The paper contained
references, but no footnotes. It was not written in the
genteel, dispassionate voice common to scientific
inquiries but as a polemic. Its science was mainly
conjecture. Most American academics expected the thing
to drop like a stone.
It didn't. The Journal of Biosocial Science, published
by Cambridge University Press, posted it online and
agreed to run it in its bi-monthly periodical sometime
in 2006. The New York Times, The Economist, and several
Jewish publications risked their reputations to
legitimize it. Today, the paper has a lively presence on
the Internet-type 'Ashkenazi' into Google and the first hit
is the Wikipedia entry, where the article gets pride of
place.
Ascribing an ethnic or racial explanation to any trait
more ambiguous than skin color is by definition a
dangerous idea, the kind of notion that can seep into
the political arena with disastrous consequences.
Institutionalized racism has always found sanction in
the scientific community, from eminent biologist Louis
Agassiz's racial typologies justifying slavery in the
1850s, to the Nazi scientists' depraved use of calipers
to establish Jewish inferiority, to psychologist Arthur
Jensen's call in the sixties to stop funding Head Start
because most of its poor, black recipients were
intrinsically uncoachable.
We may consider ourselves the products of a new, more
enlightened age, and scientists may carry on with more
sensitivity than they did in the past. Yet to invoke the
genome as an explanation for anything more complicated
than illness or the most superficial traits (like skin
color) is still considered taboo, as Harvard president
Larry Summers discovered when he suggested the reason
for so few female math and science professors might
lurk in scribbles of feminine DNA (rather than, say,
the hostile climes of the classroom, the diminished
expectations of women's parents, or a curious cultural
receptivity to Pamela Anderson's charms).
For this reason, and the fact that it did not meet the
standards of traditional scientific scholarship,
Harpending and Cochran's paper attracted a barrage of
criticism from mainstream geneticists, historians,
and social scientists.
'It's bad science-not because it's provocative, but
because it's bad genetics and bad epidemiology,' says
Harry Ostrer, head of NYU's human-genetics program.
'I see no positive impact from this,' says Neil Risch,
one of the few geneticists who's dipped his oar into
the treacherous waters of race and genetics. 'When the
guys at the University of Utah said they'd discovered
cold fusion, did that have a positive impact?'
'I'd actually call the study bullshit,' says Sander
Gilman, a historian at Emory University, 'if I didn't
feel its idea were so insulting.'
Cochran mirthfully bats their complaints away. 'I don't
see what the big deal is here,' he says when I reach him
at his New Mexico home. 'I haven't actually told people
how to make a hydrogen bomb out of baking soda in their
garages.'
But there's no question that Cochran and Harpending
knew what they were doing. They were advancing a theory
with a patina of sexiness and political incorrectness,
one that would generate a good deal of discussion.
And that it did. Some of that discussion was positive,
and some was not, as one might expect. That's always
the problem with theories that exploit stereotypes-they're
titillating, sure, but also handy refuges for the
intellectually lazy. The trick is not to harden and grow
cold as we turn backward, as sure as Lot's wife.
'Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that 'Things
should be described as simply as possible, but no simpler,''
reads the first sentence of Natural History of Ashkenazi
Intelligence. 'The same principle must be invoked in
explaining Einstein himself.' The authors, clearly, have
no fear of getting personal. Einstein, they seem to be
saying. Need we say more? The man whose very name is a
shorthand for genius was an Ashkenazi Jew.
The world's proliferation of Einsteins-well, maybe not
Einsteins exactly, but distinguished Jewish thinkers,
particularly in math and the sciences-form the stark,
quantifiable basis for Cochran and Harpending's hypothesis.
Though Jews make up a mere 0.25 percent of the world's
population and a mere 3 percent of the United States',
they account, according to their paper, for 27 percent of
all American Nobel Prize winners, 25 percent of all ACM
Turing Award winners for computer science, and 50 percent
of the globe's chess champions. (What the paper doesn't
say is that these numbers seem to be tallied for optimum
Jewishness, counting as Jews those who have as few as one
Jewish grandparent to claim; it also wrongly assumes these
winners are all Ashkenazim. But still.) Cochran and
Harpending also cite studies claiming that Ashkenazim
have the highest IQ of any ethnic group for which there's
reliable data, perhaps as much as a full standard deviation
above the general European average, which means, at the far
end of the spectrum, that 23 per thousand Ashkenazim
have an IQ over 140, as opposed to 4 per thousand Northern
Europeans.
Reading these numbers, I was reminded of a story a friend
once told me about a peer of his at Cambridge who wearily
dismissed the intellect of another student with a five-word
declaration: 'Just your average Jewish genius'
Most social scientists-and biological scientists, for
that matter-would argue that a complex combination of
culture, history, and religious tradition has been
responsible for the steady, metronomic production of
average Jewish geniuses. Cochran and Harpending make a
different case.
Their reasoning is straightforward enough: If the gene
mutations responsible for diseases in Ashkenazim didn't
confer some evolutionary selective advantage, they wouldn't
persist. Cochran and Harpending liken these defective
genes to the genes in Africans that often deform hemoglobin.
Carrying one copy of the gene, most research suggests, helps
ward off malaria-surely an adaptive advantage. Two copies,
however, cause sickle-cell anemia.
Cochran and Harpending reasoned the same must be true of
the genes that cause illness among Ashkenazi Jews,
particularly the four that cause mutations in the enzymes
responsible for breaking down fats: Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick,
Gaucher disease, and mucolipidosis type IV. Two copies cause
devastating illness, but one, they speculate, mutely aids
the carrier.
How? By enhancing intelligence. Without this extra edge,
they hypothesize, the Ashkenazim would never have survived.
The Jews 'experienced unusual selective pressures that were
likely to have favored increased intelligence,' they say.
'Their jobs were cognitively demanding, since they were
essentially restricted to entrepreneurial and managerial
roles as financiers, estate managers, tax farmers, and
merchants. These are jobs that people with an IQ below
100 essentially cannot do.'
'I have a stack of books, like four feet high, on all
metabolic diseases,' Cochran tells me. 'And the four
sphingolipid diseases affecting Ashkenazi Jews'-the ones
he and Harpending believe enhance intelligence-"are all
in the same chapter. That's like one in 100,000 odds.
People could say it's chance, I suppose-in the same way
it's chance that 27 percent of all of those guys go to
Stockholm every year.'
There's scant physical evidence for this assumption.
But what the authors found was intriguing. Among the
papers they unearthed were studies by Steven Walkley,
a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine,
that showed growth of additional dendrites in the tissues
of humans and cats with Tay-Sachs and Niemann-Pick. They
also cite a 1995 study in the Journal of Biological
Chemistry that shows increased neural growth in the
brains of rats with Gaucher disease. The authors
decided to contact Ari Zimran, the head of the Gaucher
Clinic at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.
It turns out that 81 of his 255 working-age patients have
jobs that require, by the author's estimates, an IQ of at
least 120. Twenty-three are engineers, and fourteen are
scientists-a number that, if it were consistent with the
Israeli workforce, should be just six.
Yet there are many who'd find a very different way of
explaining the intelligence of these patients. They
wouldn't invoke their extra dendrites. They'd invoke their
mothers.
To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing
scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists
and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the
Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the
center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim.
The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.
Growing up, most children in Jewish households are at
least vaguely aware of their intellectual aristocracy-who
do you think was counting all those Nobel Prize winners?
The Swedes?-and if it's not the intellectuals they're aware
of, it's the high-achieving Jews, the ones who killed on Dick
Cavett, played lead guitar, helmed the Starship Enterprise.
(The one season I attended Sunday school, one of my first
assignments was to find the name of a Jewish celebrity;
when I returned the following week with the name of Beverly
Sills, rather than Gene Simmons, my teacher didn't find
it the least bit strange.) All minorities have their
private halls of fame, of course, but it was a Jew,
Adam Sandler, who took this obsessive curatorial tendency
and set it to music. 'David Lee Roth lights the menorah/
So do James Caan, Kirk Douglas, and the late Dinah Shore-ah . . . '
It's staggering what an emphasis on scholarship, both
secular and religious, combined with a history of relentless
displacement will do. One could argue it's a near-certain
recipe for achievement. Just last month, Sherwin Nuland,
author of How We Die, wrote a meticulous, almost
pointillist essay for The New Republic explaining why
Jewish doctors have been held in high esteem for centuries.
(The title of the article: 'My Son, the Doctor.') He notes
that physical healing has always been privileged by Jewish
scripture, and therefore became the province of learned
rabbis, the apotheosis of whom was Maimonides. If the
Jews were expelled from a particular country, as they so
often were, they could take their profession with them-
medicine was divinely portable.
From there, Nuland draws on the work of John Efron, a
historian at the University of California at Berkeley,
pointing out that once universities opened their doors to
Jews, much of the Jewish emphasis on scholarship shifted
from the religious to the secular, partly as a result of
their tremendous desire for social respectability. At the
fin de siècle, for example, Jews made up a mere 1 percent
of the German population, but they made up 50 percent of
all the doctors in Berlin and 60 percent of all the
doctors in Vienna. 'It had to do with emerging from the
ghetto,' says Efron, author of Medicine and the German Jews:
A History.
'There were enormous social pressures to succeed-part of
the emancipation process was to show that Jews were good
Europeans, good Austrians, and medicine was a universal,
non-parochial science, where the barriers to entry were
low but the prestige was enormously high. It's the same
pattern you're seeing in the United States today, if you
have a look at medical-school acceptances: There are much
larger numbers of Asian and Indian students.' Numbers from
the American Association of Medical Colleges bear this out:
Today, 18 percent of all med students are Asian, as opposed
to 6 percent just a dozen years ago.
'I have always believed that the smartest people in
the world are Asians,' declares Ed Koch, former mayor
of New York (and, let's face it, a pretty smart Ashkenazi
Jew). 'If you look at the special schools in New York City,
they have so many. I think Stuyvesant's 40 percent Asian
now, and Bronx Science is 50'-actually, 53 and 49 percent-
'so this paper is something I question.'
Jews have long debated the origin and nature of intelligence.
In Kaddish, his beautiful book of aphorisms and ruminations
about the rite of mourning, Leon Wieseltier notes that Rabbi
Akiva postulated in the second century that sons inherit not
just wealth, beauty, and strength from their fathers, but
wisdom. Centuries later, Maimonides came to the opposite
conclusion: It's 'great exertion' that makes us who we are.
To attribute it to anything in our blood would trivialize
our own agency, our hard work, our humanity. Wieseltier
can't even countenance another point of view. 'The important
question is, even if there is an Ashkenazi gene, what does
it explain and what does it not explain?' he asks, when I
reach him by phone. 'The idea that it explains intellectuality
seems empirically and philosophically spurious. The world
is riddled-riddled!-with dumb Ashkenazi Jews, so it's
empirically false, and it's philosophically spurious
because it flies in the face of human freedom and the
belief in human freedom.'
He thinks. 'We're living in a new golden age of scientism-
the idea that there are scientific answers to all human
questions,' he says. 'People are so rattled by the speed and
complexity of their lives that they need rock-solid certainty.
They cannot bear to live inconclusively. Religion provides
one definitive answer; science provides another. The
important thing for most people is to feel that the way they
live is an inevitable outcome.'
'I probably have a lot to say about this,' he concludes,
'because I'm an Ashkenazi. So I must be really smart.'
Harpending and Cochran are hardly the first scientists to
suggest that the diseases of the Ashkenazim are the product
of genetic selection. Until fairly recently, many geneticists
believed these mutations may have helped protect Jews from
tuberculosis, because the disease so frequently surfaced in
ghettos, though no one has been able to show how these
mutations protected Jews-or why neighboring non-Jewish
populations didn't develop the same immunity.
If geneticists are disinclined to believe a trait is the
result of natural selection, they attribute it instead to
something called genetic drift, a process by which a mutation,
for some random reason, evolves in one population but not in
another. The smaller the population, the more glaring this
mutation will seem. Geographic isolation, for instance,
can explain radical genetic differences-if two groups evolve
in separate places with little intermingling, different
mutations are bound to pop up and spread in each. Natural
disasters are another explanation-a rock slide could kill
off a species of purple petunias, say. Or-in the case of
Jews-one of the founders of a small settlement has a lot
of children, and these children have lots of children. What
the founder doesn't know is that he or she has a gene mutation,
like the one for Tay-Sachs. It takes hold and spreads, like
an epidemic. (Geneticists call this 'the founder effect.')
'Ashkenazi neurological diseases are hints of ways in
which one could supercharge intelligence, so it seems
likely we could develop pharmaceutical agents that had
similar effects.'
The problem with this theory, as Cochran and Harpending
rather forcefully argue using mathematical models and a
long disquisition about medieval Jewish economic history
(starting from the expulsion of the Jews by King Dagobert
of the Franks in 629), is that Tay-Sachs is just one of
four sphingolipid diseases common to Jews, which seems
like a rather unlikely coincidence. It suggests they
all evolved for a reason, a similar reason. How could
random mutations account for such a closely related
cluster of ailments?
'That's one of the ways this paper is actually strong,'
says Sheila Rothman, a Columbia professor of public health
who specializes in questions about genetics and group identity.
'Geneticists don't have a great grasp of Jewish history.
They often tend to cite each other. Sometimes they cite themselves.'
It's not just social scientists who concede this part
of the paper is strong. So, too, do many mainstream
geneticists, who've never been entirely comfortable with
the theory of genetic drift to explain so many
interrelated diseases among Jews.
'If these genes were shuffling randomly,' says Gregory
Pastores, director of the neurogenetics unit at NYU, 'then
why is it that we see the clustering of four diseases in
Jews-Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, mucolipidosis type IV, and
Tay-Sachs-when the genes are in different chromosomes
entirely? They're not even next to one another.'
But this doesn't mean that Pastores buys the message of the
paper, and neither do most of his colleagues. Ostrer, from
NYU, points out what he believes is a major flaw: The
authors assume Jews are selected for sphingolipid diseases,
and not for some other gene that may happen to be passed
along with these diseases. 'Blocks of the genome are
inherited together,' he explains. 'They're saying
heterozygotes carrying these sphingolipid mutations are
smarter. Fine. But who's to say it's that gene and not
the gene next door? Or down the street?'
Furthermore, the authors' hypothesis that what's being
selected for is intelligence is a sexy guess, but it's
based on almost nothing concrete-just a handful of smart
Gaucher patients, some extra dendrites in cats, and a rat.
'Jews have been accused of being frugal, cheap, aggressive,'
says Neil Risch. 'There's a clear survival advantage to
those traits too. Why not pick on those?'
Risch is a big believer in genetic drift. He thinks the
large number of mutations in Jews is random, coincidental,
and has no causal relationship with the number of children
they've had or why they've survived. He points out
Ashkenazim are prone to other illnesses besides lysosomal
storage diseases (such as clotting disorders and breast cancer).
Anyway, what's so unique about Jews? Finns are prone to at
least twenty diseases, as are French Canadians, Costa Ricans,
Louisiana Acadians, the Amish, and European Gypsies. The
Gypsies have interrelated diseases too, just like the Jews
have interrelated sphingolipid disorders.
Risch is underwhelmed. 'This is like saying, 'Because Europeans
have a high rate of cystic fibrosis, hemochromatosis, and
Crohn's disease, the genes for those disorders must cause
great ability to play tennis,'' he says. 'And then the authors
would come up with some elaborate theory about how those
particular mutations are involved in hand-eye coordination,
which allows for better retrieval of volleys.'
Yet here's the irony: During the past year, the taboos
surrounding the genetics of race and ethnicity have been
significantly eroded, in no small part because of the efforts
of Risch. A population geneticist at the University of California
at San Francisco, a fiercely independent thinker, a fun gossip,
and a liberal Jew, he published a paper in the American Journal
of Human Genetics in February that rather boldly claimed that
the races we claimed to be almost always corresponded with our
continents of ancestry. It seemed to represent the consensus
view that's slowly emerging among geneticists. Many have now
stopped quarreling with the same vigor about whether race is or
is not a genetic fact.
'I am not sure that most geneticists have agreed to 'races' per
se,' says Ostrer. 'But continental groups or clusters, yes.' To
deny these clusters, he says, would be folly; it tells us to
willfully ignore what all of us can see-that people look
different all over the world. He quotes me a line from Jews:
A Study in Race and Environment, written by his NYU predecessor,
Maurice Fishberg: 'One can pick out a Jew from among a thousand
non-Jews without difficulty.' Ostrer is now writing a book himself,
about genetics and Jewish history. He has decided to call the
first chapter 'Looking Jewish.'
'There's no doubt their paper is polemical,' says David Goldstein,
director of the Center for Population Genomics and Pharmacogenetics
at Duke University. 'But just because it's polemical doesn't mean
I'd be dismissive of everything they had to say. I think their
paper's interesting.'
Goldstein, in fact, seems to rather appreciate its Zeitgeist.
'Until recently, most human geneticists almost . . . disallowed
discussion about genetic differences among racial and ethnic groups,'
he says. 'Really. So many awful things had been done with genetic
research in this last century that they developed a policy of
'Just say no.' But there's actually a lot of difference between
groups, when you consider there are 10 million polymorphic sites
on the genome. So it's not scientifically sound to rule out the
possibility of differences corresponding to our geographic and
ethnic heritages. It overlooks the basic point: The genome is
just a huge place.'
'If I had to choose between Jewish genes and Jewish mothers,'
Goldstein hastens to add, 'I'd choose Jewish mothers.' (He has
both.)
'But I would like us to carry out research in a way that doesn't
imply that we have anything to be afraid of. That's what upsets
me about the way this work has been approached in the past.'
Using the notion of race, for example, has proved highly
useful in medicine. Today, if you're an ambitious young
geneticist, the world's awash in money to study racial
difference and disease. It's even encouraged by statute,
thanks to the Minority Health Disparities Act of 2000. This
summer, the National Institutes of Health announced it was
exploring links between African-Americans and elevated rates
of prostate cancer; this spring, NitroMed introduced BiDil
to reduce heart disease in African-Americans.
'Historically, in medicine, white males have been the subjects
of study,' says Risch. 'But you can't always apply to women and
minorities [lessons] from them. You need to be inclusive. So
while I'm always afraid people will misuse information about
genetic differences, this is a positive development.'
Just because pharmaceutical companies are developing race-specific
drugs, however, doesn't mean race is the most useful way to parse
genetic differences. The fact remains that there's more diversity
within racial groups than between them. What does 'black' mean when
discussing the 11,700,000-square-mile expanse of Africa? There
are Pygmies and Nigerians, Zulus and Ethiopians. What, precisely,
is a Mexican? Or-for that matter-a Semite?
'BiDil is more effective for some, rather than all, African-American
hypertensives,' says Ostrer. 'Race, in this context, should
always be used as an interim measure to see us through a period
of ignorance,' agrees Goldstein. 'Once we know the underlying
genetic or environmental factors that influence individual
responses, you consider those directly and ignore race.'
Talk to most geneticists, and they'll say that it's a combination
of genetics and environment that inevitably makes us who we are -
attempts to link specific behaviors, aptitudes, and weaknesses to
genes and genes alone almost always come up short. Lynn Jorde,
professor of genetics at the University of Utah School of
Medicine, gives but one example: For a while, it was assumed that
a particular variant of monoamine oxidase caused antisocial
behavior. Then several thousand children in New Zealand with this
variant were followed for a period of more than twenty years.
Researchers found that their subjects misbehaved only if they'd
been abused as children-if they hadn't, there was none. 'We'll
probably find that there are genes that influence behavior,'
says Jorde. 'But I'm quite certain we won't find genes that
determine behavior.'
Risch noted something similar in Nature Genetics last year: Until
recently, a famous study seemed to suggest that Asian children
were more likely than Europeans to have absolute pitch. Then
along came another study, this time showing that absolute pitch
is most likely to manifest itself only if children take music
lessons before the age of 6. No one in the first study had bothered
to ask whether their Asian subjects were exposed earlier to music
than their European counterparts.
And that's just absolute pitch, easily measurable. Intelligence
isn't even possible to define, except maybe in the sense that
Justice Potter Stewart famously said of porn: He knew it when he
saw it. Intelligence is almost impossible to model in animals. How
do you create a brainy Jewish mouse? (Replicate Michael Eisner?)
There's book-smart and street-smart; numbers-smart and
letters-smart.
Matisse dreamed in paint, and Nabokov did magic tricks with words,
but could either of them do multivariable calculus? How about
calculate the tip on a bar bill?
'The problem is with phenotype,' says David Rothman, a Columbia
historian (and Sheila's husband). 'Take schizophrenia. There's
four kinds listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders. Or take alcoholism. The phenotypes are also
varied-there's weekend bingers, hard drinkers, occasional bingers.
Depression comes in many phenotypes. I don't know where to begin
with shyness. So intelligence? I'm baffled.'
'More important,' he adds, 'I don't know where they get the idea
that mercantile life and high IQs go together. I wouldn't mind
IQ-testing the bulls of Wall Street to find this out.'
In the 1860s, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and
father of eugenics, argued that Protestants were smarter than
Catholics because they let their smart offspring reproduce, rather
than shipping them off to monasteries. The idea didn't hold up
too well over time. In the early part of the twentieth century,
the mathematician Norbert Wiener suggested Jews were smarter
because the daughters of wealthy Jewish men were married off to
scholarly rabbis, who went on to have more children. Then Lewis
S. Feuer, a sociologist, came along and showed that wealthy Jews
married other wealthy Jews. 'These were Fiddler on the Roof
fantasies, a myth created by people in New York who romanticized
the shtetl,' says Sander Gilman. 'The shtetls were horrible places.
Do you think the man who wrote Tevye's story did it from a crummy
little shtetl? No! He was sitting in the south of France on the
Riviera. He's no fool.'
'This study is putting forward one of these arguments you hear
regularly but with new window dressing,' Gilman says. 'Today,
that dressing is genetics. A hundred years ago, it was vitamins -
as soon as they were discovered, everything was explained by a
vitamin deficiency. Cancer. Schizophrenia. Hair loss.' He pauses.
'Okay, not hair loss. I made that up. But you see my point.'
So who, exactly, are these people who've caused such a fuss?
Harpending is certainly the more conventional of the two: a
tenured professor, a respected population geneticist, and a
member of the National Academy of Sciences, an organization to
which few slouches are accidentally admitted. When I speak to
him on the phone, he sounds good-humored, cheerfully indifferent
to academic niceties, and slightly bored. 'I wouldn't think of
letting a grad student work on this,' he says. 'I'm very senior.
I don't live off grants. If I were running a lab, dependent on
funding from the NIH, this would be the kiss of death.'
What do his colleagues think of his work?
'They think it's probably right,' he says. 'But in public,
their only reaction is a primate fear grimace.'
But is that really the case? I ask Jorde what his colleagues
in the Utah genetics lab thought of Harpending's study. He
answers with extreme tact. 'Most of us work on very different
kinds of things,' he says. 'It's really peripheral to our
kinds of interests.'
Cochran, however, is another matter. He's a bit of a wild card,
a fellow who has developed a knack for pushing unorthodox
notions under the aegis of more mainstream intellectual
patrons. In the late nineties, he teamed up with a biologist
at Amherst, Paul Ewald, to explore the possibility that many
of the diseases we consider intractable are mere germs, which
ultimately made them the subjects of a cover story in The
Atlantic Monthly in 1999. (Their idea is less crazy than one
might think; for years, surgeons removed stomachs to get rid
of ulcers, only to discover they were caused by . . . a germ.)
Cochran's latest kick, though, is population genetics. Although
Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence is written with a
modicum of academic restraint, his independent essays, posted
online, are much more freewheeling, and they betray a much
more unsettling agenda: '[I]f this is what I think it is,' he
writes, in an essay called 'Overclocking,' the term programmers
use to describe supercharging a computer's brain capacity by
weakening it, 'all these Ashkenazi neurological diseases are
hints of ways in which one could supercharge intelligence . . .
so it seems likely that we could-if we wanted to-develop
pharmaceutical agents that had similar effects.'
To Cochran, in other words, Jews are the smart mice of history.
The Times, The Economist, and every other media outlet somehow
missed this when they first reported that Cochran and Harpending's
paper had been accepted for publication. Or at least they chose
not to report it. Nor did they choose to report another
interesting fact: The Journal of Biosocial Science, though part
of a family of Cambridge University Press publications, went by
the name The Eugenics Review until 1968.
'This guy is not some proto-Zionist,' says David Rothman. It was
Rothman's researcher, Nate Drummond, who shrewdly unearthed this
information about Cochran. 'What's driving him, as you read this,
is bioengineering, not philo-Semitism.'
So the plot thickens. At one point, I ask Cochran if he's
serious about studying Jews in order to create 'pharmaceutical
agents' for mankind's general intellectual enhancement. Has he
thought about taking this idea to pharmaceutical companies?
'I've thought about it halfway seriously,' he says, hesitating a
bit. 'I'm probably not supposed to say. Because let's say it
happens. Come patent time, I'll have told people.'
So. Is this study good for the Jews? I talk to Abe Foxman,
legendary head of the Anti-Defamation League, whose life's
mission is the pristine upkeep of the Jewish reputation. His
answer surprises me. 'If it's a genetic condition,' he says,
'it's not for us to embrace or reject. It is what it is, and
that's the way the genetic cookie crumbles.' I detect a note
of pride in his voice.
Of course, I recognize that tone. I've heard it in my own voice
from time to time. When the site existed, I used to love poking
around Jewhoo, a catalogue of prominent Jews in Western life.
Then, in the middle of a Google search one day, I stumbled
across jewwatch.com and discovered that under one if its many
rubrics-Jewish Controlled Entertainment-was a nearly identical
list.
Freud and Marx, Einstein and Bohr, Mendelssohn and Mahler.
The brothers Gershwin. The brothers Marx. Woody Allen. Bob
Dylan. Franz Kafka. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Bobby Fischer. Jews
may take tremendous pride in their aristocracy, but we
fetishize it at our own peril; to suggest that we're chosen,
rather than that we make our own choices, curdles quickly into
a useful argument for anti-Semites who'd love to claim that
the objects of their derision are immutable vermin. It can't
be an accident that the most aggressive debunkers of Jewish
essentialism, including the participants in this story, are
generally Jews themselves. The arguments come in handy when
the ugly stuff is trotted out, too.
Personally, I'm always struck by how many Jews confess to a
certain ambivalence about the volume and visibility of their
accomplishments, as if there were something slightly vulgar
or shameful about them. The friend who introduced me to Jewhoo
confided that a friend of his, also Jewish, kept a list of
Jews he wished were not. I realized I kept the same mental
list. (Andy Fastow, the crook from Enron, is currently No. 1.)
A few years ago, I myself lunged for the easy joke when a
non-Jewish friend asked what I did the summer I attended - for
one miserable season only, I'd like to stress - Jewish summer
camp. Oh, I told him. More or less what you'd expect.
Banking lessons rather than canoeing, moot court rather than
color wars. Recently, I also found myself quoting - with
relish - Sarah Silverman's reaction to being taken to task
by a watchdog group for using the word chink in her stand-up:
'As a Jew, I'm really, really nervous we're losing control of
the media.'
Perhaps one of the most subtle, insidious things about Cochran
and Harpending's study is how it plays off a bias privately
held by many Jews themselves - that the Ashkenazim are in fact
intellectual superiors, and the Sephardim, originally from the
Iberian Peninsula, are the handlers, the shylocks, the
merchants of 47th Street.
Q: How do you tell the difference between an Ashkenazi and a
Sephardi?
A: Show him a chessboard.
This, even though Maimonides, arguably the most influential
Jewish thinker to ever live, was a Sephardi, and the Sephardim
have a perfectly dazzling intellectual history of their own.
From the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Spanish Jews served
in the courts, served as doctors to the caliphs, and translated
all manner of texts, converting Greek and Hebrew into Arabic,
and Arabic into Romance languages.
Yet in America, that sense of otherness, which for so long has
served as a kind of incentive to strive and achieve, may be
dissipating. 'I'm no demographer, but I think what's happened
in the U.S. is the normalization of the Jew,' says Leon Botstein,
who, as the president of Bard College, has seen all sorts of
students cross his field of vision. 'They've become as complacent
and culturally undistinguished as the average, suburban, white
middle-class American.'
And maybe that's the price we pay for our current freedoms. Not,
as Seinfeld or Larry David might say, that there's anything
wrong with that."
--
Visit the Cybermuseum of BBC War Crimes at:
http://users.bluecarrots.com/rbisto/BBC/BBC.html
Admission *FREE* - even for libruls!