The chosen few
In 70 CE, the Jews were an agrarian and illiterate people living mostly in the Land of Israel and Mesopotamia. By 1492 the Jewish people had become a small group of literate urbanites specializing in crafts, trade, moneylending, and medicine in hundreds of places across the Old World, from Seville to Mangalore. What caused this radical change? "The Chosen Few" presents a new answer to this question by applying the lens of economic analysis to the key facts of fifteen formative centuries of Jewish history. Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.
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What Hacker News says
- It's a pretty common narrative. And it's an easy one to exploit. Hitler used anti-semitism to make it an even more poignant narrative. Instead of a distant foreigner, the Nazis got to point at foreigners who were living amongst them: Jews. And that, in particular, was a very, very old narrative that the Jewish people had been forced to suffer many times before.
One of the most interesting classes I took as an undergrad was a history course that focused on the challenges that faced Jews during and after the diaspora, and how they met those challenges while somehow managing to preserve their culture, faith, and a shared sense of identity over the course of--literally--millennia as a minority group inside other cultures and empires. Maristella Botticini's The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 is one of a few rather fascinating books on the subject.
- There are those (generally average people) that wish to democratize IQ insisting that unlike beauty and athletic ability that IQ is nurture and not nature. But like beauty and athletic ability high IQ and giftedness in science and the arts is mostly genetic. It should also be noted that IQ tests frequently do not indicate true intelligence -- at least among the truly gifted. For example, Genius Richard Feynman was reported to have an IQ of 125 -- clearly not a true measure of one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.
Regarding Ashkenazic Jews (disclosure, I am one) and their high IQ, Jews instituted universal education until 6th grade for all males beginning 2,000 years ago -- about 1,750 years before any other ethnic group. It was required of all Jewish males to study the Old Testament and The Talmud and Jewish law since that time. It was around that time that Jewish males were encouraged to move away from agriculture to occupations that required reading, writing, and math.
The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 http://www.amazon.com/The-Chosen-Few-Education-Princeton/dp/...
