Tevi Troy, author of Intellectuals and the American
Presidency, is an observant Jew who has held a number of
positions in the Bush White House. He began his career in
government working as an aide to then-Governor John Ashcroft of
Missouri. He told me that when the Shavuot holiday approached, he
cringed at the prospect of asking for the day off. Most secularized
Jews don’t observe it, so how could he expect his non-Jewish boss
to give him the time?
Sure enough, the initial reaction was puzzlement; the name of
the holiday was unfamiliar. Tevi plunged on, explaining that it is
the holiday mentioned twice in Exodus (23:16, 34:22), once in
Leviticus (23:21), once in Numbers (28:26), and once more in
Deuteronomy (16:10). It is celebrated exactly seven weeks from the
second day of Passover and the tradition is that the Jews received
the Law at Sinai on that day. “Oh,” said Ashcroft’s chief of staff,
a devout evangelical, “you mean Pentecost. Certainly you can have
the days off.”
This year Shavuot, or Pentecost, is on Monday and Tuesday, June
13 and 14. Whenever statistics are compiled, it always ranks dead
last as the least observed of the holidays. The Bible refrained
from devising specialized rituals for it; since it celebrates the
intellectual task of study, it is best celebrated by study itself,
rather than by symbolic acts or objects. And as with all things
cerebral, it tends to be the province of the few, the select. No
call to ponder its neglect: it’s neglected because it calls for
pondering.
NOW A FASCINATING confluence of timing brings into focus an element
of this heritage. Just a few days ago, the London
Economist reported on a scientific paper being published
in the coming issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science.
The authors, Drs. Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry
Harpending, offer some coy self-congratulation on their fearless
“political incorrectness.” Then they sock it to you.
Their subject: the demonstrable edge in intelligence enjoyed by
Ashkenazi (literally “German,” but used to designate all of Europe
except Spain, Greece, and Turkey) Jews over the rest of the
Caucasian population, a gap of about 12 IQ points. Their
conclusion: it developed since the Middle Ages, as the result of
being denied access to trades and forced into more cerebral
livelihoods like banking.
There is a chuckle to be had from the irony that the oppressors
actually engendered superiority in their victims by ignoring the
verse in Scripture (Exodus 1:12): “And the more they oppressed him
(the Israelite), that much he would multiply and that much he would
be strengthened.” To which the Talmud (Sotah 11a) adds, that the
future tense of he would multiply and would be strengthened is
used, because it is a prophecy for the future history of the Jewish
People as well.
In fact this analysis is not only demonstrably incorrect, its
blind-man-and-the-elephant methodology doomed it from the start.
Let’s ask this: is it logical to say that the people who produced
the world’s greatest literary work in the 24 books of Scripture,
the most powerful (and unprecedented) poetry in history in the
Psalms and Song of Songs, and the most ingenious legal compilation,
the Talmud, did not have these smarts? That by the merest
coincidence their offspring fell into an ironic social anomaly two
millennia later and only then achieved a belated smartening?
Any reasonable scientific mind, not catechized by the Church of
Latter-Day Determinists, would conclude that if people seemed to
have produced very smart work 3,000 years ago and are calculably
smart today, then there is likely to be one cause for this long
trans-historic run of intellectual excellence.
FURTHERMORE, MANY PARTS of Eastern Europe had socioeconomic
conditions which forced the vast majority of Jews to be shoemakers,
tailors, and carpenters. Yet the children of those people, once
liberated into urban modernity, dominated the academy, the arts and
wide swaths of the political arena.
The correct answer is simple enough but difficult to ascertain
in the laboratory. The Jews developed their intellect by studying
the Torah as a lifetime passion. The moment a young boy showed
signs of being bright, the Rabbi would make sure that he was
singled out for extra instruction in Talmud. When the kid became
too smart for him, he sent him up to a greater scholar and on
upwards. Later, after the first Yeshiva opened in Eastern Europe in
1804, this system became more formalized.
It is an open, incontrovertible fact that the hierarchical
system of pride and privilege within Judaism was built on
intellect, analytical skills, and scholarly knowledge. Indeed this
eventually created a backlash in the 1700s, when the Hasidic
movement was begun with the explicit goal of deemphasizing
scholarship and focusing on simpler virtues.
This was how the genetics of intelligence was fostered. Scholars
taught other scholars and their children married each other. There
was also a strong culture encouraging beautiful women to marry
scholars (unlike de Maupassant’s false assertion to the contrary)
so that the children would be smart and good-looking. People of
wealth were honored to subsidize the intellectual activity with
their assets.
It is much more common when reading about a brilliant Jewish
author and scientist to find that he came from a family of Rabbinic
scholars than from a family of bankers. Just read the signature of
Maimonides, one of the great geniuses of history, upon completing
at age 30 his commentary on the Mishna: “I am Moses, son of Maimon
the Judge (of Jewish Law) son of Rabbi Joseph the Wise son of Isaac
the Judge son of Joseph the Judge son of Obadiah the Judge son of
Rabbi Solomon the Rabbi son of Rabbi Obadiah the Judge.”
My grandfather was 15 years old when he arrived in 1908 from the
Ukraine; within three years he was excelling at Syracuse
University, then Columbia. He died when I was eleven, but not
before telling me this joke. The Gentile asks the Jew how Jews are
so smart, so he sells him a piece of their special mind-sharpening
herring for fifty dollars. Afterwards, the man angrily shouts that
he ate the herring and feels no different. “You see?” says the Jew.
“You’re getting smarter already.”
Dr. Gregory Cochran is too smart to eat the herring. He should
learn the true answer: Pentecost.
