Professional Documents
Culture Documents
generation would call a head for figures. If you were Jewish in Perpignan in 1270, and you
didnt have a head for figures, you didnt 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, youll thank me later . . . Q: When does a Jewish
fetus become a human? A: When it graduates from medical school.
Of course, theres 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 Ashkenazimparticularly 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 didnt. 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 Internettype Ashkenazi into Google and
the first hit is the Wikipedia entry, where the article gets pride of place.