Race / History / Evolution Notes has taken Jacob Berkman's list from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a step farther and broken out all the obvious ethnicities of the 2009 Forbes 400.
The black Forbesian is Oprah.
One of the Hispanics is John Arrilliga, son of Basque immigrants. (Do Basques consider themselves Hispanic? I know a 93-year-old Basque lady who arrived in America in the early 1920s, and still has her Basque accent.)
The other is billboard baron and Angels owner Arturo Moreno, a genuine Mexican-American from a family of 11 in Tucson.
In these estimates, Northwestern European serves as kind of a catch-all for people who don't obviously jump out at you as something else. So, maybe there's, say, a Bulgarian whose immigrant father changed his name to "Johnson" to fit in. He would get listed as Northwestern European at first glance. And "Northwestern European" doesn't recognize the fairly sizable ethnic divide between the Protestants and Catholics (Irish and more than a few Germans), who tend to have gone to separate schools.
The Jewish percentage is probably a little high because it includes some some people who are half or even just quarter Jewish by ancestry. (It may however miss some others who are part Jewish.) My preference is to allot by fraction of ancestry, but that's a lot of work.
The small number of Slavs jumps out at you. The various kinds of Slavic-Americans tend not to show up in large numbers in elites (outfielders being one exception: Musial, Yastrzemski, etc.)
RHE Notes has all 400 names and his guess at their ethnic identification, which is always interesting.
For example, after 20 years of watching the back of Larry David's head as he plays George Steinbrenner on Seinfeld, I'd assumed that the owner of the Yankees was Jewish. There's a natural tendency to assume that anybody with a Germanic-language surname who has made himself conspicuous in the media is Jewish, but that's by no means always true. Various confident-sounding individuals on the web say Steinbrenner isn't Jewish. And that's how RHE Notes lists Steinbrenner: as Northwestern European.
Steinbrenner's father's Great Lakes shipping firm was named Kinsman, perhaps after the neighborhood in Cleveland, which was a center of Cleveland's Jewish community at one point (but not at other points). His mom's name was Haley. George's upbringing seems Midwestern gentile: Culver Military Academy, Williams College, Delta Kappa Epsilon (same fraternity as the Bushes and three other Presidents), US Air Force officer, graduate assistant at Ohio State to football coach Woody Hayes, etc. Steinbrenner does have an advanced degree, but it's a Master's in P.E., which is about the least Jewish advanced degree imaginable.
So, I dunno.
My initial estimate of the ethnic breakdown:
Northwestern European 53.5%
Jewish [or part Jewish] 35.25%
Italian 3.5%
East Asian 2%
Indian 1.25%
Middle Eastern 1.25%
Greek 1.25%
Eastern European 1.25%
Hispanic 0.5%
Black 0.25%
The black Forbesian is Oprah.
One of the Hispanics is John Arrilliga, son of Basque immigrants. (Do Basques consider themselves Hispanic? I know a 93-year-old Basque lady who arrived in America in the early 1920s, and still has her Basque accent.)
The other is billboard baron and Angels owner Arturo Moreno, a genuine Mexican-American from a family of 11 in Tucson.
In these estimates, Northwestern European serves as kind of a catch-all for people who don't obviously jump out at you as something else. So, maybe there's, say, a Bulgarian whose immigrant father changed his name to "Johnson" to fit in. He would get listed as Northwestern European at first glance. And "Northwestern European" doesn't recognize the fairly sizable ethnic divide between the Protestants and Catholics (Irish and more than a few Germans), who tend to have gone to separate schools.
The Jewish percentage is probably a little high because it includes some some people who are half or even just quarter Jewish by ancestry. (It may however miss some others who are part Jewish.) My preference is to allot by fraction of ancestry, but that's a lot of work.
The small number of Slavs jumps out at you. The various kinds of Slavic-Americans tend not to show up in large numbers in elites (outfielders being one exception: Musial, Yastrzemski, etc.)
RHE Notes has all 400 names and his guess at their ethnic identification, which is always interesting.
For example, after 20 years of watching the back of Larry David's head as he plays George Steinbrenner on Seinfeld, I'd assumed that the owner of the Yankees was Jewish. There's a natural tendency to assume that anybody with a Germanic-language surname who has made himself conspicuous in the media is Jewish, but that's by no means always true. Various confident-sounding individuals on the web say Steinbrenner isn't Jewish. And that's how RHE Notes lists Steinbrenner: as Northwestern European.
Steinbrenner's father's Great Lakes shipping firm was named Kinsman, perhaps after the neighborhood in Cleveland, which was a center of Cleveland's Jewish community at one point (but not at other points). His mom's name was Haley. George's upbringing seems Midwestern gentile: Culver Military Academy, Williams College, Delta Kappa Epsilon (same fraternity as the Bushes and three other Presidents), US Air Force officer, graduate assistant at Ohio State to football coach Woody Hayes, etc. Steinbrenner does have an advanced degree, but it's a Master's in P.E., which is about the least Jewish advanced degree imaginable.
So, I dunno.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
"There's a natural tendency to assume that anybody with a Germanic-language surname who is a figure in the media world is Jewish, but that's by no means always true."
ReplyDeleteTrue, but the opposite is also true. Lots of Jews Anglo-cized or goy-ized their names long ago, and we wouldn't know if they're Jewish just from their names. Many Jews named Stein have turned it into Stone, for example. Or some guy originally named Finkelsteinowicz could have changed his name to Finnegan for all I know.
And some apparently non-Jews have may have some hidden Jewish lineage which accounts for their high intelligence and talent. Recently, a new bio surmised that Leni Riefenstahl, the greatest film director of the Third Reich, may have been 1/4 Jewish.
And, Madeleine Albright didn't know she was Jewish until she was an adult. And, didn't the ex-Southern Senator of "Malacca" notoriety discover his Jewish roots only much later when his ma finally told him?
So, we don't know if someone's really Jewish or not unless we look at his DNA.
"True, but the opposite is also true. Lots of Jews Anglo-cized or goy-ized their names long ago, and we wouldn't know if they're Jewish just from their names."
ReplyDeleteThis comment, and Steve's mention of Larry David, remind me of a great scene from an episode of Larry David's HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. David's walking down a Los Angeles street humming a melody from a Wagner opera. A Jewish passerby, offended, asks, "Excuse me, are you a Jew?". And David responds, "You want to see my penis?"
I too assumed Steinbrenner was Jewish, but looking at his wikipedia entry his full name is George Michael Steinbrenner III. The III is nearly a guarantee that he's not Jewish since Jews (at least Ashkenazi) don't give their kids their own names.
ReplyDeleteSteve Jobs is half-Syrian? Can't say I knew that.
ReplyDeleteAgain: why does the Jewish ethnicity get full credit for only part Jews, like Page, the 3 Ziff brothers, etc.?
ReplyDeleteDominant vs. recessive.
NW Euros/Nordics are recessive.
Off topic but did anyone see the Charlie Rose interview tonight with Lee Kuan Yew. I really liked the part where he was tlking about Singapore's and America's strentgh of being accepting of immigrants. Lew Kuan Yew then corrected himself by saying skilled immigrants not fruit pickers. He said fruit pickers would not be so good.
ReplyDeleteYou're really losing your stereotype touch if you thought that George Steinbrenner was Jewish.
ReplyDeleteIt has never entered my mind for a moment that George Steinbrenner could possibly be Jewish. I guess this idea enters due to his connection to New York -- I bet most don't know that he's from Cleveland and that his money originally came from shipowning and shipbuilding.
Steinbrenners are akin to the Midwestern industrial magnates like Rockefellers, etc., a group that had a minimum, if any, Jews. Jews concentrate in commerce or the professions, not heavy industry. The shipping business also seems a little too outdoorsy for Jewish tastes, too.
I also agree with essentially a "one-drop" Jewish rule. Nobody I've ever met is "half-Jewish".
Do you guys think that Marge Schott is Jewish too?
Dominant vs. recessive. NW Euros/Nordics are recessive.
ReplyDeletePlease tell me this was tongue-in-cheek? All 30,000 non-Jewish genes are recessive all 30,000 Jewish ones? Rubbish.
Because the whole point of this post and the preceding one was that Jews are overrepresented among the wealthy and powerful in America, and it helps that case to round up partial Jews.
Well it helps to identify why you're making the list before you make it. If you're just writing another Adam Sandler song then I suppose it doesn't much matter. If you're looking at identity or religion most half-Jews probably don't count. If you're doing the HBD thing and considering genetic contributions to success then half is half, no more, no less.
Remember that the original list was compiled by Jacob Berkman, not David Duke.
The shipping business also seems a little too outdoorsy for Jewish tastes, too.
ReplyDeleteShipping as opposed to cruise lines, right? Because there's Carnival (Arison) and Royal Caribbean (Pritzker).
continuing my hypothesis that east asians on average have little appetite for big risk:
ReplyDeletejapan has 127 million people, germany has 82 million. germany has 35% less people than japan. according to forbes, japan has 17 billionaires. how many for germany? it has to be less, right? germany has less people and they're supposed to be less intelligent too. assuming equal appetite for risk, our prediction should be that there are roughly 17 * 0.65 - 2 (because white guys are supposed to be dumber) = 9 billionaires in germany. but forbes says germany has 54 billionaires. so not only does germany have 3 times as many billionaires as japan, japan needs 7.5 million japanese humans to produce one billionaire, whereas germany needs only 1.5 million german humans to produce one. germany has a measured, observed billionaire production rate 5 times higher than japan. the data contradicts the idea that east asians are just as interested in risk as any other group. the billionaire production rate difference looks like crime rates or twinning rates or any other measurable group difference that is observed again and again.
for obvious reasons, zero of the german billionaires are jewish. so the usual "they're really just jews" argument does not work. jews are not generating germany's wealth. indeed, germany has the highest trade surplus in the world at over 200 billion dollars per year. germany does not have vast fields of oil, and imports over 2 million barrels of oil per day. so none of the german billionaires are oil tycoons like the saudis, collecting free money due to sheer dumb luck. the most simple explanation is that tolerance for risk is not equal, on average, between all groups.
europeans have more appetite for the risk necessary to accumulate huge sums of money, while east asians have much less interest in the kinds of highly dangerous financial and business decisions required. there could not be a more clear example of this than what volkswagen recently did with hedge funds, versus how toyota operates it's finances. it is glaringly obvious that east asians are conservative by nature and not major risk takers. you don't even need HBD statistics to understand this. japanese society itself is organized around conformity and AVOIDING RISK. it is strange that people challenge the idea that east asians tend to plan carefully and minimize risk.
Yes, but is that true for all East Asians? Are Japanese and, say, Cantonese all that similar in appetite for financial risk?
ReplyDeleteLas Vegas casinos are full of Chinese tourists. I don't think the Japanese are as crazy for gambling as the Chinese.
My impression is that the Chinese talk about harmony a lot, but tend to actually live stress-filled lives, but the Japanese actually try to live out their pro-harmony ideology in their lives.
Shipping as opposed to cruise lines, right? Because there's Carnival (Arison) and Royal Caribbean (Pritzker).
ReplyDeleteThe traditional shipping industrialists/magnates and cruise lines developed in the latter part of the 20th cent. are quite different animals. Also, the Pritzkers simply acquired and hold the financial assets of Royal Carib.
it is strange that people challenge the idea that east asians tend to plan carefully and minimize risk.
ReplyDeleteI don't think anybody seriously challenges this idea.
It's like one of those few stereotypes that's ok to have/nobody cares enough about that it isn't persecuted. It's one of those working assumptions everybody already has. If you revealed that you hold this assumption to wider society, nobody would care or even notice.
People here aren't so much fundamentally challenging this idea as they are just quibbling about the margins.
Jody, you've advanced this hypothesis in the past, and its both sad and disappointing to see you persist in unwarranted folly like this.
ReplyDeleteThe lack of billionaries in Japan is insubstantial evidence - this could simply be the result of an economic structure which prevents the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth by single individuals.
Also, if you read "Saving the Sun" - an account of the contribution of Japan's defunct banking sector to the country's long-term economic malaise, you will see that the problem was a wild excess of risk-taking by Japanese real-estate investors, who had bought so much of the hype (imported from the West) about Japan as the indomitable miracle economy.
Evidence to counter your argument about Eastern Asians being unusually risk-averse is the obvious fact that parts of the Chinese diaspora can be found just everywhere on the planet - in some of the most dangerous and foreboding parts of the world in fact. You think people with an usual level of risk-aversion would flock to Africa - as the Chinese are doing right now - to pursue opportunities for gain?
Also, even if your argument that the lack of billionaries in Japan indicates high risk aversion, well, look at the considerable number of billionaries in Southeast Asia - Hong Kong, Indonesia and the Phillipines, who are not indigenous to the region, but are generally Chiense immigrants. Just have a look at the number of Chinese billionaries on the list of wealthiest Fillipinos.
Just a cursory, commonplace level of knowledge about the extent and history of the Chinese diaspora completely defeats your argument.
"My impression is that the Chinese talk about harmony a lot, but tend to actually live stress-filled lives, but the Japanese actually try to live out their pro-harmony ideology in their lives."
You're comparing apples with oranges - China is still very much a developing economy, and its population is subject to all the pressures and anxieties that result from such circumstances. If you're a guy and you don't make money, well, good luck accessing reproductive opportunities worth having.
Japan, in spite of its moribund growth prospects, remains very much an affluent, developed economy, with far fewer sources of stress for the general population. If you bomb out in China, you are going to suffer from extremely reduced living circumstances - not outright poverty (as far as I've seen), but still a life of extreme material restriction. In Japan, well, I've heard of homeless former salarymen, but I'm sure the perils are far lesser.
I can't claim to know much about Japan. Taiwanese I've found to be pretty laidback and easy-going, however.
Steve, the southeastern Chinese (Fujianese, Cantonese, Zhejiangese) and their various far flung diaspora communities seem to have an appetite for financial risk. Not surprising when you consider the long history of trade and commerce in the southeast. The rest of the China is quite different though, in many ways....
ReplyDeleteFrom what I can tell, Asians are more detail oriented rather than big picture oriented. So they can do a good job providing quantitative analysis for Wall Street bankers or writing code in Silicon Valley, but they tend to have a more difficult time connecting the dots together and leveraging their skills into big money. I would also say that they're smart and industrious, but sometimes have difficulty quickly thinking on their feet when an unexpected situation arises.
A few reasons why eastern European names might be under represented:
ReplyDelete1) Many of the names were Anglicized upon arrival in the U.S. Many last names were later Anglicized by families for business purposes or to fit in better.
2) Many Germanic last names are very common in Eastern Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary.
3) Simply matter of time. Eastern Europeans arrived later. A fair amount of the wealth is inherited, so the likelihood of having inherited wealth increases the greater the distance between you and your penniless immigrant ancestors.
"Lots of Jews Anglo-cized or goy-ized their names long ago": I was once told that when East European jews turned up in Britain in the late 19th century, they often adopted what seemed to them distinctively British surnames, which were disproportionately Campbell, MacDonald, and so forth, so that wags referred to them as "Whitechapel Scots". It occurs to me that there would be merit in adopting surnames that were compatible with being a bit brighter, and better with numbers, than the cockneys.
ReplyDeletethe Japanese actually try to live out their pro-harmony ideology in their lives.
ReplyDeleteUh, oh... I think whiteness abiteur C. Lander has decreed that admiration for Japan, especially in relation to other non-white cultures, is the gold standard of SWPL-ness.
Richard Rainwater is Lebanese.
ReplyDeleteEdward Roski Jr sounds Slavic or Jewish.
Only 1.25% Greek? I expected higher. Oh well. Still not bad for a nationality with a supposed average IQ of 92.
ReplyDelete"jody said...
ReplyDeleteeuropeans have more appetite for the risk necessary to accumulate huge sums of money, while east asians have much less interest in the kinds of highly dangerous financial and business decisions required."
I don't see that this is good. A society can be prosperous without billionaires. But it can not be prosperous if it is not prosperous. I don't really care about billionaires, or what is required for their growth and maintenance.
I agree with Steve's point that overall the Japanese seem much more conservative and risk averse than the Chinese.
My uncle is married to a Japanese woman. Her father is conservative in all aspects except gambling. When goes to Las Vegas he gets the VIP treatment. The casino sends a limo for him and he gets a great room all because he gambles a lot and with high stakes.
ReplyDeleteAnd some apparently non-Jews have may have some hidden Jewish lineage which accounts for their high intelligence and talent. Recently, a new bio surmised that Leni Riefenstahl, the greatest film director of the Third Reich, may have been 1/4 Jewish.
ReplyDeleteThe "one drop rule" seems to apply to certain ethnic groups and not to others. Any smidgen of Jewish ancestry seems to make a person Jewish for some reason. I guess the reason is that it amplifies the numbers of "Jews" with a record of accomplishment.
That this is in fact the case is confirmed by the fact that it's only people of "high intelligence and talent" whose lineage is scoured for signs of a quasi-Jewish grandparent.
"Do Basques consider themselves Hispanic?"
ReplyDeleteSeemed like a simple question, until I checked out the Wikipedia entry on "Hispanic" !!
Partially OT:I'm rather annoyed by listmania of some persons of Jewish ethnicity. I can understand the collective ego-ride of ethnic pride it provokes in average, not-too-societally successful Jews, but, c'mon: to count as "Jews" persons who got, say, an indisputably Jewish grandma, or even father, if this same person doesn't possess any kind of Jewish identity- this is way overboard. Both Rabbis & Nuremberg laws got it wrong. What a mammoth list would be the one of, say, prominent Germans if we threw in numerous Americans of some German heritage, from Custer and Mencken to Nimitz and Henry Miller ? Twain was right: lies, damn lies & the statistics.
ReplyDeleteBasques are not hispanic. Heck, Spanish people are not hispanic. To count as hispanic, as most people understand it in their guts, you (or your family) needs to hail from Latin America and have either a mix of European and Indian ancestry or all Indian.
ReplyDeleteI have a good friend, a physician, with dark, curly hair and a slightly dark complexion. He's actually of Dutch-German ethnicity, and his family have been Methodists for as far back as he can remember. Once he moved to a certain part of a city that was considered "the Jewish neighborhood," even though only about 10-15% of the population there was Jewish. A couple of weeks after he moved in, a rabbi from the nearby Reform synogogue showed up at his door with a bottle of wine and a bunch of brochures about the congregation. The rabbi was going on and on about how wonderful it was when my friend cut him off with, "But we're Methodists." The rabbi looked shocked and then shrugged and said, "Oh, well, enjoy the wine."
ReplyDeleteSo it can be hard to tell, even for experts.
- Black Death
"the Japanese actually try to live out their pro-harmony ideology in their lives."
ReplyDeleteAre they trying, or does it come naturally? ;-)
Steve, check out this AP graphic about the rate of foreclosures in various states. Nothing new to the people here, but an interesting headline: "Where foreclosures cluster: a few states disproportionately hit". I wonder what those states have in common?
ReplyDeletehttp://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/files/specials/interactives/_business/foreclosure5_map/index.html?SITE=TNKNN&SECTION=EUROPE
Also, Chinese are huge gamblers compared to the Americans who go to Las Vegas. The casinos in Macau will have three giant floors of table games whereas most LV casinos have one floor, a large portion of which are slot machines. The Chinese patrons are more willing to gamble as opposed to being entertained by shiny lights like Americans.
I suspect the Jewish & slavic portions are reduced by people anglicising their names & the NW European one increased to the same extent. In Britain we have a government minister called McShane whose father was called Matyjaszek.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to see somebody using a random selection of US names to assess ethnicity rather than using the cesus. The results would be less accurate but much more relevant for this correlation.
Jody, you need to spend some more time at the reeducation camp.
ReplyDeleteFirst, you need to understand that whites simply do not have the same intellectual capabilities as Jews and Asians. And therefore, by the rules of "meritocracy", whites must relinquish control of the power structures of the white societies to people who can obviously "run things better".
See? It's only fair and right and proper that this be done.
Second, you need to understand that (unfortunately) whites do have slightly more intellectual capabilities than blacks and Hispanics. And therefore, by the rules of "liberalism", whites must relinquish control of the power structures of the white societies to these people also...as a matter of basic fairness because blacks and Hispanics "deserve to do better".
See? It's only fair and right and proper that this be done too.
I know it must be painful for you, a white man, to come to grips with the adjustments we all need to make to live in a "liberal meritocracy". But the good news is that the white societies are becoming much more competitive with the rest of the world now due to the "liberal meritocracy".
Look at the UK and the USA, for instance. These societies are now on an apparently boundless upward trajectory toward a higher standard of living, and a new glorious golden age of civilization, that could never have been achieved with boring old dull white people in charge.
See? Do you see how progress works?
Jody
ReplyDeletePer Steve, you live a life sheltered from Asians if you think the Japanese are the rule for Asians. If anything, the Japanese are the exception.
Similarly, if you think the Chinese are not successful financial risk takers, you cannot see what was obvious to the first European traders hundreds of years ago in noting the Chinese as future competitors. Colonial Europeans continually used laws, military (Opium Wars) and race hatred (Indonesia) against the Chinese to keep them at bay.
Koreans have one of the highest rates of entreprenurialism in the US. Unfortunately, their cultural and personality defects (bluntness, inability to work well with other) limit their big money opportunities.
SE Asian Indians have the highest average incomes in the US. Much of this seems duee less to risk taking than to constant and methodical exploitation of higher education and their relatively higher verbal facility much in the way first generation Jews used to get a foothold up. Still, they are no slouches when it comes to risk taking either and they stick together.
Asia started out at least a hundred or two years behind the West in the Capitalist race. Aside from Japan, the most competitive contries have only begun from ground zero in the last 50 years or so: Korea rebuilt from dust since the 50s, China softening Communism in the late 70's and India with economic reforms in the 80's
In a bet if there will be more or less Asians on the Forbes 400 in 10, 20 or 30yrs - the smart money is on the side of more (Assuming the Forbes 400 could accurately capture the data - which it can't).
RE anglasizing names: many also have the curious habit of making the name sound deliberately archaic like 'Holbrooke' with an e.. I guess it fools some people.
ReplyDeleteAs many here probably know most of the big zionists israelisized their names -Eric Dickstien became Ariel Sharon.... etc..
Do Basques consider themselves Hispanic?
ReplyDeleteThey certainly should not. But "Hispanic" is meaningless anyway. Most Catalonians and Basques may as well be Northern Europeans ethnically.
Irish are very different from other Europeans. I would guess their average IQ must be at least 15 points below the European mean.
It would be interesting to classify each billionaire as first, second, or third+ generation.
ReplyDeleteFor example Gates and Buffet would be first generation, but the Waltons would be second generation.
Then to see what percentage of Jews and what percentage of anglos are in each generation.
"And some apparently non-Jews have may have some hidden Jewish lineage which accounts for their high intelligence and talent."
ReplyDeleteI'm no geneticist, but if Askenazi Jews average, say, 10 IQ points higher than gentiles, how much of an IQ boost can you expect from being one-half or one-quarter Jewish? Particularly when you factor in regression to the mean.
I realize there are issues around the upper tail of the IQ bell curve, but even so.
"Steinbrenners are akin to the Midwestern industrial magnates like Rockefellers, etc., a group that had a minimum, if any, Jews. Jews concentrate in commerce or the professions, not heavy industry. The shipping business also seems a little too outdoorsy for Jewish tastes, too."
ReplyDeleteYou have to make a distinction between today and when these fortunes were built. The Rockefellers aren't into heavy industry these days either; in fact, the family even tried recently hamstring the great industrial company their namesake built. Same with Steinbrenner, he's not exactly working on the factor floor. Same also with the Jewish Pritzkers, whose ancestors built plenty of heavy industry companies (see, Marmon Industries -- "outdoorsy" enough for you?) which the current family members recently sold to Warren Buffett.
In other words, many of (but not all of) today's rich Jews and WASPs have both moved, to a large extent, from yesterday's heavy industry to post industrial ventures. There are exceptions, though. There was an interesting NY Times article about a family of liberal Jews who had hired some gentiles to run a successful Midwestern scrap metal business their immigrant grandfather had started. The funny thing was that the family got all the Midwesterners NY Times subscriptions and took them to see plays, etc., because they wanted to inculcate them with their liberal values -- not even thinking that these were almost certainly not the values their immigrant ancestor, who built the successful business in the first place, shared.
I don't think the Japanese are as crazy for gambling as the Chinese.
ReplyDeleteWalk through any Japanese city and you'll see a Pachinko/slot parlor on every block, crammed with middle-aged men and old women turning the wheels.
The reason Japanese tourists don't go to Vegas is that they don't have to...
(Many still do, though. Employees of Japan's public television station were recently busted for spending government money on Vegas trips. And the yakuza are some of the most notorious Vegas money-losers.)
Of course, I can't say anything about the Chinese, not having lived there.
That list puts several Hungarians in the Slav category. The Hungarian language is no more related to Slavic ones than it is to Chinese. It's a member of the Uralic family. Its only living realtives are Finnish, Estonian and a few dying languages in provincial Russia.
ReplyDeleteWhen I have more time, I'll look up which ethnicities Hungarians resemble most genetically. Going by stereotypes and hunches alone, I'd say it's Germans. Seriously.
I agree with Steve. Hong Kong has 17 billionaires with a population of 7 million. Japan has a population of 128 million and 30 billionaires. Obviously, Hong Kongers and Japanese people don't have the same level of risk aversion.
ReplyDelete"Again: why does the Jewish ethnicity get full credit for only part Jews, like Page, the 3 Ziff brothers, etc.?"
ReplyDeleteFrom my admittedly anecdotal experience living in a very Jewish area and having gone to school with many Jews, including many, many half-Jews, I've noticed that the children of mixed Jewish-Gentile families tend to be secular/irreligious, but in culture, mannerism, ethics, politics, and world outlook they are very stereotypically "Jewish." This is why it is important to count half Jews when examining Jewish influence. It is not the Jewish religion per se that tends to lead to conflict/animosity between Jews and gentiles (in fact, observant Jews seem to have the least conflict with Gentiles), but rather behavioral/cultural practices like aggressiveness, tough/sharp/nepotistic business practices, and a tendancy to engage in a deconstrutive intellectual style re the majority culture (Boasian anthropology, Frankfurt School, Freudianism, etc.) and a highly legalistic/Talmudic manner of argumentation that turns on twisting the meaning of words (hence the stereotypes about Jewish lawyers). From my experience, half Jews generally behave the same way as Jews in these respects.
Hong Kong is made up mostly of immigrants, isnt it? I don't really think it's fair to compare Hong Kong to a singular nation like Japan.
ReplyDeleteIrish are very different from other Europeans. I would guess their average IQ must be at least 15 points below the European mean.
ReplyDeleteNot true.
Berkman writes:
ReplyDeleteThis list is by no means an exact science. But those who we considered Jewish were those who were of Jewish descent or those who openly identified as Jews either personally or in thier giving.
Given the confounding nature of their crypsis it's welcome to have a kosher working definition of "jewish".
"Eric Dickstien became Ariel Sharon"
ReplyDeleteSharon was never named Eric Dickstein.
"but rather behavioral/cultural practices like aggressiveness, tough/sharp/nepotistic business practices"
One of those business practices is not like the other -- can you guess which? Nepotism is common among a few small, insular Jewish communities -- e.g., those Syrian Jews in New York -- but it is also common among other small, insular immigrant communities in the U.S. (e.g., as Steve has noted, Greek restaurateurs don't hire a lot of non-Greeks to run their diners). It is not common among Jews as a whole -- and especially not common among Jews who marry non-Jews, or Greeks who marry non-Greeks, for that matter. Out-marriage increases the number of relatives, which dilutes the power of any nepotism.
Also, in highly competitive businesses, nepotism is a killer. It's simply not worth it, as the late, great, Jewish (since we care about who's a Jew here) business guru Peter Drucker noted. Drucker wrote that you're better off paying an incompetent nephew not to work in your business.
There are about one or two dozen gene loci that have been associated with IQ. Cochran and Harpending argue that their are a couple specific genes that help make Ashkenazis smart but at a health cost.
ReplyDeleteCavalli-Sforza didn't become famous for his arm chair theorizing - he sampled the DNA of thousands of people all over the world. We need some of that here.
Steve, go collect cheek swabs from the Forbes 400.
Irish are very different from other Europeans.
ReplyDeleteGood grief!
I would guess their average IQ must be at least 15 points below the European mean.
Thus demonstrating that your own intelligence is comically low.
The average IQ for Ireland is 93, one point lower than Israel at 94.
The UK comes in at 100.
Any other guesses you want to run by me?
This link is for you, Peter A. Knowledge is the cure for mindless bigotry.
ReplyDelete>Irish are very different from
ReplyDelete>other Europeans. I would guess
>their average IQ must be at least
>15 points below the European mean.
Quite wrong.
Actually, Peter Drucker is a non-Jew who left Nazi Germany out of principle. This is recounted quite explicitly in more than one of his books.
ReplyDeleteAlso, in highly competitive businesses, nepotism is a killer.
ReplyDeleteMost business is not highly competitive though. In fact a great deal of business depends on knowing people rather than on possessing a brilliant mind in the scientific sense.
Look at the US Congress and the business people who finance them for an illustation. None of the people involved posses any great intellect. (Even though the people involved are disproportionately Jewish.)
Same also with the Jewish Pritzkers, whose ancestors built plenty of heavy industry companies (see, Marmon Industries -- "outdoorsy" enough for you?)
ReplyDeleteNah. The Pritzkers built their fortune in banking and law. Then moved into real estate. They bought into industry much later, in the 1950's and 60's.
"Given the confounding nature of their crypsis"
ReplyDeleteWhat's confounding to me is why, if crypsis is the Jews' evolutionary strategy, so many powerful and influential Jews don't do anything to hide their Jewishness -- e.g., Steven Spielberg, Obama chief of staff Ramh Emanuel, etc.
"Actually, Peter Drucker is a non-Jew who left Nazi Germany out of principle."
Right, Drucker wasn't Jewish. Thanks for that correction. Though I suppose he left Germany out of more than principle, given that the Nazis had burned and banned two pamphlets he published. As Heine had predicted a century before, "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
Fred,
ReplyDeletePeter Drucker was not Jewish.
"Most business is not highly competitive though."
ReplyDeleteThen go start a successful business and get rich.
So, we don't know if someone's really Jewish or not unless we look at his DNA.
ReplyDeleteWe don't even know then, there being no such thing as "Jewish DNA", despite the rather Nazi-like efforts of some Jewish websites to claim otherwise.
"Due to assortative mating, it’s unlikely that Jews marry gentiles who are significantly dumber than themselves (though you probably to have somewhat of a blonde bimbo trophy wife effect going on). Therefore, part Jews are probably roughly similar to full-blooded Jews in intelligence, and the main effects of being a half or quarter Jewish probably have more to do with being exposed to the Jewish cultural milieu, which influences attitudes and behavior."
ReplyDeleteOK, so having Jewish relatives-by-marriage is a marker of high intelligence in gentiles. Makes sense.
"Most business is not highly competitive though. In fact a great deal of business depends on knowing people rather than on possessing a brilliant mind in the scientific sense."
Successful business people usually to have very good judgement, which is a kind of intelligent. They're not necessarily grad-school smart, admittedly.
OK, so having Jewish relatives-by-marriage is a marker of high intelligence in gentiles.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to think you're being sarcastic. Tough to tell around here.
"We don't even know then, there being no such thing as "Jewish DNA", despite the rather Nazi-like efforts of some Jewish websites to claim otherwise."
ReplyDeleteYou can identify Jews by DNA.
That this is in fact the case is confirmed by the fact that it's only people of "high intelligence and talent" whose lineage is scoured for signs of a quasi-Jewish grandparent.
ReplyDeleteJeffrey Dahmer was a quarter Jewish - claim him!
I would really like to see the number of Mormons, Protestants, and Catholics. I'd bet Mormons are overrepresented, though not to the extent of Jews.
Already did that on the other link. There are 4 Mormons on the list that I know of - the 2 Marriott brothers, Richard Peery, and Earl Holding. That gives them 1% of the list while Mormons are 1.9% of the overall population, making the underrepresented.
germany has a measured, observed billionaire production rate 5 times higher than japan.
When people talk about the rise of Asia they tend to forget how many people Asia has. China is the equivalent of Europe, not Great Britain or Finland. Indians love to talk about the "Global Indian," but there damn well better be a few famous Indians in the world - they comprise 1/6th of it.
Las Vegas casinos are full of Chinese tourists. I don't think the Japanese are as crazy for gambling as the Chinese.
Much of Sheldon Adelson's spectacular rise in (since evaporated) wealth was built on casinos in Southeast Asia.
I would really love to see a breakdown of Asian billionaires (in Asia) by ethnicity and caste. Do Chinese have their own versions of Jews, Hispanics, etc., and is the disparity as large?
Many Germanic last names are very common in Eastern Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary.
Yes - because they're often ethnic Germans.
Simply matter of time. Eastern Europeans arrived later. A fair amount of the wealth is inherited, so the likelihood of having inherited wealth increases the greater the distance between you and your penniless immigrant ancestors.
What happened to the immigrant miracle? I thought it was immigrants building all the new wealth?
After the first generation I'd guess the increased likelihood of being a billionaire approaches zero.
In a bet if there will be more or less Asians on the Forbes 400 in 10,20 or 30yrs - the smart money is on the side of more (Assuming the Forbes 400 could accurately capture the data - which it can't).
Well...Indians and Orientals already comprise 3.25% of the list, but 5% of the population. And of course they comprise a larger share of the populaton (7.1%) if you exclude the roughly 30% that is black or Mestizo. So that bet's basically a sure thing.
Most business is not highly competitive though. In fact a great deal of business depends on knowing people rather than on possessing a brilliant mind in the scientific sense.
Funny then that Jews do about as well in the Nobels as in the Forbes 400s.
I'd like to think you're being sarcastic. Tough to tell around here.
ReplyDeleteA person with Jewish in laws is likely to be smarter than one without, due to assortative mating. Is that difficult to understand?
One of the interesting new ways to determine the ethnicity of a name is to use Facebook. I have an old friend with an interesting surname, though I never knew its origin. I found her, but I also found lots of people with her surname in France. Riddle solved.
When I was young I had no interest in money or politics, even though I was very smart and had a very good personality; I was much more interested in science and art. Money and politics were boring and required giving up privacy .... for what?
ReplyDeleteJews, of course, saw it differently; they wanted to be leaders in money and politics because they were afraid and wanted the protection that those activities offered.
If I were young today, seeing the influence that Jews have and the way they are using it to suppress Anglos ... I would be very interested in money and politics ... to protect myself and my people.
"We don't even know then, there being no such thing as "Jewish DNA", despite the rather Nazi-like efforts of some Jewish websites to claim otherwise."
ReplyDeleteI think, from a scientific point of view, that there is no doubt that, on average, there is such a thing as Jewish DNA. See gnxp for plots of clusters of individuals from Europe, Africa, Asia and Jews with axes derived from principle eigenvectors of genomes. They are quite distinct.
Italians are 6% of the population from the census. I bet a higher percentage of Americans have Italian surnames than that. Yet they are only 3.5% of the 400.
ReplyDeleteLeast successful white group?
I've noticed that the children of mixed Jewish-Gentile families tend to be secular/irreligious, but in culture, mannerism, ethics, politics, and world outlook they are very stereotypically "Jewish."
ReplyDeleteMy experience in college was the same. The half-Jewish guys I knew/was friends with were definitely like this and often even overcompensated. They weren't religious but were very nationalistic regarding Israel, adopted a kind of macho Israeli/IDF attitude, endlessly talked about Birthright Israel trips, etc. Some of them even took up Krav Maga.
Due to assortative mating, it’s unlikely that Jews marry gentiles who are significantly dumber than themselves
ReplyDeleteIt seems that this assortive mating between Jews and Gentiles has been going on for centuries and accounts for a good measure of Eurpean Jews' high IQ. I've certainly seem it in action in Jew-Gentile marriages between equally accomplished and high-IQ and successful individuals.
Contrast the high IQ of Eurpean Jews with the relatively low IQs of Jews who stayed in the Levant or wider Middle East. Certainly both Jewish groups shared the same culture and values and placed the same high-IQ filter on marriages outside the tribe. The difference being that Jews who stayed in the Levant and wider Middle East did not have as high IQ outsiders to intermarry.
Also, Jewish intellectual accomplishments are virtually non-existent prior to the last several hundred years of migrating to Europe. This is in sharp contrast to ancient Greeks, Chinese and Indians.
What will European Jewish-Indian/Chinese intermarriages result in?
OK, so having Jewish relatives-by-marriage is a marker of high intelligence in gentiles.
ReplyDelete"I'd like to think you're being sarcastic. Tough to tell around here."
No, I'm perfectly serious. If all you know about the gentiles Joe Schmoe and Sam Schlub is that Joe married a Jewish girl and Sam married a Polish girl, you can predict (weakly) that Joe is brighter.
I should probably have said "indicator" rather than "marker".
I too assumed Steinbrenner was Jewish, but looking at his wikipedia entry his full name is George Michael Steinbrenner III. The III is nearly a guarantee that he's not Jewish since Jews (at least Ashkenazi) don't give their kids their own names.
ReplyDeleteI wondered why my uncle, whose formal name ends with a "III", didn't give his elder son his own name with a "IV". My uncle's Jewish wife told me that Jews never hand names down to their sons. So yes, this is correct.
OK, so having Jewish relatives-by-marriage is a marker of high intelligence in gentiles.
I'd like to think you're being sarcastic. Tough to tell around here.
Hahaha, could be... it would not be unlike Jews to intermarry with high-IQ gentiles. My mom comes from a high-IQ Irish Catholic / Yankee Puritan family, and yup, I have the aforementioned Jewish aunt (-in-law).
Some saint in the Middle Ages put it as, "he-fool marries she-fool...", i.e., there is assortative mating by IQ level. And Ashkenazi IQ has been written about here quite often. So, if the average IQ in your family is at the 130 level, it's only obvious that the chance one of your relatives has a kosher wedding goes up dramatically.
First Sonia Sottomayor and now George Steinbrenner. How many people here have actually met a Jew?
ReplyDeleteSay I know of this woman, has red hair, degree in chemistry, grew up among Communists, and best of all she has a German-sounding name: Angela Merkel
Say I know of this guy who was big in the American music business with a long-running TV show and constantly played Broadway songs, had a yiddish type accent, and best of all had a German sounding name: Lawrence Welk.
I've got you all started, let's see what you can do?
Irish are very different from other Europeans.
ReplyDeleteNo, they are very much like the other ethnic groups indigenous to the British Isles.
As Steve wrote in his VDARE review of Bryan Sykes' book Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland:
"Sykes writes: "Overall, the genetic structure of the Isles is stubbornly Celtic." (Interestingly, this means that the Irish and the English are largely the same—and Sykes is unable to discern any difference at all between the Ulster Catholics and Protestants, or “Scotch-Irish”, as they are known to American immigration history)."
jody,
ReplyDeletecan you atleast look into some of the history of japan and china before you spout nonsense about them being risk-averse? honestly, your ignorance is embarrassing and one of the major reasons why men do not take the opinions of women seriously.
"Similarly, if you think the Chinese are not successful financial risk takers, you cannot see what was obvious to the first European traders hundreds of years ago in noting the Chinese as future competitors."
ReplyDeleteWhy didn't the Chinese do what those European traders did - explore the world in search of business opportunities? Why didn't THEY reach the West before it reached them and assess that way how much of a competitor it would be for them?
Probably the same reason Asians didn't come up with science and the industrial revolution on their own - conformity, group think, tradition above innovation.
"Colonial Europeans continually used laws, military (Opium Wars) and race hatred (Indonesia) against the Chinese to keep them at bay."
The Indonesians dislike the Chinese because the Chinese are a dominant market minority in Indonesia. I'm sure that this dominance and the dislike it inevitably brings were there centuries before any Europeans arrived on the scene.
"Unfortunately, their cultural and personality defects (bluntness, inability to work well with other) limit their big money opportunities."
I have never, even for a second, entertained the idea that any Asian group may suffer from too much bluntness. And I've dealt with Asians quite a bit. Blunt as compared to whom? Flattery, face-saving, super-complicated social etiquette whose entire point is to hide people's real feelings about each other - that sounds more realistic.
"In a bet if there will be more or less Asians on the Forbes 400 in 10, 20 or 30yrs - the smart money is on the side of more..."
I agree, but that's only because the West is busy committing suicide through feminism, multicultural and the rest of it. Ask yourself this question: will the Chinese-led world of the future advance science and technology in any non-trivial way? Will it try to go to the stars? Seriously, will the culture that in the space of 4 or 5 thousand years showed next to no interest in exploring even its own earthly continent try to explore the galaxy and beyond?
"You think people with an usual level of risk-aversion would flock to Africa - as the Chinese are doing right now - to pursue opportunities for gain?"
They're obviously doing that because Westerners withdrew from many of these opportunities due to brainwashing about colonial guilt. This created a vacuum. The Chinese are filling it. Perhaps East Asians are more immune to such brainwashing than Westerners. If true, that's a real competitive advantage.
"I have never, even for a second, entertained the idea that any Asian group may suffer from too much bluntness."
ReplyDeleteKoreans are blunt and they can say some pretty rude things without even realizing it. They may not be as brash as say African Americans but they are definitely not timid Asians.
Filipinos also break the Asian mould of being introverted. They are very social people.
"Also, Jewish intellectual accomplishments are virtually non-existent prior to the last several hundred years of migrating to Europe."
ReplyDeleteThe ancient Jews weren't at the level of the Greeks, but they were more advanced than most non-Greek Europeans were at the time: 2,500 years ago, Jews had stone architecture, cities, roads, engineering, metal-working, a written language, the bible, etc. There were also a handful of prominent Medieval Jewish scholars in the Islamic Caliphate.
"I wondered why my uncle, whose formal name ends with a "III", didn't give his elder son his own name with a "IV". My uncle's Jewish wife told me that Jews never hand names down to their sons. So yes, this is correct."
The Jewish tradition is to name a child after a deceased relative. In modern practice, some Jews just use a name with the same first letter instead of the exact same name.
"Ask yourself this question: will the Chinese-led world of the future advance science and technology in any non-trivial way? Will it try to go to the stars?"
ReplyDeleteWell, it depends on the economy for one thing and can we not measure technological advancement by a country's space program? I mean, I loathe NASA and think they are wasting a ton of government cheese and it would be wise if China avoided America's excesses in terms of space technology.
"They're obviously doing that because Westerners withdrew from many of these opportunities due to brainwashing about colonial guilt."
Well, that and the Western colonial powers decided that maintaining a colonial presence in Africa was not worth the investment. The Chinese are in Africa so that they can make a profit and benefit from the raw resources while the Europeans were in Africa in order to "civilize" the Africans and to make a profit. It seems to me that the Chinese have a more realistic outlook than the Europeans wrt Africa.
The ancient Jews weren't at the level of the Greeks, but they were more advanced than most non-Greek Europeans were at the time
ReplyDeleteBut less advanced than their immediate neighbors in Syria, Eygpt, Babylonia, and Turkey. The point stands that they had no record of intellectual accomplishment prior to a few hundred years ago in Europe. The Jews of the Middle East still have no such record.
It's almost like the brains come from the European aspect and not the Jewish, isn't it.
Anon wrote
ReplyDeleteWhat will European Jewish-Indian/Chinese intermarriages result in?
--
I have 2 jewish relatives as in-laws ( sort of de-facto admitted into the caste )
When outmarriage happens reluctantly,
Hindu parents prefer Jews ( non-proselytising )
over Christians ( Muslims are banned ),
since Judaism is viewed as a non-hostile religion ( has co-existed in India for 2000 years peacefully )
and Jews tend to be better educated
I really cant understand the anti-semitism, since there have never been any issues between jews and hindus in India for over 2000 years. Jews have been in high positions over the millenia and served well
In the US diaspora, Indian and Hindu organisations have tapped jewish groups for advice as consultants
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/us/29religion.html
ReplyDeleteMr. Agnihotri absorbed the news as the co-chairman of an 80-member group in the Atlanta area called the Indo-Jewish Coalition.
In its modest way, the coalition attests to the deepening bonds between Jews and Indians, whether in Israel, India or the United States;
“The best way to explain it is that I was telling my daughter, ‘If you have to marry outside India, marry a Jew,’ ” said Shoba Narayan, a writer in Bangalore who has visited Israel
Indeed, a Jewish community known as the Bene Israel has lived in India for more than 2,400 years, fully tolerated by the surrounding Hindu and Sikh populations.
Even more recently, the term “Hinjew” has emerged. It does not reflect a religious amalgamation, which would be nearly impossible given Hindu polytheism, as much as it does the cultural common ground of American Jews and Indian Americans who have grown up and gone to school together.
In suburbs like Great Neck on Long Island or West Windsor, N.J., the same top-flight public schools that attracted Jews moving out of cities in the 1950s have more recently drawn Indian immigrants.
“Some of us in the Indian-American community feel our Jewish-American friends set a very good example of being good citizens,” Mr. Agnihotri said.
http://www.interfaithfamily.com/relationships/marriage_and_relationships/Om-Shalomers_Come_of_Age_Children_of_Jewish_and_Hindu_Parents_Are_Emerging_as_a_New_Cultural_Subset.shtml
ReplyDeleteOm-Shalomers Come of Age: Children of Jewish and Hindu Parents Are Emerging as a New Cultural Subset
By Jeremy Caplan
Mishra is the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Hindu father, and her experience is reflective of a cultural heritage that she shares with many in her generation. Some call them "HinJews." Others say they're "Om-Shalomers." But whatever they're called, young Jews of Hindu and Jewish parentage are coming of age,
In the wake of the Hart-Cellar Act, which liberalized U.S. immigration policy in 1967, a wave of mostly male Indian graduate students moved to the United States to study engineering. Many of them married Jewish-American women
"Ask yourself this question: will the Chinese-led world of the future advance science and technology in any non-trivial way? Will it try to go to the stars?"
ReplyDeleteI'd make a pretty hefty bet with you that it will. Statements like this are going to seem pretty silly in a century, heck, maybe even just five decades time. Just check out the roster of names at the science departments of America's leading universities - three-syllable Sinitic full-names are beginning to predominate.
As regards historical assortive inter-marriage between Ashkenazi Jews and European Gentiles yielding a high IQ - has anyone given any consideration to the possibility that for a poor yet intellectually-inclined European during the Middle Ages, conversion to Judaism and the pursuit of Talmudic scholarship would be the best means of him gratifying his keen cerebral longings? I'm assuming that there might be barriers to joining the Christian priesthood - and there aren't any other intellectual-demanding professions or vocations to choose from.
If you were a bright, European gentile from a humble background during the Middle Ages, the bookish culture of the Jewish wisdom tradition would be of immense appeal.
"The ancient Jews weren't at the level of the Greeks, but they were more advanced than most non-Greek Europeans were at the time: 2,500 years ago, Jews had stone architecture, cities, roads, engineering, metal-working, a written language, the bible, etc."
ReplyDeleteI think that is because they were part of broader Middle Eastern civilization which had its origins in the Tigris and the Euphrates, and was, truth be told, the earliest and for a long time the most sophisticated of all sedentary human civilizations. I wouldn't impute these developments to any unique ingenuity on the part of the Jews of antiquity themselves - in fact, they belonged to a relatively back-water part of the Near Eastern world, whose culture was derivative of the main centres in today's Iraq (akin to the relationship between Korea/Japan/Vietnam with the hub civilization of China).
"I have 2 jewish relatives as in-laws ( sort of de-facto admitted into the caste )
ReplyDeleteWhen outmarriage happens reluctantly,
Hindu parents prefer Jews ( non-proselytising )
over Christians ( Muslims are banned ),
since Judaism is viewed as a non-hostile religion ( has co-existed in India for 2000 years peacefully )
and Jews tend to be better educated
"
I'm not sure if this is significant of a general tendency, but I have two male cousins (from the Chinese side of the family) who live in very Anglo-Saxon part of the States, yet who both ended up marrying Jewish women (both within the same profession - one is a physicist, the other is a medical doctor).
Their mother is now an immensely bitter women.
When I have more time, I'll look up which ethnicities Hungarians resemble most genetically. Going by stereotypes and hunches alone, I'd say it's Germans. Seriously.
ReplyDeleteI once heard that Hungarians make very good mathematicians and computer scientists because of the way their language works. It has something to do with the language structure encouraging a sort of logical thinking that helps one succeed in the aforementioned fields.
IINM, former Dartmouth president (and BASIC developer) John Kemeny was an advocate of that theory.
Peter
So apparently now, according to some of the geniuses here, the Jews are not smart and never were. They just used their evil voodoo to steal smart genes from unsuspecting Europeans.
ReplyDelete"I think that is because they were part of broader Middle Eastern civilization which had its origins in the Tigris and the Euphrates"
ReplyDeleteThat's where Jews had their origins too, before they moved West.
“As regards historical assortive inter-marriage between Ashkenazi Jews and European Gentiles yielding a high IQ - has anyone given any consideration to the possibility that for a poor yet intellectually-inclined European during the Middle Ages, conversion to Judaism and the pursuit of Talmudic scholarship would be the best means of him gratifying his keen cerebral longings? I'm assuming that there might be barriers to joining the Christian priesthood”
ReplyDeleteThat’s one of the silliest things ever written here. Medieval Jews wouldn’t have excepted a gentile peasant into their society. The barriers to joining the Christian priesthood would have been miniscule in comparison.
“No, they are very much like the other ethnic groups indigenous to the British Isles.”
They descend from the same ancestral stocks. However, you should read Cochran and Harpending (“The 10k Year Explosion” and “A Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence”) and Clarke (“A Farewell to Alms” and “Survival of the Richest”). Gene frequencies influencing things such as talents and temperaments can change fairly quickly under different societal pressures. The English and Irish may have been very similar several thousand years ago, but their different social and population histories over the last millennium may have yielded significant cognitive differences.
“It seems that this assortive mating between Jews and Gentiles has been going on for centuries and accounts for a good measure of Eurpean Jews' high IQ.”
No it hasn’t. Before the late 19th C. at the earliest, intermarriage was negligible. Look at the genetic studies. Intermarriage has only really been a big factor since the mid-20th century.
Why didn't the Chinese do what those European traders did - explore the world in search of business opportunities? Why didn't THEY reach the West before it reached them and assess that way how much of a competitor it would be for them?
ReplyDeleteThe navigator Zheng He explored sea routes to India, the Middle East Africa, Indonesia and Siam in 7 voyages over 30-90yrs before Columbus arrived in the Carribean. His ships and an armada were much bigger than any European of the wooden ship era which lasted until hundreds of years afterward.
Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming government sponsored a series of seven naval expeditions. Emperor Yongle designed them to establish a Chinese presence, impose imperial control over trade, and impress foreign peoples in the Indian Ocean basin. He also might have wanted to extend the tributary system
Chinese sea exploration ceased for several reasons:
(1) Increasing northern threats from Mongols causing a shift of the capital north to Beijing and an expansion of the Great Wall
(2) Internal strife when the Mongols captured the Chinese emperor and released him only after his half-brother claimed the throne resulting in 8 years of civil war.
(3) The trips were not deemed profitable. China was largely self-sufficient. Even when Europeans forced open trade with China it remained largely self-sufficient until the European powers forced opium into China to stop the gross trade imbalance and staunch the flow of gold/silver from Europe into China.
(4) Arrogance and complancy from being so dominate for so long thinking the world had nothing to offer it.
Intermarriage of Europeans with jews was minimal for over 1000 years
ReplyDeleteXtianity did not modernise until 1800 ( western xtianity ), and until then, if a jew wanted to marry a xtian he or she would have to convert
to xtianity
On the other hand, if a xtian married a jew, without the jew converting, the xtian would be killed for apostasy
Remember the Inquisition ended only in 1810
Zhang wrote
ReplyDeletehas anyone given any consideration to the possibility that for a poor yet intellectually-inclined European during the Middle Ages, conversion to Judaism and the pursuit of Talmudic scholarship would be the best means of him gratifying his keen cerebral longings
--
That would get him killed by the xtian church for apostasy
There are 5 Indians on this list
ReplyDeleteBharat Desai - Brahmin
Ram Shriram - Brahmin
Wadhwani - Sindhi merchant
Khosla - Punjabi Khatri merchant
Raj Rajaretnam - Tamil merchant arrested
That's where Jews had their origins too, before they moved West.
ReplyDeleteYes, and Hebrews also were slaves in Egypt and built the pyramids.
Oh, wait - that's just the mythological backstory.
I'm not sure if this is significant of a general tendency, but I have two male cousins (from the Chinese side of the family) who live in very Anglo-Saxon part of the States, yet who both ended up marrying Jewish women...Their mother is now an immensely bitter women.
When outmarriage happens reluctantly,
Hindu parents prefer Jews ( non-proselytising )
over Christians ( Muslims are banned ),
since Judaism is viewed as a non-hostile religion ( has co-existed in India for 2000 years peacefully )
and Jews tend to be better educated
Growing up I had a not insignificant number of Asian friends, and most of them, at an age when they were unaware that such things were unacceptable to voice publicly, willingly admitted that their parents didn't want them to date or marry whites (which nearly all the girls wound up doing, anyway). Can't imagine what the particular reasons were, but I remember that when I read stories like this, about BNP leader Nick Griffin's recent TV interview. Writes the author, who most vehemently disapproves of Griffin and all things racist, "one thing he said rang true: that if Winston Churchill were alive today, the British National party would be the only party that would have him. Churchill had notably racist opinions. About Indians, as the historian Ramachandra Guha has written, he could be 'truly dreadful'."
One of the few truly great leaders of recent memory had politically incorrect views on race, and we're to take that as evidence against such opinions?
A certain cultural confidence is necessary, or your people won't be long in this world. But I suspect that if Churchill were still alive he'd take a good look around and shoot himself, his own culture having been so thoroughly destroyed by Labour entitlement and the leftist-approved 60s revolution.
RE: Selective intermarriage between Jews and Europeans resulting in higher-IQ
ReplyDeleteNo it hasn’t. Before the late 19th C. at the earliest, intermarriage was negligible. Look at the genetic studies. Intermarriage has only really been a big factor since the mid-20th century.
If you were selectively breeding for very high-IQ, you'd expect that the intermarriage rates between Jews and very high-IQ Gentiles would small to negligible. Very high-IQ Gentiles probably had far worse reproductive prospects among their own before technological societies. Even today, prospects for very high-IQ Gentiles are better among IQ-worshipping Asian, Jewish and a few elite WASPs than among the masses of Gentiles.
Beyond the obvious large IQ difference between European and Middle Eastern Jews and how that came about, make a list of the most accomplished high-IQ Jews born before your mid-20th century explosion in intermarriage. Most look more European than Semetic and sometimes have direct public family trees: Proust, Strauss, Mendelssohn, Oppenheimer, Feynman, von Neumann, Wittgenstein and even Theodore Hertzel (not sure his IQ).
Even one of the most Semetic-looking famous high-IQ Einstein has some faint European features like his pale skin. He looks like Bill Maher (whose father was Catholic) than a swarthy native Semetic Arab.
One of the keys to Jewish success is maintaining high cultural standards (e.g. IQ, wealth, accomplishment) and applying them to selectively absorb high-quality outsiders. Don't you have high standards for yourself, your family, your social circle and especially those individuals who marry your children?
I can understand those who hang onto group identification a bit too needily being upset, but why would anyone of true merit view this explaination as "evil"?
I believe all the Forbes list Indians and Chinese/East Asians are 1st generation and the large majority made their money off techological innovation. I predict that as technology increases its importance in the globale economy, those with a strong undertanding will continue to gain ground economically.
ReplyDeleteSoutheastern Chinese (Fujian, Canton, Zhejiang) are the Jews of China. They control much of the private sector economy and historically did outstandingly well on the imperial exams. If you look at the Chinese diaspora, the overwhelming majority comes from the southeast and has done good. Of the small few communities from outside the southeast, performance has been much more mixed.
"Oh, wait - that's just the mythological backstory."
ReplyDeleteWhat's your "real" story: we're all Khazars?
"One of the few truly great leaders of recent memory"
Churchill? Is it fair to call a leader great if his country is practically broke and in steep decline by the time he leaves office?
A HUGE number of White Americans are partially Jewish and they do not even know it, many millions of them.
ReplyDeleteMost are only about 1/4 or 1/8 Jewish, usually having 1 or 2 grandparents and/or great-grandparents who were ethnic Jews.
The percentage of White Americans with partial Jewish ancestry is very high, especially in many urban and suburban areas. I wouldn't be surpised to find out that approximately 25% or so of White Americans have at least partial ethnically Jewish ancestry.
Recman1
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, if a xtian married a jew, without the jew converting, the xtian would be killed for apostasy
Remember the Inquisition ended only in 1810
No, you have a cartoon version understanding of the Inquisition based upon British anti-Spanish propaganda known as the Black Legend.
The Inquisition claimed about 6 verified death per year over the most active years 1540-1700 when supressing breakaway Protestantism throughout the Spanish Empire. Inquisitions were more a scare tactic and propaganda than substance in Spain or elsewhere.
Anon:"The shipping business also seems a little too outdoorsy for Jewish tastes, too."
ReplyDeleteWrong. Jews have been deeply involved in the shipping industry and international trade for many centuries now, even during the Middle Ages and before. They played a huge role in the early shipping industries of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the UK during their major empire phases in centuries past.
Notice how Jews often tend to settle in major port cities for instance...there have been 2 books written on the major role of 'port-city Jews' by an author named David Cesarani.
Jews settled in various important port-cities worldwide have a huge worldwide ethnic network with each other that they use to trade in various goods/services.
c'mon: to count as "Jews" persons who got, say, an indisputably Jewish grandma, or even father, if this same person doesn't possess any kind of Jewish identity- this is way overboard.
ReplyDeleteI would classify myself as having at least WN sympathies yet I would fit into the above category. I have no living Jewish family connections, but I know that one grandparent was Jewish, only found out recently. So someone could pop up and say I was Jewish, though genetically its no more than 1/4, culturally, religiously, socially its zero.
If all you know about the gentiles Joe Schmoe and Sam Schlub is that Joe married a Jewish girl and Sam married a Polish girl, you can predict (weakly) that Joe is brighter.
ReplyDeleteAnd that the Schlub children may well be prettier.
Antoine Zhang:"I'm not sure if this is significant of a general tendency, but I have two male cousins (from the Chinese side of the family) who live in very Anglo-Saxon part of the States, yet who both ended up marrying Jewish women (both within the same profession - one is a physicist, the other is a medical doctor). Their mother is now an immensely bitter women."
ReplyDeleteIn the USA you do see a whole lot of male Jews these days intermarrying with Asian (especially Chinese) women these days, especially in major cities.
Is this in preparation for a possible immigration of these new 'Chijews' to Asia in coming decades? Are these Jewish Asians preparing to immigrate away from the West and in to Asia for some reason?
"As regards historical assortive inter-marriage between Ashkenazi Jews and European Gentiles yielding a high IQ - has anyone given any consideration to the possibility that for a poor yet intellectually-inclined European during the Middle Ages, conversion to Judaism and the pursuit of Talmudic scholarship would be the best means of him gratifying his keen cerebral longings?"
ReplyDeleteThat is possible -- but what is known for sure is that the celibate Christian/Catholic priesthood had (for over 1,000 years) a SEVERELY DYSGENIC effect on European populations by barring the intellectually-elite priests from marrying and siring children.
The most intelligent Europeans were basically funneled (i.e., forced) in to the priesthood for a very long time, and the loss of their 'smart genes' has lead to the partial intellectual degeneration of European peoples.
Dr. MacDonald's next book ought to be entitled "Celibate Catholicism as a Dysgenic De-Evolutionary Strategy."
Notice how the nations which adopted Protestantism rose to become the most advanced in Europe in terms of learning, technology, economics, politics, etc soon after abandoning the celibate priesthood.
Many Germanic last names are very common in Eastern Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary.
ReplyDeleteYes - because they're often ethnic Germans.
Not anymore, certainly not in the Czech Republic, probably not in Poland or Hungary. Central Europe currently is home of Europe's ethnostates par excellance.
"Steinbrenners are akin to the Midwestern industrial magnates like Rockefellers, etc., a group that had a minimum, if any, Jews. Jews concentrate in commerce or the professions, not heavy industry. The shipping business also seems a little too outdoorsy for Jewish tastes, too."
ReplyDeleteThe world's biggest oil tanker company, Tanker Pacific, was built and is owned by the Ofer Brothers, Israeli Jews (though the company is headquartered in Singapore and all the management are non-jewish for obvious reasons). The Ofer's also own Zodiac Maritime and Zim, two of the largest global cargo shipping companies. Also, in France, Dassault and Citroen were started by Jews. In Israel, the industrial tool manufacturer Iscar was recently bought by Warren Buffett, making the founders billionaires.
Chinese isolationism and reluctance to explore is often cited as a defect.
ReplyDeleteBut it's possible that burning one of the greatest and largest ocean going fleets in the 1400s will end up being one of the greatest moves ever made in history.
China avoided the fate of the West consequent to colonization: Being reverse colonized by immigration from less developed countries and subjected by verbally, intellectually, and culturally dominant others. As a consequence China might be set to outpace the rest of the world.
A wise move that we may have done well to emulate. The cultivation of lands previously held by hunter gatherers by Europeans may turn out to be small compensation for the loss of our homelands—especially if the newly cultivated lands turn out to be lost.
Of course with increasing prosperity, China may end up being subjected to mass immigration and increasing influence and power from certain verbally, intellectually, and culturally dominant groups. They seem to have greater checks in place such as greater ethnocentrism, collectivism, etc., that would better serve to prevent this, but it may belie a greater vulnerability under the surface that would wilt once the external barriers are destroyed.
So it might end up having wisely avoided the the biotoxic path of African colonization (along with other 3rd world and dominant groups that followed) that has infected the West. On the other hand, if China does head down that biotoxic path, it may find itself unable to escape the Malthusian catastrophe that awaits those who refuse to automate rather than populate.
"That is possible -- but what is known for sure is that the celibate Christian/Catholic priesthood had (for over 1,000 years) a SEVERELY DYSGENIC effect on European populations by barring the intellectually-elite priests from marrying and siring children."
ReplyDeleteThink of all the great Jesuit minds who never had the chance to perpetuate their genes.
I recall that the Khazars had a similar system in place - I think certain Arab chroniclers have claimed that they killed members of their nation deemed too scheming and clever.
I'm not sure that love of gambling is a reliable measure of risk-taking. It may be with professional gamblers, but for most people, gambling is just a way to have fun, blow steam, and get some thrills. It's like playing videogame or going to Disneyland.
ReplyDeleteThere was this Chinese carryout I used to frequent. The owner used to be on the phone with his bookie quite often, gambling on sports games. I asked him why(as he seemed to lose quite often), and he said he did it for fun since he was drearily stuck at the joint 7 days a week. It wasn't so much a case of economic risk-taking as recreational escapism from the humdrum routine of work. (Of course, when the debts pile up, gambling turns from pleasure to pain, just as narcotics go from fun to fury when the addiction kicks in.)
I would wager most people who go gambling do it for fun than with any big idea or plan in mind. After all, Saudi princes have been notorious for dropping tens of millions at a casino in a single day. Does this mean that the Saudi royal family is brimming with adventurous entrepreneurs? A lot of poor people obsessively purchase scratch off lottery tickets, but they are among the laziest people on Earth. And, go to any Indian Casino and you see rows upon rows of old people blowing their social security checks at the slot machines. Evidence of risk-taking? No, just bored people without hope or meaning in their lives making busy with SOMETHING. Japanese pachinko is the same way. Few people play with winning in mind. They just wanna forget that the world exists and lose themselves in the cascade of metal balls. It's probably not much different than kids who were addicted to pinball machines.
The kind of risk-taking we are talking about is one where an entrepreneur builds a casino and controls gambling. That is constructive, ambitious, and intelligent risk-taking. But, most people who go to gamble are looking for fun, chasing after fantasies of riches, robotically addicted, or hoping for success(than doing anything really constructive or intelligent to make it in life). The difference between someone who controls gambling(builds a casino) and someone who gambles is like between someone who produces/directs movies and someone who just goes to the movie theater.
Indeed, many blacks love to roll the dice and gamble(lottery, casinos, video poker, etc), but they don't seem to be very entrepreneurial in general.
in France, Dassault and Citroen were started by Jews.
ReplyDeleteFun fact: the post-war French aircraft industry depended almost entirely on jet engines built by Germans to a WWII German design - the SNECMA Atar, a development of the BMW 003.
Jewish industrial involvement tends to be pretty much what the sterotype would suggest - they provide the money and others provide the technical expertise.
So apparently now, according to some of the geniuses here, the Jews are not smart and never were.
ReplyDeleteYour effort at sarcasm aside, there is a good deal of truth to that. The Jews of the ancient world were never noted for their intellect, as the Greeks were.
Intermarriage of Europeans with jews was minimal for over 1000 years
ReplyDeleteThat's completely unknown, as least as far as "ethnic Jews" are concerned. The reality is that Jews, who looked very much like the people they lived among, could marry them any time they wanted. The human heart being what it is, it's certain that this happened with considerable frequency.
Some process took place in order for Jews to stop looking like Yasser Arafat (Semitic) and to start looking like WASP's or Nordics. For instance -
http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/image2/israeli-idf-babe-12.jpg
Since none of us believe in magic, that would seem to leave good old-fashioned sex as the most logical explanation.
The English and Irish may have been very similar several thousand years ago, but their different social and population histories over the last millennium may have yielded significant cognitive differences.
ReplyDeleteYou seem determined to stick with this story even after people have demonstrated that it is incorrect.
But set that aside. What does the theory of rapid shifts in the cognitive ability of populations have to say for modern American race relations? Is it conceivable that fairly shortly, in the lifetime of the human race, blacks will be the smart ones and whites the stupid ones?
Look at the genetic studies. Intermarriage has only really been a big factor since the mid-20th century.
ReplyDeleteGenetic studies cannot say such things. They lack the ability to pin things down to the century level, let alone the decade level.
You're telling us what you want to be true.
The dysgenic effect of a celibate priesthood is also shown up in Buddhism
ReplyDeleteThe recently ended civil war in Sri Lanka got started because the majority Buddhist Sinhalese had celibate monks and hence developed lower IQ and could not compete against the non-celibate minorities
and they started a lot of Affirmative Action
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Goa_Inquisition
ReplyDeleteThe Goa Inquisition was the office of the Inquisition acting in the Indian state of Goa and the rest of the Portuguese empire in Asia. It was established in 1560, briefly suppressed from 1774-1778, and finally abolished in 1812.
In addition, the Inquisition prosecuted non-converts who broke prohibitions against the observance of Hindu or Muslim rites
Based on the records that survive, H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon state that between the Inquisition's beginning in 1561 and its temporary abolition in 1774, some 16,202 persons were brought to trial by the Inquisition
In Europe, the Goa Inquisition became notorious for its cruelty and use of torture, and the French philosopher Voltaire wrote "Goa is sadly famous for its inquisition, which is contrary to humanity as much as to commerce. The Portuguese monks deluded us into believing that the Indian populace was worshiping The Devil, while it is they who served him."
The inquisitor's first act was forbidding Hindus from publicly practice of their faith through fear of death. Sephardic Jews living in Goa, many of whom had fled the Iberian Peninsula to escape the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition to begin with, were also persecuted. The narrative of Da Fonseca describes the violence and brutality of the inquisition. The records speak of the necessity for hundreds of prison cells to accommodate fresh victims. Seventy-one "autos da fe" were recorded. In the first few years alone, over 4000 people were arrested, with 121 people burnt alive at the stake[8].
Persecution of Hindus
R.N. Sakshena writes ".. in the name of the religion of peace and love, the tribunal(s) practiced cruelties to the extent that every word of theirs was a sentence of death"[9].
The Portuguese colonial administration enacted anti-Hindu with the expressed intent to "humiliate Hindus" and encourage conversions to Christianity. Laws were passed banning Christians from keeping Hindus in their employ, and the public worship of Hindus were deemed unlawful[9].Hindus were forced to assemble periodically in churches to listen to preaching or to refutation of their religion.
Thus, they initiated a new wave of baptisms to Hindus who were intimidated by their brutality into converting[12].
When the local clergy became jealous of a French catholic priest operating in Madras, they lured him to Goa, then had him arrested and sent to the inquisition. He was saved when the Hindu King of Carnatica (Karnataka) interceded on his behalf, laid siege to St. Thome and demanded the release of the priest.[14]
RE: Selective intermarriage between Jews and Europeans resulting in higher-IQ
ReplyDeleteNo it hasn’t. Before the late 19th C. at the earliest, intermarriage was negligible. Look at the genetic studies. Intermarriage has only really been a big factor since the mid-20th century.
Further, if you broke out the "Jewish" group in those genetic studies it's clear that European Jews would lie closer to the European groups than Middle Eastern Jews. These two groups are about as different as high IQ Koreans and (non-Chinese) average SE Asians are.
Most very high-IQ people I know have a deep sense of uniqueness and isolation from society. They're far more ready to ignore convention, question arbitrary traditions and feel more comfortable with out-group very high-IQ individuals than in-group mass mediocrity.
Given this along with the fact that the smartest and most driven Jews often carved out successful niches among the the smartest, most driven and ruling Gentiles (administrators, advisors, bankers and traders) for hundred of years one can easily anticipate the eugenic benefits to the descendents of what selective intermarriage took place.
With modern, complex and highly stratified society (by education, careers, geography) further concentrating global elites, one can image a much higher rate of assortive mating resulting in even faster eugenic results. This is happing against a background of possible mass dysgentic population growth.
US and global elites may view increasingly socialism as the only way to force a semblance of fairness in a world that is becoming increasingly unequal with each generation.
"most business is not highly competitive though"
ReplyDeleteMost successful businesses fail when they're handed off to the second generation. Even more fail when they're handed off to the third generation. There's actually quite a bit of interesting research on this. The exceptions tend to be those where the business is so successful that its been turned over to professional managers.
"Many Germanic last names are very common in Eastern Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary.
ReplyDeleteYes - because they're often ethnic Germans."
Maybe--its hard to say. Germans were mainly concentrated in the urban areas and historically the urban areas were demographic sinks. Some historians think that the German populations maintained themselves by assimilating slavic immigrants from the countryside. I understand that at least in Bohemia there's lots of evidence for this.
"That is possible -- but what is known for sure is that the celibate Christian/Catholic priesthood had (for over 1,000 years) a SEVERELY DYSGENIC effect on European populations by barring the intellectually-elite priests from marrying and siring children."
ReplyDeleteTwo problems with this:
(1) You are wildly overestimating when celibacy became expected of priests and wildly, wildly overestimating when priests actually were celibate and
(2) you are overestimating the intellectual requirements of the catholic priesthood during the middle ages. Most parish priests, for example, seem to have been illiterate.
Antoine Zhang:"Think of all the great Jesuit minds who never had the chance to perpetuate their genes."
ReplyDeleteYes, exactly.
However, with Jews it was the exact opposite as many scholars, historians, and geneticists have often noted; the socially and intellectually-elite Jews -- people like rabbis, businessmen, royal helpers, scholars, etc -- ALWAYS had the most children in the Ashkenazi Jewish community for many centuries, and Jewish social structures supported this set-up via widespread communal support of the children of elite, wealthy, and intelligent Jews.
Conversely, at the same time the elite Jews were having large numbers of children, the poor and non-intelligent 'blue-collar' Jews had the least children.
For a long time Ashkenazi Jews had an elaborate system of eugenic matchmaking wherein the children of rabbis, successful businessmen, notable scholars, and other highly intelligent Jews often arranged marriages between their children, which further led to an increase of 'smart genes' in the Jewish population pool.
I wonder what the ethnic breakdown is of those at the top who were actively involved in the financial meltdown/current recession.
ReplyDeleteFurther, whose got stats on the ethnic makeup of the financial sector in general?
There have been a few references to Jewish origins and "Jewish DNA" in this thread that don't seem to take into account recent data. These range from Fred's invocation of the traditional origins in Ur story to suggestions that medieval intermarriage in central Europe might be responsible for Jewish IQ advantages.
ReplyDeleteRazib at GNXP summarized one of the latest autosomal studies nicely :
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/01/how_ashkenazi_jewish_are_you.php
Razib's inference is that Jews cluster away from both Europeans and Middle Easterners under some data analysis conditions because they are a hybrid population. When all the populations sampled are plotted, the Jewish sample (mostly Ashkenazi in that paper) cluster between southeast European populations and Middle Eastern populations. He (and Gregory Cochran in the comments) suggests that the admixture dates from the early diaspora period in southeastern Europe (also Anatolia), where large Jewish populations existed at that time. Moreover, there were fewer legal restrictions on intermarriage in the pre-Christian Roman Empire.
A recent ASHG abstract supports this inference:
1)http://www.ashg.org/cgi-bin/2009/ashg09s?abst=jews&sort=ptimes&sbutton=Detail&absno=10575&sid=482554
"By pairwise Fst analysis, the Jewish groups are closest to Southern Europeans (i.e. Tuscan Italians) and to Druze, Bedouins, Palestinians. Interestingly, the distance to the closest Southern European population follows the order from proximal to distal: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian... STRUCTURE results show that the Jewish Diaspora groups all demonstrated Middle Eastern ancestry, but varied significantly in the extent of European admixture. There is almost no European ancestry in Iranian and Iraqi Jews, whereas Syrian, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi Jews have European admixture ranging from 30%~60%."
There is also an earlier autosomal DNA study by Bauchet that showed that Jewish samples clustered closely with southern European samples:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1852743/?tool=pubmed
That is possible -- but what is known for sure is that the celibate Christian/Catholic priesthood had (for over 1,000 years) a SEVERELY DYSGENIC effect on European populations by barring the intellectually-elite priests from marrying and siring children.
ReplyDeleteThe most intelligent Europeans were basically funneled (i.e., forced) in to the priesthood for a very long time, and the loss of their 'smart genes' has lead to the partial intellectual degeneration of European peoples.
Dr. MacDonald's next book ought to be entitled "Celibate Catholicism as a Dysgenic De-Evolutionary Strategy."
Notice how the nations which adopted Protestantism rose to become the most advanced in Europe in terms of learning, technology, economics, politics, etc soon after abandoning the celibate priesthood.
Sure, some high-IQ genes might be lost to the priesthood, but they would be more than made up for by the priests' non-celibate brothers siring children with concubines. (Every person with the surname "Fitzroy" is descended from an English king's bastard.)
Men were not forced into the priesthood; if they did not have a "vocation" (i.e., if they really didn't want to do this) they were actually forbidden from becoming a priest.
One of the most scientifically advanced parts of Europe has been Italy, home of the Renaissance. They were a bit distant from the core territory of the Industrial Revolution, but they certainly were no dunces.
I think the Protestant dominance over Catholic Europe has had to do more with cutthroat mercantilism, moneylending with interest, and strong centralized government rather than having a higher IQ.
Or perhaps the people who became Protestant were inherently the more independent thinkers. It is interesting that those Northern Europeans who stayed Catholic -- the Irish and the Poles -- did so for nationalistic reasons; the religion was something to rally the nation around to resist outside Protestant bullies.
Chinese isolationism and reluctance to explore is often cited as a defect.
But it's possible that burning one of the greatest and largest ocean going fleets in the 1400s will end up being one of the greatest moves ever made in history.
China avoided the fate of the West consequent to colonization: Being reverse colonized by immigration from less developed countries and subjected by verbally, intellectually, and culturally dominant others. As a consequence China might be set to outpace the rest of the world.
Before you celebrate:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/05/content_12183718.htm
China avoided the fate of the West consequent to colonization: Being reverse colonized by immigration from less developed countries and subjected by verbally, intellectually, and culturally dominant others.
ReplyDeleteThe places being reverse-colonized the most, though, are places the West gained via colonization to begin with - Canada, the United States, Australia, etc.
And of course, we have the option to stop reverse colonization.
what is known for sure is that the celibate Christian/Catholic priesthood had (for over 1,000 years) a SEVERELY DYSGENIC effect on European populations by barring the intellectually-elite priests from marrying and siring children.
Possibly. That would be the logical result. But that assumes that they were, in fact, an "intellectual elite," or that they had no offsetting positive effects on the society or culture, or that priests and monks didn't get any action on the side - which would assume that they were drastically different from priests of today.
The cultivation of lands previously held by hunter gatherers by Europeans may turn out to be small compensation for the loss of our homelands—especially if the newly cultivated lands turn out to be lost.
Yeah, I like Mark Steyn, too, but the fact is that it's the new lands which are getting reverse-colonized the fastest. Steyn, of course, never talks about it, but the United States is well ahead of Europe in that regard. 50% of American children are now minorities. England still doesn't even come close to that.
Does all that not make sense? Would Jews have been as similarly successful if they would have never been allowed to settle in Europe?
What I don't get is that we hear often enough about historic anti-Semitism in Europe, and yet amongst all this anti-Semitism the powers that be allowed Jews a near monopoly on one of the most profitable and consequential industries of all - moneylending.
The percentage of White Americans with partial Jewish ancestry is very high...I wouldn't be surpised to find out that approximately 25% or so of White Americans have at least partial ethnically Jewish ancestry.
Got news: we all have Jewish ancestry if you look back far enough. How do you define partial? 1/8th? 1/4th? 1/1024th?
Churchill? Is it fair to call a leader great if his country is practically broke and in steep decline by the time he leaves office?
And that would be his fault, or the fault of the war and the post-war Labour government?
Don't you have high standards for yourself, your family, your social circle and especially those individuals who marry your children?
Nope. The media tells me my children can marry whoever the hell they want, for "love," and that if I object I'm an evil human being.
What does the theory of rapid shifts in the cognitive ability of populations have to say for modern American race relations? Is it conceivable that fairly shortly, in the lifetime of the human race, blacks will be the smart ones and whites the stupid ones?
ReplyDeleteRapid? WTF? 8,000 years is rapid?
Judaism was a proselytizing religion. Most of the Jews today have no DNA connection to the Biblical Jews.
ReplyDeletehttp://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel
Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile
Israel deliberately forgets its history
An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East
by Schlomo Sand
The Jews of the ancient world were never noted for their intellect
ReplyDeleteThis point always perplexes me a bit. Doesn't the fact that Jews wrote two tremendously influential ancient books - the Old and New Testaments - indicate that their culture was already quite advanced in some way?
The percentage of White Americans with partial Jewish ancestry is very high, especially in many urban and suburban areas. I wouldn't be surpised to find out that approximately 25% or so of White Americans have at least partial ethnically Jewish ancestry.
ReplyDeleteDoubtful that it would be this high. Likely under 10%, probably less than 5%.
Any evidence for your wild assertion?
"Jewish industrial involvement tends to be pretty much what the sterotype would suggest - they provide the money and others provide the technical expertise."
ReplyDeleteExactly. Investment in and control/trade of financial paper assets of industrial companies is not the same thing.
"That's completely unknown, as least as far as "ethnic Jews" are concerned. The reality is that Jews, who looked very much like the people they lived among, could marry them any time they wanted. The human heart being what it is, it's certain that this happened with considerable frequency.
ReplyDeleteSome process took place in order for Jews to stop looking like Yasser Arafat (Semitic) and to start looking like WASP's or Nordics."
Not true.
See this post from Race/History/Evolution Notes.
“Genetic studies cannot say such things. They lack the ability to pin things down to the century level, let alone the decade level. You're telling us what you want to be true.”
ReplyDeleteWell gee whiz Genius, you’re right. Genetic studies alone cannot say such things. HOWEVER, combining what we know from genetic studies with a little history, we can make a pretty good guess. Now let’s work this out together from what we know: Ashkenazi Jews are about 60-40 Middle Eastern-European by ancestry. However, their European ancestry is almost exclusively from SE Europe, not N., C. or E. Europe. After the second Jewish revolt, the huge Jewish Diaspora was mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean (Greece, Anatolia, etc.) and there was also a large Jewish community in Rome during the late Roman Empire. By the 8th or 9th C. we have well attested records of the Ashkenazim along the Rhineland in W. Europe. During the Middle Ages they were mostly expelled from W. Europe and ended up in Poland and Lithuania and other parts of E. Europe. Since the genetic studies tell us that their European ancestry is SE European, and not from the German, Baltic and Slavic countries they have been living in for the last 700+ years, it seems pretty reasonable to conclude that their European ancestry was mostly picked up during the late Roman Empire in SE Europe and not from the Slavs, Germans, and Balts they lived among during the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Of course, I guess it is possible, if you want to wield Occam’s butterknife, that, even though they weren’t interbreeding with their neighbors, huge numbers of SE Europeans from, say, Greece or Italy were making their way to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in early modern times to interbreed with the Ashkenazi, but it doesn’t seem very likely given the historical record.
“Beyond the obvious large IQ difference between European and Middle Eastern Jews and how that came about, make a list of the most accomplished high-IQ Jews born before your mid-20th century explosion in intermarriage. Most look more European than Semetic [sic]…”
Before the genetic results came out, I too would have assumed that the European ancestry in the Ashkenazim came from N. Europe because they are not particularly dark, but SNPs don’t lie – they are SE, not NE Euro ancestry. Perhaps there was some selection for pale skin related to vitamin D production, as is hypothesized to have been responsible for the depigmentation of Europeans generally.
The reality is that Jews, who looked very much like the people they lived among, could marry them any time they wanted. The human heart being what it is, it's certain that this happened with considerable frequency.
ReplyDelete--
There are 2 possibilities
First is that cossacks raped jewish women and those who became pregnant raised these kids as jewish
However, DNA studies seem to show that white gentile women have been imported into the jewish gene pool
What I am saying is that post constantine, and until 1800 or later
Any jew who wanted to marry a gentile would have to convert to xtianity or face death at the hands of the church
So how did jewish men manage to get gentile women, not just have sex with them, but actually marry them and raise the kids as jews ?
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/10/billionaires-2009-richest-people_The-Worlds-Billionaires_Rank.html
ReplyDeleteIn the top 10 richest people in the world
5 northwest europeans
1 jewish
2 spanish-white
2 Hindus
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteAnon:"Before the genetic results came out, I too would have assumed that the European ancestry in the Ashkenazim came from N. Europe because they are not particularly dark, but SNPs don’t lie – they are SE, not NE Euro ancestry."
ReplyDeleteGood comments Anon -- however, not all Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is from Southeastern Europe...quite a bit of it is from Slavic Eastern Europe as well. Remember that Ashkenazi Jews lived in Eastern Europe for MANY centuries, and there was definite gene flow between the native Slavs there and the Jews.
A fairly large number of Ashkenazim, especially those from Russia and the Ukraine (instead of Poland where the Jews tend to be darker and more Semitic looking), have some lighter European features including pale skin, non-brown eyes, straight (instead of curly) hair, and a height which is above the shorter Jewish average.
Nurit:"The Jews have had, for over 2000 years, a societal structure that encouraged, if not demanded, literacy from a young age, as well as a tradition of scholarship and critical thinking."
ReplyDeleteNot always, actually. For instance, when Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe for a long time most of the Jews there were poor and illiterate (many Jewish beggars, paupers, and thieves lived there), though the Ashkenazi elite such as rabbis, scholars, businesspeople, etc were indeed very educated because they spent their entire lives studying arcane texts like the Talmud and the Zohar endlessly.
“You seem determined to stick with this story even after people have demonstrated that it is incorrect.”
ReplyDeleteYou can’t be this dense. It has been demonstrated that if you go back to the Mesolithic, the English and Irish mostly descend from common ancestors. However, if over the course of centuries or millennia, traits like general intelligence (g), conscientiousness, and a lower time preference (i.e., ability to defer gratification) have bigger fitness payoffs in one society than the other (most likely do the different social structures in said societies), then you can get shifts in gene frequencies influencing these traits and, over a relatively short historical time frame (we’re talking centuries here, not a human lifetime), two populations can diverge quite a bit from one another in these traits even though they descend from a common ancestral stock. Read “The 10,000 Year Explosion” by Cochran and Harpending an “A Farewell to Alms” by Clarke.
“But set that aside. What does the theory of rapid shifts in the cognitive ability of populations have to say for modern American race relations? Is it conceivable that fairly shortly, in the lifetime of the human race, blacks will be the smart ones and whites the stupid ones?”
All modern welfare states probably are suffering from dysgenic selective pressure with respect to general intelligence (g), conscientiousness, and a time preference. We’re probably headed towards Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy.” It is theoretically possible that blacks could surpass whites in intelligence if intelligence has higher fitness payoffs for blacks than whites and this goes on long enough (longer than any of us on this board will live), but in practice this is unlikely. Charles Murray has analyzed the NLSY and found that about half the children born to white women in the survey had mother below the white average in IQ. By contrast, 58% of the black children of NLSY women were born to women below the black average. The NLSY has also collected IQ data from the children of survey participants and it does appear that the black-white gap among the children is slightly larger than between the parents in the original sample. So, if current trends persist, the black white gap will probably increase in future generations.
There is almost no European ancestry in Iranian and Iraqi Jews
ReplyDeleteThose should be the smartest ones then, right? Being "pure Jew" and all.
In the top 10 richest people in the world: 5 northwest europeans, 1 jewish, 2 spanish-white, 2 Hindus
ReplyDeleteThanks, Rec1man! You just destroyed my faith in Indian brains! If you can't realize that the top ten doesn't count as a statistically valid sample then other Indians probably can't, either.
Before the genetic results came out, I too would have assumed that the European ancestry in the Ashkenazim came from N. Europe because they are not particularly dark, but SNPs don’t lie – they are SE, not NE Euro ancestry.
I really have no dog in this fight, but I have a hunch that before it's all over we're going to discover that mtDNA and the Y chromosome don't give you an entirely accurate picture of genetic ancestry. There's a lot of genetic history that's lost because it didn't pass straight down either the maternal or paternal line.
in France, Dassault and Citroen were started by Jews.
ReplyDeleteFun fact: the post-war French aircraft industry depended almost entirely on jet engines built by Germans to a WWII German design - the SNECMA Atar, a development of the BMW 003.
Jewish industrial involvement tends to be pretty much what the sterotype would suggest - they provide the money and others provide the technical expertise.
------------
Actually, both Dassault and Citroen were engineers, not financiers, and were responsible for important technical developments.
To respond to Hugo- it probably varies by region and class. I think many affluent whites in the Northeast and California have Jewish ancestry even if they don't identify as Jewish by religion or ethnicity, but almost no whites in Appalachia or other more rural parts of the country have Jewish ancestry.
ReplyDeleteNobody would deny this. The original claim was 25%, which is absurdly high.
"It is also possible that this relationship is more apparent than real, and results from the fact that southeastern Europeans have more ancient Near Eastern ancestry than northern Europeans."
ReplyDeleteIf Neolithic SE European ancestry rather than admixture explained all of the genetic affinity with Ashkenazi Jews, why aren't those populations equally close to the Middle Eastern populations sampled in the papers and abstracts? The Middle East is not an entirely genetically undifferentiated place, and the Neolithic ancestry in SE Europe and Italy likely came from the northern Middle East via Anatolia. No one knows for certain the exact origins of the biblical Jews (although I would bet with Finkelstein and Silberman on a Canaanite origin rather than Ur of the Chaldees), but their genetic profile was likely not so northern Middle Eastern. Moreover, even SE European and Italian populations are not entirely derived from the neolithic migrations.
That's a key point that some other posters made: the European ancestry that Ashkenazi Jews have is mostly from Mediterranean people in the late Roman Empire, not Northern Europeans in the middle ages. That's a misconception that most people who talk about this subject have.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the neolithic farmer ancestry that Europeans have came into Europe several thousand years before Jews migrated into Europe, so Europeans with these genetic markers can be distinguished from Jews and other people with more recent Near Eastern ancestry.
There is almost no European ancestry in Iranian and Iraqi Jews
ReplyDeleteThose should be the smartest ones then, right? Being "pure Jew" and all.
Why would Iranian and Iraqi Jews be more "pure Jew" than Askenazi Jews? Think it through and try again.
Why would Iranian and Iraqi Jews be more "pure Jew" than Askenazi Jews? Think it through and try again.
ReplyDeleteIf you bothered to read the article linked and quoted earlier, Iranaian and Iraqi Jews are more "pure" than the European ones, who have an up to 60% European mixture.
You're not arguing with the data, are you?
Think it through and try again.
That's a key point that some other posters made: the European ancestry that Ashkenazi Jews have is mostly from Mediterranean people in the late Roman Empire, not Northern Europeans in the middle ages.
ReplyDeleteThe trouble with this "point" is that it is belied by what we can see with our eyes.
The blond blue-eyed master race seems to be alive and well and living in ....uh .... Israel.
Either that or history is wrong and the Mediterranean people of the Roman Empire were actually Aryans.
You can’t be this dense.
ReplyDeleteYou're the one insisting that the Irish trail other Northern Europeans by 15 IQ points, and you think I'm being dense?
What you are saying is factually false, and no amount of blubbering on about ""The 10,000 Year Explosion” by Cochran and Harpending" will change that.
From the days of constantine till about 1800, in Western Europe
ReplyDelete( and about 1900 in eastern europe )
Any Xtian converting to judaism was mostly killed by the church for apostasy
There are some shockingly ignorant people commenting on this site.
Anon wrote
ReplyDeleteAny Xtian converting to judaism was mostly killed by the church for apostasy
There are some shockingly ignorant people commenting on this site.
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First you need to read Constantines Sword and other scholarly books on the decline of non-xtian religions after Constantine, and on how Euro Xtians used religious persecution to go from 5% at the time of Constantine to 99% soon after
Until the time of Voltaire, any western person declaring himself an apostate was likely to get killed under various church laws
==
Amazon.com
In March 1940, a month before Nazi troops entered Belgium, an 88-year-old monk died at the abbey in Bouhay. Born in Bologna as Edgardo Mortara, this monk, as a six-year-old Jewish child, had been kidnapped from his family after unsubstantiated reports of his baptism by a Christian servant surfaced. He was sent to Rome and raised and educated there under the special eye of Pope Pius IX. Although such kidnappings were not extraordinary in European Jewish communities, this case occurred against the backdrop of a changed and changing political climate. The case attracted the attention of the Rothschilds, Sir Moses Montifiore, Napoleon III, and even some Americans, and turned international public opinion against the Vatican.
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Yes until 1900, the xtian church was rather islamic in the matter of forced conversion
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Under this scenario, it was impossible even in western europe until 1900, for a jewish man to marry a gentile woman and raise the kids as jews
If a jewish man or woman wanted to marry a gentile he / she would be forced to convert to xtianity
The trouble with this "point" is that it is belied by what we can see with our eyes.
ReplyDeleteSee Corporal's comment above. He has a link to Race/Evolution/History Notes on that point.
The trouble with this "point" is that it is belied by what we can see with our eyes.
ReplyDeleteAs is well known, many non-Jewish Russians immigrated to Israel within the past couple decades, many serving in the military.
Do Basques consider themselves Hispanic?
ReplyDeleteArrillaga seems to. He's a major donor to "National Hispanic University", and I imagine he has benefited from minority loans and set-asides.
“You're the one insisting that the Irish trail other Northern Europeans by 15 IQ points, and you think I'm being dense?
ReplyDeleteWhat you are saying is factually false, and no amount of blubbering on about ""The 10,000 Year Explosion” by Cochran and Harpending" will change that.”
WTF? Are you moron? I never wrote that the Irish trail other Northern European peoples by 15 IQ points. I did say that the studies (by Carr using progressive matrices among others) cited by Lynn do seem to indicate a deficit of about 0.5 S.D. Rindermann has shown that the PISA and other international academic tests are de facto IQ tests. On these the Irish appear to do a bit better, but still score in the mid to high 90s. Look here, I’m not anti-Fenian (I’m 3/8ths Irish descent myself), but I’m not going to ignore the data. You can complain about my “blubbering,” but you just show yourself to have no clue about population genetics and natural selection. It IS quite possible for two populations that originate from the same ancestral stock to diverge from one another in genetically influenced traits over time if the selection pressures are different. You may not like this, but it is so and no amount of complaining about “blubbering” or saying that my point is “factually false” (in what way?) will change this.
“The trouble with this "point" [about Jewish European ancestry being SE, not NE European] is that it is belied by what we can see with our eyes.”
Whatever. As I said, SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) don’t lie. BTW, ever heard of natural selection? When people first settled northern Europe they didn’t start out as fair skinned and light eyed either.
“I really have no dog in this fight, but I have a hunch that before it's all over we're going to discover that mtDNA and the Y chromosome don't give you an entirely accurate picture of genetic ancestry. There's a lot of genetic history that's lost because it didn't pass straight down either the maternal or paternal line.”
Some of the papers on Jewish origins cited above examine autosomal DNA. That’s where the claim for ME and SE Euro mixture comes from. (Though I agree with your point, it’s just that it is not relevant to the comment.)
“Good comments Anon -- however, not all Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is from Southeastern Europe...quite a bit of it is from Slavic Eastern Europe as well. Remember that Ashkenazi Jews lived in Eastern Europe for MANY centuries, and there was definite gene flow between the native Slavs there and the Jews.
A fairly large number of Ashkenazim, especially those from Russia and the Ukraine (instead of Poland where the Jews tend to be darker and more Semitic looking), have some lighter European features including pale skin, non-brown eyes, straight (instead of curly) hair, and a height which is above the shorter Jewish average.”
Actually, the real shocker from the recent genetic surveys is that the Ashkenazi DON’T seem to have much Slavic ancestry, i.e., there was very little gene flow between the two populations. I’m not familiar with the differences in appearance between Polish (and from other parts of the Pale) and Russian Jews, but remember, before the partitions of Poland in the late 18th C. between Prussia, Austria and Russia, there were very few Jews in Russian territory and for a good while after that the Russian government forbade Jewish settlement outside the Pale.
The trouble with this "point" is that it is belied by what we can see with our eyes. The blond blue-eyed master race seems to be alive and well and living in....uh....Israel.
ReplyDeleteI support your contention that Ashkenazi Jews have more Northern European blood in them than is claimed, but linking to a "Babes of the IDF" pictorial on Maxim is hardly scientific evidence of that. It's like looking at Miss Mexico and claiming that because she's blonde therefore so is the population of Mexico.
Carlos Slim Helu is from a Lebanese Maronite family, not a Spanish one.
ReplyDeleteThe trouble with this "point" is that it is belied by what we can see with our eyes.
ReplyDelete------------------
I agree, my eyes make me question the validity of the genetic data - a very large percentage of ashkenazi jews have red hair, which you don't find in SE Europeans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_billionaires_%282009%29
ReplyDeleteHas a list of 106 richest
of which, 7 Hindus,
8 muslims ( oil sheikhs ), 7 Orientals ( Chinese and Japanese ) and the rest Jews and Europeans
Recman1
ReplyDeleteInquisition was a short hand for xtian theocracy
No, again, you are talking out your arse. Inquisitions were a well-defined historical events with the Spanish Inquisition the most familiar (and wildly exaggerated).
There were "inquisitions" thorughout Christianity, especially early on, to root out apostasy. These were most brutal when the Church was young, vunerable to self-destruction and certain ideas were struggling for supremency (e.g. the trinity). Again, this doctrine-inspired warfare was most brutally conducted against other Christian sects. Although genecidal at times, these intra-Christian conflicts explain the sucess of Christianity compared to the constant fracturing of Prostant sects.
Any Xtian converting to judaism was mostly killed by the church for apostasy
Righhhht... Do Indian nationalist supremists have it in for Christians or is it just you? Would those murderous "inquisitions" somehow explain how the Ashkenazim have upto 60% Southern European by some genetic measures? You know Rome was the primary center of the early church, yes? But all those Jewish converts were murdered by "Xtians" by your imaginary "inquisition" histories? At least you recognize the existence of European genes in modern elite Jews refutes your imagined anti-"Xtian" inquisition savagery.
Please use your head more than your hatred when posting. I've known a number of Christian-Indian couples and am curious if this anti-"Xtian" hatred is a fringe thing or a more common Indian belief I'm missing? Check out the blog Christian Terror and Agression in India.
Well the list has one fewer Jew: Bernie Madoff buddy Jeffry Picower was just found...at the bottom of his swimming pool.
ReplyDeleteThe most intelligent Europeans were basically funneled (i.e., forced) in to the priesthood for a very long time, and the loss of their 'smart genes' has lead to the partial intellectual degeneration of European peoples.
ReplyDeleteAs others before me have said "Horsefeathers!" as far as affecting IQ in Europe. But you do have a point, as I will show.
The percentage of priests (and nuns) was way too small to have had that large an effect, and in any case, there were plenty of women with analagous IQs, reproducing themselves. Also, it didn't take THAT much brains to be the average priest; most could barely read. Some religous orders were especially consecrated to books and study, but most priests were not. In fact, religous orders were probably more of a refuge for high IQ women than men. Nunneries, at least of certain orders, were about the only organizations where female intellect was encouraged and many women entered them quite willingly. St. Teresa of Spain who would have been declared a doctor of the Church, except for being a woman, was one such person.
Still, celibacy was not mandatory for priests, only for monks (in theory and law if not practice) until well into the middle ages. All that being said, one must be struck by the number of "great" men and women born into clergy families, among the Protestant countries. Because I am American, I am more aware of the English speaking areas. People such as Jane Austen and the Brontes, and Lewis Carroll come to mind immediately, but many, many others also, who excelled in science, letters and politics. American clergy also had intellectually active families during the pre-20th century days, and even Scandinavia, i.e. Ingmar Bergman.
Protestant clergy families did possess a singular culture and probably did contribute more to progress than we realize.
So while I don't think the "celibacy" of priests could make much difference genetically (not enough of them really being celibate), the cultural aspect of a "breeding" clergy class probably did make a big difference in Protestant vs. Catholic culture.
Here's a discussion of hair color among Jews, with tables showing the share of Jews with blonde and red hair by country prior to WWI:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=H&artid=93
About 1/3 were blonde or red...
Apparently, according to one blogger, only 30% of America's Rich are Jewish.
ReplyDeleteAnd he says that "[Sailer's] analysis has only entertainment value for me and antisemitic propaganda content for others."
Hear that? Breaking down the Forbes 400 by ethnicity has entertainment value solely for that blogger. For everyone else it's an exercise in anti-Semitic propaganda.
As is well known, many non-Jewish Russians immigrated to Israel within the past couple decades, many serving in the military.
ReplyDeleteNon-Jewish according to halakha (which stipulates matrilineal descent) but not according to the civil right of return law, which states that anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent (or the spouse of such a person) is eligible to immigrate.
In short, for the purpose of discussing genetics - these Russians may be part-Jewish, but they're not non-Jews.
I support your contention that Ashkenazi Jews have more Northern European blood in them than is claimed, but linking to a "Babes of the IDF" pictorial on Maxim is hardly scientific evidence of that.
ReplyDeleteI never said that it was scientific evidence, a rather meaningless term in any case. I said that the evidence of our eyes tells us that European Jews are not overwhelmingly Semetic or Southern European. I personally know Jews with red hair who could pass for Vikings.
linking to a "Babes of the IDF" pictorial on Maxim is hardly scientific evidence
ReplyDeleteYou know you liked it. Would you really prefer a link to some boring research paper?
I've come across plenty of blonde and redheaded Jews that look, well, Jewish.
ReplyDeleteThey'll have light coloration of hair and eyes coupled with certain characteristically "Jewish" features such as curly/less straight hair, narrow face, eyes set close together, heavy lidded eyes, prominent nose, mouth shape, etc.
I don't understand why this is such a controversial issue. It seems to largely divide into to equally wrong positions: 1. That blondism/light coloration doesn't or can't exist among Jews. 2. Having blonde hair/light coloration means that you automatically look indistinguishably "Nordic" with "Nordic" facial morphology/features.
The fact of the matter is that, yes, there are blonde/redheaded Jews, and no, they don't look the same as Northern Europeans nor are they indistinguishable from them. They look like what you'd expect, Jewish/Mediterranean with light coloration.
There's a similar effect with many South Asians. Many of them will have strong Caucasian facial morphology, but have very dark skin and hair. They look like Caucasians in blackface or something.
linking to a "Babes of the IDF" pictorial on Maxim is hardly scientific evidence
ReplyDeleteHaha, I suspect so too... Americans marry Israeli men considerably more (almost 2:1) than Israeli women. A similarly lopsided ratio is found only for British, Irish, and New Zealand men over women. And last I knew, British Isles women weren't famed for their beauty, to put it lightly.
Anon wrote
ReplyDelete--
those Jewish converts were murdered by "Xtians" by your imaginary "inquisition" histories? At least you recognize the existence of European genes in modern elite Jews refutes your imagined anti-"Xtian" inquisition savagery.
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At the time of the Roman Jewish wars from 70 AD to 130 AD , about 10% of the Roman Empire was jewish
There had been significant intermarriage between hellenised jews and greeks
Hence the south east european genes in Ashkenazi jews
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Regarding Indian-xtian intermarriage,
In India, any Indian religionist marrying a xtian ( and especially muslim ) will get 99% outcasted
In the diaspora, some marriages do occur with nominal non-practising xtians and some of these may escape outcasting, depending on the specifics of each case
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Church Inquisition against apostasy in India, 1550 - 1800
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa_Inquisition
The Goa Inquisition was the office of the Inquisition acting in the Indian state of Goa and the rest of the Portuguese empire in Asia. It was established in 1560, briefly suppressed from 1774-1778, and finally abolished in 1812.[1]
. In Goa, the Inquisition also turned its attention to Indian converts from Hinduism or Islam who were thought to have returned to their original ways. In addition, the Inquisition prosecuted non-converts who broke prohibitions against the observance of Hindu or Muslim rites or interfered with Portuguese attempts to convert non-Christians to Catholicism.[2]
Based on the records that survive, H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon state that between the Inquisition's beginning in 1561 and its temporary abolition in 1774, some 16,202 persons were brought to trial by the Inquisition
In Europe, the Goa Inquisition became notorious for its cruelty and use of torture, and the French philosopher Voltaire wrote "Goa is sadly famous for its inquisition, which is contrary to humanity as much as to commerce. The Portuguese monks deluded us into believing that the Indian populace was worshiping The Devil, while it is they who served him."[4]
"2,500 years ago, Jews had stone architecture, cities, roads, engineering, metal-working, a written language, the bible, etc."
ReplyDeleteThe pentatuech wasn't written down until around 500BC. Nice try though.
500 BC was 2500 years ago.
ReplyDelete"akin to the relationship between Korea/Japan/Vietnam with the hub civilization of China"
ReplyDeleteA typically Chinese-American assertion, however Japan shouldn't be lumped with the others. It's like saying England rotates around the "hub" of Germany, simply because English is Germanic and they share a bit of history -- and yet historically and culturally they have taken very different paths. For Korea and Vietnam, you may have a point.
"The navigator Zheng He explored sea routes to India, the Middle East Africa, Indonesia and Siam in 7 voyages over 30-90yrs before Columbus arrived in the Carribean."
ReplyDeleteThe purpose of Chinese exploring was to impress the world at how great the Chinese were, not out of any particular curiousity about the world.
""2,500 years ago, Jews had stone architecture, cities, roads, engineering, metal-working, a written language, the bible, etc."
ReplyDeleteThe pentatuech wasn't written down until around 500BC. Nice try though."
LOL. Didn't know "Truth" commented as Anonymous as well.
rec1man
ReplyDeleteFirst you need to read Constantines Sword and other scholarly books on the decline of non-xtian religions after Constantine, and on how Euro Xtians used religious persecution to go from 5% at the time of Constantine to 99% soon after
First, it should be obvious to you that James Carroll’s "Constantine’s Sword" is NOT a scholarly book despite its anti-Christian and anti-Western propaganda that is popular among lefty PC pseudo intellectuals. It is written by a journalist with no historical background who stormed out of the Catholic priesthood during the hippie era and has made his excommunication a point a pride in one of his books. The guy is a reactionary whiner and his many one-trick screeds against Catholics are about as useful in learning about Catholic Church as the Protocols are about understanding Judaism. (BTW, he is also where you get your unsubstantiated and likely equally unreliable "fact" that 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish.)
Most 1 star reviews on Amazon are from nuts with nothing but ad-homs. Carroll is such a egregious liar and manipulator even the well-informed and reasoned critics are filling the 1 star reviews. This is a good summary (many others provide details debunking many of Carroll’s specific claims):
I can't judge the religion of the author. I don't share the endless fascination of many of our reviewers for the man's excommunication from the Catholic Church.
As a professional historian, I can say that this book is not a book of history, as it claims to be. The author has not used primary sources to construct his case on the Catholic Church's attitude toward the Jews. Many of the secondary sources he uses (such as John Cornwell's discredited book) are not considered serious by professional historians. On the rare occasion when the author does use primary sources, he clearly distorts the source. I've noted at least ten Church documents where the author draws out several phrases that appear to be anti-Semitic, but where he ignores passages (in the same document) which explicitly condemn violence against Jews.
Rarely have I read a book that so ruthlessly cuts the evidence to suit the author's personal biases.
I'm completely baffled by the end of the book, where suddenly the author launches into Bob Dylan, contraception, women priests, and a hundred other topics that have nothing to do with the Jews.
By the end of this overstuffed work I had the sickening feeling that the suffering of the Jews had been used as a means to end. The author had developed a cartoon of Catholic anti-Semitism in order to attack John Paul II, a man who has made extraordinary overtures to the Jewish community.
I think the average Jewess may well be less attractive than the average northern european, but the top 10% among Jewish women are definitely better looking (same goes with Greeks, Turks, and Italians) - a certain sparkle in the eyes, like a young Natalie Portman. See, for instance, here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jv_x0vG5Ks
rec1man
ReplyDeleteRe: the Goa Inquisition.
Did not think no one would follow the wiki link you cited and actually read the entry? You intentionally truncated your quote which reads in full as:
Based on the records that survive, H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon state that between the Inquisition's beginning in 1561 and its temporary abolition in 1774, some 16,202 persons were brought to trial by the Inquisition. Of this number, it is known that 57 were sentenced to death and executed in person
So 57 known deaths by Christians judging only other self-professed Christians (incl converts) over 248yrs in Goa is your idea of a bloody Christian holocaust against non-Christians? That is a shocking 0.2 deaths per year and 0 committed against non-Christians. No wonder "the Goa Inquisition became notorious for its cruelty and use of torture".
I can see why you can only cite Carroll's "Constantine's Sword" for your anti-"Xtian" propaganda - you follow his same high integrity journalistic standards to justify your ends.
"They'll have light coloration of hair and eyes coupled with certain characteristically "Jewish" features such as curly/less straight hair, narrow face, eyes set close together, heavy lidded eyes, prominent nose, mouth shape, etc."
ReplyDeleteThese are features of a certain subset of Ashkenazi Jews, not all. There are many who don't fit this phenotype. Some could pass for Slavs or Balts or Greeks or Italians, depending on their various admixtures. Some look distinctly Jewish in other ways but are nevertheless attractive.
"There's a similar effect with many South Asians. Many of them will have strong Caucasian facial morphology"
Uh, because they are Caucasians, perhaps? The U.S. government defining them as "Asians" for the purposes of minority set asides doesn't make them non-Caucasians.
"Haha, I suspect so too... Americans marry Israeli men considerably more (almost 2:1) than Israeli women."
This may have more to do with Israeli men being more adventurous and more willing to move overseas. From my experience, Israeli women are quite attractive, more attractive than a random sample of American women. It may have something to do with the unique melange of interbreeding in Israel or it may be more of a "California effect", where living in a sunny, Mediterranean climate encourages more exercise, attention to personal appearance, and healthy living.
I think the average Jewess may well be less attractive than the average northern european, but the top 10% among Jewish women are definitely better looking (same goes with Greeks, Turks, and Italians) - a certain sparkle in the eyes, like a young Natalie Portman. See, for instance, here:
ReplyDeleteLet's stop pointing to individual examples to make strong claims about large samples.
I think the average Jewess may well be less attractive than the average northern european, but the top 10% among Jewish women are definitely better looking
ReplyDeleteI think you're a very poor judge of women.
Jews tend to be overepresented in showbiz, for reasons having nothing to do with their looks or talent.
rec1man
ReplyDeleteThere is a sort of Godwins Law which states that anybody who cites Wikipedia in support of his position loses by default.
according to the civil right of return law, which states that anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent (or the spouse of such a person) is eligible to immigrate.
ReplyDeleteIn short, for the purpose of discussing genetics - these Russians may be part-Jewish, but they're not non-Jews.
Actually the spouse of a person of Jewish descent may very well be genetically non-Jewish, and frequently is.
There is a small but growing populaton of "non-Arab non-Jews" in Israel, who give a real headache to that countries self-definion as a ethnically Jewish state.
As for whether or not the red-haired Russian Jews are "really" Jewish or mot, the old one-drop rule applies here and says that they are Jewsh if they want to be.
But it makes a mockery of those who like to insist on the fable of untainted Jewish bloodlines stretching back thousands of years.
The fact of the matter is that, yis, there are blonde/redheaded Jews, and no, they don't look the same as Northern Europeans nor are they indistinguishable from them.
ReplyDeleteYou're ignoring the evidence of your eyes. The fact is that there is no such thing as "Jewish features". Even the sterotytpical Jewish features of swarthy skin and hooked noses are Semitic features. That is to say, features shared by all the Semitic people, of which Jews are only a part.
And there are a great many Jews who look identical to their host populations.
It's interesting that so many people here have such a large emotional investment in the purity of Jewish blood, an attitude which in anybody else would be considered downright Nazi-like.
First you need to read Constantines Sword and other scholarly books on the decline of non-xtian religions after Constantine
ReplyDeleteI repeat, there are some shockingly ignorant people commenting on this site.
Incidentally, what's with all this "xtain" nonsense? Does the word "Christ" scare you so much you can't even type it?
So 57 known deaths by Christians judging only other self-professed Christians (incl converts) over 248yrs in Goa is your idea of a bloody Christian holocaust against non-Christians? That is a shocking 0.2 deaths per year and 0 committed against non-Christians. No wonder "the Goa Inquisition became notorious for its cruelty and use of torture".
ReplyDeleteAgreed. The Holy Inquisition (its official name) was set up primarily to prevent trouble against the Catholic Church, hence its very targeted thrust. The fantastic tales of Holocaust-style persecution and extermination were thought up by anti-Catholic intellectuals and had no basis in reality.
This may have more to do with Israeli men being more adventurous and more willing to move overseas. From my experience, Israeli women are quite attractive, more attractive than a random sample of American women. It may have something to do with the unique melange of interbreeding in Israel or it may be more of a "California effect", where living in a sunny, Mediterranean climate encourages more exercise, attention to personal appearance, and healthy living.
I wouldn't really agree about being "more adventurous" and willing to move overseas, since I don't see why it should affect Israeli men more than men of other countries. I have also heard things to the effect that Israeli women, even if they aren't actually ugly, do have relatively bad attitudes or other aspects which turn men off, i.e., the Jewish Princess factor. Physical attractiveness may have been improved by what you're talking about, outbreeding (Jews used to inbreed just as bad as Muslims do; the youngest Rothschild brother married his oldest brother's daughter) and a "California effect". This same effect might explain, for instance, why Australians are noticeably more attractive than their cousins in the British Isles.
Fred wrote
ReplyDeleteThere's a similar effect with many South Asians. Many of them will have strong Caucasian facial morphology"
Uh, because they are Caucasians, perhaps? The U.S. government defining them as "Asians" for the purposes of minority set asides doesn't make them non-Caucasians.
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I wish that the US govt will classify Indians as Caucasians
That way we need just 1460 SAT to get into the Ivy league colleges, instead of 1600 SAT we need as Asians
It will be easier to compete against whites than Chinese
As far as the small business loans go, the Gujurati businessmen can use their caste network instead
Recman, pretty much everyone knows "Xtian" is a Christophobic convention.
ReplyDeleteJust saying.
Let's push this above 200 comments...
ReplyDeleterec1man
Outside a few established Christian communities in India, most Hindus marrying Christians in India would be marrying lower caste converts. In the West, the Hindu Indians I've seen marry rather attractive blonde middle to upper class Christian doctors, academics, researchers, and nurses. This seems to explain the taboo differences you noted.
Indian groups have been consulting with Jewish groups to try to reproduce their successes in transitioning to the West. Indians will fail for two fundamental reasons.
Hinduism is not very compatible with Western elightenment, egalitarism, democracies and monotheastic traditions with relatively alien concepts like out group charity and sanctity of all life. Also, you can't tell the vast majority of your population (non-Brahims and women) and the dominant Western world that they suck without withdrawing from modernity like much of the Arab world.
Secondly, elites and people of exceptional talents are increasingly globalized. The growing number of talented Indians that outmarry and all their gifted offspring are almost always lost to the Indian community for all practical purposes. This is a permanent, one way genetic and resource drain away from India (NE Asia suffers this as well).
To the point that rec1man raised, Indian special interests lobbied hard for their minority status and the free flow of government monies reserved for such. On the otherhand, I've never heard of any Indian lobbies fighting to be classified as caucasian to avoid the reverse discrimmination other Asians face. Can't have it both ways.
"Haha, I suspect so too... Americans marry Israeli men considerably more (almost 2:1) than Israeli women. A similarly lopsided ratio is found only for British, Irish, and New Zealand men over women. And last I knew, British Isles women weren't famed for their beauty, to put it lightly."
ReplyDeleteI'd suggest the man/woman disparity is best explained by the fact that my accent would make your wife's underwear melt like butter under a hot grill.
Any charges that could be levied against British women could be levied double against American women. They do not age well, a strongly expressed tendency towards fatness that is sometimes taken to extremes.
"This same effect might explain, for instance, why Australians are noticeably more attractive than their cousins in the British Isles."
Plenty of Australians come over here and I've not noticed it. They tend to age terribly under the hot sun as well.
I am the author of "Desi by Marriage." I'd like to clarify that I did not become a Hindu, a vegetarian, or adopt Hindu culture in an attempt to "snag" a husband. I had already been involved in the culture and had been a vegetarian for fifteen years. I, have also--never been a follower of the Christian faith.
ReplyDeleteWhile it may be accurate in some cases, I don't think it's smart to make a generalization that all "white nurses want to find a rich husband and pretend to be all things India to trap a Hindu doctor."
The couples I interviewed for my essay share both east and west values. Neither of the Americans interviewed (not the man, or the woman) gave up their American identity to marry an Indian. They live happily blended lives by choice.