Quick Take: The Myth of the Persecutions that Made Jews Smart

It wasn't persecution that selected Jews for intelligence, but religiousness, self-isolation and urbanization

One of the world’s oldest and most pervasive urban-intellectual legends explains the intellectual excellence of Ashkenazi Jews as a byproduct of racist persecution throughout the Middle Ages, which would allegedly have created a super-race of Jewish survivors specialized in turning the tables on evil Goyim.

In this old, 2017 post, Scott Alexander summarizes the theory:

Due to persecution, Jews were pushed into cognitively-demanding occupations like banker or merchant and forced to sink or swim. The ones who swam – people who were intellectually up to the challenge – had more kids than the ones who sank, producing an evolutionary pressure in favor of intelligence greater than that in any other ethnic group. Just as Africans experiencing evolutionary pressure for malaria resistance developed the sickle cell gene, so Ashkenazim experiencing evolutionary pressure for intelligence developed a bunch of genes which increased heterozygotes’ IQ but caused serious genetic disease in homozygotes. As a result, Ashkenazi ended up somewhat more intelligent – and somewhat more prone to genetic disease – than the rest of the European population. If true, this would explain the 27% of Nobel Prizes and 50% of world chess champions thing.

Most of the words in this paragraph are perfectly right. There are three very important words that are wrong:

It’s important to understand that ancient Jews were never considered particularly intelligent people. Graeco-Roman literature, in particular, is full of off-hand references to Jews as being rather primitive and lacking in any appealing intellectual sophistication.

The Jews did have a cognitive, intellectual elite, like most other Eurasian societies, and may have been marginally more literate, on average, than most Levantine societies by the time Christianity appeared. They were not more literate than Graeco-Romans and their cognitive elite was, of course, tiny and pitifully inadequate compared with the extraordinary figures produced by Graeco-Roman antiquity. I wrote about this here:

Greeks Vs Jews

The Jews’ lack of an intellectual reputation was a problem when their holy book, the Bible, started to become popular among the Roman lower classes and some Graeco-Roman intellectual perceived the possibilities it offered to reinvigorate flagging religious sentiment among a brutalized populace.

The biggest barrier that educated Greeks and Romans found to adopt the new religion, indeed, was the conventional construction of the Jewish (and later Christian) deity, “so self-evidently primitive as to be embarrassing,” as Philip Jenkins wrote.

Indeed, two failed Jewish revolts against the Romans — the First Jewish-Roman Revolt of 66-74 AD and the Bar-Kokhba Revolt of 132-136 AD — may have facilitated the adoption of Christianity as they set the Jews starkly apart from the Christians, allowing Graeco-Roman intellectuals to work on making the new religion more acceptable to their own tastes.

Importantly for Jewish history, the second of these revolts, with an aftermath of large-scale massacres and expulsions, led in effect to the rise of Talmudic Judaism.

The Bar-Kokhba Revolt was great evidence that ancient Jews were not cognitively anything to write home about. If you excuse my French, it was the most moronic uprising ever conducted by anyone for any reason anywhere: it wasn’t just that Jewish leaders decided that they would defeat the most powerful empire on Earth at the absolute peak of its military effectiveness, or that they did it while the empire was ruled by possibly the nicest man to ever have had such absolute power — Hadrian — and also one of the smartest.

No. It gets even worse: there are good reasons to think the whole uprising was the result of a stupid misunderstanding. You see, Hadrian (like most of the Graeco-Roman intellectual class) hated the Oriental custom of castration, so he banned it. And, it appears, the Jewish priestly elite misunderstood this and thought that the crazy barbarian was banning sacred circumcision.

The reaction to this debacle was key to the Jewish future. For generations, Jews had prided themselves on being the craziest suicidal motherfuckers of the Levant, so Samson brought down a temple upon himself to kill Philistines and the heroes of Maccabees stabbed Greek elephants on the underbelly even though gravity recommends against the idea. After the Bar-Kokhba thing, the Jewish elite said “enough of this nonsense.”

Defeated and scattered across the Roman and Iranian lands, a closely-watched, suspect minority in their own homeland, under pressure from the Christian schism that was growing fast and removing faithful from synagogues, 3rd century Jews reacted with vigor to the difficulties they faced: and this propaganda response, focused on challenging the claims made by Christianity, was first articulated from around 200 by Judah ben Simon (called “ha-Nasi,” the Prince), a Palestinian rabbi who wrote the Mishnah, a written compendium of the Oral Torah that forms one half of what later was called the Talmud.

The Talmud, and the Mishnah in particular, is an unashamed nationalist defense of ethnic Jewish nationalism and traditions, often verging on the absurd: in a remarkable moment of ethnocentrism, the founding of the city of Rome is explained as the result of sediment accumulated around a reed placed during King Solomon’s times , a result of Israel’s sins; and it’s revealing that such sins ultimately came back to haunt Jews when, centuries later, they fell under Roman dominion.

Talmudic law is all about reconciling loyalties in the course of everyday life, the exact way in which Sabbath laws may be subject to exemption, the right way to conduct rituals. No more hero stuff. The typically Greek search of the ideal and the sublime is absent in Jewish texts from the 3rd century onwards. Jews, once convinced that God himself had become their personal guide through the desert on the way out of Egypt, removing all obstacles from their path, turned to everyday minutiae, to a survival mode, a focus on family- and community-building.

Judaism had once been a (not overly enthusiastic) proselytizing religion; many Jewish diaspora communities, in Rome, Alexandria and elsewhere, had welcomed these seekers and inquirers, sometimes enraging Roman officials in the process. Such Judaizers had spread Jewish themes and attitudes in the larger culture, and the result had been Christianity – so Talmudic Judaism firmly shut the door on any more proselytism.

That attitude explains the animus displayed in the Talmud not only against the external enemy but, very particularly, against the internal enemy. Since the Bar Kokhba revolt was perceived as a terrible mistake that had led to the disappearance of the Sadducees as a separate group, the list of religious holidays sanctioned in the Mishnah includes no commemoration of the event or of those who gave their life in the foolish attempt to expel the foreign oppressor.

Public debate with dissidents was discouraged under the idea of “killing by silence.” The concept of Mesirah (“hand over”) appears as the sinful conduct of those who seek to handle the community’s business in public, by reporting it to outside authorities – an idea that was absurd when the outside authorities, until the Bar Kokhba era, frequently were Jews themselves.

The dissident 2nd century rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah, who sided with Roman occupiers, is presented as a being so thoroughly corrupted by his heretic views that he’s referred to as “The Other.” To provide an example of his learned, profound betrayal of Judaism, the Jerusalem Talmud explains that Abuyah instructed Romans on how to detect religious Jews who avoided violating Sabbath labor prohibitions by carrying loads jointly.

As Judaism evolved from a religion of public ritual into a religion based on the study and transmission of texts, it expelled the dumbest, poorest elements from its midst. We can couch this as nicely as we want, but the whole gamut of elite policies imposed on the Jewish population throughout the Talmudic era is best summarized in a single slogan that, to the best of my knowledge, was never actually used:

WE NEED BETTER JEWS

As explained by by Maristella Botticini & Zvi Eckstein in "The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492," (Princeton UP, 2012), over the centuries farmers and manual laborers with not enough money, time or interest in sending their kids to Talmudic schools drifted away from the religion and into the largest denominations, first Christianity and later Islam. That is something that was already noted by Max Weber in “Ancient Judaism” (1917), when he pointed out that self-segregation to ensure the purity of religious observance had deep economic implications for the Jewish people in the long run:

“A truly correct observance of the ritual was made extremely difficult for peasants… Observance of the true Levitical purity commandments, which the exemplary pious propagated increasingly, were well nigh impossible for the peasants in contrast to the city people… Moreover, Jews living among foreign peoples could hardly maintain a ritually correct way of life in rural areas. The center of gravity of Jewry had to shift increasingly in the direction of a transformation into an urban pariah people – as, indeed, came to pass.”

None of this was a reaction to external pressure or hostility. The Jews weren’t popular among other peoples in places like Alexandria and, to some extent, the city of Rome itself, but there was no Roman-era antisemitism, rather a series of isolated local conflicts of an ethnic nature in which Jews, as the largest minority present throughout the empire – excluding Greeks – often featured. The friction between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, the worst, most pronounced racial friction of antiquity, was not driven by Greek dislike for Jews: it was a mutual sentiment .

A millennium later, firm and clear boundaries, including laws about residence in specific neighborhoods – “ghettoes” – as well as jobs and the legal standing of people of different religions would be widespread across the Mediterranean and beyond; that was not the case in antiquity or in the early Middle Ages. Collaboration across the ethnic and religious divide in multiple spheres of life, from civic projects to political arrangements, was common under the Romans (as well as the Iranians, Kushan and Chinese) and, indeed, a bit of a theme for the empire itself, and other, future empires to come.

Remarkably, Talmudic Judaism soon became an Islamic thing. The barbarian invasions and multiple disruptions suffered by Europe led to the disappearance of Jewish communities there, except the ones in relatively stable Visigoth Spain — the one Western European state that retained Roman law and social arrangements. And, by the early 8th century, even the Spanish Jews were under Muslim rule.

Frustrated and disappointed, but not really oppressed or persecuted, Judaism under Islamic government became even more self-regarding than before. About 75% of all Jews in the world in the 8th and 9th centuries lived in Iraq and Iran, mostly working – like Christians and Muslims – as wage laborers, farmers or sharecroppers, but the effects of the stress put on education by Talmudic Judaism were evident in that a larger percentage of Jews had moved to the region’s large, flourishing cities, taking advantage of their higher literacy levels to take up well-paid, higher status jobs in city trades , or as scribes and accountants.

Jews, who in particular were often better educated and more entrepreneurial than the average Muslim, did find success as government advisors and officials, occasionally, and often as merchants. This only accelerated the pre-existing trend under which the smarter Jews who were able to put their education to good use moved to the cities and joined ever larger Jewish congregations there, while those who struggled with literacy requirements or didn’t have the money to have their children educated, typically rural Jews, gave up their religion and became Muslim (just like they would have earlier become Christian) to stop paying the jizya.

Between 750 and 900, almost all the Jews in Iraq and Iran who remained Jewish left agriculture, moved to the cities and towns of the newly established Abbasid Empire, entering many skilled occupations. Having abandoned agriculture, many began migrating to Yemen, Syria, Egypt, and the Maghreb seeking new opportunities and lesser competition than they found in overcrowded cities like Baghdad, Samarra and Damascus.

This is also the time when the new tide of Jewish migrations reached Carolingian Europe and southern, Byzantine Italy, sowing the seeds of the later Ashkenazim — crucially, after Talmudic Judaism had already made Jews an almost entirely urban minority. By 900, the Jewish population of the Middle East and North Africa was overwhelmingly urban and, by the mid-12th century, essentially no Jewish farmers were left anywhere on the planet. No persecutions or discrimination had been needed to make the Jews the bookish kids on the block.

In a region generally populated by illiterate people – as most Christians and Muslims of Western Eurasia were – the ability to read and write contracts, business letters, and account books using a common alphabet gave the Jews a comparative advantage. They were helped by their uniform code of law (the Talmud) and a set of institutions (including rabbinic courts providing legal arbitrage) that fostered contract enforcement, as well as an ever more complex religion that functioned as a secret handshake.

Liturgical and theological (“Gaonic”) documents show that Jewish communities were extremely well connected with each other and were very responsive to ruling and dicta from respected authorities. There’s surviving correspondence between influential Geonim (“heads”) of leading Iraqi academies and Jewish communities in distant places like Barcelona and Tarragona, in northern Spain, as well as Islamic Sicily.

This shrinking, highly literate minority produced copious documentation about business practices, Gaonic consultations and all other sorts of communications across the Middle East and further away. Business and personal communications, often written in casual Arabic transcribed into Hebrew letters, help to delineate a group of chatty co-religionists capable of shifting codes, being able to speak the Arabic lingua franca, and also able to hide information from others who wouldn’t be able to read Hebrew characters.

A great deal of that material was preserved in dumps because all religious concerns about destroying documents in the sacred Hebrew alphabet, and the most productive and famous of those dumps – the “Geniza” or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Egypt’s Fustat – has provided loads of evidence from between the 6th and 19th century about the main concerns and activities of Jewish communities in three continents, engaged in about 450 occupations altogether including synagogue teachers, scholars, administrators and cantors, of which farming is the least common and crafts, trade, moneylending and medicine the most common .

In 787, Iraqi Geonim decreed that debts from orphans and women’s dowries could be exacted from movable property (as well as landed property, as had been the custom before), in a ruling that was dispatched to all Jewish communities in the Diaspora – and was complemented years later by a related ruling that explained that this change was necessary because most Jewish people did no longer own land estates. In a world of illiterate peasants and soldiers, the Jews were now a cognitive elite.

The argument I just presented raises the question of how to place Eastern Jews (Mizrahi) within this larger context. By 1939, Mizrahi were possibly under 10% of all Jews and they had a small contribution to the creation of the state of Israel, mostly an Ashkenazi project. Still, various studies place the average IQ of Mizrahi somewhat below that of Ashkenazi. My impression is that, given that the difference is not great, this is easily explained by the fact that Mizrahi lived for generations in poorer regions — mostly Iran, Mesopotamia and the Maghreb — which curtailed their IQ potential, much as the lack of the development in Sub-Saharan Africa does much to depress average IQ there.

One final point. Botticini & Eckstein explain (p. 52) how 19th century scholars like Israel Abrahams and Cecil Roth popularized the false explanation that Jews specialized in trade and moneylending because of constraints and prohibitions on owning land. As they argue, this explanation was consistent with the contemporary reality of these historians, since Jews were often persecuted in Europe and the Zionist movement that eventually created the State of Israel was rising:

“Their apologetic views of the history of the Jews should be understood in the context of this cultural and political milieu.”

Jews were never banned from owning land either in the Roman Empire or its successor states like Byzantium, or in the Muslim caliphates. Many medieval documents (including thousands of contracts, letters, business partnerships, account books, deeds, and wills) and the rabbinic responsa (comprising debates and court cases) refer to the sale and purchase of land and other transactions involving landholdings.

The first restrictions on Jewish land-ownership only appear in some charters from around the 14th and 15th centuries in Central Europe, and are possibly explained by the accumulation of estates by rich town dwellers, rather than a desire to keep (non-existent) Jewish farmers away. The fact that the Jews became an urban minority at a time when they overwhelmingly lived in Islamic lands, facing no religious persecution, makes it possible to reject the alternative explanation that they preferred to invest in human capital, fearful of having their assets stolen.

The Samaritans (and later the Druze), additionally, serve as a counter-example: they were mostly farmers at the start of the 1st millennium, and remained mostly farmers throughout, despite facing many of the same socioeconomic and political pressures as the Jews; and ethnic persecution certainly is not a direct route to widespread literacy, as the example provided by the Gypsies shows.