Who are the Jews?

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Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People
Harry Ostrer
Oxford University Press: 2012
288pp., $24.95

Are Jews a religion or race?

This is the age-old question that medical geneticist Harry Ostrer tackles in his concise but informative book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People.

As Professor of Pathology and Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Director of Genetic and Genomic Testing at Montefiore Medical Center, as well as former Director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University’s School of Medicine, Ostrer has devoted much of his career to unraveling the DNA sequencing of recessive genetic disorders common among Jews, such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher disease. After two decades of medical research, he explains that Jews share more than religious and cultural traditions — a common biological bond links Jews throughout the Diaspora.

This body of work has led Ostrer to conclude that Jews are genetically related worldwide. Three millennia of selective breeding have created a distinct population with unique racial characteristics. Within this broad isolated population, diverse ethnic tribes formed and branched out. Mutual genes serve as the ancestral linkage between major Jewish tribes: Ashkenazi (who are related to one another on average as fifth cousins), Sephardic, Eurasian Khazars, Middle Eastern, and Mizrahi or African Jews.

Legacy is a slim book that incorporates history, natural selection, population genetics, evolutionary psychology, and contemporary medical findings. The author’s quest for the basis of Jewish origins and identity forms the basic storyline of Legacy. Each chapter highlights various aspects of Jewish ancestry: physical measurements and characteristics, DNA studies, blood groupings, genealogical evidence, tribal lineage, physical and psychological traits, and, finally, the crux of Jewish identity. The result is an informative overview of 25 years of detective work unraveling the genetic kinship of Jews. Read more

Jewish Intelligence

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Editor’s note: This was originally posted on August 19, 2007 on my website, before TOO was established. I re-post it here to encourage comments and because it remains relevant given continuing interest in Jewish IQ—e.g., Richard Lynn’s The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement (Whitefish, MT: Washington Summit Publishers, 2011). Lynn finds that the average IQ for Ashkenazi Jews is 110, for Sephardic Jews 98-99, Oriental Jews 91, and Falasha Jews (a largely African group genetically) < 70. Lynn’s book will be reviewed by F. Roger Devlin in the Summer issue of The Occidental Quarterly (see also “Are Jews Smarter“). The focus on IQ in this article does not imply that ethnic networking is unimportant, for example, in admission to elite universities. Thus taking Richard Lynn’s estimates of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ and correcting for the greater numbers of European Whites in America, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews should be around 7 to 1 (IQ >130) or  4.5 to 1 (IQ > 145). Instead, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews is around 1 to 1 or less. There is also presumptive ethnic networking at work in particular niches, such as Hollywood and other forms of media where Jews are represented far beyond anything predicted by IQ  (see, e.g., Edmund Connelly’s work and this recent blog on Jewish networking in literature and art). As noted often in TOO, the problem is not that Jews are an elite. The problem is that they have a long track record as a hostile elite —hostile to the people and the culture of the West.

Jewish intelligence has become a hot topic following the publication of a paper by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending in The Journal of Biological Science. Charles Murray weighed in with an article in Commentary (“Jewish Genius”, April, 2007). Murray’s theory is quite a bit like the one I published in my 1994 book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (Ch. 7). I discussed eugenic events such as the Babylonian exile in which the elite Israelites were relocated to Babylon and refused to intermarry with those left behind when they returned (as graphically recounted in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah). I also described a great deal of discrimination against the illiterate in the ancient world, with the effect that such people were excluded from the Jewish community. Marriage to such a person was especially abhorrent. And I recounted the history of Jewish education and Jewish idealization of the scholar, including especially the practice of wealthy Jews marrying their daughters to scholars and providing them with business opportunities. Because wealth was correlated with reproductive success in traditional societies, this had the effect of eugenic selection for intelligence. All of these practices originated in the ancient world and are well attested among both Ashkenazi and Sephardic populations in later centuries. Read more

Remembering Andy Griffith (1926-2012)

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Like many middle-aged white adults, the news of Andy Griffith’s death yesterday brought back memories of my youth. Such somber reflection is quite depressing considering how much our country has changed in such a short amount of time.

Thirty-five and forty years ago, one’s after-school choices were rather limited. I usually spent my free time playing with friends if I wasn’t fishing with my grandfather.

As pastime activities, our generation lacked modern electronic gadgets. The Stone Age — the period prior to modern conveniences of the Internet, iPads, iPods, personal computers, or smart phones — offered few choices for entertainment. Jigsaw puzzles, board games like Monopoly and Ouija, or a deck of cards provided some relief on rainy days.

Ever reliable sitcoms, such as the “Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Gomer Pyle, USMC,” “Green Acres,” and “The Andy Griffith Show,” would get us through the week until Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Tweety and Sylvester, Speedy Gonzales, and Foghorn Leghorn hit the TV screen on Saturday mornings.

As an adolescent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I spent countless hours watching reruns of the “Andy Griffith Show” (1960–1968) well into the late 1970s. Part of it was the simple fact that there wasn’t that much to do coming of age in the semi-rural Midwest. The other thing is that one could relate to the characters and mundane existence of Mayberry, RFD.

It was the one show that reflected the reality of small-town America where few if any Blacks or ethnic minorities lived; one could roam freely without fear of assault, rape, robbery or homicidal gang violence; neighbors helped each other in time of need and routinely never felt compelled to lock their doors or windows at night. Daily life in vast stretches of Middle America wasn’t the endless slutty, self-indulgent, mind-numbing, interracial onslaught of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” or for that matter much of today’s Disney Channel productions. Read more

Heinrich Heine: German Lyric Poet and Jewish Political Agitator

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A hundred years before Adolf Hitler assumed power an event occurred in Germany that was a harbinger of worse things to come in the relations between Germans and Jews. It was the German reaction to the “Young Germany” movement led by several young Jews whose aim it was to introduce certain liberal social reforms, including greater opportunities for Jews in all aspects of German society. In the course of their campaign, the participants said and did things that German authorities and large segments of the population found insulting and offensive. At the center of the movement and considered by many the personification of the Jewish mentality and nature was world-famous poet Heinrich Heine.

Heine was a sorely conflicted man. While still young he quickly rose to be recognized as Germany’s greatest Romantic poet after Goethe. Because of the beauty and subject matter of his poetry, he was thought to be a man who loved his homeland, especially the Rheinland region, but by middle age he had morphed into a bitter, sarcastic critic,  hostile to almost everything and everyone he had previously loved or admired. In the absence of any other known cause, his life and personality, even his health, seem to have been wrecked by a psychological clash between his genetic makeup, essentially his core Jewish nature, and the culture of the world in which he lived. In his Faust, Goethe had the appropriate line to describe the condition: “Two souls dwell in my breast, alas, forever warring with each other.”

Born in 1797 to ethnically Jewish parents who lived comfortably but modestly in Duesseldorf, young Harry Heine, as he was so named, entered life in an essentially Roman Catholic city whose Jewish residents, but only a minority of the German majority, had welcomed the liberal reforms introduced by Napoleon. Harry’s parents put the poet-to-be in a German kindergarten at age four while concurrently instructing him in Jewish traditions at home and making available additional instruction in the Jewish religion in a private school. Harry attended the local Lyceum in a Franciscan cloister run and taught by Catholic priests, often Jesuits. Discipline was strict— designed to provide useful subjects of Napoleon. Read more

Promoting Israel in the world of literature: A tale of Jewish ethnic networking

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I was looking over Brenton Sanderson’s TOO article on Mark Rothko (“Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism, and the Decline of Western Art“). For Rothko, an artist without any of the skills that are traditionally associated with being a professional artist,  it was all about Jewish networking.

Towards the end of 1943, all of the ethnic networking finally began to bear tangible fruit for Rothko. He befriended Peggy Guggenheim, “the most voracious patroness of American avant-garde art”, who had migrated to New York in 1941. Guggenheim’s artistic consultant, Howard Putzel, “convinced her to show Rothko in her Art of This Century gallery, where she had opened in 1942, during the low point of the war.” In January 1945, Guggenheim decided to put on Rothko’s first one-man exhibition at her gallery. In 1948 Rothko invited a coterie of mainly Jewish friends and acquaintances to view his new ‘multiforms’. The [very influential] art critic and historian Harold Rosenberg “remembers finding these works “fantastic,” and called his experience “the most impressive visit to an artist” in his life.”

This is actually quite remarkable. It would be one thing if Rothko was aspiring to be a leading rabbi or the head honcho at the ADL. But he was aspiring to fame and fortune as an historically important artist in the Western canon. He achieved his goal. One of his paintings recently sold for $87 million.

$87 million Rothko

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The Menace of the New “McCarthyism”

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On June 25, the Huffington Post “reported” that a Cambridge University academic “responsible for mentoring students” has “come under pressure” to resign his position. Guess which allegations resulted in Martin Sewell, a supervisor in the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge University, coming under intense scrutiny:

(a) Rapist
(b) Pedophile
(c) Serial killer
(d) Flash-mob thief
(e) Cannibalistic predator
(f) Racist, sexist, “pro-Hitler” eugenicist

If you guessed (f), you are correct! Critics are horrified that Sewell, an accomplished academic and incisive observer of human differences, has bucked the forces of political correctness and some how remains gainfully employed.

Sewell, a 43-year-old native of Reading, has posted summaries of “taxonomies of race,” which include notable (hint: notorious) sources: John R. Baker’s Race, a landmark study published in 1974 by Oxford University Press; Michael Levin’s seminal work Why Race Matters; Herrnstein and Murray’s bestseller The Bell Curve; Arthur Jensen’s The g Factor; Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests; Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence; and Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone.Sewell’s Website postings have driven his adversaries raving mad. Surely a “responsible” mentor of students should know better than to risk one’s academic position by favorably citing such radioactive literature on race and ethnicity. Acknowledging that race is a valid scientific taxonomy and that race differences are natural biological realities will generate accusations of “racist” faster than Heidi Beirich can inhale a tray of donuts. After all, “responsible” mentors know better!

"Hideous Heidi" loves to get people blacklisted and fired.

The fact that an academic with Sewell’s laudable record is under such scrutiny speaks volumes as to the nature of the infraction. From whence does this “pressure” come?
Left-wing critics have worked tirelessly over decades to make it dangerous to espouse such views—positions that are now rendered career-sacking offenses. How this has come about is worth closer scrutiny.

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Some observations on the end of the university as we know it

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A while back I was watching a news report about some Black guy who had completed college in DC. He had a dual major in Women’s Studies and Black Studies, had something like $89,000 in student loan debt, and could not find a job commensurate with his great learning. He was, of course, an idiot.

A lot of people disagree with me but I think students loans are a dreadful way to pay for education and there should be a forgiveness program on such loans as a part of a national educational policy. So if you get a masters in molecular biology or aerospace engineering, the loans should be forgiven.

If you are $100,000 in student loan debt and you have a degree in Madonna Studies, go back to Occupy, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 dollars.

The failure of the university system in all its diverse glory has been publicly catalogued by the Occupy Movement. At many Occupy gatherings lists of people’s student loans appeared in the early days: $100,000, $80,000, etc.: thats a lot of pizza, beer and Facebook whining.  Read more