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(I touched on the connection between Ashkenazi Jews and Italians. This will be about evolution of Jewish nepotism as well as another part of the puzzle to the high Jewish IQ.)

Ashkenazi Jews are over-represented in many facets in America, as well as around the world. What is the cause of Jewish nepotism? What makes them stick together so much while derogating other ethnicities?

The evolution of nepotism in Ashkenazi Jewish communities goes back a few thousand years. They constantly got kicked out of nations, 109 times to be exact, so therefore, they needed to be more clannish, which comes with increased genetic similarity. They needed to stick together and always have each other’s backs. This is due to inbreeding, which as noted above leads to increased genetic similarity and therefore, individuals who inbreed closely become more related to one another than non-co-ethnics. When two groups who are so genetically distant live in one society together, strife happens. Which is going on in Europe at the moment. But with Jews, it’s different. They are more in the background, so to speak. They hide in the shadows while giving more favoritism to their own kind, ethnic nepotism.

Ethnic nepotism in the Jewish community evolved due to persecution over the thousands of years by non-Jews on Jews for things such as usury, which is defined as the illegal action of borrowing money at extremely high interest rates. In the middle ages in Europe, the Catholic Church forbade money lending. This is where the Jews came in and became bankers, lending money to the populace of the countries. Abnormal amounts of interest were given to the people in the country. In turn, the Jews got driven out due to preying on the populace of the country and taking advantage of them.

So when they got driven out, they had to stick together. As I noted in the linked article on the connection between Ashkenazi Jews and Southern Italians, male Jews migrated from the Levant to Rome during Greco-Roman times, which mass conversions led to 6 million ( =^) Roman women who then began to practice Judaism. The genetic proximity of Ashkenazi Jews and Syrian Jews to Northern Italians, Sardinians and French populations suggest that there is non-Semitic ancestry in Ashkenazi Jews. The findings also say that any theories of Ashkenazi Jews having ancestry in Khazaria or from Slavs are incompatible with genetic studies. The close genetic similarity of Ashkenazi Jews and Southern Europeans has been noted in many studies. Any theories of Ashkenazi Jews being converts from the Khazar empire got put to rest by this paper. Anyway, that’s part of the reason for their higher average IQ, breeding with beautiful Roman women a few thousand years ago.

Combined with selection pressures selecting against those less smart Jews, as brought up by Cochran, Hardy and Harpending, this led to those less intelligent Jews to be culled from the population. Due to this, this led to them only being in occupations in which they had to have high intellect. Therefore, those less intelligent Jews couldn’t make the money needed to survive, and, therefore, their genes got taken out of the gene pool. The more intelligent Jews, in turn, then had more kids, increasing the chances for more genetic mutations to positively affect IQ. So because those rich Jews in the middle ages had more kids, this led to even more selection for higher IQs in the Ashkenazi population. So because those more intelligent Jews had more money, and obviously more intelligence, they could be more nepotistic to others in their in-group while derogating those in the out-group.

In Rushton’s paper, Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory, he posits that since ethnic groups are repositories of shared genes, xenophobia, as well as out-group derogation, is the “dark side of human altruism”. Which makes sense. If you care more for your own group than for others, that will make for a better chance for individuals, as well as groups, to pass on shared genes. Due to very close inbreeding. All Ashkenazi Jews are 30th cousins. So with that increased genetic similarity, this leads to increased altruism as well as a higher chance to shun others not in the ethnic group. This is a sound evolutionary strategy to keep the close genetic similarities. Though, with whites, as I have alluded to a few times on this blog, that doesn’t happen due to media socialization (owned BY the Jews).

So because the individual is the carrier of the genes, the close relatedness (Rushton says in the paper linked above the co-ethnics from around the world are related to each other on the order of first cousins!), we can see that how we protect our close family and want nothing bad to happen to them as well as favor them over other peoples/groups, the same holds true for those ethnicities that are extremely genetically close due to inbreeding.

The close inbreeding, however, leads to an increased chance for recessive genes to be given to the child. Therefore, genetic diseases developed. In their paper, Cochran, Hardy and Harpending say that Gaucher, Tay-Sach’s and Niemann-Pick heterozygotes lead to increased IQ. To quote from the paper:

We do have strong but indirect evidence that one of these, Gaucher disease, does indeed increase IQ. Professor Ari Zimran, who heads the Gaucher Clinic at the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem, furnished us a list of occupations of 302 Gaucher patients. Because of the Israeli medical care system, these are essentially all the Gaucher patients in the country. Of the 255 patients who are not retired and not students, 81 are in occupations that ordinarily average IQ’s greater than 120. There are 13 academics, 23 engineers, 14 scientists, and 31 in other high IQ occupations like accountants, physicians, or lawyers. The government of Israel states that 1.35% of Israeli’s working age population are engineers or scientists, while in the Gaucher patient sample 37/255 or 15% are engineers or scientists. Since Ashkenazim make up 60% of the workforce in Israel, a conservative base rate for engineers and scientists among Ashkenazim is 2.25% assuming that all engineers and scientists are Ashkenazim. With this rate, we expect 6 in our sample and we observe 37. The probability of 37 or more scientists and engineers in our sample, given a base rate of 2.25%, is approximately 4 x 10-19 . There are 5 physicists in the sample, while there is an equal number, 5, of unskilled workers. In the United States the fraction of people with undergraduate or higher degrees in physics is about one in one thousand. If this fraction applies even approximately to Israel the expected number of physicists in our sample is 0.25 while we observe 5. Gaucher patients are clearly a very high IQ subsample of the general population

So those certain genetic diseases, which came about due to such close inbreeding, have negative effects on Ashkenazi health, but clearly not their intellect.

The reasons for high Ashkenazi nepotism are persecutions for the past few thousand years (which led to them needing to stick together more), the need for them to go in to high IQ occupations such as banking, which led to the culling of those Jews who weren’t as intelligent, therefore leading to the culling of those genes out of the gene pool, and finally genetic diseases most likely, with some pretty solid evidence that there is a rise in a few IQ points due to certain diseases they have. The biggest reason for Jewish nepotism is, of course, increased genetic similarity due to such close inbreeding for thousands of years which basically make Ashkenazi Jews 30th cousins.