Several prominent psychologists endorse the claim that Jews are more intelligent than White gentiles. Of them, I count:
Steven Pinker: Jewish IQ of 108-115
Richard Lynn: Jewish IQ of 107-115
Cremieux: Jewish IQ of 110
Jordan Peterson: Jewish IQ of 115
Cochran: Jewish IQ of 112-115
There is a tendency for numbers to be cited as gospel after a certain point (e.g. Black IQ of 85, Asian IQ of 105) without doing the necessary statistical/conceptual work to do an estimate that is precise. It would be hilarious if Jews were somehow falsely considered intelligent and fudged the IQ test score averages to make themselves look intelligent. So, why don’t I check if this is the case?
Fortunately, lots of data these days is public, and have been able to determine that Jews score higher than White gentiles in IQ in various datasets:
NLSY79: 110 (n = 109) (using sampling weights and ASVAB factor scores)
NLSY97: 107.1 (n = 99) (using sampling weights and ASVAB factor scores)
Project Talent: 106.83 (n = 6944) (my estimate is slightly different from Dunkel’s, who found 106.7)
MIDUS: 104.5 (n = 96)
GSS WORDSUM: 108.5 (n =1321)
The NLSY datasets use the ASVAB, which loads highly on crystalized ability, but is otherwise a fairly exhaustive test of intelligence.
To calculate IQ scores in the Project Talent, I used their 50+ subtests, combined those into 6 major abilities, and calculated IQs based on those 6 major abilities. Jews scored above White gentiles, though this varied based on the ability tested:
Jews have mediocre memories and spatial abilities, but perform well on every single other test, particularly mathematical/verbal tests.
The MIDUS score comes from a set of tests that largely test executive function and processing speed (backward counting, fluency, number series, word recall, and a few others), which explains why they didn’t score that well on that test (104.9).
I was also able to find other scores in the literature that scored ability exhaustively and scored relative subjects relative to the White mean:
ABCD (2023): 106.5 (relative to the White mean)
Hirsch 1926: 104.23 (n = 75, Polish Jews)
Hirsch 1926: 101.23 (n = 627 Russian Jews)
Seaqo and Koldin (1936): 108.73 (n = 800)
Rigg (1936): 98.4 (n = 445)
The older samples are all over the place, probably due to data quality issues, but the ABCD sample generated the same exact score that the Project Talent dataset did, probably because they used a high quality measurement of intelligence:
An (unnamed) colleague of mine noted that in two different years, Jews scored the equivalent of a 108 on the SAT, which is about as high as you would expect them to score if they have an IQ of 106.5-107 and a small crystalized tilt. I was able to get the source for the 2002 SAT, but not the 1995 one, unfortunately. The Unz surname analysis he did for the classic post The Myth of American Meritocracy is also consistent with a difference of roughly 7 points, according to the math he did.
Because of the ability tilt issue, I attempted another meta-analysis, where I subtracted 1.5 points from tests that test crystalized ability, and added 1.5 points to tests that primarily tested non-crystalized abilities. I removed all of the old samples that had extremely inconsistent results for the sake of data quality. This adjustment increased the precision of the estimate massively.
Yes, the heterogeniety is still terrible, but the confidence interval does not even include 108, which was the lower bound that most of the other researchers cited. Yes, of course, I could add more studies, but many of them (particularly the old ones) look iffy and have unusually unstable numbers.
Objection 1: Israel’s IQ is 92
Cremeiux already tackled this, and it’s due to the fact Israel has a large Mizrahi, Ethiopian, and Arab population.
Using more realistic numbers (85 for Arabs, 75 for Ethipoians, 97 for Europeans, 107 for Ashkenazi) we get… 94.5, just 2 points from the estimated average.
> (.318*.79)*107+(.49*.79)*85 + (0.079*0.79)*97 + (.124*.79)*97 + (0.03*0.79)*75 + 0.21*85
[1] 94.96743
Objection 2: researchers use bad measurements of intelligence to test the Jewish IQ.
This criticism doesn’t apply to me, because most of the datasets I used (particularly the project talent) use high quality measurements of intelligence. Second, because of the dominance of g, most group differences in low quality measurements of IQ will still have group differences in the expected direction.
Looking back at my project talent table, all subfactor tests generate differences in the expected direction except for four cases:
Asians score lower on general knowledge, processing speed, and verbal ability despite having slightly higher IQs than Whites. Even so, the ability tilts are still pretty close to the overall average (100.6)
Jews have lower spatial abilities than what would be expected from their IQs.
Objection 3: Jewish eminence is due to nepotism/corruption
Explain this to me, then. How are Jews so overwhelmingly overrepresented in basically every single position of power, achievement, and ability?
You’re free to check all of the sources (I provided them in the article), and the figures for the intellectual movements, which were assessed using the ol’ reliable.
Objection 4: The Jewish IQ is a myth that Jews use to justify Jewish power.
What if… it’s just true that Jews are smarter than White gentiles? Hispanics (IQ = 89) are less intelligent than Whites, East Asians in Asia are more intelligent than Whites (IQ = 105), and Africans are less intelligent than Whites (IQ = 80-85). I understand that it’s a little uncomfortable to accept this, but I don’t see why the fact that Jews are more intelligent than White gentiles is somehow uniquely toxic. Some truths will justify power, others will contest it. It is best to accept all truths regardless of their relationship to power, and if power is corrupt, then the truth will oppose it.
Objection 5: Jewish IQ cannot explain Jewish eminence.
For what it’s worth, basically everybody who has examined this question quantitatively has come to the same conclusion - the Jewish IQ alone cannot explain Jewish eminence. For my own work, it looks like somewhere between 17% and 40% of American geniuses are Jews, though it’s difficult to tell what the exact number is. For now, I’ll stick with a conservative estimate of 25%. Based on current population estimates, the distribution of IQ within Whites and gentiles in modern America should look something like this, assuming normality and equal variance.
Even at extremely high levels of ability (160 > IQ > 145), there are still about 6 gentiles for every Jew, which is below the observed number of Jewish geniuses. Most people who are high achievers in the sciences are highly intelligent (average IQ of an extremely outlier in the sciences is ~152), the average is almost certainly lower for other fields, and if all fields are averaged, the true average is probably closer to 140-145.
Instead, noncognitive explanations such as general factor of personality or mental instability must be advanced instead. It would be unlikely (for historical/evolutionary) that White/Jewish differences in personality are larger than the ones in cognitive ability. If eminence is assumed to be due to a sum of cognitive and noncognitive factors that are uncorrelated, and Jews have a 0.45 SD advantage in cognitive ability, and a 0.35 SD advantage in noncognitive ability, and that these factors contribute equally to eminence, the distribution of “latent eminence” within Whites and Jews will look something like this:
Jews are now 28% of the people who score within 4 to 5 SD above the mean in eminence, which is very consistent with the observed number of Jewish geniuses, despite the small advantages of Jews in both cognitive and noncognitive abilities. This, of course, is not an accurate model of reality, as eminence does not always translate into outlier achievement due to extrinsic factors like luck, location, beliefs, motivations, and the like. Also, it doesn’t consider that some of the Jewish advantages in noncognitive abilityies are also unlikely to generalize to lower levels of ability, as they are due to higher levels of creativity and mental instability.
Personally, I doubt Jewish psychological differences/advantages can wholy explain their achievement, though they almost certainly play a large role in it. Others like Sean Last have documented that social networks may play a role in Jewish achievement, which seems plausible enough to me.
Appendix:
Effect sizes used in the meta-analysis of Jewish IQ
I tried latent analysis in the Project Talent upon Cremieux’s comment. Personally I think latent analysis is useless when dealing with precise measurements, as they tned to derail work because of arguments over fit indices/cross-loadings/model accuracy/MGCFA and so on. Regardless, I did some simple lavaan models in prokect talent to attempt to test whether the g difference is of a different magnitude than the observed one, and it was marginally larger (107-108 points vs 106.8).
(Jewish g of 107.4)
Jewish g of 108
(CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE/TECH KNOWLEDGE MODELED SEPARATELY)
Jewish g of 108
Modeling every subtest as all falling under one g, aka using this model:
lat0 <- "
G =~ mech + twod + threed + abst + arith + bmath + amath + spell + capital + punct + english + express + words + reading + create + disgwords + arithfast + table + cler + obj + sentmemory + wordmemory + phsk + aerok + eleck + mechk + sportk + huntk + fishk + litk + musk + sstudiesk + mathk + biok + sciattk + farmk + homek + artk + lawk + healthk + engk + archk + jourk + fork + militk + salesk + prack + clerick + biblek + colorsk + etiqk + outdk + photok + gamesk + theatk + foodk + misc
G ~ race
"
Jewish g of 108
From what I’ve heard from Woodley, g loads more heavily on nonverbal factors than verbal ones when hierarchical models are used, which is also in line with what I have seen in the literature. Because of this, I will try a model with no verbal or information factors first, and then a model with no verbal factors (but with info).
lat0 <- "
G =~ VIS + MATH + SPEED + MEM
VIS =~ mech + twod + threed + abst
MATH =~ arith + bmath + amath
SPEED =~ arithfast + table + cler + obj
MEM =~ sentmemory + wordmemory
G ~ race
"
lat0 <- "
G =~ VIS + MATH + SPEED + MEM + TK + CK
VIS =~ mech + twod + threed + abst
MATH =~ arith + bmath + amath
SPEED =~ arithfast + table + cler + obj
MEM =~ sentmemory + wordmemory
TK =~ phsk + aerok + eleck + mechk + sportk + huntk + fishk
CK =~ litk + musk + sstudiesk + mathk + biok + sciattk + farmk + homek + artk + lawk + healthk + engk + archk + jourk + fork + militk + salesk + prack + clerick + biblek + colorsk + etiqk + outdk + photok + gamesk + theatk + foodk + misc
G ~ race
"
>My ancient 4chan-tier analysis of the Lynn data where I corrected for convenience sampling turned out to be right on the money.
I think it is possible that historical jewish IQ is significantly higher than current when i consider jewish success in 20th century. Central european(germany, austria, hungary) ashkenazis seem particularly smart.