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The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement Paperback – September 5, 2011

by Richard Lynn (Author)

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Einstein...Shylock...Rothschild...Trotsky...Jesus. The scientist and philosopher...the greedy moneylender and middle man...the impoverished immigrant...the elite of politics and finance...the prophet...the revolutionary. All of these have been faces of the Jewish people over the centuries. They have inspired admiration, envy, suspicion, and hatred and overflowed with world-changing personages. The historian Yuri Slezkine claimed that the 20th century was nothing less than the Jewish century, so indispensable were Jews to the creation of the modern world.

With The Chosen People, Richard Lynn undertakes a systematic inquiry into the general intelligence of Jews worldwide. Calling upon history as well as the latest advances in genetic analysis and evolutionary theory, Lynn demonstrates that in the past 250 years, high IQ has been the foundation of Jewish influence, success, and power. This study is integrated with concise narratives of the Jewish experience in various countries and regions, as well as a discussion of the cultural and genetic divisions within the Jewish ethos. The Chosen People will be valued by historians, evolutionary scientists, and anyone who wants to understand more fully this remarkable people.

Print length

408 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Washington Summit Publishers
Publication date

September 5, 2011
ISBN-10

1593680368
ISBN-13

978-1593680367
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Richard Lynn
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Even as we attain greater and greater insights into the tangled web of nature and nurture, society stubbornly refuses to concede humankind s conformity as an animal species to the ongoing process of evolution. It instead imposes a mythological worldview almost entirely divorced from science: indeed, we see no contradiction in celebrating cultural diversity while simultaneously suppressing even a mention of genetic variance. Undaunted, Richard Lynn has with The Chosen People accomplished a yeoman s task in summing up work done thus far on Jewish intelligence. Given the disparate nature of the many studies that he cites, the relationship of intelligence to IQ is often problematic, and intelligence itself is but one piece in a complex mosaic, but this courageous and dispassionate book provides a platform for the study of a topic that is of considerable importance on the scientific plane, and for the sophisticated reader of even greater importance in the world of politics. --John Glad, author of Jewish Eugenics

In The Chosen People, Professor Lynn has shown once again his talent for combining exhaustive research with daring scholarship. He is also an engaging writer, which is a quality in short supply among those who do detailed statistical work. Like his earlier books, this monograph should be read by anyone who is interested in the relation between innate intelligence and professional and social achievements. We ignore this historically significant subject at our peril and at the cost of future generations. --Paul E. Gottfried, Elizabethtown College

Professor Richard Lynn s work addresses dispassionately and objectively the question of why Jews have been so remarkably successful as intellectuals and in professional and managerial life. Using a wealth of statistics and commentary from many different countries and societies, he demonstrates their success over and over again. Because of the odious uses to which the Nazis and their ilk put eugenically-based arguments, Jews and others have often been reluctant to engage in debating this question. Professor Lynn shows that this question ought to be addressed, and that it can be addressed objectively by philo-semites favourable to the Jews as well as by anti-Semites who are hostile to them. --William D. Rubinstein, University of Aberystwyth

About the Author

Richard Lynn is Emeritus Professor of Psychology of the University of Ulster. He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Cambridge and has authored over 200 scholarly articles. His books include Dysgenics,Eugenics, Race Differences in Intelligence, and with Tatu Vanhanen, IQ and the Wealth of Nations and IQ and Global Inequality.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Washington Summit Publishers; First Edition (September 5, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 408 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1593680368
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1593680367
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds

Best Sellers Rank: #5,116,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Hector Bravo

Nice book

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2019

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The book conclusion is very interesting

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françois pagès

The Fall of the House Lynn

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2014

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In the chapter "France", which has six pages, I have counted fourty mistakes. The biggest one : of the French who have received the Nobel Prize he forgot fifteen - one fourth - how possible !
His theory of the low intelligence of the North African Jews and of the Sephardi (based upon extremely lacunary testing), he does not at all confront it to the massive factual evidence olf the contrary.
For me, this book : extremely disappointing.

9 people found this helpful

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D. Riddle

... AN INTEREST IN IQ AND INHERITANCE THIS IS A GOOD BOOK.

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2014

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IF YOU HAVE AN INTEREST IN IQ AND INHERITANCE THIS IS A GOOD BOOK.

3 people found this helpful

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Tom B.

Jewish overrepresentation in the professions well-documented yet poorly analyzed

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2019

This book was interesting for its discussion of the lopsided representation of Jews in the professions in America. I hadn't realized that a mere 2% of the population could have so many more of its members in choice jobs than other groups. The problem with the author's analysis of the facts he presents, if accurate, is his unabashed pro-Jewish prejudice, which simply cannot be denied. If there are more Jews in a given profession than otherwise might be expected by their numbers in society, he simply explains it away by continually stating that Jews are much smarter than gentiles or other groups, including Germans, Chinese, Japanese, and everyone else. It is very unscientific in this regard. There are other explanations that he obviously does not want to consider, such as Jewish bigotry, wherein Jews tend to hire and promote their own kind over other groups, just like other groups do and have done in the past. OMG, you don't say? You mean that Jews, the victims of prejudice down through the ages, are just as bigoted, themselves??? How could that be? I dunno, but it is pretty clear to me that it is. If you came across a company or profession that had too many white people in it and not enough black people, or too many men and not enough women, the obvious explanation nowadays would be that there is discrimination in hiring and promotion going on there. You wouldn't simply assume that the whites are smarter or better than the blacks or the women, would you? Of course not because that would come off as obvious bigotry. Lynn avoids any such conclusion for explaining Jewish overrepresentation in the professions even though avoiding it is the book's biggest flaw. It's as if he's deathly afraid even to bring it up but that as an explanation seems far more likely to me than his, that Jews are inherently smarter by a country mile than everyone else. Balderdash, I say! Just because Jews have experienced lots of prejudice against them doesn't automatically mean that they cannot discriminate themselves. Of course they can and obviously they do, just like other groups who have, yet instead of facing this disturbing and rather hypocritical problem head on, the author simply explains it all way as due to innate Jewish superiority and higher IQ. In fact, the book is so crammed full of bigoted statements of precisely that sort that it is sickening at times, and to my mind, little more than bunk. The cataloguing of Jewish overrepresentation in a whole host of desirable professions is surprising, enlightening, and helpful, but Lynn's analysis of why that is is very weak, indeed, and in my humble opinion, completely wrong.

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Amazon Customer

Best Booke

Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2020

Fantastic book. I see how some retarded low iq black bastards gave low rating.

Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2015

This is an excellent work. It hasn't been since the 70s, with John R. Baker's monumental tome, "Race", that the verity of the Jews' unique makeup has been defended so vigorously, with such empirical rigor.

2 people found this helpful

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R. Williams

Lynn's history and analysis of Jewish intelligence

Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2011

The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement
Richard Lynn
Whitefish, MT: Washington Summit Publishers, 2011

Reviewed by Bob Williams

Richard Lynn has added yet another valuable collection of global data and historical insight to the literature. Various sources (Lynn, Herrnstein and Murray, Storfer, etc.) have reported studies showing high mean IQs for Ashkenazi Jews, which Lynn estimates to be 110, but these have not included a detailed study of Jewish intelligence on a global basis, nor a supportive set of data relating to real world accomplishments. The Chosen People provides both, along with a fascinating look at Jewish history. The result is a bit of a history book, combined with a truly massive quantity of data.

In the early part of the book, Lynn discusses the Mizrahim, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Ethiopian Jews as separate groups with different mean IQs. [Mean IQs in the prior order: 91, 99, 110, and 66] Lynn examines these four groups on a country-by-country basis and historical basis, sometimes going back 2,000 years. Proceeding alphabetically from Australia through 17 countries, ending with the United States the reader sees a consistent pattern of outstanding accomplishment in a wide variety of fields.

The pattern that emerges is consistent and becomes repetitious. Jews consistently show low fertility, low infant mortality, greater longevity, high educational achievement, high income, high SES, encouragement of eugenic practices, and extraordinary performance levels in a wide range of disciplines. To show the magnitude of achievement, Lynn presented data in the form of Achievement Quotients (AQ), which are simply the ratio of the percentage of Jews who met an achievement measurement (such as receiving the Nobel Prize), divided by the percentage of Jews in the country. For example, US data from 1922 to 1932 showed that 37% of virtuosi musicians were Jews. The 1927 population (3.6%) was taken as the reference, giving an achievement quotient of 10. In situations where the Jewish population is quite small, the AQs sometimes become large. For example, Switzerland has produced 17 Nobel Prize winners, three of whom were Jewish. During the 20th century, Jews were about 0.3% of the Swiss population. This works out to an AQ of 60.

In the U.S. (1960), Jewish AQs by profession show a wide range of successes:

Psychiatrists 5.8 Lawyers 3.3
Dentists 4.0 Architects 1.7
Mathematicians 3.8 Engineers 1.1
Doctors 3.7 Artists 1.4
Writers 3.4 Military 0.5

Lynn interprets the high verbal scores of Jews as explaining the relative magnitudes of the above numbers. AQs above 3.0 are found in fields that depend strongly on verbal (and math) skills; those with lower AQs are fields that require strong visualization and spatial abilities.

United States

Of the country chapters, the one on the US is the most detailed and the one on Israel is of special interest, given the nature of the country. The U.S. discussion has a section on "Music and Hollywood" that is not paralleled by discussions of the other countries. No American would be surprised that the motion picture business is dominated by Jews, but the degree of the domination was beyond my prior knowledge. Studios such as Paramont, Fox, Universal, Goldwin, etc. were founded by and are still run by Jews. Some of the great performers (Streisand, Borge, Marx, Newman, and Hoffman, for example) retained their Jewish names, but many changed their names. Some of the highly recognizable names in Lynn's longer list:

Konigsberg Woody Allen
Ullman Douglas Fairbanks
Kaminsky Danny Kaye
Schwartz Tony Curtis
Keisler Hedy Lamarr
Tuvim Judy Holiday
Goldenberg Edward Robinson
Kubelsky Jack Benny
Gumm Judy Garland
Birnbaum George Burns

Jews have likewise been generously represented in both classical and popular music as composers and performers. In the former category there are such names as Copland, Bernstein, Schnabel, Horowitz, Rubinstein, Heifetz, Milstein, Stern, and Menuhin.

The Jewish dominance has likewise shown up in the media, founding or controlling entities such as Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Daily News, Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, The Public Interest, The New York Review of Books, New Republic, and Partisan Review.. Some AQs for media elites:
% Jews AQ
1975 Media elite 26 10.0
1980 Media elite 30 13.6
1980 Hollywood movies 66 30.0
1994 Hollywood TV 46 20.9

Israel

Israel has five major ethnic groups: Ashkenazim, Sephardic, Oriental, Ethiopian, and Arabs. The Arabs (as discussed in the last chapters) are the source group for Jews, about 2,000 years ago. Their mean IQ in Israel today is 86 (the mean outside of Israel is 84); they account for 20% of the population. Oriental Jews in Israel have a mean IQ of 85. As Lynn has shown in his other books, the genetic nature of intelligence is evident in mixed groups. In this case, high school graduates with both parents European have the largest percentage of their children above high IQ reference points (128, 120, and 110); families with one parent European and one Oriental had smaller percentages at these levels; when both parents were Oriental, the percentages were considerably lower at the reference IQs. Since all of these children were reared together in the same kibbutzim environment, the effect is presumably limited to genetic causes.

Ethiopian Jews in Israel have a mean IQ of about 69 (about the same as that for sub-Saharan Africans-67). Ethiopian Jews in Israel display the characteristics of other low IQ groups: high juvenile crime rate; high percentage of single-parent families; high dropout rates from high school; poor school achievement; low scores on matriculation exams; low employment rates (45% of men in 2003); high fertility (60% of families with 5 or more children); and a high HIV infection rate. The Brookdale Institute estimated that each Ethiopian immigrant costs the Israeli taxpayer about $100,000 over the course of his lifetime.

Achievement

There are a large number of measures that indicate very high performance in various fields. Among those used in the book:

Nobel Prize
Membership in the Royal Society and Membership in the British Academy (Britian)
Fields Medalist and Wolf Prize (mathematics)
Pulitzer Prize
Wealth (wealth quotients are calculated the same way as EQs)
Eminence (Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment cited)
Education (educational quotients are calculated the same way as EQs)
Chess grandmasters and bridge champions

Jews, and particularly Ashkenazi Jews, have performed much better in these measures than would be expected on the basis of their group size. This leads to the obvious question of why? Throughout the book, Lynn points to high intelligence as a likely explanation for success in any task that is cognitively demanding. The 10 point IQ advantage (relative to the Northwest European standard, known as the Greenwich standard," after the reference point for longitude) increases the percentage representation at the high end of the bell curve. Above IQ 130 the representation is four times that of a group with a mean of 100; above 145, it is six times as great. [My calculation agrees with Lynn's at 130, but I found a 7.3 times as great number for 145.] The point is that various AQs are considerably larger than the number of high IQ individuals who might form a pool for success in the measures listed above. Charles Murray also commented that the higher mean IQ is not sufficient to explain the high rates of success of Jews.

Lynn presents discussions of other factors that may account for the unusually high achievements, such as cultural values and motivation. He offers the formula:
IQ x Motivation x Opportunity = Achievement.

Causes for High IQ of Ashkenazi Jews

Lynn discusses the history of the four Jewish groups and offers some speculation as to how they arrived at their present day numbers. The Ashkenazi Jews are decedents of Arabs, who presumably had the same mean IQ (84) as they have today, leading to the most interesting question of how they increased the mean by 26 points and what factors may have led to the higher verbal-math and lower visualization-spatial abilities.

Before getting into specific theories, Lynn discusses the genetic basis of intelligence and the present day understanding that the family environment has no long-term effect on intelligence. He builds a solid case that the high Ashkenazim mean is not the result of environmental factors, then addresses the possible explanations for the genetic boost.

Eugenic Hypothesis The idea is that Jewish customs and practices favor the survival of the intelligent. The only argument that seems to support this line is that sometimes there were restrictions on the marriages of the poor. This happened when the controlling Gentiles limited the number of Jewish marriages allowed per year. The problem with this hypothesis is that it fails to explain why there were significantly greater gains among the Ashkenazim than among other Jews.

Persecution Hypothesis The country by country history from Lynn shows that Jews were frequently expelled from one nation, then another, throughout Europe. At various times they were killed, sometimes in connection with the Inquisition and Crusades. It is not unreasonable to believe that this protracted and deadly stress factor caused disproportionate numbers of less intelligent Jews to die, in much the same way as the stress of cold weather is likely to have killed off less intelligent people who migrated north from the African Savannah.

Discrimination Hypothesis Jews were sometimes limited to the jobs they were allowed to hold, limiting their options severely. One area in which Jews were successful was money lending (as a result of usury laws that applied to Gentiles). This was a sufficiently complex task that it is reasonable to believe that only the bright survived. At that time, wealth was a significant advantage to survival, as infant and child mortality rates were high.

Miscegenation Hypothesis There is evidence of interbreeding between Jews and Gentiles who lived in the same locations. This practice created a path for higher IQ genes to boost the Jewish mean intelligence. Lynn put the gain limit at 6 points, moving the mean from 84 to 90 and requiring other factors to account for the additional gain of 20 points.

Apostasy Hypothesis Proposed by Charles Murray, this hypothesis is based on a requirement from 64 AD that all Jewish boys attend school. The scholastic requirements were demanding and the argument is that individuals who did not possess high verbal ability became discouraged and renounced their faith. This is consistent with the decrease in the number of Jews from 4.5 million in the 1st century to about 1.5 million in the 6th century.

Lynn does not argue in favor of or against any of the five hypotheses, but points out that they are all possible and that several or all of these processes contributed to the IQ gains. He ends the book with three conclusions: (1) the high IQ of the Jews must be genetic; (2) eugenic customs contributed to high Jewish IQ, proving that eugenic practices work; and (3) a minority group with high IQ succeeds despite discrimination. These conclusions are strongly supported by the large body of independent research cited by Lynn, but all are counter to the PC thinking that is prevalent today.

The Future

Jewish populations are declining throughout the world, except in Israel. This has been due to low Jewish fertility, migration to Israel, loss of faith, and intermarriage with Gentiles. In the U.S. Jewish fertility is 1.16, which will result in an approximate halving of the population in each generation. Despite migration to Israel, the Central Intelligence Agency issued a report in March of 2009, predicting that Palestinians and Jews would merge in a single state and that, over time, the higher fertility of the Palestinians would lead to their majority status. That, combined with a predicted migration of Jews from Israel to Russia will likely result in Israel not surviving as a Jewish state.
The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement

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Roger Mendelson

A Scholarly and Confronting Book

Reviewed in Australia on January 6, 2017

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This is an easy read, backed by scholarly research and reaching conclusions which many will find confronting .Lynn is not afraid to express his views. I FOUND, as a layman in this area that most of the arguments and evidence could be easily followed. His final conclusions up about the possible end of Israel as a Jewish state is one I disagree with. ROGER MENDELSON.MELBOURNE

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The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement Paperback – September 5, 2011

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