Astral Codex Ten

Jewish

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Jewish

Article

Jewish is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between June 14, 2021 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""mystery of Jewish achievement""; “That still leaves one mystery: why Hungary? There were Jews all over Europe”; “but not the Protestant or Jewish ones”. It most often appears alongside America, Ashkenazi Jews, Jews.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: June 14, 2021
  • Last seen: August 08, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration
June 14, 2021 · Original source
This is possible. I confess to doing this when listing the Solvang Conference attendees above. But this is why we have objective data. The income, net worth, and education numbers all come from self-report, which shouldn't be vulnerable to this problem. Or you can look at Nobel prizes won by Israel vs. other countries, using Israeli residence as a non-one-drop-rule-biased proxy for Judaism. Or at the Russian numbers, which were presumably based on the Russian census. Really no source of data other than hand-counting Jewish high-achievers is vulnerable to this problem, and we have lots of other sources of data.
Inline links: Nobel prizes won by Israel vs. other countries
It would not be the first time something like this happened. The 1700s and 1800s are sometimes called the "Scottish Golden Age". Scottish people were extraordinarily over-represented in Britain and the former British colonies during that time, in science and academia, in business and industry, in politics, and even in the upper ranks of the military. Anecdotally, people in the 1800s compared Scots favorably to Jews. Today, though I suspect Scots would still stand out somewhat on average if anyone was able to track ancestries carefully, Scottish overachievement is not really a hot topic. I can easily see the same happening to Jews, especially given ultra-low Jewish fertility rates (sure to be lower among the rich and educated), and the trend toward outmarriage among non-Orthodox Jews; the Jewish upper crust will simply evaporate away from the Jewish group identity.
Inline links: "Scottish Golden Age", compared Scots favorably to Jews, trend toward outmarriage among non-Orthodox Jews
(in case it shapes the way you read any of this, both he and I are Jewish)
Book Review: The Man From The Future
July 13, 2022 · Original source
In my post, I was able to track down a few clues to the mystery. All of the Martians were Jewish, which linked the puzzle to the general puzzle of Jewish overachievement (for example, 36% of US Nobel Prize winners are Jews, compared to only 2% of the US population). Greg Cochran and others suggest a genetic explanation, with Daron Acemoglu and others suggesting a cultural/historical one; unsurprisingly, I side with Cochran. Granting that this is a Jewish phenomenon, it’s not too hard to explain why it happened at the turn of the century in particular - too long before then, and anti-Semitism prevented European Jews from getting a good education; too long after then, and they all died in the Holocaust.
Inline links: a genetic explanation, a cultural/historical one
In the last post, I came up with a few theories. Places too far east (eg Russia) had more anti-Semitism and less education. And the rest of Central Europe actually did have have lots of Jewish or half-Jewish geniuses during this period - Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example.
As a consequence, there was a flood of Jewish immigration into Hungary in the 1880s and 1890s as there was simultaneously into New York.
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
Jesus died two days before Passover, but Passover is linked to the Hebrew calendar and can fall on a variety of Roman calendar days. So the main remaining degree of freedom is how the early Christians translated from the (Biblically fixed) Hebrew date to the (not very clear) Roman date. This seems to have been calculated by someone named Hippolytus in the 3rd century, but his calculations were wrong - March 25 did not fall on a Friday (cf. Good Friday) on any of the plausible crucifixion years. Also, as far as I can tell, the relevant Jewish tradition is that prophets die on the same day they are born, not the same day they are conceived. For example, Moses was born on, and died on, the 7th of Adar (is it worth objecting that it should be the same date on the Hebrew calendar and not the Roman?) Maybe this tradition was different in Jesus’ time? But it must be older than the split between Judaism and Islam - the Muslims also believe Mohammed died on his birth date.
Inline links: Hippolytus, Moses, Mohammed
I would quibble that Jesus as the Messiah is not one of Jews’ top objections to Christianity, which I think would be first that it flirts with polytheism (the Trinity), that it flirts with idolatry (icons + Michelangelo-esque depictions of God), and that it says you don’t need to follow the Law. Other sects of Judaism that have “just” posited a Messiah (eg the subset of Lubavitchers who think Rebbe Schneerson was the Messiah) have met much less resistance.
Apparently the logic for March 25 is that it was calculated to be the day that Jesus died (easier to calculate since it was Passover), and Jewish tradition held that great people lived for exact, whole number of years. (i.e. were conceived and died on the same day)
Highlights From The Comments On My California Ballot
November 05, 2022 · Original source
Dishonorable mention goes to Peter Liu, who is in the news for making anti-Semitic threats after local synagogues refused to platform his campaign. Liu is also interesting for his claim that God contacted him at the Ziggurat of Ur and told him to bring peace to the Earth.
Inline links: anti-Semitic threats
Henry is listed as a "mulatto" born in Alabama in 1845, so it's at least possible his father was a white slaveholder. You can find an online family tree connecting Henry to the family of Solomon Cohen, a prominent Jewish South Carolingian, but based on five minutes of review and several years of experience, there are serious problems with this family tree. But--great family to do a Y-DNA test on! If you get a common Jewish haplogroup or even the "Cohen modal haplotype," you've got a compelling clue.
Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
I’m skeptical of this. My favorite counterexample is the Torah, which says that Moses was the most humble man in the world (Numbers 12:3), plus the ensuing scholarly debate on how Moses himself could write this in the Torah with a straight face. My favorite answer claim that God forced Moses to write that he was the most humble man in the world, but Moses fought back by making some of the alephs in the Torah really small as a sort of steganographic claim that he was embarrassed by having to praise himself. See also this essay, “In the Jewish tradition, humility is among the greatest of the virtues, as its opposite, pride, is among the worst of the vices.”
Inline links: the ensuing scholarly debate, favorite answer, this essay
In general I’m skeptical of most attempts to draw a bright line between Jewish and Christian philosophies (“Jews think like this, Christians think like that”). Christianity grew out of Judaism, and most post-1400s Jewish scholarship was written in Christian societies, so both religions had ample chance to influence each other. “Everybody knows” that Christianity judges you by belief and Judaism judges you by your actions, but the Talmud says “The following have no part in the World to Come: One who says that the resurrection of the dead is not biblical, or that the Torah is not from Heaven, or the Epicurean.”
Inline links: the Talmud says
I’d like to pick up on the passing comment, near the start of this post, that Nietzsche thought slave morality originated with the Jews. If that is so, it can only reflect the extent to which his Christian upbringing and cultural environment distorted his (and his followers’) understanding. Jewish morality is very much based on actions, not beliefs, which would put it in the “enbiggedness” camp. And the emphasis on enlittleling (humility, sacrifice etc) is very much a Christian thing, used through the ages to demonstrate their superiority to the Jews that they had replaced — it’s the core of antisemitic supercessionism.