Poor Bret Stephens. He went into town, just tryin’ to do right, and look what happened to him! Well, don’t let no one tell you them dogs won’t bite, n'est-ce pas?1
A couple of days ago—well, in dog time—Bret wrote a column “The Secrets of Jewish Genius”, that, in its original form cited a “study” that “found” “proof” (okay, I’m a skeptic) that Ashkenazi Jews (vaguely, those who lived for centuries in central and eastern Europe) were genetically superior, at least in terms of intelligence, to other mortals. The results of the resulting kerfuffle were tartly but conveniently summarized in an energetic though rather scattershot takedown by the energetic Jack Shafer, “Bret Stephens and the Perils of the Tapped-Out Column”, slapping both Bret and the Times around, with good reason. As Jack explains, the whole point of Bret’s column was that there is good reason to believe that Jews are genetically superior—a hypothesis that both Jack and I reject as nonsense—nonsense that the Times then compounded by performing a “post-edit” on Bret’s column, claiming that Stephens wasn’t arguing for Jewish “superiority” after all, which was a lie, and which, in turn, is kind of a no-no for journalists, which both Stephens and the nameless Times editors supposedly are. Wrote Jack
The Times disavowal and re-edit (tellingly neither co-signed nor acknowledged by Stephens) was too little and too late—if you’re going to edit a piece, the smart move is to edit before it publishes. More than that, it was clearly wrong about what he was saying. Jewish genetic superiority was the exact direction his woolly argument was headed, something easily deduced from reading the passages excised from the original column.
Furthermore, as his head suggests, Jack feels it’s time for Bret to be put out to pasture, noting that he’s written a number of columns that have provoked some measure of outrage:
Just a few months ago, he assumed a vindictive and petty pose by bullying a professor who playfully called him a “bedbug” on Twitter. Other Stephens columns in the Times about global warming and Ilhan Omar had been irritating the paper’s liberal readers (he’s a conservative) since he moved over from the Wall Street Journal in 2017, but by outraging readers across the political spectrum, his “Jewish Genius” piece marked a new personal low.
But just because you make people mad doesn’t mean you’re bad. And 47-year-old Bret is actually a good deal younger than fellow columnist Jack, who is 62. Furthermore, the “irritating” column on global warming was Bret’s first, for the Times, at least. It was, in fact, a stupid column, whose whole “argument” was that, well, who knows what the future will bring? Bret could have written an intelligent “skeptical environmentalist” column à la Bjørn Lomborg or Reason’s Ron Bailey, but that would be too much work for a gentleman like Bret, who generally prefers his opinions to be fact-free. Bret also came off like a jerk during l’affaire punaise, as Jack’s link explains, but his takedown of Ilhan, while one-sided, emphasizing all of her bad ideas, and ignoring her good ones, is largely valid. Omar’s support of the clearly anti-Semitic “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” campaign deserves about all the criticism Bret can give it.
Jack doesn’t bother to wonder why the Times bothered to hire Bret in the first place, which would raise the whole “Jew” thing once more. The Times clearly hired Stephens because it wanted to ingratiate itself with right-wing anti-Trump neocons, hoping to build a solid anti-Trump phalanx that would bring as many of the old Weekly Standard/Commentary crowd, heavily though not exclusively Jewish, back into the Democratic fold, from which they had departed decades before, as it hired the thirty-something Bari Weiss as opinion editor to connect with “young Jews”, Bret and Bari taking the load off big-picture Jewish columnists David Brooks and Thomas Friedman, who prefer not to ride the ethnic thing so hard, not to mention Jewish columnists Paul Krugman and Michelle Goldberg, who prefer not to write Jewish at all, other than devoting an occasional column to “meh”. If you’re a Conservative or Orthodox Jew, the Times doesn’t seem to care about you very much.
I don’t think Stephens, who I find pretty much unreadable, should necessarily lose his job for writing a self-congratulatory column. He’s hardly the first Jew, and surely not the last, to think that “we” are smarter than they are, though most Jews are, I guess, too smart to come out and say it the way Bret did. Lines like “No one ever accused Jews of being stupid” are a much better way to go. No one ever did, did they?
One Jew who clearly thought that “Jewish intelligence” was genetically based was the prominent medieval historian Norman Cantor. Cantor, a Jew born in Canada whose family moved to New York City while he was still young, wrote, in addition to his excellent historical volumes, a number of quasi-autobiographical works that I found quite entertaining. Cantor had his own “Just So” theory for Jewish superiority, which did not rely on anything as tedious as DNA. According to Cantor, rabbis were held in very high esteem in all traditional Jewish societies (surely true); therefore, wealthy men wanted their daughters to marry rabbis (maybe); therefore, rabbis had lots of kids, and outproduced the dummies (dubious). Among other things, this flies in the face of perhaps the most famous bit of Jewish lore, the passage in the Talmud explaining how often a man is obliged to make love to his wife, saying that learning takes precedence over procreation, so that, while a rich man’s wife can expect to have sex five times a week, and a poor man’s wife three times a week, a rabbi’s wife should be content with twice a week.2
Cantor tells his just so story in several of his books, the first time around suggesting but not stating the obvious corollary: while Jews were making themselves smarter, Catholics were making themselves dumber, forcing all their bright boys to take vows of celibacy. The second time around, he didn’t shy away from the obvious, and stated it outright.
Of course, it’s not only Jews who are frequently suggested to be genetically superior in terms of intelligence. The Chinese often get the nod as well. But here’s the thing: the “Scientific Revolution”, running more or less from the age of Copernicus (d. 1543) to the publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687, surely a decisive event in world history, was fueled at the first entirely by Catholics, with the Protestants coming on strong in the third and fourth quarters. Jewish mathematicians in the medieval Mediterranean world had better access to Moslem mathematical works, which preserved and improved upon the learning of the Greeks, and which also imported “Arabic” numerals from India, works which Jewish scholars could read in the original Arabic, while Christians had to struggle with second- and third-hand translations. So why didn’t the Jews invent modern science, instead of following in the wake of the stupid Italians? Or why didn’t the Chinese?
Because, of course, it wasn’t a matter of “pure” intelligence, whatever that is. In the Italian Renaissance humanists wrested control of “learning” away from the traditional clerical class, which defined learning as the endless study of a handful of official sacred texts, turning it to use in the “real world” in a wide variety of ways. It was only when the Jews, and the Chinese, abandoned their devotion to tradition, and applied their traditional veneration of learning to “western” thought, that their contributions to the sciences and humanities exploded.
Afterwords
Cantor did not invent Jewish “Just So” stories. In Moses Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, he tells us that Moses “invented” circumcision because wanted Jews to be chaste, and he knew that nothing so reduced sexual desire as circumcision. When I was a freshman at Oberlin in 1963, my roommate, Harris Lieb, told me that Moses instituted circumcision because he wanted the Jews to be fertile, and he knew that nothing so increased sexual desire as circumcision. In fact, there was no Moses—the entire “Exodus” story is a myth—and the practice of circumcision, however it originated—and all of the traditional “explanations” were surely rationalizations of pre-existing practices—predated the emergence of the ancient Hebrews and was no doubt an established practice when the Hebrews “invented” themselves as Hebrews and developed a (relatively) coherent explanation/rationalization of their pre-existing customs, experiences, and beliefs, centered around not a god but the God, who had chosen them as his special people beyond all others.
1. Adapted, except for the French, from Mose Allison’s classic lament, “Parchman Farm”.
2. This is the way it was explained to me by several Jewish women, and it’s clear that it’s a long-running gag among American Jews. This piece of Jewish “folk wisdom” seems not to be available on the Internet, though a brief survey suggests that the “full” treatment of the issue in the vast collection of Jewish writings known as the Talmud actually provides much finer detail. The wife of a camel driver, for example, can expect to get laid no more than once a month.
