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The Mayor's Hard Bargain By Chris Smith Republicans combined to help Bloomberg get elected. Even as he heads towa rd a second term, its a deal that still costs him.
Did Jewish intelligence evolve in tandem with Jewish diseases as a result of discrimination in the ghettos of medieval Europe? Thats the premise of a controversial new study that has some preening and others plotzing.
What's Larry David's evidence for his exceptional brainpower? At some point during the tenth century, a group of Jews abandoned the lus h hills of Lucca, Italy, andat the invitation of Charlemagneheaded for t he severer climes of the Rhineland and Northern France. But ultimately, they became known as Ashkenazim, a variation o n the Hebrew word for one of Noahs grandsons. In some ways, life was good for the Jews in this strange new place. Theyd been lured there on favorable terms, with promises of physical protecti on, peaceful travel, and the ability to adjudicate their own quarrels. Yet the Ashkenazim did very well, in spite of these constraints, because they found an ingenious way to adapt to their new environment that didnt rely on physical labor. What they noticed, as they set up their towns, located mainly at the crossroads of trade routes, was that there was no one around to lend money.
Because of the Christian pr ohibition against usury, Jews found themselves a financially indispensab le place in their new home, extending loans to peasants, tradesmen, knig hts, courtiers, even the occasional monastery. In 1270, for example, 80 percent of the 228 adult Jewish males in Perpignan, Fran ce, made their living lending money to their Gentile neighbors, accordin g to Marcus Arkins Aspects of Jewish Economic History. Two others were identified, in the notarial records , as poets. Success at money-lending required a different set of skills than farming or any of the traditional trades. Some, surely, were social: cultivating connections, winning over trust (or maybe bullying your way there, Shyl ocks awful pound of flesh). It probably required some aggression, becaus e the field was competitive, with Jews suffering so few professional opt ions. But it also required cognitive skills, or something my generation would call numeracya fluency in mathematics, a dexterity with numbersand my grandmothers generation would call a head for figures. If you were J ewish in Perpignan in 1270, and you didnt have a head for figures, you d idnt stand much of a chance. Numeracy, literacy, critical reasoning: For millennia, these have been th e currency of Jewish culture, the stuff of Talmudic study, immigrant suc cess, and Borscht Belt punch lines. Jewish cleverness ha s also been an enduring feature of anti-Semitic paranoia. In the sixteen th century, Martin Luther said Jewish doctors were so smart they could d evelop a poison that could kill Christians in a single dayor any other t ime period of their choosing (and four centuries later, Pravda suggested Jewish doctors were spies sent to kill Stalin). After the calamities of September 11, one of the creepier conspiracy theories to whip through t he Muslim world was the idea that only Jews were cunning enough to have pulled off the hijackings. Last summer, Henry Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist at the Univ ersity of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, an independent scholar with a flair for controversy, skipped cheerfully into the center of this minefield. The two shopped around a paper that tried to establish a genetic argumen t for the fabled intelligence of Jews. It contended that the diseases mo st commonly found in Ashkenazimparticularly the lysosomal storage diseas es, like Tay-Sachswere likely connected to and, indeed, in some sense re sponsible for outsize intellectual achievement in Ashkenazi Jews. It was not written in the ge nteel, dispassionate voice common to scientific inquiries but as a polem ic. Most American academics expected the thing to drop like a stone. The Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge Univer sity Press, posted it online and agreed to run it in its bi-monthly peri odical sometime in 2006. The New York Times, The Economist, and several Jewish publications risked their reputations to legitimize it. Today, th e paper has a lively presence on the Internettype Ashkenazi into Google and the first hit is the Wikipedia entry, where the article gets pride o f place.
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