THE ISRAEL TEST
by George Gilder

Aish
August 17, 2009

Israel is hated not for her vices but her virtues.

Like the Jews throughout history, Israel poses a test to the world. In
particular, it is a test for any people that lusts for the fruits
of capitalism without submitting to capitalism’s imperious moral
code. Because capitalism, like the biblical faith from which it
largely arises, remorselessly condemns to darkness and death those
who resent the achievements of others.

At the heart of anti-Semitism is resentment of Jewish achievement. At
the heart of anti-Semitism is resentment of Jewish achievement. Today
that achievement is concentrated in Israel. Obscured by the usual
media coverage of the "war-torn" Middle East, Israel has become
one of the most important economies in the world, second only to the
United States in its pioneering of technologies benefiting human life,
prosperity, and peace.

But so it has always been. Israel, like the Jews throughout history,
is hated not for her vices but her virtues. Israel is hated, as the
United States is hated, because Israel is successful, because Israel
is free, and because Israel is good.

As Maxim Gorky put it: "Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk,
they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit,
and more capable of work than they are." Whether driven by culture
or genes — or like most behavior, an inextricable mix — the fact
of Jewish genius is demonstrable. It can be gainsaid only by people
who do not expect to be believed.

Charles Murray distilled the evidence in Commentary magazine in
April 2007. The Jewish mean intelligence quotient is 110, ten points
above the norm. This strikingly higher average intelligence, however,
is not the decisive factor in overall Jewish achievement.

The three-tenths of 1 percent of the world population that is
Jewish has contributed some 25 percent of notable human intellectual
accomplishment in the modern period.

What matters in human accomplishment is not the average performance
but the treatment of exceptional performance and the cultivation
of genius. The commanding lesson of Jewish accomplishment is that
genius trumps everything else. Whatever the cause of high IQ,
as Murray explains, "the key indicator for predicting exceptional
accomplishment (like winning a Nobel Prize) is the incidence of
exceptional intelligence… The proportion of Jews with IQs of 140 or
higher is somewhere around six times the proportion of everyone else"
and rises at still higher IQs.

The great error of contemporary social thought is that poverty must
result from "discrimination" or "exploitation." Because Jews tend to
be overrepresented at the pinnacles of excellence, a dogmatic belief
that nature favors equal outcomes fosters hostility to capitalism
and leads inexorably to anti-Semitism.

The socialists and anti-Semites have it backwards. Poverty needs little
explanation. It has been the usual condition of nearly all human beings
throughout all history. What is precious and in need of explanation
and nurture is the special configuration of cultural and intellectual
aptitudes and practices — the differences, the inequalities — that
under some rare and miraculous conditions have produced wealth for
the world. Inequality is the answer, not the problem.

In his book Human Accomplishment Murray focused on the fact that the
three-tenths of 1 percent of the world population that is Jewish
has contributed some 25 percent of notable human intellectual
accomplishment in the modern period. Murray cites the historical
record: In the first half of the twentieth century, despite pervasive
and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the
Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite
the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature,
chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology.

He then proceeds to more recent data: In the second half of the
twentieth century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from
all over the world, that figure [of Jews awarded Nobel Prizes] rose to
29 percent. So far in the twenty-first century, it has been 32 percent.

The achievements of modern science are heavily the expression of Jewish
genius and ingenuity. If 26 percent of Nobel Prizes do not suffice
to make the case, it is confirmed by 51 percent of Wolf Prizes in
Physics, 28 percent of the Max Planck Medailles, 38 percent of the
Dirac Medals, 37 percent of the Heineman Prizes for Mathematical
Physics, and 53 percent of the Enrico Fermi Awards.

Jews are not only superior in abstruse intellectual pursuits, such as
quantum physics and nuclear science, however. They are also heavily
overrepresented among entrepreneurs of the technology businesses
that lead and leaven the global economy. Social psychologist David
McClelland, author of The Achieving Society, found that entrepreneurs
are identified by a greater "need for achievement" than are other
groups. "There is little doubt," he concluded, explaining the
disproportionate representation of Jews among entrepreneurs, that in
the United States, "the average need for achievement among Jews is
higher than for the general population."

"Need for achievement" alone, however, will not enable a person
to start and run a successful technological company. That takes a
combination of technological mastery, business prowess, and leadership
skills that is not evenly distributed even among elite scientists
and engineers. Edward B. Roberts of Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Sloan School compared MIT graduates who launched new
technological companies with a control group of graduates who pursued
other careers. The largest factor in predicting an entrepreneurial
career in technology was an entrepreneurial father. Controlling for
this factor, he discovered that Jews were five times more likely to
start technological enterprises than other MIT graduates.

For all its special features and extreme manifestations, anti-Semitism
is a reflection of the hatred toward successful middlemen,
entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, lenders, bankers, financiers, and other
capitalists that is visible everywhere whenever an identifiable set of
outsiders outperforms the rest of the population in the economy. This
is true whether the offending excellence comes from the Kikuyu in
Kenya; the Ibo and the Yoruba in Nigeria; the overseas Indians and
whites in Uganda and Zimbabwe; the Lebanese in West Africa, South
America, and around the world; the Parsis in India; the Indian
Gujaratis in South and East Africa; the Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire; and above all the more than 30 million overseas Chinese in
Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Capitalism overthrows theories of zero-sum economics and dog-eat-cat
survival of the fittest. Thus, as in the United States (outside
the academic arena), anti-Semitism withers in wealthy capitalist
countries. It waxes in socialist regimes where Jews may arouse
resentment by their agility in finding economic niches among the
interstices of bureaucracies, tax collections, political pork fests,
and crony capitalism.

Socialist or feudal systems, particularly when oil-rich and
politically controlled, favor a conspiratorial view of history and
economics. Anti-Semitism is chiefly a zero-sum disease.

As Walter Lippmann eloquently explained in The Good Society,
capitalism opened a vista of mutually enriching enterprise with the
good fortune of others creating opportunities for all. The Golden
Rule was transformed from an idealistic vision of heaven into
a practical agenda. From Poor Richard’s Almanack to rich Andrew
Carnegie’s autobiographical parables, all were rediscovering the
edifying insights of the author of Proverbs.

Judaism, perhaps more than any other religion, favors capitalist
activity and provides a rigorous moral framework for it. It is based on
a monotheistic affirmation that God is good and will prevail through
transcending envy and hatred and zero-sum fantasies. Judaism can be
plausibly interpreted as affirming the possibilities of creativity
and collaboration on the frontiers of a capitalist economy.

The real case for Israel is as the leader of human civilization,
technological progress, and scientific advance. The incontestable
facts of Jewish excellence constitute a universal test not only for
anti-Semitism but also for liberty and the justice of the civil
order. The success or failure of Jews in a given country is the
best index of its freedoms. In any free society, Jews will tend to
be represented disproportionately in the highest ranks of both its
culture and its commerce. Americans should celebrate the triumphs
of Jews on our shores as evidence of the superior freedoms of the
U.S. economy and culture.

The real case for Israel is as the leader of human civilization,
technological progress, and scientific advance.

In a dangerous world, faced with an array of perils, the Israel test
asks whether the world can suppress envy and recognize its dependence
on the outstanding performance of relatively few men and women. The
world does not subsist on zero-sum legal niceties. It subsists on hard
and possibly reversible accomplishments in technology, pharmacology,
science, engineering, and enterprise. It thrives not on reallocating
land and resources but on releasing human creativity in a way that
exploits land and resources most productively. The survival of humanity
depends on recognizing excellence wherever it appears and nurturing
it until it prevails. It relies on a vanguard of visionary creators
on the frontiers of knowledge and truth. It depends on passing the
Israel test.

Israel is the pivot, the axis, the litmus, the trial. Are you for
civilization or barbarism, life or death, wealth or envy? Are you an
exponent of excellence and accomplishment or of a leveling creed of
frenzy and hatred?

This essay is based on George Gilder’s new book, The Israel Test. This
article originally appeared on