Jews seem to generate a lot of negative emotions among non-Jews, and it’s been going on for a while. However, when one strips away the accusations and obsessive focus on high-profile figures, all that remains is envy.
The Romans fought three wars against the Jews, who had been a civilization for over a millennium before the Romans ever touched the sands of the Middle East. The first of those wars, the First Jewish-Roman War (66-73 AD), which ended with the deaths of Masada’s defenders, saw Jerusalem’s destruction, including the Temple, the death of 50,000 Jews, and absolute Roman control over Jerusalem. Nevertheless, Jews tried two more times to throw off the Roman yoke.
Those wars would change the Jewish universe dramatically, with the adherents going from a powerful entity (although one subservient to the Romans) in the eastern Mediterranean, with semi-autonomous local control and nominal power over large swaths of land, to a vilified people with virtually no power, no land, and its surviving population either sold into slavery or kicked out of its traditional home and spread out across the region.
The reasons people give for hating Jews through the ages are numerous: They were a thorn in the Romans’ side. They killed Christ. They made matzo with the blood of Christian children (something decided non-kosher). They’re greedy bankers. They’re insular, self-dealing, and dislike non-Jews, and their faith puts them above other second-tier peoples and religions. Then there are people who say Jews stole the land from the Arabs, put Palestinians in camps, and Israel was founded by terrorists.
A Jewish family from England arriving at Ellis Island (pre 1915). Public domain.
In America, too, some of that hate exists. Why? Again, the haters have their answers: Jews control everything. They built and still control Hollywood. Jews control the media. They frequently use finance to perpetrate scams on others (think: Boesky, Epstein, and Madoff). They control Wall Street. They have a huge influence in technology & Silicon Valley. In general business they’re everywhere, founding Home Depot, Carnival, Rocket Mortgage, Levis, Hyatt, Ben & Jerrys, Starbucks, Snapple, and others.
Then, of course, there is the place where power is most cancerous: government. Particularly where Democrats are concerned, Jews play a dominant role. In the current administration, Jews helm Homeland Security, Treasury, and State. The Attorney General and the White House Chief of Staff are Jews, as are 10 Senators and 21 Congressmen. And of course, the Rosenbergs, who gave the nuclear secrets to the Soviets, Marc Elias, who helped Joe Biden steal the White House, and George Soros, who’s been funding the near collapse of the United States. Almost without exception, these Jews have abandoned, or are actively hostile to, the Torah’s precepts.
Lastly, there are groups like AIPAC that push America to pour billions of dollars into Israel’s security.
All in all, for someone looking to hate, Jews make a good target.
But here’s the thing: Most of the Jews who come to dominate in America do so because they’ve been successful, not destructive. And most of them, except the politicians, have become successful because they created a business or a service that consumers—all consumers, not just Jews—were willing and able to freely exchange their hard-earned money for things they wanted, i.e., they were making people’s lives better. That is very possibly the most noble way for a human being to make money.
When someone stops to think of all the Jewish names dominating an industry, one might think that Jews are a huge segment of the population. But they’re not. American Jews number about 7 million, or about 2% of the population. Worldwide, the 16 million Jews represent just .2% of the population.
Do you ever wonder why, when we think of Jews, we think of banking and media and not construction or farming? Is it because Jews can’t build or farm? No. They built Jerusalem long before the Romans arrived and centuries later created a vibrant farming industry out of what was essentially a 19th-century desert in what would later become Israel.
The reason Jews are often associated with banking and media and other such pursuits has to do with the fact that historically they were prohibited from large swaths of the economy. In Europe, under the Romans and Christians, Jews were often excluded from guilds. In Islamic lands they faced Jizya, a tax on non-Muslims.
Those exclusions and taxes dovetailed with usury bans on Christians and Muslims to open a significant opportunity for Jews. A key element of their being able to take advantage of that opportunity comes directly from the Jewish faith itself, which requires Jews read the Torah. Literacy and its companion numeracy allowed Jews to become successful bankers. That expertise and success, in turn, provided them with the capital and connections to branch into other areas.
So why are there still so few Jews relative to the rest of the population? A few factors. As people become more prosperous, birthrates decline. Additionally, successful Jews often intermarry into Christian families and seem to drift away from the faith. And lastly, as Gad Saad points out in The Parasitic Mind, Judaism demands a great deal of its adherents and even more from those who want to become members. The result is that while Jewish civilization is one of the oldest in human history, its adherents remain a tiny fraction of mankind.
That tiny number hides much. With their focus on education handed down over thousands of years, Jews have the highest IQs in the world. While representing just .2% of the world’s population, Jews represent more than 20% of Nobel Prize recipients across disciplines including 41% in Economics, 26% in Medicine, and 25% in Physics. Jews outperform virtually every other group on the planet in terms of success across a wide swath of culture and civilization. Mark Twain observed:
[The Jews] are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual aristocracy… [Jewish] contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world…and has done it with his hands tied behind him.
As with members of every other group, there are no doubt Jews who are avaricious, malicious, and mendacious, but I would suggest they, too, are a minority. In reality, the hatred directed at Jews has little to do with anything other than envy. People hate or dislike Jews because, in the aggregate, they’re so successful, and people focus this animus on the keys that empowered Jews: family, community, and education. (I am somewhat dumbfounded why so many of these manifestly smart people vote for Democrats, who are against virtually everything Jews have harnessed to succeed…)
The fact that Jews make up such an incredible proportion of successful Americans should not be a reason to hate them but rather should be taken as a roadmap. Tony Robbins may have put it best: “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do, and you’ll achieve the same results.”
While I doubt I could ever become a chess master, regardless of how much I practiced, the notion of strong families, strong communities, and a focus on education is a proven 3,000-year-old recipe for success. America would be far better off if more people followed it.
Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA
Jesus Christ is King
