Title: Fatal Gift: Jewish Intelligence and Western Civilization,John Glad

Title: Fatal Gift: Jewish Intelligence and Western Civilization
Author: Seymour W. Itzkoff
Publisher: Paideia Publishers

Fatal Gift is the concluding volume of the trilogy, Who Are the Jews?, the first two of which are Soul of the Israelites (2004) and A Nation of Philosophers (2004). A retired professor of Smith College, Itzkoff is the author of some two dozen books, a number of which are devoted to human intelligence as an evolutionary phenomenon. This latest series of three books is both an erudite, iconoclastic history of Jewry's historical roots and a recommendation for its clearly problematic future.

Fatal Gift is dedicated to six members of Itzkoff's family who perished in the Holocaust, and the memory of their deaths, superimposed on Jewish persecutions over the ages, has laid its stamp on both his impressive historical summing up and his prescription for the future - not only for the Jews, but for humanity itself. In short, this is not just another Jewish history, of which there are hundreds and possibly even thousands, but a work that stands alone, not just in its conclusions, but in its total independence. Because of its political unorthodoxy, its chief chance of broad discussion will have to rise from the controversial nature of the views expressed in it.

Before getting down to the essence of Itzkoff's view, let me first make what is traditionally referred to as "full disclosure": Itzkoff wrote the preface to my book Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century (available free online at www.whatwemaybe.org, an excerpt from which was published in The Jewish Press (www.jewishpress.com/page.do/3151/_History,_Eugenics,And_The_Jews.html). To be entirely honest, I must confess that certain portions of Itzkoff's preface startled me, and there were things I disagreed with from a colleague whom I had never met, but I let them stand in their entirety out of respect for the integrity of his approach. Likewise, there are aspects of Fatal Gift with which I disagree, just as he in his preface noted his disagreements with me.

After discussing the origins of human civilization and the role of intelligence as its determining factor, Itzkoff provides what reviewers like to call "a broad panorama" of Jewish history: Semitic interbreeding with Sumerian and Greco-Roman civilizations, the subsequent shaping of Jewish thought in the closed Talmudic world, and then the opening to the Enlightenment, which inevitably drew after it, first, emancipation and later the assimilation that - even as you read this review - is busily extinguishing the basis of future Jewish society as efficiently as the eraser on the tip of a No. 2 pencil. Itzkoff sees his task as no less than saving humanity by explicating its biological and historical roots.

Itzkoff's ideological platform is straight-forward eugenics - a movement that was driven underground, not immediately after the end of World War II, but only a generation later - specifically after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, when the Holocaust memorial movement was founded with its need for an image of the "enemy." The assault on eugenics was led, for the most part, by liberal and leftist Jews with names like Gould and Lewontin, who declared, as evolutionary scientists, the triumph of nurture over nature. Itzkoff approaches both history and biology from a diametrically opposite view.

In 1996 Sandor Gilman published a book entitled Smart Jews, the very subtitle of which describes the conception of Jewish intelligence as a "construction." Itzkoff's response could not be more straight-forward: "Gilman, it is sad to say, is a representative example of a newer kind of self-hating Jew, a denier of the objective reality of Jewish intelligence, even when it stands before us universally in evidence in the scientific and historical record. Can we ever resolve the dilemmas posed by history as well as our own fragile civilizational existence if we refute fact and truth in favor of momentarily salving mythologies? Here is the essential tragedy of the Holocaust. Had Western civilization been able to proclaim the truth that Jewish accomplishment was not part of a sinister conspiracy to take over the world, here a people apart, tainted with peculiar cultural traditions, could we not have been able to stop the insanity of 'National Socialism' and the other pseudo-egalitarian crusades against human accomplishment?"

Ashkenazi Jews, Itzkoff points out emphatically, score better on IQ tests by a full Standard Deviation (15 points) than do European populations, perhaps even more. He views this genetic superiority as achieved by interbreeding with the elite of other civilizations in antiquity. Itzkoff emphasizes Jewish piety vis-à-vis the scholar, quoting an ancient rabbinical injunction: "To the future bridegroom: One should always sell everything one possesses in order to marry the daughter of a scholar; if one does not find a scholar's daughter, he should marry the daughter of the great men of the generation (the communal leaders); if he does not find a daughter of great men, he should marry the daughter of the archisynogogi (lay head of the synagogue); if he does not find the daughter of the archisynogogi, he should marry the daughter of charity supervisors; he should marry the daughter of elementary teachers; but he should never marry the daughter of the people of the land (am haaretz/illiterates)."

The resulting superior genotype was, according to Itzkoff, further supported by the higher survival rate of children in the Middle Ages than was the case of their host populations. Thus the kernel of his argument is that Jews followed eugenic practices over the ages, their high intelligence permitting them to compete successfully with other populations that decimated their talented individuals in endless "suicidal" wars. The historical violence wrecked upon successful Jewry is thus presented as an "irrational" lashing out based on envy. The Jews, according to Itzkoff, were "a new ethnicity created out of a central religious vision." Bred for intelligence and saved from interbreeding with the peoples in whose midst "enforced ghettoization" had embedded them, these disdained and powerless people in barely one and one half centuries used their high intellect to become leading figures in a Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Itzkoff is pessimistic about the effects of the centuries-old traditions of concubinage and polygyny on Muslim societies: "We may eventually have to concede that the attempt to bring these peoples into the mainstream of the West is beyond our means."

Itzkoff provides details on Jews who were active in the eugenics movement. In Britain Joseph Jacobs (1854-1916) was a pupil of Sir Francis Galton and studied superior Jewish intellect, France's Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed intelligence tests, and Wilhelm Stern in Germany developed the numeral concept of IQ. Itzkoff also points out that the elevated incidence of genetically transmitted diseases suffered by a highly inbred Jewish population (Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibosis, Canavan, Goucher), has been largely eliminated in current populations by the rigid application of eugenic methodologies.

Lastly, Itzkoff provides his vision for the future of Jewry in the face of a low fertility typical of high-IQ groups (the core of eugenicists' concern for over a century) by actually welcoming the majority intermarriage that threatens Jewy's very survival as a separate group: "As for the Jews, the desire, as with the Hellenistic Jews of Judea and Alexandria, to go out and welcome new participants in a modern belief system, as with the ancient 'God fearers,' would bring new life to Judaism, a hungry constituency of those who today would want to go beyond the cults and superstitions of the times. In so, attracting much new blood to this ancient intellectual and moral heritage there could be created a Judaism that would not fade into a tiny ritual committed synagogue minority."

Summing up, to say that Fatal Gift is controversial is to be guilty of understatement. The big question, obviously, is whether this vision is indicative of a radically new Jewish intellectual mindset, a biological and ideological framework for the "new conservatism."

I predict that Itzkoff's ill-wishers will try to stifle it with censorship's weapon par excellence: silence. After all, "bipartisanship" is when you never have to say you're sorry... or anything else, for that matter. Read it and make up your own mind.

And don't forget, you learned about it first in The Jewish Press.

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