Whoa. Whoa. Just when Ashkenazi Jews thought it was safe to belong to a white ethnicity, genetic research rears its ugly head. The Great White Race is making a comeback, this time riding the unlikely coattails of Tevye the milkman.
Some geneticists from Utah—already a suspicious place—recently published a paper alleging that the Ashkenazi Jewish population carries a great proportion of genes for high intelligence along with certain diseases, which they claim is the result of 1100 years of oppression in Eastern Europe acting as a natural selection device. Barred from many medieval professions, including peasant, blacksmith and apparently village idiot, Jews fell to usury, dealing in liquid assets for lack of any other kind. Medieval society favored Jews who were quick on their feet, and those who managed to stave off pogroms and calculate interest rates in their heads were rewarded with survival, prosperity and many children who intermarried to produce more of the same.
This led to the now-infamous Ashkenazi Advantage, dubiously named as it includes an increased risk of Tay-Sachs disease, not to mention morbid sensitivity and the bad habit of rattling off prime numbers in one’s sleep (particularly disturbing to bedmates who are not fellow geniuses, and hence a further disincentive to miscegenation).
I first read about this theory in a June 3rd article published in—would you believe it—the New York Times, which quickly rose to the top of the “most emailed” list in the week it was published. My field research indicates that a few Jews dared to be openly flattered by the article—and who can blame them? After all, it seemed to suggest that they were smart; but the truly cagey ones, always wary of being singled out, wondered why such a study would come out of Utah, of all places. What’s in it for them? The article quotes one Dr. David Goldstein cautiously allowing that the paper makes “quite a strong case” for itself, while probably also thinking that it’s times like these you wish your name was Smith.
Well, that’s easy for Dr. Goldstein to say—he is, after all, a geneticist at Duke—but not every Jew is so sanguine. Swell as it felt to belong to a population burdened with exceptional genius, many felt a bit stiffed. For the bulk of Ashkenazi Jews, who found out the news while sitting on their sagging sofas watching network TV in dimly lit dens, the news was cold comfort indeed. So you’re telling me my ancestors lived by fleecing Polish peasants and making it with their cousins? Wait a second, they shouted, rising to their feet and jabbing a meaty finger at the screen: If I’m so Jewish, then where’s all my money, where’s all my goddam smarts? Hey, at least I don’t have a disease.
As a half Ashkenazi Jew myself, my own feelings about the paper were, well, mixed. The news reminded me how, like many other hapless members of the Tribe, I have been waiting forever for the International Jewish Conspiracy (IJC) to send me my membership card along with all the privileges it confers. I’d previously been telling myself they sent it to the wrong address (you know how they assign the dim bulbs to the mail room), but now I began to wonder if I really belonged.
Failing my receipt of the genius gene, perhaps I really am doomed to rot in the same mediocrity as everyone else. For even among the Chosen people, most of us are not Chosen to be genetically exceptional, and we must brave the world as our unremarkable selves. We get stuck in the same jobs, the same moral dilemmas, the same traffic jams—worse ones, even, because of our people’s genetic predilection to live off the New Jersey Turnpike.
The nice thing about being American is that none of this has to matter. My parents married each other across state and religious lines, and nobody blinked—they just showed up at the wedding bearing Cuisinarts and baby carriages as if to say, Let the mixing begin. I like to think of myself as a genetically-modified-meat-‘n’-potatoes kind of gal. Like most of you, my list of ingredients is too long to account for, and we’re a stronger race for it.
