The Intelligence of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Serbia

Abstract

The intelligence of 136 adult Jews in Serbia was tested with Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. The sample had a British IQ of 103.5, significantly higher than the IQ of 100 of Northern and Central Europeans and of 91 in Serbia. The 30 individuals who identified themselves as Sephardi had a lower IQ (100.3) than the 22 who identified themselves as Ashkenazi (103.8), but most of the sample identified themselves as mixed Sephardi and Ashkenazi showing that the Sephardim and Ashkenazim are well integrated in Serbia.

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The Intelligence of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Serbia
Richard Lynn*
University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland
Jelena Čvorović
Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences,
Belgrade, Serbia
*Corresponding author: lynnr540@aol.com
The intelligence of 136 adult Jews in Serbia was tested with Raven’s
Standard Progressive Matrices. The sample had a British IQ of 103.5,
significantly higher than the IQ of 100 of Northern and Central Europeans
and of 91 in Serbia. The 30 individuals who identified themselves as
Sephardi had a lower IQ (100.3) than the 22 who identified themselves as
Ashkenazi (103.8), but most of the sample identified themselves as mixed
Sephardi and Ashkenazi showing that the Sephardim and Ashkenazim
are well integrated in Serbia.
Key Words: Intelligence, Jews, Serbia, Progressive Matrices
Following the emancipation of the Jews in most of Europe in the nineteenth
century, it began to be asserted that Jews have an exceptionally high average
level of intelligence. In Britain, one of the first to make this assertion was Lord
Ashley, who observed in 1847 that “The Jews are a people of very powerful
intellect… they present, in proportion to their numbers, a far larger list of men of
genius and learning than could be exhibited by any gentile country. Music, poetry,
medicine, astronomy, occupied their attention, and in every field they were more
than a match for their competitors” (Vital, 1999, p. 179). Francis Galton (1869,
p.47) also believed the Jews are a highly intelligent people, writing in his
Hereditary Genius that they “appear to be rich in families of high intellectual
breeds”. In France, the Count de Gobineau (1853) discussed the cultural and
intellectual achievements of different peoples and concluded that the Aryans
(Northern Europeans) and the Jews were the two most intelligent peoples. In the

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United States, the physician Madison Marsh (1874, p.343) wrote that the Jews
have “high average intelligence,” and in 1898 Mark Twain (1985, p.12) wrote that
the Jewish “contribution to the world’s list of great names in literature, science,
art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning is way out of proportion to
the weakness of his numbers”.
This contention was frequently reiterated in the twentieth century. In Britain,
John Fraser (1915, pp. 30-1) in his book The Conquering Jew advanced the
thesis that the principal reason for Jewish achievement is that Jews are more
intelligent than Christians: "in alertness and knowledge, the Jew is the superior of
the Christian; the struggle between the sons of the North, with their blond hair and
sluggish intellects, and the sons of the Orient, with their black eyes, is an unequal
one; if the Russian dispassionately spoke his mind, I think he would admit that
his dislike of the Jew is not so much racial or religious as a recognition that the
Jew is his superior, and in a conflict of wits will get the better of him".
Writing four years later, Joseph Jacobs (1919, pp.55-7) gave an account of
the success of Jews in Germany and attributed this to Jews having high
intelligence: "German Jews are at the present moment at the head of European
intellect", hence, "a determinant number of Jews will produce a larger number of
geniuses than any equal number of men of other races." In the United States,
Thorsten Veblen wrote of the "intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in modern
Europe" (1919, p.35).
With the development of intelligence tests in the first decade of the twentieth
century, evidence began to accumulate substantiating the theory that Jews have
high intelligence. Studies showing this began to be published in the 1920s in
Britain and the United States, and more studies confirming this in the United
States were published from time to time throughout the twentieth century. In the
1960s a landmark book was published by Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan Possony
(1963) and a further book by Weyl (1966), which brought together the evidence
of the high Jewish IQ and achievement and discussed the reasons for this.
By the end of the twentieth century, it continued to be asserted that Jews
have a high IQ. Herrnstein & Murray (1994, p.275) wrote that "Whenever the
subject of group differences comes up one of the questions sure to be asked is
'Are Jews really smarter than everyone else?’” They showed that in the United
States Jews obtained an average IQ of 112.6 in relation to 100 for non-Jewish
Whites. Others who have reviewed the evidence on Jewish intelligence and
concluded that Jews have a high IQ include MacDonald (1994, pp.188-190);
Eysenck (1995, p.159): "as far as Jews are concerned, there is no question that
they score very highly on IQ tests"; and Michael Levin, who has written: “in every

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society in which they have participated, Jews have eventually been recognised
(and disliked) for their exceptional talent” (1997, p.132).
The studies of the intelligence of the Jews have been reviewed by the first
author and are summarized in Lynn (2011, p. 316). This summary presents the
IQ evidence for the four principal ethnic populations of Jews. These are the
Ashkenazim, who are indigenous to northern and central Europe, but most of
whom are now in the United States and Israel; the Sephardim who were resident
in Spain until they were expelled in 1492, when they dispersed to various
locations, principally to the Balkans; the Mizrahim, who were indigenous to North
Africa and the Near East, most of whom are now in Israel; and the Ethiopian Jews,
who were indigenous to Ethiopia, and most of whom are also now in Israel. The
first three of these groups have some genetic affinity as they are all descended
from the same original stock in Palestine, as shown by Hammer et al (2000) and
Ostrer and Skorecki (2013). Ethiopian Jews do not have any genetic relationship
with the other Jewish peoples, but are descendants of Ethiopians who converted
to Judaism many centuries ago.
The conclusions of this study are summarized in Table 1. This gives the IQs
of the four ethnic Jewish populations in relation to a British IQ of 100 (sd of 15)
(column 1), the IQs of the Gentiles among whom these four Jewish populations
lived given in Lynn (2006) (column 2), and the difference between the two (column
3). The first row shows that the Ashkenazim have an IQ of 110, the Northern and
Central Europeans among whom they lived have an IQ of 100, and there is a
difference between the two of 10 IQ points. The Ashkenazi IQ of 110 is based on
studies in the United States, Britain, Canada and Poland. The second row shows
that theSephardim have an IQ of 98; and Europeans in the Balkans among whom
they lived have an IQ of 92.5, and there is a difference between the two of 5.5 IQ
points. The third row shows that the Mizrahim have an IQ of 91, the Arabs in the
Near East and North Africa among whom they lived have an IQ of 84, and there
is a difference between the two of 7 IQ points. The fourth row shows that the
Ethiopian Jews have an IQ of 68, the Ethiopians among whom they lived have an
IQ of 67. Thus, the IQ of 68 of the Ethiopian Jews is approximately the same as
that of other Ethiopians and sub-Saharan Africans given in Lynn (2006).
The IQ of the Sephardim is the least well-established of the four principal
ethnic Jewish populations. There have been no studies of the intelligence of the
Sephardim in the Balkans. Their IQ of 98 was estimated from the data presented
by Benbassa & Rodrigue (1995, p. 191) that in Israel the Sephardim fall about
midway between the Ashkenazim and the Mizrahim on a number of socio-
economic phenomena including average earnings and educational attainment.

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Table 1. IQs of Jews and Gentiles.
Jews
IQ
Non-Jews
IQ
IQ difference
Ashkenazim
110
North/central
Europeans
100
10.0
Sephardim
98
Balkans
92.5
5.5
Mizrahim
91
Arabs
84
7.0
Ethiopians
68
Ethiopians
67
1.0
To fill this gap in the research literature, we report here a study of the
intelligence of Ashkenazim and Sephardim in the Balkans.
Method
The sample consists of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Serbia. Jews have
been present in Serbia since Roman times. In the late 15th century, a large
number of Jews who had been expelled from Spain settled permanently in the
Balkans, including Serbia. Since that time approximately 80% of Serbian Jews
were Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews, and 20% were Yiddish-speaking
Ashkenazi Jews. During the Second World War the Serbian Jewish population
was almost completely destroyed in the Holocaust. In the early 1990s there were
around 2500 Jews resident in Serbia. In the 2011 census there were 1185 Jews
in Serbia, with approximately 40% in Vojvodina (mostly in Novi Sad, a city in
Vojvodina, about 200 kilometers from Belgrade), and approximately 60% in
Belgrade, the capital city (Census Serbia, 2011).
In the present research, Jews were recruited through personal contacts and
community organizations led by the local rabbi, who heads the only remaining
functioning synagogue in Serbia, the Belgrade Synagogue. Personal in-depth
interviews were conducted in 2013 of Jews in Belgrade and Novi Sad. The data
collected include intelligence, age, gender, group membership (Sephardi or
Ashkenazi), complete genealogies including marital and reproductive histories.
The sample consisted of 136 Jewish adults (62 men and 74 women) with an
average age of 54.5 years.
The intelligence of the sample was tested with Raven’s Standard Progressive
Matrices (SPM). This is the most widely used of all “culture-reduced” tests,
measuring reasoning ability, general intelligence and Spearman’s g(Jensen
1998). The test has 60 diagrammatic puzzles with a missing part to be chosen
from several options. The participants were not paid for their participation and
there was no time limit placed on completing the test. Approximately two-thirds of
the sample were tested individually and one third was group-tested at the Annual
Jewish Family Seminar outside Belgrade.

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Results
During the investigation, it was found that Ashkenazim and Sephardim are
well integrated. Only 22 of the participants identified themselves as Ashkenazi
and 30 as Sephardi, while 84 identified themselves as mixed. Table 2 gives the
SPM means and SDs for the Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mixed groups. These are
followed by the American percentiles (US/PC) obtained in 1993 and given in the
American standardization sample by Raven et al (1996, p. 65, Table SPM 1). The
American percentiles are given because there are no satisfactory British adult
norms for the SPM. The next column (US/IQ) gives the American IQ equivalents
of the American percentiles. The last column gives the British IQ equivalents of
the American IQs obtained by deducting 2 IQ points from the American IQs in
accordance with the procedure adopted in Lynn (2006). Thus, the last row gives
a British IQ of 103.5 for the total sample. The Ashkenazim obtained a higher mean
score than the Sephardim but the difference is not statistically significant
(t=1.185). No adjustment to these IQs is made for a possible “Flynn effect”
increase in theBritish IQ because there was no increase in the SPM among adults
in Britain from 1979 to 2008 (Lynn, 2009).
Table 2. Means and standard deviations of Serbian Jews on the Standard
Progressive Matrices (SPM) test, US percentile, and IQ according to United
States and British norms.
Group
N
SPM raw score
US PC
US IQ
British IQ
mean
SD
Ashkenazim
22
53.3
4.0
65
105.8
103.8
Sephardim
30
51.4
6.6
56
102.3
100.3
Mixed
84
53.7
5.5
67
106.6
104.6
Total
136
53.2
5.5
64
105.5
103.5
Discussion
The results show three points of interest. First, the Jewish sample as a whole
obtained an IQ of 103.5. This is higher than the IQ of 100 of the Northern and
Central Europeans and confirms previous studies finding that Jews in Europe
have a higher IQ than non-Jewish Europeans. Second, the IQ of 103.5 of the
Jewish sample as a whole is substantially higher than the IQ of 88 for Serbia
reported by Rushton & Čvorović (2009) and of 91 for Serbia given in the most
recent calculations of national IQs given by Meisenberg & Lynn (2011) and Lynn
& Vanhanen (2012). This 12.5 points advantage of Jews in Serbia compared with
the general population confirms previous studies summarized in Table 1 showing

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that Jews obtain significantly higher IQs than the populations among whom they
live.
Third, our objective to obtain an IQ for Sephardic Jews in Serbia had only
limited success. We did find that the Sephardi had a lower IQ (100.3) than the
Ashkenazi (103.8), as predicted. However, this is only a 3.5 IQ point difference.
Further, as noted above only 30 of the participants identified themselves as
Sephardim, and only 22 as Ashkenazim, and this difference is not statistically
significant. Most of the sample (N=84) identified themselves as mixed and their
IQ of 104.6 was slightly but not significantly higher than that of the Sephardim and
Ashkenazim. It is evident that the Sephardim and Ashkenazim are well integrated
in Serbia through intermarriage over a number of generations and even those
who identify themselves as Sephardim and Ashkenazim probably have some
mixed ancestry.
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