DOES THE EMANCIPATION BEAT THE GOLDEN AGE OF SPAIN?: Charles Murray has an article in Commentary Magazine this month about Jews and their IQ over the course of history.

The Jews do not appear in the annals of philosophy, drama, visual art, mathematics, or the natural sciences during the eighteen centuries from the time of Homer through the first millennium C.E., when so much was happening in Greece, China, and South Asia...But when George Sarton put a high-powered lens to the Middle Ages in his monumental Introduction to the History of Science (1927-48), he found that 95 of the 626 known scientists working everywhere in the world from 1150 to 1300 were Jews--15 percent of the total, far out of proportion to the Jewish population.

Murray pooh-poohs that era since few of those Jews--many of them products of the Muslim Golden Age of Spain--influenced world history and culture. But:

As soon as Jewish children born under legal emancipation had time to grow to adulthood, they started appearing in the first ranks of the arts and sciences. During the four decades from 1830 to 1870, when the first Jews to live under emancipation reached their forties, 16 significant Jewish figures appear. In the next four decades, from 1870 to 1910, the number jumps to 40. During the next four decades, 1910–1950, despite the contemporaneous devastation of European Jewry, the number of significant figures almost triples, to 114.

Technorati Tag: Jews and Golden Age of Spain.