Are Jews smarter than Catholics?

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The Jewish people I know value education and tend to be professionals.
I don’t know exactly why formal education seems to be higher priority, and I don’t like to speculate on other people’s culture (my own is enough of a mystery to me).
Also, this is a long standing trend. My dad was a teacher and he always said the Jewish kids were the smartest in the class.
 
Ugh, you’re trapping me into a corner :crazy_face:

I don’t know if it’s native intelligence (which is a very controversial land mine) or if it’s a cultural emphasis on formal education.
But as a group, one could make a case that Jewish people tend to do better with education and move up the career ladder.

And I hope I don’t wind up in a 🔥 war haha
 
From what I have seen, Jewish culture puts a huge emphasis on studies, doing well in school, getting advanced degrees, and professional achievement. Their families push them or expect them to excel. I saw Jewish students at my college having a huge amount of stress over this. Catholic culture doesn’t emphasize those things.

So if you’re going to use measures like how many Nobel prizes won and how many advanced degrees obtained etc then Jewish people are probably “smarter” by that measure. I think there are a wide variety of ways to measure intelligence, not all of them relating to degrees, achievement or how well one does on a test; my parents were two of the smartest people I ever met and neither one had a college degree and both got mediocre grades in school because they didn’t like school. You won’t see their names on the Nobel Prize list but they knew a lot about how the world worked that they passed on to me, and I found that a lot more valuable than a list of academic credentials.
 
AlNg said:
Jews constitute about 0.2% of the world’s population but have won about 20% of the Nobel Prizes. For example, Jews have won about 56 Nobel prizes in physics, whereas Roman Catholics have won about 3. Jews also excel in many other areas. Are Jews smarter than Catholics?
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Are Nobel Prize winners smarter than the rest of the population?
 
Jewish family values characteristically include parents pushing their kids hard, with the aim of either academic achievement or success in a career, or both. A few years ago, when there was a surge of Chinese immigration – largely from Hong Kong, I think – to Victoria and Vancouver, in Canada, a Jewish friend’s daughter who was then at high school in Vancouver noted how similar the two cultures were and how easily Chinese high school students adjusted to a Canadian Jewish environment.
 
I wouldn’t see that as problematic if they are. We are the universal church, pulling all people of all intellectual abilities to herself. That heaven is not run like Mensa should be a great relief to us all.

Cultural forces explained by several people so far account for the relative success of our Jewish brothers and sisters.
 
DisorientingSneeze said:
I wouldn’t see that as problematic if they are.
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Yeah, and there’s nothing stopping any individual Catholic from “being all that s/he can be.”

If you want to work as hard as those Jewish (and Asian) people do, and prioritize your worldly success to the degree they do, then you’ll probably also be just as successful at something. I’ve worked pretty hard in life, but I also like to kick back and have time to do things I enjoy that aren’t necessarily going to result in a degree or an award.
 
AlNg said:
Jews constitute about 0.2% of the world’s population but have won about 20% of the Nobel Prizes. Are Jews smarter than Catholics?
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Wait wait, I can do this. Take .02 and multip1y it by .oo2 then add t2o decimal plac3s…

Hold on, I know someone who can figure this out.
 
They say Albert Einstein was pretty smart, but he didn’t publish a lot, like they do today. I’ve published twice as many scientific journal articles as he did. Maybe that makes me smarter? 🤓
 
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The impression I get is that Jewish families not only push their children to get an education but they push their children to be well educated and to excel in their chosen occupation once they have have received an education. And by doing so their family’s name will live on. I don’t know a lot of Jewish people but they seem very results oriented to me.

I’ve seen some other cultures where there is a big emphasis on getting an education but it can be more about the degree and the status of having one than about the knowledge and the ability to apply it.

In the Catholic Christian world, education is firstly supposed to help us to know and serve God and secondly, to help the Church. Historically, education was considered most important for the clergy and religious. It is also considered important for political leaders. But I just don’t think most Catholic families raise their children with the expectation that they will be world changers.
 
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If Jews were smart then they would have become catholic.so therefore Catholics are smarter…100s of years waiting for the Messiah and when he showed up the refused to believe it was jesus.and all the healing and miracles done in front of them .it was written in the old scrolls that the new all there life’s and yet they refused.so in my opinion the Jews are not smarter than Catholics
 
jvickers said:
Here is a Pew Research study on the most and least educated U.S. religious groups:
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I see that American Hindus are on top with 77%.
Yes. I agree that from my experience, Hindus in the US do seem to be doing quite well. I am not sure if American Hindus are representative of Hindus in India where there is more poverty. There is a group in southern California called the Self Realization fellowship which emphasizes the spiritual legacy of the Hindu Paramahansa Yogananda,and which incorporates Christian teachings into its teachings. I met and spoke with many former Catholics who have joined this fellowship.
 
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AlNg said:
I see that American Hindus are on top with 77%.
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I am wondering about that, considering Hinduism worldwide isn’t that well-educated, as @jvickers already pointed out.

It is possible that the conductors of the study didn’t account for if the person was an H1B worker. If so, there’s the potential for some seriously skewed results in favor of Hinduism, considering there are way more H1B workers from India than everywhere else combined.

Alternatively, it could just show that, given the means, Hindus and/or Indians put tremendous emphasis on education, and the worldwide problem has to do more with poverty than with lack of motivation. It could also be a reflection of Hinduism here likely being made up mostly of those with the means to immigrate here (probably educated) or experiment with whatever religious ideas they’re exposed to in college (obviously educated).
 
AlNg said:
at least 20% were Jews, although the Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world’s population
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If what you say is accurate, and the purpose of Nobel prize is to recognize people who have ‘conferred the greatest benefit on mankind’ then I can name a Jew who did that better than anyone and who founded the Catholic Church while he was at it.
 
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