That's the new fascist talking point. The old Nazi talking point was that Jews have subhuman intelligence.Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat May 16, 2026 11:39 pm The racist noise I have heard is that Jews and East Asians are the Übermenschen (cf. the percentage of Nobel prize winners who are Jewish versus the percentage of the world population which is Jewish), and that (non-Jewish) White people need to 'protect' themselves from them because if things are on an even playing field Jews and East Asians will run roughshod over them as they are naturally superior to (non-Jewish) White people.
The Nazis said they could detect nebulous "Jewish influences" in sciences, arts, societies, etc. corrupted by Jewish stupidity. Technically, this attitude predates the Nazis. Mahler's music was panned in his lifetime because Germans thought it sounded too Jewish and not "organic" enough.* This is an extension of an idea that "rooted" things are good, which was pervasive in prewar Germany but seems to have disappeared since then. There's a famous novel called The Man Without Qualities that talks about it at length. Today, it only seems to survive in some attitudes of leftist existentialists (who are often Jewish; often German Jewish too). The right seems to have gone full Deleuzian, saying Muslims are bad because their societies tend to be traditional. The old right thought that's a good thing.
Back in the day, the right was trying to protect the interests of people who had a lot of money and didn't want anyone else to make any. Today's right fights for the interests of people who want to make a lot of money fast. That's the difference. Today's right hoodwinks the masses into thinking they could be millionaires too if the dirty Muslims and Mexicans weren't in the way.**
Like Jews in the West, there are minorities overrepresented in intellectual professions in India too, like Zoroastrian Parsis and later immigrants from Muslim Persia. (My mother's family was originally Muslim Persian centuries ago, or so they claim.) The Jains are also in this group, and they are the biggest supporters of BJP in India.
Jews were historically discriminated against in general professions like farming. That's why they were forced into the cities in financial professions and outcast jobs like acting. They still had a sizable working class population, especially in the east like the Pale of Settlement, until it was decimated in the Holocaust.
It often happens in financial families that the next generation wants to go into social professions like education or entertainment instead of just moving money back and forth. This was represented in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice. It's also Schopenhauer's life story IIRC.*** (Same with Walter Benjamin IIRC. IIRC Wittgenstein too?)
When a demographic puts a lot of effort into something, some of them are statistically likely to succeed. Having money also helps in going into risky ventures like education. There, the occasional outlay of funds can be necessary. And if one thing doesn't work, their network of acquaintances can put them to work on something else. (I have no safety net of that kind.)
I feel a little awkward discussing this in so much detail given neither of us are Jewish.
* Italians thought German music like Mozart sounded too "swinish". From what I can tell, they thought it's too shameless and unrestrained. The combinations are too dense to be within the bounds of good taste.
** Their money making ventures are funded by Muslim sheikhs from the Middle East. The fools sunk in value-based reasoning, some of whom have high technical intelligence, keep thinking this is a temporary absurdity that will disappear as irreconcilable differences in values surface. In reality, other values have no material effect in comparison to the value these sides agree on: making money.
*** Schopenhauer was the OG Sam Harris. Harris pushes meditation. Schopenhauer pushed his own version of Buddhism. Harris is an Islamophobe. Schopenhauer was an Antisemite. Today's Islamophobes would have been Antisemites back in the day. The arguments and stereotypes are identical. (The ones in the West haven't yet come around to lying about Muslims being smart. I hear Israelis talking about how their enemies are so much more sophisticated than them all the time.) One major difference is that Schopenhauer fully embraced the pessimism that's traditional in Buddhism.
