SPIKER,

You say that the Ashkenazi Jews "were bred more intelligent". Can you provide the "assorted mating" mechanism that was employed to this end? The cognitive abilities of Ashkenazi Jews, it would seem, derive from the fact that they were essentially an urbanized population who in the European post-feudal era were primed to play a central role in bourgeois--as opposed to "feudal"--culture with its adaptive demands of numeracy and literacy. In fact, some 19th century thinkers like Marx argued[though himself an atheist ethnic Jew] that the Jew represented the "essence" of capitalism. Of course, Marx was condemned as an antisemite for making such remarks.

But note that in the intellectual resume of the West its major luminaries were non-Jewish--except Maimonides, Spinoza, Marx, Ricardo, Husserl, Freud and Einstein. That is 7 over a period of 300 years.