Thorstein Veblen
"The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe"

Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1, (Mar., 1919), pp. 33-42.
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Among all the clamorous projects of national self-determination which surround 
the return of peace, the proposal of the Zionists is notable for sobriety, good 
will, and a poise of self-assurance. More confidently and perspicuously than all 
the others, the Zionists propose a rehabilitation of their national integrity 
under a régime of live and let live, "with charity for all, with malice toward 
none." Yet it is always a project for withdrawal upon themselves, a scheme of 
national demarcation between Jew and gentile; indeed, it is a scheme of 
territorial demarcation and national frontiers of the conventional sort, within 
which Jews and Jewish traits, traditions, and aspirations are to find scope and 
breathing space for a home-bred culture and a free unfolding of all that is best 
and most characteristic in the endowment of the race. There runs through it all 
a dominant bias of isolation and inbreeding, and a confident persuasion that 
this isolation and inbreeding will bring great and good results for all 
concerned. The Zionists aspire to bring to full fruition all that massive 
endowment of spiritual and intellectual capacities of which their people have 
given evidence throughout their troubled history, and not least during these 
concluding centuries of their exile.
The whole project has an idyllic and engaging air. And any disinterested 
bystander will be greatly moved to wish them godspeed. Yet there comes in a 
regret that this experiment in isolation and inbreeding could not have been put 
to the test at an earlier date, before the new order of large-scale industry and 
universal intercourse had made any conclusive degree of such national isolation 
impracticable, before this same new order had so shaped the run of things that 
any nation or community drawn on this small scale would necessarily be dependent 
on and subsidiary to the run of things at large. It is now, unhappily, true that 
any "nation" of the size and geographical emplacement of the projected Zion 
will, for the present and the calculable future, necessarily be something of a 
national make-believe. The current state of the industrial arts will necessarily 
deny it a rounded and self-balanced national integrity in any substantial sense. 
The days of Solomon and the caravan trade which underlay the glory of Solomon 
are long past.
Yet much can doubtless be done by taking thought and making the most of that 
spirit of stubborn clannishness which has never been the least among the traits 
of this people. But again, to any disinterested bystander there will come the 
question: What is the use of it all? It is not so much a question of what is 
aimed at, as of the chances of its working-out. The logic of the Zionist project 
plainly runs to the effect that, whereas this people have achieved great things 
while living under conditions of great adversity, scattered piecemeal among the 
gentiles of Europe, they are due to achieve much greater things and to reach an 
unexampled prosperity so soon as they shall have a chance to follow their own 
devices untroubled within the shelter of their own frontiers. But the doubt 
presents itself that the conditioning circumstances are not the same or of the 
same kind in the occidental twentieth century A. D. as in the oriental twelfth 
century B. C.; nor need it follow that those things which scattered Jews have 
achieved during their dispersion among the gentiles of Europe are a safe index 
of what things may be expected of a nation of Jews turned in upon themselves 
within the insulating frontiers of the Holy Land. It is on this latter point 
that a question is raised here as to the nature and causes of Jewish achievement 
in gentile Europe; and the contrast of the conditions offered by the projected 
Zion will present itself without argument.
It is a fact which must strike any dispassionate observer that the Jewish people 
have contributed much more than an even share to the intellectual life of modern 
Europe. So also it is plain that the civilisation of Christendom continues today 
to draw heavily on the Jews for men devoted to science and scholarly pursuits. 
It is not only that men of Jewish extraction continue to supply more than a 
proportionate quota to the rank and file engaged in scientific and scholarly 
work, but a disproportionate number of the men to whom modern science and 
scholarship look for guidance and leadership are of the same derivation. 
Particularly is this true of the modern sciences, and it applies perhaps 
especially in the field of scientific theory, even beyond the extent of ist 
application in the domain of workday detail. So much is notorious.
This notable and indeed highly creditable showing has, of course, not escaped 
the attention of those men of Jewish race who interest themselves in the fortune 
of their own people. Not unusually it is set down as a national trait, as 
evidence of a peculiarly fortunate intellectual endowment, native and 
hereditary, in the Jewish people. There is much to be said for such a view, but 
it should not follow that any inquiry into the place and value of the Jewish 
people in western civilisation should come to rest with this broad assertion of 
pre-eminence in point of native endowment.
It is true that the history of the Chosen People, late and early, throws them 
into a position of distinction among the nations with which they have been 
associated; and it will commonly be accepted without much argument that they 
have, both late and early, shown distinctive traits of temperament and aptitude, 
such as to mark them off more or less sharply from all the gentiles among whom 
it has been their lot to be thrown. So general is the recognition of special 
Jewish traits, of character and of capacity, that any refusal to recognise 
something which may be called a Jewish type of hereditary endowment would come 
to nothing much better than a borrowing of trouble.
That there should be such a tenacious spiritual and intellectual heritage 
transmissible within the Jewish community and marking that people off in any 
perceptible degree from their gentile neighbors is all the more notable in view 
of the known life-history of the children of Israel. No unbiased ethnologist 
will question the fact that the Jewish people are a nation of hybrids; that 
gentile blood of many kinds has been infused into the people in large 
proportions in the course of time. Indeed none of the peoples of Christendom has 
been more unremittingly exposed to hybridisation, in spite of all the stiff 
conventional precautions that have been taken to keep the breed pure. It is not 
a question of a surreptitious hybrid strain, such as would show itself in 
sporadic reversions to an alien type; but rather it is a question whether the 
Jewish strain itself, racially speaking, can at all reasonably be held to 
account for one half of the pedigree of the Jewish nation as it stands.
The hybrid antecedents of the Children of Israel are not a mere matter of 
bookish record. Evidence of their hybrid descent is written all over them, 
wherever they are to be met with, so that in this respect the Jews of Europe are 
in the same case as the other Europeans, who are also universally cross-bred. It 
would perplex any anthropologist to identify a single individual among them all 
who could safely be set down as embodying the Jewish racial type without 
abatement. The variations in all the measurable traits that go to identify any 
individual in the schedules of the anthropologists are wide and ubiquitous as 
regards both their physical and their spiritual traits, in respect of 
anthropometric measurements as well as in temperament and capacities. And yet, 
when all is said in abatement of it, the Jewish type, it must be admitted, 
asserts itself with amazing persistence through all the disguises with which it 
has been overlaid in the course of age-long hybridisation. Whatever may be found 
true elsewhere, in their contact with other racial types than those of Europe, 
it still appears that within this European racial environment the outcome given 
by any infusion of Jewish blood in these cross-bred individuals is something 
which can be identified as Jewish. Cross-breeding commonly results in a gain to 
the Jewish community rather than conversely; and the hybrid offspring is a child 
of Israel rather than of the gentiles.
In effect, therefore, it is the contribution of this Jewish-hybrid people to the 
culture of modern Europe that is in question. The men of this Jewish extraction 
count for more than their proportionate share in the intellectual life of 
western civilisation; and they count particularly among the vanguard, the 
pioneers, the uneasy guild of pathfinders and iconoclasts, in science, 
scholarship, and institutional change and growth. On its face it appears as if 
an infusion of Jewish blood, even in some degree of hybrid attenuation, were the 
one decisive factor in the case; and something of that sort may be well allowed, 
to avoid argument if for no more substantial reason. But even a casual survey of 
the available evidence will leave so broad a claim in doubt.
Of course, there is the fact to be allowed for at the outset, so far as need be, 
that these intellectuals of Jewish extraction are, after all, of hybrid 
extraction as well; but this feature of the case need be given no undue weight. 
It is of consequence in its bearing on the case of the Jews only in the same 
manner and degree as it is of consequence for any other hybrid people. Cross-
breeding gives a wider range of variation and a greater diversity of individual 
endowment than can be had in any passably pure-bred population; from which 
results a greater effectual flexibility of aptitudes and capacities in such a 
people when exposed to conditions that make for change. In this respect the Jews 
are neither more nor less fortunate than their gentile compatriots.
It may be more to the purpose to note that this intellectual pre-eminence of the 
Jews has come into bearing within the gentile community of peoples, not from the 
outside; that the men who have been its bearers have been men immersed in this 
gentile culture in which they have played their part of guidance and incitement, 
not bearers of a compelling message from afar or proselyters of enlightenment 
conjuring with a ready formula worked out in the ghetto and carried over into 
the gentile community for its mental regeneration. In point of fact, neither 
these nor other Jews have done effectual missionary work, in any ordinary sense 
of that term, in this or any other connection; nor have they entertained a 
design to do so. Indeed, the Chosen People have quite characteristically never 
been addicted to missionary enterprise; nor does the Jewish scheme of right and 
honest living comprise anything of the kind. This, too, is notorious fact; so 
much so that this allusion to it may well strike any Jew as foolish insistence 
on a commonplace matter of course. In their character of a Chosen People, it is 
not for them to take thought of their unblest neighbors and seek to dispel the 
darkness that overlies the soul of the gentiles.
The cultural heritage of the Jewish people is large and rich, and it is of 
ancient and honorable lineage. And from time immemorial this people has shown 
aptitude for such work as will tax the powers of thought and imagination Their 
home-bred achievements of the ancient time, before the Diaspora, are among the 
secure cultural monuments of mankind; but these achievements of the Jewish 
ancients neither touch the frontiers of modern science nor do they fall in the 
lines of modern scholarship. So also the later achievements of the Jewish
scholars and savants, in so far as their intellectual enterprise has gone 
forward on what may be called distinctively Jewish lines, within the confines of 
their own community and by the leading of their own home-bred interest, 
untouched by that peculiar drift of inquiry that characterises the speculations 
of the modern gentile world - is learning of the later generations of home-bred 
Jewish scholars is also reputed to have run into lucubrations that have no 
significance for contemporary science or scholarship at large.
It appears to be only when the gifted Jew escapes from the cultural environment 
created and fed by the particular genius of his own people, only when he falls 
into the alien lines of gentile inquiry and becomes a naturalised, though 
hyphenate, citizen in the gentile republic of learning, that he comes into his 
own as a creative leader in the world's intellectual enterprise. It is by loss 
of allegiance, or at the best by force of a divided allegiance to the people of 
his origin, that he finds himself in the vanguard of modern inquiry.
It will not do to say that none but renegade Jews count effectually in the 
modern sciences. Such a statement would be too broad; but, for all its excessive 
breadth, it exceeds the fact only by a margin. The margin may seem wide, so wide 
as to vitiate the general statement, perhaps, or at least wide enough materially 
to reduce its cogency. But it would be wider of the mark to claim that the 
renegades are to be counted only as sporadic exceptions among a body of 
unmitigated Jews who make up the virtual total of that muster of creative men of 
science which the Jewish people have thrown into the intellectual advance of 
Christendom.
The first requisite for constructive work in modern science, and indeed for any 
work of inquiry that shall bring enduring results, is a skeptical frame of mind. 
The enterprising skeptic alone can be counted on to further the increase of 
knowledge in any substantial fashion. This will be found true both in the modern 
sciences and in the field of scholarship at large. Much good and serviceable 
workmanship of a workday character goes into the grand total of modern 
scientific achievement; but that pioneering and engineering work of guidance, 
design, and theoretical correlation, without which the most painstaking 
collection and canvass of information is irrelevant, incompetent, and 
impertinent - this intellectual enterprise that goes forward presupposes a 
degree of exemption from hard-and-fast preconceptions, a skeptical animus, 
Unbefangenheit, release from the dead hand of conventional finality.
The intellectually gifted Jew is in a peculiarly fortunate position in respect 
of this requisite immunity from the inhibitions of intellectual quietism. But he 
can come in for such immunity only at the cost of losing his secure place in the 
scheme of conventions into which he has been born, and at the cost, also, of 
finding no similarly secure place in that scheme of gentile conventions into 
which he is thrown. For him as for other men in the like case, the skepticism 
that goes to make him an effectual factor in the increase and diffusion of 
knowledge among men involves a loss of that peace of mind that is the birthright 
of the safe and sane quietist. He becomes a disturber of the intellectual peace, 
but only at the cost of becoming an intellectual wayfaring man, a wanderer in 
the intellectual no-man's-land, seeking another place to rest, farther along the 
road, somewhere over the horizon. They are neither a complaisant nor a contented 
lot, these aliens of the uneasy feet; but that is, after all, not the point in 
question.
The young Jew who is at all gifted with a taste for knowledge will unavoidably 
go afield into that domain of learning where the gentile interests dominate and 
the gentile orientation gives the outcome. There is nowhere else to go on this 
quest. He comes forthwith to realise that the scheme of traditions and 
conventional verities handed down within the pale of his own people are matters 
of habit handed down by tradition, that they have only such force as belongs to 
matters of habit and convention, and that they lose their binding force so soon 
as the habitually accepted outlook is given up or seriously deranged. These 
nationally binding convictions of what is true, good, and beautiful in the world 
of the human spirit are forthwith seen to be only contingently good and true; to 
be binding only so far as the habitual will to believe in them and to seek the 
truth along their lines remains intact. That is to say, only so long as no 
scheme of habituation alien to the man's traditional outlook has broken in on 
him, and has forced him to see that those convictions and verities which hold 
their place as fundamentally and eternally good and right within the balanced 
scheme of received traditions prove to be, after all, only an ephemeral web of 
habits of thought; so soon as his current habits of life no longer continue to 
fall in those traditional fines that keep these habits of thought in 
countenance.
Now it happens that the home-bred Jewish scheme of things, human and divine, and 
the ways and means of knowledge that go with such a scheme, are of an archaic 
fashion, good and true, perhaps, beyond all praise, for the time and conditions 
that gave rise to it all, that wove that web of habituation and bound its close-
knit tissue of traditional verities and conventions. But it all bears the date-
mark, "B.C." It is of a divine complexion, monotheistic even, and perhaps 
intrinsically thearchic; it is ritualistic, with an exceedingly and beautifully 
magical efficacy of ritual necessity. It is imperiously self-balanced and 
self-sufficient, to the point of sanctity; and as is always true of such 
schemes of sanctity and magical sufficiency, it runs on a logic of personal 
and spiritual traits, qualities and relations, a class of imponderables which 
are no longer of the substance of those things that are inquired into by men to 
whom the ever increasingly mechanistic orientation of the modern time becomes 
habitual.
When the gifted young Jew, still flexible in respect of his mental habits, is 
set loose among the iron pots of this mechanistic orientation, the clay vessel 
of Jewish archaism suffers that fortune which is due and coming to clay vessels 
among the iron pots. His beautifully rounded heirloom, trade-marked "B.C.," 
goes to pieces between his hands, and they are left empty. He is divested of 
those archaic conventional preconceptions which will not comport with the 
intellectual environment in which he finds himself. But he is not thereby 
invested with the gentile's peculiar heritage of conventional preconceptions 
which have stood over, by inertia of habit, out of the gentile past, which go, 
on the one hand, to make the safe and sane gentile, conservative and complacent, 
and which conduce also, on the other hand, to blur the safe and sane gentile's 
intellectual vision, and to leave him intellectually sessile.
The young Jew finds his own heritage of usage and outlook untenable; but this 
does not mean that he therefore will take over and inwardly assimilate the 
traditions of usage and outlook which the gentile world has to offer; or at the 
most he does not uncritically take over all the intellectual prepossessions that 
are always standing over among the substantial citizens of the republic of 
learning. The idols of his own tribe have crumbled in decay and no longer cumber 
the ground, but that release does not induce him to set up a new line of idols 
borrowed from an alien tribe to do the same disservice. By consequence he is in 
a peculiar degree exposed to the unmediated facts of the current situation; and 
in a peculiar degree, therefore, he takes his orientation from the run of the 
facts as he finds them, rather than from the traditional interpretation of 
analogous facts in the past. In short, he is a skeptic by force of circumstances 
over which he has no control. Which comes to saying that he is in line to become 
a guide and leader of men in that intellectual enterprise out of which comes the 
increase and diffusion of knowledge among men, provided always that he is by 
native gift endowed with that net modicum of intelligence which takes effect in 
the play of the idle curiosity.
Intellectually he is likely to become an alien; spiritually he is more than 
likely to remain a Jew; for the heart-strings of affection and consuetude are 
tied early, and they are not readily retied in after life. Nor does the animus 
with which the community of safe and sane gentiles is wont to meet him conduce 
at all to his personal incorporation in that community, whatever may befall the 
intellectual assets which he brings. Their people need not become his people nor 
their gods his gods, and indeed the provocation is forever and irritably present 
all over the place to turn back from following after them. The most amiable 
share in the gentile community's life that is likely to fall to his lot is that 
of being interned. One who goes away from home will come to see many unfamiliar 
things, and to take note of them; but it does not follow that he will swear by 
all the strange gods whom he meets along the road.
As bearing on the Zionist's enterprise in isolation and nationality, this fable 
appears to teach a two-fold moral: If the adventure is carried to that 
consummate outcome which seems to be aimed at, it should apparently be due to be 
crowned with a large national complacency and, possibly, a profound and self-
sufficient content on the part of the Chosen People domiciled once more in the 
Chosen Land; and when and in so far as the Jewish people in this way turn inward 
on themselves, their prospective contribution to the world's intellectual output 
should, in the light of the historical evidence, fairly be expected to take on 
the complexion of Talmudic lore, rather than that character of free-swung 
skeptical initiative which their renegades have habitually infused into the 
pursuit of the modern sciences abroad among the nations. Doubtless, even so the 
supply of Jewish renegades would not altogether cease, though it should 
presumably fall off to a relatively inconsiderable residue. And not all 
renegades are fit guides and leaders of men on the quest of knowledge, nor is 
their dominant incentive always or ordinarily the quest of the idle curiosity.
There should be some loss to Christendom at large, and there might be some gain 
to the repatriated Children of Israel. It is a sufficiently difficult choice 
between a life of complacent futility at home and a thankless quest of 
unprofitable knowledge abroad. It is, after all, a matter of the drift of 
circumstance; and behind that lies a question of taste, about which there is no 
disputing.
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