Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique argues that Jews created or contributed significantly to various destructive pseudosciences and ideologies. (He does not seem interested in their positive contributions.) John Derbyshire reviews the book and notes some similarities between Mandarins and Talmudic scholars:
For instance: I happen to be fairly well acquainted with the culture and history of China, a nation which, like the diaspora Jews, awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities to young men who had shown mastery of great masses of content-free written material.Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China’s history knows that the guy who gets the girl — who ends up, in fact, with a bevy of “secondary wives” who are thereby denied to less intellectual males — is the one who has aced the Imperial examinations and been rewarded with a District Magistrate position.
This went on for two thousand years. Today’s Chinese even, like Ashkenazi Jews, display an average intelligence higher by several points than the white-Gentile mean.
Naturally, some found this insulting:
It is insulting, and borderline antisemitic, of you to describe traditional Talmudic scholarship as “content-free” and “meaningless esoterica.” The Talmud is chock full of content and very meaningful.Is it? Then I can only say that I am surprised how little actual good has come out of all those centuries of intensive study. A person who has devoted his life to the study of Judaic texts ought, if those texts have meaningful content, to be wiser, better equipped to live in the world, better, than a person who hasn’t. Is this actually the case?
Possibly it is. I didn’t mean to insult anyone, and in fact I confess to a slight regret over this remark. By way of excusing myself, let me say that my own early training — my first degree, in fact — was in mathematics. Now, studying math at the higher levels makes you a terrible intellectual snob. No other discipline has the standards of rigor required in mathematics. Of course, none really can have, so this is a very unfair point of view. It is, though, one that mathematicians find hard to avoid. “When you’ve worked on a farm, nothing else ever seems like work,” said J.K. Galbraith. Similarly, when you’ve studied higher math, nothing else really seems like study. For this reason, I approach all the human sciences with an opening attitude of deep skepticism — though I am always willing to be convinced. I guess this attitude shows in my review.
Now, pure mathematics is a very peculiar thing. Consider the man I have just written a book about, for example, the 19th-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann. On June 10, 1854, Riemann delivered a paper to the faculty of Göttingen University. In that paper he laid out the fundamental ideas of Riemannian geometry, a challenging and very beautiful branch of pure mathematics which he thought up entirely out of his own head. Riemann’s ideas were pure intellection, rooted in some philosophical ideas about the nature of space. They had no conceivable practical application. It was sixty years before Albert Einstein picked them up and used them as the basis for the General Theory of Relativity.
The kind of pure intellection that Talmudic scholars immerse themselves in is as abstract and, from a worldly point of view, useless as Riemannian geometry … but there is never an Einstein. Talmudic concepts never have any real fruit in the world of men. Talmudic scholarship consists (it seems to me) of racing the engine of the brain without engaging the gears.
Another influence on the way I think about this is my own studies of Chinese history and culture. Candidates for the Imperial examinations in old China had to engage in the same kind of years-long concentrated study of huge masses of accumulated written material that Talmudic scholars have to master. At the end of their studies, for the Imperial examinations, the Chinese scholars had to write an “eight-legged essay” — that is, one conforming to certain traditional patterns of style and presentation. You can find translations of prize-winning “eight-legged essays” in books about Chinese culture. I have one here. It is gibberish. It is content-free. However, if you passed the exam, you got a lifetime job as a Mandarin, a guaranteed income, and a choice of breeding partners.
The attitude of the Chinese themselves to the material these scholars had to master is encapsulated in the old proverb: “Learning is like a brick, which you can use to break down a door. When you have broken down the door, you can throw away the brick!”