Frankly, when you start attributing racial attributes to me - even positive ones - and telling me you got these ideas reading Mein Kampf, I get very, very wary.
I understand what you mean, and this is one of the many reasons we all feign great surprise at this news and others. However, an undesirable or uncomfortable reality doesn't make it any less real.
And, even if you take the popular position that objectively extraordinary Jewish achievements are all due to education- see for example here: [1] - the bottom line doesn't change- there are more higher achievers in the Jewish population.
Nitpick: note that I'm not attributing anything to you, that would surely be racist. Every individual is different and needs to be judged on his or her own merits. Also, the Mein Kampf guy is the other one :)
Interesting link. I specifically noticed this part:
And the argument could be made that this is nothing to do with genes but instead a response to handicaps placed on our people since time immemorial by those who want us to fail.
This is interesting, because it's precisely such handicaps that could explain a genetic component to Jewish performance. And the Ashkenazi in particular.
If a population is banned, for hundreds of years, from owning land and working as farmers, that creates a very significant selection pressure for finding other ways to survive. Those not able to do so either died off or converted to Christianity.
And it just happened to be that most other livelihoods available to them required more mental capacity than farming.
Also, as you say, this is at the population level. It's perfectly possible for Jews to have average or below intelligence. It's simply a lot more likely for an Ashkenazi Jew to have an IQ of 160 than for other Europeans (or other Jewish groups).
