[Jack Black]

Your confusing cause and effect. Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQ of any national group, around 112 according to the Wikipedia article on the topic. That's even above Hong Kong Chinese. So, naturally when they decide to go create their own country it's pretty advanced.

If you took Equatorial Guinea, where the average IQ is 59, and converted them to Judaism I don't think you would see a sudden outbreak of new vaccines and computer designs. It might still be good for the society to have a unifying religion, but it's not going to make them into really smart Jewish people.

[Alberta's Child]

The original piece at the top of this thread also has an underlying assumption about the scientific/academic/cultural superiority of "Judaism" (in a cultural sense, not a religious one) that simply isn't supported by historical evidence.

I would suggest that "European culture" (to the extent that there is even a unified definition of it) came to dominate the world by almost any objective measure due to a combination of four underlying influences that haven't been replicated in any other one culture:

1. The linear worldview of Judaism -- i.e., the understanding of the world in the context of a physical reality with a beginning and an end, which replaced the cyclical worldview that marks aboriginal cultures that never change over time.

2. The egalitarianism of Christianity -- i.e., the notion that human salvation, and by extension human morals and civil law, should apply equally to all people regardless of race, religion and/or culture.

3. The Arabic numerical system ... Yes, the Islamic conquest of Europe left this lasting positive contribution to the world.

4. An Anglo-Saxon sense of order ... which explains why it wasn't Europeans in general who ended up dominating the world through as the colonial era progressed -- it was people of Germanic and British extraction.