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The 2026-01-29 post quotes Lee Kuan Yew attributing Ashkenazi Jews’…

2026-01-29 · 16:03 UTC ·LKYMM23 ·1 min read

Brief

Lee Kuan Yew is presented making a hereditarian and cultural argument about group differences in intellectual achievement. The post says Ashkenazi Jewish success emerged from centuries of assortative marriage around rabbis, unlike Sephardi communities, and contrasts that with Catholic celibacy reducing reproduction among bright men. The tweet frames these claims through a cited book and highlights them with high engagement on 2026-01-29.

Why it matters

The 2026-01-29 post quotes Lee Kuan Yew attributing Ashkenazi Jews’ disproportionate share of Nobel Prize winners, compared with Sephardi Jews, to a 10th-11th century European marriage pattern in which rabbis were preferred as sons-in-law by wealthy families.

Key details

  • The quoted explanation, drawn from the book *The Jewish Mystique*, claims this selection process reinforced literacy and intellectual ability over 9-10 centuries because bright rabbis married young, had many children, and their brightest sons often became rabbis in turn.
  • Lee Kuan Yew contrasts this with Catholic Europe, arguing that because many bright men became celibate priests and had no children, cultural and economic reproductive patterns favored different long-run outcomes; the tweet had 4,528 likes, 556 retweets, and 126 replies at posting metadata.
Source evidence

title: @LKYMM23: Lee Kuan Yew on Jewish People! I’ve always wondered: why are the Jews so extraor...
author: LKYMM23
contenttype: twitterpost
published: 2026-01-29T16:03:39+00:00
source_url: https://x.com/LKYMM23/status/2016905086384177581

word_count: 289

Tweet by @LKYMM23

Lee Kuan Yew on Jewish People! I’ve always wondered: why are the Jews so extraordinarily smart and why are the European Jews smarter than the Arab Jews? If you look at the Nobel Prize winners, they tend to be Ashkenazi Jews, not Sephardi Jews. (I was reading a book called The Jewish Mystique. It was recommended to me by a Jewish banker, an American Jew, a top American banker.) Its explanation, I did not know this, was that from the 10th to 11th century in Europe, in Ashkenazim, the practice developed of the rabbi becoming the most desirable son-in-law because he is usually the brightest in the flock. He can master Hebrew, he can master the local language and he can teach it. So he becomes the son-in-law of the richest and the wealthiest. He marries young, is successful, probably bright. He has large numbers of children and the brightest of his children will became the rabbi and so it goes on. It’s been going on for nine, ten centuries. The same thing did not happen among the Sephardis, they did not have this practice. So one had a different pattern of procreation from the other, and so we have today’s difference. That was his explanation. The Catholic Church had a different philosophy. All the bright young men became Catholic priests and did not marry. Bright priests, celibate, produce no children. And the result of several generations of bright Fathers producing no children? Less bright children in the Catholic world. In the older generations, the pattern of procreation was settled by economics and culture. The richer you are, the more successful you are, the more wives you have, the more children you have. That’s the way it was settled.

Posted: 2026-01-29T16:03:39.000Z
Engagement: 4528 likes, 556 retweets, 126 replies