Status & Jewish Intellectuals

I recently asked a French friend why that country produces so many brilliant mathematicians and scientists - not really expecting a good answer. He replied that in France, being an academic or theoretician is seen as the most admirable position to aspire to, on a par with philosopher or artist. However, engineers and entrepreneurs are associated with far less prestige, which would roughly explain why so many of those scientists and mathematicians end up working for foreign companies.

It reminded me that when I was growing up, I thought of writers, historians, philosophers and other intellectuals as most worthy of respect, and assumed that I should want to do something similar when I was older, if I could afford it. It is possible that this is undergoing a sea-change, as the increased prominence of information technology and financial difficulties of media and academia increase the social capital (in Bourdieu’s term) associated with “STEM” subjects. Nonetheless, I was surprised to find a very bald expression of this idea in Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday.

It is generally assumed that getting rich is a Jew’s true and typical aim in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting rich, to a Jew, is only an interim stage, a means to his real end, by no means his aim in itself. The true desire of a Jew, his inbuilt ideal, is to rise to a higher social plane by becoming an intellectual. Even the most prosperous Jew would rather marry his daughter to an indigent intellectual than a merchant. This high regard for intellectuals runs through all classes of Jewish society, and the poorest pedlar who carries his pack through wind and weather will try to give at least one son the chance of studying at university, however great the sacrifices he must make, and will consider it an honour to the entire family that one of them is clearly regarded as an intellectual: a professor, a scholar, a musician. It is as if such a man’s achievements ennobled them all.

Another expression of this I found in Tom Wolfe’s long, interesting Esquire history of Bob Noyce (co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel), discussing why so many early tech pioneers came from the Midwest and West Coast, rather than the traditional East Coast centres of intellectual brilliance:

Back east engineering was an unfashionable field. The East looked to Europe in matters of intellectual fashion, and in Europe the ancient aristocratic bias against manual labor lived on. Engineering was looked upon as nothing more than manual labor raised to the level of a science. There was “pure” science and there was engineering, which was merely practical. Back east engineers ranked, socially, below lawyers; doctors; Army colonels; Navy captains; English, history, biology, chemistry, and physics professors; and business executives.