Jews & Intellectual Life

This is a serious thread, not some garbage Holla Forums bait.

Basically, I'm interested in the reasons why so many European Jews played such an eminent role in 20th-century Western thought. I mean, they made up only 1-2% of Europe's population before the Holocaust and encountered discrimination at every corner yet they seem to always be around any achievement in science, the humanities or art.

We should know, considering the amount of Jewish socialists — including the one and only Karl Marx and the infamous Frankfurt School of witchcraft and wizardry. But this is also true of physicists (Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer), chemists (Prigogine, Haber, De Evesy), historians (Bloch, Hobsbawm, Zinn), sociologists (Durkheim, Simmel, Elias), anthropologists (Boas, Lévi-Strauss, Mauss), writers (Proust, Kafka, Asimov), artists (Chagall, Lissitzky, Modigliani), musicians (Schönberg, Ligeti, Reich), even game designers (Baer, Spector, Mechner) — and the list goes on.

I mean, African-Americans (a similarly historically discriminated minority) are over-represented when it comes to innovations in popular music — blues, jazz, rock, disco, funk, soul, electro, hip-hop, house, techno, etc — but Jews' area of expertise is incomparably broader.

So… how did they do it?

Our faith stresses intellect. The bulk of our religious texts (Gemara, Mishna, Zohar, etc.) are exegeses looking to find the meaning behind the meaning of the written Torah. Historically, it was much more important for a Jewish guy to be well-learned than rich when it came to marriage. The stress on intellectual life and drive to repair the existing world is undoubtedly what gave the world leftism and Marxism.

Shabbat shalom!

Most of the Jewish figures I mentioned were non-practicing, non-believers or even atheists though.

1) Jewish culture places high emphasis on logical and scientific thought
2) Jewish groups are notable for taking part in nepotism to an extent not seen in many others
3) Ashkennazi Jews probably do have some kind of genetic basis that means they're more likely to be geniuses

Satisfied?

They were still immersed in Jewish paradigms. If you accept Zizek's advocacy of an "atheist Xtianity" - and completely agree with calling it "Xtian" - then you should see minimal difference.

Were they as children? Religious cultural practices may get abandoned with age, but their effect on us as we grew doesn't disappear

Jews were more educated and urbanized for centuries than most of the population in western europe because medieval ordinances prohibited them from working the land, forcing them to find other occupations.

Yeah, but why though? What's the reason for this trend?

see

Jews maintained isolated communities which didn't integrate into the broader christian they lived in. This combined with a lack of centralised authority led to jewish communities placing a strong emphasis on maintaining certain traditions which kept their disparate communities coherent such as hebrew schools. In a christian europe where a vast majority of people lacked any education and even many aristocrats couldn't read and write well these being restricted to the clergy and only later the lawyers and urban professionals/emergent bourgeoisie. Jews (at least the men) who knew how to read, write, were far likelier to be mathematically competent found them, in spite of all the persecution against them, frequently employed by the nobility and otherwise filling in the demand for secular educated professionals that europe lacked at the time. This basically continued with while many jews historically having been victims of pogroms and the like possibly even as a perverse natural selection towards the jews who were in these professional intellectual roles and more likely to survive persecution than poor rural jews.
Whether practicing or not having parents who are educated has a profound impact on intellectual potential and how you grow up so its understandable that in the 19th and early 20th centuries people of jewish descent were substantially likelier to have grown up in a literate household with parents who are intellectual than christian/non-jewish descent the households of which are in 90% going to be working class households in which the parents had no formal education or otherwise.
Basically jewish focus on education suddenly conferred a significant advantage in academic disciplines which had just entered their golden age and industrial society allowed them access to.

Equally black popular musical ability in the 20th century was the result of the unique historical experience that emancipation was in the us. blacks had been denied education and had very low literacy levels, instead developing a fairly rich oral cultural tradition which with the advent of mass media, radio and television, recording industry etc, in the early 20th century as well as the civil rights movement giving blacks access to higher education and generally a focus on desegregation and some limelight on american blacks led to them exploding into the musical scene.