http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/10/did-modern-jews-originate-italy

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#31404025)

From Auden -

IX. The Tower

This is an architecture for the old;

Thus heaven was attacked by the afraid,

So once, unconsciously, a virgin made

Her maidenhead conspicuous to a god.

Here on dark nights while worlds of triumph sleep

Lost Love in abstract speculation burns,

And exiled Will to politics returns

In epic verse that makes its traitors weep.

Yet many come to wish their tower a well;

For those who dread to drown, of thirst may die,

Those who see all become invisible:

Here great magicians, caught in their own spell,

Long for a natural climate as they sigh

"Beware of Magic" to the passer-by.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#34423742)

The German territories of the HRE also had a better genetic starting point than Italy, which they shared with Scandinavia, northern France, and England. However the Germans excelled within this cohort.

I would chalk it up to the lack of a Metropole within the HRE such as Paris or London. This encouraged more Intercity competition and the development of more meritocratic urban elites i.e. those not coddled by political patronage.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#35004953)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#34444076)

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2009/01/madoff200901

“There were two kinds of people. There were ‘people we visit’ and ‘people we wouldn’t visit,’” Stephen Birmingham wrote 42 years ago in Our Crowd, a history of the German Jews of New York. The term “our crowd” immediately became a code of the culture and was used commonly in conversation. “They are very our crowd,” one might say. Or, “They aspire to be our crowd.” Birmingham eloquently depicted a world of what he called “perpetual reassurance,” the upper-class world of Loebs and Lehmans, Guggenheims and Sachses. Our Crowd became, for many, a guidebook for the emerging Jewish middle class’s cultural aspirations. The book was an immediate popular success, but it turned into something more profound, a template for achievement that was discussed in many Jewish homes all across America. Our mothers underlined significant stories, such as the one about August Belmont’s name change and the one about a member of the Lehman family who took a psychology test and was startled to learn that she was an anti-Semite. Our crowd did not wear flashy clothes or elaborate jewelry. “No stones” was a mantra. Birmingham identified the core values of the new society, a group that prided itself on a lack of showiness.

The expression “our crowd” passed out of fashion in the 1980s, with the arrival of Ronald Reagan to the White House, deregulation, pouf skirts, the leveraged buyouts of Michael Milken, and the vulgarities of Donald Trump. It took Bernard Madoff to bring the term back again. You heard it frequently in the days after he was indicted. He wanted to be our crowd. He was never showy. He gave so much to charity. Madoff knew the psychic buttons of his victims.

Madoff was 29 when Our Crowd was published. He was on the generational cusp, out of Hofstra University at a time when Wall Street was opening up to men of ambition and intelligence who had not been born into the world of our crowd but comported themselves as if they had. Wall Street was still reasonably small, divided into the Wasp houses of Brown Brothers Harriman and Morgan Stanley and the elite Jewish firms—Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Kuhn, Loeb. “In 1967 there were a lot of guys like Bernie Madoff trying to make their way,” former Lehman Brothers vice chairman Peter Solomon said. “Everyone was still categorizing then. [New York mayor] Ed Koch said to me one day, ‘You German Jews!’ and I said, ‘Ed, I am Russian.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care if you are poor and Polish, to me you are always rich and German.’” Madoff was the kind of kid who worked his way up through a commercial-paper house, who was kept in the back room with the brain trust so that he would not embarrass the clients. In those years, an ambitious young man would have set his cap on a membership to the Harmonie Club, the bastion of the Jewish upper class, or the Century, the Westchester club where the children of the great Jewish families met and socialized. Growing up, Madoff probably understood implicitly that this world excluded him. “If you were Bernie Madoff in 1965, the entry to a major firm was through the trading floor,” Peter Solomon said

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#34444119)

In later times, the yekke (German) Jews were known for leaning secular, so that's why we got the secular intellectualism we value from that community. Over the past hundred years, it seems like the same evolution happened with the intellectual culture of the Russian Jews.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#34447146)

http://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3562408&mc=24&forum_id=2

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#34447175)

what is the point of mastering accounting gimmicks and legal trickery when you can't change a tire or organically interact with the opposite sex

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#35004952)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#35005396)

https://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml

Though, the women are higher (6th):

https://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml?tops=1

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#35005850)

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.540.9298%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#35005883)

germans: marshaling tanks and planes across europe, conquering everything in their path, exterminating undesirables at will

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#35006335)

they also actually were thrown in the trash (despite advantages and warmer weather conditions that other diaspora populations didn't have)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3351182&forum_id=2#35005998)