Bruna Frascolla
The question of the relationship between religious cultures and science, today, is usually approached with a mixture of the End of History and ethnic-racial determinism.
Lately, we have seen here at SCF that modern science has its origins in the Western Catholic world, that it also was very strongly developed in the Protestant world (which competed with the Catholic world) and, later, in the atheist communist world. On the other hand, the Islamic world made exceptional mathematical and technological advances in the Middle Ages, but the contradictions between science and the Quran meant that science, and not the Quran, was defenestrated (an attitude contrary to that of the Protestant world, which, seeing contradictions between the holy book and science, generally preferred to become atheist).
This question of the relationship between religious cultures and science, today, is usually approached with a mixture of the End of History and ethnic-racial determinism. Science would have emerged in Western "Judeo-Christian" civilization because we are superior. This "we" is ambiguous, because the proportion of Ashkenazi Jews who win the Nobel Prize is often mentioned, and it is explained that their DNA gives them superior intelligence. (Indeed, scientific racism has been replaced by genetic determinism and a fetish for the heredity of IQ.) The fact that they are Ashkenazi Jews serves to explain why Arabic-speaking countries, which also have a significant Jewish population, are not great Nobel laureates. After all, neither the Iberian Jews (Sephardim) nor the Jews of the Islamic world (Mizrahim) are Ashkenazi. On the one hand, it is claimed that it is anti-Semitism to say that the Ashkenazites descend from the Khazars who converted to Judaism and are not related to Jesus; on the other hand, it is claimed that only Ashkenazi Jews have a peculiar genetics that make them superior to non-Jewish whites and non-white Jews. It's not something that makes a lot of sense.
All this talk that superior genetics would explain scientific advances also makes no sense. If Europe has had Ashkenazi Jews since the Middle Ages (when the Khazars converted to Judaism), why didn't modern science develop among them first ? It is not worth saying that it is because of the persecution of the Catholic Church, since DNA does not change with conversion, and since the Jewish faith has always had separate writings and studies. Poland was full of Jews, it was always a peripheral country, and yet the first key character of modern science is an old Polish Christian (Nicholas Copernicus).
One answer to this is the obscurantism of Jewish orthodoxy itself, which would make Sunnis look like Enlighteners. Here is what Israel Shahak (1933 - 2001), of Jewish Polish origin, reported about the intellectual life of Ashkenazic Jews from the Middle Ages until emancipation:
"The rabbinical authorities of east Europe furthermore decreed that all non-talmudic studies are to be forbidden, even when nothing specific could be found in them which merits anathema, because they encroach on the time that should be employed either in studying the Talmud or in making money - which should be used to subsidise talmudic scholars. Only one loophole was left, namely the time that even a pious Jew must perforce spend in the privy. In that unclean place sacred studies are forbidden, and it was therefore permitted to read history there, provided it was written in Hebrew and was completely secular, which in effect meant that it must be exclusively devoted to non-Jewish subjects. (One can imagine that those few Jews of that time who - no doubt tempted by Satan - developed an interest in the history of the French kings were constantly complaining to their neighbours about the constipation they were suffering from) As a consequence, two hundred years ago the vast majority of Jews were totally in the dark not only about the existence of America but also about Jewish history and Jewry's contemporary state; and they were quite content to remain so." (Jewish History, Jewish Religion, p. 24)
In other words, the ancestors of Einstein, Freud, Marx, Chomsky, Polanyi, Edith Stein, Lise Meitner, Trotsky, Sholem Aleichem and a bunch of Nobel Prize-winning scientists didn't know about the existence of America in the 18th century because the rabbinate didn't let them and they obeyed. Without a doubt, a great loss of human potential. This serves to reflect on how much theology matters for the development within people of the same society, since in the 18th century the Christian ancestors of any peasant were more informed about the world than the ancestors of so many intellectuals and men of science who began to appear in the 19th century.
If it is true that IQ is decisive for the promotion of science by a given ethnic group, and that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest in Europe (if not in the world), then Ashkenazi Jews should have enlightened the world with the discovery of modern science. However, what did this was Western Christianity, which maintained, at least until the 20th century (when criticism of "white science" began to appear), the appreciation for universality in the sphere of science (in the religious sphere, Protestants rejected it).
All the blame for the backwardness of pre-19th Century Ashkenazi Jews must be sought in Judaism itself, that is, in the religion embraced and (regionally) led by Ashkenazi Jews. As we mentioned above, the Jews never stopped having their bibliographical production. In the Middle Ages, Kabbalah appeared, whose books were written by both Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazic Jews. The thing becomes all the more curious because the alchemists and esotericists, who made important contributions to modern science, were influenced by Kabbalah - however, among them, to my knowledge, there is no Ashkenazic Jew. Newton was an esoteric Protestant who studied Kabbalah, and discovered universal gravitation and the law of gravity. Paracelsus was a Renaissance occultist who is considered the father of toxicology. Since the Egyptian priests and Pythagoras, it is not uncommon for mysticism to go hand in hand with astronomy and mathematics. Uncommon is the case of the Jews, who before emancipation had no substantive contribution of this kind to offer to the world, no matter how much they spent their time studying.
Given such stagnation, it is a wonder that Ashkenazi Jews have freed themselves. This liberation coincided with civil emancipation, when they did not need to be baptized to be recognized as full citizens. Thus, liberalism was the first contact that many Jews had with universalism, and there was a demand to create a Reformed Judaism that would take place in a typical liberal Protestant society. In Eastern Europe, poor Jews, concentrated in Poland, remained under the yoke of an oppressive rabbinic authority until they rebelled and became Marxists, exchanging the beard of the religious prophet for that of the scientific prophet.
Given the material advancement of Western Christianity, easily related to the Scientific Revolution, it would be impossible for Jews to live in a mental ghetto for a long time. Only if they became rural communities like the Amish, but then it would be difficult to raise a lot of money to finance Talmudic studies.
From all of this we conclude that the history that places the Jews as great geniuses of the West can only be written if most of it is left out, as the Ashkenazic Jews lived most of the time in ignorance induced by their own religious leaders, and were only saved from that state because of their coexistence with Christianity.