jews: are we actually different?

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as someone jewish who has broken the big ass cultural taboo of marrying a non-jew, i seem to get into the same argument a lot lately... and it always lead to one question:

are jews, particularly secular jews who have very little but bloodline to define themselves jewish and do not carry much jewish tradition, actually different from any other people?

intuitively it seems to me to be complete bullshit. almost every set of people has come up with stupid excuses to why they are special.

but then i always face arguments that look something like this: "look how much economical power jewish people have being able to gain, look at how many great scientists and philosophers came from us. sure, every people have these, but for such a small population we take a huge percentage. even our comedians tend to be the most successful".

and i have no idea of how to explain this.

in fact for every theory that i heard i came up with a dozen much more rational counter arguments:

• it's not genetic - all the jewish groups pretty much look like the people from whatever country they came from, we barely constitute a race really... the only reason we stick together is because every century or so people come up with a reason to kill us.
• sure, a tradition of being religiously literate might have given us an advantage in the past but that advantage would have died off with the arrival of public schools.
• really t's not tradition at all, because it applies to people of second third or even fourth generation secularism that barely keep in touch with the traditions - personally i know more atheist and agnostic and even buddhist jews then actually religious jews.
• it's not even the accumilation of wealth - most sucessful jews had to make their wealth on their own or in less then two or three generations, everyone i know of actually, from bill gates to my grandfather. apparently migrating a lot does that to people.
• and i am certainly not willing to settle for the religious "chosen people" argument... if someone wants to chose me to anything they better send me a fax or an email.

so what the fuck is the statistical curve doing there? and why doesn't the jewish economical mojo apply itself to my bank account?