Autism common among Ashkenazi Jews?

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I can see them being interested in Autism but probably as part of their decisions as to who goes left and who goes right. Not due to an actual link to Autism and Jews.

Leo Kanner only published his paper identifying and describing Autistic individuals in 1943, and Hans Asperger published in 1944. I find it highly unlikely that any research specific to Autism, other than Hans Asperger's was going on in the area controlled by the Nazis during this time.

Just that I can see Hitler being inetersted for reasons having nothing to do with a link between Jews and Autism. He was very interested in eugenics, and was fond of sentencing people with all varieties of disability to death. Autism would just be another thing to shoot you for.

ETA: Hitler wasn't clueless as to other things going on in the world, btw, Just because something isn't in the area they controlled doesn't mean they didn't have access to information/media/etc from other places.

I find it difficult to believe that Hitler would have been aware of or have cared about Autism as distinct from general incurable disability unless perhaps he was interested in the positive attributes claimed by Hans Asperger.

I find it unlikely that many people in the US were particularly aware of Leo Kanner's work in the 1940s, much less that such information would have been deemed sufficiently important to present to Hitler who then would have recognized some value in differentiating such instances from general "childhood dimentia/intellectual handicap/incurable intellectual disability". I find this very unlikely. What would be the purpose of wasting resources determining if dispensible person X is afflicted with Y rather than Z? They'll both expire equally well with the application of deadly gas or a bullet.

Evidently, I cannot find any indication that such research was being conducted by Nazis when I google it. This is not proof, but I would suggest if the poster who initially suggested it were working from known facts rather than supposition, that such facts would turn up somewhere in the first few pages of google search results.

From what I do know of the Nazi activities and "culture" in respect of disability, I doubt that Autism as a nosological entity would have been of any importance to them other than the potential positives suggested by the work of Hans Asperger, in which case research would have been focussed on identifying individuals to preserve them and their positive attributes, or in confirming whether or not what Asperger had identified was correlated to the positive attributes he associated with it.

For me I see Aspergers as definitely genetic when my father, me and my son all have it. Interestingly related to this thread there is German ancestry but no recent Jews to the best of my knowledge.

I'd like to see a lot more research done in this area. There are so many factors involved including the cultural. For example if Aspergers people are less likely to thrive in a given culture then logic says they are less likely to pass on their genetic traits and hence potentially disappear from that culture's genetic pool.

Yeah, Hitler based the majority of his inspirations on the beliefs of Martin Luther, who was batsh*t crazy.....

Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Church, believed in following faith question-free, but to challenge reason at every turn. Good lord, he sounds almost like Emmanuel Kant...

Regardless, it would be funny though if Hitler wanted the Jews knocked off due to Autism. Heh, yeah: the super race would consist of nothing more than a bunch of mindless drones. Funny.

I know that they have an over the average IQ. The average Ashkenazi Jews IQ is 111, this justify (partially) their over-rapresentation in highly intellectual jobs.

This Jewish population is also bound to many other genetic conditions in high prevalence other than ASDs (if these are in fact higher in this population).

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... etics.html

This is why crossbreeding is good. Less chance of some recessive nastiness coming out. Plus it's hard to argue with hybrid vigor. Check out these badasses

Well there's the question as to how they got successful. That and black nationalists who say things like how presumably the Jews were involved in the African Slave Trade. I need a 'legitimate' source on that, the most I keep getting it rense and Nation of Islam sites - and I know people would say 'biased source' - as well it is biased.



Because they tend to be elitist jack-asses (some of the elitists at least). That's why some often hate the "smarter" people - they act elitist and condescending.

/

I'm Half Jewish and I exhibit some "Ghosting" of Autism. I've often pondered a connection between Jewishness and Autism due to the contentious debate on the cause(s) of Jewish achievement; that is, whether it is primarily cultural or intelligence that is responsible for it. It makes sense that it may be a triad instead: I.Q, culture, and personality traits (personality has been shown to be about 50% heritable). The Jewish people I know don't all strike me as extraordinarily intelligent but they all seem to get focused on, and proficient at achieving there ambitions. As socially irresponsible as it may be to mention such things I will say that we do sometimes seem a little odd. A satire of these oddities is that show "Curb Your Enthusiasm", or though I've never seen one, I suppose a Woody Allen movie.

The first thing you need to know is that genetic studies have shown Ashkenazi Jews to be very homogeneous (closely related). This is why we are used so often in genetic studies.

In the Ashkenazim population there is a 5% prevalence of a mild form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia which causes in high levels of fetal testosterone. High levels of fetal testosterone has been correlated with less social children and speculated as a possible cause for Autism.

Jewish men have a 2 fold higher rate of depression then gentiles and the most common Jewish stereotype is that of the Neurotic Jew. Both anxiety and depression are highly comorbid with Aspergers syndrome.

There have been conjectures that our history "selected" us through founder effects, persecution and assimilation to have "Jewish traits". An example of this would be how the psychometrics shows our strongest ability to be verbal, and we just so happened to mandate universal literacy almost 2000 years ago. In the good old days if you knew the Torah and Talmud well you could have any woman you wanted... meanwhile catholic priests were celibate thereby removing genes for higher I.Q. from the christian population.

Just some ideas.

I wouldn't believe it unless somebody actually showed me the stats. They're bound to have higher rates of some things because they've got a smaller, more isolated gene pool; but I've never heard of any particular connection with autism.

Hello all-

Myself, I'm a German Lutheran. So unless I've got some Jewish ancestry I don't know about, I have to assume from my own personal experience that my Asperger's syndrome owes more to specific genetics that appear in any or all gene pools.
There is a very good Cohen brothers movie available on DVD now called a Serious Man, which deals with a Jewish professor living in a Midwestern Jewish community in the sixties. The Professor's brother, who is a mathematical genius, is also extremely socially impaired to the point that he is unable to make his way in the everyday world without the help of his family. My wife and I immediately agreed the brother must have been an Aspie, though he lived in a time when a diagnosis would have been impossible outside Europe. The brother was later arrested for sodomy - homosexuality was a long ways from acceptability back in those days, as well.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I might be biased because I'm a Lutheran myself, but Hitler was hardly a Protestant. He was raised in Catholic Austria, which had had its own tradition of antisemitism for centuries (not that I'm bashing Catholicism or Austrians). The birthplace of Nazism was not the Protestant north or southwest Germany, but the stronghold of Catholic Germany, Bavaria (again, please no one think I'm bashing Catholicism or Bavarians here). Most Nazis in fact rejected traditional religion, and saw the state as god, and Hitler as the messiah. Church membership was at an all time low in German history under the Nazis. Many of the men of conscience who were involved in the coup attempt in 1944, which culminated in the failed Stauffenberg bomb plot to kill Hitler, were inspired by their Lutheranism or Catholicism.
By the way, I have strong suspicions Martin Luther was himself an Aspie. He only went off the deep end in later life, after surviving more than one catastrophic illness, which had left him very likely with organic brain damage. It was then that he wrote not only all those ugly things about Jews, but also about other Protestant groups, the Catholics, and at times even his own friends, fellow theologians, and students. Don't think I'm defending Luther's antisemitism; rather I'm only explaining why he had started spouting that crap, after years of making friendly overtures to the Jews.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

interesting.

Bear in mind I never said Hitler was Protestant; I know the guy was extremely spiritual, was into tarot cards and all that--horoscopes, the like--but I just said that he based many of his ideas off the teachings of Martin Luther.

I mean..I don' know if you've ever read Mein Kampf or not, but I read the passage from it where he talks about his hatred of Jews; it made absolutely no sense..I could seriously picture him stoned off his ass on acid, staring at a piece of string for 5 hours; it was that bad.

So my guess was that a lot of this had to come from somewhere.

Now, in regards to Martin Luther, well, regardless of whether or not he was good to the Jews in earlier years or not, in his later years no matter how bad his health apparently was, he was one of the most influential people out there, whether intelligent ideas were coming from him or not.

So when he started spouting satanic ideals about the Jews, you can damn well believe the folks in his country were lappin' it up like chocolate milk'd just been invented.

Actually, Luther's antisemitic rants were almost forgotten, till Hitler resurrected them. Even in Luther's life time, his wife, friends, and his fellow theologians were rather embarrassed by his rants against Jews, and saw that these writings were suppressed after he died. Hitler didn't have to base his antisemitism on any thing Luther wrote, rather, he only used it to justify his own hate.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer