Greater Israel—Jewish Genius and Technological Accelerationism (Part 3)

Part 3 of 3

A great deal of the answer to the question of the rapid 19th and 20th century technological acceleration has to do with the rapid growth of the European Jewish population in the mid-19th century and more significantly, the growth of the Jewish population within the specific, heterogenous and rich cultural milieu of Western and Central Europe and the remodelling of this environment in America and elsewhere in the New World. The larger part of the answer is essentially that this cultural nexus allowed for the symbiosis and fusion of a stable and advanced civilization with an ascendant and cognitively talented population. 

We view Zionism as very much a part of the clutch of factors spurring European and Jewish “acceleration”. To reemphasize,  mid-19th century intellectual breakthroughs and concomitant technological advances are intricately related to the preeminence and ascendancy of the very high performing “Jewish intellectual fraction’. Our position is that Zionism was an operative and determinative factor in contributing and enabling this  cultural environment. The expectations of Zionism and the possibilities of transit to America, the other promised land, are different sides of the same coin. Both movements are deeply intertwined to a degree that is not fully understood. They are part of the same weltanschauung of hope and promise (and they remain so to this day).

Jewish demographic growth of the 19th century is unique and remarkable and quite possibly unduplicated. European Jewry’s rate of demographic growth far outpaced all other European populations and they did this quite significantly and dramatically. 

The European Jewish population in 1700 was likely less than 1.1 million people. By 1800, the world Jewish population was approximately 2.5 million, with the population reaching the figure of 5 million in 1850 and almost 13.5 million in 1914 on the eve of the First World War. The Jewish population would grow to 16.6 million on the eve of the 2nd World War in 1939 ( a sixteen fold growth over just more than 200 hundred years!).  As the Jewish population growth increased almost exponentially in the late 19th century, Jewish achievements skyrocketed across almost all intellectual, scientific and commercial domains. 

These Jewish achievements are so utterly overwhelming, self-evident and undeniable as to make any kind of denial or even the futile effort to diminish them, seem preposterous. Jewish invention and activity during this period was utterly transformative for much of Europe, upending and overturning long held verities, scientific paradigms, intellectual dogmas and age-old and hoary European Institutions. Jewish ascendancy commencing in the 1870s led to a complex set of reactions, including extreme xenophobia and racial hostility that played no small role in providing the ideological context and background for the Second World War.  

The full impact of the Jewish nation on 20th century human civilization was not, however, to be fulfilled. The Second World War intervened and continental civilization was to be incalculably damaged by the mass destruction and extermination of European Jewry in the Holocaust. These losses are visible not only at the level of our civilization but represent losses to our species, Homo sapiens, and potentially to our very planetary existence as George Gilder has suggested in his important and readable book, The Israel Test.

We have canvassed Jewish accomplishments and achievements in an early blog entry so there is no reason to further reiterate or extend this point. One could, however, add here by way of emphasis, an excellent recent summary of Jewish achievements in physics and computational science at the web address <jinfo.org/Physics.htlm>. It is a single page and easily digested.

The author notes a recently published “2018 study by researchers at CERN” that encompassed a “weighted, citation frequency analysis and survey of over one million physics papers”. The authors of the study found that “of the ten individuals whose work had the greatest impact on foundational research, seven of the ten were Jewish”. Those seven individuals being “Edward Whitten, Steven Weinberg, Albert Einstein, Julian Swinger, Alex Polyakov, Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann”.

The author of the web page also notes the dominant and superintending involvement of Jews in “laying out the theoretical basis for the computational semiconductor-based post-industrial economy”. The website’s author makes his case succinctly and to overwhelming effect. Even the Nobel Prize for the landmark invention of the transistor by Bell Laboratory Scientists usually attributed to John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, should be justly attributed to Julius Edgar Lillenfeld according to the author. Lillenfeld’s patents of 1929, twenty years prior, make the argument incontrovertible and apparently made it impossible for Bell Laboratories to patent the “field effect transistor” or related intellectual art. In any event, the achievements as outlined are jaw-dropping and astonishing.  

We believe accordingly, and without invoking a Pierre Teilhard de Chardin type Omega Point, that the same ‘smart’ intellectual fraction of the Jewish people who drove multiple scientific and technical revolutions in Europe and America will arise again. We believe that this coming event or ‘singularity’ if you like, will occur when the Jewish population reaches a certain specific demographic threshold. Crossing these thresholds will result in “accelerationist’ like phenomena occurring within Israel. We see this event as having worldwide ramifications. 

Some of the projects that are integral to Zionism 2.0 will depend on a ‘super intellectual fraction’ arising to solve problems and engineer machines and systems which are currently intractable.  

We see then a cluster of events, inventions and intellectual breakthroughs, a veritable singularity, tied to Israel passing distinct demographic transitions. Based on our calculations and predictions, when Israel reaches a population of between 12-14 million we will see individuals comparable in stature to:  Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, John Von Neumann, Paul Erdos, David Bohm, Theodore von Karman, Edward Whitten, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and many other similarly gifted individuals. 

This population threshold will be attained before Israel’s 100th birthday in 2048 (three years after Eric Drexler’s Singularity prediction). More far-reaching civilization scale events will occur, we predict, when Israel’s population crosses the 25 million mark around the time of Israel’s sesquicentennial in 2098 or 2100 as a rough mark.   

The evolutionary clock measures time periods and horizons in terms of eras and geological timescales that encompass millions and even billions of years. It took almost four billion years for advanced life to arise on earth. We emerged as species likely less than 300,000 years ago. Some 50,000 thousand years ago, possibly in the Levant, likely in the caves of the Mount Carmel area of Northern Israel, humankind became truly self-aware and became a symbol-making creature. Not long thereafter, possibly less than three thousand years ago, the monotheistic religious conception arose and with it the Hebrew alphabet as a means of literary communication (a related conjoined event). The echoes of this thunderous event can still be heard throughout our world and culture today! 

Human and social life has not been easy. Most societies, most nations, most languages and most advances of all sorts have been quashed or just lost over the course of time. Only a tiny fraction of what has been created and achieved still remains. Most tribes and nations and entire branches and cousins of our species have died out or been killed by rivals. Our own modern-technological civilization has only a tenuous and weak hold on the means of our survival and any number of catastrophic events of a human and non-human origin could derail all progress to date and doom life and our civilization.

Much of the vital capacity, accumulated reflexes, talents and intelligence of the Jewish people have been destroyed. The children who may have solved problems crucial to human society and survival have been blotted from this Earth. The European Holocaust has happened within living memory. The Shoah’s destructive effects and legacy are all around and act as a constant reminder. European Jewry, the cradle of our people, has been ineradicably decimated. A surviving remnant has made a heroic effort to reclaim and rebuild their never abandoned and beloved homeland in Eretz Israel.  

It is of paramount importance that the Jewish homeland and Israeli State exist within highly defensible, unassailable and utterly secure borders where the Jewish people are free and without harassment or threat in order to increase their population and develop their unique culture. What happens in Israel is vital not only to the continuing survival of the Jewish people but to the continuation and survival of humanity. 

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Dedicated to Maya Puder, a 25-year old aspiring actress and filmmaker and second year student at Tel Aviv University. She was killed on October 7th, 2023 at the Supernova music festival. May she not be forgotten and may her memory be a blessing.