Updated Estimates of IQs Within Israel

Have Israel's traditional ethnic differences washed out with time?

It’s an open question to what extent the various groups within Israel vary from one another in terms of measured cognitive ability. There’s a lot of older data that has answers to this question, but people have suggested the data is no good because only the most recent generation is plausibly fully acculturated.

Fair enough!

For a review of this older data, see the section on Israel from my recent post on estimating Ashkenazi Jewish IQs globally.¹

Pinpointing Jewish IQ

Right after that article went live, a reader found some interesting data from around 2012 or 2013 from the Israeli version of the SAT, the PET, or Psychometric Entrance Test. Scores on this examination were provided for Ashkenazim (619), mixed Ashkenazim-Mizrahim (597), Mizrahim (559), Ethiopians (401), the Soviet émigré (559), Muslims and Druze (447), and Christians (480).

With this data, we can provide credible modern estimates of the IQs of various groups within Israel in what should be a fully assimilated group of youths. Unfortunately, we were only given the means for these groups and the rates at which eligible group members took the test. These rates varied considerably, and they were moderately related to the means of different groups (ρ = 0.396).

To estimate each group’s performance, we need to ascertain a few different numbers.