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I don't really believe in your jewish superiority hypothesis, I found an interesting wikipedia article though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence I might have another explanation. But first of all genetics does not work the same speed as you think. A few thousand years does not matter at all unless a very high percent of the population is wiped out by a disease like the black death. Genetic diseases are common amongst closed groups like you mentioned, where they marry almost exclusively with each other. I think a jewish diaspora rooted back to the time of the Roman Empire is something like that. Even if they have genetically higher IQ, which I doubt, I don't think that this extra 10-15 IQ in average makes the difference between dozens of geniuses and something average. From my perspective it might have contributed to the phenomenon if it is really true, but I think Hungarian math education, talent promotion and education amongst family members had the major role. Even nowadays Hungarian math education is more or less ok, at least in top highschools certainly. In the long run it may be destroyed to be more EU conform... https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2015/01/10/the-hungarian-approach-and-how-it-fits-the-american-educational-landscape/ Budapest is the capital of Hungary, so I think it is obvious, that the most educated people concentrated there just like nowadays. Those people had the opportunity to teach their children too. As far as I know in the family of Theodore von Kármán always the older sibling taught the younger one and the father taught only the oldest one. So it is not just about school education, but it is about the education inside the family too. You mentioned that Neumann was well educated too before going to school and I think that was common amongst relative rich citizens. The high schools you mentioned are the sign of a good talent promotion system. We have different top schools nowadays like Fazekas, but I think we managed to preserve that talent promotion system. So in theory even nowadays we could give some Neumanns, Tellers and Kármáns to the world (or I could mention here Tesla too), but times are different. Hungary was always relative poor compared to Western Europe and things got even worse after losing WW1 and 72% of the area with it containing most of our natural resources. https://www.quora.com/Did-Romania-steal-Transylvania-from-Hungary/answer/George-Bajor So I guess the governments after WW1 intentionally invested into human resource, because we barely had anything else left. That was a fine move, we had great engineers and scientists with smart solutions. They knew how to do things with limited resources. Some of them were talented jews, which is not surprising with 25% jewish population as you mentioned. When jews fled because of the nazis to the USA, they met with an environment with almost unlimited resources and they had the knowledge to exploit it. End of story...