I am curious to know. Why does the Jewish community have a disproportionately large number of extremely intelligent people as evidenced by the number of Nobel laureates and other great intellectuals?
I heard it's preference for non-physical work (lawyers, doctors, bankers, artists, writers...). Also, an old Polish novel "Lalka" by Bolesław Prus says Jews have an admiration for intellect and charades is one of their favorite family past-times.
Because they have higher than average intelligence, thus having "disproportionately large number of extremely intelligent people". I doubt their distribution is not normal.
I was interested about that too and after some research the likely explanation is that people with an Ashkenazi ancestry have a higher intelligence thanks to genetics.
Look up azkenazi Jews on Wikipedia, the average IQ of that subgroup is 108 with similar variance, apparently. But they also suffer from haemophilia and other genetic inbreeding disorders...