Ashkenazi Jews are just white people. A sizeable subset of them are very studious and industrious which multiplies their productivity in the way you'd expect with any other individual, but the reason they appear so disproportionately more successful than an analogous group of equally studious and industrious gentiles is because of their intense ethnocentric cooperation, not because they're all indefatigable geniuses. Said cooperation gives them access to resources, networks, and opportunities not available to gentiles, motivates them to position themselves as the marquee "brains of the operation" in undertakings that were in reality collective efforts (in which they may or may not have even played that crucial of a role), and to employ cunning to advance their position in ways that most others would find unscrupulous or dishonest. Hence the meme that they're "parasites who need a host to live" is half-true; it's false in the sense that they're perfectly capable people in and of themselves who can do fine on their own, but it's true in the sense that the larger the pool of gentile population and resources that they can integrate themselves into, the more opportunities it presents to connive their way to the top and take outsized credit for productivity output that is, for the most part, not their doing