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.

See "The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project" https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... and "Hungarian Education II: Four Nobel Truths" https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/ by Scott Alexander.

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.

There is some interesting genetic theorising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence#...

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...