Here is a relevant example concerning the Jewish minority in late 19th-century Vienna, as recorded by Peter Gay in Freud: A Life for Our Time:

Many of the immigrants from the miserable villages to the east dressed and spoke and gestured in ways alien and disagreeable to the Viennese; they were too exotic to be familiar and not exotic enough to be charming. They came as peddlers and small shopkeepers, but many of their sons entered callings vulnerable to bigoted criticism and easy slander: banking, or wholesale trading, or journalism. By the 1880s, at lead half of Viennese journalists, physicians, and lawyers where Jews. [Sigmund] Freud at Gymnasium contemplating either a legal or a medical career was being perfectly conventional. That is what many young Jews in Vienna did. Demonstrating their proverbial appetite for learning, they poured into Vienna's educational institutions and, concentrated as they were in a few districts, clustered in a few schools until their classes resembled extended family clans. During the eight years that Freud attended his Gymnasium, between 1865 and 1873, the number of Jewis students there increased from 68 to 300, rising from 44 to 73 percent of the tool school pollution.

IMO the phenomenon is clearly not restricted to Jews and to followers of the Abrahamic religions alone (as suggested in another answer): To some extent it e.g. also applies to Chinese minorities in countries such as Indonesia (as I know from a friend's familiy history), to Indians in Africa (V.S. Naipaul's novel A Bend in the Rvier conveys a bit of that), and to Asian-American students excelling in top graduate schools today (let's not forget that their forefathers once also were also confined to "persecuted minorities").

Here is a relevant example concerning the Jewish minority in late 19th-century Vienna, as recorded by Peter Gay in Freud: A Life for Our Time:

Many of the immigrants from the miserable villages to the east dressed and spoke and gestured in ways alien and disagreeable to the Viennese; they were too exotic to be familiar and not exotic enough to be charming. They came as peddlers and small shopkeepers, but many of their sons entered callings vulnerable to bigoted criticism and easy slander: banking, or wholesale trading, or journalism. By the 1880s, at lead half of Viennese journalists, physicians, and lawyers where Jews. [Sigmund] Freud at Gymnasium contemplating either a legal or a medical career was being perfectly conventional. That is what many young Jews in Vienna did. Demonstrating their proverbial appetite for learning, they poured into Vienna's educational institutions and, concentrated as they were in a few districts, clustered in a few schools until their classes resembled extended family clans. During the eight years that Freud attended his Gymnasium, between 1865 and 1873, the number of Jewis students there increased from 68 to 300, rising from 44 to 73 percent of the tool school population.

IMO the phenomenon is clearly not restricted to Jews and to followers of the Abrahamic religions alone (as suggested in another answer): To some extent it e.g. also applies to Chinese minorities in countries such as Indonesia (as I know from a friend's family history), to Indians in Africa (V.S. Naipaul's novel A Bend in the River conveys a bit of that), and to Asian-American students excelling in top graduate schools today (let's not forget that their forefathers once were also confined to "persecuted minorities").

Here is a relevant example concerning the Jewish minority in late 19th-century Vienna, as recorded by Peter Gay in Freud: A Life for Our Time:

Many of the immigrants from the miserable villages to the east dressed and spoke and gestured in ways alien and disagreeable to the Viennese; they were too exotic to be familiar and not exotic enough to be charming. They came as peddlers and small shopkeepers, but many of their sons entered callings vulnerable to bigoted criticism and easy slander: banking, or wholesale trading, or journalism. By the 1880s, at lead half of Viennese journalists, physicians, and lawyers where Jews. [Sigmund] Freud at Gymnasium contemplating either a legal or a medical career was being perfectly conventional. That is what many young Jews in Vienna did. Demonstrating their proverbial appetite for learning, they poured into Vienna's educational institutions and, concentrated as they were in a few districts, clustered in a few schools until their classes resembled extended family clans. During the eight years that Freud attended his Gymnasium, between 1865 and 1873, the number of Jewis students there increased from 68 to 300, rising from 44 to 73 percent of the tool school pollution.

Here is a relevant example concerning the Jewish minority in late 19th-century Vienna, as recorded by Peter Gay in Freud: A Life for Our Time:

Many of the immigrants from the miserable villages to the east dressed and spoke and gestured in ways alien and disagreeable to the Viennese; they were too exotic to be familiar and not exotic enough to be charming. They came as peddlers and small shopkeepers, but many of their sons entered callings vulnerable to bigoted criticism and easy slander: banking, or wholesale trading, or journalism. By the 1880s, at lead half of Viennese journalists, physicians, and lawyers where Jews. [Sigmund] Freud at Gymnasium contemplating either a legal or a medical career was being perfectly conventional. That is what many young Jews in Vienna did. Demonstrating their proverbial appetite for learning, they poured into Vienna's educational institutions and, concentrated as they were in a few districts, clustered in a few schools until their classes resembled extended family clans. During the eight years that Freud attended his Gymnasium, between 1865 and 1873, the number of Jewis students there increased from 68 to 300, rising from 44 to 73 percent of the tool school pollution.

IMO the phenomenon is clearly not restricted to Jews and to followers of the Abrahamic religions alone (as suggested in another answer): To some extent it e.g. also applies to Chinese minorities in countries such as Indonesia (as I know from a friend's familiy history), to Indians in Africa (V.S. Naipaul's novel A Bend in the Rvier conveys a bit of that), and to Asian-American students excelling in top graduate schools today (let's not forget that their forefathers once also were also confined to "persecuted minorities").