Here is a relevant example concerning the Jewish minority in late 19th-century Vienna, as recorded by [Peter Gay](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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").