The rightwing New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has sparked furious controversy online for a column praising Ashkenazi Jews for their scientific accomplishments, which critics say amounts to embracing eugenics.

In a column titled The Secrets of Jewish Genius and using a picture of Albert Einstein, Stephens stepped in the eugenics minefield by claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent than other people and think differently.

Citing Sarah Bernhardt, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx, Stephens asked: “How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of one per cent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?”

He answered: “The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true … Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different.”

That prompted furious accusations that Stephens was using the same genetics arguments that informed Nazism and white supremacist thinking.

“It’s hard to read this column as expressing anything other than a belief in the genetic and cultural inferiority of non-Ashkenazi Jews; it’s hard to tell if that’s intentional or due to appalling sloppiness, but either way it’s not the sort of thing the Times should be running,” tweeted Tim Marchman, editorial director of Vice.

New York Times contributor Jody Rosen offered on Twitter: “Speaking as both an Ashkenazi Jew and a NYT contributor, I don’t think eugenicists should be op-ed columnists.”

“A Jew endorsing the idea that certain races are inherently superior to other, lesser races, what could possibly go wrong?” asked the journalist Ashley Feinberg on Twitter.

The writer Carrie Courogen posted the phone number to cancel a Times subscription, “citing ‘too many awful Bret Stephens pieces, today’s eugenics propaganda being the final straw’ as why you can ‘no longer in good conscience subscribe’. It was easy & painless & I just did it; you can too.”

Stephens’ latest column is far from his first brush with controversy.

In August, he became embroiled in a dispute with a professor who had called him a “bedbug” on Twitter, after it emerged the New York Times had become infested with the insect pest. The spat ended with Stephens cancelling his Twitter account.

“Time to do what I long ago promised to do,” tweeted Stephens before he deactivated his account. “Twitter is a sewer. It brings out the worst in humanity. I sincerely apologize for any part I’ve played in making it worse, and to anyone I’ve ever hurt. Thanks to all of my followers, but I’m deactivating this account.”

Stephens is a regular target of liberals’ ire for other columns attacking climate change science, saying the activist group Black Lives Matter has “some thuggish elements” and for writing a piece about “the disease of the Arab mind”.