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Notes -
It's a bit complicated. I think they were urban dwellers at certain times but after the expulsions from western Europe (13-15th centuries) they lived mostly in rural villages in Eastern Europe.
I propose this selection effect for the Ashkenazi:
Until the Industrial Revolution, we know that rich people had more surviving children. A high proportion of Jews were in g-loaded trades where greater intelligence led to riches. These include being merchants, moneylenders, and rabbis. For Jews, more so than Gentiles, a high IQ was associated with more children.
The explanation that I've heard is that Jewish culture in the shtetl selected heavily for verbal IQ as demonstrated by analysis, research and commentary on Jewish holy texts. If you wanted to have lots of kids the easiest way to do that was to be a distinguished rabbi and scholar - which is why the Ashkenazim are specifically advantaged with regards to verbal IQ, but less gifted in terms of spatial IQ. There's also a decent case to be made (though I'm not sure where the current research is on this) that the higher rates of certain mental/developmental disorders among Ashkenazim are the result of this process as well - potentially with a similar mechanism to sickle-cell, where you have an allele that confers a reproductive advantage when heterozygous but negative outcomes when homozygous.
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