www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/chosenness-and-its-enemies-13662
Over the past several centuries alone, both Jews and non-Jews have judged this key tenet of classical Judaism to be undemocratic, chauvinistic, superstitious--in short, retrograde in every way that matters to the progressive mind. Nor is it just progressives who have found it deficient. It, and Jews who still believe in it or otherwise decline to assimilate to prevailing norms, have been savaged by everyone from captains of capitalism to Soviet commissars. Henry Ford, to cite a famous example, sponsored the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery originating in czarist Russia and alleging a Jewish plot to achieve global domination. Things have been no better on the other side of the political spectrum. The Soviet Union viciously persecuted the Jews, even issuing a book equating Zionism with racism and Nazism long before such moves became the hardy perennial of anti-Zionist invective. Not to be outdone, President Charles de Gaulle of France, in a press conference not long after the Six-Day war of 1967, identified Jewish separateness not only as a reflection of the noxious character of the Jews themselves but as the cause of anti-Semitism in others. The Jews, de Gaulle observed, have long been "an elite people, self-confident and domineering"--and, presumably for that reason, guilty of "provoking ill will in certain countries and at certain times." And yet, like the Jews themselves, the idea of the chosen people will not die. Last year, for example, the distinguished social critic Charles Murray published in COMMENTARY a much-discussed article in which he sought to explain what he called "the disproportionate Jewish accomplishment in the arts and sciences."
Nor is this statistic simply a consequence of modern social history. Instead, Murray speculated, the higher average intelligence of Jews existed even in antiquity. And that raised a larger question, to which Murray offered a benignly provocative answer: Why should one particular tribe at the time of Moses, living in the same environment as other nomadic and agricultural peoples of the Middle East, have already evolved elevated intelligence when the others did not? At this point, I take sanctuary in my remaining hypothesis, uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable. Whether or not Murray intended his concluding words in full seriousness, what is curious is how readily the old theological idea of the chosen people came to the mind of "this Scots-Irish Gentile from Iowa," as he described himself. Alas, many a Gentile thinker has been decidedly less positive. In a recent study of the ancient teaching and its role in modern anti-Semitism, the Israeli diplomat and political scientist Avi Beker presents a broad assortment of contemporary attacks on the Jews that in one way or another echo the analysis put forward by Charles de Gaulle.
And then there is Jos Saramago, the Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize laureate, who a few years ago described the Jews in perfervid terms as contaminated by the monstrous and rooted "certitude" that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological, and pathological exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they suffered in the Holocaust. As for the genealogy of this enduring set of attitudes, it stretches back all the way to early Christian writings that portray the Jews as a self-righteous and spiritually blind people, the enemies or even the murderers of God. In some of its inflections, it goes even farther back, to Greco-Roman depictions of Jews as culturally inferior newcomers and misanthropes whose religion forbids them to show goodwill to outsiders. Theodorakis, for one, exhibits the influence of both streams. He speaks of his grandmother's admonition to avoid the Jewish neighborhood on Easter because "the Jews put Christian boys in a barrel with knives inside.
But the hoary resonances of such bigotry should not mislead us. In focusing on the very idea of a chosen people, these modern anti-Semites break with the classical Christian tradition to reveal an indebtedness to Enlightenment notions of universalism. The Church, as Joel S Kaminsky points out in a highly illuminating recent book, not only accepted the idea of a chosen people;
Christianity, that is, did not claim to replace the people Israel with an undifferentiated humanity; rather, with few exceptions, it claimed the status of Israel for itself exclusively. Given the massive expansion of Christianity in the intervening centuries, it is easy to forget that the Enlightenment belief in a uniform humanity, loyal to reason alone and disregarding all claims of historical revelation and normative tradition, poses a formidable challenge to Christians as well as to Jews. Once upon a time, the question was, which is the real chosen people? For the past two centuries or so, the question has been, how can there be a chosen people at all? Kaminsky's study, the work of a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, is exceptionally helpful in clarifying the first question-- in which the second has perforce become entangled. For even ostensibly careful readers of the Bible fall captive to the historical animus against the doctrine of the chosen people. Among some Christian scholars, indeed, the traditional belief in the supersession of the Jews and of Judaism has often proved toxic, all the more so when melded with the Enlightenment commitment to universalism. Hence the common misconception that Christianity is open, inclusive, and universal, while Judaism is tribalistic, ethnocentric, and xenophobic. Gerd Ldemann, for example, a prominent German professor of the New Testament, writes that "the Nazis shamelessly directed ideas which were similar to those developed by Jews under Ezra and Nehemiah," two biblical leaders at the time of the Persian empire who strove to protect their endangered little community in Palestine from intermarriage. For her part, Regina Schwartz, an English-literature specialist at Northwestern, reads the Bible, and biblical chosenness, through the prism of today's invidious polarities of the "self" and the "Other": The Other against whom Israel's identity is forged is abhorred, abject, impure, and in the "Old Testament" vast numbers of them are obliterated. The very idea that identity is constructed "against" suggests scarcity, as though there were a finite amount of identity itself, and so a space must be carved out for it and jealously guarded, like finite territory. In countering such convergences of religious and anti-religious bias, Kaminsky has his work cut out for him. He begins by situating the biblical concept of election in the narratives of fraternal rivalry in Genesis.
human behavior," as embodied in the offerings brought by each; Efforts by readers to figure out what Abel did right and Cain did wrong--efforts that were already under way in antiquity--do violence to the narrative, which is revealingly focused not on the favored (and doomed) younger brother but on the non-elect, on Cain.
For example, Beker quotes the reaction of the philosopher Martin Buber to the Israeli capture of the Western Wall in the Six-Day war--no small feat, since Buber had died two years earlier. About the Author Jon D Levensonis the Albert A List professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School and the co-author (with Kevin J Madigan) of Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (Yale University Press) 2009 Commentary Inc.
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