Why Jews as 'The Chosen People' Drives Bigots Crazy

Christians and Muslims, who jealously believe they are God’s chosen people, denounce Jews for having trademarked the concept first. But anyway.

Jews carrying a Torah at the Kotel (the Western Wall) in Jerusalem

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This is a guest essay written by Pat Johnson of Pat’s Substack.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/why-jews-the-chosen-people-drives-bigots-crazy

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You do not have to scroll social media very long before some Mensa member pops up with a sneering reference to “the chosen people.”

In my limited social media scrolling recently, I have come across this several times a day.

A lot of people, whose ignorance battles for preeminence with their sanctimoniousness, cite the Jewish concept of “chosen-ness” incessantly, certain it is proof of Jewish supremacism.

If they did so much as a Google search, they would know that this theological concept is not about supremacy but about obligation, a covenant with God that many Jews today interpret as compelling them to pursue the unfinished work of God’s creation by striving for the perfection of the world. (I am not a Jew nor a theologian, so this is a crude summary  —  but it is a lot less crude than the stuff you see on social media.)

The concept of chosen-ness does not, as so many confident amateurs assert, mean Jews claim they are God’s favorites.

But this raises the larger question: Doesn’t pretty much every religion tell its adherents that they are God’s favorites? Isn’t that exactly what Christianity and Islam very emphatically assert?

God knows antisemitism for 2,000 years has been driven by the fury of Christians, and later of Muslims, toward Jews who obstinately refuse to accept the (obviously true!) “successor” religion.

It is a characteristic of antisemitism to accuse Jews of precisely that of which the accuser is guilty, to project the sin onto the Jewish scapegoat. (The last clause is, come to think, the very essence of Christianity, which we recently celebrated as Easter.)

Christians and Muslims, who jealously believe they are God’s chosen people, denounce Jews for having trademarked the concept first. But anyway.

Of course, even those who do have some understanding of the Jewish concept of chosen-ness will use it against them, rarely missing an opportunity to point out where Jews, individually or collectively, have failed to live up to ideals of human perfection.

This is the self-righteous derision by members of the unintelligentsia who point at the Jews and say: “See, they’re no better than the rest of us!”

This approach toward Jews echoes the double standard to which Israel is held. Any other country can be human and make mistakes. But if Israel is not superhuman  — God-like — in its faultless adherence to the highest ideals, it is condemned not merely as proof that the best of us are no better than the worst of us but, by massive extension, as the ultimate extreme of this presumed lesson: that Jews epitomize humans’ fall from grace.

Even those who do not adhere to a religion fall back on rather remarkably theology-like black-and-whites when it comes to Jews and Israel. They can be either infinitely perfect or mortally flawed, never nuanced like real people (or countries).

G(o)od or (d)evil, never anything in between. For much of the world, Jews (and Israelis) are avatars, paradigms, archetypes — symbols that take on whatever we need them to represent, rather than what they are.

It’s why the world obsesses about perceived sins of Israel while ignoring exponentially worse “sins” occurring almost anywhere one cares to look in the world.

It is a perverse form of cosmic schadenfreude — an apparent human need to knock off their pedestal the people who the perpetrators themselves have put there. (Again: It is not Jews who declare themselves superior, but antisemites, who conversely fetishize the Jews as the embodiment of perfection and then condemn them for failing to be so.)

Bullying, elementary school teachers tell us, is a tactic of people with inferiority issues trying to make themselves feel better about themselves. Antisemitism is bullying on a theological, cosmic level.

“Proving” Israeli iniquity is necessary to justify our individual and collective failures — as civilizations, as countries, as movements for human progress, as individuals.

In this demented worldview (and, if I am right, it is a worldview rampant across continents and societies), if we can demonstrate that the divinely “chosen” are perpetrating “apartheid,” “genocide,” “settler-colonialism” and leaving the cap off the toothpaste, it kind of takes the pressure off the rest of us to go the extra mile in our inconsequential tasks.

Misunderstandings around this idea of chosen-ness are among the reasons envy plays such a role in the lives of antisemites. The obsession with the “chosen people” is a parallel phenomenon. While envy is a pretty clear-cut emotion, though, the chosen-ness thing is slightly more complex and probably more vexatious to the perpetrator.

“Chosen-ness” chafes antisemites based perhaps not so much on the idea that Jews think they are better than other people, but rather the horrifying mirror-image: that antisemites believe Jews are better than they are.

See the subtle difference there? Most forms of racism are premised on the idea that the racist thinks they (or their kind) are better than the object of their racism. Similar to the way Zionism inverts the “natural” order of Jews knowing their place, antisemitism, in many cases, reverses the racist order. The perpetrator does not see themselves as superior to Jews, but inferior.

And how infuriating must that be?! Instead of feeling better about themselves because they convince themselves they are better than the object of their racism, they feel even worse about themselves. (What a waste of perfectly good hatred!)

Traditionally, both in Muslim and Christian lands, Jews were often accepted (except when they were not, and when they were not … well, anyway) as long as they knew their place as inferior beings. (In the Muslim world, the term was, or is, “dhimmies.”)

But this “inferiority” is a deceptive concept. Both Christianity and Islam are offshoots of Judaism, and they have, put mildly, complex relationships with the parent theology. They are religions with daddy issues. They do not know, it has seemed throughout history, whether to love or hate the source of their monotheistic god. So it is complex.

But let’s just say that if Christians and Muslims genuinely believed they were superior to Jews, they would probably not have to create a whole civilizational hierarchy to prove it. It would just be. So the centuries-old infrastructures codifying Christian and Muslim supremacy over Jews is possibly an inverted sense of inferiority.

Zionism is a movement of Jews who finally had enough of accepting their place as socially constructed inferiors in someone else’s societies. By upending the “natural” order of centuries of Muslim and Christian assumptions, Zionism is a wildly revolutionary idea. (Which makes “anti-Zionism” a massively reactionary force.)

At the best of times, Zionism subverts the condition in which Jews “know their place.” In the worst of times, like now, when Israel defends itself against genocidal enemies, Jews not only fail to know their place but have the audacity to put someone else in the role that the haters think Jews rightfully belong. That sets the antisemites off like nobody’s business.

This is why other countries can get away with actual genocides while the world snores, but Israel evokes hysterical accusations of genocide every time a soldier turns the key in a Jeep’s ignition.

This is also why, as I keep hammering home, it is not okay for “progressive” people to utter the brainless mantra: “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.”

It is not as simplistic as people saying (or thinking), “I hate Jews, therefore I hate Israel.”

No, there is a complex psychodynamic happening in both phenomena. And barking stupid slogans, rather than looking inward at some of the deep-seated prejudices and complex undercurrents of envy, inferiority/superiority and the most intricate received civilizational concepts, is not how intelligent, “progressive” people respond.

Or, at least, it should not be.

But there is the problem.

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