The Blogs: The Weight of the Chosen

The idea of the Jews as a Chosen People is perhaps one of the most persistent canards that rankles the gentile imagination. To claim the Jew as chosen is already to disrupt the preferred image of Jews as a purely subdued and oppressed victim—a figure that elicits pity but not presence. Chosenness fractures the moral cosmology of the gentile world, rendering the Jew not simply a sufferer but a subject, one marked not by submission but by distinction. And that distinction—however modest or morally framed—is often perceived as arrogance, even supremacy.

This is the case despite the fact that Jews rarely speak of chosenness in triumphalist terms. More often, it is invoked with ambivalence, as a moral task rather than a metaphysical privilege, a burden of memory rather than a claim to power. It is a structure of responsibility—an obligation to remain who we are, to carry forward what was given, not because we are better, but because we were called.

And while the right to place oneself at the center of one’s own perspective is now freely granted to Indigenous peoples—especially within anthropology and related disciplines, perhaps because they are not seen as a threat to the West’s historical sense of entitlement—that same right is denied to Jews.

When Jews speak of chosenness, they are not afforded the same hermeneutic generosity. Instead, the concept becomes saturated with foreign projections: images of Jewish power, wealth, and cunning rush in to fill the space, distorting an internal structure of responsibility into an external symbol of domination. Chosenness, in the non-Jewish imagination, comes to bear the weight of Western histories of racial supremacy—histories that have nothing to do with Judaism, but are mapped onto it with relentless force.

A bizarre sort of jealousy often seems to underlie antisemitism—a resentment that the Jew was born chosen, and one was not. Despite the fact that Jewish tradition has always made room for righteous converts and fellow travelers, the idea that one could join the Jewish people rarely satisfies the antisemite. What he resents is not exclusion, but the fact that chosenness was not his inheritance to begin with. It is a rage not at barriers, but at origins.

The contradiction is telling: the antisemite accuses the Jew of clannishness and exclusion, yet rarely seeks sincere entry. He disdains the idea of a distinct, enduring people, even as he envies it. He projects onto the Jew a fantasy of unearned metaphysical privilege—and then punishes the Jew for carrying it.

The irony is that the idea of being chosen is not unique to the Jews. Most peoples have understood themselves as bearers of a distinct purpose or destiny—holders of a language, a law, a relation to the land. Ethnocentrism is, in many ways, the best shared secret of humanity. The problem is not chosenness itself, but a world that cannot accept a form of chosenness that makes space for others.

What makes Jewish chosenness so provocative is not that it asserts a special role, but that it does so without denying the possibility that others are also chosen. In Jewish thought, the covenant with Israel does not require the negation of other covenants. The God of Abraham is also the judge of all the earth. Our particularity never claimed to be totality.

And yet, this is precisely what the modern political imagination cannot abide: a people that insists on its distinctiveness without seeking to universalize it. A people that survives not through empire, but through memory. A people whose persistence, paradoxically, exposes the lie that universality requires uniformity.