The most memorable debate I had when I was in law school didn’t take place in law school. The debate—really more of a disputation—took place on the Green, a historic park in the middle of New Haven, Connecticut. My interlocutors weren’t lawyers, but they were spectacular debaters. They belonged, I know now, to a movement referred to as the “One West Camp,” named for the place the group first met, at 1 West 125th Street in Harlem, New York. One Westers are one small subgroup of a larger set of movements known as Black Hebrew Israelites. Like many Black Hebrew Israelites, they believe they, not Jews, are the true descendants of the children of Israel.*
I encountered the One Westers for the first time while walking home from class. There were only half a dozen of them, I’m pretty sure, but they were hard to miss. They wore colorful, ancient-style outfits with bandolier-like belts crossed over their chests. They were surrounded by large placards explaining how each of the twelve tribes of Israel corresponded to a different location or group of people in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. They were having animated conversations with passersby. I stopped to listen. I couldn’t help myself. I was drawn in.
What got me going was what the One Westers were saying. They were arguing that God loved the children of Israel, his chosen people, more than anyone else on earth. To them this was part of a broader theory of Black supremacy. But that conclusion engaged me less than the method they were using to support their claims. They had proofs from the Bible. Lots of them.
The lead speaker would announce a verse: “Exodus 19:5! Read it!” Then his colleagues would recite it loudly, reading from a well-thumbed copy of what I remember as the King James Version of the Bible. Each time, the biblical passage he chose would powerfully bring home his point: “If ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine.”1
This was in the middle of the 1990s. We were in the immediate aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. The brutal war in the former Yugoslavia was ongoing. My own conception of Jewishness had been painfully challenged by these extreme manifestations of insider-outsider dynamics. Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish doctor born and raised in Brooklyn, had murdered 29 Muslim worshippers and injured 125 more in the mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. He was a Modern Orthodox Religious Zionist who had been educated at a high school nearly identical to mine. His actions had shaken my belief structure like no other event in my life, before or since.
In the moment, all I wanted to do was to tell the One Westers that God didn’t love the Israelites most: God loved all humans equally. I had a few verses of my own to back me. The best was Amos 9:7. I asked them to read it out:
Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?
Then I drew my lesson. “You see? God doesn’t care more about the Israelites than he cares about any other people!”
The One Westers were ready. They knew that verse well. “What color were the Ethiopians?” they called out. “Black,” came the response. “That verse proves the Israelites were Black,” the leader explained with a smile of easy victory. “It says the Israelites are ‘like the children of Ethiopia.’”
At this point, I should have conceded defeat. True, the One West debaters hadn’t exactly addressed my interpretation of the verse from Amos. But they had effectively reinterpreted that verse, deflecting my wish to enlist the Bible for the view that God loves all peoples the same.
The problem—my problem, I guess—was that I was brought up in the tradition of Talmudic debate, where you never leave well enough alone. The One Westers had claimed the Israelites, God’s chosen people, were Black, so I came back with another verse. I told them to read out Exodus 11:7. It was the second half of the verse that I wanted: “that you may know that the LORD does make a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.” Now I had my own question for them. “What color were the Egyptians?” I demanded to know. In terms of Afrocentrism, there was only one possible answer. And if the Egyptians were Black, and if God differentiated them from the Israelites, what did that say about the Israelites?
Even as the words came out of my mouth, I remember thinking two things. One, I had made what was at best nothing more than a clever debater’s point. Two, I hadn’t set out to “prove” the Israelites weren’t Black. I had wanted to show God’s love for all humans. I had now argued something totally orthogonal to what I really wanted to say. In a debate, that’s called losing.
The One Westers seemed not to have previously encountered the somewhat perverse argument that Exodus 11:7 refuted the Blackness of the Israelites, maybe because I had invented it on the spot. There was an uncomfortable pause. Then one of them looked me in the eye and said, bluntly, in a Hebrew accent I had not heard before, “Attah lo yehudi”—“You are not a Jew.” I knew enough not to argue with that one. As I turned and headed home, I could hear them calling after me, almost taunting, a bit louder each time: “Atah lo yehudi!”
Leave aside the question of who was a Jew, me or the One Westers, or both, or neither. That belongs to the previous chapter. The reason I’m telling you the story now is to underscore how hard it is to avoid a basic question of Jewish theology, politics, and philosophy. Are the Jews chosen by God? If so, what does that mean? And, in the words of the old joke, couldn’t He choose someone else next time?
The idea that the children of Israel are chosen by God is central to the Hebrew Bible and to Jewish consciousness ever since. The book of Deuteronomy puts it succinctly:
For you are a holy people to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you for himself to be a treasured people [‘am segullah] from among all the peoples on the face of the earth. Not because you were greater than the other peoples has God loved you and chosen you, for you are the smallest of all peoples. But from God’s loving you and his keeping the oath which he swore to your fathers, God took you out with a strong hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.2
The basic idea is straightforward. The people of Israel are nothing special and have not done anything special to merit God’s choice of them. It is simply an unchangeable fact, based on God’s love of their forefathers and by extension of them.
Even in the Bible, being chosen is not an unalloyed good. To the contrary: God took the children of Israel out of Egypt because God loved them, but God also intentionally put them into bondage in Egypt in the first place.3 A constantly recurring theme of the entire Hebrew Bible, one I emphasized at the end of part II, is that when the children of Israel sin against God, they will be terribly punished for it. The extent of their punishment is connected to their special status as God’s beloved people.
The most extreme biblical expression of this dynamic can be found in the book of Hosea. The poetic motif of the entire book, all fourteen chapters, is that Israel is a wayward, unfaithful wife whom God loves but cannot resist punishing even as he (the gender matters) yearns for her return. Enacting the emotional structure depicted in the poetry, Hosea is instructed to marry a woman who betrays him with other lovers, thus placing himself in the empathetic position of God. He suffers terribly, as presumably does his wife. This is not a model of a healthy relationship.
Nevertheless, whether construed in terms of advantages and blessings or distinctive punishments and curses, the idea of Jewish chosenness has persisted. It survived Paul’s Christian theology, which flipped chosenness on its head by first universalizing God’s love to reach all Christians, then ascribing to the Jews permanent and distinctive punishment for spurning and killing Christ. It survived Islamic theology, which holds that all peoples have their own prophets sent to them by God, and that Moses and the other Jewish prophets (including Jesus) were eventually succeeded and superseded by Muhammad. Although in theory this should have made the Jews into just another nation, it did not, mostly because the Qur’an retold and reimagined many stories that also appeared in the Bible. The Jews came to be seen by Muslims as a “people of the book,” entitled to special protection by virtue of their monotheism but also subject to special disabilities and subordinate status.
Jewish chosenness even survived the rise of modern secularism, what Nietzsche (optimistically, in retrospect) called the death of God. Earlier, I described how classical Zionism sought to put an end to the idea of chosenness, only to have it reappear through the historical events of the Holocaust and the course of Israel’s historical development. Meanwhile, for modern antisemites, whether non-Jewish or otherwise, Jewish chosenness was often reflected in various pseudoscientific or cultural condemnations of the Jews as uniquely sick, weak, bad, or dangerous.
For philo-Semites, whether Jewish or otherwise, Jews came to be depicted as especially suited to modern life, excelling in science, scholarship, medicine, progressive political activism, the arts, finance, business, and beyond. Not infrequently, philo-Semitic and antisemitic visions of Jewish distinctiveness converged, so that Jewish success in a given domain could be depicted as evidence of conspiratorial Jewish control. The rueful joke that captures this phenomenon depicts a Jew of the 1920s reading Der Stürmer, a Nazi propaganda tabloid. Challenged by another Jew about how he could read that filth, the Jew replies, “In every other paper I read that Jews are poor and oppressed and beaten down by pogroms. But in this one they tell me that the Jews control Hollywood, they control Wall Street, they run the Communist International. I feel great!”
The persistence of the idea of Jewish chosenness, like the persistence of the Jewish people itself, therefore calls out for some exploration. The place to begin that exploration is with a caveat: it turns out not to be so unusual for a group of people to think of itself as special or chosen.†
Start with the biblical account of chosenness. In the ancient Near East and beyond, most peoples—in fact most city-states—had specific gods associated with them, gods who had chosen the ancestors who founded the city and stayed with them always. The Bible depicts a number of them, like Chemosh, the god of the Moabites.4 Athena is the goddess who gave her name to Athens. For Israel to be chosen by the God of Israel was therefore not on its own unique, even in the eyes of the prophets. In the passage I tried to use against the One Westers, Amos tells the Israelites that God has even given other peoples their own exoduses.5 The point of this passage is that even the Exodus from Egypt, which the Bible repeatedly makes the touchstone of God’s love of the Israelites, is not a one-off but a familiar worldly phenomenon that has parallels in the lives of neighboring peoples.
Seen in this context, the biblical idea of chosenness was about making the people of Israel distinct in their relation to the particular God of Israel (the meaning of ‘am segullah, which literally means a treasured people), not unique when compared to other peoples. What transformed the biblical idea of chosenness into a notion of uniqueness is a separate development in biblical thought, one that was to have substantial global effects later. That was the idea that the God of the Israelites was not merely one god among many, but the only true, real God—and that the other gods were wood and stone.‡
Other ancient peoples who considered themselves chosen by their god or gods did not necessarily deny the reality of the existence of other gods who were patrons of other peoples or places. They were content to believe that their god was more powerful or worthy of worship or at any rate appropriate for them to worship. But from the moment that the Israelites began to tell themselves and their neighbors that their God was the single universal God and that other gods had no real existence, the meaning of their chosenness by that God—the creator and ruler of heaven and earth—attained a different conceptual status. Their chosenness became not a matter of similarity to other peoples’ relationships with their gods but a matter of dissimilarity and uniqueness. If the one unique God had chosen Israel, then Israel was the one unique people.
It is tempting to speculate that antisemitism itself can be traced back to this particular claim of uniqueness. Almost all peoples come in for dislike, distrust, stereotypes, and even hatred by their neighbors, especially if they are competitors for land or wealth or trade routes or prestige. Yet you would think there would be something especially irritating about being told by your neighbors not that their god was better than yours but that your god was no god at all. The truth is, however, that we have little evidence that this sort of monotheism occasioned particularly virulent antisemitic responses in the ancient world.
In contrast with the denial of other gods, we do know that the Jewish claim to chosenness has featured, in one form or another, in most kinds of antisemitism, past and present. This chosenness, I am suggesting, is a provocation to anyone not so chosen, because it amounts to the claim that the Master of the Universe has chosen me and not you. If God is cosmic, so is the chosenness of the Jewish people.
For Traditionalist believers, there is nothing threatening or morally troubling about this belief. It flows easily and naturally alongside the rest of their conception of God, a conception most Traditionalists see little reason to question. Jewish theology had many centuries to make sense of Jewish suffering, and Traditionalists follow the main line of that theodicy willingly, as I mentioned earlier. It can be traced back to the Hebrew Bible: Follow God’s laws and you will be rewarded. Deviate and you will be punished. The same principle can be applied to any of the many misfortunes in Jewish history, all without disrupting the functional concept of chosenness.
To Traditionalists, even the trauma of the Holocaust did not fundamentally disrupt this basic structure of reward and punishment. Traditionalists may debate which sins precipitated the Holocaust, and whose, but that sort of debate is normal in Jewish history in the aftermath of tragedy. God did not destroy the Jewish people utterly, because God had promised not to do so. Anything short of total destruction is, to be callous, part of the divine deal.
It is for this reason that Traditionalists prefer to commemorate the Holocaust not on a special memorial day but on the ninth of the month of Av, the day of fasting and prayer associated with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Over the centuries, as tragedies multiplied, Jews incorporated their commemoration into the ninth of Av liturgy, each tragedy remembered by its own poetic lament. Although special days of commemoration were sometimes added to the Jewish calendar in the aftermath of particularly devastating tragedies, over time those tended to be subsumed into the ninth of Av. It’s not only that the calendar would be too full of fast days if all Jewish communal tragedies got their own individual commemoration. Theologically, all these tragedies had in common a basic pattern of sin, punishment, and inspiration for repentance to future generations. The villains might come and go, but the basic repetitive structure was the same. In the words of the Passover Haggadah, “Not just one [enemy] alone has stood up to destroy us; rather, in every generation they stand up to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.”
Traditionalists, then, take Jewish chosenness as a religious fact, and they bear its consequences with proper mourning where required. They tend not to take much pride in the secular accomplishments of individual (mostly secular) Jews, nor do they especially believe that secular Jews are consistently better or more ethical people than non-Jews. They do believe that the Law, properly obeyed, should make for piety and goodness. But Jews who do not accept the authority of God or the yoke of God’s commandments should not be expected to prosper more than anyone else and should not in any case be specially praised or honored, considering their failure to perform their true task for which they were put on earth.
Progressive Jews have a much more ambivalent relationship to the idea of chosenness, which is in a certain sense at odds with their egalitarian ideals. The Progressive God loves all humans equally, and the idea of that God singling out one people would seem to undermine the universality of that love. For those Progressives who understand God more metaphorically or spiritually as a unifying principle of order in the universe, it makes little sense to think that such a divine principle prefers some people to others.
In the past, Progressive Jews frequently preserved the notion of chosenness through the idea that the Jews were appointed to be “a light unto the nations,” a phrase taken from the book of Isaiah,6 one of Progressives’ favorite sources. For Jews to be a light unto the nations was for them to take on the mission of spreading the prophetic, moral truths of the Hebrew Bible to the world. This formulation subtly preserved the idea that the Jews have a special historical role while downplaying the possibility that this role entailed any unique connection to God. It also put the Jews as a whole into a world-historical role that the Gospel according to Luke assigned to Jesus, namely that of spreading divine revelation to all humans.§
The idea of the Jews as a light unto the nations was by no means restricted to Progressive Jewish thought. It occasionally appeared in classical Zionism—where Ben-Gurion placed it alongside the rather different goal of being a nation like all others—and in Religious Zionism, where the elder Rav Kook made it part of his messianic vision for Israel to be a model state that would inspire others and in turn hasten universal redemption.7 But the idea was especially fitting for Jewish Progressives because it called for Jews to be model messengers of the divine project of achieving social justice. If Jews fell short in that mission, they could justifiably be chided for failing to live up to their divinely assigned task. If they performed well, their mission would enhance the lives of all humans.
Today’s Progressive Jews typically approach the “light unto the nations” version of Jewish chosenness cautiously. Contemporary Progressives mostly think all cultures and societies are equally moral or wise, roughly speaking. To claim a special mission of enlightenment as the distinct role of the Jews smacks of presumptuousness, not to mention condescension. The early Progressive Jewish claim was that the refined essence of prophetic Judaism prefigured not only Christian morals (circa the middle of the nineteenth century) but Western morality in its entirety. Today’s Progressive Jewish thought has more modest aspirations. It prefers to think of God’s morality as unfolding fitfully but progressively through history, and by no means as the special preserve of the Jews or the ancient Israelites.
That leaves contemporary Progressive Jews in something of a quandary with respect to chosenness. Yet collective chosenness is so fundamental to Jewish thought that something is needed to fill the gap. I argued earlier that for much of post-1980s Progressive theology, the Holocaust (chosenness as unique genocidal suffering) and the state of Israel (chosenness as unique postgenocidal redemption) came to function as the content of chosenness. For a small number, critique of Israel has subsequently substituted for support of Israel, while still preserving some vestigial version of chosenness. If the Holocaust and Israel eventually can no longer fulfill those roles for younger Progressive Jews, there will need to be a new interpretation or reconfiguration of chosenness to take their place.
I would suggest for this purpose a theology of existential self-chosenness. More easily than most other Jews, Progressive Jews may be able to mount the case that by choosing to be Jews and identifying with the divine values of social justice, they are themselves creating the covenantal relationship with the divine. The biblical idea that God chose the people of Israel can be reread or transvalued into the idea that the people of Israel chose their God, and choose that same God still. Chosenness can then be reunderstood once again as a divine covenant, in which the human and the divine conjoin freely, voluntarily, and, as it were, equally.
Seen this way, voluntariness constitutes chosenness. One should be able to choose to be a Jew or choose not to be one. The voluntary choice of the individual or the community corresponds to divine choice. This conception differs radically from the idea that Jewishness is something one does not choose but is “thrown into,” to borrow the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s description of how we are thrown into existence. A Heideggerian chosenness can only be the experience of being chosen to be a Jew, not of choosing it. It might well satisfy those Jews who feel, as I sometimes do, that they have no alternative but to engage the Jewishness that shaped their consciousness and lifeworld. But this feeling of being thrown into Jewishness can do little or nothing for Jews who experience themselves as free to be Jews or not to be.
Another version of being chosen rather than choosing Jewishness is associated with Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous assertion that the antisemite makes the Jew, and that the Jew therefore has no escape from being a Jew.8 Sartre, one of the leading figures in existentialism, was writing for a world in which Jewishness was conceived, by non-Jews as well as many Jews, as a social disability. It is certainly true that under the Nazi Nuremberg laws, one could not avoid being categorized as Jewish by insisting on not being a Jew. That followed from the Nuremberg laws’ inspiration, namely American Southern Black Codes, which designated a person as Black based on blood quantum, regardless of the person’s self-perception.
Nowadays, however, it seems anathema to rely on antisemites—to say nothing of genocidal antisemites who were borrowing from American white supremacists—to provide a definition that we would like to use. If a person asserts that he is not a Jew, it feels ethically strange to insist that he is a Jew nevertheless. If he chooses to “pass” as a non-Jew, no one would be the wiser. And at a deeper level, to be chosen by antisemites is so fundamentally different from being chosen by God that it feels (to me) like a repugnant inversion of the divine covenant to insist that chosenness persists as a consequence of the hatred of Jews.
It follows, I think, that today we should see the appeal of a conception of Jewish chosenness that is essentially voluntary and self-chosen. You should be able to choose not to be a Jew. You should be able to choose to be a Jew.
To see how deep this voluntarism runs in Jewish thought, consider that to the rabbis, becoming a Jew if you were not born one is considered a voluntary act, specifically, the act of joining the covenant. According to Maimonides’s code of Jewish law, itself based on the Talmud, what it takes to become a Jew is to declare your desire to be a Jew before a rabbinic court. The court reminds you that Jews are subject to oppression. If you say, “I know, and I am not worthy,” you are accepted as a Jew “immediately.” After you have voluntarily asked to belong and been accepted, the court informs you of basic principles of Jewish belief and of Jewish law, and you are given the chance to change your mind. If you accept what you have been told, the court “should not delay” you, Maimonides states,¶ but should proceed “immediately” to circumcision (for males) and immersion in a ritual bath (for men and women alike).9 The essence of the process is neither more nor less than a declaration of intent to belong and acceptance of Jewish beliefs and laws.
The simple, voluntary nature of this process is why I dislike the English-language term “conversion” to describe joining the Jewish people. Far better to speak simply of a person becoming a Jew. The word “conversion,” with its Christian origin and associations, implies a transformation that makes someone into a different, new person. None of that is present in the rabbinic conception of becoming a Jew. The process does not require or even recognize a transformative “conversion” experience, like the one Saul of Tarsus experienced on the road to Damascus when he became the Christian Paul. The rabbinic Hebrew word for becoming a Jew, giyyur, derives from the biblical Hebrew word for stranger, ger, which the rabbis interpreted to refer to someone who becomes a Jew. The idea is that by joining the Jewish community and becoming a Jew, the stranger becomes also fully Jewish. She is still herself, still a person with the same non-Jewish origin. She is not transformed into a new being. Rather, by joining the Jewish people voluntarily, she is a full member of the Jewish people, with the same obligations as other Jews.
If a person not born a Jew can join the covenant and become a member of the chosen people by voluntarily asking to do so, it makes some sense to think that all Jews can become chosen by choosing the covenant themselves. To some Evolutionist Jews, especially in the United States, such a view might seem congenial. Evolutionists often want to soften the exclusivity of chosenness in the light of their moral impulse to human equality. Using allegory, their favored tool of interpretation, they may say that to be chosen by God means to establish a special relationship with God. That relationship need not be unique so long as it is felt to be special. This approach can allow Evolutionists to avoid the apparent collective narcissism of believing God has chosen only the Jews, even as they repeat the basic principle of chosenness daily in their prayers. They can choose to live “as though” chosen by God, by taking chosenness not to be exclusive.
Nevertheless, for Religious Zionists, who are also Evolutionists, this version of chosenness may not be satisfying. To them, the chosenness of the Jewish people is no allegory. It is, rather, a necessary, concrete condition of the messianic redemption toward which their faith directs them. To Religious Zionists, the chosenness of the Jews leads directly to the state of the Jews. If the people of Israel will fulfill their divine mission, namely the establishment of the state of Israel in the land God gave them, that event will have the cosmic consequence of setting the world aright. Even if they endorse Maimonides’s dictum that the days of the messiah are indistinguishable from ours except in virtue of Jewish sovereignty, that outcome is nevertheless divinely blessed, and not by metaphor but by reality.
It emerges that, like so much of the rest of Evolutionist Jewish thought, the future of the concept of chosenness depends on how much Religious Zionism takes over the rest of Evolutionism. To the extent the (spiritual) takeover is completed, Evolutionist Jews may end up embracing their version of chosenness alongside Rav Kook. Their imagined Israel will be, for them, the model of a state that can inspire others. To the extent that some strands of Evolutionist Jewish thought pull back from a full embrace of Religious Zionism, their challenge will be to interpret the divine choice of Israel in terms that reconcile Progressive universalism with Traditionalist particularism. That reconciliation will not be easy, but with the help of allegory, it can surely be achieved.
SECULAR CHOSENNESS AND THE QUESTION OF JEWISH ACCOMPLISHMENT
This review of Jewish versions of chosenness brings me to the troublesome topic of the idea of chosenness in Godless Jewish thought, particularly in the cultural Judaism that I have called (with love, not dismissal) bagels-and-lox Judaism. An atheist worldview cannot, by definition, derive chosenness from a divine origin. So if chosenness is to persist at all—and perhaps it need not—then chosenness must be understood as a distinct product of a distinct Jewish culture.
One of the most common versions of this secular chosenness is Jewish pride in Jews’ cultural accomplishments, ascribed, often without much mechanistic explanation, to Jews’ unique abilities and talents. At its worst, this perspective expresses itself as crude cultural chauvinism: an accounting of Jewish Nobel laureates followed by “Look how amazing the Jews are!” In its most defensible form, it offers an argument about how Jewish energies and creativity have expressed themselves on the world stage in the two hundred-plus years since Jewish emancipation. It proposes that the Jewish contribution in the realms of science, medicine, law, theory, critique, revolution, and capitalism—to name a few—is unique, distinctive, and disproportionate.
This better form of the argument is not absurd. It is exaggerated. To begin with, we need to notice that the evidence for unique Jewish contributions to general culture really only starts with Jewish emancipation.10 Before that, the history of the Jewish contribution to Western thought and civilization, from ancient Greece and Rome up through the Enlightenment, is not especially remarkable.
By this I do not mean to denigrate the contributions of those premodern Jewish thinkers who managed to make their mark on broader Christian-Islamic civilization, but only to note that they are few and far between, and their influences are for the most part peripheral. Even a giant like Maimonides had little effect on the course of Western thought compared to, say, his exact contemporary Ibn Rushd (1126–1198).** Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677), the most important philosopher of Jewish origin in his or maybe any era, is arguably the exception who proves the rule, given that his work was produced in the relative equality and freedom of the Dutch Republic. (The Jewish community of Amsterdam shunned him, but that is another topic.)
In short, the Hebrew Bible influenced Christianity and Islam. Individual Jews, however, did not, for the most part, meaningfully shape the religious or secular thinking of these great civilizations before Jews were emancipated from their subordinate status in Europe. Even Jewish banking and moneylending were probably less important than Florentine banking in shaping the course of European civilizational development.
With emancipation, though, things did change. It started slowly, with a number of German Jews emerging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as important intellectual (Moses Mendelssohn) and literary (Heinrich Heine) figures. Where things began to speed up was with the movement of eastern European Jews (the so-called Ostjuden) into western Europe in search of economic betterment and cultural opportunity.
Most of these eastern Jews were impoverished and ill-educated due to the economic and social conditions in the East. Even their Jewish education was often rudimentary, limited to basic literacy and the ability to read the Bible and the prayer book. In the poverty of eastern Europe, Talmudic study was the preserve of a small number of exceptionally intelligent and talented men who became rabbis or teachers. Yet within a generation or two, the Ostjuden and the German Jews had produced not hundreds but thousands of important and influential figures in essentially all realms of Western culture. Their contributions, emblematized by Marx, Einstein, and Freud, stand in for those of innumerable other central figures of European culture and thought.
How did it happen? The simplest explanation is that these mostly undereducated Jews possessed an unbounded ambition for learning and knowledge; that these politically repressed Jews possessed grand ideals of social change; and that these economically restricted Jews possessed a boundless capacity for wealth creation. As newly emancipated Germans or as recent immigrants to western Europe, these Jews were not limited by preexisting expectations of social class. In nearly all cases, they had nowhere to go but up, socially or professionally or intellectually.
It is worth noticing that the conditions for this extraordinary process of creativity—which moved to the United States by the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century and boomed there after World War II—coexisted with the general perception that eastern European Jews were a blight on western European society. In popular media and high culture alike they were depicted as thieves, beggars, and prostitutes. In the eugenicist scientific literature of the time, Jews were often characterized as congenitally stupid, infirm, and otherwise diseased. The Nazi brand of antisemitism did not invent the stereotypes it applied to Jews. It amplified prejudices and stereotypes that were widespread in western Europe from the nineteenth century.
So whatever enabled some eastern European Jews to succeed rapidly and remarkably, it did not extend to all European Jews at the time. Nor was it anywhere near enough to save Europe’s Jews from the German attempt to take over Europe or the effects of the almost-accomplished Final Solution. What, then, was it, beyond previously bottled-up capacity and ambition, that led to this stunning flourishing of Jewish accomplishment over the course of a century on two continents, or three if you count Israel?
In an absorbing book called The Jewish Century (2004), the historian Yuri Slezkine argues that, more or less by chance, eastern European Jews happened to have the skill set necessary for succeeding in modernity. He divides the world into entrepreneurial minorities and food-producing majorities and reasons that since the Jews were already “service nomads” in Europe, they were ideally placed for an era in which the key to success was to be “urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible.”11
Slezkine’s analysis is brilliant and provocative, like everything he writes. And clearly there was some aspect of the particular cultural modes of repressed eastern European Jews (repressed in all senses) that somehow facilitated the rise of some of them. His analysis also avoids the potentially antisemitic argument that eastern European Jews somehow seized hold of modernity and bent it to their own characteristics.
Yet Slezkine’s approach cannot fully explain why a great number of Jews struggled to adapt to modernity, including both those who did not leave eastern Europe and those who emigrated West but did not become successful. Nor can it easily explain the stunning influence of a small number of creative and inventive Jews like Einstein and Freud and Marx, who were not more mobile or urban or flexible than other people, but were, in a word, geniuses: creative minds who perceived or invented what others had not.
One possible direction to explain these two phenomena—the failure of many eastern European Jews to conquer modernity and the outsize influence of a few—is to look at the particularity of Jewish intellectual culture in eastern Europe, the world from which these great thinkers’ parents came. That culture was, as I have said, literate but uneducated. Above all things it valued Talmudic genius. If a child was identified as particularly extraordinary, some way would be found to sponsor the child’s Talmudic education, even if the parents themselves could not afford it.
I believe it is significant that from the nineteenth century to the present, it is all but unknown for a Jewish genius in the realms of science, scholarship, business, or the arts actually to have undergone the twenty-plus years of full-time Talmudic training that would be necessary to launch a career as a leading Talmudist. The reason, I would speculate, is that while this education sharpens certain aspects of one’s intellectual development, it also neglects others. The handful of important academics who underwent this full training have become scholars of, well, Talmud, or allied areas of Jewish scholarship.
The magic combination for Jewish geniuses seems to be separation from the Talmudic intellectual culture of eastern Europe by a generation or two or even three. What remains of that culture in their upbringing has been moved to the background: the recognition, encouragement, and support of youthful ability; the impulse to use argumentation to hone intellectual skill; and the pervasive cultural commitment to developing one’s intellectual faculties and capacities to their fullest extent.
To this potent combination must be added a final factor: the drive to succeed, which can be found more frequently among people who are raised in conditions of immigration and immediate postimmigration. The more comfortable one’s family of origin has become in its environment, whether through economic accomplishment or cultural acclimatization, the less likely it is for the next generation to possess the drive and work ethic necessary to excel.
The takeaway is that the cycle of accomplishment associated with eastern European Jewish genius is unlikely to persist indefinitely. In the United States, it is already possible to sense and perhaps even measure a decline in Jewish dominance in a range of environments where first-generation, self-made drive and creativity are the leading indicators of success. The sciences are an excellent example. Where Jews once made up a highly disproportionate percentage of important scientists, it is already possible to see a generational shift toward Asian Americans’ disproportionate representation. Jews are still substantially overrepresented in the highest echelons of science in proportion to their numbers in the population. But the number of Jews in those positions is declining relative to the number of Asian Americans. The same is also true of admissions to top universities and to PhD programs in the sciences.††
Jews’ disproportionate representation can be expected to continue longer in domains where a deep cultural understanding of norms and customs confers a substantial advantage. In those domains, it also frequently took American Jews longer to gain a foothold than in areas where raw talent and drive could be combined to achieve fast success. The practice of corporate law provides an example. Jews did not gain access to partnerships in the most prestigious, powerful, and profitable corporate law firms (known then as “white shoe” firms) until the late 1950s.12 Even after that, their numbers were relatively small in those firms. It took the rise of “outsider” firms made up mostly of Jewish partners in the 1980s for Jewishness to cease to be a barrier to partnership at the white shoe firms.13 Today, in contrast, Jewish cultural background may actually confer a mild advantage in the search for employment or partnership at a major corporate law firm, since cultural Jewishness is as much a dominant background cultural norm in many big law firms as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant background was until the 1980s.
Over time, then, Jewish representation can eventually be expected to decline even in those areas where cultural acclimatization confers some advantage, because the need for drive is still present and because American Jews are further from immigration and therefore are less likely to have the drive. The reason to offer this hypothesis is not in any way to lessen the impressiveness of eastern European–origin Jews’ accomplishments in these or other domains. Rather, the historical accidents that led to these outsize accomplishments are time-bound and contingent. They do not inhere in some unchanging features of Jewish culture, much less in “Jewish” genetics. They are changing in real time.
To underscore the point that the accomplishments of Jews over the past century are contingent, consider the case of Israel. Since its establishment in 1948, the country has produced a handful of Nobel laureates in chemistry and economics,‡‡ but nowhere near as many as the number of American Jewish Nobel winners in the same period, despite Israel having a Jewish population of roughly comparable size to the United States. Some of this difference can be explained by the global primacy of American universities, but Israeli universities are also excellent and Israelis who teach in them can all speak English.
The major statistical gap suffices to show that genetics cannot explain Jewish accomplishment. More than that, it suggests that Jewish distinctiveness plays out in different ways in different places even in the same time frame. After all, in those same years, Israel produced a number of distinguished Jewish generals, while American Jews produced few general officers of note, and only one of real historical significance.§§ Neither of these observations has anything to do with any inherent Jewish talent or lack of talent at military command. They are the result of Israel’s military posture and the fact of near-universal conscription there.
The reason I spent this time on the question of Jewish genius and Jewish success is partly that lots of people are interested in it. Mainly, however, my goal has been to show that any secular account of Jewish uniqueness that is meant to substitute for a religious conception of chosenness is of limited utility if considered over the long historical run. Secular Jews who want to retain some notion of being unique can, if they choose, take pride in a century of remarkable Jewish accomplishments. But a serious look at those accomplishments, and an honest recognition that those accomplishments are already in decline, should quickly correct any belief that they reflect something permanently distinctive about the Jewish people.¶¶ Whatever makes Jews or Jewish culture distinctive, it cannot be their success, at least not if we consider the Jewish history before the long twentieth century or after it.
MENSCH OR MONSTER? STEREOTYPES AND THE JEWS
Beyond pride in outsize accomplishments, the other most common version of secularized chosenness is the idea that Jews particularly reflect certain character traits. A Jew is more likely to be a mensch, say philo-Semites, using the Yiddish word that literally translates as “man” and means a person of integrity and decency, someone you can rely on to do the right thing more often than not. On the other, antisemitic side of the ledger, it is easy to find stereotypes of Jews as particularly greedy or conniving or self-centered or clannish. (I will get to Jewish neurosis, which may be interpreted positively, negatively, or neutrally.)
No doubt the bases for both positive and negative stereotypes of Jews relate to some real-world aspects of Jewish culture, aspects that may or may not have any measurable effects but capture the imagination. The Jewish mensch is or was once imagined in the United States as a good (male) life partner for a woman, one who does not beat his wife or drink to excess. Sad (and needless) to say, there are and have always been Jewish domestic abusers and Jewish alcoholics. The stereotype never presented itself as anything more than a probabilistic judgment. In any case the truth or falsehood of the generalization would be difficult to ascertain, although perhaps not impossible.14 The most likely possibility is that cultural norms did play a part in shaping this positive stereotype. In close-knit communities like those of Jewish eastern Europe, strong norms against drinking, for example, can have effects. Conceivably genetics also played a role in the presence or absence of Jewish alcoholism. Yet as Jewish communal solidarity shifted with urbanization and immigration, the norms against drinking (or against spousal abuse, or whatever) may have changed too.
Furthermore, to acknowledge the possibility of some background statistical support for positive Jewish stereotypes is to open the door to recognizing the possibility of similar statistical support for negative Jewish stereotypes. After all, is Jewish financial success—taken on the average, let us say, in the United States—evidence of avarice? It is a double-edged sword to use Jews’ experience as economic middlemen or as moneylenders to explain their business success. And what of prominent Jews in finance who turned out to be frauds, like Bernard Madoff? It seems obvious that these should be treated as outlying cases, not evidence for the negative stereotype of the greedy, dishonest Jew.
Of course, pointing out the danger of the view that cultural stereotypes may have some basis in reality is only a cautionary argument against believing the stereotypes. It does not give a substantive reason to disbelieve the stereotypes altogether. Yet the deployment of stereotypes in such extreme ways in connection with Jews does suggest we should be extremely cautious about believing any of them. Which is more likely, that Jews are both superior and inferior, or that Jews are collectively a lot like anybody else, just more likely to be analyzed as a class and to have distinctive characteristics ascribed to them?
Here it is worth noting that antisemitic stereotypes are especially protean. The Jews, it seems, can be everything and its opposite.15 For example, Jews can be depicted as the ultimate capitalists, and they can be depicted as the ultimate capital-destroying communists. Antisemites have used both stereotypes, sometimes at the same time. Of course, in principle, it’s possible that some Jews are greedily seeking to control the world via their wealth while others are trying to control the world by ending capitalism and substituting radical leftist worker control. What is extraordinarily unlikely is that those different (imaginary) Jews are working together in some unified conspiratorial protocol.
A similar nesting of opposites can be found in other antisemitic stereotypes. Jews are described as closed, clannish, and exclusive; they are also condemned as cosmopolitan, rootless, and rejecting of any sense of belonging. Again, the stereotypes could perhaps be reconciled. Some Jews no doubt promote an exclusionary sense of community, and some Jews no doubt embrace a globalized cosmopolitanism that views all human groupings with skepticism and wants us all to be citizens of the world. Neither perspective, however, plausibly describes the great majority of Jews, who fall somewhere in between, believing that partial and parochial affiliations have their place while also believing that we have some bonds and obligations to all humans wherever they might live.
A final example of antisemitic nesting opposites comes from the realm of psychological diagnosis. Haters sometimes say the Jews are neurotic self-questioners and other times that Jews are narcissistically committed to their own superiority. Once again, it is in theory possible that Jews could manifest both sets of symptoms, thinking they are worse than everybody else and also that they are better than everybody else, depending perhaps on the specific area of life being evaluated. Yet it is hard to see how either “diagnosis” could be helpful in specifying Jewish uniqueness if each potentially cancels out the other.
A distinguished psychiatrist who is a close friend of mine (as it happens, not Jewish) once offered me a thoughtful variant on the stereotype of diagnosable Jewish neuroses. His suggestion was admirably free of negative prejudice but also was not, I think, inherently philo-Semitic. He proposed that Jews commonly display a greater degree of “interiority” than people of other ethnic or cultural backgrounds. By interiority, he meant, roughly, the quality of being aware of and in conversation with one’s own inner thoughts. To have interiority on this definition is to be internally thoughtful. That thought could be unhealthily ruminative, as in neurosis or obsessive compulsiveness. It could also be healthy, as in the capacity to sit with one’s own emotions instead of fleeing from them or erecting defenses against them.
Do Jews experience distinctively great interiority? And if so, why? I admit I found my friend’s idea intriguing. On the surface, it seemed to account for a style of self-reflection in which Jews talk about and to themselves, individually and collectively. Perhaps, I thought, it could explain why the Jews are so obsessed with having conversations. It would account for why psychoanalysis first found favor among high-bourgeois Viennese Jews. It might even help explain why Jews have played such a disproportionate role in culture, given that what we call culture is often a record of public conversations.
On further reflection, however, it struck me how disjunct the idea of Jewish interiority was from premodern, Christian critiques of Judaism. According to a recurrent critique that goes back to the apostle Paul, the Hebrew Bible teaches a carnal, bodily religion, whereas Christianity teaches a religion of the spirit. The idea here is that the Hebrew Bible tells the Israelites how to perform God’s commandments and tells them what the concrete real-world punishments are for failing to do so. Both the divine commandments and the punishments are of the body, not of the spirit. In contrast, runs the old notion, the Gospels offer a religion where the sole commandment is love and the sole punishment is to be cut off from God’s love, which is the definition of damnation. According to the critique of “carnal Israel,” Jewishness is all about externality and doing things. Christianity is all about interiority and the search for the elusive inner experiences of faith and love.
It does not matter, for the purposes of this analysis, whether the Christian critique of carnal Israel is valid or not. What is striking is that for centuries, Jews were condemned by Christians for a lack of spiritual interiority. To describe the Jews of the modern world as distinctively in touch with their interiority is to create yet another pair of nested opposites: the Jews distinctively lack interiority and the Jews simultaneously distinctively possess interiority. From this perspective, the idea of Jewish interiority seems more like a stand-in for the idea that Jews like to talk a lot. It is not that Jews or non-Jews or any other group have more or less interiority. It’s that Jews, or at least eastern European Jews and their descendants, spend a lot of time talking about their inner experience, the same way they spend a lot of time talking about everything else. That creates the impression of greater interiority but need not reflect any reality of the same.
The lesson I am drawing from this discussion of Jewish stereotypes and Jewish uniqueness is, I hope, more than the banal one that stereotypes are misleading or unhelpful. I am trying to argue that the tendency to seek after Jewish uniqueness as a secularized form of chosenness leads to extremely suspect generalizations. Those stereotypical generalizations can be framed positively or negatively. They can entail the claim that Jews are x and also simultaneously that Jews are not-x. They are, in short, a series of conceptual games, not useful contributions to cultural analysis.
In my view, then, we would do best to recognize secularized cultural claims about Jewish distinctness for what they are, historically speaking: attempts to preserve the old religious notions of Jewish chosenness—both positive and negative—for a nonreligious, secular worldview. Taken as a matter of religious faith, chosenness can hardly be contested. Taken as a set of cultural claims nominally based on observable fact, secularized chosenness is misleading, self-contradictory, and not valuable.
The same, I think, could be said about arguments for Israel’s uniqueness, either positive or negative. Israel is not uniquely moral, nor is Israel uniquely immoral. The things Israel does well, ethically speaking, it shares with comparable liberal democracies. The things it does badly are also shared with comparable countries, including liberal democracies that themselves are built in part on legacies of settlement, colonization, imperialism, and discrimination.
The only aspect of the actually existing idea of Israel that makes its nation-state arguably unique is the messianic quality that Religious Zionists ascribe to its emergence. Plenty of other nation-states seek territorial expansion, often based on nationalist arguments about their maximal historical borders. (Think of Russia’s claim to Ukraine or China’s claim to Taiwan.) Few of them feature constituencies who believe settlement of the land is a divine duty that will lead to messianic redemption. In other words, what makes the state of Israel unique is precisely the religious belief of a meaningful number of its citizens that it is the state of the uniquely chosen people, defined religiously.
Chosenness, it turns out, is a sacred circle. If you begin by believing that the Jewish people are chosen by God, you may well end up believing (under the influence of Religious Zionism) that the state of Israel has a unique sacral character as the fulfillment of the promises God made to the Jewish people. The persistence of the Jewish religious idea of chosenness is itself the cause of Israel’s uniqueness: it is (perhaps) the one modern nation-state in which many citizens believe the state is a manifestation of their chosenness. Ultimately, modern Jews’ efforts to secularize chosenness have come back to this sacred conception. That belief, it seems, will not die, or in any case not yet.