1. Exodus 19:5.
2. Deuteronomy 7:6–8.
3. See., e.g., Genesis 15:13 (“He said to Abram: Know that your seed will be strangers in a land that is not theirs and shall be enslaved to them; and they shall oppress them for 400 years”).
4. Numbers 21:29; Jeremiah 48:46.
5. I am using an English plural, not one from Greek or Latin. On the plural question, including a reference to The California Book of Exoduses, see Keith Paul Bishop, “A New Book of Exodus,” California Corporate and Securities Law Blog, October 11, 2021, https://www.calcorporatelaw.com/a-new-book-of-exodus.
6. Isaiah 42:6, 49:6; and cf. Isaiah 60:3.
7. See Michael Brenner, “A State Like Any Other State or a Light Unto the Nations?” Israel Studies 23, no. 3, Israel at 70; Vision & Reality (2018): 3–10.
8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Editions Morihien, 1946). The essay was first written in 1944.
9. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Issurei Bi’ah 14:1–5.
10. Jewish legal emancipation is often dated to the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries but in fact began fitfully before that. See Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation.
11. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 1.
12. Cravath Swaine & Moore named its first Jewish partner in 1958; see Jerold S. Auerbach, “Don’t Call Us. We’ll Call You,” New York Times, April 13, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/13/archives/dont-call-us-well-call-you.html; Davis Polk and Wardwell in 1961; see David Margolick, “At the Bar,” New York Times, November 11, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/11/us/the-law-at-the-bar.html.
13. Such as Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which was founded in 1965 and rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s after partner Martin Lipton invented the poison pill defense against corporate takeovers. Roy Strom, “Twitter’s Poison Pill Began with Marty Lipton’s Valuable Memo,” Bloomberg Law, April 21, 2022, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/twitters-poison-pill-began-with-lawyers-most-valuable-memo.
14. In a series of studies, Deborah Hasin of Columbia University, an epidemiologist of clinical psychiatry, has suggested that the ADH1b*2 allele, which seems to appear disproportionally among Jews and affects alcohol metabolite administration in the liver, may partially account for lower rates of alcoholism found among at least some Jews. But the same body of research, conducted in Israel over decades, also showed that cultural norms were highly significant in determining alcohol dependence and abuse patterns even among populations with similar manifestation of the allele. Thus, for example, immigrants from the former Soviet Union had higher alcohol use rates than genetically indistinguishable Israeli-born Jews. And younger Israelis had higher drinking rates than older Israelis, reflecting substantial changes in the national culture with respect to alcohol use. See Deborah S. Hasin, “Alcohol and Nicotine Use Disorders in Israel,” NYSPI/Columbia University, http://www.columbia.edu/~dsh2/Israel%20genetics.htm.
15. For a magisterial account of antisemitic ideas over three thousand years, see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).