Free The Triple Package by Jed Rubenfeld, Amy Chua

reminds the world of the Jewish claim to that status and acknowledges its priority, if only in time.
    The Jewish understanding of
why
God chose them has always been a little mysterious. It wasn’t because they were already a great and flourishing people: “The Lord,” Moses tells the Jews, “did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all people.” And it certainly wasn’t because of their purity of heart. “Not for thy righteousness,” says Moses after having led the Israelites through the desert for forty years. At various points the Old Testament refers to the Jews as “corrupt,” “warped,” “foolish,” “perverse,” “unfaithful,” and “a nation without sense.”
    Nevertheless, in the face of mammoth historical evidence to the contrary, and despite all the self-questioning without which theJewish conception of chosenness would not be Jewish, Jews maintained for millennia the idea that they were God’s chosen people. Wherever Jews settled, whatever their hardships, Jewish children were raised hearing that proposition in synagogue, celebrated in the home on Sabbath evenings, and by the entire community on holy days. (“Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast chosen us above all people and exalted us above all nations.”)
    The utter brazenness of the idea—that there is only one God, maker of all the universe, and He has chosen
us
(not
you
, or anyone else) as His people, His “peculiar treasure” (Exodus 19:5)—remains to this day a special burr for many. The reason Jews are a “contaminated” people, said the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, honored with a Nobel Prize in 1998, lies in their “monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that . . . there exists a people chosen by God.” Beloved Greek songwriter Mikis Theodorakis, who scored the film
Zorba the Greek
(and composed the Palestinian national anthem), has said that Jews “are atthe root of evil”; in an interview with an Israeli reporter, he emphasized “the feeling that you are the children of God. That you are the chosen.”
    But do modern Jews still believe in their “chosenness,” and does chosenness imply superiority?
    The greatJewish philosophers of the modern era have long been uncomfortable with these ideas.Spinoza believed that, fundamentally, “God has not chosen one nation before another”—and was excommunicated at the age of twenty-three. Walking the tightrope of Jewish assimilation in anti-Semitic eighteenth-century Germany, the philosopher MosesMendelssohn (grandfather of the composer Felix) held that God had revealed “legislation” to the Jews, not a “religion”; Jews had no special claim to salvation or any eternal religious truths.
    The early generations of Jewish Americans felt especially conflicted about the idea of the Jews as a separate, divinely chosenpeople. “To abandon the claim to chosenness,” as Arnold Eisen puts it, would have been “to discard the raison d’être that had sustained Jewish identity and Jewish faith through the ages, while to make the claim was to question or perhaps even to threaten America’s precious offer of acceptance.”Reconstructionist Judaism, founded by an American rabbi in the 1920s, renounced chosenness as incompatible with equality and democracy. Reform Judaism speaks of a Jewish “mission” to be “witnesses to God’s presence,”deemphasizing if not rejecting the idea of chosenness.
    But even as the notion of chosenness waned, Jews rarely gave up the idea of their exceptionality. “There is no doubt,” wrote Freud of the Jews, “that they have a particularly high opinion of themselves, that they regard themselves . . . as superior to other peoples.” As Jewish Americans rose in prominence in the early twentieth century, they grew less afraid to express this sense of exceptionality. In 1915 Louis Brandeis, soon to be a justice of the United