Chosenness and its discontents

ABSTRACT

Adam Sutcliffe innovatively reinterprets modern Jewish intellectual history in terms of Jewish purpose. Where possible, he avoids judgemental discourse about antisemitism and emphasizes how Jewish thinkers have been participants, together with their Christian counterparts, in forming western self-understanding. In an approximately chronological order, he shows how the ‘underlying theological template’ of Jewish purpose, both in Jewish messianism and Christian millenarianism, has profoundly influenced modern thought, both religious and secular. The biblical model of the Jews as chosen people strongly influenced British and Dutch thought in the seventeenth century. Jewish purpose was of central interest to the Enlightenment, for good and ill; the French Revolution and the ‘progressive’ change of the nineteenth century led to further redefinitions of ‘what Jews were for’. Nationalism had its own effect, both in terms of Zionism and the various non-nationalist Jewish responses. At the same time, forms of normalization (including Zionism) proposed how Jews could fulfil their purpose by ‘fitting in’. Throughout the book, the dialectic between Jewish chosenness, particularity and difference on the one hand and, on the other, the claim that the Jews were chosen precisely to proclaim, and practise, universal values of ethics and social justice, frames a fascinating account of the ongoing debates about Jewish purpose. Sutcliffe rightly reminds us that the more inclusive, outward-looking, universalist model of Jewish purpose still has much cogency, despite being overshadowed of late by a narrower, inward-looking definition focused on the Holocaust and Israel.

KEYWORDS:

• Christian Zionism
• Jewish exceptionalism
• Jewish purpose
• Jewish universalism
• messianism
• Zionism

Notes

1 Salo Baron, ‘Ghetto and emancipation: shall we revise the traditional view?’, Menorah Journal, vol. 14, no. 6, 1928, 515–26 (526) (cited in Sutcliffe, 156).

2 Eleanor Beardsley, ‘Alarm grows in France over anti-Semitic violence’, NPR Report, 3 May 2018, available online at www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/05/03/599515300/alarm-grows-in-france-over-anti-semitic-violence (viewed 3 August 2023).

3 Robert Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Pantheon 1992); Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House 2010); David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton 2014).

4 See Antony Lerman, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? Redefinition and the Myth of the ‘Collective Jew’ (London: Pluto Press 2022); Steven Beller, Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015); Ron Kampeas, ‘US Jewish scholars push anti-Semitism definition allowing more Israel criticism’, Times of Israel, 17 March 2021.

5 Lessing’s play is seen as one of the great Enlightenment statements on the need for religious tolerance, and a template for later concepts of religious pluralism.

6 The third of three Napoleonic decrees on Jewish matters in 1808, the ‘Infamous Decree’ is usually seen as having been a step backwards in Jewish emancipation in France by restricting Jews’ rights in Alsace.

7 The Damascus Affair of 1840 was an international incident concerning the Blood Libel. Intervention by European powers, especially France and Britain, led to the release of several members of the city’s Jewish community, who had been falsely accused of baking matzo with the blood of a murdered Christian monk and his Muslim servant.

8 The Eastern Question concerned what would happen to the political order of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East as a result of the decline and anticipated fall of the Ottoman Empire.

9 See pages 91–2. The Spinoza Quarrel saw Jacobi attack Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn as ‘Spinozists’, rationalist, universalist cosmopolitans, whose friendship he saw as inauthentic, over against the primacy of faith and the particular, shared community of faith in which Jacobi saw the basis of true friendship, and indeed authentic truth.

10 Freely paraphrased from several statements of Wilkins Micawber in Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (London: Bradbury & Evans 1850).

11 On Weininger, see Allan Janik, Hitler’s Favorite Jew: The Enigma of Otto Weininger (New York: Simply Charly 2021); and Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989). On Bloch, see Ian Reifowitz, Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multi-Ethnic Austrian Identity, 1846–1919 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs 2003).

12 Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, revd edn (New York: Theatre Communications Group 2013), 290 (final line, emphasis in original).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Beller

Steven Beller was born in London, England in 1958. He was educated at Cambridge University. Since 1989 he has lived in the United States. He has written widely on Austrian, Jewish and Central European history. His books include Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press 1989); Herzl (Halban 1991); Francis Joseph (Longman 1996); A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge 2006); Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2008, 2015); Democracy: All That Matters (Hodder 2013). He also edited and introduced the anthology Rethinking Vienna 1900 (Berghahn 2001). His latest book is The Habsburg Monarchy 1815–1918 (Cambridge, 2018). He is currently an independent scholar resident in Washington D.C. Email: [email protected]