Chosen Peoples by Israel Zangwill

But although, as with all other manifestations of genius, Science cannot tell us why the Jewish race was so endowed spiritually, it can show us by parallel cases that there is nothing unique in considering yourself a Chosen People -- as indeed the accusation with which we began reminds us. And it can show us that a nation's assignment of a mission to itself is not a sudden growth. "Unlike any other nation," says the learned and saintly leader of Reform Judaism, Dr. Kohler, in his article on "Chosen People" in the _Jewish Encyclopaedia_, "the Jewish people began their career conscious of their life-purpose and world-duty as the priests and teachers of a universal religious truth. " This is indeed a strange statement, and only on the theory that its author was expounding the biblical standpoint, and not his own, can it be reconciled with his general doctrine of progress and evolution in Hebrew thought. It would seem to accept the Sinaitic Covenant as a literal episode, and even to synchronise the Mission with it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peoples will, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was other than a symbolic summary of the national genius for religion, a sublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to other nations must have been evolved still later. "The conception or feeling of a mission grew up and was developed by slow degrees," says Mr. Montefiore, and this sounds much nearer the truth. For, as I said, history is the sole clue to the Bible -- history, which according to Bacon, is "philosophy teaching by example. " And the more modern the history is, and the nearer in time, the better we can understand it.

We have before our very eyes the moving spectacle of the newest of nations setting herself through a President-Prophet the noblest mission ever formulated outside the Bible. Through another great prophet -- sprung like Amos from the people -- through Abraham Lincoln, America had already swept away slavery. I do not know exactly when she began to call herself "God's own country," but her National Anthem, "My Country, 'tis of thee," dating from 1832, fixes the date when America, soon after the second war with England, which ended in 1814, consciously felt herself as a Holy Land; far as visitors like Dickens felt her from the perfection implied in her soaring Spread-Eagle rhetoric. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America merely for their own freedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others. From a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called "The Melting Pot," with its high universal mission, first at home and now over the world at large.