Chosen Peoples by Israel Zangwill — Read

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.