The problem with the chosen people*

* Andrzej Koraszewski, 7 June 2024

Atheists who abuse the Bible write about the "chosen people" with the utmost contempt. They look with amazement and indignation when someone tries to make them realise that they are faithful children of the Church. My friend stumbled in his belligerent argument, citing a well-known author who stated that all monotheistic religions proselytise and aim to conquer the world. Of course, this quoted authority mentioned Judaism in the first place. I asked about the Jewish missionary orders, about the nations conquered by the sword or converted by word to Judaism. It turned out that the friend was aware that there was no such thing as Jewish proselytism, and that attempts to convert to Judaism (as opposed to conversion to Christianity or Islam) were met with discouragement and multi-layered difficulties.

So what is the problem? It’s simple. Christians and Muslims are very angry that a stolen tribal god chose them and not us. The ancient tribal gods had a strange custom of choosing their tribes. It was their god/gods who created the world and people and provided them with care. Victorious wars usually ended with the god of defeated enemies being humiliated by having his sculptures burned, his temples destroyed, and the impotence of this divine protector ridiculed.

Out of the innumerable chosen nations, one was chosen to be persecuted, in opposition to the terrible injustice of our having abandoned our gods for their god, who behaved in the same way as our gods, and god only knows why he chose those who invented him.

It would be hilarious if it weren't for the millions of corpses. Christians murdered Jews as part of their aspiration to be (chosen by the Israelite God) Israel. This striking absurdity was repeated when the "last prophet", Muhammad, appeared, once again reaching for someone else's book in order to create his own religion to conquer and subjugate the entire world.

The fact that other people's legends have taken over our minds would be of little significance if the Jews were extinct, as were the Sumerians and other peoples who contributed to the beginnings of an agricultural and written civilisation. But the Jews persevered, continuing to believe and practice their religion, which is the cornerstone of two of the bloodiest monotheistic religions.

Giving Judaism an ugly label became a pillar of Christian theology and changed the most beautiful principle of this religion – respect for one's neighbour – into a laughingstock. The tarnished image of the Jew in Christian literature was a gate that allowed for the suspension of love of neighbour, for violence, robbery and murder with the divine favour of priests. In Christianity and Islam, Jews are the chosen people to hate.

Does this mean that the Jews themselves have ceased to believe that they are the chosen people? Judaism has dozens of varieties (as a society both in Israel and in the diaspora, they are among the most secularised), among believers the interpretation of this "chosenness" is treated as a duty rather than a reason for pride and a sense of superiority. My very superficial observation points to the absurdity of the accusations of alleged contempt for Gentiles. As individuals, they can be arrogant (also towards each other), but as a society they are characterized by tolerance and kindness. (This is best seen in the attitude towards people of other faiths living in a country where Jews are the majority.) I am not very interested in their interpretations of the term "chosen people", because the worms destroying my culture are Christian, Islamic, communist, atheist, fascist, petty-bourgeois and academic grudges against the "chosen people", and the acrobatic contortions around this concept point to the pathological need for hatred, to which the theology of replacement opened a richly carved gate.

To say that roads of all antisemites lead to Rome is an exaggeration. Moscow as the "third Rome" has passed the exam with flying colours, today's roots of antisemitism are strongly intertwined and it is difficult to distinguish which impulses of the heart come from the Christian tradition and which from the secular tradition (with a strong Russian accent).

When I read the post on the X account of an American professor (a specialist in political relations in Latin America), I wonder about the wandering of ideas that gave rise to this kind of animalistic, racist hatred. Professor Danny Shaw wrote: 

These Zi^nists are straight Babylon swine. We need to protest their neighborhoods... Why are you racist arrogant bullies?... Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it's genocidal disease.

If you have difficulty seeing antisemitism in this post, you should stop reading at this point; if you believe in the stories of the Spanish, French, Portuguese, Belgians, Dutch, and British that Israel is a colonial power and you don't burst out laughing, then it is possible that you have no sense of humour. In Poland, we experienced the colonialism of Russia and Germany (we had previously occupied western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, we had a sincere desire for a piece of Africa), we are proud that our people pushed the Turks away from Vienna. Muslims enslaved more nations than the British, but today Israel is considered a colonial power. How many such "colonial powers" would fit in Poland? 15? Do you know a colonial empire that has the graves of its ancestors from before the conquest in the colony? It's no mean feat.

American billionaire Mohamad Hadid recently stated that Israeli Jews have no genetic connection to the ancient Hebrews. Not only did he not study the genetic studies reports, but he did not even look at Wikipedia. (Hadid himself said that his father fled what is now Israel in 1948 because he did not want to live under Jewish occupation.) The matter is not complicated because the Muslim nation, chosen by Allah, has a clear prohibition to live under non-Muslim authority, especially under Jewish authority. They break this prohibition when necessary, not losing hope of conquering the infidels.

The concept of a nation chosen to be hated is connected with a kind of paranoid fear. On May 15, 2024, the Turkish president announced that if Israel succeeds in defeating Hamas, it will then "focus" on Turkey. Erdogan said: "Israel will not stop in Gaza, and if it is not stopped, the rogue state will eventually target Anatolia in accordance with its illusions about the promised land." In this situation, the Turkish president assured that Turkey would continue to support Hamas, "which is fighting for the independence of its country and defending Anatolia."

 Is Erdogan aware of the absurdity of what he is spinning, or has the disease already gone so far that he believes it himself? Adolf Hitler probably really believed in the threat of the "chosen people". (The Jordanians believed Jewish legends so much that after they occupied East Jerusalem in 1948, they walled up the gate to the old city through which the Messiah is said to return.)

The enlightened workers of the Tsarist Okhrana, while producing a fake called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were more aware that they were lying than Erdogan or Hitler. Umberto Eco, in his excellent novel The Prague Cemetery, attributes the following words to the initiator of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, who supervised the foreign missions of the Okhrana):

The people are discontented and direct their resentment against the Tsar. They need an enemy. There is no point in looking for the enemy far away. The enemy, in order to be recognizable and to be feared, must be at home, must stand on the threshold. That's why the Jews. Divine providence has given them to us, so for God's sake let us take advantage of it and pray that there will always be a Jew to fear and hate. The enemy is needed to give hope to the people. You don't love anyone all your life. But you can hate. Hatred warms the heart.

Literary fiction? Certainly, but the intrigue in the form of the production of a fake document intended to incite antisemitic sentiments clearly indicates that this view of the overseer of the Okhrana foreign missions is firmly grounded in reality.

The German historian Götz Aly claims that what irritated people most about diaspora Jews was their diligence and drive for knowledge. He wrote about the aversion of the lazy to the hard-working, reinforcing accusations of hubris of the "chosen people". The diligence and resourcefulness of the Chinese and Indians living among Christian and Islamic nations was also often the reason for riots, arson, robbery and murder, but it seems that this was not accompanied by an ideology of hatred rooted in culture. Aly reminds us that the disintegration of multinational empires in Europe and the desire for the rebirth of nation-states necessarily led to the idea of national purity, often leading to genocidal aversion to ethnic minorities, and this reinforced the pre-existing demand for an archenemy hatred of whom could strengthen the idea of ethnic and religious purity as the foundation of the nation-state.

 The collapse of the Soviet Union did not end Soviet influence. It can be said that, on the contrary, now Soviet ideas, freed from the stigma of Cold War propaganda, have gained wind in their sails, taking on a new form – hatred for Israel and its inhabitants, which can be neatly combined with commemoration of the murdered, with compassion for those whom Jews make it difficult to murder Jews, with aversion to capitalism, freedom and democracy.

The new antisemitism is as intersectional as the old. Fed on lies, the Chimera of hatred is the perfect beast of burden that can be harnessed to any wagon. (Except that today they are mechanical chimeras, supported by the engines of modern media, Wikipedias, artificial intelligence, and the inseparable smart phone that delivers the right videos at home, outdoors, at school, and in the workplace.)

There is one nation chosen to hate, and this is shown by statistics of United Nations resolutions, studies of media activity, sermons in temples, belles-lettres (in which the villains are very often called Frankenstein or similar for some reason), "scientific" literature, and phrases rooted in various languages. The principle is simple – the Antichrist is one and any distractions are not welcome.

 We live in times when the television studio is a church and the media is a pulpit. Many observers (as well as media researchers) have pointed out that tiny Israel and even smaller "Palestine" trumps Russia and China in the media, not to mention India and all of Africa. This appetite for news about the "chosen people" is unequivocally anti-Israel. It is also much more often left-wing than right-wing, although these trends merge in many points.

The "news" about Israel is a constant inversion of reality. Israel is accused of precisely the crimes that are being committed against it and by others. Internationally, democratic countries support the anti-Israel accusations made by tyrannies such as Russia and China, South Africa, and Venezuela, and abstain when they try to feign decency.

The latest case is even quite funny. For years, Arab countries have been proposing WHO resolutions condemning Israel for allegedly inadequate health care for Israeli Arabs and for inadequate medical care that the Palestinians are arranging for themselves in their Palestinian Authority. Year after year, the game went without any surprises, so this year too, routinely, the Arab countries (with the support of China, Cuba and Russia) reported the need for such a resolution. The Israeli representative behaved badly and proposed an amendment that "calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages held in Gaza, including children, women and the elderly, and condemns the use by armed groups of health facilities, including hospitals and ambulances, which endangers the civilian population."

Surprisingly, the amendment passed by a majority of 50 votes against 44, with 31 abstentions, which resulted in the resolution being withdrawn at the request of its original proposers.

The condemnation of the chosen people must in no way violate the principle of intersectional exclusivity, since this is required by tradition and the brotherhood of peoples.

Paulina Celnik, an Israeli sociologist with Polish roots, wrote a book under the significant title Nation Not Chosen. In it, she states that it was secular Zionism and socialism that made modern Israel possible. This was accompanied by the hope that the Jews would finally cease to be the chosen people and would be treated like any other nation. It turned out that there was no such option. The chosen people turned out to be too necessary to give up the centuries-old tradition.

Translation: Małgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson

Picture credit:

https://youtu.be/vtrGUVFzO-Y?t=47

Comments:

On 11 June 2024 at 12:18, Ben Dor A. wrote:

Dear Anjuli Pandavar

Happy Shavuot

Thank you for posting this important essay.

Shared it on Quora.

Best Regards

Ben Dor A

On 11 June 2024 at 23:04, Anjuli Pandavar wrote:

Dear Ben Dor A.,

Thank you. Happy Shavuot to you, too.

Anjuli