Chosenness and its discontents

Abstract

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.