Jews as the chosen people

• 1. Introduction

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  The concept of Jews as the chosen people begins with a terminological puzzle. The phrase itself does not appear in the Hebrew Bible at all. The biblical terms used for the Israelites translate more literally as "treasure people" and "heritage people." The label "chosen people" came later, coined by rabbinic scholars rather than drawn from Scripture.

  Orthodox Judaism, Conservative Judaism, and Reform Judaism all affirm some version of the belief. They disagree sharply about what it requires. Does chosenness assign a specific mission? Does it imply that God has no meaningful relationship with non-Jews? Is the covenant conditional on conduct, or is it permanent? And how did some of Judaism's most rigorous thinkers, philosophers and physicists among them, come to reject the idea entirely?

• 2. Biblical Foundations

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  The Book of Deuteronomy 7:6 contains the first direct scriptural use of the Hebrew verb "bahar," meaning to choose, applied to the Israelites. The Book of Exodus 19:6 uses different language, calling Israel a "goy kadosh," meaning holy people. These two texts established the foundation that centuries of interpretation would build upon.

  The Torah frames the selection as a conditional covenant rather than a reward. The peoples inhabiting Canaan had violated divine laws. God waited until their iniquity reached sufficient gravity before bringing the Israelites to the land. A warning accompanied that arrival: if the Israelites violated the same laws, particularly those concerning idolatry, they too would be cast out.

  The Israelites were, the Torah notes, "the fewest of all people"; divine love and a sworn oath to their ancestors were the stated reasons for the choice. The covenant's own words express the claim directly: "the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be His own treasure, out of all peoples that are upon the face of the earth."

  The prophet Amos stated the moral weight of this covenant plainly: "You only have I singled out of all the families of the earth: therefore will I visit upon you all your iniquities." For Amos, being chosen meant facing harsher scrutiny, not special protection. Isaiah and Jeremiah read God's choice as a vehicle for teaching monotheism and combating idolatry. Both prophets saw it as a call to curb human arrogance and end violence and warfare. The Torah also describes the Israelites as "a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation," a phrase that rabbinic interpreters would later develop into a theology of priestly service to humanity.

• 3. Liturgy and Mission

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  The Jewish prayerbook, the Siddur, weaves the concept of chosenness into daily and weekly worship. The Torah-reading blessing calls God "Who has chosen us out of all the nations and bestowed upon us His Torah." The Kiddush is recited over wine to inaugurate the Sabbath. It declares the Jewish people chosen and sanctified "out of all the nations," and describes the Sabbath as given "as an inheritance in love and favour." The Aleinu prayer frames Jewish distinctiveness not as ethnic superiority but as a specific relationship with the Creator.

  For the Rabbis, chosenness was less a status than a charge. Most rabbinic texts link the concept to a mission: proclaiming God's message among all nations. Even if Jews shirk that mission, they cannot become "unchosen." The covenant made with Abraham and renewed with the entire Jewish nation at Mount Sinai bound them to live as what rabbinic writing calls "God's priest-people."

  The Mishnah illustrated this with a vivid image from Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5. "When a man mints a coin in a press, each coin is identical. But when the King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He, creates people in the form of Adam not one is similar to any other." This passage grounds human uniqueness in divine creativity rather than in the elevation of any single group. The Tosefta, a collection of post-Talmudic discourses, stated the principle explicitly: "righteous people of all nations have a share in the world to come."

  Natan'el al-Fayyumi, a Yemenite Jewish theologian of the 12th century, articulated a view that many rabbis had approached. He wrote that God "permitted to some people that which he forbade to others." God, al-Fayyumi added, "sends a prophet to every people according to their own language." The Tanakh identifies prophets outside the Israelite community, and the prophet Jonah is explicitly sent to prophesy to the non-Jewish people of Nineveh. Moses refers in the Torah to the "God of the spirits of all flesh." Isaac Arama, a 15th-century philosopher and mystic, believed righteous non-Jews to be spiritually identical to righteous Jews. Rabbi Menachem Meiri, a Catalan Talmudic commentator and Maimonidian philosopher, extended this idea to all who sincerely profess an ethical religion. He called them part of a greater "spiritual Israel," explicitly including Christians and Muslims. He also considered countries inhabited by decent moral non-Jews, such as Languedoc, to be spiritual parts of the Holy Land.

  One strand of rabbinic literature described Israel as "of all nations the most willful or headstrong one." The Torah, the Rabbis held, was given to channel that intensity; otherwise, they wrote, "the world could not have withstood its fierceness."

• 4. Denominational Divergence

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  In 1984, the Modern Orthodox theologian Michael Wyschogrod wrote that the election of Abraham was God's free choice, made without stated rationale. Wyschogrod rooted chosenness in God's sovereign will rather than in any human merit. Rabbi Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, former Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue of Great Britain, saw every people as carrying a providential role. He assigned the specific Jewish covenant mission the task of pioneering religion and morality. Rabbi Norman Lamm, a leader of Modern Orthodox Judaism, tied chosenness exclusively to Torah and mitzvot as revealed at Sinai. For Lamm, it represented both communal holiness and priestly service to humanity.

  Conservative Judaism's 1988 Statement of Principles approached the concept as a covenantal responsibility rather than a marker of innate superiority. The statement invoked Amos 3:2 in support of its central claim: that chosenness creates obligations rather than privileges. Its goal was the construction of a just society, with the Land of Israel as the focal point. In 2003, Rabbi Reuven Hammer clarified that even historically polemical liturgical phrases carried no claim to ethnic worth. The real target of such language, he wrote, was paganism, not other peoples.

  By 1999, Reform Judaism had framed its position in explicitly cooperative terms. The 1999 statement called the Jewish people "singled out through our ancient covenant and our unique history among the nations" and "witnesses to God's presence." A Reform statement from an earlier era called Jewish mission cooperation "with all men in the establishment of the kingdom of God." "This is our Messianic goal," that document concluded; the aspiration was to universal brotherhood, justice, truth, and peace on earth.

• 5. Radical Revisions

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  The Reconstructionist movement rewrote the Torah blessing in its prayer books to remove the language of divine selection. The original Hebrew, "asher bahar banu mikol ha'amim," means "who has chosen us from among all peoples by giving us the Torah." The Reconstructionist replacement reads "asher kervanu la'avodato," or "who has drawn us to your service by giving us the Torah." The movement's mid-1980s Platform on Reconstructionism declared the idea of chosenness "morally untenable." It reasoned that any claim of election implies the superiority of the elect community and the rejection of others.

  The movement's own prayer books complicated that position. The newest Reconstructionist siddur, Kol Haneshamah, includes the traditional blessings alongside the revised version. The Reconstructionist feminist poet Marcia Falk wrote The Book of Blessings, since adopted by many Reform and Reconstructionist Jews. Falk extended her rejection to all distinctions: between men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, Jews and non-Jews, and even between the Sabbath and other days. She rejected Jewish theology broadly and arrived at a form of religious humanism. Judith Plaskow shared many of these objections. Unlike Falk, she held to a more classical form of Jewish theism and did not see all distinctions as inherently unethical.

  Nachman of Breslov proposed that Jewishness is a level of consciousness rather than an intrinsic inborn quality. Drawing on the Book of Malachi, he wrote that one can find "potential Jews" among all nations. Their souls, he believed, are illuminated by what he called "holy faith," which "activated" the Jewishness within them. These people prefer, Nachman wrote, to recognize divine unity within their pagan traditions rather than converting to Judaism.

  Within Chabad Hasidism, the Tanya, its foundational text, contains statements that the Jewish soul is qualitatively different from the non-Jewish soul. The Tanya's own author wrote, however, that a righteous non-Jew can achieve a level of spirituality similar to an angel. The soul differs from a Jewish soul in character, his argument ran, but not in value. Hillel Paricher, an early Tanya commentator, wrote that righteous Gentiles' souls are more similar to Jewish souls. He described them as generally good and not egoistic. Tzemach Tzedek, the third rebbe of Chabad, wrote that Muslims are naturally good-hearted people. Rabbi Yosef Jacobson has taught that most non-Jews today belong to the category of righteous Gentiles, making the Tanya's original framing effectively anachronistic.

  Abraham Yehudah Khein, a Ukrainian Chabad rabbi who supported anarchist communism, read the Tanya in reverse. Since the Tanya associates evil souls with idol worshippers, Khein concluded that truly altruistic people must be spiritually Jewish. He considered Peter Kropotkin a great Tzaddik. He claimed that Vladimir Solovyov and Rabindranath Tagore probably have Jewish souls, while Leon Trotsky and other totalitarians do not. Jewish nationalists, Khein wrote, were merely "Jewish by birth certificate." Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Chabad's most influential 20th-century leader, endorsed this view of righteous Gentiles as spiritually close to Jewish souls. His endorsement gave the inclusive interpretation normative status within the movement today.

• 6. Critics and Dissenters

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  The philosopher Baruch Spinoza devoted the third chapter of his Theologico-Political Treatise to a systematic examination of the chosen people concept. Spinoza drew his evidence from the Hebrew Bible itself. He argued that God had chosen other nations before the Hebrews, so the choice was not uniquely Jewish. He further argued that the choice did not include all Jews, only the pious ones. Nor was it exclusive; Spinoza held that it encompassed "true gentile prophets." And it was not unconditional. The Bible records multiple instances of God threatening the complete destruction of the Hebrew nation. Spinoza concluded that the covenant was neither absolute, nor eternal, nor necessary.

  The physicist Albert Einstein addressed the question in a German-language letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, dated the 3rd of January 1954. Einstein wrote that while he valued Jewish cultural identity, he rejected religious belief and the divine origin of the Bible. He also rejected the idea that Jews are chosen. The letter was private; Einstein did not publish a theological treatise. Yet it captured a position that secular Jewish thinkers had circled around for generations.

  Ze'ev Levy, an Israeli philosopher, addressed the ethical dimensions of chosenness in academic terms. Levy wrote that chosenness can be "partially justified only from the historical angle" for its spiritual and moral contribution to Jewish life. But modern anthropological theory, he argued, stresses not merely human equality. It also stresses "the equivalence of all human cultures." There are, in this view, "no inferior and superior people or cultures but only different, other, ones." For Levy, chosenness entails an ethnocentrism that "does not go hand in hand with otherness, that is, with unconditional respect of otherness."

  Avi Beker, a former Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress, called chosenness "the central unspoken psychological, historical, and theological problem" in Jewish-Gentile relations. His book The Chosen explored how the concept generates both admiration for and resentment toward the Jewish people. He argued that Christianity has modified its doctrine on Jewish displacement. Islam, by contrast, has not revised its theology on the succession of Jews and Christians. This gap, Beker wrote, presents a major barrier to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict.

• 7. Outside Traditions

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  The Quran acknowledges a special status for the children of Israel in verses 2:47 and 2:122. Muslim scholars interpreted this as conditional, tied to maintaining the covenant with God and carrying no racial superiority. In the Islamic reading, the Israelites held historical election without permanent ethnic advantage.

  The doctrine of Supersessionism holds that Jewish rejection of Jesus transferred chosen status to Christians. Others disagreed. The Christadelphians maintained that God has not rejected Israel as his chosen people. Dispensational theology, promoted by John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield, held that all Jews will ultimately accept Jesus as Messiah at the Second Coming. In this view, Jews never lost their chosen status. Augustine read Jewish chosenness as "carnal," reasoning that Israel was chosen "according to the flesh." The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the "People of God" as all who have faith in Christ and are baptized.

  Zionism, though emerging largely as a secular nationalist movement, drew on chosenness in varied ways. Classical Zionists often downplayed theological claims about Jewish superiority while retaining a sense of Jewish uniqueness. They used chosenness as a motivating force for national liberation and the establishment of a homeland in Palestine. For religious Zionists, chosenness was rooted in divine decree. It made Jewish control of the biblical land of Canaan a non-negotiable part of a divinely guided process. Christian Zionists shared this position. In both views, the land promised in the covenant with Abraham belongs solely to the Jewish people, with Palestinians excluded as non-chosen "Ishmaelites."