NONE ARE CHOSEN; ALL ARE CALLED:

AS THE HISTORIAN Sacvan Bercovitch famously argued, the Puritans spun the fantasy of chosenness they drew from their fascination with the ancient Jews into the "exceptionalism" that would come to occupy the center of American ideology. "As Israel redivivus," Bercovitch writes in his 1978 study The American Jeremiad, New Englanders "could claim all the ancient prerogatives" of the biblical Jews, including a divinely authorized state. For these settlers, Bercovitch explained, the wilds of New England took on "the double significance of secular and sacred place." In other words, the forests of Massachusetts had as central a role to play in God's unfolding plan as the deserts of Sinai. 

Among the 17th-century North American Puritans, only the renegade minister Roger Williams rejected this Judaizing vision. He believed that the divinely authorized state of the ancient Jews had become, after Christ, an illegitimate aspiration--a conviction that made him one of the earliest theorists of the separation of church and state. For Williams, the wilderness through which Moses led the Jews was, for Christians, a kind of supercharged holy metaphor for the path toward grace. No real forest or desert was required. Williams was also a skeptic of what Bercovitch called the "genetics of salvation," the notion that God's favor could be inherited. After all, the New Englanders could trace their descent to many peoples: "the Britons, Picts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans," as he wrote in one of his polemical tracts. In other words, if they were chosen, their chosenness could not be, as it was for the ancient Jews, a question of bloodline. Williams, as Bercovitch's predecessor Perry Miller put it, "would be a Christian, but not a Christianized Jew." He was accordingly exiled to Rhode Island.  [...]

We cannot expect religious myths to pay scrupulous attention to logical connections. Otherwise the feeling of the people might have taken exception--justifiably so--to the behavior of a deity who makes a covenant with his patriarchs containing mutual obligations, and then ignores his human partners for centuries until it suddenly occurs to him to reveal himself again to their descendants. Still more astonishing is the conception of a god suddenly "choosing" a people, making it "his" people and himself its own god. . . . [In other religious traditions,] the people and their god belong inseparably together; they are one from the beginning. Sometimes, it is true, we hear of a people adopting another god, but never of a god choosing a new people. 

For Freud, this anomalous act of choosing makes sense only if we understand Moses to have been an Egyptian monotheist who selected the Jews to carry on his new religion. "Moses had stooped to the Jews, had made them his people; they were his 'chosen people,'" Freud writes. In Moses and Monotheism, then, Freud exorcised what he saw as his own irrational identification with Jewishness by demystifying it. "To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be under-taken lightheartedly--especially by one belonging to that people," he says at the start of the book, with that slightly theatrical bombast that is one of his most endearing traits as a writer. "No consideration, however, will move me to set aside truth in favor of supposed national interests." In the ultimate iconoclastic gesture, Freud makes Moses himself a non-Jew and Jewish law an edifice stained with blood.

As long as the fantasy of chosenness offered by Exodus retains its archetypal power, we will need to reckon with its force and its strangeness. In contemporary American life, the fundamentalist Christian preoccupation with the return of the Jews to Israel is one distressing culmination of the "excited exchange of millennial speculations among Jewish and Christian scholars" that Bercovitch traces back to the 17th century. Meanwhile, liberal Jews skeptical of the notion of chosenness find themselves confronting it anew each Passover, when awkward claims of divine selection can feel like an ethnic variation on the crudest patriotic propaganda of the larger culture: America First. The ameliorative ritual whereby the seder's ethnonationalism is acknowledged and rejected--good politics, bad exegesis, as Dan says--will be familiar to many. Is the disarmament successful? Freud's ironic anthropology suggests, perhaps, a nobler way of managing the burdens of this inheritance: submitting to the truth that even the most powerful sources of identity are also delusions.

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