The Chosen: The History of an Idea, and the Anatomy of an Obsession

253 Pages·2008·3.071 MB·English

by  Avi Beker

The Chosen
Also by Avi Beker
Disarmament without Order—The Politics of Disarmament in the United
Nations
The United Nations and Israel—From Recognition to Reprehension
Jewish Communities of the World(editor)
The Plunder of Jewish Property During the Holocaust—Confronting European
History(editor)

Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union(coeditor)
Arms Control Without Glasnost—Building Security in the Middle East(editor)

World Jewish Congress Jubilee 1936–1986(editor)

International Law and Foreign Policy(editor)

German Unification: A Jewish-Israeli Perspective(editor)
The Chosen

The History of an Idea,
the Anatomy of an Obsession

Avi Beker
the chosen
Copyright © Avi Beker, 2008.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2008 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS.
Companies and representatives throughout the world.

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan

division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan®is a
registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave
is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60048-5

ISBN-10: 0-230-60048-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beker, Avi.
Chosen : the history of an idea, the anatomy of an obsession / by Avi Beker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-230-60048-4 (alk. paper)

1. Jews—Election, Doctrine of. 2. Judaism—Relations. 3. Gentiles. 4. Antisemitism.
5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) I. Title.
BM613.B37 2007
296.3'1172—dc22 2007012083
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: April 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.
To my late parents Aharon and Miriam
Who taught me on the gift and the burden of being chosen
And to my Song of Songs, Zvia
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Preface ix
1 Confronting the Issue of the Chosen 1

2 HowWere “The Chosen” Chosen? 15

3 The Gentile Replacement of the Chosen 39

4 Global but Apart 69
5 Hating the Chosen: Anti-Semitism 89

6 Shoah: The Final Solution for the Chosen 109
7 Israel: A Chosen Nation in Their Chosen Land 131

8 Jerusalem: The Chosen City 157

Epilogue: Why Is the World Obsessed with the Jews? 177

Notes 193
Bibliography 219
Index 231
This page intentionally left blank
Preface

This book is not a personal memoir. Rather, to coin a term, it is a concep-

tual memoir. It is an attempt, based on cumulative life experience, to

develop a frame of reference within which to understand the mysteries of
the Jewish condition and the interaction, or rather friction, of the Jewish people

and the rest of the world. I have devoted much of my professional career to study-

ing these arenas of contention and friction. As a young member of the Israeli
Mission to the United Nations in the late 1970s, I was astonished to learn how
there, in the very heart of New York, the seat of the largest and supposedly most
affluent Jewish community in the world, the institution representing the world-

wide community of nations was, in fact, in the words of William F. Buckley Jr.,
“the most concentrated gathering of anti-Semitism since the days of Hitler’s Ger-
many.” During my long career as a director of international affairs and as Secre-

tary-General of the World Jewish Congress, I came in contact with world leaders
and senior officials, as well as with Jewish community leaders from around the
globe. I continued to be puzzled by the paradoxes and mysteries of Jewish-Gen-
tile relations and was continually struck by the huge intellectual structure of

faith, perceptions, and prejudice that lay behind many polite statements, feelings
of appreciation, diplomatic ambiguities, and sometimes even expressions of envy
or contempt.
Through my diplomatic work for Israel and the Jewish people, I have come to
realize that my PhD in political science and international relations, and my years

of university teaching and research, do little to illumine or solve this puzzle. The
academic field of international relations is basically an elusive quest for a theory
that, defined as a set of hypotheses postulating the relationship among variables,
strives to make this, like other areas of social science, a semi-scientific field that
can be rationally explained, analyzed, and even used to make some limited or
general predictions. Moreover, this academic discipline can be used to help fair-
minded people believe they can engineer the political conditions necessary to cre-
ate a better world—something the Jews themselves, borrowing a mystical
concept from the Kabbalah, call tikkun olam(repairing the world).
The lack of consensus regarding grand theories about world politics and his-
tory has led scholars to lower their expectations and exchange their search for the-
ory for a search for so-called paradigms, which at most provide an example,