- Who cares if some people believe their own ‘in group’ has been chosen by Almighty God?
- So what if some folk believe this ‘chosenness’ confers on them unique historical privileges?
- Does it matter if discussions stray into nuances of self-presumed ‘in-group’ superiority?
These are questions I grappled with last week before embarking on a debate with regular contributors to the Jewish Australian website Galus Australis. My contributions to the debate go some way to explain why I think the topic – Chosenness as a Jewish concept – has relevance beyond the Jewish community and is a subject that should be open to free discussion by all of us, Jewish or not.
Open debate with Jewish folk: an ancient tradition
Everyone may recall from, childhood days, schoolyard cliques who seemed enamoured of their own particular ‘cool’. At my own school, the pack soon deflated superiority trips out of any uppity few who tried their luck getting the rest of us to believe they were ‘special’. “Jeez, they’re up themselves” was a common put-down. Offenders usually disliked being labelled ‘prats’ (or worse, much worse). Simple group behaviour mechanisms of that kind often keep notions of inherent specialness in check.
But a yard of grubby schoolkids in one thing; the great sweep of human history is more complex.
History is often thought of as ‘the past’, but properly refers to the part of the human past for which we have written records. It’s full of examples of groups that took advantage of the potential of literacy to perpetuate cultural ideas without direct inter-generational contact.
Literacy was not only deployed for sacred purposes. It had bureaucratic, commercial, political and artistic uses as well, possibly from the outset. Even so, the surviving ancient texts that have enduring cultural relevance tend to be religious in nature. India has the Vedas. In western culture, the most influential tome has been the Bible. These texts facilitated religious traditions thousands of years old.
What’s loosely known as the Bible is really a composite of many parts, some of which (but not all) are common to the world’s three major monotheistic religious groupings: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Muslims, have another Holy Book of later orgin – the Koran. It’s their most important sacred text. But Muslims also respect the Bible and consider Islam to be the heir of those earlier monotheistic traditions.
For Christians, the Bible is in two parts: the Old Testament and the New. The latter is distinctively Christian, the former roughly equivalent to the Jewish ‘Torah’.
Only the Torah component of the Bible is a sacred text for religious Jews. The most infuential book in modern Judaism is often said to be the Talmud, a collection of rabbinical commentaries on the Torah, written later. It’s not a book that’s widely read or understood by non-Jews.
At a guess, I’d say less than half the adult population in western nations have read the Bible extensively. Yet it remains influential. In part, that’s because it continues to shape the values of many religious people in the modern would. But everyday secular discourse is also replete with Biblical sayings, such as “an eye for an eye” or ‘walking on water’. Snippets from the Old and New Testament flow through our everyday conversation. Only Shakespeare comes close as a source of contemporary adages.
Fewer people in the west are familiar with the ancient religious books that are not part of the Christian tradition. Quotations from the Koran are likely to be greeted with blank stares. Extracts from the Talmud are even less familiar to most modern westerners. Inedeed, few are even aware of the Talmud’s existence. It’s hard – but not impossible – for non-Jews to locate an accesible copy.
Despite this general ignorance, an increasing number of people in the west consider themselves sufficiently knowledgeable about the Koran to express strong and very negative views about it. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. If a generation ago, a minor Church leader had staged a public burning of the Koran, other than enraging Muslims the incident would probably have gained little traction in the media or sympathy from the general public. Most people would have probably felt a sense of embarrassment and no more.
That may still be the case.
The Reverend Jones speaks to the media; truth lurks in the background 
I doubt supporters of the Reverend Jones, the obscure bible-basher from Florida whose recent Koran-burning antics became the focus of world media attention, are in the majority – certainly not in Australia and probably not in the USA. But they’re not a tiny minority either. It possible Islamophobes are growing in number.
A remarkable number of westerners these days consider themselves veritable experts on the Koran. What’s more, there are plenty of websites catering to their taste for a one-sided, negative view of this text – a text few of them have ever tried to study. These sources enable them to obtain a little knowledge – all of it grossly biased against the Muslim faith. As the old saying goes, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
Koran burning may not yet be culturally acceptable in the western world. But deriding the Islamic religion has become commonplace. Although ironically Islam is the most recent of the three major religions to evolve,it’s often branded as archaic, primitive and a serious source of mischief . Casting slurs on Islamic culture and Muslim societies has also become astonishingly ‘normalised’. It went mainstream after 9-11. Widely respected commentators on the left and right of politics have joined the fray and helped legitimise anti-Islamic attitudes.
Who are these people and what is their agenda?
Islamophobia has not, traditionally, been the bigotry of choice for western xenophobes. It’s true… a long time ago there were Crusades. But they’re a very vague historical memory. Who the hell cares about the Crusades today? Britons, for instance, had more than five hundred years of whipped up hysteria against the French that came after the crudades. Since then Germans were nominated Enemy No 1 by two whole generations. After that came the Russians…
Nor do pressures arising from recent immigration satisfactorily explain Islamophobia. Take the case of Britain once again. After the second world war it experienced an influx of immigrants from many different locations. Immigrants had different skin colours and different religions. Some were Muslims, but most were not. Until fairly recently, in Britain, skinhead types might say abusive things about ‘Pakis’, ‘blacks’ or ‘wogs’. But anti-Islamic bigotry, in its current form, is more recent phenomeno. I don’t believe it arose ‘organically’ within the western populace – certainly not in the so-called ‘Anglosphere’. It has been manufactured.
Who has been doing that and why?
As someone who has come to the conclusion that 9-11 was a false flag operation orchestrated by devotees of the Israeli State (with help from stooges and allies in the western military industrial complex), the answer becomes rather obvious.
Contemporary Islamophobia is an artificial phenomenon. It has been fabricated for one principle reason: to serve the political interests of the Zionist State. At the heart of the Zionist State is the Jewish religion.
Society as a whole has indeed a legitimate interest in better understanding the Jewish religion.
One way to do this is by reading the Torah, the Talmud and other ancient texts, but they are not easy going for modern readers. Popular commentaries on these ancient Jewish texts – and on the religion of Judaism as a whole – are more accessible. Unfortunately, they also tend to have a partisan perspective. Very few (if any) contemporary books about Judaism available in western bookshops take a negative view of the subject matter. Even a critical examination of Judaism that aims for a ‘balance’ is rare. Most available commentary is laudatory material written by Jewish authors. It is not without value, but it is unbalanced. To give a soccer analogy, one might as well as a Manchester United supporter for an unbiased view about Manchester United.
Jewish Chosenness - can be debated in an open forum
Another way to gain an understanding of Judaism is to learn what Jews – religious and secular – say when engaged in internal ‘in-group’ debate.
These are contemporary folk talking about what matters to them. It’s probably as good a way as any to get an idea of what religious Jews – as well as their secular countertparts – think about the Jewish religion.
With that introduction, I invite you to head over to the Chosenness as a Jewish concept article on Galus Australis.
The article by Geoffrey Bloch comes first. Some way down the comments you’ll find my contributions and the rebuttals.
This is the way inter-faith communication should be: open, forthright and respectful (at least I tried).
Vilification is something quite different. For examples of that, see some of the websites set up by Zionist fanatics that aim to smear the Muslim religion in the crudest of ways. The Shek Yer-mami website is a particularly obnoxious example.
For an informed response to the simplistic – and frequently made – claim that the Koran advocates violence, see Does the Quran Really Sanction Violence Against ‘Unbelievers’? by Sufi author Kabir Helminski.
Sheik Yer'mami - a revolting website that glorifies Israel and ridicules Islam
