The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness
Is Zionism not, to some extent, an excrescence of Judaism? Why the near-religious divide between Zionism and Judaism? And, am I permitted at all even to ask? ~ilana
Pro-Palestine commentators and activists, Jews and non-Jews, are religious about maintaining a bifurcation—a divide—between Judaism and Zionism. Advocates of this duality portray Judaism as humanistic, universal and pastoral, and Zionism as its opposite. In the commingled rumble of commentary over Zionism; Arab commentators have been conditioned, by necessity, to internalize the split and the exact fissure-lines, as though mouthing these were a protective amulet, a matter of survival; theirs, ours. It is, in a sense.
Why this near-religious bifurcation between Zionism and Judaism? Is Zionism, to some extent, not an excrescence of Judaism?
Biblical Chosenness is certainly a facet of Judaism. Does it relate not at all to the Jewish supremacy that animates Jewish-Israeli expression and express action? Are these not connected? If so, should the question posed, then, really be a Jewish-Israeli question? Or, perhaps a Judaism Question is more apropos?
And, am I permitted at all to even ask?
Composer of some of the best, most exquisite English prose, with insight to match, was novelist Anita Brookner. Through her Jewish protagonist in the novel Making Things Better (2002, p 22), Ms. Brookner writes that the gentleman’s Jewish “ancestral religion,” which he did not practice, “seemed to him an affair of prohibitions, of righteous exclusiveness for which he could see no justification.”
Miss Brookner, a rare gem and a genius, was a secular, unaffiliated Jew like myself. “Although resolutely secular in outlook,” Ms. Brookner also conveyed what I have long-since felt. It is that “the mystery of the Holy Spirit,” expressed in good will, gratitude and graciousness, seems absent from the encounters we Jewish outsiders, lonely people, have had within our “ancestral religion.” (Loneliness is the theme that threads Brookner’s novels.)
Like Brookner, I do not speak ex cathedra of the vexation that is Jewishness. It is indubitably a delicate matter. And, although knowledgeable, I am not an “expert.” However, to deny that eddying around the Jewish child is a sense of, or talk of, Jewish specialness—this would be dishonest. Whether you choose to imbibe “Chosenness” or not—I chose not to—as a Jew, you are likely to have been raised hearing about “Chosenness.”
The supremacy fallacy, it would thus seem, issues surely not strictly from “Zionism,” but from “Chosenness.”
The Chosen-People belief is as old as the Hebrew Bible itself. It is thus in the “Chosen People’s” philosophical marrow. For what—pray tell?—are foundational, early teachings like Deuteronomy 14:2, if not a declaration of Jewish superiority for posterity?
For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.
Alongside all the commentators and broadcasters who insist on upholding the division between Judaism and Zionism; I, too, very much hope that Zionism is not an instantiation or an extension, on some elemental level, of Judaism. I really do.
There are certainly universal elements in the Hebrew Testament. Deuteronomy, an early book, showcases an advanced concept of Jewish Social Justice, and is replete with instructions to protect the poor, the weak, the defenseless; the widows, the orphans, the aliens, even the animals who, as Deuteronomy 11:15 enjoined, must be fed first.
This ethical monotheism, developed centuries before classical Greek philosophy, was certainly expounded upon by the classical prophets, my own heroes. The Hebrew prophets railed against power and cultural corruption so very magnificently. Indeed, the Prophets of the Hebrew Testament are magnificent and munificent, heroes. In speaking truth to power, Jesus followed in the footsteps of the classical prophets.
Yet how can one forget, if one is remotely “knowledgeable,” that, for their righteous, wrath-filled universal message, the Hebrew Prophets had consequently been hounded by The People—by עם ישאל—just as Jesus was persecuted and then crucified at the People’s behest. Did not the crowd cry out “Crucify Him!”? (Matthew 27:15–26)
No doubt, the hounding the classical Prophets had received was an “existential promotion” to crucifixion.
But today, for their words, the classical Hebrew Prophets and Christ would have been chased, excommunicated, throttled on social media, shadow-banned and subjected to death by algorithm—prosecuted legally, too, for “antisemitism”—at the behest of Israel and its Western lobbies and lickspittles. Like many of us who’ve been consistently both anti-woke and anti-war; dissidents since day one, the Hebrew Prophets would have had free speech, but no reach, to use Bassem Youssef’s aphorism.
Still, a faith is more than a doctrine; it is the manner in which the faithful act and speak. I want to believe in the strict bifurcation of Judaism and Zionism, in that magical division. All the same, from Jews, liberals for the most, I’ve always heard the Chosen People storyline. To wit, “The heart of Chosenness,” states one Rabbi Meir Soloveichick (eleven minutes into “Israel: The Narcissistic State”), during a “Jewish Review of Books” symposium, is that Jews are superior, having been chosen as “the eternal nation,” and having made a greater contribution to humanity than any others.
Soloveichik, who officiates on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, is wrong; his assertion is untrue on its face. Aristotle (384 BC) was not Jewish. Neither was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685). On the basis of my bias alone; I’d close the case right there. For the reader’s edification, I’ve shored-up my bias with the help of Charles Murray’s tome, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950 (2003, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., NY).
Here are some of the “giants” who dragged their fellow men out of wattle-and-daub hovels, materially, spiritually and metaphysically:
The Buddha (563 BC)
Confucius (551 BC)
Euripides (480 BC)
Hippocrates (460 BC)
Aristotle (384 BC)
Euclid (300 BC)
Virgil (70 BC)
Al-Mutanabbi (915)
Thomas Aquinas (1225)
Zhao Mengfu (1254)
Dante (1265)
Sesshu (1420)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452)
Michaelangelo (1475)
Raphael (1483)
Titian (1485)
Galileo (1564)
Shakespeare (1564)
Rubens (1640)
Isaac Newton (1643)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685)
Voltaire (1694)
Euler (1707)
James Watt (1736)
Goethe (1749)
Mozart (1756)
Beethoven (1770)
Louis Pasteur (1822)
Thomas Edison (1847)
There has been an attempt to claim for Pasteur and others a “Jewish connection,” but none was Jewish—not even Rubens. The reader who wants badly to see certain faces in the clouds is reminded to refrain from confusing charm and cleverness with transcendent greatness. As Joyce Carol Oats has quipped, “Charisma is just another word for bullshit.” (Fox, p. 387, Hogarth, NY, 2025.)
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/05/ilana-mercer/the-judaism-zionism-bifurcation-chosenness