On 2010-01-31, at 7:11 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
> I think Chris is right, most Jews in most of the world for most of the time thought of themselves as distinctively Jewish, and as tolerated minorities among the Gentiles rather than citizens. That they were chosen and that they were descended from Jews were both things that they did not differentiate. That is the case because for most of the time nationality was conceived of as part and parcel of racial identity - it is only in the twentieth century that the America idea of a non-racial nationalism had any influence.
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In the predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in which I grew up, most immigrants described themselves as not simply as "Jews", but as "Polish Jews", "Russian Jews", "Romanian Jews" "Litvaks" (ie. Baltic Jews) etc., in the same way Irish immigrants identified themselves as "Irish Catholics". I don't recall the Jews being any more conscious of belonging to a "chosen people" than any other religious or national group which invariably flatters itself as possessing unique virtues. A large minority of left-wing Jews, in fact, insistently saw themselves as workers first and Jews second, and generally viewed ethnic affiliations as parochial and reactionary. They dwarfed the influence of the Zionists until the facts of the Holocaust became known. In any case, there's simply no basis to single out the experience and behaviour of Jewish immigrants and subsequent generations as being substantially different from that of other immigrant groups - certainly not after they emigrated from the shtetls to the cities. At worst, it can be construed as an echo of the old antisemitic trope of the Jew as Alien which was promoted outside of rather than within the Jewish communities.