ABSTRACT
One of the advantages the Jewish people found in the New World was the Puritan tradition underlying American self-understanding. Caroline Gleason gives an account of the experiences of the first Puritan colonists in America, which sheds a light on the American use of the idea of the ‘chosen people’. Gleason states that those colonists had interpreted their encounter with the Native Americans in reference to the traditional concepts of divine providence and covenant. They believed that their relationship with the Natives was orchestrated by God and that they had ‘a duty to fulfill their covenant with God by serving as an example of an ideal Christian community to the world’.1 So, under the impact of Puritanism, the Americans came to regard themselves as the ‘chosen people’ and their country as the ‘chosen land’. By quoting Reinhold Niebuhr, Eisen also points out that it was thanks to this Puritan legacy that America ‘came into existence with the sense of being a “separated” nation, which God was using to make a new beginning for mankind’. Accordingly, ‘the destiny of “Christ’s people in New England” was the destiny of all mankind’.2 As far as American Jews are concerned, the obvious peculiarity that was attached to their insistence on (cultural, ethnic or religious) particularity when trying to be part of the American nation was thus overcome by a similar American insistence on being the chosen people.
