There are Jews who distort chosenness, transforming it from a basis for serving humanity into an aggrieved separatism from the world. Chosenness can become a form of conceit, a self-glorifying theology. One can readily find examples of chauvinism, along with the opposite, in the vast corpus of Jewish religious literature. For some Jews, particularism becomes an end in itself, and the very universal purpose for which the people of Israel was appointed—to be a blessing for the nations—is displaced by an exaggerated sense of Jewish centrality.
