About the Jews: what defines them is the deal they made individually with God, and also and equally important their unbroken many thousand year history as a people, a people who kept alive the spiritual undertaking to individually keep their word with God.
When you listen to God there are no separate things in your mind. It is the nature of the experience. Therefore, obviously, there are no different races of people listening to God. There can be no races when we talk about God. The Jewish people as a group function as a collective memory. That is a spiritual undertaking, with no connection to bodies.
It is not enough to know the rules, we have to keep ourselves in condition to act on them. The same is true of our deal with God, why we must continually be reminded of it. And there we have the significance of the Jewish people as a teaching model: a deal with god and unbroken practice trying to keep it.
It is on this basis that the Jews make a claim to return to the land of Israel. It is a literary claim only, the right to continue a story, but there could be no better kind of claim. As long as it is a good story, a significant story. And what could be more significant than a model of the right way to live?
