We have great pleasure in presenting a special issue on ‘Chosen Peoples’. This is a subject that has received growing attention amongst scholars of ethnicity and nationalism. It combines studies of religion, politics, history and society, to focus on the inner sources of ethnic survival and national renewal. Few societies have been without some myth of chosenness which has sustained their sense of identity and community in the vicissitudes of daily existence and natural and human tribulation. The need to strengthen social cohesion and morale and to explain the meaning of communal destiny finds repeated expression in many periods and across the continents in mythologies of ethnic election and national mission.