They literally are. In the time of the mighty Egyptian empire, when they were enslaved or even sacraficed for not believing in Egyptian deities, the Isralies stood up and said NO, we will stand up for what we believe, we will not kneel down and do it your way. They had great faith in God, and he blessed them by getting them out of tyrany. God didn't choose them, THEY chose him.
You're a little bit behind the information curve. Recent anthropological research indicates that the traditional legend about the "bondage in Egypt" (of which there are
zero contemporary records!) is merely a case of a good story being made better over generations of oral repetition. Evidence suggests that the Jews in Egypt were not slaves at all but what we call "migrant workers" in English or
Gastarbeiter in German.
There was work to do in Egypt. Lots of work. Work on a scale never seen by the people of that era. The building of the pyramids was one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken by mankind, and tens of thousands of laborers were required to turn it from a dream in the Pharaoh's mind into reality.
This was the Early Bronze Age. Life was hard. When the call came out for laborers to build the pyramids, to be paid in food and shelter--no matter how minimal--people came running from all over the region to sign up. There was no need to enslave them, they wanted the work!
On a related note, a project like this requires a hierarchy of management and it appears that Jews held a proportional share of supervisory duties. Other evidence indicates that they were instrumental in the spread of the Egyptian writing system to other countries. It had already changed from a system of logograms (each symbol representing an individual word, as in Chinese) to an abjad (a phonetic alphabet with no vowels) and it lent itself perfectly to the other languages of the Afro-Asiatic family (Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, etc.) in which vowels are not important. Today all phonetic alphabets and abjads (not abugidas like Hindi or syllabaries like Cherokee) except Korean trace their ancestry to Egyptian.
I suggest you Google "Jews Egypt slavery" to review this mountain of new research for yourself.
Here's a typical article. I just grabbed this at random, I have not checked its references and have no idea if its scholarship is of the highest quality. It's just one of a great many on the subject.
Like nearly all the key events in Judeo-Christian-Muslim mythology, it looks like the "exile" is just one more fairytale.