The Johns Hopkins University Press New Literary History

Reading Exodus into History
Author(s): Jonathan Boyarin

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 3, History, Politics, and Culture (Summer,
1992), pp. 523-554
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/469219
Accessed: 09-11-2018 19:27 UTC
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Reading Exodus into History
Jonathan Boyarin
I. Introduction
N AN EARLIER PAPER on the shifting significance of Palestine as

the ground of Jewish historical identity, I broached several critical
questions, one of which was phrased as follows: "What are the
grander links among the ancient Jewish state, the Western cultural
complex of 'Zion' through the Bible, traditional Jewish culture in
the modern period, Zionism, and what I will call here a post-
modern ideal of Diaspora?"' Here I will be considering the link
between only two of those elements: the use of the Exodus/
Promised Land narrative in writings from various points of Chris-
tian European, and particularly English, history; and the ways that
same narrative has been drawn on for the legitimation of Zionism
Perhaps most of all, I hope to show that real insight into th
narrative construction of history cannot do without close attention
to the precise language of ancient source texts, to the translation
of such texts as a practice which helps define collective identity,
and to the multiplicity of readings they have afforded in widely
differing historical circumstances.
The politics of Exodus constitute an exemplary case of the link
between history and interpretive reading. The case is first of all
"exemplary" in the loose sense that there are so many cases, over
such a wide area and long period, in which that narrative has been
used to make events cohere into meaningful constellations. It is also
more precisely exemplary because the narrative cannot be under-
stood solely as pertaining to the time in which it purports to be
* My thanks to Talal Asad, Hannah Davis, Uri Ram, Elissa Sampson and Shalom
Goldman for their comments on the first draft of this paper. The paper was first
presented to a seminar at the Shelby Collum Davis Center for Historical Studies a
Princeton University. My thanks to the director, Natalie Zemon Davis, and to the
participants in that discussion. Further thanks to the participants in the Proseminar
on Knowledge, Power and Culture at the Center for Studies of Social Change, New
School for Social Research.
New Literary History, 1992, 23: 523-554
524 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
set, nor yet solely in the seri

up as a model.2 Rather it "i
a later one."" Far from exhaus
it will be central to my argum
repeated invocations. I inten
of readings linking source tex
interpreted in the meantime,
and interpreted now. This dif
"hermeneutic circle" linking
as sources and interpreters o
the shaping force of a histo
sequence.4 At no present mo
text fully determined by it
plausible readings, of new dir
the work the text has been
mean by a trajectory.
The ancient tale of Israelites,
with a long series of historical
As I will attempt to show in
readings the text affords surp
within the modern world-sy
conquest versus autochthono
in fact, I hope to convince th
against that model as we migh
that European culture contai
ratives of oppression, flight,
include all three terms-liberat
of a new (and "pure") home
conquest.5 In these latter case
and oppression, it would be w
justification might appear f
sequence of divine promise-s
In order fully to see the her
reading, we would, of cours
comparative ethnography of
Good work on the typologi
America has been done.7 Tw
the Rabbinic midrash literatu
Saxons-will ground two of t
far as I know, we still lack,
the workings of the Exodus
Africa, or of the Biblical sou
of Catholic and Protestant im
READING EXODUS INTO HISTORY 525
Such a lack lends itself to wild claim

on the other. Perhaps because th
narrative are so prevalent in European
enlisted in the justification of colon
Biblical narrative in general have so
the Jewish origins of Western "dom
Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit A
W. Turner locates the origins of into
[I]t was the Israelites who established mon

of humankind. And with it came the terrible concomitants of intolerance
and commandments to destroy the sacred items of others (Exodus 23:
24; 34:13-16) and to "utterly destroy" polytheistic peoples wherever e
countered .... the conception of genocide is foreign to polytheistic culture
But the distinctions raised in the covenant between religion and idola
are like some visitation of the khamsin to wilderness peoples as yet unsus
pected, dark clouds over Africa, the Americas, the Far East, until finally
even the remotest islands and jungle enclaves are struck by fire and swor
and by the subtler weapon of conversion-by-ridicule (Deuteronomy 2:
7:2; 20:16-18, Joshua 6:17-21).9
Now this statement is astonishing, if hardly unprecedented. In

sweepingly simplistic equation of polytheism and pluralism on o
hand, monotheism and chauvinism on the other, it suggests th
the Jews (like some irresistible Oriental force of nature, an e
wind) are ultimately responsible for all the evils of colonialism. Ev
more (though Turner does not write this, and perhaps if it h
crossed his mind he would have been more cautious), it implies tha
the Jews, as inventors of genocide, are ultimately responsible f
getting themselves killed by the Nazis! The monotheist-polythe
dichotomy is matched, in Turner's account, by a dichotomy betwee
primitive, mythological, cyclical conceptions, and closeness to natu
on one hand, and Israelite, historical linearism, and hostility
nature on the other.'0 A recent Jewish celebrant of the Exod
narrative discussed in the next section unwittingly walks into Turne
trap, insisting on the "linear" as opposed to "cyclical" character
Exodus, and on Exodus as a universal Western model.
A key term in the quote from Turner is the claim that the Israelites
are commanded to annihilate polytheistic peoples "wherever en-
countered." In fact, ruthless as the divine warrants are, they are
aimed precisely at those peoples that might impede the Israelites'
progress toward the land, or whose continued presence there (not
"wherever") might lead them astray and is in any case not legitimized
by divine covenant. Turner's need to find an ancient original of
the "warrant for genocide" l

ference between a strictly loc
erance and the modern Weste
to dominate weaker peoples
of Christ or progress. If I m
my own, the Jewish Biblical
narrative of partially global p
territorially based referents.
tianity once it has become
longer a Jewish sect-constit
salized, allegorized narrative o
is not an ontological one betwe
and Christianity, but a hist
paradoxes of ancient nationh
focus turns for a moment tow
and toward a less deterministic articulation than Turner's of the
changes in relations among land, ethnicity, and tolerance from th
Old Testament to the modern period. I will content myself h
with citing W. D. Davies's telling point that "One of the start
aspects of early Christianity is that, at a very early date, Gentile
for whom the question of the land could not possess the inte
that it had for Jewish Christians, soon became the majority
Because Gentile converts to Christianity did not share the d
attachment to the Land of Israel that Jewish Christians had
born with, Christianity largely dropped those elements of Judais
which were inconsistent with its increasingly catholic character. Da
suggests, in effect, that aspects of the early social history of Ch
tianity caught it ideologically off its guard. For the first few centu
when Christianity was spreading among an ethnically varied m
titude throughout the late Roman Empire, the links between
enantal destiny and promised lands were hardly relevant.
I will discuss some examples of how, starting a few centuries la
and at various points thereafter, the model of a covenantal relati
between a given people and a given land was integrated into Christ
self-understandings. When this happened, it did not represent
workings of an autonomous logic contained in a text (as Tur
would have it), but the employment and reshaping of an authorita
textual model.
Without denying that ancient Judaism is a major source of
Christian European self-understandings, we would do well not to
make a beeline to the Pentateuch for the premodern origins of
Western European colonial discourse. Thus Robert A. Williams
grounds his synoptic account of European conquistador legalism
in the universalist discourse of the medieval church. First of all,

Williams claims that law, and not, as one might suppose, Old
Testament legends of conquest, was "the West's most vital and
effective instrument of empire.""2 For Williams, the crucial in-
novation in Christian legal thought which paved the way for the
rationalization of Renaissance-era conquests occurred during the
Crusades, in a mid-thirteenth-century commentary written by Pope
Innocent IV. True, the fact that the Crusades, as a model for
European colonization, focused on the land once promised and
now Holy, reminds us that the culture of colonialism has Biblical
grounds as well. Yet Innocent IV's argument rested on non-Biblical
sources, consisting of an adroit synthesis of the doctrine of natural
law and the doctrine of papal responsibility for the "spiritual well-
being of all the souls of Christ's human flock, including infidels
and heathens" (AI 14). From these Innocent IV derived the
principle that infidel and heathen peoples behaving in gross vi-
olation of natural law were subject to Christian intervention in
their affairs.
Natural law and papal infallibility are not "Jewish" doctrines.
Whatever ideas about humanity in general may be sprinkled through-
out ancient, Rabbinic, and modern Jewish thought, they are not
cast in terms of natural law; and whatever notions about a special
place for the Jews in the divine plan for humanity there may be,
no one has imagined the Jews in a universal pastoral role.' The
basic ways of dealing with the natives in both the Biblical conquest
narrative and, mutatis mutandis, Zionist ideology'4--either avoiding
contact with the natives, or getting rid of them-are a far cry from
such early European colonial techniques as the Spanish encomienda
(the wholesale consignment of groups of Indian slaves to loyal
Spaniards) or the requerimiento, a "charter of conquest" which "in-
formed the Indians in the simplest terms that they could either
accept Christian missionaries and Spanish imperial hegemony or be
annihilated" (AI 91).
Given the different views of the broader sources of colonialism
in general indicated by this cursory look at Turner and William
it is hardly surprising that there is a confusion about the "discour
of conquest" concerning Palestine and Israel. The links amo
knowledge, culture, and power pertinent to this region, compar
to places such as the Indian subcontinent or Latin America, see
relatively underdeveloped in contemporary cultural studies. Th
in his introduction to a recent collection on Nation and Narration
(1990), Homi Bhabha appropriately apologizes for the failure
include considerations of Palestinian national culture. 5 Yet he se
unaware of the ways in whic

were critical to the formula
Zionism;16 and as vital as the
culture of nineteenth-centur
one passing reference to anti-
I attribute this underdevelo
is only a recent and convenien
to articulate the critique of an
perialism. Even the most care
slide in one of two directions.
turies of anti-Semitism and
celebration of Israel as a redem
or anger at the denial of ind
slighting of the crucial stru
Europe. To put it another w
exception of a study like Will
tianity lags behind the criti
with Jewish well-being are
into their account, and the reverse holds as well.'8 Furthermore,
versions professing equal concern for both seem unable to go beyond
the simplistic mold of a tragic, mirrored conflict between two national
rights. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a Greek tragedy, nor is
it fated. An inquiry equally concerned at understanding European
anti-Semitism and European imperialism would lead, I submit, to
a perception that the construction of Israelis and Palestinians as
being on two opposite "sides" is not at all inevitable. A more nuanced
understanding of the workings of Exodus in history might contribute
toward that perception. On the other hand, to continue debating
whether the Biblical text feeds directly into either secular liberation
or religious chauvinism is to reinforce many of the assumptions
underlying the reification of the Jewish and Arab, Israeli and Pales-
tinian, collectives. And thus on to the more immediate occasion of
this paper.
II. The Said-Walzer Debate
Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution is both a cultural inter-

vention into the modern history of Palestine, and a valuable attem
to trace the career of a central narrative in Jewish and Christ
history.'9 Walzer's primary concern is not with bondage, nor w
conquest, but with the struggle to form a responsible political com
munity in the context of newly achieved freedom. Accordingly, h
explicitly announces his intention

act of liberation, but as a secular a
effort which will echo through Wester
examples available as reinvocations
Latin American liberation theology an
the main virtue of his account is th
topic of the collective, political uses
the purely individualist, spiritual, and
of Exodus in early modern Europe.2
which sees a radical thrust in the Bibl
revision in his own thinking, for earl
as "the earliest form of political radic
Edward Said responded to Walzer's
reading."22 These texts embody, in a p
way, the political stakes in the conflic
more to teach us than their tone su
I will be using the issues raised by the
critical questions about the use of the
At the same time, I will use these h
the shared limitations of Walzer's an
hermeneutics.23
The title of Said's review makes an extremely telling point against
the way Walzer "edits" Exodus, as I will discuss shortly; the review
also contains what strike me as at least three particularly blind spots
of its own, with which I want to deal first.
First, on reviewing the Biblical text, it seems to me that Said is
correct to note that, unlike Africans brought to America as slaves,
Jacob's family is described as having gone to Egypt voluntarily. Yet
the narrative seems equally clear in its description of them as having
become a coerced labor force there. Thus it seems strange for Said
to argue that "when Egypt fell on hard times, so too did the Jews,
and because they were foreign they were the targets of local rage
and frustration" (MW 91). This assertion by Said goes against
Pharoah's reported statement that his fear is precisely that the
Children of Israel will leave, that he will lose his work force. Most
readers, I submit, whether secular or religious, Jewish or not, would
agree that the narrative describes them as being more exploited
than scapegoated. Yet Said's explanation sounds more like Simmels
than like Marx; he makes the Old Testament out to be a proto-
Zionist text, explaining oppression through the brute fact of cultural
minority difference. It seems that, by his irresistible choice of a title,
Said himself has fallen too readily into the typological association
of Israelites and Zionists, and offered readings as willful and ten-
dentious as those he accuses

to assert flatly that the Isr
that of American Blacks" (M
is replete with examples of h
that comparison ("Where wh
To all thy people known,'
Moses leading his people o
this, Said might be less pu
someone like Martin Luther
imperialist (MW 98). Equally
makes it harder to understan
liberal American Jewish sy
rights. These are both expre
drawing both on the Biblical
and on the empathic memo
from "bondage" in Russia to
recently been a very comfor
politically and morally.25
Second, because Said's pole
acceptance of the direct lin
by Walzer, he is compelled
the Biblical warrants for sla
violent exclusiveness of the
was never really carried ou
later Jewish commentary "a
143), Said retorts that these
the destruction of the Tem
collectively to implement
misreading of Walzer, sin
speculate about a time whe
able and collectively respon
commandments -the time
spell this out. For Walzer, th
grown "progressively" less e
the other hand, sees a con
Said nor Walzer acknowled
ambivalent interaction bet
greater Rabbinic emphasis on
sources both in Greek phi
forbidding mistreatment of
acknowledges the profound
and that which was understo
readily acknowledged both
opponents, along with the theme of J

to Zion.26
This leads to my third criticism of Said: his contention that early
Zionism "was primarily religious and imperialist," that "the concepts
of Chosen People, Covenant, Redemption, Promised Land and God
were central to it" (MW 98). No one can deny, of course, that
traditional "religious" associations with Israelite history and the Land
of Israel were crucial to whatever level of popular Jewish support
Zionism had. They coexisted alongside much more mundane ar-
guments, however, and one would be hard pressed to find them as
"central" themes in the writings of Leo Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, or
Max Nordau. These men were not religious and imperialist, but
rather secularist and imperialist. As I understand their ideas, the
concepts of "Chosen People" and "Promised Land" were subservient
to the desire for any land (to be sure, one available from a friendly
imperial power) on which Jews could raise themselves to the level
of a worthy European people." Nor were the concepts Said lists
necessary for giving "identity to a people scattered in exile" (MW
98), who already had a powerful, shared identity. Such concepts
may to some extent have been "useful in getting crucial European
support" (MW 98) but this was mainly because they were grounds
for preexisting support among European "non-Jewish Zionists."28
None of this vitiates Said's most telling charge: that Walzer's
account barely mentions the Canaanites, and that, consistent with
Walzer's emphasis on the continued relevance of the Exodus model,
ignoring the Canaanites serves to reinforce the invisibility of the
Palestinians. Where Said is concerned with the geographic, spatial
movements of colonialism, Walzer is concerned to link Exodus to
modern examples of the establishment of a just society against
tyranny. Contrasting Exodus politics to Messianic apocalyptism, Wal-
zer repeatedly emphasizes the partial and this-worldly redemption
that Exodus aims for, and the somewhat ambivalent hostility toward
enemies in Exodus movements as against the demonization of en-
emies in Messianism. Consistent with his claim that Labor Zionism
represents Exodus politics against a Messianic right-wing fun
mentalism, Walzer notes that the attention of the narrative "is focu
on internal rather than external wars, on the purges of the re
citrant Israelites rather than on the destruction of the Canaanite
nations" (ER 142). If Said denies Israelite slavery in Egypt, W
reads with the grain of the text: his interpretation complicitly de
to confront the Exodus model with the destruction of the nascent
Palestinian nation.29
In this exchange, both Said and Walzer seem to need to cast t
question of Palestine in typ

fulfillment of an archetypica
need to read the Old Testam
match their respective visio
politics?
For Walzer, the invocations of Exodus are carried out primarily
in time. There is an analogy between his approval of the Exodus
model of historical-political understanding, in which "events occur
only once, and . . . take on their significance from a system of
backward- and forward-looking interconnections, not from the hier-
archical correspondences of myth" (ER 13), and his stress on all
subsequent "Exodus histories" as being basically rational, this-worldly,
gradualist, progressive. On the other hand, Walzer not only shows
us latter-day politicians invoking the Exodus narrative as a model,
but feels perfectly free himself to discuss Exodus "anachronistically"
(ER 59), as if it were in fact a founding legend which still charters
his politics. There is a major problem here: Walzer does not confront
the critical question whether the Exodus narrative autonomously
"works" in history or whether it is merely available for effective
rhetoric in a wide variety of situations.3s If it is merely available,
how important is it in shaping action? If in fact it "works," how
can we accept Walzer's strategy of giving us only his preferred
"secular" reading, since that would give us a very distorted picture
of its effects in history? Outside the limited range of Walzer's polemic
against right-wing "Messianic" Zionists (who in any case are not
likely to be swayed by his secular reading of Exodus!), why should
we think that anyone's emancipatory interests are best served by
that reading?
Said calls implicitly for a history of the Exodus narrative which
would raise these issues in a more substantial way. But in their
polemic, neither approaches the necessary synthesis of historical
grounding of the text with sensitivity to its narrative power.3' In
particular, close attention to the text-concern for responsible read-
ing of its words-seems to fly out the window. This is evident on
the grossest level, as I just suggested, in Walzer's choice to present
us with an anachronistic "secular" reading divorced from a "sacred"
reading which he disowns. On a more detailed level, it reappears
in a bizarre dispute over the "original" meaning of the word "re-
demption.""2 Walzer claims the word originally means "redemption
from slavery"; if he has in mind the Hebrew word ge'ula, he is
correct. Said in turn questions the possible meaning "of a secular
politics heavily dependent on the notion of redemption (whose first
meaning is delivery from sin).""3

Hebrew Bible is not to be determi
for its definition of an English wor
There is an odd logic linking the
Walzer and Said to their claims for
that is, as a myth of origin. The an
is effectively treated by both as iner
for molding. Said's intention is t
overly assimilating, overly comfo
those who suffer today. Yet Walz
reading of the ancient text is ultim
deconstructed by Said's attitude, wh
but always distanced.
Walzer is "inclined to prefer an a
vividness of the present rather
refreshing assertion, however, is
Exodus of the power it has contai
English Puritans, and African-Amer
as a choice between the secular an
choice between living in the past
Walzer convincingly to sustain bo
overtly selective interpretation of E
either an account of how Exodus h
its "sacred" or chauvinist side, or
include the possibility of periodic r
The former would be difficult if
chauvinist and liberationist readings
and, as I discuss below, they are of
no recourse to the latter since, like
Exodus as "the crucial alternative
recurrence" (ER 12). The reader w
domination and the reader who se
are in agreement on its "linear" r
The ways in which poets and politic
Testament narrative of the Israel
primitive myth versus civilized pro
such simplistic dichotomies, and m
who flash their credentials either as
the tradition.35
III. Creating the A

Walzer gives us no indicatio
enabled the "Exodus politic
regards these invocations a
likely he is relying on the g
of the Old Testament, which
ritualism and restricted lite
the Israelites has roots in Eu
and long predates the Refor
the most sustained way by t
English uses of Exodus sho
Walzer's claim that Exodus h
and progressive narratives o
A new book by Nicholas H
Testament narrative served
self-understandings of th
general thesis is that "the
gration from continent to
exodus."38 Howe thus anchor
the Chosen People, and of
Land, much further back th
intimacy with the Old Test
Howe's book is significant n
workings of the Exodus stor
process of shaping an Englis
and Jutes who invaded the i
how to investigate intera
narrative.
One important lesson is contained in Howe's discussions of in-

tertextual history. He does not confine himself to the general point
that the Anglo-Saxons read and used the Old Testament, but looks
for further connections within the early history of writing in Britain.
Thus he sees models within models, types within types: when Wulf-
stan wrote in 1014 "to inspire [the English] to resistance against
Viking attacks" (MM 8), he cited Gildas, a Celtic poet who had
written before the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Through this reference
back to a representative of the British who had been conquered
during the adventus Saxonum, Wulfstan was able to warn the English
that sinful and irresponsible behavior could cost them their promised
land. Similarly, in discussing Bede's use of Virgil's myth of Roman
origin (of course, Exodus was not the only model used), Howe
makes the point that it is not necessary to demonstrate that Bede
read the Aeneid, since "a cultural my

when it achieves general currenc
popular imagination" (MM 62). In
able to trace an indirect literary sou
careful detective work is indispensa
most powerfully where their presen
Second, Howe is able to show that t
modelings of Anglo-Saxon history
is the parallel suggested by the c
author of the Old English epic cal
exodus" (MM 102; see also 46, 179)
wars are barely mentioned."9 But th
attention to the splicing of the mod
the importance of what Paul Cart
the geographical contingencies with
they reshape narrative models as
The Exodus story continued to be
only because of its parallels with a se
and not only because of instituti
authority, but largely because, draw
Saxon migration myth "translated c
(MM 34), and thus helped to fix m
Third, Howe understands that our conventional divisions of an-
cient textual material should not blind us to earlier readers' inclusion
of material other than that we ourselves focus on. The early insular
writers he discusses-the British Gildas, the Anglo-Saxons Alcuin
and Wulfstan-did not only read Exodus, and they used the Old
Testament not only as a model for triumphal self-justification, but
also for cautionary exhortation. In the cases of Alcuin and Wulfstan,
he points to their references to the Jews' being taken into Babylonian
captivity, the model of "a disobedient people being punished by
God by wars and defeat at the hands of foreign invaders" (MM
22). Those who used Old Testament templates to warn of impending
invasion and expulsion, therefore, were not presenting "Canaanite
readings, but rather referring to a more potently relevant crisis
period in Israelite history when the "covenantal" inhabitants wer
endangered.
Finally, with reference to the Old English Exodus which he analyzes
most closely, Howe utilizes a uniquely appropriate method. Relying
on the importance of compounds in Old English, he looks carefully
at a series of compounds contained in that text and possibly nowhere
else, regarding them as a site of fusion between the Old Testament
model and the Anglo-Saxon material. A particularly revealing ex-
ample in Howe's analysis are

flod, here used not just as a s
with religious meaning. God
The Israelites journey on th
on the other hand, are flodb
the flood) (MM 85). Thus th
which point toward the heig
doom of the Egyptians) and
new material (these Israelit
they are sailors). The techn
in Old English, serves as th
valences are bound in the sam
being a translation or paraph
the rarer achievement by wh
native imagination and idio
IV. Puritan Analo
What happened after Wulf

literature any strong claim
between William's triumph
Norman period seems to re
riographic readings of the
several changes in the approac
"Renaissance" in Anglo-Norm
more weight; the concept of
of history appeared; and the
careers was loosened.41 While
treated as yet another "new
in a classical mold: they we
erty."42 These new themes
the cyclical rise and fall of in
Roman theme of the struggl
in the influential writings of
of this shift in the rhetorica
us against any tendency to su
depends on a single narrative
need to see themselves as Is
The Exodus typology was n
and Walzer is right to insis
Protestantism. Its prominen
as early as the reign of Hen
that Henry's Declaration of Supremac

as all myghty god dyd when he dely
from the bondage of Pharao/ and dro
lande that the true Israelites myght
them."45 Whether or not such rhetoric
at all in Henry's rebellion, that rebellion
for the initiation of English settlement
for the further career of the Exodus narrative. The confiscation of
church lands made the state rich, brought power to an ambitio
class of "new men," enabled Henry to build a powerful navy, an
encouraged the displacement of former peasants to the cities, th
meeting "the vital material conditions for English expansion an
colonization" (AI 126). Finally, Protestant anti-Catholic ideology pro
vided a rationale for challenging the Spanish monopoly in the N
World.
In Exodus and Revolution, Walzer cites a fair sampling of Puritan
associations between their own revolution and the Exodus narrative.
But it is not clear how sharply those associations can be distinguishe
from the broader link between Protestant millenialism and Christian
encouragement of the ingathering and conversion of the Jews.
Among at least certain segments of English society, this link was
indeed articulated with the imperial project. The millenium would
entail "the conversion of the Jews and the spreading of Christianity
to all nations ... [along with] the destruction of the Turkish Empire,
which controlled Palestine and under whose rule most Jews lived."''46
Eventually some radicals came to give highest priority to "the reign
of the saints on earth which was to proceed the Second Coming,"
or even to equate the English with the Jews.47 The ingathering of
the Jews was reworked into "the gathering of the Gentiles," thus
serving as another justification for conquest in America.48
Yet the importance of the Anglo-Saxons' memory of an actual
sea crossing in enabling their identification with the Old Testament
Israelites suggests that explicit evocations of the Exodus narrative
would be even more prevalent among English Protestants who had
themselves crossed the ocean to America. There was first the ethnic-
moral analogy, in which Israelites were to Egyptians and to Ca-
naanites as Puritans were to Papists and to Indians. There was also
the geographical analogy, in which Egypt was to England as America
was to Canaan. In the Puritan project of justifying conquest, these
associations complemented the claims that the lands held by Indians
were in fact vacant, and that they had to be settled and civilized
in order to fulfill the Biblical command that man "occupy the earth,
increase, and multiply."''49
The generation of the Ame

range of myths of origin. I
democracy,50 they, like the
to the Exodus story. Like En
employed the idealized imag
before the Norman Conquest,
and recognizing each other's p
they also drew on images of
which, sometimes at least, w
model.52
The conjunction of the Israelite and Anglo-Saxon inspirations is
dramatically displayed in Thomas Jefferson's idea for the seal of
the United States: one side was to bear a representation of the
Israelites crossing the Red Sea, while the other was to show the
Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa, from whom, Jefferson claimed,
"we have the honor of being descended."53 The two associations
complemented each other: lest the Saxon image cause second
thoughts about rebelling against the motherland, the seal would
remind its viewers that they had, after all, left Egypt; lest they
become fearful thinking of themselves in the wilderness, they were
reminded that they were, after all, bred of a pure and warlike
Teutonic race.
This scattered discussion of the links between colonialism and
mythmaking in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England
America should be enough to suggest that the Exodus narra
was used; that it was not necessarily distinct from a Christian k
of messianism; and that it was linked both to the colonial pr
and to visions of a radically egalitarian reorganization of society
England.54 With the substitution of "nineteenth and twentieth-
"seventeenth and eighteenth-" "Europe and Palestine" for "Eng
and America," and "Jewish" for "Christian," that sentence could
describe the modern Zionist movement, to which I now turn.
V. Zionism
Is it possible to determine to what extent the Exodus narr

plays a direct role in Zionist ideology, both informing the articul
Zionist vision and helping that vision gain resonance among
at the turn of this century? Two linked premises shared by
Walzer and Said are that effective analogies can be drawn bet
the Biblical narrative and the history of Zionist settlement, and
this analogy was actively drawn on in shaping Zionist ideolog
seems to me the connection is neither

as immediate as the Walzer-Said deb
The Exodus, as commemorated in d
Passover ritual, is taken to be a fou
First, it is "the birth of a nation."
praises God for delivering to the Jew
the high point at which we truly b
the law on Mount Sinai. On the oth
assignment of lands to individual fam
between the people and the land in a
makes with God as an individual does not.55 The full narrative,
including at one end bondage and at the other the responsibilities
toward "strangers" assumed by the people newly established in their
conquered land, authorizes the separate existence of the nation on
two mutually reinforcing bases: first, the memory of bondage, re-
demption and promise; and second, the empathetic, superior mo-
rality demanded on the basis of this history. This sense of a special
providence and a special responsibility are at the core of Jewish
existence in vastly changing fortunes.
All this-the social compact at Sinai; the detailed, ancient title to
Palestine; the combination of national distinction with a model of
empathy--would seem to suggest Exodus as the blueprint for Zionism
that both Walzer and Said would make of it. Yet to the extent that
this narrative does work as a template for the Zionist project, there
are good indications that its application in Zionism does not com
directly from "traditional" Jewish culture, but from other, mo
diffuse sources.
On the basis of Walzer's account, this question would be difficult
to judge. Walzer fails to cite a single actual evocation of Exodus by
one of the pre-state founding fathers of Labor Zionism, contenting
himself with the general observation that gradualist, liberal, realist
Labor Zionists practiced Exodus politics.56 Said, as I have noted,
makes the contentious but complementary claim that "religious"
notions of divine promise and right to the land were central to
early Zionist discourse, but he does not cite examples either. On
the other hand a representative selection of Theodor Herzl's oc-
casional writings reveals a concentration on the position of Jews in
fin-de-sibcle Europe, not a vision of the past glories on which a
shining future can be modeled.57 On one occasion when Herzl did
cite the Exodus from Egypt, it was only by way of contrasting it to
the movement he envisioned: "We cannot journey out of Mizraim
[Egypt] to-day, in the primitive fashion of ancient times."58
This is not to deny that the Exodus narrative, precisely as enshrined
in daily prayer and in the P

for recruiting Jews from
vision. It was doubtless used
used rhetorically by pre-Zion
Jews, who claimed that the
gland) were "the promised
waiting for a Messiah to co
Against this I submit the h
of Exodus with the Jewish s
of Israel is largely a produ
for example, that as a chi
while watching a documen
nificantly, that film was b
memories and images of th
readily to an association with
restrictions on Jewish imm
latter-day Pharoahs, refusin
The association was popula
novel Exodus, named after o
to Palestine, and through
significant that (perhaps lik
hero of the Exodus film, th
from Zionism, is blond and
as suggested above, for lib
nection" helped to cement th
for the new Israeli nation a
struggle of American blacks
This is not to say that anc
part in the formation of Zio
simply an extraneous, ex p
for all that Walzer emphasiz
with the memory of other
Haggadah, the retelling of
shout of "next year in Jeru
return from exile in Babylo
the Biblical narrative until
Though this is by all mean
tradition hardly finds it inc
of the Exodus narrative.
This latter theme--the loss of a commonwealth and the hopes
for its return-seems more salient in Rabbinic Judaism. In praye
Jews remember and express their gratitude for delivery from Egypt,
but they beseech God for the restoration of David's kingdom and of
the Temple in Jerusalem. The poss

that the model of Babylonian exil
than Egyptian exile and Exodus in
goals and the popular (mostly Eastern
As Yaakov Shavit suggests, for a br
the Hovevei Zion ("Lovers of Zion")
1920s, when the Balfour Declarati
that made by the Persian King Cyrus
the Return to Zion was prominent
that is, in a collective "memory" stim
and a set of circumstances analogo
distant past. Shavit makes several p
prominence of the Return model
that in the pre-state period, buildin
Return to Zion was an indisputabl
Exodus from Egypt) and an outstan
East European Hovevei Zion] explai
the subsequent Return to Zion as
demption by natural means, as op
Egypt by miraculous means. . . . C
case--in fact the only one in historic
what should be expected from diplom
as a historical political method."''
During the 1930s, when Zionists b
policies of the British "Cyrus" and
dependent state became increasing
original Cyrus "revert[ed] to the stat
indeed the model of the Return from
than the Exodus from Egypt in ea
considerable bearing on the debate ove
and self. At least three consequence
First, the ancient images of the Land
Jerusalem) as desolate (Lam. 1:1) wo
colonial settlement in Palestine on the basis that the land there was
desolate now as well. This would be consistent with tropes
fertilizing the wilderness employed in other colonial contexts; f
example, for Methodist missionaries Africa was "a 'wilderness'
be turned into a 'fruitful field.' "63
A corollary of the desolation of the land is that it is implicitly
understood as not being genuinely populated. Much as the Puritans
had justified their taking of Indian land by the claim that it was
vacuum domicilium, perhaps in the imagination of the early European
Zionists, the Palestinians were not so much "Canaanites" as simply
not there.64 This blanking ou

accomplished more through
Zionist discourse which set
enabled a range of exclusions,
than through explicit argume
Such considerations may well
are they intended as a claim t
they are extremely pertinent
of persons are signified, and
and colonialist conflicts.66
Note also that this vision of the land as desolate, barren, abused,
is directly contradictory to the picture of Canaan brought back by
the Israelite spies. In the scene memorialized by the symbol of the
Israeli national tourist board, they return bearing immense clusters
of cultivated grapes (Num. 13:23). The land is already rich and
cultivated, already flowing with all good things. In order to make
this rhetoric work in support of the modern Zionist project, the
sequence had to be reversed: in 1944 Senator Bennett Clark of
Missouri described the Jewish immigrants as having "converted a
barren land into a literal Biblical land of 'milk and honey.' "67 While
the quote shows how easily the two narrative models could be mixed,
the emphasis is certainly on the right to possess barren land through
working it, rather than on a divinely-mandated conquest.
Second, the Zionist settling effort really was a "return," at least
in imagination. This is attested to by the fact that names were already
there in the lexicon: some of these names were still in use, some
echoed through Arabic variants, some were contained in Jewish
texts and could be plausibly reattached to new particular locales.
The whole phenomenon represented a close overlay of the legendary
and the referential: it is impossible simply to say that people came
in and assigned Biblical names as if they were Israelites, and it is
also impossible simply to say that they started using Biblical names
again.6s Unlike Australia, for example, where European explorers
and settlers had to transform space that to them was initially "raw"
into space that was marked by and within their culture, Palestine
was already an "occupied territory of the Jewish imagination."''69
Third, the Exodus narrative and the Babylonian exile and return
narrative differ significantly in terms of the relationships between
Israelites and empire obtaining at the end of the respective stories.
The Exodus, of course, represents a complete divorce from the
oppressor, whereas later there is a complex and in many ways
benevolent continuing relationship with the Babylonians. An em-
phasis on the latter, then, would foster the simultaneous idea of
Zionism as a colonizing mission an

entire popular Zionist effort of mas
ing the land and sending settlers
majority of nonsettler Jews, also fi
While Walzer tries, inter alia, to associate liberal Zionism with a
democratic "Western" tradition via the Exodus narrative, the Baby-
lonian analogy thus seems closer to the ambivalent attitude Israelis
bear toward the West. On the one hand, Israel is a frontier, an
outpost along a "narrow coastal strip," the "only democracy in the
Middle East." On the other hand, this very association with "Western"
values allows liberal Zionists to be retrospectively (and fairly effec-
tively) tarred as "Hellenizers" by the right-wing territorial maximalists
whom Walzer opposes. These demagogues are thereby able to elab-
orate a sort of antiliberal, "anticolonial" Zionist counterdiscourse,
which is increasingly attractive to many Israelis as the hollowness
of Labor Zionism sets in.71
Is it possible to construct a relation between Israeli Jewish identity
and the Jewish textual tradition which transcends the weakness of
Labor Zionism and the irresponsible chauvinism of Gush Emunim?
Reading secularism or chauvinism back through the tradition will
hardly serve as a basis for accomplishing that task. Rather we should
learn both to see more richly the range of both associations and
exclusions which make up Israeli identity, and to think beyond the
"Western" polarizations of secularism and fundamentalism. By way
of conclusion, I will suggest a few tentative steps toward grounding
the second of these two tasks.
VI. Decolonizing Hermeneutics

What are we to make of my breathless overview of the histor
of Exodus-reading? If I have indeed identified weaknesses in Walzer
and Said's political hermeneutics, what alternatives are or could
available?
I hope it is clear that the Exodus narrative is susceptible to both
colonizing and liberationist readings, that the two variations are not
often identified as such and that they are frequently mingled in
the minds of readers. All of these uses represent one aspect of the
heritage of modern politics, in a complex sense. Exodus was inherited
by the shapers of modern imperialism and liberationism, used by
many in their own projects, and thereby passed on as their heritage
to us. There is a useful distinction to be made, therefore, between
our ability to account for the role of Exodus (or any other preexisting
narrative complex) in the ide

and our own interaction with that text as we have received it.
The continuing power of this imperial heritage-its potential f
continued or innovative ideological effectiveness--is an open qu
tion, especially in view of the claims made recently for the "de
of master narratives" such as the Biblical stories of oppressio
liberation and conquest, or of exile and restoration.7" Since we
simultaneously critics and producers of ideology, the question
both descriptive and prescriptive. Will the grand narratives contin
to sway large numbers of people? Should we be engaging them
authoritative? The problem may in fact be with the trope of narrat
shared by large numbers of people, encompassing much histo
and an inexhaustible store of potential readings, as "master" n
ratives, since the qualifier itself implies imperial domination.
There is a different approach to the political history of reading:
the recuperation of earlier "anti-imperialist," or at least anamnest
reading strategies. Thus, for example, Daniel Boyarin's recent b
on Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash examines the Rabbi
readings of the Exodus narrative in the centuries following the fi
Roman destruction of the Jewish commonwealth. In such a situati
textual tradition and language in general are made to bear perh
an even greater weight than when a collective enjoys temporal powe
Boyarin's reading of the rabbis on Exodus is free of dichotomi
between "secular" and "sacred," or between Exodus-as-conquest a
Exodus-as-liberation. By treating language as part of the mate
world and part of history, he escapes the Hobson's choice of decid
whether narrative is autonomously effective or merely available t
political rhetoric, much as critical theory seems finally to have mov
beyond the compulsion to declare certain aspects of our world
merely reflective of others which, as certain Marxists used to say
are "determinant in the last instance."
Furthermore, Boyarin understands the rabbis themselves as having
treated language as that part of the world given by God to humanit
in order to make sense of the world. For that reason, as a "religious
obligation the rabbis were bound to stretch language to its utmost,
to make it reveal as many of its potential meanings as possible. The
midrash does not aim to discover the "true" meaning of the text
on the contrary, "the cumulative effect of the midrash as compiled
is to focus on the ambiguity and the possibilities of making meanin
out of it."73
A striking example of this approach pertains to the references
in the Bible to the Israelites "murmuring" in the desert. According
to Walzer, who pays relatively close attention to these references,
"The conflict . . . is between the m

idealism of their leaders, or it is be
moment and the promise of the fut
formulations, and one can find th
of ways in the rabbinic literature, u
unsympathetic to the people and
Boyarin closely traces the rabbis
muring and of subsequent verses,
pilation called the Mekilta. The fir
"And the whole congregation of I
seems like a pejorative description o
to contrasting interpretations by
represents as consistently evaluating
Yehoshua, who tends throughout t
generation in the wilderness, does h
Elazar, who consistently denigrate
activates the pejorative connotatio
even enhances them dramatically" (I
reads, "And the Lord said to Mos
Heaven for you." Rabbi Yehoshua
probably agree is its commonsens
goodwill. Rabbi Elazar, however, str
tend that "'He says "hereby" only
ancestors' " (quoted I 72).
What is going on here? Have Rab
for reasons extrinsic to the text, al
the generation in the wilderness, an
into their preconceived molds? On
that it is fallacious to assume that t
"transcript" of exactly what two hi
suggests, the Mekilta itself has mold
two possible, antithetical readings co
one depicting the Israelites as fai
faithful and bold: "the midrash s
ancient reader who perceives ambi
with various dialectical possibilities f
contributing to but not exhaustin
the Mekilta does not speak discurs
guage about the ambiguity of the
and inner dialogue of the biblical
dialogue of its own" (I 79).
This approach to the politics of rea
claims to share with the rabbis, bear
the idea of language in and a

cases of readers interacting
shape techniques for narra
ample room for contentious
than either claiming that on
speak of only one trend a
renews the potential of cr
with the tradition beyond t
Most important, because it
textual authority and interpr
answer to Said's question wh
yourself with Canaanites w
one is equipped to read, t
interpretations one is able
to view "belonging" as a m
able one is to work through
practice.
A legitimate objection can s
and detailed interaction wi
avoid reification of the "eth
it still entails a common set
to an authoritative tradition. Furthermore, no matter how difficult
philologic and interpretive work on midrashic or Anglo-Saxon texts
may be, and no matter how indispensable such work may be for
discussions of text as ideology, it does not present the same challenges
as the attempt to articulate ancient models with current political
situations. Is a form of "midrashic dialogism" possible beyond the
boundaries of a tightly-knit hermeneutic/political tradition? Could
it possibly be an intercultural model? Though I might be tempted
to cast Said as "Reb Edward" and Walzer as "Reb Michael," to do
so now would both neutralize the complex power-relations implicated
in their debate, and fictionalize the suffering of Palestinians for
whom Said wishes to speak.-The image of relatively comradely
interpretive dialogues preserved in the midrash may be one ideal
but it cannot serve as a standard for judging debates in the present.74
I believe that, beyond and encompassing both Walzer's "belonging
to the tradition" and Said's "embattled intellectual" stance, we are
necessarily engaged in a search for models of interpretation which
are translatable across cultural boundaries. What this search demands
I would not call enlightenment, not least because viewing our an
cestors as having been in darkness constitutes much of the problem.
We do need to struggle for social conditions which will permit u
to realize, much more than we have until now, the innate ability of
human beings to operate within a gr

and which will "authorize" a much l
group effectively to create culture
goal of expanding our peoples' capacity
ing, and understanding is inherently
humane goals which give the term "
has. Stated at this level of generalit
of falling back into a liberal unive
cultural differences, but the world sys
and deprivations which is still very
for models of intercultural and conte
sible procedure is one which maint
importance of each human life and
erative power of our particular narrat
NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH
NOTES
1 Jonathan Boyarin, "Palestine and Jewish History," Working Papers of the

Studies of Social Change, No. 92 (1989); rpt. in my Storm from Paradise: Th
Jewish Memory (Minneapolis, 1992), p. 124.
2 One reason why I will not even pretend to deal here with what "really
during the Biblical period, except to quote a recent assertion in the New
of "a growing consensus among Egyptologists, Biblical scholars and arch
that most of the early Israelites were Canaanites" (John Noble Wilford, "Ba
on Egyptian Temple May Be Earliest View of Israelites," New York Time
1990, Cl ff.). According to Sari Nusseibeh, on the other hand, "present-day
Arabs regard Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, etc. [along with more recen
migrants], as their ancestors" (Sari Nusseibeh, "Letter to the Editor," Ne
33, no. 4 [Apr. 1990], p. 5). One conclusion that might be drawn, to p
Michael Walzer, is that whoever you are, you're probably a Canaanite.
Regarding the relation between the history of Exodus and the current Pa
Israeli conflict, Nusseibeh justly writes that "while one can certainly respect
people for its astute self-consciousness and continuity, such respect cannot
be used as grounds for disinheriting the wave after wave of political man
of the non-Jewish Arab communities of Palestine, whether through den
their rightful historical role, of their rightful contemporary claims."
3 David Lloyd, "Kant's Examples," Representations, 28 (1989), 36.
4 This notion of a trajectory, rather than a hermeneutic circle or a line of
is analogously related to a critique of the reified notion of "cyclical" ver
conceptions of history to which I refer below.
5 The folklorist Yael Zerubavel, whose work analyzes the careers of Israe
myths (Masada, Bar Kochba, Tel Hai), emphasizes the importance of und
how the older legend is "spliced" for understanding the politics of its s
applications (Yael Zerubavel, "The Politics of Interpretation: Tel Hai
Collective Memory," Association for Jewish Studies Review, 16, nos. 1 an
and Fall 1991], 133-60). This will be a critical point in my discussion bel
contemporary Exodus debate. Zer

time in Israeli history classrooms.
in the relation between literature
to the mechanisms by which narr
gain social authority.
6 Not that God's promise and a hi
the prior inhabitants of Canaan to
in the Old Testament; William D. Davies has listed the traces of Biblical "bad
conscience" concerning the former-day Palestine question (William D. Davies, The
Territorial Dimension of Judaism [Berkeley, 1982], pp. 15-16). Robert Cohn ("Israe
and Sacred Space," Continuum, 1 [1990], 4-14) has detailed various qualifications of
God's promise of the Land to the people of Israel: in Genesis, the reminder tha
"The Canaanites were then in the land" (Genesis 12:6); in Leviticus 18 and 22,
explanations that the Canaanites were expelled because of sexual perversions, and
warnings that Israel will suffer a similar fate if it does not obey God's law; in
Deuteronomy, the reminder that not only for Israel has God driven out prior
inhabitants to make room for newcomers (Deut. 2:10-12, 20-23). Cohn sees "a steady
transformation in the narrative of the Torah from God's unqualified promise of a
homeland to God's conditional offer of a holy land" (p. 14). He ties this to the
situation in Babylonian Exile of the Torah's final redactors, "painfully aware that,
like the Canaanites before them, they too had been dispossessed," and anticipating
"their own return to a homeland where one could never be quite at home" (p. 14).
7 See references cited in Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the
Rise of the Modern World (Philadelphia, 1985), p. 141, n. 437.
8 Robert Thornton assures me that the Exodus narrative has been very richly
employed in South African history, both by colonialists and Africans. Currently it
is used by African independence churches; Chief Buthelezi employs the Book of
Joshua to frame his claim to recreate Chaka Zulu's state. The theme of crossing
rivers is also important in South African historical geography. Thornton concludes
that the Bible is in fact the South African master narrative: "The question is who
gets to be the Israelites" (personal communication, Shelby Collum Davis Center,
October 1990).
9 Frederick W. Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness
(New Brunswick, N.J., 1983), p. 45.
10 See Turner, p. 43. This distinction has a substantial prehistory, which it would
be helpful to have documented. The classic discussion of "cyclical" conceptions of
time is, of course, Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return
(New York, 1959). A rather more dialectical account, emphasizing the role of
astronomy in the shaping of early civilizations' conceptions of time, is contained in
Giorgio de Santillana and Herta von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill (1969; rpt. Boston,
1977). Specifically regarding the ancient Israelites, for a corrective account empha-
sizing homologies between the human body and the "natural" world in the Jewish
Bible, see Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism (Bloomington, Ind., 1990).
11 William D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial
Doctrine (Berkeley, 1974), p. 371.
12 Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses
of Conquest (New York, 1990), p. 6; hereafter cited in text as AI.
13 Intriguingly, Williams derives "[t]he basic idea of the Church as a universal
body" in part from the Pauline notion of the mystical body of Christ, "'whether we
are Jews or Greeks, whether we are slaves or freemen' " (AI p. 15). In other words,
the sources of this universalist, organicist, hierarchical metaphor are to be found,
as Davies noted in the above-cited passage,

quick spread of "Christianity" among non-
14 I must stress that I am talking about Z
that I am thinking primarily of Labor Zio
gladly hired inexpensive Palestinian labore
Territories into the Israeli economy has
"underclass" labor to the preexisting po
Nevertheless, the hiring of Palestinians in
Labor Zionists on both pragmatic and ideol
Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestin
and the presence of the new Palestinian unde
to the undermining of Labor Zionist hegem
15 See Homi K. Bhabha, "Introduction: N
Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New Yor
16 See Uri Eisenzweig, Territoires occupis d
17 Martin Thom, "Tribes within Nations
of Modern France," in Nation and Narra
exception that proves the rule here. A gre
his position as a Palestinian exile and attem
that situation. Yet with a few exceptions
Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its J
1-35), those who draw on his model analys
of Palestine/Israel.
18 Gershon Shafir, citing his colleague Baruch Kimmerling, puts it this way: "whereas
Israelis tend to focus on the non-colonialist reasons and motivations for their
immigration to Palestine, Arabs directed their attention to its results. . .
outset, Zionism was a variety of Eastern European nationalism, that is, an
movement in search of a state. But at the other end of the journey it may
more fruitfully as a late instance of European overseas expansion, which
taking place from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries" (Shafir, La
and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, pp. xiv, 8). I'm not sure I wo
endorse this formula; it still smacks of apologetics, especially since Shafir
cites explicitly colonialist proposals for Jewish development in Palestine (p
But it does represent an attempt at a just nuance that is rare in writing on P
Israel.
19 Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, 1985); hereafter cited in text
as ER.
20 See Joseph A. Galdon, Typology and Seventeenth-Century Literature (The H

1975).
21 Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. vii.
22 Edward Said, "Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading,"
Grand Street, 5, no. 2 (Winter 1986), 86-106, hereafter cited in text as MW; rpt. in
Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question, ed. Edward Said
and Christopher Hitchins (New York, 1988), pp. 161-78.
23 Two caveats are called for here: first, nowhere do I mean to suggest that the
meanings of Exodus, whether ancient or contemporary, are only those discussed in
this paper. Second, Gayatri Spivak points out that in the Walzer-Said debate, and
despite Said's protests, Exodus remains the hegemonic narrative of oppression and
liberation, the narrative that must first be responded to. She suggests, in effect, that
remaining within this framework and debating it back and forth, as Walzer, Said,
and I do, perpetuates and reinforces the colonial crowding out of nonmonotheistic
or even non-narrative discourses

nication, Shelby Collum Davis Cen
24 Lawrence Levine, Black Culture
25 "Immigration to the United S
because it was a mass exodus, unlike
Zion" (Yaacov Shavit, "Cyrus Kin
Neglected Memory," History and M
26 See "Statement by the Lubbavi
Zionism," in Zionism Reconsidered: T
(New York, 1970), pp. 11-18.
27 In 1896, Herzl asked, "Shall we
We will take what is given us and w
Herzl, "A Solution of the Jewish Q
Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinh
Congress, of course, settled decis
talking about the "origins" of Zion
does not arrive full-blown out of
about how traditional associations w
history" of Jewish colonization.
28 See Regina S. Sharif, Non-Jewis
1983).
29 The debate between Walzer and Said has received critical attention from Mark
Krupnick in "Edward Said: Discourse and Palestinian Rage," Tikkun, 4, no. 6 (1
21-25. My responses to Krupnik, some of which are elaborated here, can be f
in my letter to the same journal ("Letter to the editor," Tikkun, 5, no. 3 [19
ff.). Elissa Sampson's essay on the debate focuses more directly than this pap
critical issues of contemporary Zionist tendencies and their understanding of
tinians (Elissa Sampson, "Exodus and Empire," unpublished seminar paper,
School for Social Research [1990]).
30 In an essay on the general switch from the biblicism of the "saints" t
Romanism of the Royalists in the second half of the seventeenth century, S
Zwicker offers some very acute insights on this dialectic: "Royalist vindication reclai
materials that Puritans had once used to celebrate their triumphs; but Royalist
looked harshly and derisively at Puritan scripturalism. . . . The combinati
Puritan demise and Royalist vindication complicated the potential for Scriptu
a social and political language, but eventually such complication also underm
its authority, its capacity to sustain praise and the burden of a national life imag
in its terms" (Steven N. Zwicker, "England, Israel, and the Triumph of R
Virtue," in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, ed. Ric
H. Popkin [Leiden, 1988], p. 41).
31 For an essay which does, in my opinion, approach that synthesis, alth
focusing on the question of state power versus moral community in the Isra
kingdoms, see Harry Berger, "The Lie of the Land: The Text Beyond Cana
Representations, 25 (1989), 119-38.
32 See Michael Walzer, "Letter to the Editor," Grand Street, 5, no. 4 (Summer
248; also Edward Said, "Reply to Michael Walzer," Grand Street, 5, no. 4 (Sum
1986), 253.
33 Said, "Reply to Michael Walzer," 253.
34 David Harlan cites Walzer's book approvingly as an example of historiogra
free from the illusions of contextualism. Harlan describes Exodus and Revolution as
"a history of meaning rather than a history of the production and transmission of
meaning" (David Harlan, "Intellectual History a

Historical Review, 94 [1989], 606). Since Harl
rarified history of ideas, and strongly quest
meanings, it is hard to see what this can me
repertoire of putative past meanings for the
35 The entire body of reader-response critic
be Hans Robert Jauss's Toward an Aesthetic of
relevant here.
36 See Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to
Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York, 1966), p. 23 ff.
37 See Charles Stinson, "'Northernmost Israel': England, the Old Testament and
the Hebraic 'Veritas' as Seen by Bede and Roger Bacon," in Hebrew and the Bible in
America: The First Two Centuries, ed. Shalom Goldman (forthcoming, Univ. Press of
New England). For the medieval period as well, a comparative account of Exodus
readings is wanted. Beryl Smalley pointed out decades ago, for instance, that "the
Frisians, comparing themselves to the chosen people, inverted the order of events
in their history, so as to get a closer correspondence with the Old Testament. This
group of Frisian chronicles supplies an extreme example of the tendency to pour
one's material into a traditional mold. In the Middle Ages tradition began with the
story of Creation as it is told in the book of Genesis" (Beryl Smalley, The Study of
the Bible in the Middle Ages [1940; rpt. Notre Dame, 1964], pp. xi-xii).
It should be said that I am focusing on England here not only because the Exodus
seems to have played an extraordinary role in its self-imagining over the course of
centuries, but also because of the particular importance of the English heritage both
for the history of Zionism and the history of the United States, and because England's
was the preeminent modern world empire.
38 Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven,
1989), p. 2; hereafter cited in text as MM.
39 Shades of Exodus and Revolution! On the other hand, unlike Walzer's fearful
Israelites, "the Israelites of the Old English poem seem unmarked by enslavement
in Egypt" (MM, p. 79).
40 See Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (Chicago, 1989).
41 Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain, p. 126.
42 Hanning, p. 128.
43 See Hanning, p. 128; see also R. William Leckie, Jr., The Passage of Dominion:
Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Periodization of Insular History in the Twelfth Century
(Toronto, 1981).
44 See Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 850-1066
(Berkeley, 1988).
45 William Turner, The Huntyng and Fyndying Out of the Romish Foxe (Basle, 1534),
p. 35; quoted in Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World,
p. 111.
46 Christopher Hill, "Till the Conversion of the Jews," in his The Collected Essays,
Vol. II (Brighton, 1986), p. 271.
47 Hill, p. 277. Nabil Mattar ["Protestantism, Palestine, and Partisan Scholarship,"
Journal of Palestine Studies, 18, no. 4 (1989), 52-70] provides important documentation
of anti-Restorationist strands in British Protestant theology, but his rhetoric is con-
fusing. His contention--directed especially against Barbara Tuchman's The Bible and
the Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York, 1956) -is
that previous scholarship has ignored this anti-Restorationist tradition because of
Zionist bias. The claim is somewhat undercut by his own citation of Sharif [Non-
Jewish Zionism], a clearly anti-Zionis

as a motivation of Zionism quite se
Mattar's sweeping claim that all Br
Palestine is linked to the vision of Jew
at least this claim is disputed by on
H. Popkin, "Introduction," in Millena
Thought, pp. 1-11). Mattar further
all non-Jewish Zionism is motivated
48 Hill, p. 278. Considerably later
Christianity, and the reign of Alfr
called Christian Policy the Salvation o
the restoration of what its author con
societies of those three periods (see
Puritanism and Revolution [1958; rp
49 Chester E. Eisinger, "The Purit
Institute Historical Collections, LXXX
century, began to take a fresh critic
he too seemed really to perceive the
to one of his books evokes yet anot
To bring into conjunction a minute ev
one: it was given to Edward Gibbon t
Rome, and to have thrust upon him t
listening to barefooted friars chanting
given to me, equally disconsolate on th
upon me the mission of expounding w
United States, while supervising, in th
oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wil
Wilderness [Cambridge, Mass., 1956], p.
The passage shows clearly how the

sense of being "in the tradition"--en
raphy. Myra Jehlen, in the course of
out that Miller continued to see Ame
of course it was not. (See Myra Jehlen
and the Continent [Cambridge, Mas
Native American presence, in this s
Palestinians, shows how difficult it
and historiography. On American i
in the wilderness," see William V. S
Hypothesis: The American Appropr
(1990), 241-43.
50 See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1965).
51 Williams analyzes Jefferson's "radical mythology" partly in terms of his and
other colonial businessmen's argument against the Crown for the right to speculate
freely in land purchased from the Indians (AI pp. 266 ff.).
52 Hill, "The Norman Yoke," p. 62.
53 Quoted in MM p. 1.
54 Walzer asserts that "Among the English Puritans, for example, it is possible to
make out two groups of ministers, the one committed to what I want to call Exodus
politics, expounding the Sinai covenant, the other committed to (or at least exper-
imenting with) apocalyptic and millennialist politics, expounding the Abrahamic
covenant" (ER, pp. 78-79). Walzer obviously knows infinitely more about the subject
than I do, but without documentation, I cannot take him on faith. To sustain the
distinction we would need to be shown texts by thinkers explicitly devoted to secularism
which cite the Exodus model, along with avowedly "religious" thinkers citing messianic
visions without human agency. If these correlations obtain at all, I imagine it would
be where political considerations dictate them. Obviously the one Walzer has in mind
is the Zionist movement today, but unfortunately for his thesis, right-wing, "religious"
Zionists know exactly what God expects them to do to hasten the Messiah's coming.
55 Davies, The Territorial Dimension of Judaism, pp. 62, 71.
56 Walzer does note that "A few socialists, like David Ben-Gurion, still entertained
messianic hopes" (ER, p. 138). Ben-Gurion remains such a towering figure in Zionist
history that this acknowledgment might at least have given Walzer pause.
57 See Theodor Herzl, Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses, vol. I (New York, 1973).
58 Herzl, "A Solution of the Jewish Question," p. 424.
59 As the Reform Rabbinical Conference, meeting in Frankfurt in 1845, resolved,
"The messianic idea should receive prominent mention in our prayers, but all petitions
for our return to the land of our fathers and for the restoration of the Jewish state
should be eliminated from the liturgy" (conference resolution, quoted in The Jew in
the Modern World, p. 165; see also Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of
the Reform Movement in Judaism [New York, 1988], p. 122).
60 In modern, non-Jewish usages of the Biblical narrative, the two exiles are if
anything less distinct. For example, there is the Rastafarian Bob Marley's chant which
proclaims, "Exodus . . . we're leaving Babylon." The Exodus model of liberation
and mass movement is certainly more dramatic a model than the gradual and partial
return from Babylon. Yet the Rastafarians focus on Babylon as a model of captivity,
partly because of its reputation for corruption and partly because it is more explicitly
depicted as a place of Exile, such as in Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon").
61 Yaacov Shavit, "Cyrus King of Persia and the Return to Zion," 68-72.
62 Shavit, p. 62.
63 Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a
South African People (Chicago, 1985), p. 138.
64 Herzl described Zionism as "a modest demand which does not jeopardize or
injure anyone's rights" (Zionist Writings, p. 145). Not the rights of any Europeans,
at least; there's the rub. Compare Edward Said's analysis of Algerian Arabs as an
inert, mute, ahistorical presence in the novels of Camus (Edward Said, "Narrative,
Geography and Interpretation," New Left Review, 180 [1990], 81-99).
Clearly the place of Palestinian Arabs in the imagination of Zionists shifts according
to both spatial and temporal coordinates. Its possible formulations differed, for a
first approximation, according to whether the land was being imagined from Europe,
being settled by colonists (in which case, as noted above, Zionist workers and Zionist
planters often saw Palestinians quite differently), or constituted as the possession of
a sovereign "Jewish state."
Against my argument that the Babylonian model fits with the notion of an "empty
land," Shavit claims as one of the situational analogies between the ancient Return
and modern Zionism the "struggle with the 'people of the land' (the Arabs) who
opposed the national revival" (Shavit, "Cyrus King of Persia and the Return to Zion,"
p. 56). Unfortunately Shavit does not cite any such rhetorical analogies made by
modern Zionists. The "people of the land" at the time of the return from Babylon
were "the Arabians, and the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites [who, when they] heard
that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem went forward, then they were very
wroth; and they conspired all of them together to come and fight against Jerusalem,
and to cause confusion therein [but to no avail]" (Neh. 4:1).
65 See Myron Aronoff, "The Origins

Under Stress: Cultural and Institut
Diamond (forthcoming).
66 It is no revelation to note that t
is a tortured one. Anything like a
start by making certain discrimina
between "Western" and "Eastern" Z
notions of identity and progress. It
from the perception of Zionism a
preserving the Jewish people (see E
in the Early Zionist Movement (Phila
67 Senator Bennett C. Clark, speech
Mar. 1944; quoted in Sharif, Non-Jew
68 See Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts
69 Eisenzweig, Territoires occupis de
70 Baruch Kimmerling has an insig
the 700,000 Jewish National Fund
linkage was formed between land r
the Jewish-Arab conflict, and partici
and in the Diaspora. This linkage was
its significance, but it was part of a
out of as many aspects of the Jewish
'positive' terms unconnected with J
the symbolic level; c) making use of
to implant these symbols" (Baruch Ki
p. 76). On the other hand, when Ki
the settlers related to the local Ar
acknowledge them does not figure o
71 Shavit, citing the veteran right
today the image of Cyrus and th
foreign king are placed in oppositio
of the land in ancient times or in
King of Persia and the Return to Z
72 See Jean-FranCois Lyotard, The Po
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984
73 Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality a
58; hereafter cited in text as I.
74 Nor should we assume that all the rabbis' debates were as calmly recollective
of their own past as the record might sometimes lead us to believe. We should bear
in mind that they worked under conditions of Roman rule or Babylonian exile which
were considerably analogous to the situation of the Palestinians today. There were
doubtless bitter schisms and crises of communication in their ranks, motivated by
political pressures and also by the range of ego anxieties that "Western" men, then
as now, beyond their differences, are prey to.

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Reading Exodus into History

Author(s): Jonathan Boyarin

N AN EARLIER PAPER on the shifting significance of Palestine as

New Literary History, 1992, 23: 523-554

set, nor yet solely in the seri

Such a lack lends itself to wild claim

[I]t was the Israelites who established mon

Now this statement is astonishing, if hardly unprecedented. In

the "warrant for genocide" l

in the universalist discourse of the medieval church. First of all,

unaware of the ways in whic

II. The Said-Walzer Debate

Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution is both a cultural inter-

explicitly announces his intention

dentious as those he accuses

opponents, along with the theme of J

question of Palestine in typ

meaning is delivery from sin).""3

III. Creating the A

One important lesson is contained in Howe's discussions of in-

read the Aeneid, since "a cultural my

ample in Howe's analysis are

IV. Puritan Analo

What happened after Wulf

that Henry's Declaration of Supremac

The generation of the Ame

Is it possible to determine to what extent the Exodus narr

seems to me the connection is neither

in daily prayer and in the P

the Temple in Jerusalem. The poss

not there.64 This blanking ou

Zionism as a colonizing mission an

VI. Decolonizing Hermeneutics

narrative complex) in the ide

"The conflict . . . is between the m

the idea of language in and a

human beings to operate within a gr

NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

1 Jonathan Boyarin, "Palestine and Jewish History," Working Papers of the

contemporary Exodus debate. Zer

as Davies noted in the above-cited passage,

20 See Joseph A. Galdon, Typology and Seventeenth-Century Literature (The H

or even non-narrative discourses

meaning" (David Harlan, "Intellectual History a

Jewish Zionism], a clearly anti-Zionis

The passage shows clearly how the

65 See Myron Aronoff, "The Origins

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