SOURCE: Boyarin, Jonathan. “Reading Exodus into History.” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 23, no. 3 (summer 1992): 523-54.

[In the following essay, Boyarin explores the relationship between textual tradition and Jewish identity as it relates to Exodus.]

I. INTRODUCTION

In 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 postmodern ideal of Diaspora?”¹ 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 Christian 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 the 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 understood solely as pertaining to the time in which it purports to be set, nor yet solely in the series of new presents in which it is taken up as a model.² Rather it “is suspended between its own age and a later one.”³ Far from exhausting itself, it reacquires its force (and it will be central to my argument that its force is multivalent) in its repeated invocations. I intend, therefore, to trace out a trajectory of readings linking source texts, the ways they have been used and interpreted in the meantime, and the ways they are or can be used and interpreted now. This differs from the established notion of a “hermeneutic circle” linking only a given reader and a given text as sources and interpreters of each other, because it acknowledges the shaping force of a history of readings on the latest in their sequence.⁴ At no present moment are the potential readings of a text fully determined by its previous readings; but the range of plausible readings, of new directions of meaning, is constrained by the work the text has been used for in the past. This is what I mean by a trajectory.

The ancient tale of Israelites, Egyptians, and Canaanites resonates with a long series of historical narratives of conquest and of liberation. As I will attempt to show in the next section, the multiplicity of readings the text affords surpasses any attempt to contain that tale within the modern world-system model of imperial, adventurist conquest versus autochthonous liberation. By the end of the essay, in fact, I hope to convince the reader that Exodus is not as anomalous against that model as we might think at first. Instead I will suggest that European culture contains a discontinuous “tradition” of narratives of oppression, flight, and subsequent conquest. Some of these include all three terms—liberation, migration, and the establishment of a new (and “pure”) homeland. Others focus on migration and conquest.⁵ In these latter cases, lacking the prior history of covenant and oppression, it would be worthwhile to contrast whatever moral justification might appear for that divine one-sidedness with the sequence of divine promise-servitude-covenant in the Bible.⁶

In order fully to see the hermeneutic trajectory of Old Testament reading, we would, of course, need a much more sophisticated comparative ethnography of Biblical literacy and interpretation. Good work on the typological uses of the Bible in early British America has been done.⁷ Two very recent studies—one concerning the Rabbinic midrash literature, the other dealing with the Anglo-Saxons—will ground two of the sections of this paper. However, as far as I know, we still lack, for example, a comparative study of the workings of the Exodus model in British America and South Africa, or of the Biblical sources employed in the rationalizations of Catholic and Protestant imperialisms.⁸

Such a lack lends itself to wild claims on one hand and apologetics on the other. Perhaps because the uses of the Old Testament narrative are so prevalent in European cultural history, and so often enlisted in the justification of colonizing missions, Exodus and the Biblical narrative in general have sometimes been used to identify the Jewish origins of Western “dominationism.” Thus in his book Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, Frederick W. Turner locates the origins of intolerance in Israelite monotheism:

[I]t was the Israelites who established monotheism in the spiritual geography of humankind. And with it came the terrible concomitants of intolerance and commandments to destroy the sacred items of others (Exodus 23:23-24; 34:13-16) and to “utterly destroy” polytheistic peoples wherever encountered … the conception of genocide is foreign to polytheistic cultures. But the distinctions raised in the covenant between religion and idolatry are like some visitation of the khamsin to wilderness peoples as yet unsuspected, dark clouds over Africa, the Americas, the Far East, until finally even the remotest islands and jungle enclaves are struck by fire and sword and by the subtler weapon of conversion-by-ridicule

(Deuteronomy 2:34; 7:2; 20:16-18, Joshua 6:17-21).⁹

Now this statement is astonishing, if hardly unprecedented. In its sweepingly simplistic equation of polytheism and pluralism on one hand, monotheism and chauvinism on the other, it suggests that the Jews (like some irresistible Oriental force of nature, an evil wind) are ultimately responsible for all the evils of colonialism. Even more (though Turner does not write this, and perhaps if it had crossed his mind he would have been more cautious), it implies that the Jews, as inventors of genocide, are ultimately responsible for getting themselves killed by the Nazis! The monotheist-polytheist dichotomy is matched, in Turner's account, by a dichotomy between primitive, mythological, cyclical conceptions, and closeness to nature on one hand, and Israelite, historical linearism, and hostility to nature on the other.¹⁰ A recent Jewish celebrant of the Exodus narrative discussed in the next section unwittingly walks into Turner's trap, insisting on the “linear” as opposed to “cyclical” character of 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 encountered.” 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” leads him to overlook this critical difference between a strictly local, highly particular account of intolerance and the modern Western European “universalist” propensity to dominate weaker peoples everywhere encountered, in the name of Christ or progress. If I may be allowed a brief totalization of my own, the Jewish Biblical text in sum constitutes a redemption narrative of partially global pretensions, but with precise ethnic and territorially based referents. “Mature” Christianity—that is, Christianity once it has become an imperial religion and is clearly no longer a Jewish sect—constitutes rather a deterritorialized, universalized, allegorized narrative of spiritual redemption. This difference is not an ontological one between the respective “essences” of Judaism and Christianity, but a historical one grounded in the ideological paradoxes of ancient nationhood and ancient imperialism. Thus our focus turns for a moment toward the earliest Jewish-Christian period, and toward a less deterministic articulation than Turner's of the changes in relations among land, ethnicity, and tolerance from the Old Testament to the modern period. I will content myself here with citing W. D. Davies's telling point that “One of the startling aspects of early Christianity is that, at a very early date, Gentiles, for whom the question of the land could not possess the interest that it had for Jewish Christians, soon became the majority.”¹¹ Because Gentile converts to Christianity did not share the deep attachment to the Land of Israel that Jewish Christians had been born with, Christianity largely dropped those elements of Judaism which were inconsistent with its increasingly catholic character. Davies suggests, in effect, that aspects of the early social history of Christianity caught it ideologically off its guard. For the first few centuries, when Christianity was spreading among an ethnically varied multitude throughout the late Roman Empire, the links between covenantal destiny and promised lands were hardly relevant.

I will discuss some examples of how, starting a few centuries later and at various points thereafter, the model of a covenantal relation between a given people and a given land was integrated into Christian self-understandings. When this happened, it did not represent the workings of an autonomous logic contained in a text (as Turner would have it), but the employment and reshaping of an authoritative 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.”¹² For Williams, the crucial innovation 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 violation 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 throughout 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.¹³ The basic ways of dealing with the natives in both the Biblical conquest narrative and, mutatis mutandis, Zionist ideology¹⁴—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 “informed 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 Williams, it is hardly surprising that there is a confusion about the “discourses of conquest” concerning Palestine and Israel. The links among knowledge, culture, and power pertinent to this region, compared to places such as the Indian subcontinent or Latin America, seem relatively underdeveloped in contemporary cultural studies. Thus in his introduction to a recent collection on Nation and Narration (1990), Homi Bhabha appropriately apologizes for the failure to include considerations of Palestinian national culture.¹⁵ Yet he seems unaware of the ways in which modern Hebrew and Yiddish fiction were critical to the formulation of Jewish nationalism, including Zionism;¹⁶ and as vital as the image of the Jewish Other was to the culture of nineteenth-century European nationalism, there is only one passing reference to anti-Semitism in the entire collection.¹⁷

I attribute this underdevelopment (of which Bhabha's collection is only a recent and convenient example) at least in part to a failure to articulate the critique of anti-Semitism with the critique of imperialism. Even the most careful and thoughtful criticism tends to slide in one of two directions. Either overwhelming horror at centuries of anti-Semitism and the culminating genocide leads to the celebration of Israel as a redemptive movement of national liberation; or anger at the denial of independence to Palestinians results in a slighting of the crucial struggle for Jewish freedom in modern Europe. To put it another way, since (with the rare and recent exception of a study like Williams's) the critique of dominant Christianity lags behind the critique of empire, those most concerned with Jewish well-being are hard put to integrate the Palestinians into their account, and the reverse holds as well.¹⁸ 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 Palestinian, 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 intervention into the modern history of Palestine, and a valuable attempt to trace the career of a central narrative in Jewish and Christian history.¹⁹ Walzer's primary concern is not with bondage, nor with conquest, but with the struggle to form a responsible political community in the context of newly achieved freedom. Accordingly, he explicitly announces his intention to read Exodus not as a divine act of liberation, but as a secular and basically rational political effort which will echo through Western history. Among the historical examples available as reinvocations of Exodus, Walzer focuses on Latin American liberation theology and the English Puritans. Perhaps the main virtue of his account is the simple fact of broaching the topic of the collective, political uses of Exodus, thus transcending the purely individualist, spiritual, and typological analysis of the use of Exodus in early modern Europe.²⁰ Evidently Walzer's account, which sees a radical thrust in the Biblical text itself, represents some revision in his own thinking, for earlier he had described Puritanism as “the earliest form of political radicalism.”²¹

Edward Said responded to Walzer's book with his own “Canaanite reading.”²² These texts embody, in a particularly dramatic and bitter way, the political stakes in the conflict of interpretations. Both have more to teach us than their tone suggests. Throughout this paper I will be using the issues raised by the Walzer/Said debate to identify critical questions about the use of the Exodus narrative in the past. At the same time, I will use these historical examples to point out the shared limitations of Walzer's and Said's ideologically secularist 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 tendentious as those he accuses Walzer of providing. Why is Said driven to assert flatly that the Israelite story is “hardly comparable with that of American Blacks” (MW 91) when African-American history is replete with examples of how richly the slaves drew on precisely that comparison (“Where whites sang ‘Lord, I believe a rest remains / To all thy people known,’ blacks used the same tune to sing of Moses leading his people out of Egypt”)?²⁴ Had he acknowledged this, Said might be less puzzled at the sympathy for Zionism of someone like Martin Luther King, whom Said identifies as an anti-imperialist (MW 98). Equally important, his denial of this connection makes it harder to understand the reciprocal reinforcements between liberal American Jewish sympathy for Zionism and for black civil rights. These are both expressions of an implicit “Exodus” liberalism, drawing both on the Biblical command not to oppress the “stranger” and on the empathic memories of having been liberated en masse from “bondage” in Russia to “freedom” in America, which has until recently been a very comfortable ideology for American Jews, both politically and morally.²⁵

Second, because Said's polemical approach entails his rhetorical acceptance of the direct link between Exodus and Zionism posited by Walzer, he is compelled to assert the continuity in Judaism of the Biblical warrants for slaughter. Against Walzer's claim that the violent exclusiveness of the commands regarding prior inhabitants was never really carried out and was in any case vitiated through later Jewish commentary “arguing over its future applications” (ER 143), Said retorts that these commentaries are irrelevant since “after the destruction of the Temple. … Jews were in no position at all collectively to implement the commandment” (MW 93). This is a misreading of Walzer, since the commentaries Walzer refers to speculate about a time when Jews will again be both collectively able and collectively responsible for carrying out all the Biblical commandments—the time of the Messiah, though Walzer does not spell this out. For Walzer, this is evidence that Jewish doctrine has grown “progressively” less exclusive and more universalist. Said, on the other hand, sees a continuum of religious prejudice. Neither Said nor Walzer acknowledges the possibility of a complex and ambivalent interaction between the loss of political power and a greater Rabbinic emphasis on the demands of human empathy, with sources both in Greek philosophy and in the Biblical commands forbidding mistreatment of strangers. Neither, for his own reasons, acknowledges the profound difference between the Zionist ethos and that which was understood for centuries as Jewish—a difference readily acknowledged both by the early Zionists and their Jewish opponents, along with the theme of Jewish fulfillment through return 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 arguments, 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.²⁷ 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, Walzer 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 enemies in Messianism. Consistent with his claim that Labor Zionism represents Exodus politics against a Messianic right-wing fundamentalism, Walzer notes that the attention of the narrative “is focused on internal rather than external wars, on the purges of the recalcitrant Israelites rather than on the destruction of the Canaanite nations” (ER 142). If Said denies Israelite slavery in Egypt, Walzer reads with the grain of the text: his interpretation complicitly declines 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 the question of Palestine in typological terms, as a reenactment or fulfillment of an archetypical narrative. Otherwise why would they need to read the Old Testament narrative in ways that so closely match their respective visions of Israel, Palestine, and “Western” 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 hierarchical 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.³⁰ 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.³¹ In particular, close attention to the text—concern for responsible reading 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 “redemption.”³² 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).”³³ But surely the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is not to be determined by checking the dictionary for its definition of an English word!

There is an odd logic linking the shared, avowed secularism of Walzer and Said to their claims for the power of Exodus as Genesis—that is, as a myth of origin. The ancient or “religious” Jewish Other is effectively treated by both as inert, raw, original material, available for molding. Said's intention is to combat what he calls Walzer's overly assimilating, overly comfortable approach in the name of those who suffer today. Yet Walzer's insistence on the secularist reading of the ancient text is ultimately more complemented than deconstructed by Said's attitude, which is now ironic, now horrified, but always distanced.

Walzer is “inclined to prefer an argument that depends on the vividness of the present rather than the past” (ER 87).³⁴ This refreshing assertion, however, is based on a dichotomy that robs Exodus of the power it has contained among such people as Jews, English Puritans, and African-Americans, none of whom saw reading as a choice between the secular and the sacred, or experience as a choice between living in the past and living in the present. For Walzer convincingly to sustain both his own gradualism and his overtly selective interpretation of Exodus as origin, one would expect either an account of how Exodus has been subsequently purged of its “sacred” or chauvinist side, or a modification of gradualism to include the possibility of periodic recourse to “mythical” archetypes. The former would be difficult if not, as I suspect, impossible; chauvinist and liberationist readings of the text continue to appear and, as I discuss below, they are often inseparable. Walzer can have no recourse to the latter since, like Turner, he has already declared Exodus as “the crucial alternative to all mythic notions of eternal recurrence” (ER 12). The reader who sees Exodus as the origin of domination and the reader who sees it as the origin of liberation are in agreement on its “linear” rather than “cyclical” character. The ways in which poets and politicians have interacted with the Old Testament narrative of the Israelites throw light on notions of primitive myth versus civilized progress that should henceforth bar such simplistic dichotomies, and make us wary of commentators who flash their credentials either as secularists or as participants in the tradition.³⁵

III. CREATING THE ANGLO-SAXON EXODUS

Walzer gives us no indication of the intervening tradition which enabled the “Exodus politics” of the Protestant saints. Perhaps he regards these invocations as isolated flashes of inspiration; more likely he is relying on the general notion of a Protestant rediscovery of the Old Testament, which had been buried by centuries of Catholic ritualism and restricted literacy. But the rhetoric of affinity with the Israelites has roots in Eusebius's early Christian historiography, and long predates the Reformation.³⁶ That affinity was explored in the most sustained way be the English.³⁷ Reviewing pre-Reformation English uses of Exodus should thus serve as a useful way to check Walzer's claim that Exodus has been primarily used for “secularist” and progressive narratives of collective identity and destiny.

A new book by Nicholas Howe shows, in fact, how the Old Testament narrative served as a versatile template for the articulated self-understandings of the origins of people in Britain. Howe's general thesis is that “the Anglo-Saxons … envisioned their migration from continent to island as a reenactment of the biblical exodus.”³⁸ Howe thus anchors the identification of the English with the Chosen People, and of the Emerald Isle with the Promised Land, much further back than the sole emphasis on the Protestant intimacy with the Old Testament would suggest.

Howe's book is significant not only for what it tells us about the workings of the Exodus story in early English literature and in the process of shaping an English folc out of the various Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded the island, but also for what it tells us about how to investigate interactions among history, ideology, and narrative.

One important lesson is contained in Howe's discussions of intertextual 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 Wulfstan 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 myth of this type becomes canonical when it achieves general currency in the literary as well as the popular imagination” (MM 62). In this particular case Howe was able to trace an indirect literary source; but the point is that, while careful detective work is indispensable, narrative models may work most powerfully where their presence is most diffuse.

Second, Howe is able to show that the crucial link enabling repeated modelings of Anglo-Saxon history on the Old Testament narrative is the parallel suggested by the crossing of water. Thus, for the author of the Old English epic called Exodus, “the crossing is the exodus” (MM 102; see also 46, 179); episodes such as the Canaanite wars are barely mentioned.³⁹ But the point is not only Howe's careful attention to the splicing of the model narrative. Howe also recognizes the importance of what Paul Carter (1988) calls “spatial history”—the geographical contingencies with which historians contend when they reshape narrative models as memorials to new adventures.⁴⁰ The Exodus story continued to be so productive in England not only because of its parallels with a series of events in English history, and not only because of institutional reinforcements of textual authority, but largely because, drawing partly on Exodus, the Anglo-Saxon migration myth “translated chronology into a spatial pattern” (MM 34), and thus helped to fix memory.

Third, Howe understands that our conventional divisions of ancient 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 “convenantal” inhabitants were 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 example in Howe's analysis are the compounds including the element flod, here used not just as a synonym for a body of water but imbued with religious meaning. God is the flodweard (guardian of the flood). The Israelites journey on the flodwege (floodway). The Egyptians, on the other hand, are flodblac (floodpale) and flodegsa (in terror of the flood) (MM 85). Thus the same element is used in compounds which point toward the heightened moral powers of the model (the doom of the Egyptians) and to the adaptation of the model to the new material (these Israelites do not walk through on dry land; they are sailors). The technique of compounding, particularly rich in Old English, serves as the means by which multiple semantic valences are bound in the same text, or as Howe puts it, “[f]ar from being a translation or paraphrase, the Old English Exodus represents the rarer achievement by which a foreign story is absorbed into the native imagination and idiom” (MM 73).

IV. PURITAN ANALOGUES

What happened after Wulfstan? I do not find in the secondary literature any strong claims for the Exodus model in the period between William's triumph and Henry's revolt against Rome. The Norman period seems to represent a break in the chain of historiographic readings of the Old Testament. Robert Hanning notes several changes in the approach to history during the twelfth-century “Renaissance” in Anglo-Norman culture: human causation was given more weight; the concept of fortune was brought in; cyclical notions of history appeared; and the analogy between individual and national careers was loosened.⁴¹ While on the one hand, the Normans were treated as yet another “new Israel,” their significance was also cast in a classical mold: they were “imperial repressors of English liberty.”⁴² These new themes of secular narrative, human greatness, the cyclical rise and fall of individuals and nations, and the Greco-Roman theme of the struggle for liberty, reached their culmination in the influential writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth.⁴³ The evidence of this shift in the rhetorical grounds of historiography should warn us against any tendency to suppose that national identity ultimately depends on a single narrative model. Nor, of course, did the Normans need to see themselves as Israelites in order to conquer Britain.⁴⁴

The Exodus typology was not permanently suppressed, however, and Walzer is right to insist on its role in the debates of English Protestantism. Its prominence in Protestant rhetoric was signaled as early as the reign of Henry VIII. In 1534, William Turner wrote that Henry's Declaration of Supremacy “intended suche a thynge as all myghty god dyd when he delyuered the chylder of Israel from the bondage of Pharao / and drove the chanaanites of theyr lande that the true Israelites myght haue that land and succede them.”⁴⁵ Whether or not such rhetoric played any significant role at all in Henry's rebellion, that rebellion was extremely consequential for the initiation of English settlement in the New World, and hence for the further career of the Exodus narrative. The confiscation of church lands made the state rich, brought power to an ambitious class of “new men,” enabled Henry to build a powerful navy, and encouraged the displacement of former peasants to the cities, thus meeting “the vital material conditions for English expansion and colonization” (AI 126). Finally, Protestant anti-Catholic ideology provided a rationale for challenging the Spanish monopoly in the New 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 distinguished 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 Canaanites 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 American Revolution was inspired by a range of myths of origin. In addition to the classical model of democracy,⁵⁰ they, like the generations before them, looked back to the Exodus story. Like English radicals of their time, they also employed the idealized image of the free Anglo-Saxon yeomanry before the Norman Conquest, living justly together by natural law and recognizing each other's property rights (AI 252 ff.).⁵¹ Of course, they also drew on images of Native American tribal organization, which, sometimes at least, was explicitly analogized to the Saxon 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 and America should be enough to suggest that the Exodus narrative was used; that it was not necessarily distinct from a Christian kind of messianism; and that it was linked both to the colonial project and to visions of a radically egalitarian reorganization of society in England.⁵⁴ With the substitution of “nineteenth and twentieth-” for “seventeenth and eighteenth-” “Europe and Palestine” for “England and America,” and “Jewish” for “Christian,” that sentence could also describe the modern Zionist movement, to which I now turn.

V. ZIONISM

Is it possible to determine to what extent the Exodus narrative plays a direct role in Zionist ideology, both informing the articulated Zionist vision and helping that vision gain resonance among Jews at the turn of this century? Two linked premises shared by both Walzer and Said are that effective analogies can be drawn between the Biblical narrative and the history of Zionist settlement, and that this analogy was actively drawn on in shaping Zionist ideology. It seems to me the connection is neither as uniquely determinant nor as immediate as the Walzer-Said debate would suggest.

The Exodus, as commemorated in daily Jewish prayer and in the Passover ritual, is taken to be a founding event in several senses. First, it is “the birth of a nation.” In one sense, while the liturgy praises God for delivering to the Jews the lands of several nations, the high point at which we truly become a people is the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. On the other hand, the conquest and the assignment of lands to individual families reinforce the connection between the people and the land in a way that the covenant Abraham 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, redemption and promise; and second, the empathetic, superior morality 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 come directly from “traditional” Jewish culture, but from other, more 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 occasional writings reveals a concentration on the position of Jews in fin-de-siècle 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 Passover ritual, was a significant resource for recruiting Jews from “traditional” backgrounds to the Zionist vision. It was doubtless used rhetorically for this purpose, as it was used rhetorically by pre-Zionist Reform Jews and later by anti-Zionist Jews, who claimed that their native lands (Germany, America, England) were “the promised land,” and who denied that they were waiting for a Messiah to come take them anywhere else.⁵⁹

Against this I submit the hypothesis that the intimate association of Exodus with the Jewish settlement in Palestine and establishment of Israel is largely a product of the 1940s and after. I remember, for example, that as a child I first learned of the Nazi genocide while watching a documentary entitled “Let My People Go”; significantly, that film was broadcast on the night of Passover. The memories and images of the concentration camps lent themselves readily to an association with enslavement in Egypt, while the British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine cast the British as latter-day Pharoahs, refusing to let the Jews out of “Egypt”-Europe. The association was popularized immensely through Leon Uris's novel Exodus, named after one of the ships taking Jewish refugees to Palestine, and through the film made from that novel. It is significant that (perhaps like Moses the Egyptianized liberator) the hero of the Exodus film, the “new Jew,” the product of liberation from Zionism, is blond and blue-eyed Paul Newman. Furthermore, as suggested above, for liberal American Jews the “Exodus connection” helped to cement the connection between their sympathy for the new Israeli nation and their sympathy for the civil rights struggle of American blacks.

This is not to say that ancient associations played no significant part in the formation of Zionism, nor that the Exodus narrative is simply an extraneous, ex post facto import. The Exodus narrative, for all that Walzer emphasizes its “linear” character, is itself mixed with the memory of other exiles and returns. Thus the Passover Haggadah, the retelling of the Exodus, culminates in the hopeful shout of “next year in Jerusalem.” This is clearly a reference to the return from exile in Babylonia, since Jerusalem does not figure in the Biblical narrative until generations after Joshua's conquest.⁶⁰ Though this is by all means an expression of Messianic hope, the tradition hardly finds it incongruous as the climax to the retelling 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 prayer 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 possibility needs to be considered that the model of Babylonian exile and return was more salient than Egyptian exile and Exodus in the interplay between Zionist goals and the popular (mostly Eastern European) Jewish imagination. As Yaakov Shavit suggests, for a brief period—from the advent of the Hovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) in 1882, through roughly the 1920s, when the Balfour Declaration was explicitly analogized to that made by the Persian King Cyrus—the role of Cyrus in permitting the Return to Zion was prominent in Jewish “historical memory,” that is, in a collective “memory” stimulated by both historiography and a set of circumstances analogous to those at a point in the distant past. Shavit makes several points relevant to the respective prominence of the Return model and the Exodus model, noting that in the pre-state period, building on “the recognition that the Return to Zion was an indisputable historical event (unlike the Exodus from Egypt) and an outstanding messianic event. … [The East European Hovevei Zion] explained [Cyrus's] Declaration and the subsequent Return to Zion as an outstanding example of redemption by natural means, as opposed to the redemption from Egypt by miraculous means. … Cyrus simply served as a good case—in fact the only one in historical experience—which symbolized what should be expected from diplomacy and legitimized the latter as a historical political method.”⁶¹

During the 1930s, when Zionists became disappointed with the policies of the British “Cyrus” and the project of creating an independent state became increasingly favored, the figure of the original Cyrus “revert[ed] to the status of a passive memory.”⁶² If indeed the model of the Return from Babylon was more prominent than the Exodus from Egypt in early Zionism, this would have considerable bearing on the debate over Zionist conceptions of history and self. At least three consequences can be identified:

First, the ancient images of the Land of Israel (or more particularly Jerusalem) as desolate (Lam. 1:1) would promote a justification of colonial settlement in Palestine on the basis that the land there was desolate now as well. This would be consistent with tropes of fertilizing the wilderness employed in other colonial contexts; for example, for Methodist missionaries Africa was “a ‘wilderness’ to 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 out of the Arab presence may have been accomplished more through the shaping of an acceptable range of Zionist discourse which set the terms of polemic and therefore enabled a range of exclusions, most notably that of the Palestinians, than through explicit arguments against their legitimate presence.⁶⁵ Such considerations may well be moot to displaced Palestinians, nor are they intended as a claim that the early Zionists were naive. Yet they are extremely pertinent to understanding how certain categories of persons are signified, and others are not, in differing nationalist 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.⁶⁸ 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 emphasis on the latter, then, would foster the simultaneous idea of Zionism as a colonizing mission and as a redemptive mission. The entire popular Zionist effort of mass fundraising, gradually rebuilding the land and sending settlers with the broad support of the majority of nonsettler Jews, also fits this model better.⁷⁰

While Walzer tries, inter alia, to associate liberal Zionism with a democratic “Western” tradition via the Exodus narrative, the Babylonian 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 effectively) tarred as “Hellenizers” by the right-wing territorial maximalists whom Walzer opposes. These demagogues are thereby able to elaborate 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 history of Exodus-reading? If I have indeed identified weaknesses in Walzer's and Said's political hermeneutics, what alternatives are or could be 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 ideological construction of modern politics, and our own interaction with that text as we have received it.

The continuing power of this imperial heritage—its potential for continued or innovative ideological effectiveness—is an open question, especially in view of the claims made recently for the “death of master narratives” such as the Biblical stories of oppression, liberation and conquest, or of exile and restoration.⁷² Since we are simultaneously critics and producers of ideology, the question is both descriptive and prescriptive. Will the grand narratives continue to sway large numbers of people? Should we be engaging them as authoritative? The problem may in fact be with the trope of narratives shared by large numbers of people, encompassing much history and an inexhaustible store of potential readings, as “master” narratives, 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 anamnestic, reading strategies. Thus, for example, Daniel Boyarin's recent book on Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash examines the Rabbinic readings of the Exodus narrative in the centuries following the final Roman destruction of the Jewish commonwealth. In such a situation, textual tradition and language in general are made to bear perhaps an even greater weight than when a collective enjoys temporal power. Boyarin's reading of the rabbis on Exodus is free of dichotomies between “secular” and “sacred,” or between Exodus-as-conquest and Exodus-as-liberation. By treating language as part of the material world and part of history, he escapes the Hobson's choice of deciding whether narrative is autonomously effective or merely available to political rhetoric, much as critical theory seems finally to have moved beyond the compulsion to declare certain aspects of our world as 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 humanity 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 meaning 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 materialism of the people and the idealism of their leaders, or it is between the demands of the present moment and the promise of the future. These are common political formulations, and one can find them developed in a great variety of ways in the rabbinic literature, usually, but not always, in ways unsympathetic to the people and the present moment” (ER 51).

Boyarin closely traces the rabbis' evaluation of one such murmuring and of subsequent verses, as recorded in a midrashic compilation called the Mekilta. The first verse in point is Exodus 16:2, “And the whole congregation of Israel murmured.” This certainly seems like a pejorative description of cranky ingrates. It is subjected to contrasting interpretations by two rabbis, whom the Mekilta represents as consistently evaluating the text in opposite ways. Rabbi Yehoshua, who tends throughout to a more positive account of the generation in the wilderness, does his best to remove its sting. Rabbi Elazar, who consistently denigrates the Israelites, “enthusiastically activates the pejorative connotations of the word ‘murmured,’ and even enhances them dramatically” (I 71). Slightly later, another verse reads, “And the Lord said to Moses: I hereby rain bread from Heaven for you.” Rabbi Yehoshua gives this verse what we would probably agree is its commonsense reading, as a sign of divine goodwill. Rabbi Elazar, however, stretches the interpretation to contend that “‘He says “hereby” only to mean by the merit of your ancestors’” (quoted I 72).

What is going on here? Have Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Elazar, for reasons extrinsic to the text, already made up their minds about the generation in the wilderness, and proceeded to force each verse into their preconceived molds? On the contrary, Boyarin suggests that it is fallacious to assume that the Mekilta represents an accurate “transcript” of exactly what two historical figures said. Rather, he suggests, the Mekilta itself has molded them into representatives of two possible, antithetical readings contained in the biblical text itself, one depicting the Israelites as faithless and servile, the other as faithful and bold: “the midrash seems to present the view of an ancient reader who perceives ambiguity encoded in the text itself with various dialectical possibilities for reducing that ambiguity, each contributing to but not exhausting its meaning(s). … Moreover, the Mekilta does not speak discursively and abstractly in metalanguage about the ambiguity of the Torah. It represents the tension and inner dialogue of the biblical narrative by tension and inner dialogue of its own” (I 79).

This approach to the politics of reading, which Boyarin implicitly claims to share with the rabbis, bears several lessons. It takes seriously the idea of language in and as history, and examines closely particular cases of readers interacting with “foundational narratives” as they shape techniques for narrativizing memory against oblivion. It has ample room for contentious voices within a shared tradition, rather than either claiming that one trend must be dominant or opting to speak of only one trend as more congenial to our own views. It renews the potential of creative (and even subversive) interaction with the tradition beyond the poles of affirmation and denunciation. Most important, because it integrates powerful currents of both textual authority and interpretive heterogeneity, it suggests a positive answer to Said's question whether one can “both ‘belong’ and concern yourself with Canaanites who do not belong” (MW 106). The more one is equipped to read, the greater the number of plausible interpretations one is able to entertain, the less one is compelled to view “belonging” as a monodimensional loyalty, and the better able one is to work through such seeming contradictions in creative practice.

A legitimate objection can still be raised. Even though this intense and detailed interaction with the stuff of textual traditions helps avoid reification of the “ethnic community” which maintains them, it still entails a common set of competences and a shared reference 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 ancestors as having been in darkness constitutes much of the problem. We do need to struggle for social conditions which will permit us to realize, much more than we have until now, the innate ability of human beings to operate within a great variety of cultural idioms, and which will “authorize” a much larger and more diverse human group effectively to create culture and intervene in politics. The goal of expanding our peoples' capacity for reading, writing, speaking, and understanding is inherently political, inseparable from the humane goals which give the term “humanities” whatever value it has. Stated at this level of generality, of course, there is a danger of falling back into a liberal universalism which erases not only cultural differences, but the world system of collective discriminations and deprivations which is still very much in force. In the search for models of intercultural and contentious dialogue, the only possible procedure is one which maintains simultaneously the equal importance of each human life and the almost inexhaustible reiterative power of our particular narrative associations through time.

Notes

1. Jonathan Boyarin, “Palestine and Jewish History,” Working Papers of the Center for Studies of Social Change, No. 92 (1989); rpt. in my Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis, 1992), p. 124.

2. One reason why I will not even pretend to deal here with what “really happened” during the Biblical period, except to quote a recent assertion in the New York Times of “a growing consensus among Egyptologists, Biblical scholars and archaeologists that most of the early Israelites were Canaanites” (John Noble Wilford, “Battle Scene on Egyptian Temple May Be Earliest View of Israelities,” New York Times, 4 Sept. 1990, C1 ff.). According to Sari Nusseibeh, on the other hand, “present-day Palestinian Arabs regard Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, etc. [along with more recent waves of migrants], as their ancestors” (Sari Nusseibeh, “Letter to the Editor,” New Outlook, 33, no. 4 [Apr. 1990], p. 5). One conclusion that might be drawn, to paraphrase Michael Walzer, is that whoever you are, you're probably a Canaanite.

   Regarding the relation between the history of Exodus and the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Nusseibeh justly writes that “while one can certainly respect the Jewish people for its astute self-consciousness and continuity, such respect cannot in fairness be used as grounds for disinheriting the wave after wave of political manifestations of the non-Jewish Arab communities of Palestine, whether through denying them 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 progress, is analogously related to a critique of the reified notion of “cyclical” versus “linear” conceptions of history to which I refer below.

5. The folklorist Yael Zerubavel, whose work analyzes the careers of Israeli national myths (Masada, Bar Kochba, Tel Hai), emphasizes the importance of understanding how the older legend is “spliced” for understanding the politics of its subsequent applications (Yael Zerubavel, “The Politics of Interpretation: Tel Hai in Israeli Collective Memory,” Association for Jewish Studies Review, 16, nos. 1 and 2 [Spring and Fall 1991], 133-60). This will be a critical point in my discussion below of the contemporary Exodus debate. Zerubavel gains much of her insight from spending time in Israeli history classrooms. It is worth emphasizing that scholars interested in the relation between literature and collective ideology need to pay close attention to the mechanisms by which narratives and their determined readings circulate and gain social authority.

6. Not that God's promise and a history of suffering justified Joshua's expulsion of the prior inhabitants of Canaan to the satisfaction of quite all the voices canonized 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 (“Israel 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 that “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 emphasizing 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, in the doctrinal pressures caused by the quick spread of “Christianity” among non-Jews.

14. I must stress that I am talking about Zionist ideology here, and I should specify that I am thinking primarily of Labor Zionism. “Zionist” capitalist-colonial planters gladly hired inexpensive Palestinian laborers, and the integration of the Occupied Territories into the Israeli economy has added a major source of disadvantaged “underclass” labor to the preexisting pools of Israeli Arabs and Oriental Jews. Nevertheless, the hiring of Palestinians in the early settlements was combatted by Labor Zionists on both pragmatic and ideological grounds (See Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882-1914 [New York, 1989]), and the presence of the new Palestinian underclass since 1967 significantly contributed to the undermining of Labor Zionist hegemony in the Israeli state.

15. See Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York, 1990), p. 7.

16. See Uri Eisenzweig, Territoires occupés de l'imaginaire juif (Paris, 1981).

17. Martin Thom, “Tribes within Nations: The Ancient Germans and the History of Modern France,” in Nation and Narration, p. 40. Edward Said is perhaps the exception that proves the rule here. A great deal of his critical energy stems from his position as a Palestinian exile and attempts to illuminate the wider sources of that situation. Yet with a few exceptions (for example, Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” Social Text, 19/20 [1988], 1-35), those who draw on his model analysis of Orientalism do not discuss the case 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. … At the outset, Zionism was a variety of Eastern European nationalism, that is, an ethnic movement in search of a state. But at the other end of the journey it may be seen more fruitfully as a late instance of European overseas expansion, which had been taking place from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries” (Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, pp. xiv, 8). I'm not sure I would fully endorse this formula; it still smacks of apologetics, especially since Shafir himself cites explicitly colonialist proposals for Jewish development in Palestine (pp. 10-11). But it does represent an attempt at a just nuance that is rare in writing on Palestine/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 Hague, 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 about politics and the cosmos (personal communication, Shelby Collum Davis Center, October 1990).

24. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York, 1977), p. 23.

25. “Immigration to the United States was compared to the Exodus from Egypt because it was a mass exodus, unlike the tiny settlements [in Palestine] of the Hovevei Zion” (Yaacov Shavit, “Cyrus King of Persia and the Return to Zion: A Case of Neglected Memory,” History and Memory, 2 [1990], 68).

26. See “Statement by the Lubbavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Shulem ben Schneersohn, on Zionism,” in Zionism Reconsidered: The Rejection of Jewish Normalcy, ed. Michael Selzer (New York, 1970), pp. 11-18.

27. In 1896, Herzl asked, “Shall we choose [the] Argentine [Republic] or Palestine? We will take what is given us and what is selected by Jewish public opinion” (Theodor Herzl, “A Solution of the Jewish Question,” in The Jew in the Modern World, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz [New York, 1980], p. 425). The first Zionist Congress, of course, settled decisively on Palestine in 1897. But insofar as Said is talking about the “origins” of Zionism, I believe the point stands that the ideology does not arrive full-blown out of Jewish tradition. Below I will have more to say about how traditional associations with the geography of Palestine affected the “spatial history” of Jewish colonization.

28. See Regina S. Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History (London, 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 (1989), 21-25. My responses to Krupnik, some of which are elaborated here, can be found in my letter to the same journal (“Letter to the editor,” Tikkun, 5, no. 3 [1990], 6 ff.). Elissa Sampson's essay on the debate focuses more directly than this paper on critical issues of contemporary Zionist tendencies and their understanding of Palestinians (Elissa Sampson, “Exodus and Empire,” unpublished seminar paper, New School for Social Research [1990]).

30. In an essay on the general switch from the biblicism of the “saints” to the Romanism of the Royalists in the second half of the seventeenth century, Steven Zwicker offers some very acute insights on this dialectic: “Royalist vindication reclaimed materials that Puritans had once used to celebrate their triumphs; but Royalists also looked harshly and derisively at Puritan scripturalism. … The combination of Puritan demise and Royalist vindication complicated the potential for Scripture as a social and political language, but eventually such complication also undermined its authority, its capacity to sustain praise and the burden of a national life imagined in its terms” (Steven N. Zwicker, “England, Israel, and the Triumph of Roman Virtue,” in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, ed. Richard H. Popkin [Leiden, 1988], p. 41).

31. For an essay which does, in my opinion, approach that synthesis, although focusing on the question of state power versus moral community in the Israelite kingdoms, see Harry Berger, “The Lie of the Land: The Text Beyond Canaan,” Representations, 25 (1989), 119-38.

32. See Michael Walzer, “Letter to the Editor,” Grand Street, 5, no. 4 (Summer 1986), 248; also Edward Said, “Reply to Michael Walzer,” Grand Street, 5, no. 4 (Summer 1986), 253.

33. Said, “Reply to Michael Walzer,” 253.

34. David Harlan cites Walzer's book approvingly as an example of historiography 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 and the Return of Literature,” American Historical Review, 94 [1989], 606). Since Harlan is hardly arguing for a return to a rarified history of ideas, and strongly questions the possibility of determining past meanings, it is hard to see what this can mean but an arbitrary selection out of the repertoire of putative past meanings for the purpose of present rhetoric.

35. The entire body of reader-response criticism, one starting point of which would be Hans Robert Jauss's Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis, 1982) is obviously 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 confusing. 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-Zionist reading which focuses on British Restorationism as a motivation of Zionism quite separate from concern for the Jews' well-being. Mattar's sweeping claim that all British support for the “return” of the Jews to Palestine is linked to the vision of Jewish conversion to Christianity seems unwarranted; at least this claim is disputed by one scholar (Mayr Vereté, summarized in Richard H. Popkin, “Introduction,” in Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, pp. 1-11). Mattar further betrays his own partisanship by assuming that all non-Jewish Zionism is motivated by anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism.

48. Hill, p. 278. Considerably later, the epochs marked by Moses, the advent of Christianity, and the reign of Alfred, were invoked in a work by Thomas Evans called Christian Policy the Salvation of the Empire (London, 1816). This work called for the restoration of what its author conceived to be the republican, communist, agrarian societies of those three periods (see Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in his Puritanism and Revolution [1958; rpt. New York, 1986], pp. 110-11).

49. Chester E. Eisinger, “The Puritans' Justification for Taking the Land,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, LXXXIV (1948), 131. When Perry Miller, earlier in this century, began to take a fresh critical look at the ideology of the American Puritans, he too seemed really to perceive the land they came to as a “wilderness.” The preface to one of his books evokes yet another case of empire imagining its genealogy:

    To bring into conjunction a minute event in the history of historiography with a great one: it was given to Edward Gibbon to sit disconsolate amid the ruins of the Capitol at Rome, and to have thrust upon him the “laborious work” of The Decline and Fall while listening to barefooted friars chanting responses in the former temple of Jupiter. It was given to me, equally disconsolate on the edge of a jungle of central Africa, to have thrust upon me the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States, while supervising, in that barbaric tropic, the unloading of drums of case oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wilderness of America. (Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness

    [Cambridge, Mass., 1956], p. viii.)

    The passage shows clearly how the continued invocation of foundational tropes—a sense of being “in the tradition”—enables Miller's powerfully influential historiography. Myra Jehlen, in the course of an insightful discussion of Miller's work, points out that Miller continued to see America as having been a “vacant wilderness,” which of course it was not. (See Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation and the Continent [Cambridge, Mass., 1986], p. 28.) The continued occlusion of the Native American presence, in this sense analogous to the continued occlusion of the Palestinians, shows how difficult it is to make a clean separation between history and historiography. On American intervention in Vietnam as a latter-day “errand in the wilderness,” see William V. Spanos, “Heidegger, Nazism and the Repressive Hypothesis: The American Appropriation of the Question,” Boundary 2, 17, no. 2 (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 experimenting 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 of Israeli Political Culture,” in Israeli Democracy Under Stress: Cultural and Institutional Perspectives, ed. Ehud Sprinzak and Larry Diamond (forthcoming).

66. It is no revelation to note that the topic of racism in Zionist and Israeli ideology is a tortured one. Anything like an adequate account of this issue would have to start by making certain discriminations within the history of Zionism—such as that between “Western” and “Eastern” Zionism, which differ significantly in terms of notions of identity and progress. It would also, I think, gain strength and coherence from the perception of Zionism as an attempt to negate Jewish religion while preserving the Jewish people (see Ehud Luz, Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist Movement (Philadelphia, 1988), p. xviii ff.

67. Senator Bennett C. Clark, speech delivered on the floor of the U.S. Senate, 28 Mar. 1944; quoted in Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism, p. 110.

68. See Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions (New York 1986).

69. Eisenzweig, Territoires occupés de l'imaginaire juif.

70. Baruch Kimmerling has an insightful discussion of the symbolic significance of the 700,000 Jewish National Fund collection boxes circulating in 1937: “Thus a linkage was formed between land redemption, which was a central component in the Jewish-Arab conflict, and participation in the Zionist community, both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. This linkage was not highly visible, and it is difficult to estimate its significance, but it was part of a three-part process: a) taking the conflictual sting out of as many aspects of the Jewish-Arab conflict as possible and defining them in ‘positive’ terms unconnected with Jewish-Arab relations; b) raising those aspects to the symbolic level; c) making use of the mechanisms of socialization and social control to implant these symbols” (Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory [Berkeley, 1983], p. 76). On the other hand, when Kimmerling discusses the various ways in which the settlers related to the local Arab population (pp. 184 ff.), a failure really to acknowledge them does not figure on the list.

71. Shavit, citing the veteran right-wing Zionist Israel Eldad, notes that “In Israel today the image of Cyrus and the erection of the Temple under the aegis of a foreign king are placed in opposition to the purity of the Temple and the conquest of the land in ancient times or in the period of the Hasmoneans” (Shavit, “Cyrus King of Persia and the Return to Zion,” p. 83, n. 46).

72. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), esp. pp. 37-38.

73. Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Indianpolis, 1990), p. 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.