2 Reading Exodus Into History

Abstract

N AN EARLIER PAPER on the shifting significance of Palestine as the ground of Jewish historical identity, I broached several critical questions, one of which was phrased as follows: What are the grander links among the ancient Jewish state, the Western cultural complex of 'Zion' through the Bible, traditional Jewish culture in the modern period, Zionism, and what I will call here a postmodern ideal of Diaspora?' Here I will be considering the link between only two of those elements: the use of the Exodus/ Promised Land narrative in writings from various points of 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 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 because the narrative cannot be understood solely as pertaining to the time in which it purports to be

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