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...