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In the Winter 1986 issue of Grand Street, Columbia University professor Edward Saïd took aim at progressive political theorist Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution. Walzer’s book documented recurring references to the Israelites’ escape from Egypt along “a well-marked trail” over centuries and continents. In Walzer’s telling, the Exodus inspired the American founding, medieval thinkers and revolutionaries across the Third World, to say nothing of the re-establishment of the Jewish state.
Saïd, by then the undisputed palsgrave of academic hostility toward Israel, advanced what he called a “Canaanite reading” of the Old Testament story. In it, Israelite becomes oppressor, guilty of “dehumanization of anyone standing in Moses’ way” akin to “the murderous Puritans or … the founders of apartheid.”
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