Flight from Egypt: Blacks, Jews, Diasporas

Judaism, Wntr, 2001 by Robert Philipson

Even Marxist and leftist political thinkers who express contempt for institutional religion have employed the myth of Exodus. Richard Wright first came to widespread public notice with "Fire and Cloud," a short story about a Black preacher who leads his congregation on a protest march in alliance with the Communist Party in a small Southern town. The most extended elaboration and analysis of the myth is Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution, a commentary on Exodus as "a paradigm of revolutionary politics." [11]

It is significant that such usages of the Exodus myth in resolutely secular, even anti-clerical, contexts should issue from a Black and Jew respectively. Wright had certainly heard sermons on the Exodus theme while growing up in Mississippi. His grandmother was a zealous Seventh Day Adventist, and, through his mother, he engaged in a brief flirtation with the Methodist church. Walzer's introduction to the myth also transpired in a religious context: the portion of the Torah that he had to read as part of his bar mitzvah ceremony was a passage of Exodus known as Ki Tissa. In both cases, the Black and the Jew bring their ethnic heritage to explicate and amplify their understanding of revolutionary action. For both the Black and the Jew, this shared myth is Exodus, the flight from Egypt.

Exodus is integral to both cultures, yet its interpretation and place within ethnic discourse varies according to religious and political ideology. Black and Jewish culture share histories of oppression and marginality yet the subsequent subject positions are far from identical. There are a dizzying number of approaches to the problem of Black and Jewish relatedness, ranging from those that deny all connection to those that deny all difference. Essentialists, those who believe in a "Black soul" or a "Jewish soul," would scarcely accord any commonalty between the two identities outside of a generalized human nature. Conversely, cultural theorists such as Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd ascribe a political unity to minority experience which tends to elide the distinction between Blacks and Jews. "Cultures designated as minorities," they write, "have certain shared experiences by virtue of their similar antagonistic relationship to the dominant culture, which seeks to marginalize them all." [12]

The Exodus myth resists either extreme: the Flight from Egypt is about movement--escape from an oppressive culture, wandering, and the forging of a group identity which itself changes in time and place. The history of American Jews and Blacks encompasses not only their place in national culture but their memories of and attachment to sites of utopian belonging--Africa, Israel, shtetl, and compound. As James Clifford notes, "Transnational connections break the binary relations of 'minority' communities with 'majority' societies--a dependency that structures projects of both assimilation and resistance." [13] The consciousness that creates the modem Black and the modern Jew is, initially, a diasporic one. If, as Clifford wittily phrases it, roots precedes routes, the historical metaphors informing the consciousness of Blacks (the Middle Passage) and Jews (exile from Zion) emphasize the experience of travel. "When understood as a practice of dwelling (differently)," Clifford writes, "as an ambivalent refusal or indefinite deferral of return, and as a positive transnationalism, diaspora finds validation in the historical experiences of both displaced Africans and Jews." [14]