Israelites in Erin: Exodus, Revolution, & The Irish Revival, by Abby Bender (review)

Abby Bender's new book provides an illuminating addition to our understanding of Irish letters in the centenary year of the Easter Rising, claiming as it does that the "aura" of the Rising with the discourse of "blood sacrifice" and freedom that framed it, "is responsible for eclipsing Exodus [as an analogue for national liberation] and pushing it out of both the political and the literary imagination" (3, 3-4). The idea is particularly salient in this historic moment, in which it has been suggested that the reunification of Ireland might be achieved by an act of nationalist folly,¹ where insularity is read as liberation, and departure, in this case from the European Union, is celebrated as homecoming. These current historical circumstances might even overshadow the framing debate of Bender's well-researched and eloquent study of the Exodus trope, between Michael Walzer and Edward Said, on the question of the importance of Exodus as either a narrative of liberation or settler colonialism.² This debate provides one set of meanings relevant for her discussion, bringing it into the current moment and showing the staying power of the Exodus concept/theme and its "contentiousness" (5).

Israelites in Erin tracks the presence of the Exodus trope in Irish letters from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. In the process, Bender argues that "a common strain of Irish lament involved the analogy with the Jews" (1). The introduction lays out the history of this analogy and the "ideologies of Exodus":

And very often Exodus, which is not a story about exile but about liberation, is misrepresented as a narrative of homecoming, as if the promised land was always already the defining element of the nation. … But Exodus is a movement to nationhood, not a return to it; as Martin Buber argues, the people only become a people, a nation, in the process of their departure from Egypt.

(19)³

This apprehension becomes a major aspect of Bender's clarification of the Exodus motif, and in taking it into account we must adjust our reading of its use by authors like Joyce. She comes back around to this point very nicely in the Coda, where she reminds us that approaches to the trope of Exodus, as indeed that taken by Joyce, may "be read as prophesies or warnings about what happens when the story of Exodus shifts its focus from departure to arrival" (180). Even Said had come to see it differently, informed by Sigmund Freud's reading of Moses, as a narrative of hybrid origins.

As Bender tells it, the Exodus narrative does not conform to what is argued as the "necessarily monologic" nature of the national epic (according to David Lloyd⁴), but instead "includes something like heresy—that is, the departing Israelites' resistance to the formation of a monolithic, inflexible, contained tradition" (26, 27). In Bender's construction, which she will map out in her discussion of Lady Augusta Gregory and Joyce, in particular, "Exodus includes the Israelites persistent wishes to return to the fleshpots of Egypt, the idols of polytheism, the possibilities of bicultural existence"; such issues are integral to any imagining of the promised land (27). Bender observes that this part of the story is left out of the Haggadah, the official retelling of the Biblical Exodus during the Passover holiday, and as she will explore, this omission is analogous to the supplanting of the one narrative of Irish liberation by another.

In the book's first chapter, "British Israelites, Irish Israelites, and Ireland's Jews," Bender brings context to, for example, the eighteenth-century philologist Charles Vallancey's theory about the Irish as a lost tribe (familiar to Joyceans, certainly), and also to the shift in the Irish concept of Jews from Biblical to historical, or mythic to material, with the advent of Jewish immigration to Ireland in the latter part of the nineteenth century (42).⁵ The presence of actual Jews may in...