Scripture and Modern Israeli Literature 285so-called sacrifi ce of Isaac is a fact well known to Israelis but less so to out-
siders. Indeed, non-Hebrew speakers and readers oft en fi nd it hard to be-
lieve that despite the presence of the epithet “Israel” in the names of both
the land and the state, Israel’s literary imaginary has been dominated not
by its eponymous forefather, Jacob-Israel, who, as Genesis tells us, “wrestled
with God and with men and prevailed,” but rather by the less heroic, some-
what passive fi gure of Isaac. Th e fact is, however, that more than any bibli-
cal narrative, the story of Isaac’s near sacrifi ce in Genesis 22 has become a
focal trope in Zionist thought and Hebrew letters. As any Israeli “knows,”
the Binding is the metaphor for national sacrifi ce, and hence Isaac natu-
rally stands for Israel’s fallen warriors. A deeper look reveals that the aqe-
dah has come to signify broadly diverse, sometimes contradictory psycho-
political attitudes that range from stoic heroism and ideological martyrdom
to passive victimhood, or its obverse: fanatic (oft en aggressive) resistance
to such martyric heroism.
Moreover, whereas in the early days of the Zionist revolution, the Exo-
dus from Egypt and the journey in the wilderness may have been serious
contenders (in fact, in the early 1900s, H. N. Bialik, the Hebrew National
Laureate poet, authored two poems on the journey in the wilderness: “Th e
Dead of the Desert” and “Th e Later Dead of the Desert”), these themes
clearly lost the race in the wake of World War II and the struggle for inde-
pendence. Since the 1940s, the aqedah has become a key fi gure in Hebrew
literature. Paradoxically, it gained its prominence due to its double seman-
tic potential: Janus-like, it can represent both the slaughter of the Holocaust
and the national warrior’s heroic death in the old-new homeland.
Before I approach the psycho-political problems hinted by this dialecti-
cal semantics, a likely historical misperception must be corrected: while
the appropriation of both the aqedah and Isaac to describe mot qedo-
shim, Jewish martyrdom, goes all the way back to medieval times (see the
“Isaacs” populating Hebrew liturgy and so-called Chronicles composed in
the Rhineland following the Crusades),16 its military appropriation was the
invention of the early 20th century. Th e product of the pioneers of both
the second and third waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine in the early
20th century (1904 – 24), this rewritten aqedah slowly came to stand for the
sacrifi ces and loss of life demanded by the pioneering project in the Land
of Israel. Having escaped the bloodbath of eastern Europe, these young im-
migrants were determined now to exchange the role of the victim (qorban)
for the role of self-sacrifi ce (also qorban in Hebrew!), choosing to give up
their life on the altar of the motherland.