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This chapter analyses three brief, powerful passages, from different environments and different literary genres. These reveal an enduring ambivalence towards Jewish life in ‘exile’, a reluctance to concede that the centuries of Jewish life in foreign lands were devoid of any positive qualities, and even — rather surprisingly — the suggestion that life in exile might have religious advantages for Jews that were not available in the Holy Land. In short, the actual treatment of exile in Jewish literary texts reveals more nuanced and multivalent aspects. The familiar geography of the traditional concept — exile as forced removal from the Land of Israel and the end of exile as return to that land — is occasionally subverted in unexpected ways. Perhaps even more surprising is a revalorization of the concept, in which living in the ancestral homeland is no longer automatically identified as good, and living outside the land as bad. This chapter attempts to illustrate some of the permutations of this central concept through a literary and conceptual analysis of the three pre-modern passages from Jewish literature.

This chapter examines discursive developments in twentieth-century European thought with respect to the question of the reality, metaphoricity, and exemplarity of Jewish displacement. Throughout the centuries, the Jews have been the epitome of the displaced, wandering, and exposed stranger, the rootless intruders, or an example embodying the forfeiting of fixity, dominance, and ownership associated with territorial emplacement. In modernity, Jewish exile, beyond being a theological, historical, and political issue, became a discursive theme, a literary motif, and a loaded philosophical concept. As an embodiment of discreditable rootlessness, it appears in the antisemitic depictions of the wandering, homeless outsider rejected from the nations of the earth. The chapter considers the views of European thinkers such as George Steiner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, Jonathan Boyarin, and Paul Celan regarding displaced Jews.

This chapter covers one of the most intriguing statements found in the vast opus of R. Solomon Yitshaki (Rashi), in which he claims that the people of Israel in exile are sons of prophets. It tackles the distinction between the biblical terms 'prophets' and 'sons of prophets', including their implications or the rabbinic sources used by Rashi when referring to Jews as sons of prophets. It also highlights the centrality of custom as something that unifies all Jews in exile and also ensures their elevated spiritual status. The chapter describes the mode of behaviour and specific type of performance that is quintessential for maintaining the quasi-prophetic element in all Jews. It cites the claim that post-biblical Jews are potential sons of prophets, which implied continuity between the biblical and medieval times in both a ritual and spiritual sense.