Case Study: Moses and the Israelites

NOW F OR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:Case Study: Moses and the Israelites

Noah and his family are saved from the environmental disaster of the flood and can start a new life elsewhere. In the book of Exodus, Moses and the Israelites escape from oppressive slavery in Egypt. In Vergil’s Aeneid the defeated Trojans leave their city in search of a new country. Such great stories have provided vivid and often heartrending scenes that writers, painters, and composers have returned to. They include scenes of departures, as when Aeneas car- ries his father Anchises out of the burning city and brings his son and the Penates along but loses his wife; of difficult journeys, as when the Israelites

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4 • Werner Sollors

follow a pillar of fire at night and of cloud in the day and miraculously cross the Red Sea to reach the Promised Land; and of arrivals, as when Noah’s ark lands on Mount Ararat after the dove he sent out returns with an olive leaf in her beak. Such epic stories tell tales of the hospitality that Nausikaa extends to Odysseus and that the inhospitable Polyphemus does not. They tell tales of the many obstacles along the way; of the sadness at the loss of family, friends, or homeland; of feeling Fernweh, the yearning for faraway and unknown places; of the hopefulness of new beginnings elsewhere; of the wish for a return from exile in what remains a strange location to the familiar place of origin; or of the migrants’ peculiar sense of seeing the world through the eyes of two places.

Such stories resonate in a world characterized by vast global migra- tions. There were 244 million international migrants in the world in 2015, more than the population of Brazil, the fifth largest country. The United States was the most important host country with 47 million migrants liv- ing there, followed by Germany and Russia, with twelve million migrants each.2 But for a very long time, Europe was a continent better known for sending migrants abroad, a good many of them to the Americas, than for receiving them. Hence the term “emigration” became more popular than “migration” in Europe.