As Emily Apter and others point out, the field of Comparative Literature begins, in some sense, with such exiles and emigres from war-torn regions as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Edward Said. Beginning with the Bible, this course will follow the movements of travel, exile, and migration in constructing Jewish history and literature; so, too, will we follow the migrations of these narratives across national and cultural boundaries, and from antiquity to modernity and the global present. Learning from scholars in the fields of memory studies and diaspora studies, and reading a variety of texts of different genres and in different languages — or in the migration that is translation — we will attempt to understand the connection between movement, memory, and forgetting; migration and narrative; in the construction of worlds and selves over geographic, temporal, and ideological upheavals. Readings include Genesis and Exodus, medieval travel literature, Abramovitz's Travels of Benjamin the Third, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, and André Aciman's Out of Egypt.