‘History’ has been a stumbling block for recent attempts to give a theoretical account of the rise of nationalism in modern times. Questions – such as how theory could coherently address divergent historical experiences without effacing the historical particularity of each experience, how the North African and the Indian national experiences compare, or what the relation between ‘first-world,’ ‘second-world’ and ‘third-world’ nation-building is – continue to haunt attempts to ‘theorise’ nationalism. While such attempts underscore the historicity of the processes that gave rise to nationalism as well as national consciousness itself, one region often remains outside the realm of history, that of literary meaning. In the 1960s and early 1970s, theoreticians such as Hans-Georg Gadamer (1993) and Hans Robert Jauss (1986) explored the historical operations that produce meaning. Still, their insights appear all but forgotten by more contemporary attempts to discuss literature in the context of modern nationalism. Major figures such as Edward Said, Frederic Jameson, Stephen Greenblatt, Homi Bhabha or Benedict Anderson, who in every other aspect of their work introduce history into the reading of a text, read the literary text as if its meaning is always already set and determined, beyond history. In this chapter, I would like to address the question of history and theory by examining one case study from the history of modern Hebrew literature in the context of Zionist nationalism.