Jews, do you take the Exodus account to be a literal one?

The Christopher Hitchens quotation calling it a 'fabrication' suffers from the same literalism as creationists et al. There is a truth in the story - it's probably not a literal truth (though the congruence between some historically-known events and the outline Exodus story that Kosher Ninja mentions is interesting) but it's an inherent truth - that people travelled, that something significant was preceding that travel and the inner truth about what happens psychologically in the move from feeling out of control of oneself ('slavery') to being a fully aware, cogent, proud and independent human being is beautifully outlined in the story. The fact is, it simply doesn't matter whether/how far the story is literally true. It gives us a metaphorical sense of how we come to be who we are, and whether that was derived from a story told within the Babylonian exile or elsewhere, it is profound in its psychological truth.