Simcha Jacobovici is a cool guy, and yes, there are other theories of when the Exodus occurred. I favor the Ramose/Akhenaten thing because it supplies a reason. If people are going to leave their homes and march across the desert in search of a new place to live, they need a powerful reason. All of the other theories are just archeological/literary dots that can be connected to outline a certain picture. If you pick different dots, you get a different picture. ;) But the Ramose/Akhenaten theory has all of that, and it has a more inspiring, humanistic religion getting founded (i.e., the Amarna heresy), which has a lot in common with early Judaism, and which supplies the reason to accept exile instead of going back to the old ways under Tutankhamun and Horemheb. So that supplies the "why".

 

Then, we also find the "how" behind deeply engrained Jewish customs, such as cleanliness and kosher cooking. The fact that these customs noticably reduced the fatality rate of Jews during the Black Death in Europe (1348~1350) suggests that the customs were originally formulated during an outbreak of the same disease. This is really starting to make sense.

 

To look at it the other way around, what would be the bare minimum spiritual, social, economic, and/or political motives behind a mass migration into a new land? Now, how much of that would, of necessity, show up in the historical and archeological records? That's what we're looking for. If this were a murder mystery, we'd be looking for a motive, a means, and an opportunity. ;) Just remember that we can also infer the size of the motive/means/opportunity by the size of what resulted, and use that as a constraint. The reasons were not trivial. The Ramose/Akhenaten theory has all of this. The other theories don't even conduct this kind of analysis. There was only one major heresy in ancient Egypt, which was similar to early Judaism. There were a variety of calamities, but only one plague big enough to get mentioned by Tacitus (who called it leprosy, which of course is a different disease, but which is still a skin condition), and who also said that the plague resulted in the expulsion of a bunch of people, led by Moses, who settled in Canaan, and eventually built a temple. The plague supplies the reason for the downfall of the Amarna heresy, but in so doing, it also supplies the reason for a small group of fanatics to continue on in their beliefs, and defined how they did it (by adopting customs that protected them).