In a graduate school course on historiography many decades ago I wrote a paper comparing the two nearly contemporaneous Jewish travelers, Benjamin of Tudela and Petaḥiah of Regensburg. And so it was with great anticipation that I awaited the arrival of the book reviewed below. What would the author do with these well-known texts and others like it? Would I learn anything new? I wasn't disappointed.
Martin Jacobs's book makes an important contribution to the scholarly study of travel literature, a field of historical research that has come into vogue in recent decades. Jacobs discusses a wide variety of genres: itineraries, lists of holy places, pilgrims’ reference books, diaries and letters, poetry about travel, and others—all of which describe places and experiences in the medieval Islamic world. Most of these texts are well known and have been used to mine data about Jewish life in Muslim lands. This approach depends on the reliability of the descriptions, their “facticity.” Jacobs is more interested in what the texts reveal about the authors’ sense of self and how their own background and place of origin are reflected in what they describe and how they describe it. Ultimately, then, the value of this study lies in what it tells us about how the travelers seek to define themselves in the light of what they observe during their peregrinations.
Apart from some minor figures, Jacobs's main cast of characters includes two groups, the first consisting of twelfth- and thirteenth-century travelers from the West to the East, and the second, fifteenth-century travelers from Italy. The central figures in the earlier group are Benjamin of Tudela and Petaḥiah of Regensburg; the Hebrew poet Judah Halevi (d. 1141); and the itinerant poet and maqama writer, Judah Alharizi (1165–1225). The later group features the Italian Jewish merchants Meshullam of Volterra, who made two journeys to the East from his native land in the 1480s; Ovadiah of Bertinoro (ca. 1450–ca. 1515), who emigrated from Italy in 1486 intending to settle in Jerusalem, where he became the chief rabbinic scholar (his best-known work is his commentary on the Mishnah); and the kabbalist rabbi Moses Basola, who undertook multiple journeys to the Levant and wrote detailed accounts of Jewish holy tombs in Palestine. Supplementing these, Jacobs puts on the table the category of “imaginary travel,” namely, the shadowy ninth-century figure Eldad ha-Dani and the sixteenth-century David ha-Reuveni. The former was purported to stem from a kingdom of Jewish warrior tribes. The latter, a real figure, presented himself to the Jews, to the pope, and to the Portuguese king as an adventurer seeking to create an alliance against the Turks between western Christian powers and his own Jewish warrior tribe in “the wilderness of Habor.”
One of the running themes pursued in the book takes its cue from the postcolonial debate over what Edward Said dubbed “Orientalism.” Jacobs asks whether any of the Jewish travelers exhibit a tendency to treat the Muslim world condescendingly, anticipating thereby the imperialist vision of French and British writers that, according to Said, acted as handmaids of western colonialism in the nineteenth century. Jacobs detects in Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the Holy Land during the period of Crusader rule, a positive attitude toward Islam and a decidedly negative attitude toward Christianity and Christians. As if to negate the occupation of Palestine by Christians, he, like Petaḥiah, engages in an intertextual account of the place, using biblical imagery to cover up the reality that the Holy Land was then under Christian control.
Readers of Benjamin's itinerary have long wondered about his unrealistic and exaggerated depiction of Baghdad. Jacobs convincingly explains this as providing a counterpoint to Crusader-occupied Jerusalem. Benjamin exaggerates the population figure for the Jews of Baghdad to show that benevolent Islam enables Jews to flourish, whereas the Christian conquest of Jerusalem left the city nearly “judenrein,” with but four lone Jews. (Jacobs prefers the manuscript that has the number “four,” represented by the Hebrew letter dalet, to the manuscript that has “two hundred,” represented by the letter resh, which closely resembles dalet.) The plethora of synagogues and houses of study in Baghdad highlights by contrast the dearth of such centers of active Jewish life in the Holy Land. The exalted portrayal of the Jewish exilarch and his honored place in the presence of the caliph illustrates the respectful treatment of the Jews by their Muslim rulers. In short, Benjamin's happy image of a flourishing Jewish community in Baghdad throws into bold relief the sad state of Jewish affairs in Jerusalem resulting from the Christian conquest.
Benjamin's message, Jacobs tells us, is that Jews can only prosper under Islamic hegemony. Coming from Spain, Benjamin seems also to project memories of the halcyon era of the so-called “golden age” of Jewish life in Muslim Spain. In Baghdad Jews still bask in the warm light of Islamic tolerance, while Jews in Jerusalem live under the dark cloud of Christian oppression. Benjamin wished to “reorient the East,” to show readers how restoring Crusader-held Palestine to Muslim control would allow the Jews to once again enjoy the benefits of Islamic tolerance.
Petaḥiah of Regensburg, for his part, dwells on the piety of Jews in the Islamic East during pilgrimages to the tombs of biblical and rabbinic ancestors. In Jacobs's opinion, this represents an indirect critique of those Jews back home in his native Germany who fail to live up to the pious standards of the form of Judaism to which the traveler belonged, the Ḥasidei Ashkenaz movement.
Only the fifteenth-century traveler Meshullam of Volterra exhibits something akin to Said's notion of Western disdain for the Orient, Jacobs tells us. Meshullam lived at the time when the “Turkish menace,” in the form of Ottoman expansionism, put fright into European minds. Where Benjamin's preference for Islam dictated his gloomy picture of Jewish life under Christian Crusader rule in the East, Meshullam's bias goes the other way. His negative opinion of Islam comes out in his view of the primitiveness of the practices, religious and otherwise, of the Muslim masses, and continues with similar revulsion at the lifestyle of the indigenous Jews. He travels in oriental disguise to avoid being mistreated by oppressive Muslims.
But is this a Western “proto-Orientalism,” foreshadowing the colonialist view of the Islamic world in the nineteenth century? To his credit, Jacobs resists the temptation to draw this conclusion. Ultimately he minimizes the significance of the “Saidian” interpretation of Meshullam's patronizing depiction of the Islamic world, especially because his contemporary, the Italian Ovadiah of Bertinoro, projects a more favorable image of Muslim society and of the place of Jews in it.
Unlike Meshullam, Ovadiah traveled to the East to settle there. He conveyed his impressions not in a travel account, but rather in letters that he sent back home. Ovadiah, Jacobs believes, may have read Meshullam's account and wished to correct the record by painting a more favorable picture of the Muslim East. Unlike the merchant Meshullam, for instance, Ovadiah does not disguise himself as a Muslim when traveling, because he knows that Muslims behave kindly toward the Jews. Ovadiah admires Muslim hospitality, differing in this respect from his fellow countryman. Another Italian Jewish traveler from a little later on, the kabbalist R. Moses Basola, praises the Muslims traveling in his caravan for caring for him following an accident. Ovadiah favorably compares the Jews’ status in the Muslim world to their marginal position in Christian Italy. Here Jacobs points to Ovadiah's somewhat paradoxical statement, which I have noted elsewhere, regarding the otherwise impoverished Jewish community of Jerusalem: “From the side of the Ishmaelites, the Jews do not experience repression [galut] in these parts” (170). Attentive to the wide semantic field of the Hebrew term galut, Jacobs correctly understands the word in this context to connote exclusion from majority society, rather than expulsion and exile to another place. Jacobs adduces other statements by Jewish travelers from the West indicating a Western Jewish perception that the Jews of the Islamic world, though many of them were quite poor and downtrodden, were not excluded from the majority society.
Martin Jacobs has given us an intelligent new reading of Jewish travel literature from the Middle Ages and has shown how a careful, comparative reading of multiple sources of the same genre can go far beyond the “positivist” search for facts.
