Continuing previous foundational work on cultural exchange and identity building in Late Antiquity (Kofsky et al., Reshaping Identities in Late Antique Syria-Mesopotamia , Piscataway: Gorgias, 2016), Kiperwasser, Kofsky, and Ruzer’s Late Antique Jewish and Christian Travelogues (2024) shifts its focus to the genre of travel narratives as identity markers and settings of cultural exchange. Special attention is paid to the metaphor of boundary in the geographical sense but also as “a set of differences between various groups” (1). Consulting a wide range of sources in diverse traditions (Christian, Greek, Syriac, and Jewish, as well as the broader Syro-Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman realms), Kiperwasser et al. illustrate how the genre of travelogue allows for the transcendence of physical and meta-physical boundaries, contextualizing much of the existing evidence concerning multi-cultural and interreligious interaction in Late Antiquity. The work makes a significant contribution to a growing field concerned with the intersection of travel and religion, focusing predominantly on the background and function of the travelogue in early Christian and rabbinic narratives.

Part 1 of the work, “Sea Voyages and Intertextual Routes” is divided into five chapters, forming a comparative analysis of rabbinic and Christian late antique narrative traditions that discuss the sea as a symbolic locus. Each of these perspectives builds on an ancient “core” (5) but have their own intended readers. Chapter One, “Tales of Sea Voyage and the Story of Jonah” presents the interpretations of the common biblical heritage of the book of Jonah in Jewish and Christian late antique narratives. As Kiperwasser et al. masterfully illustrate, the book of Jonah garnered great popularity and offered a conceptual framework in which late antique authors could shape the identity of the protagonist and engage with “the Other” (25). In chapter two, “Jews and Syriac Christians Wandering on the High Seas of Late Antiquity” the reader is presented with a clear distinction between Christian and Jewish narrative traditions, working from a common narratological framework (i.e., “shared myth,” 44) but each developing a distinct perspective on the sea and its resurrective symbolism.

Chapters 3 and 4, “Encountering Goddesses in Late Antique Travelogues” and “Sailing to Rome as Romans Do,” respectively, focus on concrete themes and compare how they are interpreted in Jewish and Christian traditions. In chapter 3, appropriations of the figures of Isis and Serapis highlight the continued presence of paganism in the imagined universes of these Jewish and Christian narrators and the various strategies they employed to present and interact with them. Chapter 4 illustrates how authors used the motif of divine intervention to advance the narrative. Part One is concluded by chapter 5, which presents two parallels in Ecclesiastes Rabbah and John Moscho’s Pratum Spirituale, carefully suggesting once again the shared cultural inheritance of these two traditions, though clearly denoting aspects in which they differ. Despite marked similarities across the corpus, it is notable how Kiperwasser et al. expertly emphasize the necessity of caution in discussions concerning mutual influence between Jewish and Christian late antique narratives.

Part Two, “The Land of Israel in Missionary and Eschatological Journeys” departs from sea voyages and instead focuses on the Land of Israel and the different kinds of journeys it motivated from missionary to eschatological endpoints. Chapter 6, “The Land of Israel as a ‘Place of No Entry’ in the Religious Journey of Mar Yaret” offers a closer look at the Vita of Yaret and its parallels to the Syriac Cave of Treasures, particularly in its rejection of Israel and promotion of Syria-Mesopotamia as the Promised Land of Christians. Stories about journeys to the Land of Israel inevitably evoke themes of conversion, as chapter 7, “The Journey as a Quest to Convert,” brings to the foreground. Though almost exclusively featured in Late antique Christian narratives, their authors employed various strategies, from appealing to Scripture to including miraculous feats, justifying conversion and highlighting the contrast with the Other.

In chapter 8, “Messianic Journey to the Land of Israel in the Book of Acts,” Kiperwasser et al. emphasize the importance of the geographical markers in Jesus’ address at the beginning of Acts, a fact that, as they clearly illustrate, has been downplayed in scholarly treatments of the text. Particularly important to the author of Acts is the symbiosis between the geography of the land and the symbolism of Israel as a place of salvation, as Kiperwasser et al. refreshingly argue (125). The volume ends with chapter 9, “The Eschatological Ingathering of Israel in Early Christianity,” presenting a range of early Christian interpretations and responses to the Jewish notion of Israel’s eschatological journey of return to the Promised Land. Kiperwasser et al. present a tension within Christian eschatology; with some sources appropriating the Jewish eschatological journey to the Promised Land, and others rejecting it outright.

In their introduction, Kiperwasser et al. express the appreciation of the genre of travel motif by “classicists, archaeologists, scholars of religion, theologians, and ancient historians” (2) and in doing so have also indirectly indicated to whom their own volume would appeal. The engagement with broader literary traditions in combination with robust, comparative analyses of individual passages make this work a significant contribution to the study of travel narratives but also the intercultural and interreligious context(s) of Late Antiquity.

One point that might invite further reflection concerns the conceptual elasticity of “travelogue” as an analytical category. While the authors convincingly demonstrate the usefulness of travel narratives for exploring identity formation, boundary crossing, and interreligious interaction, the corpus occasionally stretches beyond texts that would conventionally be classified as travelogues in a strict generic sense. In some cases, “journey” appears less as a structuring narrative framework and more as a thematic or symbolic device embedded within broader literary compositions. This does not undermine the volume’s comparative insights, but it raises the question of whether “travelogue” is best understood here as a genre, a narrative mode, or a heuristic lens, an issue that future research might fruitfully explore. The length of the work is concise, only 150 pages, but this is less a criticism of the authors, who generally go into formidable detail throughout the work, and more an appreciation of the material, which will spark great interest in all students of late antique literature.