Reorienting the East, Jewish Travellers to the Medieval Muslim World by Martin Jacobs (review)

This aptly titled monograph sets out to recast the ‘European’ experience of travel to the Near East between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries through an exploration of the travel literature of Jewish writers more specifically. Martin Jacobs investigates the Jewish experience of travel from Europe to the Holy Land, and beyond, in the wake of the Crusades. The author cogently argues that literary genres such as the itinerarium and peregrinatio were by no means limited to Latin writers, and that a vigorous corpus of travel writing exists from contemporaneous Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic sources ranging from itineraries, to epistolary writing and poetry.

Jacobs’s main concern is the question of whether European Jewish travellers shared ‘Western’ perceptions of the Middle East with their Christian counterparts. In answering this question, he explores how European Jews interacted with the foreign cultures they encountered, whether Sunni Muslims, Druze, Ismailis and Levantine Christians, or Near Eastern Jewish communities and Jewish sects such as the Karaites. What emerges from this study is a nuanced series of ‘shifting views’ on the part of the Jewish writers, affected either by an author’s personal experience, motivations for travel, or the changing historical circumstances of the time.

According to Jacobs, Jewish travel accounts underwent two distinct phases. The first was prompted by the Crusades and an increase in the number of European Jews making pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Writers such as Benjamin of Tudela in his Sefer ha-Massa’ot (‘Book of Travels’; mid-twelfth century) wrote an itinerary of the journey from Europe to Jerusalem, focusing largely on visits to holy sites but also reporting on toponyms, distances, populations (Jewish or otherwise), commerce, and trade. While Benjamin’s book is basically ‘a plotless itemisation of place descriptions’, his accounts of visiting religious sites in Mesopotamia offer a unique perspective; this area is portrayed as a ‘religious utopia’ where Muslims and Jews live in harmony and ‘rub shoulders’ at the various tombs and shrines. Jacobs is unsure as to the veracity of this claim but believes it may have reflected nostalgia Benjamin felt for pre-Reconquista Europe.

The second phase in Jewish travel writing includes letters, journals, and poetry, written by pilgrims and merchants alike, some of whom settled permanently in Jerusalem. These were clearly more personal accounts and the authors displayed a ‘clear consciousness of themselves as both observers and authors’. These accounts were varied in their attitude to the cultures of the Near East; these variations depended on the writers themselves, their background, and intended audience. The diary of Meshullam of Volterra (c. 1443–c. 1507) who travelled to the Near East for business purposes, provides a highly judgemental account of the East, and criticises the perceived iniquity of the Muslims and the cruelty of their rulers. On the other hand, another Italian and contemporary of Meshullam, Obadiah of Betinoro (c. 1450–1515), a prominent Rabbi who settled in Jerusalem, shows little bias towards Near Eastern society and offers ‘genuine examples of cross-cultural understanding’.

An unfortunate transition that occurs in the ‘second phase’, at least according to a handful of quattro- and cinquecento Jewish travellers, was an increase in Muslim hegemony over sacred space following the expulsion of the crusaders from Palestine. While the Italian merchants who made this claim may have been showing the impact of contemporaneous discourse in Italy, this evidence is useful in tracing a slowly moving deterioration in relations between Jews and Muslims in Palestine, which over the last century has become so acute.

The great strength of Jacobs’s book is his access to Hebrew source material, much of which he translates into English for the first time. While English translations of prominent authors like Benjamin of Tudela have long been available, Jacobs is able to access the...