Reorienting the East: Jewish Travelers to the Medieval Muslim World by Martin Jacobs (review)

Picture a scene in the Near East in the late fifteenth century. An upper-class Jewish merchant from Italy witnesses the flaying of a Bedouin thief who has been sentenced to death by a Mamluk sultan. Reporting the experience, Meshullam of Volterra finds confirmation of Western preconceptions about the cruelty of Eastern rulers (perhaps not unreasonably in this case). Turning from autocratic barbarity to the merely uncivilized, he also disapproves of Near Eastern table manners: “They all eat out of one vessel—the slave with his master—and they always eat with their fingers, most of them sitting cross-legged.” These vignettes come from one of the two-dozen Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic travel narratives, imaginary voyages, letters, and poetic texts written between about 1150 and 1520 that are surveyed in Jacobs’ Reorienting the East.

Interrogating these fascinating sources, Jacobs seeks to establish how Jewish traders and pilgrims encountered and visualized the Muslim world between the Middle Ages and the early modern period in an area extending from Egypt to Iran. Just because Jews in Europe were the “non-Christian other,” Jacobs cautions, we should not presume that European Jewish travelers to the Near East were naturally receptive to foreign cultures. On the contrary, Meshullam of Volterra took it for granted that Italians were superior to the people living under the Mamluks and echoed characteristically Christian stereotypes about Orientals. Other Jewish writers, however, depicted Islam as a highly refined civilization with deep roots in the region’s Greco-Roman heritage. Some of them admired Muslim rulers for the benign way in which they wielded power and for respecting the autonomy of their Jewish subjects, viewing Damascus and Alexandria as urban marvels and reporting that Baghdad could provide everything that was lacking in the lives of European Jews.

Jacobs pays careful attention to the social and cultural contexts of his sources, helping readers to discern many nuances in a range of differing outlooks that undermine any artificially monochromatic picture of medieval Jewish interactions with the Muslim world. Jewish travelers do not fall into a single category; nor do they speak with one voice. We read, for instance, that some Jews praised the veil worn by Islamic women as an inducement to modesty, whereas others criticized it for the opportunities that it afforded to those seeking to cover up less commendable behavior. We also learn how the renowned Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro on a visit to late fifteenth-century Alexandria sympathized with the city’s Christians who had to avoid going out during Muslim holidays and were locked in their houses at night, thus suffering restrictions similar to those imposed on Italian Jews.

The places to which these Jewish writers traveled were not uniformly alien to them. Travelers occasionally discovered a Jewish diaspora that was simultaneously foreign and familiar. The journeys of these medieval Jews raised a question that plays an important part in the travel narratives: Where was the center of the Jewish world—in Europe or in Palestine? The problems faced by European Jews during the four centuries discussed in this book are well known. Yet, Palestine lacked a substantial Jewish population; it was ruled by one dominant, non-Jewish power after another—Christian crusaders or Muslim Ayyubids, Mamluks, and Ottomans.

The primary theme of this study is that medieval Jewish travelers subverted European constructions of the Near East. With their own multifaceted identities (neither exclusively Western nor Eastern but including elements of both), they brought a special understanding to their experiences of the Muslim world. Reorienting the East, as the book’s title expresses it, they decentered Europe. One of this book’s principal strengths is the critical introduction that it provides to medieval Jewish travel writing, which has until now received little serious attention. Most importantly, Jacobs confutes any notion that Jewish, Muslim, or Christian identities and cultures during this period can be regarded as fixed, monolithic, or reducible to an unchanging...