Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity

By University of Pennsylvania Press

Journeys of dislocation and return, of discovery and conquest hold a prominent place in the imagination of many cultures. Wherever an individual or community may be located, it would seem, there is always the dream of being elsewhere. This has been especially true throughout the ages for Jews, for whom the promises and perils of travel have influenced both their own sense of self and their identity in the eyes of others.

How does travel writing, as a genre, produce representations of the world of others, against which one's own self can be invented or explored? And what happens when Jewish authors in particular—whether by force or of their own free will, whether in reality or in the imagination—travel from one place to another? How has travel figured in the formation of Jewish identity, and what cultural and ideological work is performed by texts that document or figure specifically Jewish travel? Featuring essays on topics that range from Abraham as a traveler in biblical narrative to the guest book entries at contemporary Israeli museum and memorial sites; from the marvels medieval travelers claim to have encountered to eighteenth-century Jewish critiques of Orientalism; from the Wandering Jew of legend to one mid-twentieth-century Yiddish writer's accounts of his travels through Peru, Jews and Journeys explores what it is about travel writing that enables it to become one of the central mechanisms for exploring the realities and fictions of individual and collective identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812297935

Book preview

PART I

Introduction

Chapter 1

Departures

Joshua Levinson

There is no foreign land; it is only the traveller that is foreign.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Since Homer sang of Odysseus’s return from Troy, or the Bible recounted Abraham’s emigration from Ur to Canaan, the travel narrative has held a privileged place in the social imagination of many cultures. These two exemplary travel narratives seem to indicate that for both of these cultures being not at home was a foundational experience. Yet, while Odysseus travels home from a strange land, Abraham travels to a strange land from home. These two ancient tales already present us with two of the dominant themes of travel writing: a nostalgic yearning to return home and a desire to leave home and seek out a new world. Are these two different types of homo viator and two different trajectories of travel indicative of different strategies of self-fashioning in their respective cultures? Is it possible to speak not only of homo viator but also of homo viator judaicus?

Unquestionably, travels of dislocation and return, discovery and conquest, hold a prominent place in formative Jewish and non-Jewish fictions of identity. It would almost seem that wherever a self or community is located it has always dreamed of being elsewhere and used travel writing as a cultural mechanism for exploring and shaping its own fictions of identity. What is it about travel writing that enables it to become one of the central cultural mechanisms for exploring and shaping themes of identity? How does this genre produce representations of an other and his world, against which and through which it explores and invents a particular sense of self? How do travel discourses work with and against other forms of cultural representation and give contour to territory and experience? Do the different types of travel construct different types of self, of others, and self-other interaction, and how do the various types of travel writing interact and influence one another? In other words, what cultural and ideological work is performed by these texts? These are some of the questions explored in this volume.

The genres of travel writing have assumed a myriad of literary forms throughout their long history. Indeed, the variety and breadth of travel writing are daunting. Already in antiquity, they ran the gamut from Homer and Hanno the Carthaginian’s Periplus (lit. sailing around) to Pausanias’s Periegesis (Description of Greece) and the travelogue of Theophanes, Egeria’s epistolary Itinerary, and even Lucian of Samosata’s True History where the narrator travels to the moon. The Middle Ages witnessed the opening of new vistas and new forms of travel writing with the accounts of Benjamin of Tudela, Marco Polo, and Mandeville, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, alongside Ibn Battuta’s travels in the Islamic world of the fourteenth century. With the radical expansion of boundaries in the age of discovery and conquest, travel writing developed in new directions as, for example, the diaries and accounts of Columbus and Hakluyt enabled and fostered the European empires. Premodern and modern literature has given us Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and even Harrison Ford’s screen roles as Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Likewise, the image of the traveler himself or herself includes not only the pious pilgrims of late antiquity, but also errant knights and merchants, the explorers and colonizers of the age of exploration, as well as the ambassadors, adventurers, and tourists of the modern era.

Even if we focus on Jewish literature throughout the ages, not only can we profitably examine travel motifs in many biblical and rabbinic narratives (the Hebrew Bible actually begins [Gen. 3:23] and ends [2 Chron. 36:23] with travel), but we find a remarkably broad spectrum of medieval and early modern writings that parallel Christian and Muslim-authored travel literature in both form and content. The Geniza documents tell us of a commercial-traveling Jewish society that took shape in the medieval Muslim world, and the first Hebrew travel narratives—best represented by the eclectic accounts of Benjamin of Tudela and Petahiah of Regensburg—emerged in the wake of the Crusades. Moreover, there are ample cultural artifacts of journeys, real and imagined, including poems by Judah Halevi, the maqamāt of Alharizi, or the accounts of Meshullam of Volterra and Obadiah of Bertinoro, two Jewish travelers from quattrocento Italy. Around the time of the French Revolution, Hayim Joseph David Azulai traveled to Europe in his capacity as an emissary of the Palestinian Jewish community; and Samuel Romanelli, a Mantuan Jew, left us a description of his travels in Morocco that constitutes a fascinating amalgam of the traditional Hebrew travelogue and Enlightenment thought. Last, the Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third by Mendele Mocher Sforim (S. Abramovich) portrays a kind of Jewish Don Quixote, who on his way to the Land of Israel hardly makes it beyond the boundaries of his shtetl.

Given this embarrassment of cultural riches and the inherently hybrid nature of this literary form, it is notoriously difficult to define. In the strict sense of the term, travel writing is not a genre at all, because any genre can produce travel writing. It is written in prose and poetry and encompasses not only the itinerary and travelogue but almost every possible type of literary representation—high and low, mimetic and imaginative—from the epistolary and poetic to the ethnographic report, tour guide, or postcard. As even the few examples cited above illustrate, travel writing throughout the ages has served a variety of social and ideological functions. Each time the character or gender of the traveler changes, each means of representation, of direction, motivation, and destination—so the nature, purposes, and traits of travel writing are transformed.

So, what then is travel writing? Are all movements to be regarded as travel, and are all forms of writing that emerge from this experience to be classified as travel literature? Would Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud qualify? There is no simple answer to these questions. It has become de rigueur for scholars to point out the hybrid nature of travel writing, its dauntingly heterogeneous character in matters of form and content and propensity to borrow freely from the memoir, journalism, letters, guidebooks, confessional narrative, and, most important, fiction.¹ Jonathan Raban, in an oft-quoted comment, remarked on the tendency of travel writing to freely mix forms of narrative and discursive writing that as a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where very different genres are likely to end up in the same bed.²

In fact, one of the issues that have doggedly perplexed contemporary research is precisely how to delineate the parameters of travel literature. Scholarly discussions often divide between exclusive and inclusive approaches.³ The exclusive approach strives to distinguish the travelogue proper from other forms of travel literature. Tim Youngs, for example, stresses that travel writing consists of predominantly factual, first-person prose accounts of travels undertaken by the narrator-author.⁴ The central components here are a first-person account of an actual journey that the reader assumes to have taken place and that the author, protagonist, and narrator are identical. Other, less mimetic forms of travel writing are thus considered secondary and derivative. In distinction, the inclusive approach includes fictional and nonfictional accounts that take travel as a dominant theme and refuses to privilege either the retrospective account of the author’s own experience of a journey or the historicist assumption that all other texts that have travel as a major theme are in some way modeled upon real travel writing.⁵

While there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, and both types of travel writing are discussed in this volume, there are both practical and theoretical reasons for adopting a more inclusive framework. First, the distinction between the factual and the fictional is extremely fuzzy, and certainly problematic for premodern texts. As Gérard Genette has remarked, the idea of pure fiction or nonfiction is only a theoretical construct that does not correspond to any given text, which cannot escape the transforming influence of mimesis.⁶ Even the most mimetic of travelogues employs rhetorical and literary devices and expresses itself through the medium of a narrative voice that is never identical with the author’s, even when called by the same name. The actual experience of a journey is always fictionalized the moment when it is represented in narrative form. As Barbara Korte has remarked, as far as the text and its narrative techniques are concerned, there appears to be no essential distinction between the travel account proper and purely fictional forms of travel literature.⁷

Equally challenging, certainly for premodern texts, is the referential pact between the author and reader, the required assumption on the part of the reader that the journey portrayed actually took place. For ancient and even medieval texts, the reconstruction of a reader’s horizon of expectations is a speculative endeavor. The way that texts are read changes over time. For example, Defoe presented Robinson Crusoe as an authentic first-person account with no appearance of fiction in it, and Melville’s Typee was received as a truthful narrative before his reputation as a novelist became better known.⁸

While, theoretically, there is a logical basis for including Joseph Conrad’s Congo Diary but excluding his Heart of Darkness, we should also be open to the possibility that the so-called real or mimetic narratives may themselves be derivative of their fictional counterparts. At the origin of any journey, real or imagined, there is always another journey or another story. The most real of travelers is already a viator in fabula, a traveler traveling in a story he has read or imagined.⁹ The fact that Columbus voyaged with well-worn and annotated copies of Marco Polo and John Mandeville, both books recognized today as having considerable fictional components, had a profound effect on how he understood both himself and the New World he wrote about in his diaries.¹⁰ Just as many mimetic travelogues are modeled upon Homer’s Odyssey or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which the exclusivist approach would reject, so too we should not discard the travel accounts of Sir John Mandeville or Benjamin of Tudela even though scholars seriously doubt that they ever visited many of the places they described. Even Youngs, who privileges the factual over the fictional travel narrative, has emphasized that each of these borrows from the other and uses similar techniques; travel writing feeds from and back into other forms of literature. To try to identify boundaries between various forms would be impossible and I would be deeply suspicious of any attempt at the task.¹¹

Jan Borm makes an intuitively useful distinction between the travel book proper (récit de voyage) and travel literature as a whole. He defines the former in an exclusivist fashion as described above.¹² He posits the term travel literature as a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel.¹³ This constellation of texts would include not only guidebooks and maps, but also travel photography, road movies, and novels. Thus, the dauntingly heterogeneous character of travel writing is not merely an accommodating open house. Guillaume Thouroude has suggested that this hybridity constitutes a kind of magnetic attracting field of writing, a literary territory which generates its own creative energy.¹⁴ Seen in this light, it is precisely the discursive traffic and generic exchange in travel literature that enables it to function as a powerful cultural site for the circulation of social energy.¹⁵

Since our interest in travel literature lies precisely in the flexibility of its cultural forms and functions in a cultural system, as well as the relation between mimetic and imaginative discourses, we have little interest in policing generic borders and have chosen to avoid overly confining definitions. Following Joan-Pau Rubiés and others, we will concentrate on those writings (literary or documentary) that take travel (real or imagined) as an essential condition of their production or dramatic situation,¹⁶ that describe the movement of individuals across some kind of boundary (usually geographic, but not necessarily so). Often, this is a movement into what Mary Louise Pratt has called contact zones, those social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.¹⁷ Although not without problems (how prominent does the travel dimension have to be for it to constitute a main theme?), this is at present the definition this collection uses in order to investigate how Jewish travel narratives function as a vehicle of cultural self-perception and produce representations of an other and his world, against which and through which it explores and invents a particular sense of self.

In spite of its ancient cultural pedigree, travel writing has not always enjoyed a status commensurate with its literary longevity. While travel has always interested historians and ethnographers, the study of travel writing might have remained a marginal discipline applied to a minor form of literature if not for the intervention of contemporary theory in three different but complementary manifestations. The first was the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). His theories concerning the formation and function of the non-Western other for European identity (heavily influenced by Foucault)—and especially the lively critical debate they engendered—acted as a catalyst to reexamine travel writing as a means of identity formation, both to and from the edges of the empire. The role of travel narratives, which emerged from European voyages of discovery and prolonged contacts made through trade and war, was central to the Orientalist enterprise for obvious reasons, given that they were often the principal accounts of other places and peoples to be circulated to an audience back home.¹⁸

Second, when this theory of the non-Western other was augmented by feminist and postcolonial theories of identity, alterity, and agency, there emerged a powerful analytical perspective on travel writing. Finally, to this growing body of scholarly work, mention should be made of the so-called linguistic turn in the humanities and social sciences that resulted in a blurring of the borders not only between literary and historical disciplines but also between canonical and noncanonical forms of representation. In light of these developments, the past decade has seen the emergence of an intense interest in travel writing—in its mimetic, imaginative, and hybrid modes—as a complex range of practices and representations.

Scholars from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are represented in this collection. We look at various historical, political, and cultural contexts that inspired or forced travels of Jews and at the places they traveled to and from. In addition, our book explores what is Jewish about traveling Jews, Jews engaged in travel, and Jews producing narratives about travel. Just as the the cursus publicus unified the Roman world and enabled travelers to feel at home in remote places, so too the Jewish diasporas created a network of communities that enabled the homo viator judaicus (traders, preachers, emissaries, paupers, and pilgrims) to move from community to community in a way that undermines any simplistic dichotomies between self and other, here and there. Thus, from a cross-cultural perspective, we examine how concepts such as home and abroad, exile and domicile, roots and routes look like when fractured through a Jewish lens as opposed to a Christian or Muslim perspective. In other words, is there travel literature that can be characterized as distinctly Jewish apart from the fact that it has been penned by Jewish authors?

How do we conceptualize home for a people whose existence for many centuries was as exiles? How, in other words, might we consider the many homes (from household to nation-state) Jews considered as their natural habitat? We try to think through these categories while rethinking the themes of the pains of exile, the desire to travel to the Land of Israel, the yearning for imagined and real homes, and the different religious, political, and theological conceptualizations of returning, traveling, diaspora, and residence.

The essays in this volume reflect both these theoretical concerns and historical influences. They concentrate on the cultural and ideological work performed by these texts as a mechanism for exploring and shaping themes of personal and group identity and difference. In one form or another, travel narratives are about the construction and representation of identity; one’s own and an other’s. Since to begin any journey, to simply step out the door is to encounter alterity, all travel writing engages in a complex interplay between sameness and difference. These essays focus on travel writing as an opportunity for a culture to represent and dramatize its own fissures and fictions of identity in the negotiation between self and other that is brought about by movement in space. When Jews go elsewhere, when they imagine an elsewhere or are forced to go elsewhere, how does travel figure in their identity formation? This is the problematic that we will attempt to explore.

Chapter 2

Why Do We Need a Cultural History of Travel—and What Do the Jews Have to Do with It?

Joan-Pau Rubiés

The collective volume Jews and Journeys exemplifies the consolidation of travel writing as a fundamental resource for cultural historians and an increasingly privileged focus for their research. Back in the 1990s the subject still needed some justification, in part because the interests and methodologies of literary critics, historians of exploration and colonialism, historians of science, and anthropologists, had often pointed in different directions.¹ Where some looked for historical facts, others emphasized ideological biases, the analysis of voice and genre, or rites of passage. A couple of decades of intensive research have shown that, despite such disciplinary differences (which, of course, remain legitimate), there was a significant amount of common ground too. This common ground could be cultivated profitably by adopting overtly interdisciplinary methodologies that combined rhetorical and theoretical awareness with a wide-ranging effort at historical contextualization. Under this umbrella, travel has emerged not just as a practical activity of varying historical importance but also as the condition of possibility for a multifarious genre that constitutes a key resource for analyzing perceptions of ethnic and religious diversity. However, it is also obvious that any such perceptions of other places, peoples, and their cultures are not objective—that is, they involve a great deal of subjectivity. Hence travel writing has also become a privileged source for analyzing cultural identities, and in particular the mechanism by which the self (whether strictly individual or imagined as belonging to a nation, ethnic group, gender, or another collective) is defined in relation to an other—a cross-disciplinary concept rooted in philosophical hermeneutics and popularized from the late 1970s in a series of influential works by Edward Said, Michel de Certeau, Johannes Fabian, François Hartog, Stephen Greenblatt, and others.² Whether this other is real or imaginary seems less important than revealing through discourse analysis and (increasingly since the 1990s) historical contextualization the dynamics by which, when constructing the other, the self also constructs itself. In fact, more often than not images of human diversity in travel writing—what we might define as an implicit ethnography—are neither strictly empirical nor entirely fictional, but rather are produced through a combination of the factual and elements of fantasy. What matters here is that through a history of travel writing—or, more precisely, through a cultural history of travel writing that takes account of the complexity of the genre—one can write the history of cultural identities, how they are formed and how they are transformed. The now dominant paradigm by which identities are understood to be multiple rather than single, changing rather than rigid, relational rather than self-generated, and often contradictory rather than coherent, therefore owes a great deal to the contribution of studies in the history of travel writing.

Despite the apparent promise of the subject already in the 1990s, one fundamental limitation of the kind of work possible at the time Jaś Elsner and I edited Voyages and Visions (other than the utter impossibility of offering a comprehensive analysis of the whole period from antiquity to science fiction) was the difficulty of constructing a grand narrative that was not Eurocentric. While it was possible to sketch a longue durée perspective that focused on the emergence of modernity in travel writing, its Western focus seemed at that point inevitable and also logical, given the higher proportion of available sources originally written by European observers and in European languages. Although in reality much work was already taking place on travel writing in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Hebrew, or Judeo-Arabic, what was missing was a collective impetus toward bringing together these various disciplines and developing shared methodologies—a process that even today, despite the consolidation of the topic, is far from complete.³ For this reason, we were perfectly aware that our attempt to offer the sketch of a grand narrative centered on European and American travel writing could only offer a starting point. This is especially true because we also understood that cultural and religious traditions (or even world civilizations) evolve through interactions and cannot be analyzed as entirely autonomous realities with rigid boundaries. Under the impetus of globalization, one of the most significant and welcome developments of the last twenty years has been a strong move toward an interactive model for understanding cultural encounters. Concepts such as contact zone, shared (or entangled) history, and connected history have helped steer the historiography toward understanding hybridity and interactions, thus balancing any analysis—however sophisticated—simply focused on deconstructing a modern or Western discourse.

I may therefore offer as a first observation that the new cultural history of travel is increasingly interactive. However, this does not mean that it is sufficiently balanced. It is not the same to write about European perceptions of, let us say, Mughal India, the Incas of Peru, or sixteenth-century Japan by carefully contextualizing European ethnographic productions and taking account of native perspectives and cultural realities, as to assess the contribution of non-Western cultures to the history of the genre. While some outstanding examples of travel writing in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, or Chinese have attracted the attention of various scholars, and we have an increasingly detailed understanding of (in particular) Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca across the ages, a lot still needs to be done in order to produce a comprehensive analysis comparable to the complex grand narrative of the evolution of the genre in the West. Thus the current challenge is to widen the perspective not simply by paying attention to the most interesting examples of travel writing in the Islamic world or China, but rather by developing a thick historiography of the history of the genre in different cultural contexts, one capable of producing a truly global comparative history of travel and travel writing.

Obviously the biggest difficulty in such an enterprise is the relative paucity of sources in non-European languages. This cannot be fully eliminated, but the challenge of avoiding a crude form of Eurocentrism is being increasingly addressed through a combination of new scholarship concerning those sources we do have (editions and translations, with more careful contextualization) and learning how to read European sources concerning other peoples with a reasonable dose of skepticism. The essays in Jews and Journeys offer excellent examples of these two approaches. However, at this point one might ask, what exactly is the role of Jewish travel writing—together with travel writing about the Jews—in this project of developing a cultural of history of travel that resists the traditional bias toward Christian Eurocentrism? In fact, the kind of material analyzed in this collection is particularly useful, for two reasons: first, because the tradition of Jewish travel writing is rich enough—it has enough mass—to allow for a longue durée perspective. As Martin Jacobs notes in relation to the late medieval period, from Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century to Meshullam of Volterra in the fifteenth, it is possible to trace changes and continuities in the treatment of certain topics and to establish some correspondences with the Christian and Muslim cultures to which the authors of these texts in part belonged.⁴ For example, while recognizing how closely imbricated the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim eschatological traditions were, one may also talk of the emergence in the late Middle Ages of a distinctively westernized Jewish identity—increasingly acculturated to Latin Christian assumptions—in relation to Islam, here understood not only as a religious tradition, but also as a social and political system. This critical mass of Jewish travel writing only increased in later periods, as shown by other essays in this collection.

More interesting perhaps, throughout the late antique, medieval, and early modern periods Jews occupied a privileged position as potential mediators between East and West. Here, of course, East and West are not strictly geographical, let alone religious, concepts, since most of Spain was under Muslim rule for much of the Middle Ages, North Africa remained so throughout the early modern and modern periods, and the Middle East was a complex mosaic of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and other communities, as well as a contested political field that saw the gradual erosion of the Greek Roman Empire of Byzantium, and the emergence and consolidation of the Turks as a military and dynastic force. Moreover, in terms of the intellectual legacy of the ancient world, the impact of Greek philosophy, science, and the arts was shared by Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Zoroastrians, and the circulation was often from Syriac to Arabic and from Arabic to Latin (in this sense the European Renaissance was more of a reinvention than a discovery of the classical past). The East/West duality in effect involves a simplification of a high level of ethnic and cultural pluralism within all religious traditions and only makes sense in relation to the eventual transformation of Latin Christendom—only one segment of Christian culture—into the modern European system of rival nation-states, one distinguished by the global reach of its colonialism and by the fact that countries divided by religion and politics nonetheless shared a highly innovative intellectual and scientific culture. It was primarily in relation to this radically transformative West, and because of the continuing importance of complex cultural interactions, that Jews were placed to play a unique role as potential mediators. This was notably the case in the Mediterranean, but also in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, thus also participating in the global turn of the early modern period, from Cochin and Goa to Pernambuco and New York, albeit usually in a politically subordinate position. The close interaction between the Eastern and Western Jewish communities, through the Sephardic diaspora, for example, may illuminate the circulation of people and ideas across cultural frontiers and help avoid the dualistic dichotomies that too often have dominated the historiography of global encounters and which, when taken to extremes, can be rather misleading.

This is not to suggest that Jews alone help us challenge the traditional East/West dichotomy: Oriental Christianity, for example, with all its plurality, was similarly connected to different worlds, and whether as objects of European observation or as individual subjects traveling to Western Europe, non-Latin Christians are receiving increasing attention.⁵ Particularly fascinating is the extent and cultural influence of the Nestorian diaspora, which flourished in Persia, India, and China in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries and was still relevant at the various Mongol courts in the thirteenth (a Nestorian Onggud monk from northern China, Rabban Sauma, famously wrote about his embassy to Rome and the Latin West on behalf of Arghun Khan in 1287).⁶ Similarly, Islam also reached across continents from Spain to India and China, often showing a high degree of accommodation to local customs and producing some of the most detailed examples of empirical travel writing in the High Middle Ages. Nevertheless, given the intensity and complexity of the experience of migration, exile, and persecution, including notorious episodes such as their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the importance of Jews as a bridge between worlds cannot be underestimated, and Jewish sources can help redress the great quantitative and often qualitative imbalance between European and non-European sources. While at some points European Jewish writers (such as the Genoese doctor Joseph ha-Cohen) simply seemed to interpret for their own community the new geographical and scientific horizons of early modern European culture, others, like the Italian Marco Navarra whose fascinating Lettere orientali (Oriental Letters) of 1771 is studied by Asher Salah in this volume, participated in the debate of a self-conscious enlightened Europe by playing up the capacity of Jews to write from Syria, Isfahan, or India no less than the cities of Italy. Writing within the established European genre of philosophical letters by a fictional traveler, the Jewish writer echoed, but at the same time challenged, the influential works by Boyer d’Argens (Lettres juives, 1736) and, behind him, Montesquieu (Lettres persanes, 1721). Thus, he questioned the assumptions of European scientific and technological superiority over the Orient, but only in order to claim back the central role of Jews at the source of a transcultural Republic of Letters both East and West in the name of a prisca sapientia judaica.

Although Navarra’s Italian work (primarily addressed to a Jewish audience) was not particularly influential—not certainly when compared to its French Christian models—it also exemplifies that the post-Enlightenment Western story of modernity cannot be told without reference to the contribution of Jews, in the same way that the Jewish story cannot always be separated from the dynamics underlying the intellectual transformation of Latin Christendom after the late Middle Ages. The very historical process of embedded participation in an exogenous modernity generated its own identity myths, so that, for example, the existence of a Jewish community in early modern Amsterdam became a point of reflection for a modern transnational Jewish geography of belonging, in Nils Roemer’s expression.⁷ Writing for a Jewish audience (for example, in Yiddish) while participating in the Western civilizing project in the New World—including the late romantic idealization of the figure of a noble Indian that no longer mattered politically—was perfectly consolidated in the twentieth century, as shown by the curious case of the Polish Argentinian Marcos Paryszewski and his imaginative account of travels in a multiracial Peru full of Jews.⁸

Not only will the cultural history of Jewish travel help rethink the global history of travel by enhancing its cross-cultural aspects, but placing the material in a comparative framework will also help avoid the risks of a self-centered ethnic and religious narrative, content to emphasize its real or imaginary exceptionalism. The various chapters in this collection suggest that many themes that appear in Jewish travel accounts invite comparisons: for example, the importance of ethnic or imperial foundation myths built upon an original journey or migration; the way the emphasis of such myths can vary in the retelling, where sometimes defining a point of arrival is more important than defining a point of departure; the connection between travel as a transformative event and anxieties about the loss of religious or ethnic identity; the use of the journey as a metaphor for spiritual progression; the diversity of meanings that a same location can elicit in different observers; or the way travel stories themselves travel and are appropriated by new audiences. The connected themes of arrival and return are a case in point. As Joshua Levinson shows, the travels of Abraham to Canaan—possibly the key foundational figure in the construction of a Jewish identity—could be interpreted in the rabbinic midrash of late antiquity in relation to their significance at the moment of arrival, rather than departure or (another alternative) the travails of the journey itself.⁹ Quoting Moshe Weinfeld, he also points out that the use of a journey as the foundational myth for ethnic or political identities is also apparent in some other cultural traditions, notably the ancient Greek and Roman (Aeneas, in particular, Trojan founder of Rome in Virgil’s great poem, offers an exciting parallel). No doubt one can go further in exploring the structural similarities and subtle differences in such possible comparisons. What emerges is not simply the possibility of placing the Jewish material alongside other cultural traditions, but also of identifying some key interpretative possibilities within each tradition, as the same mythical journeys may acquire different meanings in relation to an internal plurality. The theme of return in Homer’s Odyssey, for example, the inspired point of departure for the theme of the journey in ancient Greek literature as well as the model for Virgil’s Roman counternarrative (and also a text that may be as old as the book of Genesis), is not about national origins in a new land, but rather the opposite, about the challenge of restoring the hero to his original domestic space. Not only is this a very different kind of return from the one implied in the concept of aliyah, it is also a very different theme from the one Dante would develop when he sent an impious Ulysses beyond the pillars of Hercules and made him sink at the sight of Mount Purgatory.¹⁰

To emphasize comparability is not to deny differences, and, of course, many of the themes associated with the interpretation of travel often acquire a specific meaning in the history of Jewish peoples, notably the theme of quasipermanent exile. It was the recurrence of the experience of forced movement in Jewish memory and its connection to a mythical narrative of origins that made this theme special, generating, among other things, the ideal of return to Israel (my heart is in the East, yet I am in the furthest West).¹¹ The extensive geography of the Jewish diaspora, while not unique (Armenians, Arabs, Genoese, and other mercantile communities also operated in many different places), is also distinctive for its persistence across many centuries. But the theme of displacement and restlessness also generated particularly insidious external manifestations—consider, for example, the Christian figure of the wandering Jew. Attested after the twelfth century in Europe in various monastic chronicles (often as reported by Armenian Christians or by Latin writers in the East, hence a product of the culture of the crusading kingdoms), this began as the story of a man called John Buddeus or Cartaphilus who had, it was said, taunted Jesus on the way to Calvary and was condemned to wait forever (and hence not to die) until Christ’s second coming, in order to bear witness of the truth of the Christian religion.¹² Sometimes encountered by pilgrims in Jerusalem, but more often as an itinerant figure, the legendary Jew would find a new life in Germany and elsewhere in Northern Europe after the seventeenth century, under the name Ahasuerus, with a growing emphasis on the association of restless wandering with eternal punishment; by the eighteenth century the wandering Jew had become a symbol of the unsettled status of the Jewish nation, acquiring stronger anti-Semitic undertones and casting its shadow on the Jewish Question throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹³

Balancing elements specific to the Jewish cultural experience against more general aspects of the historical reality of displacement should be one of our primary tasks. As Peter Burke emphasized in his recent study of exiles and expatriates in the history of knowledge—the Stern lectures he delivered in Jerusalem in 2015—Jews were not the only group of ethnic or religious exiles in the early modern and modern worlds: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alone provide a long list of cases, including Greeks fleeing Constantinople; Muslims expelled from Spain before and, perhaps more surprisingly, also after being forcibly baptized into the Catholic faith (but not assimilated); Catholics and Protestants fleeing from each other’s persecution, notably important in the case of the French Huguenots expelled by Louis XIV.¹⁴ Were we to look beyond Europe and the Americas colonized by Europeans, we would need to consider many other cases, for example, the Armenian Christians that the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas took to New Julfa in Isfahan, creating a new center of silk merchants, recently studied by Sebouh Aslanian.¹⁵ Here the potential for illuminating comparisons is obvious, and Aslanian’s detailed case study of an early modern mercantile community operating across long distances, but without the benefit of a military and political superstructure (unlike the European commercial empires of the same period), is worth comparing to the Sephardic Jews of Livorno brilliantly studied by Francesca Trivellato.¹⁶

Looking at all these various cases of forced migration together, we might conclude that what often characterized them was the transfer of skills and knowledge and sometimes, but more rarely, the consolidation of new ideas. This was notably the case of those seventeenth-century Protestant exiles who actively contributed to the consolidation of the Republic of Letters as a cosmopolitan, transnational, and nonconfessional—indeed, tolerant—community of learning. Similarly, from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century the experience of political exiles—both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary—was also of great ideological significance, shaping much of the political cultures of liberalism and socialism as transnational phenomena. In this case, however, we are primarily considering individuals rather than members of a religious or ethnic community. By contrast, what seems to have characterized the intellectual efforts of the Jewish diaspora expelled from Spain and Portugal after 1492 and 1497 to cities in Italy, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and, later, the Dutch Republic—either as Jews who refused to be converted or eventually as New Christians who had been persecuted by the Inquisition and reverted back to Judaism when they could do so—was the preservation of a religious community against external threats. This makes sense, because in the early modern period in Europe religious persecution and discrimination were the key generators of new diasporas, by contrast with more recent centuries, marked by overtly political ethnic conflicts.¹⁷ In this respect, Jewish writers affected by the new experience of exile primarily wrote about it for a Jewish audience. Hence the expulsion of 1492 was often experienced as a reenactment of the previous exodus from Egypt and led to a fresh historical consciousness, often tinged with messianic themes.

There is nevertheless an important difference between the more traditional emphasis on preserving a religious culture of those Sephardic Jews who settled in cities such as Salonika, Safed, or Constantinople; the growing exposure to humanistic culture and European historiography of others who remained in Italy (especially those who studied medicine in universities like Padua); and the direct participation in the European Republic of Letters of a few who, like Baruch Spinoza, grew up in Amsterdam and were influenced by modern philosophy. Obviously where one came from originally was not the only thing that mattered: the location and the timing of forced migration were probably of greater significance when determining cultural and intellectual outcomes. Without dismissing the great importance of the printing press in increasing the connections and expanding the horizons of early modern Jewish culture—a point that has been emphasized by David Ruderman—if we were to identify a key moment of rupture, that would be the European Enlightenment.¹⁸ As noted by Iris Idelson-Shein, late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Jewish adaptations by the maskilim (enlightened scholars) of German travel books presumably addressed to a young audience, notably their efforts to appropriate the popularization of accounts of discovery and conquest by Joachim Heinrich Campe (German translator of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and also a writer influenced by Rousseau), the hazards and travails of travel served to illuminate the challenges created by the external pressures toward Jewish modernization, and in particular the need by Ashkenazic reformers to define a point of departure between the savage and the civilized.¹⁹ Despite the overt effort to selectively Judaize some of the discourses of the European Enlightenment, the consequences of this kind of engagement would be deep and long lasting and fed into a crisis of rabbinical authority, which, in turn, generated an orthodox reaction.²⁰ For those who were more thoroughly westernized, there was no turning back. As Israel Bartal notes, those Jewish immigrants and tourists who traveled from the West to Palestine in the post-Napoleonic era could no longer simply rely on biblical verses and Talmudic citations, since they brought with them a whole baggage of nontraditional views and opinions.²¹

While the themes of exodus, exile, and return are of great cultural significance, they are, of course, only one manifestation of Jewish travel—and certainly not the most characteristic forms of travel that generated travel writing, namely, pilgrimage, trade, education, and diplomacy (or, in more recent times, leisure tourism). Some of the more distinguished travelers—pilgrims, rabbis, kabbalists, poets, exiles—have long attracted the attention of scholars, while others—such as the itinerant paupers who carried messages across the Mediterranean noted by Miriam Frenkel—have remained largely invisible, despite the importance of their function in facilitating communication in the Middle Ages.²² Jewish travelers range from the religious intensity of the twelfth-century pilgrimage from Spain to Israel by Judah Halevi, to the subjective exploration of romanticism, religion, politics, and sexuality in Heinrich Heine’s Travel Pictures (1826–31), to the nostalgic analysis of the end of a cosmopolitan European civilization destroyed by modern nationalism in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), also a work written in exile and a tragic testimony to the loss of a homeland without borders. Of course, any particular list of significant travelers could be seen as arbitrary, given the massive variety and transformations of Jewish identities over time and place. The point I want to emphasize here is that the wealth of Jewish travel writing offers much more than an additional perspective from which to explore a number of well-known themes in Jewish history: potentially, Jewish travel writing also has a unique role to play in the efforts to construct a less Eurocentric, genuinely comparative longue durée narrative of cultural change—that is, a history of literary and intellectual traditions in their contexts that does not assume a single linear path to modernity. By means of its intimate imbrication with the European tradition, but also through its continuous status as an internal outsider to that tradition, often overtly resistant to it, Jewish travel writing offers the kind of perspective that a global cosmopolis may profitably study.

PART II

Traveling with the Bible

Introduction

Joshua Levinson

As mentioned in the opening chapter, the Bible recounts journeys of many different kinds: of exile and redemption, of conquerors and rebels, of women travelers, and sacred travel to holy sites. In fact, the entire biblical text is framed by travel, as it begins with the expulsion from Eden (Gen. 3:23) and concludes with Ezra’s return from exile (2 Chron. 36:23). It is not surprising, therefore, that David Clines has characterized the Pentateuch on the whole as a travel narrative where everyone seems constantly on the move. The story of the Pentateuch can be told as a traveller’s tale: the preparations for a departure, the hazards of departure, privations and dangers on the journey, decisions to go back and to move on, moments of rest and days of march, failure to reach the goal even when it is within sight [after] years of fruitless wanderings and encampments.¹

These narratives of exodus and exile, return and restoration, are of single importance not only for understanding travel and travel writing within Jewish contexts, but also because throughout history many ethnic and religious communities have modeled their own fictions of identity on these biblical travel narratives, from the first Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land to Go Down Moses of black slaves in the antebellum South.

The Bible that accompanied many travelers was not only a book, it was a conceptual and cultural map. It is not fortuitous that when Columbus witnessed the abundance of fresh water flowing from the Orinoco he made his infamous claim to have discovered the earthly paradise and the outlet of its four rivers.² Thus, the ancient land of Israel would serve a host of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim travelers, from pilgrims and crusaders to geographers and colonial officers who would traverse its landscape, experience its geographical and spiritual features, and endow this space with old and new qualities according to their faiths and ideological leanings.

The Bible as a traveler’s tale had its own peculiarities; it neither starts from home nor arrives at home.³ One of these paradigmatic biblical travel narratives is the tale of Abraham’s emigration from Ur to Canaan, which became over time one of the foundation narratives of many religious and political communities and a paradigm for many journeys. The Travels and Travails of Abraham follows the reception history of this tale as it moves through different historical reading formations; from the Bible to the Second Temple book of Jubilees and subsequently into rabbinic literature. One of the surprising aspects of the biblical account is that it portrays Abraham as an outsider, one who comes from elsewhere as a stranger to a strange land. This unexpected choice raises questions of legitimacy that could easily be avoided by telling a tale of indigenous origins. This essay explores some of the ideological gains of this move as this tale is retold and restructured in its reception history. All travel narratives, as I note, are structured around the moments of arrival, departure, and what transpires between them, yet they can be characterized according to their narrative focus along this trajectory. It is this focus of the narrative that changes from version to version, and consequently each account portrays a different fiction of identity, a different other, and a different meaning for home.

Another theme raised here is the importance of vision in travel narratives, in seeing and being seen. Two elements that are indispensable for any travel narrative—more so than actual travel itself—are seeing and telling. Without seeing (real or imagined) there is nothing to tell, and without the telling no one besides the traveler can see. Since Laura Mulvey’s pioneering work on the male gaze,