ABSTRACT
Travel, for obvious reasons, is at the core of the Jewish experience in the Diaspora, but the records of so-called "proficient" travelers of the sort who make it their business, to borrow a line from the black poet Langston Hughes, to "wander as I wonder," are sparse. Thanks to Benjamin of Tudela, historians today have firsthand knowledge of Jewish communities around the globe in the twelfth century. His traveled extensively for years, up to 1173, visiting Rome, Greece, Constantinople, Palestine, Damascus, Baghdad, and Persia. His chronicles have the taste of anthropology: he reflects on costumes, politics, and communal life. He wrote his Masaot Benjamin in Hebrew (in English, The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela) based on notes taken on the spot. The book was first published in 1543. This segment about Jerusalem is revealing in that it ponders the sorrowful status of the capital after the First Crusade of 1099. As Nahum N. Glatzer puts it, "Benjamin came... not only to study the sorry present; mainly, he wanted to relive the glories of Israel's past and to behold its remains." The Masaot Benjamin has been incredibly influential in Jewish letters. S. J. Abramovitsh (1835—1917), known as the cornerstone of Yiddish literature, published a parody of it (The Travels of Benjamin III [1878]), and in this anthology, the Mexican author Angelina Mumíz-Huberman is represented with a fragment of an appropriation of the journey, delivered in modern Spanish.
