ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that Herman Melville's Clarel is spending his last night before arriving in Jerusalem at a hostel owned by an aging Black Jew from India named Abdon. Significantly, Abdon himself is a traveler who has come to Palestine to die. He has lived in both his native Cochin and the Netherlands, as for so many characters in Clarel, the Holy Land emerges as the site at which he can finally confront ultimate questions of meaning of life and death. Clarel transforms genre of the American Holy Land travel narrative by using the landscape, inhabitants, and the pilgrims in nineteenth-century Palestine to interrogate the fundamental ideas about religion, nationality, and epistemology that the earlier travelers take for granted. The epistemological quandary that religious pluralism posed for nineteenth-century Americans was a pressing matter for Herman Melville long before he published his 18,000 line Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in Holy Land in 1876, and even before he visited Palestine in 1856.
