Far Apart but Never Closer: Diasporic Unity in Twelfth-Century Jewish Travel Literature

Jewish identity in the Middle Ages is too often reduced to the categorizations associated with geographic barriers that divided the Jewish communities of Sepharad (Iberia), Ashkenaz (France, Germany, and Slavic lands), and the Islamic Near East and North Africa. When the Crusader conquest resulted in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and an unprecedented capacity for Mediterranean interconnectivity, Jewish travelers pushed the boundaries of defining their society within the wider political sphere. This paper demonstrates how two European Jewish Travelers, Benjamin of Tudela and Petachia of Regensburg, used the mechanism of travel to present new ideas about Jewish diasporic unity. By defining the boundaries of the Jewish world through heritage and historical memory of the Temple period, invoking the presence of the Talmud as a proxy for the existence of Jewish culture, and transcribing oral traditions from distant Jewish communities to reveal them to a home audience for the first time, Benjamin and Petachia evidence a changing perception of global Jewish peoplehood in the late twelfth century