Jewish Travel in Antiquity.

• Author: Eliav, Yaron
• Position: Book review

Jewish Travel in Antiquity. By CATHERINE HEZSER. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, vol. 144. Tubingen: MOHR SIEBECK, 2011. Pp. x + 529. [euro]139.

The phenomenon of travel, i.e., people journeying from one place to another, seems like an elementary, almost requisite act of creatures possessing two or more strong legs, especially if accompanied by adventurous curiosity; as such, it dates to the earliest phases of human existence. Crossing territories, departing from one place and arriving at another, brought change in geographic and cultural sceneries and facilitated new encounters, exposures, and threats; it led to great revelations, progress, and achievements, as well as war and devastation. No wonder that some of the oldest myths in history relate to expeditions of individuals or nations (The Tower of Babel, Jason and the Argonauts. Odysseus, and Abraham, to name but a few). Just the same, modern-day travels infiltrate almost every corner of our lives, from magazines, travel guides, and cookbooks to literature and film.

Within this context, the interest of scholars in the traveling habits of the ancients should come as no surprise, resulting in a steady stream of publications. In the 1860s, when Ludwig Friedlander, himself a wandering Jew of sorts, wrote the definitive chapters on "Verkehrwesen" and "Die Reisen der Tourism" in his three-volume tour de force, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms, he engaged an already established line of inquiry on the subject, not only of his great teachers--Mommsen and Burckhardt--but going back to Winckelmann, a century or so before him. Scholars of ancient Judaism followed similar paths, both hitting the road themselves (as early as the fourteenth-century Spanish Jewish investigator and scholar Estori of Florenza) and writing about the travels of their ancestors. In his now-classic work about Jewish life in the Late Roman world, Talmudische Archaologie, Samuel Krauss devoted the entire eighth section to "Trade and Transport" (Handel und Verkehr; vol. II, pp. 316-423), meticulously detailing all rabbinic sources pertaining to the physical and human aspects of these phenomena.

In the book under review, Catherine Hezser sets out to reconstruct the entire spectrum of travel experiences for Jews in the Roman world. Well recognizing her debt to Krauss, even if critical of his work (see, for example, p. 11), but rather oblivious to the broader drama of travel studies, Hezser divides her book into...