The Good Old Days of Travel
Just finished a Dover Press book entitled Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages, 19 Firsthand Accounts. Good for putting the discomforts of present-day travel into perspective…
Mushullam Ben R. Menahem in 1481:
“And even if you escape all these dangers [bandits on the road, Muslims who like to kill Jews, etc.] yourself it often happens to people that the horses on which they ride die, or they are nearly dead when they reach Jerusalem, because of the brackish water they drink, and the great heat and the dust which comes into their mouths, and the sand in which they go up to the knees in great pain and also because of the want of food and the long journey…”
Once you got to Jerusalem there wasn’t all that much to see compared to what greets modern-day travelers. Obadiah Da Bertinoro 1487:
“Jerusalem is for the most part desolate and in ruins. I need not repeat that it is not surrounded by walls. Its inhabitants, I am told, number about 4,000 families. As for Jews, about seventy families of the poorest class have remained; there is scarcely a family that is not in want of the commonest necessaries; one who has bread for a year is called rich.”
Just getting to the vicinity of present-day Israel was a long process. Obadiah continues…
“… every year Jews come in the Venetian galleys and even in the pilgrim ships, for there is really no safer and shorter way than by these ships. … The Galleys perform the journey from Venice here in forty days at the most.”
Worth a trip to the library but not a book with which you’d want to clutter your house in the long run.
