Introduction to the Early Medieval Period
Benjamin of Tudela and His Account of Jewish Society
Among the early medieval texts in The Posen Library is a description of Baghdad, from The Book of Travels of Benjamin of Tudela. A native of Spain, Benjamin took to the road in about the year 1165 and headed east. The account of his journey, which was likely put into writing shortly after his return home in about 1173, consists primarily of laconic reports about the many Jewish communities he encountered as he made his way across Europe, the Levant, Iraq, and Egypt. (The account also contains descriptions of regions in eastern Europe and central and eastern Asia, but scholars doubt these are based on Benjamin’s firsthand observations.) Often Benjamin’s comments provide little more than information about the number of Jews living in a given town or village, their chief occupations, and the names of prominent rabbis and leaders. At various points, though, the travel account offers longer anecdotes that shed precious light on communal history, local customs, and the nature of relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of an area.
The description of Baghdad is the single longest sketch in Benjamin’s text, making up almost one tenth of his account. Significantly, it includes an extensive and enthusiastic portrait of the Abbasid caliph that describes his friendly relations with the nominal head of the diasporic Jewish community, the exilarch (Hebrew: rosh golah; Aramaic: resh galuta, “head of the exile”), and his respectful attitude toward the Jewish religion. In both its terse notes on dozens of local communities and its more expansive narrations about a few select locales, Benjamin’s travel account presents us with a revealing view of the Jewish world at the close of the twelfth century.
Three features in particular stand out in Benjamin’s depiction of Jewish society, characteristics that underscore the momentous changes that occurred during the early medieval period and that can serve to conceptualize the significance of this period within the broader sweep of Jewish history.
An Expanded Jewish World
Perhaps the first thing the reader of Benjamin’s work senses is the dramatic reconfiguration of the physical geography of Jewish life. Compared to the situation half a millennium earlier, the Jewish world in Benjamin’s day had expanded considerably, and its center of gravity had begun to shift. While Benjamin still looked to the East as the historic source of Jewish tradition, one is struck by how far north and west the Jewish world in his day extended. And if Benjamin was still thrilled by the size and antiquity of the Jewish communities he found in the East, his narrative nonetheless bears ample witness to the ascendant vitality of Jewish communities on the European continent in sites both old and new. What’s more, this enlarged and reoriented Jewish world was, for the most part, highly urbanized. A slow and far-reaching process had, by the late twelfth century, transformed the Jews from farmers into a town-dwelling people engaged in a range of skilled occupations. Although Benjamin could still find Jewish farmers in a handful of locations, such instances were relatively rare and called for comment.
The occupational and residential transformations within Jewish society also spurred increased travel between the new urban centers of Jewish life as Jews came to participate more actively in trade, a reality that helps us put Benjamin’s own journey into proper perspective. A startling illustration of the way these various changes worked together to bring the far-flung reaches of the Jewish world into contact with one another is presented by the correspondence of the twelfth-century Egyptian merchant Ḥalfon ha-Levi ben Nethanel. These records reveal that over the course of just seven years, between 1132 and 1139, Ḥalfon visited India, Yemen, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain!
Two Worlds: Islam or Christianity
A second notable feature of the Jewish world depicted in Benjamin’s itinerary is its profound bifurcation. Benjamin’s wanderings led him over vast expanses and through a dizzying variety of landscapes. Yet for all the physical diversity, Benjamin presents his readers with a reality understood primarily in binary terms: Jews lived in lands ruled by either Christians or Muslims—religious communities he identifies using the names of their presumed biblical progenitors, Edom and Ishmael. Christianity had emerged during the first century, but it became a potent political force only in the fourth, with the conversion of the Roman Empire. Islam appeared during the first half of the seventh century and shortly thereafter developed into the organizing ideology of imperial realms of its own. Fundamental to the medieval Jewish experience, then, was life in a world riven between these two competing religio-political systems, each of which envisioned its mission as universal in scope and understood itself in one way or another as the divinely ordained heir to the Judaic heritage. While Jews first confronted such challenges in antiquity, it was during the Middle Ages that the encounter with rival religious traditions would become a defining feature of the Jewish experience and would leave a clear mark on Jewish cultural activity.
The Triumph of the Babylonian Rabbinic Tradition
Finally, turning from structures of power beyond the Jewish community to those constituted within, one cannot but note the pervasive presence of rabbis and rabbinic authority in Benjamin’s narrative. He finds rabbinic scholars serving as communal officials in practically every land he visits, observes the existence of schools for the study of the Talmud throughout Europe and the Near East, and reports on a Galilee region crowded with the graves of talmudic rabbis venerated as Jewish pilgrimage sites.
To be sure, Benjamin also acknowledges encountering a variety of alternative forms of Judaism in his travels. He mentions communities of Karaite Jews, who did not recognize the authority of the rabbis, in Constantinople, Cyprus, Damascus, and Ascalon, for instance, and in some of the same places he finds Samaritans, who claimed descent from the northern tribes of Israel, as well.
But at the end of the twelfth century, it was apparent that the rabbis had won the day and that the text of the Babylonian Talmud had emerged as the basis for a remarkably unified presentation of Jewish ritual. Although rabbinic teachings circulated long before the period covered in this volume, only during the early Middle Ages did they develop into the normative expression of Judaism for the vast majority of the world’s Jews. Surely some of the demographic realities noted above, including the shift toward more concentrated urban settlements and involvement in long-distance travel for the purposes of trade, played a critical role in bringing this about. The medieval triumph of the Babylonian rabbinic tradition stands out as one of the farthest-reaching and enduring achievements of the centuries stretching from 600 to 1200. Many Jewish sources from this era relate in one way or another to efforts to systematize, interpret, implement, and, in certain cases, resist that tradition.