The Book of Travels: Baghdad

In The Book of Travels (Sefer ha-masa‘ot), written in Hebrew, Benjamin describes his journey through Jewish communities across Europe and the Near East. The motives for Benjamin’s journey and the reasons for its preservation in writing are unknown. His account leads the reader from Tudela, in northern Spain, through Girona, Provence, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Benjamin even recounts details about Jewish communities in lands further east, including India and China. He also includes stories about the twelfth-century messianic claimant David Alroy of Iraq. This account achieved immense popularity, was printed and translated many times, and has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Despite embellishments in some sections of his account, the excerpt presented here seems relatively reliable in its depiction of Jews and Muslims in Baghdad.