Early Medieval History and Travel Writing

The Goals of History Writing

Historical narratives explicitly seek to tell the events of the past or (medieval) present and, in so doing, illuminate their community’s understanding of those events. Many feature accounts of violence, both small and large scale, against individual Jews or against the Jewish community as a whole. Some depict family histories, often seeing them as part of a larger national context and bridging the division between local and wider Jewish identity. 

Travel Writing

Travel accounts record stories that travelers may have heard secondhand alongside events that they may have witnessed or places they visited themselves. The accounts were often eagerly consumed by hometown readers.

Conversion Narratives as Jewish History

There are a few accounts of conversion from Judaism to other religions written during the early medieval period. These texts are not, strictly speaking, Jewish cultural production, as they are, naturally, written by former Jews. They do shed light on the pressures felt by some medieval Jews, however, presumably including those who did not ultimately convert, and their authors usually reflect to some extent on their life before conversion. Accounts of converts to Judaism are rarer still, for conversion in this direction would have incurred serious risks, given the harsh laws against it in Islam, for example. There is, however, one example of an individual who chose this path and wrote about it.