Reorienting the East

"[L]ively, intelligent, and informative...As an operation to rescue fascinating and informative texts from the oblivion of specialization, this book deserves readers. As a careful study of how Jews viewed Christians, Muslims, and themselves across several centuries, numerous geographical areas, and distinct cultural zones, it deserves recognition."—International Journal of Middle East Studies

"[A]n important contribution to the scholarly study of travel literature. Jacobs discusses a wide variety of genres: itineraries, lists of holy places, pilgrims’ reference books, diaries and letters, poetry about travel, and others—all of which describe places and experiences in the medieval Islamic world...Martin Jacobs has given us an intelligent new reading of Jewish travel literature from the Middle Ages and has shown how a careful, comparative reading of multiple sources of the same genre can go far beyond the 'positivist' search for facts."—AJS Review

"In Reorienting the East, Jacobs has discovered a rich new source in the genre of travel narratives, accounts of Jewish travelers in the Islamic world, primarily the Near East. In an engaging and scholarly consideration of twenty three narratives, both factual and imaginary penned between the eleventh century and the early fourteenth century Jacobs interrogates the sources for clues as to Jewish travelers interacted with the foreign cultures of the Near Eastern Muslim world, the literary tropes they used to described the differences between themselves and the people they met, and ways that travel in the Islamic world contributed, or not, to 'Jewish reflections on identity, community, and home.'"—Jeanette M. Fregulia, Appositions

"[A] brilliant thematic analysis of more than 24 accounts from the 12th to the 16th centuries by Jewish travelers and pilgrims from Europe to Muslim lands of the East, primarily to the land of Israel...Jacobs describes in rich detail the travelers and their works, including letters, diaries, and poems revealing their mainly religious motivations."—Choice

"An original, comprehensive, and clear account of medieval and early modern Jewish travel writing. Martin Jacobs discusses all known relevant Jewish writings from the period, giving the textual history of each and often comparing them to contemporary Christian and Muslim texts. Any reader of this book will come away not only with a clear picture of Jewish travel writing but also with a good introduction to the main concerns of contemporary scholarship on medieval and early modern travel writing more generally."—Iain Macleod Higgins, University of Victoria

"Impressive and unique. . . . A timely discussion of Jewish identity and reflections on self and 'other' in the premodern Islamic world. Jacobs clearly and cogently demonstrates the complexities of Jewish identity in the Mediterranean and the Islamic world."—Josef Meri, Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge