The Good Old Days of Travel

by philg

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.

8 thoughts on “The Good Old Days of Travel”

  1. Philip,

    Did you really read your latest “Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages, 19 Firsthand Accounts.” in just two days assuming you started reading after you finished Godforsaken Sea on the 20th? Jewish travellers is over 400+ pages long…

  2. At 2 minutes per page, that’s only 13 hours, or around 6.5 hours per day. He could easily have done that if he does little else for two days.

  3. Bob: I did have a rainy/windy day in San Martin de los Andes (Lake District of Patagonia), which was good for some serious reading in the hotel bathtub. And then there was the flight from Bariloche to Ushuaia. If I’m motivated I can read one page per minute of the average paperback.

  4. Philip,
    Its interesting how you keep slipping in Anti Muslim rhetoric in your insinuating quotes/posts. “Muslims who like to kill jews”. “Arab Slave Traders”, without any historical context.

    If one didn’t know better, they would think that you had motives other than intellectual honesty at hand.

    If you ever have time in between your fairy tale hops around the globe, pick up Shimone Dubnov’s “History of the Jews” and see what he has to say about the same period that you are talking about.It would seem to me, that most Spanish jews had settled in and were suckling off the teats of the Ottomon Empire by then having been taken in after the “Judeo-Christian” Spanish Inquisition’s “Convert, Get out or DIE” proposition.

    It is one thing to be blissfully ignorant of a matter. Being wilfully and conveniently ungrateful is another thing altogether.

    Happy Holidays, und a Blissful Neu Jaar.

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