The Katz Center's Rare Book Room holds a copy of one of the earliest print editions of Benjamin of Tudela's late-twelfth-century itinerary, Massaʻot shel Rabbi Binyamin (מסעות של רבי בנימין), which was published in Freiburg (in the German Breisgau region) by ha-Zifroni in 1583.
Although his journey purportedly extended from Iberia to the Middle and Far East we have very few reliable details regarding the life of Benjamin of Tudela. According to the anonymous introduction to his book, he originated from the city of Tudela in Navarre (northern Spain) and returned from his far-flung peregrinations in 1173, which is the only firm date that we have for him. His Book of Travelsconstitutes one of the earliest Hebrew travel accounts, a genre whose emergence seems to be tied to the Crusades, when the increase in maritime traffic between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean also included Jewish pilgrims and merchants traveling to the Levant. However, it is far from clear whether Benjamin visited all the places listed in the itinerary. For only the opening lines (according to the Freiburg print depicted here) quote the traveler's own words: "Rabbi Benjamin ben Jonah ... said: First, I set out from the city of Saragossa and then I went down the River Ebro to Tortosa. From there it took me two days to the ancient city of Tarragona [the place names are corrupted]." But then the first-person narrative comes to an abrupt end. Henceforth the Tudelan neither emerges as the protagonist of his travels nor as the book's narrator, which raises a host of questions concerning authorship, editing, and transmission of the work. That said, Massa‘ot offers its readers a description of much of the then-known world, as viewed through a medieval Jewish lens.
Far from falling out of fashion, Benjamin's Travels gained a new lease on life with the advent of Hebrew print and was first brought to press in Constantinople (Istanbul) by Eli‘ezer ben Gershon Soncino in 1543. In fact, the Freiburg edition featured here is based on this editio princeps (and thus repeats some of its errors). Around the same time, Benjamin's itinerary was first translated into Latin and hence became accessible to an early modern Christian audience during the period of New World exploration. This translation titled Itinerarium Beniamini Tudelensis ... ex Hebraico Latinum factum was rendered by Benito Arias Montano, a Spanish humanist and biblical scholar, and published in Antwerp at Christopher Plantin's world-renowned printing house in 1575. The University of Pennsylvania's Rare Book and Manuscript Library Lea Collection indeed holds a copy of this first Latin print of Benjamin's itinerary.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Marcus Nathan Adler, took the unprecedented step of basing a critical edition of the Hebrew text (that together with a rather antiquated English translation is still standard today) on several medieval manuscripts: The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Critical Text, Translation and Commentary (London: Oxford University Press, 1907).
