Prof. Martin Jacobs, Associate Professor of Rabbinic Studies and Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies
Travel literature has emerged over the last decade as a key theme of academic discourse, with Christian writers from the eighteen to twentieth centuries as the main focus. Prof. Jacobs hopes to change this trend with his new book project Re-Orienting the East: The Islamic World as Depicted in Medieval Jewish Travel Literature. In this project Jacobs explores the Islamic world as it was encountered and envisioned by medieval and early modern Jewish authors. Among them features prominently Benjamin of Tudela, a twelfth-century Iberian Jew, who has been compared to Marco Polo for his description of the then-known world.
Besides the Tudelan globetrotter, Prof. Jacobs’s project pulls together different genres and forms of Hebrew travel writing between the eleven and sixteenth centuries and makes ample comparisons to analogous Latin, vernacular, or Arabic texts. At the same time, he engages with questions raised by postcolonial studies which have rarely been applied to Jewish travel literature. One of the major questions Jacobs raises is what role do stereotypes play in the attempts of European Jewish authors to articulate their visions of the Middle East and are these exclusively negative stereotypes? Did Jews, in spite of their own marginality or because of it, take part in creating a larger Western discourse that imposes a set of prejudices on an alien world? The answer to these questions may help differentiate models of interpretation that are based almost exclusively on travel literature representing what Edward Said calls the ‘Orientalist’ view of the world through the eyes of a Christian West.
This intellectual journey brings together several research foci Martin Jacobs has developed over the years. The first of these is his interest in Jewish-Muslim cultural and literary encounters. This, along with his study of pre-modern Jewish historiography and historical narratives, led him to write several articles and a book including: Islamische Geschichte in jüdischen Chroniken: Hebräische Historiographie des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Islamic History in Jewish Chronicles: Hebrew Historiography of the 16th and 17th centuries; Mohr Siebeck, 2004); “Exposed to all the Currents of the Mediterranean – A Sixteenth-Century Venetian Rabbi on Muslim History,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 29:1 (2005); “An Ex-Sabbatean’s Remorse? Sambari’s Polemics against Islam,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007); and “From Lofty Caliphs to Uncivilized ‘Orientals’ – Images of the Muslim in Medieval Jewish Travel Literature,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 18/1 (2011). Lastly, Prof. Jacobs’ love of travel piqued his interest in this topic, as he has wandered many of the roads described by the travelers he studies.