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Following the "spatial turn" of disciplines such as history, literature, and anthropology, place and space are no longer seen as abstract sets of coordinates, fixed positions on a map, or neutral areas of geography but rather as cultural constructs - shared understandings of a reality that is always described in socially determined ways.1 This essay explores the ways in which space is conceived of, and represented in, an account written by Benjamin of Tudela, a twelfth-century Jewish traveler from Navarre (northeastern Spain of today) who has been dubbed the "Jewish Marco Polo."2
Benjamin's Sefer masa'ot (Book of travels) is widely taken to be an eyewitness report documenting an actual journey from Iberia to the Middle East and beyond and has mainly been studied and mined for the potential data it provides about the history and human geography of the late medieval world.3 Much importance has been attributed to the travel er's remarks about the presence of Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean basin and beyond, and in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, in particular.4 To confirm the authority of Benjamin's assertions, scholars have sought external evidence. Whatever does not make sense from a rationalist perspective has been either attributed to hearsay recorded by Benjamin when he was unable to visit a certain place or dismissed as a later interpolation. This positivist approach has characterized much of the scholarship on the Sefer masa'ot since the days of Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), a pioneer of the "scientific" study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums). These words by Zunz also hint at an apologetic motive behind this approach: "As we find . . . the historical and geographical data [in the Sefer masa'ot\ to be fully authenticated, and as the fables must be charged, not to [Benjamin's] own account, but to that of his time, a sound critique has rejected with justice all those suspicions and attempts at derogation, which have been directed against this, our [the Jewish people's] first traveler."5
In challenging this positivist approach to Benjamin's Sefer masa'ot, I certainly do not intend to "derogate" a medieval author or accuse him of fabrications and lies. Rather, instead of reading the book as a more or less reliable source of human geography at a specific point in history, my aim...