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- Title
The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, Lost Israelites, and Vanishing Indians: Trans-Atlantic English Reception of the Medieval Past in the Seventeenth Century.
- Authors
Kim, Margaret
- Abstract
This essay is an investigation of the history of books on Jewish identity and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, in terms of their reception in an early modern Anglophone world of trans-Atlantic colonial expansion. It examines three texts, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (Benjamin of Tudela, 1173/1983), The Hope of Israel (Menasseh ben Israel, 1650/1987), and Jews in America (Thorowgood, 1650). The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (hereafter referred to as The Itinerary) is an account of a medieval European Jew's travels eastward to the border regions of China between 1159 and 1172. In the seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic Anglophone world, The Itinerary began to be read in connection with The Hope of Israel and Jews in America, works that promoted the idea that native Americans were the Lost Tribes, written respectively by a Jewish and a Protestant author. The essay asks why The Itinerary, a twelfth-century Jewish travel account largely unread by and unknown to medieval Christian Europeans, began to be read by the English on both sides of the Atlantic in the early modern era and to be associated with writings locating the Lost Tribes in the Americas. It argues that the English debate and dialogue on the historical understanding of the ethnic other as difference and the role of difference in projects of colonization and expansion underlie the connection between these three discourses and their reception in the seventeenth century.
- Subjects
ESSAYS; JEWS in literature; JEWISH migrations; JEWISH identity; DIASPORA; NATIVE Americans; IMPERIALISM
- Publication
EurAmerica, 2010, Vol 40, Issue 1, p103
- ISSN
1021-3058
- Publication type
Essay