Travel Writing, 1750–1880

The proliferation of the press and travel by steamship (and toward the end of the period, railroad) brought descriptions of far-flung parts of the world and reports about Jews living in them from one corner of the globe to another. Such accounts were primarily written by people who traveled for the joy of expanding their horizons. They acted on dreams of exploring different civilizations and unfamiliar climates with exotic flora and fauna, accumulating rich experience and colorful impressions that they then recorded in their enduringly appealing works.

Jews had always been highly mobile, traveling for commerce, for scholarship, for refuge, and for adventure. As the expense and danger of travel diminished, motives for traveling increased. New forms of pilgrimage arose not only to stone monuments but to human ones as well. People traveled to visit the great savants, even briefly, and bask in their aura. Some had excuses for their peripatetic lives. 

Christian Hebraists with interest and curiosity in antiquities and exploration contributed as well to the impetus for contact and research into the conditions of Jewish communities that had grown apart from the mainstream Jewish world. Among the former we may count the Samaritans (who figured prominently in the Christian Bible), Karaites, Khazars, as well as the Beta Israel of Ethiopia and the Jews of Kai Feng in China. Jews traveled for many reasons, and travel brought with it a sense of Jewish lifeways that differed radically around the world. In the farthest outposts, new permutations of Jewish identity remained to be discovered.