"... And the Ishmaelites Honour the Site": Images of Encounters Between Jews and Muslims at Jewish Sacred Places in Medieval Hebrew Travelogues
Abstrakt
This paper presents several images of encounters between Jews and Muslims at sacred sites, as portrayed in medieval Jewish travel writings stemming from the Crusades and the Mamlūk period. These images range from examples of shared ownership and practices to situations where different parties vied for control and ownership.
The narratives contained in these sources, written predominantly by European authors for a European readership, strive to confirm the Jewish identity of the sacred sites in the Holy Land and Babylonia and the Jews' rights of ownership to them. They not only reverse the relationship between the ruler and the ruled but, at the same time, they convey the message that the real owners of the holy places connected with the narratives of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish history, and ipso facto of the true religion, are the Jews.
Jewish travel writings therefore served European Jewish readers not only as a vehicle for spreading the knowledge of the sacred topography, but also as one of the avenues for conducting polemics against Islam.