=4. A Great Traveller.=――Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela was a Spanish merchant, who, between the years 1165 and 1173, visited the Jewish communities then existing in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa, and has left the most valuable record extant of the general condition of the Jews at that period throughout the three continents. It is quite likely that commercial pursuits shared with the pursuit of knowledge the motive of Rabbi Benjamin’s wanderings. For, in the modern sense, he certainly did not ‘make a book’ of his travels. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela is the plainest and most unvarnished record of experiences, and, on the face of it, the work of a man who had no great literary ability. There is a lack both of detail and of polish in these rather rough notes of twelfth-century travel, and some critics have gone so far as to account for this meagreness by suggesting that Rabbi Benjamin might, in strict truth, have dated some of his despatches from Tudela. But more charitable and better informed commentators do not accuse our traveller of this bad faith, but explain his baldness of description and his occasional omissions by the much more likely suggestion that parts of the diary may have been altogether lost. The text which we now possess is considered by competent judges to be an abridgment of the original, and if this be the case, it would account for many otherwise unaccountable omissions. For instance, there is very little space indeed given to the Jews of Germany, who were numerous enough in the twelfth century to have afforded plenty of material to a traveller bent on recording his impressions. There would seem to be no cause for any wilful omission of this sort on the part of Benjamin, but the accidental loss of the German descriptions would easily explain it. With all its drawbacks, the book is extremely valuable. It gives us a glimpse of Jews, ‘toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,’ in the midst of alien peoples, and it enables us to see how they looked to the eyes of a very keen-sighted and very plain-speaking traveller, who spent eight years in visiting all the chief cities of the world in the second half of the twelfth century. Rabbi Benjamin wrote his journals in Rabbinic Hebrew. They have been translated into Latin, French, Dutch, and English, but, strange to say, never into German. Possibly the Germans considered a book of travels, which did not say much about them and their country, to be too trivial for the trouble of translation.[38]