The scholar-traveler is a figure familiar to medievalists and to historians of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. In the lands of Islam too, the quest for knowledge required long journeys and distant wanderings. Accounts of them are found in the biographies and ṭibrāsa-s of nearly all the illustrious savants, and in the riḥla-s (travel narratives) of the great pilgrims.
In Jewish societies, one also traveled in order to learn. Study was already the goal of frequent peregrinations when Palestine was still, in Antiquity, the spiritual center of a diaspora established throughout the Mediterranean world and in Asia (in Persia notably). When, in its turn, Babylonia (the Iraq of the following centuries) became, later on, the foremost hearth of Jewish studies, to go from one to the other of these two poles of rabbinic science was a commonplace, and, during the early Middle Ages and beyond, exchanges of masters and students were the ordinary currency between the “academies” (Yeshivot) of these two lands — to which, moreover, the scholars of the other communities of West and East periodically flocked, as an abundant and trustworthy documentation attests. Thus one sees, in the thirteenth century, a rabbi of France, Joseph Ben Gershom, visiting Alexandria (Egypt), then Baghdad, where, indeed, he died shortly after his arrival in the city. The story of Masliah Ben Eliyah dates from the eleventh century. A judge at the rabbinic tribunal of Palermo, he traveled to Egypt and to Palestine for the needs of his trade (he dealt in silk) and did not hesitate to push on as far as Baghdad to pay a visit to Hai Gaon and to study at his school.
Among the savants and masters issuing from the great Yeshivot, there were those who emigrated in order to go and found, elsewhere, new “houses of study.” The documentation of the Cairo Geniza furnishes us with numerous examples. It is there that one learns how the illustrious Yeshiva of Kairouan was created, at the end of the tenth century, by an Eastern savant come from Italy; how the community of Old Cairo experienced a renaissance of Hebrew studies under the direction of a Tunisian rabbi. We know how the illustrious Saadia (philosopher, grammarian, exegete, and translator of the Bible), a native of Fayoum (Egypt), became gaon at Baghdad (tenth century) — a destiny shared also by the Spaniard Isaac ben Moses. The same documentation (that of the Geniza) reveals to us that the most eminent scholarch of the Academy of Jerusalem, Solomon Ben Yehudah (Al-Maghrebi), who died in 1051, was not a Palestinian, but had been born at Fez (Morocco). It was from southern Morocco, the region of the Draa, that Abraham Ben Jacob Al-Dar’i was summoned to Alexandria, toward the beginning of the twelfth century, to be invested there with the high offices of president of the rabbinic tribunal and spiritual head of the Community.
It will be noted that the great journeys and distant wanderings undertaken periodically, or once in a lifetime, answered also to another exigency which, in the eyes of religious orthodoxy or of a ritualism cultivated by tradition, has at least as much importance as the quest for knowledge. This is the visit to the holy places, the pilgrimage to the tombs of the “righteous.” It is an imperious duty for the Muslim, a meritorious act for the Jew.
Maghrebi Judaism in the Modern Era: the great journeys and relations with the outside world
The Maghrebi Judaism of the Modern Era — more especially that of the Far West (al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, Morocco), which we have studied best — also knows the great journeys; the chapter of its relations with the outside world will hold our attention a little longer. Emigration seems uninterrupted since the Almohad persecutions, and, for a good number of the megorashim “expelled” from the Iberian Peninsula, the Muslim West most often constituted only a land of transit, a stage on the long road to the Holy Land, where one goes to settle for the sake of the Yeshivot “places of Talmudic teaching” or to end one’s days. All through the last four centuries the movement is continuous in the direction of the Muslim East, of the eminently hospitable Ottoman Empire. Insecurity drives savants and scholars to flee toward more clement skies, finding refuge then in Western Europe, especially in Italy and in Holland. Some even go to settle beyond the Ocean, in the Americas.
The contacts with the communities of universal Jewry are maintained all through the centuries in the form of juridical consultations between rabbis, of commercial relations, of cultural exchanges — particularly exchanges of books. In the absence of printing enterprises on the spot, the Moroccan rabbis have their manuscripts printed at Livorno, Amsterdam, Constantinople, Prague, Berlin, Krakow, or nearer at hand at Djerba… One procures, almost clandestinely, outside the country, the prayer books, the treatises of Talmud, of rabbinic legislation, of homiletic and kabbalistic literature (Zohar) that one needs — at exorbitant prices, despite difficulties of every kind, and in spite of the measures, long imposed by the Church, tending to prevent the free circulation of Hebrew books.
Relations with the communities of the Holy Land; the Emissary-Collector Rabbis (E.C.)
The interrelations of the diaspora with the Holy Land are closely associated with the millennial institution of the Emissary-Collector Rabbis, those itinerant delegates of the communities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed, and Hebron, who criss-cross the Jewish world to collect the gifts consecrated to their principals and to diffuse Jewish learning — particularly the thought of the Palestinian masters — through teaching, preaching, the lending, or the distribution of the books printed in the rest of the world that they traverse.
An appended document: The peregrinations and adventures of a scholar of Agadir in the eighteenth century
The wandering and tumultuous life of Moses Ben Isaac Ed-Der’y is a tissue of adventures and strange vicissitudes. He was born in 1774 at Agadir, which its inhabitants were forced to leave the following year, by order of the king, Mohammed ben Abdallah, the Alaouite sultan (1757–1790), who wished to draw onto Mogador, the city he had just founded, all the commerce of southern Morocco; he wished thereby to punish a traffic that escaped his control. He was raised and educated at Mogador, then at Rabat-Salé. At the age of 16, he accompanied to London an Emissary rabbi of Safed; there he was received at the Sephardi yeshiva Sha’ar Hashamayim: his marriage in the English capital is a failure, which inspires in him his Ma’aseh Nashim “Women’s Adventures,” a work still unpublished. For inexplicable motives, he leaves London and passes, in 1802, to Amsterdam, where he frequents the Sephardi yeshiva ’Etz Hayyim. There, in 1807, he is entrusted with the proofreading of Tehillah le-David, a collection of poems (piyyutim) whose author is the celebrated Moroccan cantor of Meknes, David Hassin. It is at Amsterdam that Moses Ben Isaac Ed-Der’y publishes, in 1809, his book Yad Moshe, a collection of fourteen sermons, whose preface contains the details of his biography. A wandering rabbi in search of the Ten lost Tribes, he assembles a certain number of texts relating to this theme and publishes them, at Amsterdam, in 1818, under the title Ma’aseh Nissim “Book of Miracles,” which goes through several successive editions in Hebrew, in Yiddish, and in English. The English version we have consulted, printed at London in 1836, bears the title An Historical Account of the Ten Tribes, settled beyond the River Sambatyon in the East… There are, in profusion, in the preface of this book, biographical indications that deserve to be pointed out.
The title page already bears the mention “The Rev. Dr. M. EDREHI, native of Morocco, Member of the Talmudical Academies of London and Amsterdam, Professor of Modern and Oriental languages, Private Tutor of the University of Cambridge, Author of the Law of Life, hand of Moses, etc.”
In the pages that follow, the author has assembled a host of documents, in English, in French… letters of recommendation that he received in the course of his peregrinations and in the multiple and varied functions he filled in the course of his existence, testimonies of notable persons, attestations and certificates from various officials (members of the Talmudic Academies of the Portuguese Israelite Community and of the Ashkenazi Community of Amsterdam, syndics, mayor, police commissioner…). Then come the homages rendered to his erudition and his learning by professors of institutes and men of science of Amsterdam, Leiden, The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Arnhem, Nijmegen, Cleves, Cologne, Mainz, Strasbourg, Nancy, Paris.
At Paris, he knew “Baron Sylvestre de Sacy; Langlès, member of the Institut, curator-administrator of the Manuscripts of the Imperial Library, administrator and prefect of the Special School of Oriental Languages (the certificate bears the date of 2 February 1814)….” The Head of the Prefecture of Police “certifies that M. Moïse Ederhy, a Moroccan, served twice at the Prefecture of Police… as an interpreter of the Arabic languages for the interrogation of a Persian.” The Secretary-Interpreter to the King for the Oriental languages delivers to him an attestation for the services he rendered to his administration (document dated 2 February 1817). The police commissioner of the 5th section of the city of Brussels certifies that the said M. E. resided three years in this quarter (1 January 1821); the one of the city of Paris, the Feydeau quarter, attests that the said M. E. of Morocco occupied a shop in the center of the bazaar, boulevard des Italiens, that the bazaar fell prey to the flames on the 1st of this month, and that all the merchandise that was in the shop of the said Edrehi was destroyed, which reduces him to the most pitiful situation, since he has no other resource (Paris, 5 January 1825).
He is then found at Lyon, Marseille, Geneva, Livorno, Malta, Izmir, Jaffa, Jerusalem, where he arrives, in 1841, ill and without resources, and where he died shortly after.
Excerpt from chapter II, “Maghrebi Judaism between the East and al-Andalus,” of Juifs d’Andalousie et du Maghreb (Jews of Andalusia and the Maghreb), Maisonneuve et Larose, 1996.