What is it about?
For centuries, "Gliles Erets Yisroel" was a popular travel book among European-Jewish readers. Its author claimed to have travelled to the Land of Israel and Babylon, and to have seen many wonders along the way. In reality, this little book was a mix of mostly medieval travel accounts, reorganized to tantalize the reader with exoticism and violence - and to sell well.
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Why is it important?
This is a first comprehensive analysis of "Gliles Eretz Yisroel". It demonstrates what happens on a literary level when a travel book is not the product of travel but of a pre-existing library, and suggests that the resulting reading experience was also a new and different one. It also shows how a work can be both very conservative in its use of sources, and very unruly in how it uses them.
Perspectives
I was excited to work on "Gliles Erets Yisroel" because of how little attention it had previously received in spite of its obvious popularity. Researchers sometimes shy away from texts that are obvious reworkings (sometimes verging on plagiarism) of other known works. But understanding early modern Jewish narrative and readership, much of which does not fit well with modern concepts of singular creative genius, means tackling not just what we consider masterful original work, but also what readers actually read and loved.
Ossnat Sharon-Pinto
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Yiddish Cabinet of Curiosities: Gliles Erets Yisroel and the Early Modern Afterlife of the Medieval Hebrew Travel Book, September 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004730823_014.
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