Very little is known about Petahiyah: he was apparently the brother of the prominent Tosafist R. Isaac ha-Lavan of Prague, and he set out in the late twelfth century on a tour of the Crimea, Babylonia, the Land of Israel, and elsewhere—perhaps on pilgrimage, perhaps in search of economic opportunities,232 perhaps in search of eschatologically meaningful portents.233 The Sivuv describes Petahiyah’s travels, records his observations regarding the Jews and non-Jews he encounters along the way, and is especially concerned with listing and describing the pilgrimage sites that Petahiyah visited during the course of his journey. But it also describes in detail the wondrous animals, objects, and social mores Petahiyah encountered during his travels—Petahiyah describes with manifest amazement his observation of elephants, mandrakes, and hybrid birds; the political power of the Exilarchate; Babylonian women who are learned in written and oral Torah; and so on. Moreover, the shrines and holy sites he tours are depicted as sites of magical activity so manifest that they are revered by Jews, Muslims, and other religious groups alike.
Though a critical edition of the Sivuv was published over a century ago,234 the existing scholarship on Petahiyah and his travelogue is relatively minimal—scholars have tended to dismiss the Sivuv as a useful historical source, given its fantastic and unverifiable contents, and have generally compared it unfavorably with the contemporaneous, more straightforward travelogue of the Spaniard Benjamin of Tudela.235 But more recent scholarship on medieval chronicle and travel writing should make us skeptical about dismissing a source merely on account of its fantastic or impossible contents. By focusing attention on the “social logic of the text” rather than on the discreet “facts” it purports to compile, scholars have demonstrated that a range of medieval Ashkenazic texts that “look like history” might be best approached from a literary or anthropological perspective rather than a positivistic one.236 Martin Jacobs’s recent work has applied these critical tools to medieval Jewish travel narratives to illuminating effect.237
Indeed, in the case of Petahiyah’s Sivuv, the specific circumstances of the text’s composition strongly suggest that it should be read as a literary artifact rather than as a collection of accurate and objective observations. First of all, Petahiyah did not himself compose the surviving accounts of his travels—rather, the Sivuv, which is extant in two main recensions, was compiled and composed by none other than Judah he-Hasid during the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries, by which point he was already living in Regensburg. Now, Judah did not merely transcribe the account of Petahiyah’s travels—he edited it, at times with a heavy hand.238 As such, the surviving accounts of Petahiyah’s travels must not be seen as merely one man’s idiosyncratic recollections; rather, it is worth considering whether the Sivuv can be situated within the Pietists’ broader approach toward the investigation of nature, its workings, and its theological meaning. And indeed, the account contains no shortage of observations of natural phenomena, which Petahiyah (as channeled by Judah) recounts breathlessly. Thus in Baghdad, Petahiyah benefits from the healing properties of the waters of the Tigris River,239 observes an elephant for the first time,240 rides a “flying camel” that traverses a mile in just moments,241 and spies mandrakes growing in a local garden,242 all of which lead him to declare the region “strange and glorious” (meshuneh u-mefu’ar).243 Elsewhere, he observes new species of birds,244 snakes that behave in a marvelous manner,245 and weather conditions so unlike those of Europe that he declares, “Babylonia is truly a different world!”246 The observance of novel natural phenomena is a staple of travel accounts, and the notion that Petahiyah himself set out on his journey solely for the purpose of seeking out such natural wonders seems to me overstated.247 But Judah’s authorship of this description of Petahiyah’s travels may well have been motivated by such concerns—the Sivuv begins by claiming the work was written in order to record “all the novelties and miracles and wonders of God that he saw and heard,” and “to tell his nation, the Children of Israel, the power and might of God, Who performed miracles and wonders each day for him.”248
In this reading, it is not only the Pietists’ approach to the natural world that mirrors that of their Christian contemporaries, but also the genre through which this approach was manifested: firsthand accounts of travels to the East. Seen from this perspective, it becomes highly significant that elements of Petahiyah’s Sivuv are directly modeled upon the Alexander Romance, Hebrew versions of which were spreading in Ashkenaz just as Latin and vernacular versions were becoming increasingly ubiquitous. We have noted above that the Pietists repeatedly reference the narratives about Alexander found in rabbinic writings, and that they incorporated elements of the Secretum secretorum, addressed to Alexander, into their esoteric writings. In the Sivuv, too, rabbinic passages about Alexander are invoked—but implicitly, masked as Petahiyah’s firsthand observations. For instance, Petahiyah is said to have encountered messengers headed toward the land of Gog, which is past the “mountains of darkness,” whose location Petahiyah then describes in detail. The reference to these mountains in the context of an eschatological discussion, however, originates in a talmudic narrative about Alexander and his adventures in the East—the same passage in which we encountered the salted fish reanimated by the waters of the Garden of Eden. As we have seen, these fish were invoked by Judah and Eleazar as one of the “remembrances” of God’s power to resurrect the dead, confirming that this passage may well have been on Judah’s mind when he recorded Petahiyah’s travels in the region of the “mountains of darkness.”
In other instances, the wonders Petahiyah is described as having encountered during the course of his travels are adapted not from rabbinic legends about Alexander, but specifically from Hebrew versions of the Alexander Romances that were in circulation during this time period. For example, Judah at one point describes Petahiyah’s experiences at Mt. Ararat: “[Mount Ararat] is full of thorns and herbs, and when the dew falls upon them, manna falls there as well…. One takes the manna together with the thorns and herbs, and chops them up, since they are very hard…. The thorns and herbs are extremely bitter, [yet] when they are combined with the manna they become sweeter than honey or any other sweetness. And if one were to prepare [the manna] that falls on the mountain without the thorns, one’s limbs would come apart from the excessive sweetness.”249 While these observations are attributed to Petahiyah’s direct experience, they are in fact adapted almost verbatim from an Alexander Romance that circulated in Ashkenaz during this approximate time period.250 In the so-called Toldot Alexander ha-Gadol, we read:
[Alexander] came to the land of Sidon and there found very high mountains. On the tops of the mountains there was something that looked like white snow. The king and his warriors climbed to the top of a mountain and there found something similar to manna. The king tasted it, and vomited it out because it was so sweet.
While the king was on top of the mountain, a man … approached him, and said to the king: “Why did you respond in this way to the manna?” The king said, “I was sickened by the excessive sweetness of the manna.” The old man said to him, “There is a certain herb next to the manna which is extremely bitter. Had you mixed the herb with the manna you would not have become ill.”
The king did this, and placed [the herb] in his mouth, and it was as bitter as honey is sweet. The king and his warriors gathered some manna and some herbs and brought them to the army and they ate it.251
Judah’s familiarity with this text252 can account for another strange passage in the Sivuv as well. In Shushan, Petahiyah is said to have come across a local river, which is home to “fish with rings of gold in their ears”—an obscure description (not least of all because fish do not have ears). In the same Alexander narrative, however, the protagonist “came to a very wide river. In the river, they found fish with golden rings in their ears.”253 Here again, Judah apparently interpolated contents from the Alexander narrative he knew well into his account of Petahiyah’s travels in the east.
A separate,
