TRAVEL NARRATIVES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY

This chapter focuses on travel writing as an opportunity for a culture to represent and dramatize its own fissures and fictions of identity. It investigates how travel narratives in rabbinic literature function as a vehicle for exploring, producing, and policing their own fictions of identity in the complex interaction between self and Other that is brought about by movement in space. Various types of travel narratives are examined, including roadside encounters between rabbis and nonrabbinic and non-Jewish figures, wayside inns as a social space where identities could meet and mingle, pilgrimage and other forms of sacred travel, as well as tales of exile and captivity, and fantastic utopian or dystopian voyages to other worlds and other eras.