The Book of Travels סֵפֶר הַמַּסָּעוֹת

The book describes a route through Provence, Italy, Greece, Constantinople, the Land of Israel, Damascus, Mosul, Baghdad and further east, returning by way of Egypt and Sicily. For each community Benjamin names the head or heads, sometimes the scholars, sometimes the trade by which they live, and a number—of souls, or of householders.

The first printing is Constantinople, 1543; the critical edition is M. N. Adler's, London, 1907, with the recensions collated.

What makes the book indispensable: there is nothing like it in the twelfth century, before or after. No other source gives a cross-section of the Jewish world from the Pyrenees to the Tigris at a single moment. Hence its misfortune: its figures are used as a census, which they cannot bear.

Three rules of caution. The figures depend on the recension: for Baghdad, different manuscripts give "forty thousand and twenty-eight synagogues" and "about a thousand families and twenty-three." The eastern sections are hearsay: Persia, Central Asia, India and China are not described from life, and the text's confident tone does not distinguish. The chronology is approximate: departure between 1159 and 1165, return in 1172–73; the individual datings within are later scholars' reconstructions, not the author's dates. And one telling error in the reference works: the Encyclopaedia Iranica dates his visit to Hamadan to 1067—impossible, since Benjamin travelled in 1165–73.

For all that, the book is worth reading not for its numbers. Its value is structural: one sees who is connected to whom, where letters travel from and to, where a court sits and where only a minyan, who pays tax and to whom. It is a map of connections rather than a table of populations, and as a map of connections it is reliable.