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Communities in Crisis: The Medieval Archive and the Jewish Heritage Traveler

ABSTRACT This essay considers how the experience of being a Jewish heritage traveler inflects the author’s approach to reading and teaching medieval literature. For the author, Jewish heritage travel, whether medieval or modern, tells alternative histories which rely upon alternative ways of seeing and interpreting in the face of ongoing, chronic crisis. Just as the medieval travel narrative of Benjamin of Tudela lists Jewish monuments in Rome alongside Christian ones, modern heritage tours intersect with and deviate from mainstream historical narratives, highlighting the achievements — and suffering — of the Jewish minority. To examine medieval literature from this vantage point leads the author not only to construct a parallel archive of Jewish-authored narratives, but also to find surprising examples of collective identity, borne of trauma and the shared experience of crisis, in Christian anti-Semitic sources.