Conclusion

This book concludes with a discussion of two figures, one Christian and one Jewish, each a master storyteller of fictions of Diaspora. The first is “John Mandeville, knight,” who recalls his journey to everywhere in the mid-fourteenth-century French text Mandeville's Travels. In his account, Mandeville claims that Hebrew is no longer the language of the Old Testament but rather of the Jews' current-day conspiracies against Christians. The other voice is provided by Eleazer ben Asher ha-Levi, whose Book of Memory deals with inheritance in a diasporic inversion that encompasses the loss of Jerusalem. This conclusion also considers The Testament of Naphtali, a text that distills the themes of Diaspora in the Book of Memory and resists some of the redemptive possibilities for the ten Jewish tribes offered by rabbinic midrash.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and the Moral Geography of the Medieval World

Mandeville’s Travels was, for more than two centuries after its appearance in c.1356, of enormous influence and popularity in many fields of European culture. This paper discusses first its unprecedented generic eclecticism and its casting into the form of a first person narrative, and then proceeds to explore concepts of space and how a journey narrative may be articulated. Finally, it moves to consideration of the journey and what the traveller reports as having encountered on it as a moral exploration of a world seen as symbol as well as material.