From the earliest days of Hebrew printing to the present, Jewish readers have found great favor in literary accounts of Jewish travellers, especially those who, like the famed 12th-century Benjamin of Tudela, provided first-hand descriptions of the holy city of Jerusalem. One of the acknowledged classics of the genre is Travail in an Arab Land,…
Tag: Morocco
Restoring Jewish heritage sites with Sam Gruber
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The first time Sam Gruber stepped inside the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, Poland, he was “incredibly moved” by what he saw. Considered the lone surviving example of the great 19th-century synagogues of Poland, the sumptuously decorated Moorish-Gothic structure had been built as a Reform synagogue in 1862. It had been enlarged in 1892 and again…
Incident in Marrakech
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In 1786 the Italian Jewish scholar Samuel Romanelli (1757 1817) boarded a ship at Gibraltar expecting it to carry him eventually to his home in Mantua. The vessel stopped at several Moroccan ports, however, and Romanelli went ashore and innocently became entangled in some legal trouble. Consequently his passport was confiscated and, to his immense chagrin, his intended brief…
