“For dress and language are my witness that I am a Levantine”: Alternating identities in eighteenth-century rabbinic journeys

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During the early modern period, the Mediterranean basin was a vast melting pot fostering encounters with a variety of cultures and environments. These intense interactions also affected the identities of individual travellers. Rabbi Haim Yosef David Azulai (known by his Hebrew acronym, the ‘Hida’) was a rabbinic emissary from the Holy Land who made two long journeys to raise funds in the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean area and beyond for the Jews of the Holy Land. The interest in Azulai and his travels stems from the fact that he chronicled his travels extensively in two volumes. A careful reading hints at the ways in which he was transformed by the different people he met, the places he visited, and the cultures he encountered. His travelogues reveal a dynamically developing self-identity that show how his self-definition was closely tied to an internal interplay between his image of himself, his image of the people he encountered, and what he derived from the surrounding cultures. This interplay formed Azulai’s “space and time dependent identity” whose facets were alternatively revealed or concealed as a function of the setting, while nevertheless preserving his traditional Jewish identity.