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Three Faiths, One Holy Land

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Three Faiths, One Holy Land Three Faiths, One Holy Land An Interfaith Study on Holy Land Pilgrimages in the Early Modern Period Crystal Kolden The Holy Land, encompassing the city of Jerusalem and its surrounding religious sites, has long been a destination for pilgrims from all three major monotheistic religions, some of the earliest dating back to the fourth century. Following the Ottoman conquest in 1517, the region experienced a pax Ottomanica1 during the 16th and 17th centuries, and the Holy Land saw a great influx of pilgrims. With this tradition of pilgrimage came a vast convergence of ideas and views originating from diverse geographical regions and religious backgrounds. This study examines the travel accounts of four pilgrims of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths to begin unraveling this complex intersection, as well as explore the ways in which these differing faiths and places of origin influence perceptions of the same geographical region. The first pilgrim is David Reubeni, a Jew claiming to be from the Jewish kingdom of Habor in central Arabia. He visited Jerusalem and surrounding holy sites in 1523. Henry Timberlake, a Protestant Christian merchant, then traveled to Jerusalem in 1601. The third pilgrim, Evliya Tshelebi, was a Muslim travel-writer from Istanbul who visited Syria and Palestine in 1648-1650 and again in 1672. Lastly is Henry Maundrell, a Church of England clergyman stationed at the Levant Company’s consulate in Aleppo, Syria, who journeyed to Jerusalem in 1697. 1 Rhoads Murphey, "Bigots or Informed Observers? A Periodization of Pre-Colonial English and European Writing on the Middle East," Journal of the American Oriental Society 110, no. 2 (1990): 299, doi:10.2307/604532. Kolden 2 Differences in faith immediately makes themselves manifest in the sites that each pilgrim visits. In the instances where the same sites are visited by different pilgrims, tone and attitude toward the sites differ. Reasons for writing their accounts, along with their intended audiences, also differ among the pilgrims. Timberlake and Maundrell write with their English friends in mind. Reubeni’s account is written in a personal journal, and Tshelebi’s writes for his profession. There are also distinct levels of tolerance towards other faiths. All pilgrims express some form of hostility toward those who are not their coreligionists, but Timberlake goes so far as to develop a friendly relationship with a Moor. For Reubeni, this hostility only seems to be directed at certain members of this Muslim faith. As for commonalities, perhaps the most encompassing thread common among these four pilgrims is that they do not undertake pilgrimage in the traditional sense. Pilgrimages typically involved movement that was “no longer local”2 and are voluntary or obligatory acts of “reuniting with the symbolic center of one’s faith.”3 The pilgrim internally transcends space and time by seeing this symbolic center through the lens of its sacred past, and the journeys have a definite subject,4 especially in medieval pilgrimages. For different religions, pilgrimage was often penitential for Christians, obligatory and ritual-focused in Islam, and for Jews a powerful reminder of the diaspora. The pilgrims in this study, however, undertake pilgrimage only as an extension of an already-existing journey or treat pilgrimage as a secondary aspect of their travels. Thus, these four pilgrims have their own functions of pilgrimage that transcend the typical pilgrimage functions for their faith. 2 Robert Stoddard and Alan Morinis, eds., Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces: The Geography of Pilgrimages (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1997), 45. 3 Ethel Klutznick and Philip M., Pilgrims & Travelers to the Holy Land (Omaha, Neb: Creighton University Press, 1996), 13. Paraphrase of Victor Turner’s "The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goal." 4 Mary Baine Campbell, “Medieval Travel Writing (1): Peregrinatio and Religious Travel Writing,” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, edited by Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 36, doi:10.1017/9781316556740.003. Kolden 3 Function of Pilgrimage Reubeni’s travels in the Holy Land did not stem from a specific intention of visiting Jewish holy sites but were part of a longer journey to Rome. In his diary, he writes of his noble heritage as a brother to the king of a Jewish state on the Arabian Peninsula, and the purpose of his royally mandated mission was to seek an audience with the Pope in Rome. From central Arabia he makes his way to Jeddah, then across the Red Sea to the Ethiopian Empire, and then travels northward to Cairo and on to Gaza, Hebron, and Jerusalem. After Jerusalem he backtracks to Alexandria, from where he sails to Italy. In Rome he tries to enlist the help of Pope Clement VII to help strengthen the alliance between the Holy Roman Empire and France, two central European powers. Reubeni wants them to help him wage war against the Turks in Palestine so that the Holy Land could be wrested from Muslim control and into Jewish hands, and he offers Jewish troops to European leaders in return for arms. Some scholars, along with some of Reubeni’s contemporaries have voiced doubt about the veracity of Reubeni’s claims to nobility.5 There is also uncertainty about whether or not he actually visited some of the places in his account, such as early sixteenth-century Sudan, but there is evidence that his experiences there may be authentic and that he acquired valuable information on this area.6 During his visit to Hebron and Jerusalem, Reubeni seems to place his initial mission on hold for a few weeks as he visits multiple holy sites. He fasts for five weeks and challenges the Holy Land guides as to the location of Abraham’s grave in order to access the real site. In this light, Reubeni is embracing the traditional role of a pilgrim in search of sanctity in physical 5 Elias Lipiner, O Sapateiro de Trancoso e o Alfaiate de Setúbal (Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1993), 318, 319. 6 S. Hillelson, "David Reubeni, An Early Visitor to Sennar," Sudan Notes and Records 16, no. 1 (1933): (find actual page number, not just span) 56, www.jstor.org/stable/41716047. Kolden 4 places of religious importance. He does, however, seem to include his original agenda in his visit to Jerusalem, as he instructs a fellow Jew to deliver a letter of unnamed content to the religious leader of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, this letter most likely addressing the alleged soon- coming redemption of the land of Israel. This personal narrative of his travels in Jerusalem is in contrast to a letter sent from Jerusalem to a Rabbi Abraham in Italy in 1523. It describes Reubeni as a “troublemaker”7 for his grand claims of the soon coming of the redemption of the Jews and the reemerging of the Jewish tribes. Most likely Reubeni’s motives for visiting the Holy Land fall between these two narratives. In this sense, Reubeni’s journey stands out from the other pilgrims as a diplomatic mission. Whereas the others had an individualistic aspect to their pilgrimages, the greater framework of Reubeni’s journey revolved around an external purpose. Henry Timberlake, a merchant and ship captain from London, originally sets out for the Mediterranean on his ship the Trojan in 1601 and initially does not intend to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. From Algiers he transports around three hundred pilgrims on his ship to Alexandria. He then traveled overland to Cairo, and it was there that he and his companion, John Burrell, first decided to make the pilgrimage. Thus, from this moment Timberlake is not only a merchant but he also becomes a pilgrim, from the time he decides to go to Jerusalem until he returns to his ship in Alexandria fifty days later when he writes that he ended his pilgrimage. Upon arriving at Jerusalem, Timberlake joyfully gives thanks to God for the opportunity to “behold so holy a place with my eyes, whereof I had read so often before” (9).8 This same 7 Qtd. in F. E. Peters, Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985), 492, www.muse.jhu.edu/book/51080. 8 All direct references to a certain page in each pilgrim’s account will be hereafter cited in parenthetical style. Kolden 5 devoutness characterizes the rest of his account, and when he visits sites, he carefully documents their Biblical significance. Thus, for Timberlake pilgrimage functioned as a quest to take part in the geography of the Bible. For him, the Holy Land’s importance was not derived from its current state but from its significance as the place where Jesus and other Biblical figures, such as Lazarus and Mary, had walked and lived in the past. When he does mention the current state of the Holy Land, his predominant attitude is one of displeasure at the way the Muslim Turkish “infidels” had apparently rid the land of some of its holiness. Yet, the sanctity of the sites Timberlake visited did not yield any penitential value; his sins were not forgiven for visiting a certain holy site nor did he gain any special favor in the sight of God for doing so. Protestants were loath to take part in these ideas that were more commonly practiced by Catholics. During this period, the institution of pilgrimage had even been abandoned under the continuing Reformation under Elizabeth I, but travelers like Timberlake still referred to themselves as pilgrims while making sure to emphasize their Protestantism,9 which is a prevalent theme in Timberlake’s account.
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