Little Known Facts About Jewish People Who Were Involved With Geography

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

We know from early on in the Torah and Jewish people were involved migrating to Egypt and that Abraham and his father, Terah migrated from the city of Ur to Canaan. 

 Moses had to have learned some geography in Egypt to lead 600,000 released slaves to Canaan, though it did take him 40 years to move that many from Egypt, The miles based distance from Egypt to Canaan is only 314.466 miles.  Today a land trip could be driven in 7 hours and 1 minute. 

Another measurement showed the distance to be only 309.737 miles that could be driven in 6 hours and 55 minutes.  It must depend on the car, month of the year, climate and political conditions.  

The distance from Portland, Oregon eastward to Ontario, Oregon is 378.8 miles and can be driven in 5 hours 50 minutes via I-84.  The geography of the highways must be a little harder on the Egyptian-Jerusalem freeway.  

 

The Jewish geographical horizon early on included Egypt, Chaldea, and Babylon, while King Solomon had trading expeditions that extended knowledge southward.                                                         

The growth of the outer lands, the Diaspora, brought Jews into contact with Greece, Western Asia and the Roman Empire.

                                                       

Later, under Byzantium and Islam, Jews traded from the Rhone River through the Mediterranean or Central Europe to India and China, until interrupted by the Crusades of the 11th century and the rise of gentile trade.  Evidently up until this period, Jews were the most prolific traders in the world. 

                                                     

 Jews nevertheless pioneered the routes from North Africa to the Niger River in the 14th and 15th centuries.  The Niger River is the principal river of West Africa, extending about 4,180 km. Its drainage basin is 2,117,700 km² in area. Its source is in the Guinea Highlands in southeastern Guinea.

The Bible and Apocrypha (non-canonical Jewish literature, possibly composed after finishing the Bible or were written in Greek-normally applied only to books incorporated in the Septuagint which were canonized by the Catholic Church) reflect the belief that the world was a circle of land surrounded by sea.  

                                                        

The concept that Jerusalem was the center of the world was shared with Christianity, but the knowledge of the earth as a sphere came to Jews via Islam in the 10th century, while the Zohar (the chief work of the Spanish Kabbalah, a commentary on sections of the Torah and Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations) in the 13th century knew that the world revolves on its axis. 

                                                         

 The Jewish Cartographers of Majorca (islands belonging to Spain where Jews lived since Roman times) showed in their maps a remarkable knowledge of the geography and trade-routes of the Mediterranean and North Africa.

The first systematic geography in Hebrew was by Abraham bar Hiyya in about 1100. It was Christopher Columbus (1446-1506), born in Italy but spoke as a native Spaniard, could have been born into a Marrano (hidden Jewish ancestry) who sailed away in 1492 with a few sailors fleeing from the Spanish inquisition.  He was looking for a short-cut to India and his new map indicated such a direction.  Christopher himself wrote to his son in Hebrew.  Who sold him his maps?  Who did he go to for maps?  The geographical knowledge derived from new discoveries was communicated to Jews by Abraham Farissoi in the 16th century. Jewish travel books are known from the 10th century, the most important one being that of Benjamin of Tudelea of the 12th century, while his contemporary, Pethahiah of Regensburg, wrote on his own journey to Eastern Europe and the Orient.  After the 13th century, accounts of Palestine are common.  In the 18th century, Hayyim Joseph David Azulai described Jewish communities throughout the world and in the 20th century, Jacob Saper added information on Yemen, etc.

The 1st modern Hebrew geographical text-books were published in the 18th century based on German sources of Samson ha-Levi, Shevile Olam, in 1825, while Hillel Khana's Gelilot Aretz in 1880 laid the foundation for the textbooks and terminology used in Israel today.  

 

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

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