Menachem ben Peretz of Hebron

Also known as Menachem ben Peretz the Hebronite

Otherwise unknown thirteenth-century Jewish pilgrim from Hebron whose short Hebrew itinerary names the holy graves of the Galilee in some of the same terms used by his contemporaries Samuel ben Samson and Yehuda Alharizi.

Menachem ben Peretz is one of the medieval Jewish travellers we know only through the fragments of his own pen. The byname 'of Hebron' suggests he was a member of the small Jewish community that survived in the city around the Cave of the Patriarchs — perhaps a descendant of the families that had returned in the years immediately after Saladin's reopening of the holy sites to Jewish worship.

His brief Hebrew itinerary, preserved within the great anthologies of Jewish travel literature collected from the seventeenth century onward, lists the tombs of biblical and rabbinic figures from the upper Galilee down through Tiberias and the coastal plain, and includes some of the earliest surviving Hebrew descriptions of the holy graves of Meron and Safed. He travelled in roughly the same generation as Samuel ben Samson, and his short text is one of the principal companion pieces to the better-known accounts of the Aliyat ha-Sheloshmeʾot of 1210.

He is included here for the same reason every minor traveller of his century is — that the bare list of names, distances, and tomb-locations he wrote down constitutes for the medieval scholar a piece of indispensable factual ground on which the larger picture of Jewish life in thirteenth-century Palestine has been built.