Petachiah of Regensburg

Also known as Petachiah ben Yaakov, Petahyah ha-Lavan

Bavarian rabbi whose Sibbuv ('Circuit') describes a long Ashkenazi Jewish journey through Eastern Europe, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and the Holy Land in the years just before Hattin.

Petachiah was a learned rabbi of Regensburg whose elder brother Yitzhak was a prominent Tosafist scholar and whose own travels seem to have been undertaken partly in search of Jewish learning at distant academies and partly as private pilgrimage. He set out in the 1170s and his journey, recorded by a disciple after his return, traversed Bohemia, Poland, the Rus' principalities, the steppe lands of the Khazars, the kingdom of Armenia, the Tigris cities of Mosul and Baghdad, and the Holy Land itself.

His Sibbuv is short, irregular, and full of marvels — Petachiah was particularly interested in the burial places of biblical figures and rabbinic sages — but it is also the only twelfth-century Ashkenazi Jewish travel narrative we possess. He describes the Jewish academies of Baghdad with respectful awe, names the gaonim he met there, and on his arrival in Jerusalem records what he found of the Jewish community of the holy city in the last years of Frankish rule.

Petachiah is the natural complement to his slightly older Sephardi contemporary Benjamin of Tudela: a Jewish German pilgrim with different sources and a different temperament, walking many of the same roads in the same generation, and seeing the same Mediterranean Jewish world through the eyes of central European Ashkenazi piety.

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