AUTHOR: Lucian-Zeev HERȘCOVICI
THE HARBOR TOWN OF GALAȚI IN HEBREW AND YIDDISH TRAVEL LITERATURE, FROM THE XVII-TH AND XVIII-TH CENTURIES
Danubius, XXXV, Galaţi, 2017, pp. 21-40.
Abstract
The aim of our paper is to present a description of the harbor town of Galați and of the Jews living in this town in the 17th and 18th centuries as observed by Jewish travellers from Central and Eastern Europe on their way to Palestine via Moldavia. These observations were written in Hebrew or in Yiddish. We have chosen fragments from the travel descriptios of Gershon ben Eliezer HaLevi Iddels of Prague (17th century), and of Simchah ben Yehoshua Hes of Zalozce, Yosef of Safed, Yisrael of Polotzk, Nachman of Braslav (18th century), translated them to Romanian, and analyzed them. These fragments reveal the goal of the authors – their Messianic desire to live in the Holy Land – as well as relating their travels, thereby adding to the knowledge of the history of the town, as well as to the history of Moldavia and of the Jews of this Principate in the 17th-18th centuries.