A Jewish Source on Damascus just after the Ottoman Conquest

In the year 5282 (A.D. 1521–2) an Italian Jew made a pilgrimage to Palestine, of which he left a brief record in Hebrew. Until the present year, no manuscript of this work was known,, and even the author's name had not come down to us. The text was preserved in an old Italian collection of Palestine Itineraries, published in Leghorn in 1785, under the name of Sh ibhḥē Yěrū sh ālāyim , by one Jacob Bārū kh b. Mō sh e Ḥayyim, and several times reprinted since.The editor informs us that he found the work in an old manuscript, and that though the author's name was not marked, he was obviously a man of great learning. Nothing beyond this was known of the anonymous traveller. It had been suggested, without much evidence, that the traveller's name was Bārū kh , and that he was the Rabbi Bārū kh with whom the theologian R. Tam b.Yaḥya corresponded. The latest reprint of this text is that of Mr. J. Eisenstein, in his Corpus of Jewish Travellers. In the present year a new edition of this work has been published by Mr. Isaac Ben-Zevi, who has had the good fortune to find an early—probably an autograph—manuscript. Mr. Ben-Zevi's text is in every way fuller and better than the Leghorn edition, and is presumably the original and correct one.Although the manuscript does not bear the author's name, there is no reason to doubt Mr. Ben-Zevi's attribution of the work to Rabbi.