Travel and Anxiety in Early Jewish Literature

While some early Jewish texts highlight opportunities enabled by travel, others reflect related concerns, suggesting that an encounter with the unknown moves people not only physically but also emotionally. This article addresses the latter phenomenon by investigating the blend of travel and anxiety in a selection of passages from Jubilees, Tobit, Aramaic Levi Document, and Philo of Alexandria. Drawing on affect theory, it argues that travel-related anxiety is best understood as an inclusive affect covering both explicit and more unspoken or fuzzy forms of anxiety, which can be either acute or chronic in nature. Seeking to map out a range of ancient responses to or strategies of managing apprehensions, I demonstrate that the selected sources reflect both emotional and ethical concerns. The authors of narrative texts invite their audiences to immerse themselves in “historical” events and to share the emotionally taxing aspect of relocations undertaken by ancestral figures in the past, while the authors of instructional texts address current experiences arising from their own communities: they mitigate possible worries related to encountering competing claims of wisdom on the move and instruct against trips driven by a greedy pursuit of luxurious goods.