Benjamin the Third's Travels

The Travels of Benjamin the Third ( Yiddish Majssess Binjomin haschlischi, literally “Stories of Benjamin the Third”) is the name of a story by Mendele Moicher Sforim , which is apparently written in the style of a picaresque novel .

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Benjamin is a Jewish Don Quixote (also the subtitle of the Polish translation), who with his Sancho Panza Senderl, the woman decorates his environment with all kinds of fantastic figures. These are taken from old Jewish legends and folk tales, for example those about the “ Red Jews ” living on the other side of the Sambation River, the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel living on the edge of the world . Despite all the mockery of popular superstition and unworldliness, the subject also reflects a messianic longing to return to the sources of the forefathers.

The title alludes to the journeys of two earlier Benjamines, whose travel reports, some of which were probably fictional, were widespread and which flowed into the book in various places without being mentioned directly: Benjamin I is in this sense the medieval Jewish travel writer Benjamin von Tudela , who traveled from Spain to the borders of Persia and Egypt in the 12th century. A German edition of his report appeared in 1858, as did Eight Years in Asia and Africa. From 1846 to 1855 by Israel Joseph Benjamin . Its French first edition from 1855 was entitled Israel Joseph Benjamin II! This describes u. a. how he thinks he can find traces of the ten tribes of the northern kingdom.

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Based on the book by Mendele Moicher Sforim, various works were later created under the title The Journeys of Benjamin the Fourth , for example by Z. Prejgerson, who describes the decline of the old Jewish culture during the early Soviet period. A poem by Nathan Alterman from 1942, which deals with Rommel's desert campaign, has the same subtitle. In the current political debate in Israel , the title found polemical use against the politics of Benjamin Netanyahu .

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The book was published in Yiddish in 1878 and in Hebrew in 1896 . A first German translation was published in 1937 by Schocken-Verlag Berlin under the title Die Fahrt Binjamins the Third; the translation was done by Efraim Frisch . This was published again in 1962 by Walter Verlag , Olten in 1983 in the second edition. The new translation by Susanne Klingenstein under the title Benjamin's Travels the Third was published in 2019 by Hanser Verlag in Munich ( ISBN 978-3-446-26395-6 ). It is the first complete translation of the last edition (Warsaw 1913) and contains an extensive afterword that classifies the work historically and literarily.