China Sea as the edge of the world and is used to imagine the margins of the world as a realm of marvels and unknown dangers.

Benjamin's travelogue is a product of his imagination, influenced by biblical authority and rumors, rather than actual geographical knowledge.

Jewish utopia in the Arabian Peninsula, where 300,000 Jews live in 40 cities and 200 villages, free from the rule of gentiles.

universal Jewish community that despite its dispersion among various Muslim and Christian regimes still managed to preserve a strong sense of unity and cohesion

"a day's journey" to indicate close social interactions among Jewish communities,

rather a way to link places along a real but somewhat abstracted route.

medieval understanding of travel writing.

mprecise unit of "a day's journey" and the parasang, an ancient Persian unit of measurement

geography is experienced through human movement on specific routes.

literary grid that allows the author to reflect on the medieval world from a Jewish perspective.

First, to clarify - what is "code", what is "data"? In this article, when I say "code", I mean something a human has written, that will be read by a machine (another program or hardware). When I say "data", I mean something a machine has written, that may be read by a machine, a human, or both. Therefore, a configuration file where you set logging.level = DEBUG is code, while virtual machine instructions emitted by a compiler are data. Of course, code is data, but I think this over-simplified view (humans write code, machines write data) will serve us best for now...

However, if the distinctions between the two concepts appear to be superficial, intentional conflation may be desirable for the sake of conciseness and recall