Jacob of Ancona

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"Jacob of Ancona" is the name that has been given to the supposed author of a book of travels, purportedly made by a scholarly Jewish merchant who wrote in vernacular Italian an account of a trading venture he made, in which he reached China in 1271, four years before Marco Polo. While he was there, the narrative contains political debates about the future of the city in which he engaged with the aid of a translator of mixed Italian and Chinese ancestry.

The manuscript from which David Selbourne, an Englishman residing in Italy, professed to have made his translation, published as The City of Light: The Hidden Journal of the Man Who Entered China Four Years Before Marco Polo, has not come to light, even in photocopies; its possessor still anonymous. Selbourne asserts that "provenance and rights of ownership over it are unclear," motivating its owner's desire for anonymity.

In 1997, Little, Brown was prepared to publish the diary, under the title "The City of Light" in the United States. The house had just published the book in the UK when word spread that China scholar Jonathan Spence, the Sterling Professor of History at Yale, had written a book review for the New York Times^[1] that questioned the book's provenance. Despite growing pressure, David Selbourne has continued to refuse to make the original manuscript available for public scrutiny. At the last minute, Little, Brown pulled the diary from U.S. publication. The Kensington imprint Citadel published the unverified The City of Light in 2000.

No scholar has come forward to support the text's authenticity in public.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ It was published, "A leaky boat to China," 19 October 1997; Spence's review detailed several doubtful aspects of Selbourne's alleged translation: "the reader is thrown back on the English of the translated text as it is presented here. Such a reading does not do much to increase our confidence." Among unlikely aspect Spence noted: the author's two female servants, suggesting "a convenient device for enriching the action with unwanted pregnancy, forced abortion and shrill complaint," the prominence of sexual themes, the extended philosophical debates which bear "traces of all sorts of narrative genres and traditions".

[edit] References

• Natalie Danford, "The Chinese discovered America!" Assessing 1421.
• London Review of Books 21.1 (7 January 1999: Correspondence

[edit] Further reading

• Halkin, Hillel, "The Strange Adventures of Jacob d'Ancona: Is a memoir of China purportedly written by a 13th-century Jewish merchant authentic? And if not, what then?" in Commentary Magazine, 111.4 (April 2001)