"For all the savagery of the Holy Inquisition and the pitilessness with which the hidalgos enforced the expulsion, Spain and Portugal's Sephardim would never be able to forget Iberia, the sun-drenched land they had come to love, spending centuries helping to build, convinced that Jews had finally found a place of welcome and refuge. Until Christian royalty and nobility decreed otherwise, and they were driven out to wander again. Yet they retained the language, and recited the poetry, and cherished the culture for their own. Ashkenazim could huddle in their ghettos in central and eastern Europe, shutting the outside world from their souls. But not the Sephardim. Almost a century and a half had gone by since their expulsion from the land they called Sepharad, but it was still the highest praise, amongst them, to call a man hidalgo."
     --Eric Flint, 1632 Chapter 4

It's really pretty complex: an inherited obligate nostalgia for a place you had never seen, Spain, which was itself a place of exile and really just a stand-in for a different, even more ancient and even more distant lost and longed-for city, Jerusalem, just as the Spanish place of exile had only been a stand-in for the Babylonian place of exile.

Yet at the same time, Jerusalem was nearby and easily visited.

And they didn't even bother to go there! Mazower writes, "Indeed, only a few devout older people, usually men, were ever tempted to make the journey southeast to Jerusalem itself, even though it formed part of the same Ottoman realm."

It really reminds me of a Kafka parable.

Yet at the same time, Jerusalem was nearby and easily visited.

Well, relatively.

Iran is just a few months walk to Jerusalem today, however I lived with a family in 1965 that made the trek in the 1920s that took them 25 years to make. They started out with 9 children and lost most of them on the way, so the phrase "yet at the same time, Jerusalem was nearby and easily visited" can only be said by someone with frequent flyer miles.

Yeah, but Iran was outside the Ottoman Empire, and I would guess that the family you mentioned had other impediments. "Easily" is relative, but Jerusalem in the nineteenth century was majority Jewish (they say) and was a common tourist and pilgrimage destination.

Yes, and I expect the merchants of the city made trips to Beirut, Damascus, and Alexandria on more than rare occasions.