It’s always hard to get back to work after a vacation, even if you’ve only been away for a week. Who wants to write about disengagement from Gaza, or the nuclearization of Iran, after having just come home a few hours ago from the Ionian islands?

I was “bareboating” there with some friends. That’s a popular vacation these days. You get together a few people, at least one with an international skipper’s license, rent a bare yacht that you have to operate and stock with provisions yourselves, and take off. It’s not much more complicated than renting a car, and although it is considerably more expensive, it’s also a way to enjoy a cheap vacation, since you’re taking your sleeping quarters with you and have no hotel bills to pay.

This was the fifth or sixth time I’ve done this with friends, always in the Mediterranean. That’s mostly because we’re already there, I suppose. Why think of sailing elsewhere when, if you live in Israel, you’re an hour’s flight from the coast of Turkey, two hours from Greece, three from Italy? You can leave for Ben-Gurion Airport at four in the morning, reach Athens by nine, and be installed on your yacht on the other, west coast of Greece, which you’ve crossed by following the Gulf of Corinth, by late afternoon.

It’s not only that, though. It’s something about the Mediterranean itself. Although I’ve been in many other parts of the world and loved many of the places I’ve been in, it’s always the Mediterranean that calls me back again and again.

There’s such a thing as the Mediterranean mystique, of course. It goes back to the 18th century and to the Romantics, to Winckelmann and Goethe, to Heine’s frozen fir tree dreaming of southern palms, and Keats’s Grecian urn with its “leaf-fringed legend … Of deities or mortals, or of both, / In Tempe or the dales of Arcady.” This is the Mediterranean as seen from northern Europe, with its bright light and hot sun and human warmth and clear waters, that cradle of civilization whose children grew up and wandered off to colder, snowier, foggier climes in which they became cold-blooded and murkier-souled themselves. It’s a vision, reproduced on posters of white sands and blue seas, that hangs in the windows of thousands of travel agencies and brings tens of millions of tourists to the Mediterranean every year.

I grew up on that northern vision of the Mediterranean myself; as a teenager, I knew the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” practically by heart. In fact, the first time I saw the Mediterranean and swam in its waters came from having won, as an 18-year-old boy, an essay-writing contest sponsored by a Jewish organization on “Why I Want To Visit Israel,” into which I put as much Keats as Judaism. The dales of Arcady figured in it no less than did the Plain of Sharon.

Today, having lived for over three decades in a small Israeli town that overlooks the Mediterranean from a hilltop of the Carmel (although if my wife and I don’t ask our neighbor to prune back his trees, we’re soon going to lose our only view of it), I’m perhaps a bit less romantic about it. I wouldn’t mind if it were a little cooler, both meteorologically and humanly speaking, especially on hot August nights two weeks before disengagement. And yet the Mediterranean not only still appeals to me more than any other part of the world, I also believe that in coming back to it, the Jewish people have come back to its regional and not just its national home. It’s where we most belong.

We had our love affair with northern Europe, it’s true – a long and a deep and a tragic one. But we were always out of place there. The peoples of the north felt it even if we didn’t. We weren’t just a different religion. We had a different character. We were more hot-blooded, more passionate, more aggressive, livelier, quicker, more emotional. And yet more lucid and clear-minded, too. The fogs and mists of northern Europe were never for us, nor were its reserve and its manners.

When my wife and I settled in Israel in 1970, we bought a car in Paris, drove it to Venice, and boarded a ferry that stopped all over the eastern Mediterranean until it docked in Haifa. The closer we came to Israel, the more we felt that we were already half-there. The landscape, the flora, the architecture, the food, the light, became more and more like its own. The people, too. They were freer, friendlier, louder, more talkative. They were, though Christians and Muslims, more like Jews. Perhaps that’s why the history of the Jews in lands like Italy and Ottoman Turkey was, generally speaking, a happy one. We stuck out less there.

The question has sometimes been raised of whether Israel should seek to belong to Europe or the Middle East. To my mind, this is not the right question at all. We are by both history and temperament neither a European nor a Middle Eastern people, but rather a Mediterranean one. We have the love of life and the love of clarity that have always typified the region. We are impatient with obfuscation, with formality, with forms of etiquette. We love to argue and to debate. These are all characteristics of the Mediterranean.

That’s what I love most about traveling there. You’re never so far away from home that you’re not at home all the time.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.