“Draw in your mind a small place like this, 3,000 Jewish souls, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Arabs who weren’t separate, but a person glued to his brother, loud voices, flag raised, singing, some drinking and others clapping their hands, skipping and dancing wildly…I don’t know how to convey to you the great joy I felt within my heart! I imagined that the messiah had already come to Israel.” In 1866, Abraham Rosanes found himself on an extended expedition in Palestine, dispatching reports of his travels to be serially published in the newspaper Ha-Magid. Here Rosanes evocatively recaptures his experience as a participant in the hilula festivities—the “great joy” felt, his imagining of redemption. This is one of a handful of Sephardic Ottoman hilula narratives that use participant observation and ethnographic methods to record and represent the religious, cultural, and economic aspects of hilula celebrations for their readers. Though scholars have long delved into the religious and cultural practice of the hilula pilgrimage, it is often approached through Muslim and Must’arab Jewish sources. This paper argues that accounts by Ottoman Sephardic writers both reflect similarities with other accounts while markedly diverging in ways that reflect their broader positionalities. This paper considers the experience of hilula from the Ottoman Sephardic perspective by focusing on two nineteenth-century travelogues that were published serially in the Jewish press: Abraham Rosanes’s 1866-1867 Masaot ha-Haham ha-Abir, published in the Prussian Hebrew journal Ha-Magid and Yaakov Shaul’s Impresiones de Viajes en Palastina, published in the Izmirli Ladino newspaper, La Buena Esperansa. Although both composed by Sephardic scholars living in the Ottoman Empire, these two accounts differ in language, tone, and motivation. Comparing these two texts not only brings an Ottoman Sephardic perspective to help illuminate hilula practices in Palestine, but also highlights the variegated social terrain and key social, political, and religious divergences within the Ottoman Sephardic community.