Implied in this latter idea of geniza is that these works, like people, are living things, possessing an element of the sacred about them—and therefore when they “die,” or become worn out, they must be honored and protected from profanation. “The contents of the book,” wrote Solomon Schechter, “go up to heaven like the soul.” The same Hebrew root, g-n-z, was, he noted, sometimes used on gravestones: “Here lies hidden (nignaz) this man.”
The origins and otherworldly aspects of the institution aren’t the only mysterious things about it. Both its development and its precise nature have remained curiously elusive. What we do know is that at some point the verbal noun “geniza” evolved from indicating a process to also connoting a place, either a burial plot, a storage chamber, or a cabinet where any damaged or somehow dubious holy book would be ritually entombed. In this way, the text’s sanctity would be preserved, and dangerous ideas kept from circulating. Or, as one early scholar of the material neatly put it: “A genizah* serves … the twofold purpose of preserving good things from harm and bad things from harming.”
Often this depositing of the sacred texts in a secure location was only an interim solution and suggested a kind of liminal existence preceding actual interment. In some communities texts that had been stored in a geniza would eventually be buried alongside a saint or righteous individual; more frequently the scrolls and scraps were ritually consigned to the earth alone. In still other cases it appears that removal from circulation to a geniza constituted the terminal stage of the process and brought the writings in question to their final place of rest.
With modifications, the practice of geniza has continued throughout the Jewish world into the present, ranging greatly from community to community. (A related though less well-known tradition exists in Islam, and in Arabic the word for funeral, janaza, derives from the same three-letter root implying “concealment.”) In general and over time, it seems the talmudic notion of geniza as a form of censorship waned, and most genizot came to serve the more neutral function of holding obsolete texts. Beyond that, customs were idiosyncratic and highly variable. A nook near or under the synagogue’s ark, a basement room, a cubbyhole—all could and did function as genizot. (One Iraqi community chose to honor their bags of tired texts by throwing them into the river.) The fragments that required this sort of treatment became known as shemot, or names: they were considered sacred because they bore the name of God. In some towns and cities, the geniza materials were taken out of their receptacles on a designated day and buried in an elaborate ritual that was part funeral, part carnival. Depending on local tradition, the papers and books—and often discarded ritual objects that included or had contact with a written text, such as mezuzot, phylactery straps, and the like—would be placed in straw baskets, leather sheets, or lengths of white cloth, like shrouds. Coffins draped with decorative fabrics were sometimes used to hold a no-longer-valid Torah scroll, and the privilege of pallbearing was bestowed upon those who had donated money to the synagogue. Songs were sung, cakes eaten, and arak was drunk as a procession set out for the cemetery. This act of inhumation served, in fact, as a kind of twin ritual to the dedication of a new Torah scroll, and after the old scroll was buried, pilgrimages to the “grave” would be performed, just as they were made to the tombs of certain holy men.
For reasons that remain obscure, in the case of the Palestinian Jews of Fustat, or Old Cairo—who worshipped in what would eventually become known as the Ben Ezra synagogue—the tradition of geniza was, it seems, extended to include the preservation of anything written in Hebrew letters, not only religious documents, and not just in the Hebrew language. Perhaps, as one scholar has proposed, “the very employment of the Hebrew script … sanctified written material.” Another theory holds that the Jews of this community may simply have piled up papers in their homes and periodically delivered whole cartfuls to the Geniza without bothering to separate sacred from secular writing. Or, maybe, as another writer has suggested—in an effort to make sense of the hodgepodge of texts that have turned up in the Fustat Geniza—the impulse to guard the written word may have gone beyond piety and evolved into a “generalized aversion toward casually discarding texts of any kind.” Whatever the explanation, for most of the last millennium, hundreds of thousands of scraps were tossed into the Ben Ezra Geniza, which came to serve as a kind of holy junk heap.
(Photo Credit 1.4)
More town square than sanctuary, the Fustat synagogue complex was the pivot around which its community’s life in the busy city spun. In addition to serving as a house of prayer and center of study, it provided the congregation’s welfare office, soup kitchen, hostel, clerical and bookkeeping headquarters, and its court of law. As such, all manner of paperwork passed through it and—when discarded—slowly filled to the actual rafters a windowless box of a room on the synagogue’s second floor. Thanks to the dry climate and various legends about a venomous serpent guarding the entrance and a curse that would visit anyone who dared disturb what it held, the haphazardly piled paper and parchment mostly remained hidden behind a wall in the women’s section, until Schechter’s arrival in late December of 1896.
What he discovered there astonished him, and in fact it seems almost impossible now to imagine how it is that so much could have emerged from so little. Barely more than eight feet long by six and a half feet wide, and extending to a height of some six yards, the Ben Ezra Geniza was the size of glorified walk-in closet. Yet here was an entire civilization. After Schechter had climbed a rickety ladder to reach that dim attic-like opening, and once his widening eyes had adjusted to the dark, he found himself staring into a space crammed to bursting with nearly ten centuries’ worth of one Middle Eastern, mostly middle-class Jewish community’s detritus—its letters and poems, its wills and marriage contracts, its bills of lading and writs of divorce, its prayers, prescriptions, trousseau lists, Bibles, money orders, amulets, court depositions, shop inventories, rabbinic responsa, contracts, leases, magic charms, and receipts. “A battlefield of books,” Schechter called it, and at first glance it must have seemed an unlikely (and unsightly) mess. As another visitor described the physical state of the Geniza’s contents: “For centuries, whitewash has tumbled upon them from the walls and ceiling; the sand of the desert has lodged in their folds and wrinkles; water from some unknown source has drenched them; they have squeezed and hurt each other.”
It took, in other words, real imagination on Schechter’s part to grasp what faced him in the unprepossessing room later referred to by one Cambridge professor as “that pestiferous wrack.” But grasp it he did: in the dank and musty chaos, Schechter soon came to understand that he had uncovered no less than a cross section of an entire society, and one that lay at the very navel of the medieval world—linking East and West, Arab and Jew, the daily imprint of the sacred and the venerable extension of the profane. Written on vellum or on rag paper, in ink of gallnut and soot and gum, these pages and scrolls were composed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as Greek, Persian, Latin, Ladino, and even Yiddish—all written in Hebrew characters. Because those family and business papers were often tossed in unsorted, and stationery was precious and regularly “recycled,” we also find Syriac, Arabic, Coptic, and—in one odd instance—Chinese. Their words were set down by young men and old, by women, children, students, and scribes, by rabbis and rebels, rich and poor, the famous and the forgotten.
Such was the miraculous nature of what Schechter found in the Cairo Geniza that some have compared its discovery to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Cairo Geniza, goes this argument, is actually the more important find, since the sensational, ancient scriptures from Qumran were—as most scholars have seen them—a cultic aberration, “the work of men who gave up the world … to find God in a wilderness,” whereas the Geniza embraces and embodies the world as it really was, warts and wonders alike, for the vast majority of medieval Jews. One of the twentieth century’s greatest historians, S. D. Goitein, whose writing about the daily and most mu
ndane Geniza documents unfurled a vibrant panorama of this Mediterranean society, clearly had such a comparison in mind when he titled a 1970 talk about the Geniza “The Living Sea Scrolls.”
The materials of the so-called classical period of the Geniza alone (the later tenth through mid-thirteenth centuries) have occupied scores of scholars for more than a hundred years, transforming in the most fundamental way how we might understand Jewish history, leadership, literature, economics, marriage, charity, prayer, family, sex, and almost every other subject imaginable—from the nature of the silk trade to astrology, religious dissent, Hebrew grammar, glassmaking, and medieval attitudes toward death. There is, in point of fact, no other premodern period of the Jewish past about which we have so many and varied details. Because of the Geniza, we can nearly hear and see—and often almost smell and touch—the urbane world of the Arabized Jews who populated Fustat. If one is used to thinking of Judaism as a straight shot from the Bible to the shtetl, followed by a brief stopover on the Lower East Side, it may seem strange to realize that this socially integrated Jewish society was not just a product of some peculiar local circumstance but was, instead, emblematic of its epoch. Lest we forget, from the time of antiquity until around 1200, over 90 percent of the world’s Jewish population lived in the East and, after the Muslim conquest, under the rule of Islam. Fustat was, in its medieval heyday, home to the most prosperous Jewish community on earth, and served as a commercial axis for Jews throughout North Africa and the Middle East and as far away as India. At the same time, the city contained nearly every race, class, occupation, and religious strain the region had to offer. “It was,” as Goitein saw it, “a mirror of the world.”
The story of the Geniza and its recovery is, by nature, a tale with numerous heroes, medieval and modern. Although Schechter deserves much of the credit for having, by force of his expansive historical vision and truly exceptional personality, rescued some 190,000 Geniza fragments from a kind of oblivion (or random dispersal), he was hardly the first to be drawn to the cache. Its presence was known—and at least partly appreciated—well before he arrived on the scene, and this book is, accordingly, also a chronicle of those who came before him, and others who would follow. “Looking over this enormous mass of fragments about me,” Schechter wrote, in Moses-on-Nebo-like fashion, after several years of hard work breathing in the dust and spirit of this culture’s disjecta membra, “I cannot overcome a sad feeling stealing over me, that I shall hardly be worthy to see all the results which the Genizah will add to our knowledge of Jews and Judaism. The work is not for one man, and not for one generation.”
But this is perhaps as it should be. For the Geniza itself tells the tale of many generations, each of which preserved and transformed a part of the tradition it received. Maintaining the practice of concealment, ironically, made future revelation possible, as, over the centuries, an inadvertent archive was amassed. And so, in an almost unconscious manner, the Fustat community restored to the notion of geniza its ancient and essential dimension—that of history as hidden treasure. The protagonists of this story are the men and women who have brought its wisdom to light.
(Photo Credit 1.5)
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*“Geniza” and “genizah” are two different transliterations of the same Hebrew word. In citations throughout this book, we have maintained the spelling used by the original authors. The plural of geniza is “genizot,” which is also occasionally written “genizoth.”
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Serpents and Secrets
As a young Jewish boy in early-nineteenth-century Germany, Heinrich Heine spent hours exploring his family attic, which sounds oddly like a kind of domestic geniza and opens indirectly onto Cairo’s: “a dusty lumber room,” he would later call it, “a hospital for … old furniture that had reached the last degree of decrepitude.” It was here that the poet-to-be discovered a faded notebook in the hand of his flamboyant great-uncle, a charismatic con man named Simon von Geldern.
Known as the “Chevalier” or the “Oriental,” this uncle set out often on trips for the East and wrote about them in his journal, in Hebrew, which Heine could not read—he thought the letters “Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic”—though the idea of this yellowing travelogue ignited the child’s imagination, and, from family legend and a good dose of his own fancy, he compiled a swashbuckling CV for his eccentric forebear. Von Geldern claimed, according to Heine, to have had a mystical vision at the site of the former Temple in Jerusalem and to have been the captain of a gang of robbers in Africa. He boasted deep kabbalistic knowledge, gambled heavily, escaped bands of pirates, and also made a great splash at various European courts, where he charmed the ladies in particular with his “pretended secret knowledge.” Heine described his late uncle as a charlatan, though “not of a common kind. He was not one of those ordinary charlatans who pull the teeth of peasants at fairs, but he courageously entered the palaces of the great, for whom he pulled the strongest molars.”
As it happened, Heine’s uncle entered more than palaces. In his diary, dated 1752 or 1753, von Geldern makes a brief, cryptic notation, on the occasion of a visit to Fustat:
I was in the Elijah synagogue and searched in the Geniza. I gave 5:—
What was he searching for? Why did he pay? Did he take anything with him when he left? Apparently the first foreigner in modern times to enter the crammed room, von Geldern had been intrigued, according to one nineteenth-century commentator, by the “wealth of possibilities that lay hidden amid the rubbish of the Genizot” of Cairo. But how, we must wonder, did he know about the Geniza in the first place? Did he really possess some sort of privileged, arcane knowledge?
Word, it seems, had somehow begun to trickle out about a possible treasure housed in the formerly elegant, now derelict Ben Ezra synagogue. Some hundred years after von Geldern’s elliptical adventure—and while the prepubescent Solomon Schechter was still busy hiking miles to his yeshiva through the bitter Romanian frosts—another foreign visitor reported on his own trip to Fustat. After an 1859 expedition to Egypt and points farther east to collect money for the poor of his city, the Lithuanian-born Jerusalemite Yaakov Safir described how he had coaxed the superstitious synagogue beadle to let him risk his life by climbing a ladder and sneaking a peek at a scroll that was alleged to have been personally copied by the biblical Ezra the Scribe. (Legend had it that anyone who dared disturb it would die within the same year.) Unconvinced that this “very old, very worn and decayed” manuscript was really of pre–Second Temple provenance, he did sense the proximity of something valuable—even as he realized that this particular scroll was likely a kind of medieval MacGuffin and not the genuine prize. By the time he returned some five years later, he had resolved to talk his way into the Geniza, which “they told me … is very ancient, a chamber filled with discarded books from days of old.”
The usual warnings followed: the synagogue’s beadle and its treasurer adamantly refused him entry, proclaiming the extreme danger of such an adventure—adding that “a serpent was coiled up there.” But Safir remained determined, and he traipsed back yet again several months later to beg them to let him ascend to the roof, which then provided the only angle of access to the Geniza: “They laughed at me and said: ‘Why would a man risk his life for nothing? He won’t live out the year!’ I pleaded with them and showed them that I had a small mezuza with me, for protection, and said that I knew how to charm snakes. And I promised the treasurer a reward if he’d bring me a ladder.”
That last offer seems to have done the trick—and in a short while he found himself inside the Geniza, which was at the time heaped with broken rafters, wood panels, stones, and plaster from a recent roof collapse. It was also, he noted, spilling with scrolls. “After I had toiled for two days and was covered with dust and grime, I picked out a few pages of various old books and manuscripts, though I found nothing of value in them. But who knows what still lies beneath?”
As close as Safir had come, he hadn’t yet p
enetrated the depths. “I was,” he explains in a memoir of his travels, “tired of searching. But I did not find any fiery serpents or scorpions, and no harm came to me, thank God.”
Snakes and ancient curses were the least of the dangers that lurked. “A perfect orgy of spoliation” was how one writer, the Scottish reverend James Baikie, later described what had gone on in and around the ancient tombs and temples of Egypt during the first half of the nineteenth century. “Every important or noble traveller had to add a few curios from Egypt to his miscellaneous collection gathered from half a dozen other lands, and sculptures, inscriptions, and papyri of the greatest value were thus uselessly dispersed in paltry private collections, where, when they had gratified a passing curiosity or ministered to a momentary spirit of emulation, they were allowed to gather dust through years of neglect, till at last the futile cabinet of curios was dispersed, and its items were lost sight of altogether.” Another observer called it “unbridled pillage.” And while this frenzy of grave-robbing and sarcophagus-snatching centered on Pharaonic relics alone, the treasures of the Cairo Geniza barely missed meeting a similar fate. Others, besides Solomon Schechter, would come within a hairsbreadth of carrying the whole stash off before he did.
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