Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

  In all probability, it wasn’t the idea of the Geniza itself.

  For at least a decade and a half Schechter had been working intensively with Hebrew manuscripts at the British Museum in London and in close proximity to Neubauer at Oxford’s Bodleian Library—“the promised land of the Hebrew scholar,” as he put it in an 1888 article. And for six of those years he had been at Cambridge, which held the “Egyptian fragments” that Shelomo Wertheimer had been selling to the university since the early nineties. By all accounts, Schechter was devoted to this work and, once he arrived at Cambridge, to the Hebraica housed in the library at what was known as the Old Schools. He was often there on the Jewish Sabbath, and the head librarian’s diary entries from the pre-Geniza years register Schechter’s ongoing engagement with the collection: “November 4, 1891, Schechter till too dark to write.” “July 8, 1894, Schechter took me to Library to sort fragments of Hebrew MSS from Egypt … After tea, another hour at the Hebr. MSS.” “December 31, 1894, About an hour with Schechter at Hebrew MS. fragments from R. Wertheimer.” “May 4, 1896, At Library [with] Schechter, … Benzine failing to touch the lumps on an Egyptian Hebrew fragment on vellum. Ordered some chloroform.” Yet none of this moved Schechter to seek out the source of these treasures.

  Far from currying favor with Wertheimer, who seemed to have steady access to a heap of highbrow Hebraic trash, Schechter often made life difficult for the impecunious scholar-dealer in Jerusalem. Nor was he stirred to action by the finds of other collectors—above all the two Adlers—who had also retrieved fragments from the Egyptian capital. Moreover, many of the pieces the library had acquired while Schechter was hard at work with his manuscripts remained in boxes, unclassified in even a provisional fashion. They don’t seem to have interested him at all. Finally, Schechter himself had in 1894 gone well out of his way, to Italy, in pursuit of manuscripts he required for articles he was writing. So travel itself wasn’t a problem. But not until the grimy leaf of Ben Sira was in his hands did his dreams begin drifting toward Egypt. Clearly it was something about this particular work that led the burly Talmudist through that Cairene hole-in-the-wall. Again, what was the allure?

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  Schechter’s interest in the Palestinian Talmud notwithstanding (since the 1870s he’d worked on the lesser-known, shorter, and older sibling of the Babylonian Talmud), he and the Giblews would, in their correspondence and in the public announcements of their find, focus not on that fragment of the Oral Law but on the small square of gall-eaten rag paper bearing lines of Ben Sira in a tenth-century hand. Between the blotches and the fading ink, the scrap looked like a bad photocopy of a bookkeeper’s double-entry ledger, the principal information barely legible in a cloud of ambient ink. As Mathilde tells it somewhat fancifully in her memoir, Schechter returned home from the library after having confirmed his identification of the manuscript “in a very excited mood, and very pale. His first words were: ‘Wife, as long as the Bible lives, my name shall not die! This small torn scrap is a page of the Hebrew original of Ben Sira.… I have been to the library to verify my suspicion. Now telegraph to Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson to come here immediately.’ ” To stake their claim, Mrs. Lewis dashed off short pieces for two leading journals, the liberal Academy and The Athenaeum, also an independent weekly that featured a distinguished roster of contributors and a lively swirl of social chitchat and scholarly buzz, including, that particular week, notice of a revised edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a review of a volume on The Mogul Emperors of Hindustan, a new poem by Algernon Swinburne (dedicated to his mother), “fine-art gossip,” “science gossip,” and, under the heading “literary gossip,” Agnes’s announcement to “All students of the Bible and of the Apocrypha” who “will be interested to learn that amongst some fragments of Hebrew MSS. which my sister Mrs. Gibson and I have just acquired in Palestine, a leaf of the Book of Ecclesiasticus has been discovered to-day by Dr. Schechter, Lecturer in Talmudic to the University of Cambridge.”

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  “The book interested him very much,” wrote Mathilde. “Again and again Dr. Schechter would say, ‘If I only had leave of absence and sufficient money, I would go in search of the rest of that lost Hebrew original.’ This idea began to take so firm a hold … that his sleep was disturbed and his health was impaired.”

  Almost from the very start of his scholarly career, Schechter had been drawn to what he called “the dark ages” of Jewish history, the period extending from about 450 to 150 B.C.E.—toward the end of which Ben Sira was composed (probably in Jerusalem) and just after which it was translated into Greek by the author’s grandson (in Alexandria). “No period in [our] history,” wrote Schechter, “is so entirely obscure.… All that is left us from those ages are a few meagre notices by Josephus, which do not seem to be above doubt, and a few bare names in the Books of Chronicles of persons who hardly left any mark on the history of the times.… More light is wanted, … [and] this light promises now to come from the discovery of the original Hebrew of the apocryphal work, ‘The Wisdom of Ben Sira.’ ”

  The spectacular aspect of the discovery apart, Schechter saw in this find a redemptive sort of promise for two substantive reasons, though these dual motivating factors soon gave way to numerous and far more complicated, unconscious, and perhaps ultimately unfathomable concerns. First, and most straightforwardly, he felt that the Greek and Syriac versions—which had spawned translations into many other languages, including English—were, at times, “mere defaced caricatures of the real work of Sirach.” An accurate source text would at least tell us what Ben Sira really said (if not necessarily what he meant).

  Schechter’s second reason for placing such hope in retrieving the original Hebrew concerns the seemingly arcane but in fact surprisingly significant matter of dating. Many of the prominent biblical scholars of the day were exponents of the interpretive approach known as “source criticism,” or, sometimes, “Higher Criticism.” These largely Protestant scholars used historical tools to reconstruct how and when various biblical books came to be, identifying and assigning approximate dates to distinct authorial strands, which, they believed, combined to form the texts as we know them. (Lower criticism, on the other hand, focused primarily on the words of the text—their correct reading and precise meaning.) By Schechter’s time, the higher critics had concluded that a number of books in the Hebrew Bible were composed much later than previously supposed—in the latter half of the Second Temple period, that is, toward the end of the third century or the beginning or even middle of the second century B.C.E. These included the Song of Songs, the Book of Job, the Book of Ruth, and especially certain Psalms.

  But this chronology, like much else about the work of the higher critics, was controversial. Noting that Ben Sira himself seems to be quoting as “classical” passages from books that some of the modern critics claimed were written at the same time as Ben Sira, or even later, Schechter remarks: “Altogether, the period looks to me rather over-populated, and I begin to get anxious about the accommodations of the Synagogue, or, rather, the ‘House of Interpretation’ (the Beth haMidrash), which was … a thing of moment in the religious life of those times.” Schechter felt a deep-seated animus at work in this line of thought. The higher critics, he believed, were with their dating, and maybe with their very being, trying to “argue out of existence” the “humble activity [of] whole assemblies of men” enlisted in the service of religious study.

  To Schechter’s mind, something was wrong with this higher-critical picture, and Ben Sira might help clear things up, as it is the only quasi-biblical book for which we have a reliable date. The grandson’s testimony in the prologue to his Greek version of Ben Sira indicates that he made his translation around 132 B.C.E., which would mean that Ben Sira himself wrote his work some two generations earlier—between, say, 200 and 180 B.C.E. If one had in hand a substantial sample of the original Hebrew of Ben Sira, whose date was more or less known, it could be compared with the Hebrew of th
ese biblical books whose dates are a matter of considerable speculation, and scholars could, as Schechter put it, “test the mode of thinking as well as of the language and style of the period in question.” Then readers would know just how reliable these Protestant higher critics were.

  Unfortunately, the last sighting of the Hebrew original of Ben Sira had been in the tenth century, when an important Jewish scholar wrote about it. The final Christian to mention it was Saint Jerome in the fourth century. By that time Ben Sira was known as Ecclesiasticus—a Latin term meaning “Book of the Church”—as its moral thrust and presentation of ideal religious figures had earned it a place of pride among the apocryphal writings. It was seen as being “inspired by God,” and many of the early Greek and Latin Church Fathers considered it authoritative. Later Catholic editions of the Bible grouped it with the standard set of Old Testament wisdom writings, and though Protestants never accepted it into the inner ring of sacred texts, the book was regularly printed as a supplement to many—though not to Presbyterian—Protestant Bibles. In short, the canonical or almost canonical Ecclesiasticus drew considerable Christian devotional and theological interest through the ages, and any major development relating to it would, the ever-canny and even competitive Schechter no doubt knew, cause a sensation. It might even pry a book like Ben Sira loose from Christian claims.

  Schechter was suspicious not only of the Higher Criticism but of several other contemporary Christian approaches to theology and history as well. And for the two years prior to his identification of the Ben Sira scrap, he had been feverishly preparing a series of lectures intended to counter in respectable fashion these Christian critics and Jewish scholars of a Christianizing bent. (Speaking off the record, though, in a letter to a friend, he referred to “their” theology as an “abomination” and accused these scholars of wanting to undo history and of not being “real … monotheists.”) It wasn’t that he disagreed with the scientific impulse underlying the work in question. On the contrary, he was all in favor of serious scholarly analysis of scripture—and had gone so far as to call the fundamental effort of the Higher Criticism “one of the finest intellectual feats of this century.” What he objected to was the “brutal vivisection” of Jewish history that all too often came with it.

  This slashing into the living flesh of an entire people’s faith was part and parcel of the distinctly anti-Jewish bias that Schechter felt lay behind the Protestant critics’ line of inquiry, which perceived much of Jewish history as a continual falling off from the heights of early revelation and prophetic vision to a preoccupation with ceremony and legal sophistry. Second Temple Judaism was in this worldview reduced to a mechanical priestly cult, and post-Temple or rabbinic Judaism—which Schechter held in the highest esteem—was dismissed outright as a spiritually sterile legalism. The Law as given in the Torah, charged Julius Wellhausen, the highest of these higher critics, “thrusts itself in everywhere … blocks up the access to heaven, … and spoils morality.”

  Wellhausen made the case against later Judaism in disconcertingly compelling fashion. “The warm pulse of life,” he wrote, “no longer throbbed in it to animate it.… The soul was fled; the shell remained.” But it wasn’t just a matter of spiritual fatigue. As this leading member of the school saw it, the problem of religious evolution also touched on fraudulence. “It is well known that there have never been more audacious inventors of history than the rabbins. But Chronicles affords evidence that this evil propensity goes back to a very early time, its root the dominating influence of the Law, being the root of Judaism itself.” In Wellhausen’s most important book, which was published in Germany while Schechter was taking courses at the University of Vienna in biblical grammar and other related subjects (he was just three years younger than Wellhausen), biases of this sort extended to the most fundamental level of scriptural interpretation, including philology, where, for instance, Wellhausen derived the key Hebrew word “Torah” from the root suggesting the casting of lots or the pronouncement of oracles, rather than from the three-letter radical indicating “the thing taught or reported” or “come down by tradition.” “Wellhausen’s hypothesis,” Schechter noted, “is … strangely in harmony with [his] conception of the law, which thus would originate in a sort of priestly fetisch [sic].” For Schechter, however, the heart of Judaism was its unbroken (if often battered) line of transmission—precisely what had been reported or what had come down by tradition—without any loss of revelation’s power. The teaching of Judaism embodied “the effluence of God’s mercy and love,” and its yoke was joyfully taken on through history by “all sorts and conditions of men, scholars, poets, mystics, lawyers, casuists, schoolmen, tradesmen, workmen, women, [and] simpletons.”

  Put in the plainest terms, for Schechter Higher Criticism was poorly or barely disguised “higher anti-Semitism”—“German dogs,” he called the beer-loving Wellhausen and his followers—and the Hebrew Ben Sira was the newest weapon with which he could combat them.

  It had already been a long fight. The very first article Schechter published under his own name was a short 1881 piece treating the essential distortion of actual Jewish practice and tradition that anti-Semitic bias in scholarship brought about. Two years later he wrote to a younger colleague studying in Germany, “It is sad to see the ways in which Wissenschaft des Judentums [the science of Judaism] is neglected here [in England]. As in Germany with the Bible, here the entire literature of Judaism is taken care of only by Christians.… There is no spiritual life and I feel like death. My only comfort is the manuscripts in the British Museum.”

  Over the course of the next seven or eight years, Schechter poured out a steady stream of articles on a wide range of Jewish subjects spanning the centuries, from the Hasidim to the presence of women and children in Jewish literature, from medieval figures such as Maimonides to modern historians such as Leopold Zunz—one of the founding fathers of that “scientific,” which is to say also broadly humanistic, Jewish scholarship. Schechter summed up Zunz’s project in an 1888 essay: “To restore the missing links between the Bible and tradition, to prove the continuity and development of Jewish thought through history, to show their religious depth and their moral and ennobling influence, to teach us how our own age with all its altered notions might nevertheless be a stage in the continuous development of Jewish ideals and might make these older thoughts a part of its own progress—this was the great task to which Zunz devoted his whole life.” From that visionary if indirect statement of Schechter’s own mission—he was clearly aligning himself with the great leaders of the Jewish past—it isn’t far to Ben Sira’s heart and substance. For an authentic Hebrew Ben Sira would confirm the existence of a moral and spiritually vital Second Temple Judaism far removed in both time and practice from the “source” revelation and yet hardly desiccated by excessive legalism or the mechanical maintenance of priestly rites.

  Because of its core ethical focus and concern with transmission, Ben Sira was beloved among the rabbis of the early talmudic period. In fact, they prized the collection of hymns and homiletical verse so (one might think of it as a kind of rabbinic self-help manual—an epigrammatic miscellany of manners, morals, and the ways of wisdom and the world) that they set it almost on par in importance with the Book of Proverbs. Some scholars feel that Ben Sira was banned from the Jewish biblical canon only because of its late date or the fact that its author was known so specifically, as a particular figure from their own not-too-distant past. Though it may once have been considered a member in good standing of Israel’s company of sacred writings, by the time the rabbis fixed the canon and decided what was in and what was out, Ben Sira found itself among the “outs,” and along with the other “external books”—as the apocryphal writings are known in Hebrew—its study was proscribed in Judaism. Eventually the Hebrew original vanished altogether, though passages from it continued to be quoted and have left their mark on some of the prayers regularly recited by Jews today (even if most are unaware of it). Passages from t
he book are likewise found in the two Talmuds and other central rabbinic texts, where they are sometimes introduced with the formula “it is written”—a phrase usually reserved for quotations from scripture.

  Scholarly interest apart, one is tempted to say that it was Schechter’s developed literary sensibility that pulled him almost uncontrollably toward this lost valley of Hebrew letters—a path leading from the later poetry of the Bible to the next conspicuous stage in the history of Hebrew verse, the hymns and prayers of the fifth through eighth centuries. “Ben Sira,” he remarked, “should rather be described as the first of the Paitanim [liturgical poets] than as one of the last of the canonical writers.” It is, though, by no means clear that he intended this as a compliment, as Schechter seems to have had decidedly mixed feelings about the value of that later hymnography. In addition, like most scholars, he noted the derivative and pastiche-like quality of the Ben Sira text, which a Cambridge friend and colleague called “a tissue of old classical phrases,” and which another scholar has described only a bit more generously as an attempt “to adapt the older Scriptures in order to popularize them and make them relevant to the new Hellenistic age in which [Ben Sira] lived.” Still other modern writers are more blunt in their assessment of Ben Sira’s limitations: “Polonius without Shakespeare,” says one, suggesting that Ben Sira’s wisdom is passed on without panache or anything in the way of a style that might make it memorable. Numerous commentators have found the work “tedious,” and one Jewish biblical scholar has said that the Hebrew of the section identified by Schechter is “composed in an idiom which is for the most part hideous.”