Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

  (Photo Credit 6.5)

  Schocken had long been obsessed with finding a Jewish equivalent for the foundational works of German literature, such as the national epic The Nibelungenlied (The Songs of the Nibelung), a poem based on pre-Christian heroic motifs, which eighteenth-century scholars had brought to light. Discovering a work of this magnitude would, Schocken believed, contribute to the strengthening of a precariously vulnerable and insecure modern Jewish culture, and could refute the common assumption of the day that Jews had no distinctive art form of their own. And so, after looking through the stack of old scraps, which he too could not read, Schocken agreed to the steep selling price of 28,000 marks (roughly $75,000 today) for the mysterious pile of papers.

  To appraise his purchase, Schocken called in his A-list of learned friends—among them the novelist Agnon and the de facto Hebrew national poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik—and was informed in short order that his hunch had been right and that he had on his hands a kind of mother lode of Hebrew literature. Prepared by a single anonymous copyist either in Egypt or Turkey in the seventeenth century, the tightly written, two-column manuscript contained some four thousand poems, including the nearly complete works of many of Muslim and Christian Spain’s greatest Hebrew poets (among them Shelomo ibn Gabirol and Moshe ibn Ezra). Some of this work had been lost for centuries. This portable private library of Hebrew Andalusian poetry had passed through various hands, in Iraq, in Bombay, and again in Iraq—where it was rescued by an antiquarian-book dealer and writer from a pile of papers just before being used to heat the next day’s wash water. After all this, it somehow landed in Schocken’s lap in Stuttgart. Ever the practical visionary, Schocken decided to build on this spectacular find by opening a research center that would publish both scholarly studies and critical editions of this manuscript and others like it. On November 4, 1930, Das Forschungsinstitut für hebräische Dichtung—the Institute for the Study of Hebrew Poetry—opened its doors in Berlin. While Schocken 37, as the manuscript came to be known, was not from the Geniza, the literary enterprise it gave rise to would go on to play an axial role in the Geniza’s history.

  The Institute’s director was Heinrich (Hayyim) Brody, a Hungarian-born former chief rabbi of Prague, who also happened to be the world’s leading scholar of medieval Hebrew poetry. Within a short time Brody had hired several gifted young research assistants, including a thirty-year-old Galician Jew named Menahem Zulay—who had recently transposed his name from the German Billig, meaning “cheap,” to its rough Hebraic equivalent. Like Davidson, Zulay had been orphaned early and raised by an aunt. Barely twenty, he left Poland for Palestine, where he worked in construction before enrolling at a teacher’s seminary in Jerusalem. Not long after taking up a position in the Jezreel Valley, he was approached by Schocken, who, during a visit to Palestine, was seeking among other things a Hebrew tutor for his young children. Zulay, a fellow Ostjude, or Eastern European Jew, came highly recommended, and in 1927 Schocken brought him back to Saxony. While instructing the rich man’s children and living awkwardly in his house, Zulay enrolled at the University of Leipzig. Eventually he transferred to Berlin.

  When he joined the Institute, the small-framed, mild-mannered young scholar with a soft, open face and an almost secretly potent imagination—along with a fierce patience beaming from within his blue-eyed gaze—had recently completed his doctorate at the University of Bonn under Paul Kahle, a Lutheran Semiticist who had spent six years as a pastor in Cairo, and would go on to become one of the pioneers of Geniza studies. Brody and his other assistants at the Institute concentrated on the Spanish and Ashkenazic material, which added considerably to the work done by nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century German-Jewish scholars; facing east, Kahle’s modest and musically inclined protégé (Zulay’s daughter recalls his delicate voice singing prayers and hymns that accompanied the family’s religious rituals) took up research in “terra incognita”—the Hebrew poetry of late antiquity. This was an area that had been barely touched, apart from Davidson’s groundbreaking publication, which, Zulay later said, “flashed like lightning across the skies of this scholarly field.”

  (Photo Credit 6.6)

  What that lightning briefly revealed to Zulay, as though in a dream-vision, was the possibility of much much more: the gaps in Davidson’s time-eaten manuscript pages filled in; the discovery of Yannai’s poems for the remainder of the Palestinian liturgical cycle; poems by the poets that preceded him and whom he admired, those who followed and perhaps rebelled.… In other words, an entire literature embodying the middle millennium of Jewish poetry’s three-thousand-year history. Far too little was known about that period, said Zulay, though it had given normative Judaism its shape and character. “In my dream,” he wrote, “I see some thirty volumes containing the work of the writers of sacred poetry throughout the generations, those whose hymns now languish in the Geniza.”

  Call it, as many did, a vision of dry bones returning to life. Or, to take up an appropriately Egyptian metaphor (courtesy of Schechter’s Cambridge walking companion James Frazer and his monumental Golden Bough), a gathering of the limbs of Osiris—the god who had taken the Egyptians into civilization, introducing them to the cultivation of grain and a social structure that would ensure nourishment and sustenance. Osiris spread his message abroad then returned home, only to be murdered and dismembered by envious rivals and kin, who scattered the parts of his body far and wide until his sister, Isis, gathered these severed parts together and, using her sorcery, brought Osiris back to life so that “his genius would be always at work in the world.”

  Bones, or limbs, or both, they were lying in Geniza collections around the globe—mostly in Cambridge, but also in Oxford and London and Berlin, Frankfurt and Leningrad, Warsaw, New York, Philadelphia, and Paris—and month by month, week by week, packages containing photostats of these manuscripts were dispatched to the Institute. For five years Zulay’s efforts were concentrated almost solely on this ingathering. But the pieces of the puzzle were scrambled in a heap that boggled even the very best minds. The work, it seemed, called for an almost impossible combination of vision and patience, passion and science. And perhaps for a kind of Isis-like magic—albeit one born of tremendous labor and prodigious powers of recall. (“Memory,” said Zulay, “is the finest index.”)

  For while it was tempting to dive in and cherry-pick one’s way through the chaos—looking for work by major poets in whatever form one might find it and tossing the rest to the side—Zulay realized that this wouldn’t do. He would have to begin at the beginning (like the eighteen-year-old Davidson returning to first grade) and sift through the thousands of copies of fragments with loving care and steady devotion, as he himself put it, likening the work to a sacred task that has no measurable worth and would never come to an end.

  “Each photostat is a prayer congealed,” he wrote. “Each page a poem frozen in place. The dust of the generations has to be shaken from them; they have to be woken and revived; and the workers are busy; and a day doesn’t pass without resurrection.… And at the center of [it all] stands Yannai.”

  The pressures were enormous. The economic crisis of 1929 had put new wind in the sails of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party, and anti-Jewish sentiment was mounting. Department stores in particular (Schocken owned some sixteen of them by then) were singled out as representative of Jewish parasitism, with the Nazi Party platform calling for their immediate communalization and for their being “leased at low rates to small tradesmen.” In 1929 Schocken’s Stuttgart store was attacked by thugs with stink bombs—putting to perverse use the same chemicals the Giblews and Burkitt had employed to help bring the fading foreign past to light; now they were intended to drive it into darkness. And in 1933, Sigmund Freud—who two years earlier had been awarded Frankfurt’s Goethe Prize, which he considered the culmination of his public life—saw his writing burned in the same city and elsewhere in Germany. Also that year Schocken joined a wave of Jewish intellectuals, as well as the
ir endangered Christian supporters (including Kahle), who had begun to flee; he announced his imminent departure for Jerusalem. Zulay and the Institute followed.

  In both Berlin and in Jerusalem, Zulay was painstakingly sorting the fragments that reached him and gradually beginning to see the figure in the carpet, though he was, he felt, working against the clock and being driven by another sense of time altogether. As he would later write, “It seemed as though it wasn’t me working, but something working within me, some hidden power that was fed at once by hope and despair, and served as a kind of opium during these difficult times. Day after day as I entered the Institute I would forget the outside world entirely, and when I left it [at the end of my workday] I felt like someone emerging from a deep mine who had to let his eyes readjust to the light of the sun.”

  The world around him was, in other words, collapsing; but as it crumbled, Zulay constructed—sifting and checking, marking and imagining, and, virtually line by line, reaching back through his own catastrophic historical hour to another era and a transcendent literary force. And his labor was bearing fruit: in 1938, Piyyutei Yannai (The Poems of Yannai) was published by Schocken Books. Zulay’s persistence had allowed him to piece together, bit by dispersed and often damaged bit, coherent fragments of some eight hundred poems—a 200 percent increase over Davidson’s finds. Short on frills but long on irony, and in a handsome, dignified format, this last Hebrew volume to be published in Nazi Germany presented to the public a classical Jewish poet of mythic power and stature—precisely what Schocken had hoped for.

  Obscure or bizarrely exegetical as the opening sections of the kerovot could often be (Yannai takes on topics like the rules of engagement in war and the multitude of cattle possessed by the tribes of Reuben and Gad), other movements of these multipart poems were more accessible. Even the most sacerdotal of poems—Yannai’s verses about pus, for example—could make way later in the same sequence for a stirring lyric that might, for readers of the day, become emblematic of twentieth-century Jewish suffering. And such was the force and range of this work that publication of these poems in popular Hebrew journals, even as Nazi power closed in, prompted one leading Jerusalem intellectual to liken the discovery of Yannai’s poems to a new midrash by means of which “the Jewish tree of life, with blood spurting from its trunk, has been rejuvenated from its roots.”

  In their original context, many of these hymns were intended either to invite the participation of the congregation or simply to arouse its awe. The cadenza-like seventh unit of the kerova, for instance—known as the rahit, or the runner, because of the striking way in which it employs speed and density of ornament as an embodiment of virtuosity, racing from the past of scripture to the present of the listener—showcased the poet’s musical talents so tangibly that even the sleepy or merely simple members of the audience on the back benches of the synagogue couldn’t help but be drawn in. One particularly stunning example involves a profound commentary on the meaning and eternal relevance of the burning bush in the Book of Exodus (which happened to give the Giblews’ church its symbol and was taken up by Schechter in New York as the JTS emblem). In Yannai’s vision, the heart of the unconsumed flame is understood in supercharged midrashic fashion as the embodiment of the Shekhina, the Divine Presence, or “immanence of God in the world”:

  And the angel of the Lord was revealed to him (in the heart of the flame)

  Angel of fire devouring fire

  Fire Blazing through damp and drier

  Fire Candescent in smoke and snow

  Fire Drawn like a crouching lion

  Fire Evolving through shade after shade

  Fateful fire that will not expire

  Gleaming fire that wanders far

  Hissing fire that sends up sparks

  Fire Infusing a swirling gale

  Fire that Jolts to life without fuel

  Fire that’s Kindled and kindles daily

  Lambent fire unfanned by fire

  Miraculous fire flashing through fronds

  Notions of fire like lightning on high

  Omens of fire in the chariots’ wind

  [Pillars of fire in thunder and storm]

  [Quarries of] fire wrapped in a fog

  Raging fire that reaches Sheol

  T[errible fire that Ushers in] cold

  Fire’s Vortex like a Wilderness crow

  Fire eXtending and Yet like a rainbow’s

  Zone of color arching through sky

  This sacred fire, as one commentator has noted, comes down from the heavens bearing with it the entire alphabet.

  But Yannai could also be powerfully unadorned and tender. One kerova develops around a more human figure, the biblical Leah, whose eyes were weak and who was rejected by her husband, Jacob, in favor of her sister, Rachel. Here an analogy to the people of Israel—and in a sense to all who believe—is hauntingly constructed through a modulation of cadence and tone that reaches its lyric peak in the free-flowing form of the poem’s fourth part. Once again the poet holds a literary stethoscope up to a specific narrative moment, making audible its mythic pulse:

  Our eyes are weak with longing for Your love,

  for we are loathed by a hateful foe:

  see how afflicted we are within,

  and how, without, we’re abhorred—

  like Leah, whose suffering you saw,

  as you bore witness to her distress.

  She was hated at home,

  and also despised abroad.

  Not each beloved, however, is loved,

  and all who are hated are not hated:

  some are hated below, but loved on high.

  Those You despise are despised,

  and those You love are beloved.

  We are hated because we love

  You who are holy.

  In dedicating his career, in devoting his days and years to reassembling fragments of elemental poems such as this one—pieces of Judaism’s cosmic puzzle—Zulay, like his colleagues, was propelled by something much deeper than a sense of professional responsibility or even the thrill of the scholarly hunt. Certainly it wasn’t comfort or security, for Schocken paid the frail Zulay very little and—despite his history of heart trouble—drove him hard, demanding that he submit daily reports detailing his research. (Once when the usually reserved researcher complained to the patron about the time and energy the reports were taking, and wasting, he was duly informed: “Mr. Zulay will continue to write the reports and Mr. Schocken will continue not to read them.”) Lingering tensions at the Institute aside, Zulay spoke repeatedly in public—and with particular force in the wake of the Holocaust, which took his sister and her family—of the need for both grunt work and dream work, precision and extension, along with the “remnant of a vital faith and naiveté into which every true scholar must tap … Without faith,” he wrote, “there’s no enthusiasm, and without enthusiasm there is no transcendence. The soul withers and one’s vision narrows. Scholarship finds itself mired in trivia and the great goal is forgotten.”

  Like Schechter, Zulay knew that even transcendence requires traction—and that meant the continuous work of scholars across generations. Surveying the thousands of disjointed, anonymous manuscript pages—and possibly identifying with what he saw—he likened them to “mute orphans” needing a home that might let them speak. And so, hoping to make it possible for others to follow where he would one day leave off, Zulay set about the maddening task of cataloging and cross-referencing all the fragments that were arriving daily at the Institute’s broad tables. Maybe he knew that his heart, which had fueled his endless and grueling labor, would soon give way. And it did. Though he worked all day and into the evenings as long and hard as he could, through a flood tide of finds in the forties and beyond, all the while suffering from a debilitating angina that forced him to stop often on his way home from the Institute to lean against walls and regain his strength, he finally succumbed, dying after a fall in his family’s two-room Rehavia apartment one sunny November mo
rning, a few months short of his fifty-fifth birthday.

  But as he’d hoped, others did follow—helping to recover what he had called, in his inimitable way, this “lost page from the passport of Hebrew literature.” In a moving, unpublished lecture scribbled on small notepaper and delivered at a Jerusalem rest home where he was convalescing after one of his many hospital stays, Zulay spoke on the fiftieth anniversary of the Geniza’s discovery about how the essence and enduring legacy of the Jewish people cannot be apprehended by the five senses, and won’t be found in conquered lands or constructed cities. Its entirety lies, he said, in what it has written, which can be grasped only by the mind and the spirit. And that literary record, he explains, “is like a tourist’s passport … Each page bears the stamp of a different consulate. And now it happens that one of these pages becomes detached from the passport and is lost.… One day the lost page is found and it turns out that the owner of the passport had once, in the middle of his travels, entered his own country and stayed there for a while, then picked up and gone on his way.” That lost page, Zulay explained to his audience of fellow convalescents, contains the story of the Hebrew poetry of late antiquity written in the Land of Israel.