Since the appearance of Zulay’s 1938 collection of Yannai’s piyyutim, more than half of the thirty volumes he envisioned of this verse based on Cairo Geniza manuscripts have been published in critical editions; and month by month, as they scroll through spools of microfilm and rifle through their files and the indices of their memories, scholars continue to reunite separated pieces of poems. Almost miraculously, it seems, the literary harvest of some seven centuries has been recovered.
But not quite miraculously. The late Ezra Fleischer, the principal inheritor of Zulay’s mantle—and someone who would also speak of the electric aspect and sorcery of the piyyut’s allusive, self-contained language, as well as of its distant, strange, and “uniquely Jewish beauty”—in a 1999 assessment offered a sobering reminder of just what it is that goes into the work that Zulay and his colleagues did and do. Observing that “the Geniza didn’t change [this] discipline … it built it from the ground up,” he sent forth a paean to the scholar as cultural redeemer.
“The importance of the Geniza’s contribution to the study of Hebrew liturgical poetry,” wrote Fleischer,
cannot be overstated. [But] what has been garnered from this tremendous contribution … is not the contribution of the Geniza itself, and we err in speaking of these finds in the passive formulations [so often employed in this context]. For in this field, as in other fields of research, nothing is given and nothing is discovered. No document is deciphered and no author is identified. No item is dated, no picture reconstructed, and no theory is raised. All these acts are the achievements of a dedicated host of scholars—early and later—great and less great, who devoted their lives to the study of the Geniza and wearied in their labor, sweating blood in their efforts to sort its treasures, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing, their eyes weakening, their hairlines receding, and their backs and limbs giving out as they grew old and frail—each in his way and at his own pace.
Looking back across the millennia of registration and effacement that the Geniza documents embody, one is tempted to say that this—the systole and diastole of dismissal and deliverance, of composition and copying and translation and erasure, of rejection and retrieval—is the true Isis- or maybe Ezekiel-like mystery at the heart of the enterprise. Risking desiccation for an ultimate vitality, and anonymity for the sake of another’s name, the work of the Geniza’s redeemers, meticulous even in their dreams, brings us back in uncanny fashion to the glory of “the famous” whom the first payyetan, Ben Sira, singles out for the highest praise—“those who composed musical psalms, and set forth parables in verse.” In equal measure, however, the efforts of these scholars also recall the fate of the far less conspicuous, a few verses later, “who have no memorial … and perished as though they had not been.” But like Ben Sira’s craftsman, “who labors by night and by day … diligent in his making,” and like his “smith sitting by the anvil, [as] the breath of the fire melts his flesh … his eyes on the pattern of the object, his heart set on finishing his work and completing its decoration,” these deliverers of Hebrew’s makers “maintain the fabric of the world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer.” For in giving themselves day after day to poem after poem and manuscript after manuscript, they become links in the chain of transmission that Schechter himself sought to extend back to the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and from that spirit to its source. And so, in their way, they too partake of eternity.
7
* * *
That Nothing Be Lost
It wasn’t always so dramatic.
Among the early toilers in what has been called the “salt-mine” of the Geniza, the young Cambridge library assistant—later curator in Oriental literature—Ernest James Worman stands out, in a way, for not standing out. Self-reliant, modest, and reserved to the point of opacity, he died at age thirty-eight, and his name is known only (if at all) to those involved at the fine-tooth-comb level of Geniza research. At most, a reference to one of his smattering of scholarly articles will occasionally surface in a footnote to someone else’s scholarly article, though the role Worman played in the preliminary ordering and decipherment of the Geniza cache—and, indeed, in the first, tentative attempts to imagine Jewish life in medieval Fustat—was critical.
Remembered by a school friend as a loner by choice, “strong, reliable, genial and kindly: but not, I think, either enthusiastic or visionary,” Worman was hardly a natural successor to the charismatic Solomon Schechter. “I felt dimly that he would do something excellently,” wrote that same friend of the adolescent Worman. “What that might be I puzzled often, for it did not seem he had—at that time—any conception of it himself.” Yet after Schechter’s 1902 departure for New York, the Geniza collection at Cambridge was left more or less without a guardian. The English Jewish scholar Israel Abrahams had replaced his on-again, off-again friend Schechter as the university’s Reader in Rabbinics, but was too busy or distracted to pay the Cairo manuscripts much attention. (His lack of interest is peculiar, to say the least, given the fact that Abrahams himself visited Cairo in March of 1898, and wrote letters to his wife declaring it “a real sell” that Schechter was “pretending he had brought away everything” from the Geniza when in fact it seemed there might be just as much remaining in Cairo as what Schechter had taken. The trail of this mysterious pronouncement gives out here—as Abrahams appears not to have brought back more than a few fragments for himself; during his time at Cambridge he basically ignored the Taylor-Schechter collection. He was, it should be said, responsible for the Jewish Quarterly Review, the journal he edited with Claude Montefiore, which published almost all the early articles about, and texts from, the Geniza.)
A believing Baptist and former bookshop salesman, the twenty-four-year-old Worman had been hired by the library in 1895, during Schechter’s tenure, and, after being sent by his employers to study Semitic languages as a “non-collegiate” student at the university, he had been recruited to help sort the Cairo fragments. Mathilde Schechter singles him out in her memoir as having provided her husband with the most “actual help” of all those involved in this stage of the work.
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Abrahams, for his part, remembered meeting Worman in 1900, when the librarian-in-training knew “little Hebrew and less Arabic.” In the void created by Schechter’s absence, some sense of a calling, though, seems to have stirred within Worman: he realized that the orphaned and utterly distinctive Geniza collection required care, and, finding no one else prepared to take responsibility, he rose, quietly, to the occasion. “At first,” Abrahams recalled, in a memorial tribute published shortly after Worman’s untimely death of an unspecified illness, “he copied mechanically, but soon revealed an unsuspected and unique power to decipher half-obliterated texts and a remarkable facility in reading doubtful passages.” During this period, he was pressed into service by various far-flung scholars who lacked direct access to the collection. At times he served as a kind of belated (and anonymous) medieval scribe. Without Worman, the soon-to-be-celebrated Lithuanian-born Talmudist Louis Ginzberg, for instance, whom Schechter hired for JTS in 1903, could not possibly have written several of the books that would make him famous in Jewish circles. At one point, Worman copied out in laborious longhand for Ginzberg fifty-five fragments of the Palestinian Talmud, and in another prephotostatic instance he transcribed all the known rabbinic responsa concerning Jewish law in the Cambridge Geniza collection. And it wasn’t just Semitic languages that occupied him. The librarian Francis Jenkinson reckoned that Worman could catalog books in “nearly twenty different languages” and recalled that he once helped another scholar transcribe certain Pali texts, “though he had no previous acquaintance” with that Indic alphabet.
This was drudge work, to be sure, but it seems to have served Worman as an excellent apprenticeship and compelled him to push further. According to Abrahams, “He did not long continue as a mere copyist; he resolved to understand what he transcribed.” And so, “with untiring diligence and almost mag
ical rapidity he made himself master of a difficult language and an intricate literature, his success being rare in the history of the self-taught.” In 1905, after several years spent categorizing, copying, and translating hundreds of fragments onto loose scraps of paper, as he carefully assembled lists of streets, names, buildings, and the like, he published, in the JQR, an article that may be the first attempt to draw from the Geniza’s historical materials a composite view of the Old Cairo community.
“Notes on the Jews in Fustat from Cambridge Genizah Documents” was, as its title suggests, extremely gestational, and Worman’s tone was a bit cautious as he put forth the simple but—for the time—rather audacious notion that “from the business documents that come from the Genizah … many facts come to light which may serve to unveil something of the history of the Jewish race in a large city where they abode in great numbers, were very wealthy, and had much to endure.” After tapping several classical Arabic chronicles for a précis of the history of Fustat from its founding in 640 to its conquest by the Fatimid (Shiite) caliphate in the second half of the tenth century, he proceeds to offer a rough sketch of the medieval Jewish parts of town: he accounts for the two Rabbanite synagogues located there—the synagogue of the Jerusalemites (or Palestinians, that is, Ben Ezra) and the synagogue of the Iraqians (also known as the Babylonians)—as well as the nearby Karaite synagogue. He gestures to the rabbinical courts and attempts to account for some of the officials whose names are mentioned in legal documents found in the Geniza. He lists a number of the Fustat markets (including the Big Market, the Market of the Perfumers, the Market of the Steps, and the Markets of Saffron, Wool, Linen, and Cotton). He then describes the oldest part of town, the fortress called Qasr ash-Sham‘ (known variously in English as the Fortress of the Romans, the Greeks, Babylon, or the Lamp), which is where the Ben Ezra synagogue is situated and which, together with an adjoining Jewish neighborhood known as Musasa, he characterizes (not entirely correctly) as “the ‘ghetto’ of Fustat.” Musasa, he writes, was also home to “the mart of the Jews” and the chief location for the mills and millers. While the picture of Jewish Fustat that takes shape here is still very crude, and riddled with basic mistakes, the roughest outlines of the city begin in Worman’s account to appear—word by word, line by line, fragment by fragment, like a blurred photograph gradually emerging in its developing fluid.
Worman went on to publish several other articles on related subjects, but he seems soon to have realized that his true gift lay not in scholarship but in bibliography. In Abrahams’s words, “He determined to qualify himself for a task which he foresaw must be undertaken by himself if it were to be undertaken at all.” The Geniza collection, Worman understood with uncanny prescience, would be next to worthless without a catalog.
That was easier said than done. As he set out to make sense of, and give form to, the mass of disparate paper and vellum scraps that formed the collection, the technically untrained Worman—working in almost complete isolation and with little precedent to follow—faced an enormous task that required not only advanced knowledge of several languages, expert paleographic skills, and superior eyesight, but an almost bottomless well of patience. (A devout Christian, Worman may have had the words of the Gospel of John in mind as he labored: “Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost.”) Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic, Arabic, and Worman’s own English translations and descriptions all crowd together in the inky scrawl he left behind on hundreds of slips of paper and in six plain marble notebooks that contain his draft handlists of all the fragments preserved in glass and some of those bound in volumes—about twenty-five hundred pieces in all.
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A typical page of one of Worman’s handlists looks something like a working lab notebook, in which one can trace the arc of an experiment through the scientist’s deliberate notations, scribbled figures, and blotchy scratch-outs. In its text-crammed and sometimes hard-to-decipher yet strangely animate way, it also bears a peculiar resemblance to a leaf from the Geniza:
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Compiled between 1906 and 1909, this first, fledgling handlist of Geniza manuscripts remains the only catalog of this part of the collection. And though some of the information contained there has since been superseded, corrected, or greatly expanded upon by more recent and informed readings, it offers a remarkable microcosm of the Geniza world and its riches, and shows Worman anticipating—really intuiting—a whole century of study.
Besides these chaotic drafts, Worman managed to complete two “finished” handlists, which contain brief descriptions of some of the documents, calligraphed immaculately in his fine Victorian cursive. His premature death, however, brought the process of cataloging to an abrupt halt: the bulk of the Cambridge collection would remain unclassified for another sixty years. But the descriptions that Ernest Worman left behind in that small pile of tattered notebooks would prove a great help to several others toiling in the mine.
The Polish-Jewish historian Jacob Mann, for instance, seems to have made excellent use of that handwritten legacy. Mann arrived in England from Przemysl, Galicia, in 1908—just a year before Worman’s death—and while Mann had access to Worman’s notebooks, it appears the two never met, a fact that somehow suits this, the loneliest period of Geniza research. If it wasn’t every man for himself, it was certainly every man by himself.
That may have been the way Mann preferred it. Remembered by an acquaintance as “one of the shyest men I have ever known,” he comes across in his own voluminous writings as stern, pedantic, and chronically humorless, rigid in his commitment to what he dubbed “a cautious and laborious inductive method.” If that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, it must be said that the same characteristics that would have made Mann, one imagines, a singularly insufferable dinner guest may also be what rendered him precisely the (exacting, unsentimental) scholar the field needed at this stage. Mann’s was “the genius of indefatigable and herculean industry,” in the words of one admirer, who also praised his “infinite painstaking care and patience.”
Raised in a household of Belz Hasidim by a ritual-slaughterer father who would offer his sons anatomy lessons based on the inner organs of a cow, Mann was considered a religious prodigy and began from an early age to study secular subjects—modern Hebrew literature, German, philosophy, and astronomy. He was by nature wary and withdrawn: it has been said that the “caution in relation to other people and the isolation” that marked him as a young man later gave way to “excessive … distance from his colleagues.” But his aloof bearing may also have derived from an understandable instinct for self-preservation.
At age twenty, Mann convinced his father to let him travel to London to avoid the draft; they had, after all, cousins in England—and religiously observant cousins at that. In fact, Mann planned to study at both the liberal Jews’ College and secular London University, and soon after his arrival, the London branch of the family picked up and moved to Antwerp, leaving him completely on his own. Impoverished, largely friendless, and new to the English language, Mann poured himself into his studies during these years, only to be pronounced an enemy alien during World War I and threatened with deportation. He had, however, already been recognized as a scholar of exceptional promise, and after the chief rabbi of England, Joseph Hertz, and the head of Jews’ College, Adolph Büchler, intervened with the authorities, it was agreed that Mann could stay in London if he would report twice daily to the police.
Perhaps it was Büchler—penny-pinching Oxford librarian Adolf Neubauer’s nephew and protégé—who first steered Mann toward the Geniza’s untapped documentary wealth and encouraged him to take on the project that began as his dissertation and, with its 1920 publication as a book, constituted the first major historical work based on Geniza documents. The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fatimid Caliphs became, according to one later scholar, “a classic almost immediately after its publication.” Subtitled A Contribution to Their Political and Communal History Based C
hiefly on Genizah Documents Hitherto Unpublished, this two-volume tome charted a much more expansive realm—both physically and chronologically—than any previous modern account of medieval Middle Eastern Jewish history: Worman’s inching attempts to enumerate the synagogues and markets of Fustat had given way to Mann’s wide-ranging effort to chart Jewish life across the heart of an empire. By his own account, Mann had “practically gone through the whole Cambridge collection from one end to another” (wearing, it seems, a homemade gas mask, to protect himself from the fumes), and had done much the same with the Geniza holdings at the Bodleian, the British Museum, and in the private collection—then housed in London—of that early Geniza explorer, the lawyer Elkan Adler. Yet in his typically tiptoeing way Mann insisted that “no claim is put forward of having exhausted all the available material. As with the nation of Israel, so with its literature—‘scattered and separated among the peoples.’ ”
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His book presented, according to Mann, an “attempt … to reconstruct the life of these Jewries [of Egypt and Palestine] from the beginning of the Fatimid reign in Egypt (969 C.E.) till about the time of Maimonides, who died at the end of the year 1204 C.E.” But it was, he warned, just a start. Before all else, he needed to establish the most basic cast of characters and outline of the period. “It is my sincere hope that, as more of the Genizah fragments see the light of publication, the skeleton presented here will … clothe itself in flesh and blood and approach the stage of completion.”
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