Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

To his credit, Mann understood both the overwhelming scope of the task he had set himself and the limits of his own powers. He had made it his business to present a tremendous amount of “new” documentary material by offering in raw form the transcriptions of hundreds of mostly Hebrew fragments (communal appeals, elegies for public figures, formal “epistles,” letters to and from religious leaders) plucked from the Geniza and never before published. “In Geniza research, quantity is quality,” in the words of S. D. Goitein, the century’s greatest explorer of the documentary Ben Ezra material. The difference between the interpretation of a single, isolated fragment and the analysis of a much larger accumulation of manuscripts relating “to the same period, the same person, the same phenomenon” was essential. Mann’s triumph lay, first of all, in the sheer scale of his undertaking.

  His success also derived from his ability to arrange these sources in some comprehensible order, and in doing so, to delineate a pivotal period in Jewish history, what Goitein called “the time when everything in Judaism became consolidated, crystallized, and formulated.” And Mann’s reading of the texts in question entailed a major historical revision: before him, the Gaonim, or presidents of the two talmudic academies of Babylonia (in the towns of Sura and Pumbedita), had been considered the leaders and sages of all the world’s Jews. In Mann’s version—based not on canonical religious literature or official histories but on the messier, accidental evidence found in the Geniza—the life of Jewish Palestine and the academy there was suddenly thrust into focus. Despite endless political and military upheavals, Jews had, it became clear, continued to live and flourish in the Holy Land, and the Gaon of Jerusalem had in fact been the leading Jewish authority in the Fatimid Empire. Mann’s book was, in this sense and according to Goitein, “a revelation. It reclaimed pre-Crusader Palestine for Jewish history.”

  The book was also—it must be said—a serious slog to read. The result of all that maniacal document-sifting came across as what the historian Gerson Cohen has described (in relation to one of Mann’s scholarly forebears) as “a staggering array of data with almost no connective thread, a vast number of trees with no forest in sight.” While deeply appreciative of the “veritable gold-mine of historical information on every aspect of Jewish life in the Near East” put forth in The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine, Cohen respectfully wondered if Mann should in fact be classified as a historian at all. He was, rather “a master antiquarian” whose work was actually “closer to philology and textual scholarship than to historical synthesis.”

  Others, including Goitein, have defended Mann’s claim to the historian’s mantle by describing The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine as “not representing a consecutive narrative” but resembling, instead, “a string of pearls, held together by a chronological or associative sequence.” According to Goitein, this necklace-like quality did not render the book any lesser and was, in fact, almost a given at this stage; such a piecemeal approach was attributable, he wrote, to “the very nature of Genizah research and to our knowledge of medieval history in general. Thousands of documents, often or mostly fragmentarily preserved, heaped up topsy turvy in a lumber room, and later dispersed in many different collections, have to be identified, collected, deciphered and translated, and, finally, to be understood in the context of sources, Jewish and general, otherwise known. A complete historical account will be possible only after all this work will have been done.” Writing a half century after Mann, Goitein declared that “even now … we are far from such a final, all-comprising view of one of the greatest periods of Jewish history.” Mann had, though, turned the soil and sown the seeds.

  The empire that Jacob Mann worked so hard to map was a place of constant movement. The letters, edicts, and declarations he transcribed and attempted to parse had arrived in Fustat from all corners of the medieval Islamic world and Byzantium, as Jews propelled by persecution, poverty, family ties, or business opportunity took to the roads and seas.

  In an odd way, the profound restlessness of this period mirrored Mann’s own very mobile life and indeed his times—as, at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, traditionally raised Eastern European Jews found themselves sprung from their shtetls and ghettos and bound for America, Palestine, or some other, more cosmopolitan spot than the one from which they’d come. So it was that the Przemysl-born, London-educated Ostjude and Austrian national Jacob Mann would pack his bags in 1920 and take up a teaching job in Baltimore, settling just a few years later in Cincinnati, at Hebrew Union College, where he would live and continue to dedicate himself tirelessly to work with the Geniza’s historical materials, publishing several other major—massive—volumes of “texts and studies” before his death in 1940.

  There were, of course, others on the move in these years—and as Jews wandered, so did Jewish learning. In fact Solomon Schechter’s 1902 arrival in New York (by way of Romania, Berlin, Vienna, London, and Cambridge) marked more definitively than any other single event the shift of Jewish scholarship away from Europe, toward points both west and east.

  Upon installing himself at JTS—and delivering an inaugural address that was criticized in the newspaper for the heavy foreign accent in which it was spoken—Schechter was quick to hire an almost exclusively European faculty, beginning with the Kovno native and great-great-nephew of the Vilna Gaon, Louis Ginzberg (whose studies in Lithuanian yeshivot were followed by years of academic work in Berlin, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg), the Polish Bible scholar Israel Friedlander (trained in Strasbourg and Berlin), the Lithuanian Israel Davidson, and the Koenigsberg-raised, Berlin-educated librarian and historian Alexander Marx. No matter how worldly this crew, there was, at first, a certain failure to communicate at the school, since several of the professors could only teach in German, and many potential students, recent immigrants themselves, were inclined to speak Yiddish. Schechter, however, was adamant that all those affiliated with the Seminary express themselves in English. (The Baltimore native Henrietta Szold, one of the first women to study at JTS and later the founder of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, offered the teaching staff private lessons.) Schechter also lobbied hard for JTS to emphasize rigorous European-styled textual scholarship and not what he considered the mere trade-school manufacture of congregational rabbis.

  Schechter’s stance was quite controversial and would remain a bone of contention for years to come. There were certain community leaders who considered his stress on the scientific study of Jewish texts “far too highbrow” for the mass of American Jews, but—at least during his own lifetime—Schechter had his linguistic and methodological way within the walls of the Seminary, where such scholarship flourished, and where Schechter also insisted that students needed to know more than just classical Jewish texts. He reportedly informed one young candidate for rabbinical school that “nobody is qualified to enter the ministry who has not read [Rousseau’s] Confessions” and told him to apply only once he had absorbed it.

  As such ideas made their way to the new world of America and, later, the old-new world of Palestine, the primary language of Jewish scholarship would shift from German to English, and, increasingly, Hebrew. The use of Hebrew for Jewish scholarly writing was, noted one German Jewish commentator in 1923, a matter of spiritual survival, as “only through its aid can a natural connection to living Judaism be found.” The same year, the first lecture was delivered at the soon to be officially inaugurated Hebrew University in Jerusalem—by Albert Einstein, who uttered his opening remarks, on the theory of relativity, in the holy tongue. Another symbolically meaningful modulation occurred with the 1907 announcement by Israel Abrahams and Claude Montefiore that they were ceasing publication of the London-based Jewish Quarterly Review; in 1910 the journal was launched again by Philadelphia’s Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, under the editorship of Schechter and another early collector of Geniza manuscripts, Cyrus Adler, who declared in the first issue of the resuscitated journal that “America is fast becoming the c
enter of Jewry, and in all likelihood will become also the center of Jewish learning in the English world.”

  With all these scholars and scholarly notions zigzagging oceans, it is not surprising that libraries themselves—and with them, important gatherings of Geniza fragments—would also start to migrate. Since the end of the nineteenth century, various Geniza collections had made their way to all parts of the world—from Vienna to Manchester to Paris. Right around the time of Schechter’s Egyptian adventure, for instance, the Moravian polymath and scholar David Kaufmann had—rather mysteriously—come into possession of a compact but valuable collection of some six hundred Geniza fragments, which were donated after his death to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Although the details remain extremely sketchy, it seems Kaufmann too had been racing with Schechter and Neubauer to seize hold of the whole Geniza: Kaufmann and Schechter were regular correspondents in the 1890s, and according to one of Kaufmann’s students, he had been negotiating to “purchas[e] the complete Geniza” when he learned of Schechter’s Egyptian trip and “became deadly pale.” Later he blamed “the careless Hungarian connection which gave it to … Cambridge University.” The reference remains obscure—Neubauer was, it is interesting to note, Hungarian—and according to the Budapest-born Geniza scholar Alexander Scheiber, “Kaufmann never spoke of the matter.”

  After Schechter and his crates had departed Fustat, the aristocratic Cairene Jew Jack Mosseri had continued to gather up manuscripts left behind by those he dubbed “the wise men of the West.” Poised in a privileged way between Occident and Orient, the British-educated Mosseri had a vision of local Egyptian “spiritual revival.” He was also sharply, if politely, critical of what he called in 1911 “the raid on our literary treasure-house,” though he admitted the Egyptian-Jewish community’s role in this loss: “We did not at the time appreciate the nature of the hoard with which we so lightheartedly parted.” Perhaps as a kind of compensatory gesture, from 1909 to 1912 he and a small group of French and American scholars dug for fragments in the Basatin graveyard and on the Ben Ezra grounds, unearthing Geniza manuscripts that had apparently been buried during the synagogue’s 1890 renovation. The collection they rescued was substantial—some eight thousand fragments; a catalog was drawn up around the time of the excavation, some of the collection was then photographed, and the whole lot was apparently stored in a “new Geniza” and communal library, attached to one of Cairo’s more modern, Sephardic synagogues. Mosseri hoped that this would serve “not only [as] a storehouse … of the records of the past, but a well from which will be drawn a living stream of ideas for the present generation of Jews in and beyond the oldest home of the children of Israel.” But Mosseri died young, in 1934, and with that his entire stash disappeared. After years of determined sleuthing by yet another Adler, the Israeli librarian and musicologist Israel Adler, the fragments eventually resurfaced—in 1970 in Paris, when the family granted Adler ten days to sort and microfilm them. Although the manuscripts were willed to the National Library in Jerusalem, they remained in a private bank vault until 2006, when they were loaned to the Cambridge library where, as of this writing, they are being preserved and cataloged. (The original handlist remains missing.)

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  By the second decade of the twentieth century, the United States had become home to a number of Geniza collections, including one at Dropsie College and another at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. Of all the American Geniza collections, though, the largest and richest by far would make its way from Europe only after Schechter’s death—to the Jewish Theological Seminary, then under the presidency of Cyrus Adler. The collection was none other than that of Schechter’s old friend Elkan Adler, who had managed to talk his way into the Geniza a few months before Schechter had, in 1896, and to fill a Torah mantle full of fragments. As it turned out, Adler had also continued to buy up in secret large quantities of Geniza fragments for several years afterward—as the overworked and underappreciated Count Riamo d’Hulst had excavated around the Ben Ezra synagogue and supplied the Bodleian with a “great many sacks” of unearthed fragments. Since most of these were deemed by Neubauer and Cowley to contain “useless Hebrew MSS,” the Oxford library chose to put them on the market, describing the transaction in their receipt book as the “sale of waste.”

  But the Bodleian’s trash became part of Adler’s cache—his extensive Judaica library, which, as early as 1916, JTS librarian Alexander Marx had been exploring the possibility of buying for the Seminary. In addition to precious incunabula, manuscripts, and rare books, the collection contained more than twenty-six thousand Geniza fragments, and the whole of it was reported to fill every room of a five-story house. “I realize it is a bold thing to ask,” Marx wrote to Mayer Sulzberger, “but … you know what it would mean for this country to get [such a library] into the new center of Judaism.” Adler may not have been especially eager to sell, but it seems the embezzlement by a business partner of much of his firm’s money made it necessary. Negotiations and fund-raising continued on and off for some seven years—with Hebrew Union College also, reportedly, “gunning for the same library” and Marx and Cyrus Adler eventually securing the support (and funds) of various influential New York Jews, including Mortimer Schiff, Felix Warburg, and Louis Marshall. Adler finally agreed to accept the sum of £25,000 (the equivalent of approximately a million dollars today) and on March 18, 1923, the New York Times reported the purchase of the Adler collection, the addition of which would make JTS “the greatest Jewish library in the world.”

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  A few days later, Elkan Adler wrote to Cyrus Adler, confirming the shipping and insurance arrangements, and admitting his own sadness: “I need not tell you that it is a great wrench,” he wrote, “and I feel as though I were giving away an only daughter in marriage[,] but it is a comfort to think that she will find a happy home and that she will continue to bear my name.”

  Cyrus Adler was quick to reply: “I fully understand that it is very hard for you to be suddenly separated from your Library to which you have devoted so much paternal love and care and which you have brought up for more than a third of a century. But you can be sure that your ‘daughter’ will find a proper home. The union with her younger cousin will be very beneficial for both.”

  America was the setting for this bookish wedding, and, as it happens, the scene of various family feuds that had marked the Jewish community there for much of its young life—and that also had echoes in the Geniza.…

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  A Gallery of Heretics

  Of all the riddles the Geniza offers,” Schechter wrote in 1901, as he prepared himself for the encounter with a fractured but burgeoning American Judaism and appraised a Hebrew scrap he’d come across by an upstart eighteen-year-old Persian Jewish immigrant to Babylonia, “this is one of the most puzzling.” Its six pages contained parts of a loosely cadenced, rhymed expository work, and its young author’s limitations as a writer “make his style,” according to Schechter, “occasionally forced and even unintelligible.” It was content, however, rather than eloquence, that drew Schechter into the puzzle of this not-quite-prose, and what he found there were the words of a shockingly skeptical ninth-century Jewish critic of the foundational Jewish document—the Bible. As though he’d been reading a mix of mid-twentieth-century literary New Criticism and a rationalist’s guide to theology, the seemingly fearless neophyte calls into doubt the integrity of scripture on both textual and moral grounds, complaining that it lacks clarity and requires constant explanation, contains needless details and repetitions, often contradicts itself with regard to major considerations, and, worst of all, presents an implied ethics that are “inferior and in no way compatible with the moral nature of God”—whom our doubter claims is depicted in scripture as a capricious, double-dealing dispenser of punishment. Schechter also notes the “jarring” and “irreverent and irritable” tone of the questions. I
t is unlikely, he adds, that the writer’s Jewishness was more than superficial.

  This anonymous contrarian appears, however, to have had fellow believers in disbelief, and they had a teacher—who has also been delivered from the limbo of the Geniza and into a kind of tag-team denominational debate. The teacher’s redeemer was the same Israel Davidson who, as a teenager, had crossed the ocean to reach New York, learned English, and entered into the Geniza’s orbit when Schechter brought him to JTS.

  In the summer of 1914—after he’d found the first wispy trace of the circa sixth-century liturgical poet Yannai in a Geniza fragment—Davidson, we’ll recall, reversed direction and crossed the ocean once again, this time heading for Cambridge, where he was to spend a few weeks squinting his way through the University Library’s Taylor-Schechter collection. We don’t know for certain what he hoped to find there—though his record of publication prior to the trip, along with his wife’s comments in her memoir, suggest that he was “especially anxious” to see what the collection might offer and most likely had liturgical poetry (which is to say, Yannai and company) on the brain. In a small book he published the following year, Davidson notes that he had the “privilege of examining every part of the Genizah collection,” especially the “numerous fragments which had remained unclassified.”

  While the grail of Yannai’s long-lost poetry eluded him on that round, Davidson did find something smaller and off to the side that turned out to be among his most important discoveries: a polemical work composed in response to the person scholars now believe served as the model or even mentor for Schechter’s doubter. His odd name as it has reached us is Hiwi al-Balkhi—which is to say, he came from Balkh, or Old Bactria, then Persia and today northern Afghanistan. (There is considerable confusion over the name, with some scholars suggesting that Hiwi—a corruption, it seems, of the Persian “Haywayhi”—was a nickname that may have carried overtones of an Arabic word meaning “snake,” or “heretic.”) In the Middle Ages, Balkh was famous as the birthplace of Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism, and the region was fertile ground for a number of religion-splintering sectarian movements, including various Shiite strains of Islam and one quasi-Jewish sect that sought to shift the Sabbath from Saturday to Wednesday(!)—the day the sun was created in the Book of Genesis. Prior to the nineteenth century, Hiwi al-Balkhi’s name had been mentioned only a handful of times in the entirety of Jewish literature—always by writers who vehemently objected to his line of thought—and nothing of his work itself remained.