The story of Wuhsha’s little sting operation is repeated in the document by a ritual slaughterer who lived downstairs from her and who described how she had invited a couple of other neighbors to come up to her place “for something.” He explains: “The two went up with her and found Hassun sitting in her apartment and …” the badly damaged manuscript gives out here, but picks up with the telling “ … wine and perfumes …” and breaks off again, suggestively.
Others were less understanding than Hillel and the neighbors. According to testimony provided in the same document, Wuhsha—whose unorthodox sexual situation was apparently no secret around town—had put in an appearance at the Babylonian synagogue on Yom Kippur, and the head of the community had noticed her … and promptly kicked her out.
However mortifying it must have been for Wuhsha to be expelled from synagogue on the holiest day of the year, she had her pride—and she also had the last laugh. In her will, written by the same Hillel ben Eli, she made a point of leaving an equal amount of money to each of the synagogues of Fustat, including the Babylonians who had given her the boot. The funds were earmarked “for oil so that people may study at night.” And while she piously promised a respectable 10 percent of her estate to charity, she also stipulated that “not one penny” should go to Hassun, and she provided lavishly for her own funeral: At a time when two dinars could support a lower-middle-class family for a month, she set aside a full fifty dinars for this posthumous extravaganza since “the socially ostracized Wuhsha wanted,” according to Goitein, “to show off and prove to everyone what a great woman she was.”
Finally, though, it was Wuhsha’s son, Abu Sa‘d, then still a child, who was her main concern: she left him a good deal of money, as well as “all I possess in cash and kind, in rugs and carpets,” and she made provisions for his education. She named a teacher who should instruct him about the Bible and prayer book “to the degree it is appropriate that he should know them,” and she set aside funds for the teacher’s salary, ordering that he be given “a blanket and a sleeping carpet so that he can stay with” the boy. Wuhsha may have been unusual for her time, but she was still a Jewish mother.
At the very opposite end of the Egyptian social scale was the tortured figure of Abraham Maimonides (1186–1237), with whom Goitein chose to bring A Mediterranean Society to its melancholy close. Although time has not been especially kind to Abraham and though he faced serious controversy in his day, this “perfect man with a tragic fate” was much more than the only son of the renowned Moses Maimonides. Abraham, in Goitein’s words, “stood for everything regarded as praiseworthy in the society described in this book.” He was also, as several other commentators have noted, a figure with whom Goitein himself seems to have identified deeply.
The two had a long history together. In 1936, as a hyper-engaged Hebrew University scholar of Islam, Goitein had been asked to translate a book of Abraham’s responsa—or rabbinic answers to petitioners’ questions—from Judeo-Arabic to Hebrew. “I developed quite a personal affection for him,” Goitein wrote of that early encounter with the scholar, physician, and communal leader known for his blend of humility and firmness, as well as for what his doting father called his “subtle intelligence and kind nature.” Over the course of Goitein’s decades spent in the company of the Geniza materials, he had made the assessment of Abraham’s legacy a kind of pet project, and collected numerous letters and records that pertained to him, as well as more than seventy-five Geniza documents in Abraham’s own hand—a prototypically hard-to-read doctor’s hand, as it happens, whose Hebrew letters run together in an almost uninterrupted flow that looks much like Arabic.
Up to Goitein’s final months, in 1985, he had been laboring late into his nights to complete A Mediterranean Society—the comprehensive, several-thousand-page work that he continued to refer to as “only a sketch.” He and Theresa had moved to Princeton in 1971, when he retired from teaching and became a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study there; he converted the living room of their modest, green clapboard house into his study and the headquarters of his Geniza Lab, and wrote most of the last three volumes in this quiet suburban setting. While he had proceeded according to a typically punctilious schedule through the first four installments (and continued to publish other books and numerous articles, even as he dashed off or dictated letters by the score, admitting to one correspondent in 1977 that “sometimes I write up to twenty … a day”), the fifth and final volume was, as one of his Princeton colleagues remembered after his death, “the most difficult to conceptualize and write.” No precedent existed in either Islamic or Jewish studies for offering, as Goitein did, a summation of this sort: an extended meditation on the inner life of the medieval Mediterranean individual as it was revealed in the Geniza documents. Now, at the twilight of a long, fertile, and intensely varied career, he had chosen to return to the place he’d set out from as a young scholar—to Abraham Maimonides, who represented, in Goitein’s words, “all the best found in medieval Judaism, as it developed within Islamic civilization.”
(Photo Credit 10.5)
Like his father before him, the charismatic Abraham had served as Rayyis al-Yahud, the head of the Jews—representative of Egyptian Jewry before the Muslim authorities and the supreme spiritual and secular authority within the community. His political career, though, was not what distinguished him for Goitein. Rather, it was how he “united in a single person three spiritual trends that were usually at odds with each other”: a total mastery of traditional Jewish sources; a “fervor bordering on faith” in the Greek sciences; and greatness as a teacher of religious ethics.
Beyond that, he was a visionary religious reformer, a rationally minded mystic who was outspoken in his condemnation of the superficial and luxury-loving behavior of so many of his fellow Fustat Jews. As an alternative, Abraham reiterated in detail the laws that bound the Jewish community and proposed various synagogue reforms: the washing of feet before prayer, numerous prostrations, and the lifting of hands heavenward in supplication—as at the mosque. He had also gathered around him a small band of pietistic disciples. Drawing directly from the Sufi teachings that swirled through the Middle Eastern air at the time, he described the virtues of the “special way” or “high paths” to be followed by this elect group and went so far as to praise the rag-wool-wearing, night-vigil-keeping bands of Sufi—that is, Muslim—novices as being truer descendants of the biblical Prophets than the Jews of the age. He longed, it seems, to bring his select band of “Jewish Sufis” together as a community of initiates, dedicated to the ascetic life, the contemplation of secret knowledge, and the striving toward “the arrival at the end of the way, the attainment of the goals of the mystic.”
Yet for all Abraham’s prophetic pronouncements about “high paths,” it was his entanglement in far lower matters—in the mundane business of serving as his community’s all-in-one administrator—that emerged from the pile of Abraham-related documents that Goitein unearthed in the Geniza. While Moses Maimonides had been the official head of Egypt’s Jews on and off for just a few years and was known to have “groaned under” the load of this work, his son served in this distracting capacity for his entire adult life, from the age of nineteen until his death at fifty-one.
Goitein found it “appalling” that Abraham was forced to play so many roles at once: he presided as judge at sessions of the Fustat court and penned numerous written responsa to legal questions, many drafts of which turned up in the Geniza. (These Dear Rabbi queries concerned everything from sexual relations with female slaves to the milking of sheep on the Sabbath.) He was, at the same time, chief of welfare services, responsible for the poor and sick, the widows and orphans of his city: Goitein counted more than fifty orders of payment (salaries, subventions, donations) in Abraham’s own hand from a single year alone. As Geniza letters attest, he managed the hiring and firing of communal personnel and was frequently required to smooth the ruffled feathers of various miffed provincial dignitar
ies. Besides having to snuff out the rash of political wildfires that flared around his own tenure as Rayyis, he often served as peacemaker, intervening, for instance, in a nasty power struggle between the warring members of a prominent Alexandria family. He also performed weddings and acted as registrar of all Jewish marriages and divorces, and he worked, too, as his own legal proofreader; scribal standards had fallen off by his time, and Goitein discovered court documents that Abraham himself had corrected.
And then there was his day job in Cairo, where he served as personal physician to the caliph and overworked doctor at the government hospital. All this before struggling to find the time to sit still and write his works of religious scholarship. As teacher and leader of his band of disciples, he also had yet another nagging task to attend to—since even wool-wearing, solitude-seeking ascetics required letters of recommendation.
In short, the workload was “staggering,” and Abraham was, declared Goitein, “destroyed by it.” The constant preoccupation with all this bureaucratic busyness brought about as well the eventual failure of his reforms and the disappearance of much of his writing, a process connected to the gradual decimation—by “persecutions, epidemic, and apostasy”—of the Egyptian Jewish community in the late Middle Ages. Besides the Geniza documents, only a small fraction of what Abraham wrote has come down to us—a collection of responsa and but a single volume of the ten-volume, or twenty-five-hundred-page, composition the younger Maimonides called “my book.”
And here it is worth stopping to consider how it is that S. D. Goitein both did and did not resemble this “perfect man with a tragic fate.” Like Abraham, Goitein was utterly fluent in the language of both Jewish and Muslim texts. Like Abraham he combined a keen (if complex) religious faith with a no-less-fervent belief in the power of “science.” He, too, had devoted himself to public service and teaching, alongside his own scholarship. Goitein’s protégés and students—and the protégés and students of his protégés and students—stand at the forefront of historical Geniza studies today. Many of them express an almost filial affection for the fastidious man with the gentle smile, drill sergeant’s attitude toward punctuality, and drily self-deprecating wit.
(Photo Credit 10.6)
Like Abraham, Goitein was a traditionalist who had been known to offer up fairly radical ideas about that tradition and its possible transformation. According to his oldest daughter, Ayala, Goitein dreamed—somewhat vaguely—of founding “a new religion,” and in the late 1950s he had published several articles about his vision for a political union called EurAfrAsia, which would stretch “between France and Persia on the one hand and between Sweden and Abyssinia on the other.” This new world power would emerge from “the cradle of many of humanity’s most essential achievements,” Greek thinking and art, the three monotheistic religions, constitutional government, and so on. As a “more or less integrated political body” and common market, EurAfrAsia would be “a blessing for the world not only as a safeguard for peace, but also as a fountain for moral and spiritual values.” This was just one of the surprising political proposals Goitein put forward over the years.
While he remained a committed and involved Zionist throughout his life, Goitein’s precise political attitudes were notoriously difficult to pin down. One person close to him remembers him as being “very left wing,” while another has called him a “hard liner [about] Israeli politics, an extreme conservative”; other characterizations have run the gamut between these poles. Perhaps it would be truest to say that his ideas evolved over time and depending on the historical circumstances. During the war in 1948, he wrote to one of his friends who belonged (as he himself did not) to Brit Shalom, a group of Hebrew University professors who advocated the establishment of a binational state in Palestine, and who in 1942 had formed a political party called Ihud (Union): “You know that I never joined ‘Ihud’—not because I don’t love the Arabs, [and] am not ready to give my life for a pact of friendship with them, but because I know that there’s no chance of peace with them, as long as they believe they can just annihilate us.” That said, shortly after the Six-Day War he concluded a Hebrew letter to his cousin David Baneth, back in Jerusalem, by asking: “Is there still talk in Israel about the possibility of a binational state? … Never before has the possibility existed as it does now—despite the tremendous difficulties.”
In their very different contexts, both Abraham Maimonides and S. D. Goitein strove to realize the promise of what Goitein called the historical “symbiosis” between Arabs and Jews. “Biology defines symbiosis as the coexistence of two organisms so that both benefit from their being linked, and neither suffers loss,” wrote Goitein, in 1949. “Just a thin line separates this desirable symbiosis from subordination or parasitism, which is to say, a situation in which two bodies are connected to one another and one drains the marrow of the other without giving anything in return. And there is a third kind of living-in-proximity: conflict and competition, which ends in the subjugation or destruction of one partner and the impoverishment of the other.” The fact that the Jewish people are building their new life in close proximity to the Arabs, he wrote in Hebrew in that first year of Israel’s existence, provides “the possibilities for dangers without measure and blessing without bounds.”
He would return repeatedly to this notion of symbiosis throughout his intellectual life—most famously in his popular 1955 survey Jews and Arabs, which was written as a series of lectures, in the context of the political and military tensions that plagued the Middle East at the time, and which offers a slightly gloomier view. By the late 1960s, when he began to publish A Mediterranean Society, his attitude was more upbeat. Drawing as it does on all the Geniza realia, the book offers Goitein’s most subtle examination of actual (rather than theoretical) coexistence between Arabs and Jews.
His vision of the profound and inextricable bonds that joined the two peoples was, it should be said, not always understood or fully appreciated, even by those closest to him. The Nobel Prize–winning novelist S. Y. Agnon was one of Goitein’s oldest and dearest Jerusalem friends (in 1919, when they all still lived in Germany, Agnon’s then wife-to-be, Esther Marx—none other than the sister of JTS librarian Alexander Marx—had studied Arabic with Goitein and Hebrew with Agnon), and throughout the years that Goitein spent in America, the two men corresponded frequently. In a letter written during Goitein’s total immersion in his research for A Mediterranean Society, Agnon urged him to return to Jerusalem (“the main thing is that I miss you”) and challenged him—in typically lofty language—to “put aside the study of the Arabs and return heart and soul to the study of the Hebrews. Many of the great and good have given their best to the gentiles, and in the meantime the goyim have come into our legacy and grasped the art of Jacob with the weapons of Esau.” Goitein, for his part, wrote eloquently and often about Agnon’s fiction, which he held in the very highest esteem—though in a memorial lecture, delivered shortly after his friend’s 1970 death, he admitted, “For my taste, both Yehuda HaLevi and Agnon are a little bit too Jewish. I mean, in both the mere human element is too often subordinated to the specifically Jewish aspect.”
Although Goitein must certainly have been frustrated, as Abraham Maimonides was, by the failure of many of his ideas to take wider hold, he was careful not to make the same professional mistakes as his absurdly overextended medieval counterpart: Goitein’s decision to leave Israel and all its public demands and focus so tightly on his Geniza scholarship may have saved him—and his work—from Abraham’s sad fate. In 1948, there were reports that Goitein was being considered by David Ben-Gurion for the position of minister of education in the first Israeli government; one can only wonder what would have happened to the Geniza and its documentary treasures had that appointment come to pass.
Perhaps most important, the difference between Goitein and Abraham is manifest in the relationships both men developed to the mass of daily details that crowded the universe of the medieval Mediterranean—and spilled f
orth from the Geniza. Engagement with the “trivia” of his culture brought Abraham low—nearly to ruin—and it prompted in him, paradoxically, a kind of hermit’s contempt for material existence. (The saints and the Prophets, he believed, were nobler for having shunned the “love of this world” and contented themselves with “reflections of the heart,” as they wore wool, fasted, and “gave up women … and repaired to mountain caves and secluded deserts.”) S. D. Goitein, on the other hand, managed, through his patient attention and almost boundless curiosity, to be lifted up by that same detritus, and while far from a sybarite, he made the celebration and disciplined scrutiny of just this quotidian jetsam his all-consuming lifework.
It was also how he absorbed the world: Goitein had been dubbed “a born schoolmaster” by his old friend and shipmate Gershom Scholem (it was a barbed characterization that reportedly hurt Goitein, accurate though it may have been), but he was also, as one admiring former student, Eric Ormsby, now an accomplished Arabist, essayist, and poet, put it in a posthumous tribute to his teacher, “a perpetual student himself,” and someone who existed in “a state of concentrated delight at every new fact or hint of a fact.” Ormsby recalls once accompanying Goitein to the Polish Catholic funeral of the murdered father of another graduate student, which took place in Philadelphia on the Jewish Sabbath, no less: “I drove him there and we sat together during the mass. Throughout the service he peppered me with questions. Why is the priest doing that? What does this gesture signify? Can you explain those vestments?” Ormsby then relates how he “listened in horror as [Goitein] interrogated the funeral director about the precise mode of embalming that he used. Were the intestines removed beforehand? How was this done?”
While there was, as Ormsby describes it, something “a bit frightening about his inquisitiveness, something implacable, and relentless,” he understands Goitein’s passion for all this maniacal minutiae in terms of the “fierce tenacity” at the root of his scholarship and, perhaps more profoundly, as the embodiment of a long Jewish tradition of respect for the smallest things, placed in the service of the largest ones. As the mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers) counsels, “Despise not any man, and dismiss not any thing, for there is not a man who has not his hour and not a thing which has not its place.” Goitein observed this teaching until the very end—mailing off to his publisher the final, chock-full, and meticulous volume of his magnum opus at age eighty-four, and the very next day getting back to work on the “India Book,” the project he’d long put off. Six weeks later he was dead.
Sacred Trash Page 22
