Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

  “Dismiss not any thing …” The words of the Mishna’s rabbis echo down through the history of the Geniza and its dramatic, incremental retrieval, as they also call to mind lines by the great Polish-born, Yiddish-and-Arabic-speaking modern Hebrew scavenger-poet Avot Yeshurun—whose name means “the fathers are watching,” and who, in 1971, wrote in Tel Aviv: “I bring back all I find. / Not all that glitters is gold. / But I pick up / all that glitters.”

  Which takes us around to that May day in 1896, when Margaret Gibson first handed Solomon Schechter the grimy scrap of Ben Sira and noticed the glint in his eyes. From Schechter and Taylor to Davidson and Mann; from Zulay to Schirmann, Fleischer, and Goitein; and from them to the delta of their successors—the scholars who have devoted their lives to the exalted and often exhausting work of recovering the Geniza have been guided, each in his hour, by a similar fascination with a “hidden light.” For some it has been a matter of life and death for Jewish culture. Others have been driven by philological passions and the challenge of bringing order to history’s detritus. For others still, an almost mystical sense of resurrection has been involved. For most it was, and is, much of the above—and then some. As it happens, very little in the Geniza glittered; but almost all, in its way, was gold.

  AFTERWORD

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  Once the very hub of a thriving empire, Fustat seems barely to register on the otherwise-occupied residents of crumbling, sprawling, diesel-choked modern Cairo, and taxi drivers find their way to it only after repeated stops to ask for directions. But it remains—marked Misr el-Qadima (Old Cairo) on the maps—hugging the Nile south of downtown and divided in half by the train tracks and the Mari Girgis, or Saint George, Metro station.

  The haphazardly parked cars and tinny Koranic recitations pouring forth from storefront radios notwithstanding, it’s tempting to say that Old Cairo looks and sounds more or less as it might have when Wuhsha and Hillel ben Eli, Halfon ben Netanel and Abraham Maimonides lived there. A gargantuan man in a turban and galabia stands stern guard over a donkey-drawn cart piled high with swollen cabbages and cauliflowers. A small boy balances on his head a straw basket twice his size, filled with fresh, grainy pita, still puffed with heat. Women in headscarves pick through heaps of oranges, onions, and greens, much as they might have in Fatimid or Ayyubid Fustat. Sludgy-looking Nile fish flap in basins plunked in the dirt. And at the corner, men in long robes sit on stools and silently eye the passersby. The flies and filth are everywhere.

  Easing away from this color and squalor, up onto the walkway that leads over the train tracks and toward Qasr ash-Sham‘ (the ancient Roman Fortress of the Lamp, which holds the Ben Ezra synagogue), one is struck by the made-over feel of the place: English signage, Pharaonic tchotchkes, elaborately epauletted Egyptian soldiers at every turn, and tourist groups with their leaders’ flags held high. And then one arrives at the front gate of the Ben Ezra synagogue, where sunglass-wearing security guards man an airport-style metal detector.

  Though there are today fewer than a hundred (mostly elderly) Jews left in Egypt, and none at all who live in Fustat, Ben Ezra probably looks better now than it has for centuries. A Canadian team carried out a major renovation project in the late 1980s and the then-derelict synagogue was restored, inch by ornamented inch. Outside, the moldering brick was resurfaced with a pale lemon gypsum facade and cast stucco crenellation affixed to the roof. With its inlaid cabinetwork, richly painted ceilings, hanging lamps, and cool gray marble pillars and floors, there is a modest splendor to the place. And into this echo of authenticity come the guides and their charges, who are regaled with explanations of the synagogue’s importance that call to mind the characterization of Ben Ezra by one early-twentieth-century British visitor, Herbert Loewe, as “a perfect storehouse of fable and fancy.” Moses was a baby in the rushes right on this spot (a large, engraved slab near the front of the hall is indicated and duly gawked at by groups from France and India, Australia, America, and Indonesia); the Prophet Jeremiah built the synagogue with Alexander the Great’s permission; after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Ezra the Scribe came here with his very own Torah scroll; in the ninth century a wealthy rabbi bought the structure (then, in this version, a Coptic church) for a great deal of cash from the caliph.… And so on and fantastically on, with nary a fact in earshot: “It is,” marveled Loewe in 1906, “quite wonderful how many miracles they have managed to cram into that small building.”

  Meanwhile, the true miracles go mostly overlooked. Perhaps in keeping with the modern history of the Geniza—and the frequent dismissal of its contents as “worthless”—the hole in the wall at the upper left corner of the women’s gallery barely gets mentioned on these potted tours. Empty and, like the entire women’s gallery, off-limits to visitors, the “room” itself draws little interest and, if it merits comment at all, the conversation quickly returns to the far more cinematic subject of the suckling Moses and Pharaoh’s daughter.

  To reach the Geniza today—the actual Geniza—one has to travel to Cambridge, England, where Schechter’s Cairene haul is preserved in neat black binders on rows and rows of shelves a few aisles down from the Charles Darwin papers in the closed stacks of the University Library. Constituting nearly 70 percent of the worldwide Geniza stash, the Taylor-Schechter collection and the library’s other Geniza holdings (those received from Wertheimer, Chester, Henriques, and others) were winnowed by scholars throughout the century; yet during that time the bulk of the fragments remained, remarkably, unsorted and dangerously exposed. Systematic examination began only in 1973, when the library hired the energetic young Scottish Jewish scholar and bibliographer Stefan Reif, who laid out an ambitious ten-year plan to bring order to the jumbled mess, by conserving, cataloging, microfilming, and creating a bibliography for the collection in its entirety. (Among Reif’s many other, unspoken duties was the gentle weaning of various visiting scholars from their staunch belief that certain Geniza manuscripts were their own private property.)

  With this the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit was born, and over the course of the next eight years, all the previously unconserved materials were cleaned, ironed, provided with shelf marks, and placed in protective Melinex (Mylar), the same flexible polyester film used in the radiation monitoring devices carried by the Apollo 11 astronauts during their moon walk. At this time, the so-called Additional Series was also created: these were fragments that earlier scholars hadn’t regarded as worthy of sorting, either because of their content or due to their degraded state. (Even Goitein, in his great excitement over the discovery of the boxes in the library attic, failed to recognize the value of these particular pieces.) At final count, the Additional Series would amount to 105,090 folios—more than the Old Series (40,308) and New Series (45,128) combined! Despite the often mutilated or minuscule nature of the fragments, the Additional Series has yielded, and continues to yield, significant finds.

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  Over the nearly four decades since the founding of the Genizah Unit, scholars working there have prepared an invaluable and ever-expanding array of catalogs and bibliographies. Meanwhile, in the basement of the library, the eight thousand fragments of the Jack Mosseri collection are currently being treated to the most state-of-the-art conservation conceivable. Gone are the dread steam irons; now fragments are examined under an electron microscope and the chemical stability of the iron-gall ink is tested before a scrap may be treated. In a humidification chamber, a sheet clenched in a thousand-year-old fist is gradually coaxed into unfolding. Fragile pages are strengthened with Japanese paper and a mixture of methylcellulose and wheat starch paste. And the process is by no means rote. Creative solutions must be found for every sort of decay and damage. “Inspecting each folder,” observed the collection’s conservators, “has been like opening a parcel: sometimes a pleasure, sometimes a portent, depending on the prize within.”

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  Beyond Cambridge, Geniza fragments on paper and parch
ment are held physically in many other library and private storerooms, from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York to the Bodleian at Oxford. All told, seventy-five collections—from vast to tiny (just a single fragment)—have been counted. And copies—on microfilm and photostat, in typescript and in books—are kept elsewhere, making detailed organization and study possible. They’re in Jerusalem, where at the newly renamed Ezra Fleischer Geniza Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry, located in a maze-like back hallway of the National Library, scholars work in a windowless room roughly the size of the Geniza itself. Surrounded by tin shelves crowded with files, under framed, black-and-white portraits of Schirmann, Zulay, Fleischer, Goitein, Leopold Zunz, Shalom Spiegel, and others (well aware of his brother’s passion for the Geniza, the Hollywood mogul Sam Spiegel left money in his will, which keeps the Institute running), they bear down like detectives on a very cold case: it is sometimes a thousand years old. Using two vintage microfilm machines, a few new computers, and a bank of metallic gray, circa 1970 card catalogs, they are gradually sleuthing their way through the Geniza’s poetic holdings, identifying every fragment they can. And those typescripts and microfilms are also in New Jersey, where, under the auspices of the Princeton Geniza Project, one of Goitein’s leading disciples, the historian Mark Cohen, has since the mid-1980s given new life to his late mentor’s Geniza Lab by supervising groups of knowledgeable students to transcribe and create a large, searchable database of the Geniza’s historical documents in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew. Known by the modern yet somehow medieval name of TextGarden, the database currently includes some four thousand fragments, or nearly a quarter of the Geniza’s documentary (nonliterary) materials.

  At the same time, and beyond these individual efforts, the nature of Geniza research is in the process of being wholly reimagined—in virtual form—by the Friedberg Genizah Project. Established in 1999 by the Toronto currency trader and avid bibliophile Albert Friedberg, the multimillion-dollar plan is to inventory and digitize in full color and high resolution every Geniza scrap in existence, compiling for each fragment identifications, formerly far-flung catalog entries, and comprehensive bibliographies. No such centralized clearinghouse (or nerve center) has ever existed for the Geniza, and in fact “Friedberg,” as it is commonly known, represents the largest, most ambitious manuscript computerization project of any kind, anywhere. In his conjoined devotion to business and to Jewish texts, Albert Friedberg himself might best be seen as a kind of latter-day Salman Schocken—a man willing to put his money where his people’s manuscripts are. But this sweeping vision of the Geniza as a reconstituted whole—and the highly complex application of that vision (carried out in a day-to-day way by a staff of young ultra-Orthodox women on the fourteenth floor of an unprepossessing office building, surrounded by shwarma stands, banquet halls, and government offices in one of the uglier industrial neighborhoods of Jerusalem)—is, like so much about the study of the Geniza, a product of the combined talents and efforts of dozens of individuals, scattered in all corners of the earth.

  Working together with international teams of scholars, expert in various Geniza fields, the cyberwizard behind the Friedberg site, Yaacov Choueka, has—without fanfare though in a distinctly inspired fashion—already begun to revolutionize the study of the Geniza. (It seems not so much ironic as it is fitting that this phase of the Geniza’s redemption has become the mission and passion of this veteran, pioneering computer scientist, a Hebrew-and-Arabic-speaking Jew born and raised in—of all places—Cairo.) If everything goes according to plan, when this stage of the project is complete, vividly photographed images of hundreds of thousands of the Fustat manuscripts—the recto and verso of the estimated 331,351 folios from the Ben Ezra cache—will be available at the mere click of a mouse on the Friedberg website, along with nearly half a million items of data about these manuscripts, compiled over the course of the last century. Adapting state-of-the-art face-recognition technology to the medieval context, the Friedberg programmers have also made possible the mechanical identification of candidates for “joins,” the reunion of long-separated parts of a torn manuscript, as well as different fragments written in the same scribal hand. The Friedberg project is, one might say, the high-tech, democratic realization of Solomon Schechter’s hundred-year-old dream of creating the modern era’s “Greatest Historical Work on Jewish Lore”—a corpus of the Geniza.

  We’ve tried, with Sacred Trash, to make our way into that corpus. Rummaging in the attic of an overlooked aspect of communal history, we’ve known all along we’d find things that some would consider rubbish and others treasure. This, though, is what literature does—what writers do—and, when it comes to it, what faith is. And as this book makes clear, it is also what the scholars of the Geniza have done, in a quietly heroic way, for more than a century now. If, with Cynthia Ozick, we think of history as “what we make from memory,” then these scholars have quite literally been making history by re-membering it, by putting it back together syllable by syllable under the intense pressure of powerfully informed and at times visionary imaginations. The yield of that labor of remembrance is staggering, and we’ve drawn on only a small fraction of it, a handful of examples, hoping that they might stand for the marvelous if messy whole. In doing so, we’ve been led not only by this microcosmic principle, but by the great historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who understood as well as anyone the complex role that memory plays in history (how memory both is and isn’t the finest index) and who spoke often of the importance of the historical “olfactory sense”—one that allows scholars, and also writers, “to sniff out connections.”

  In short, we’ve been guided in our choice of subjects by our noses, and another entire Geniza book, or three, could be written around what we’ve left out. Front and center among our neglected topics is the Bible, which is represented in the Taylor-Schechter collection alone by some twenty-five thousand fragments. Just as the Geniza scrambles “early and late” in its scrap heap, so, too, it sometimes and literally turns things upside down, or downside up—revealing, for example, that the Morse Code–like array of dots and dashes that indicate proper vocalization of the text didn’t descend from Sinai—that is, vowels weren’t always placed under the Hebrew letters, where we are used to finding them today. Once upon a time, the Geniza makes clear, the vowels were placed above the Hebrew letters. While the Geniza’s two alternative systems of vocalization—Palestinian and Babylonian—were eventually phased out with the adoption of the Tiberian or Masoretic system, and the introduction of “codified” (printed) biblical texts, they remained in limited use in nonbiblical texts through the sixteenth century.

  Among the other important subjects that have, alas, been given short shrift in our book are many standard rabbinic modes. Key Geniza fragments expose, for instance, previously unknown (and sometimes mystical) midrashim, as well as a cacophony of legal responsa, dispatched by the heads of the academies in Babylonia and Palestine and by later halakhic authorities to correspondents scattered throughout the Jewish world—from Lucena to Aleppo to Kairouan. These scribbled replies to queries posed from far away offer a fascinating and previously obscured angle onto the medieval rabbis’ unedited, unabridged opinions about a sprawling range of topics pertaining to Jewish law as it was actually—not theoretically—practiced. Moving back still further in time, the Geniza also provides us with a Talmud that is—at least visually—not at all talmudic. These early Talmud fragments predate the now-familiar arrangement of a central text surrounded by a constellation of commentaries, and present what looks like a more straightforward, if still charged and not-always-easy-to-follow argument. The older versions of the text bring scholars closer than ever before to the origins of this classic expression of Jewish thought—especially as we find it in the Palestinian Talmud, which Schechter described as “in some respects more important for the knowledge of Jewish history and the intelligent conception of the minds of the Rabbis than the ‘twin-Talmud of the East,’ ” the Babylonian version. The P
alestinian Talmud had been, however, seriously neglected over the centuries and therefore “little copied by the scribes.” The Geniza, as Schechter saw right away while leaning over the Egyptian tea chests, would “open a new mine in this direction.”

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  Sexy subjects such as grammar, lexicography, and paleography have likewise been treated only in passing here, as have various historical topics—including Jewish life in Crusader Palestine and the legendary Jewish kingdom of the Khazars. As with so many other Geniza matters, documentary evidence about the Khazars sends us back to some of the most basic questions about Judaism, including perhaps the most basic one: Who is a Jew and how did he or she become one? From an early discovery by Schechter of what appears to be a tenth-century letter that details Khazar history to an important 1962 find of an epistle concerning the medieval Khazar community of Kiev (the earliest known mention of that city in any language), the Geniza has furnished us with convincing evidence of the existence of this legendary and isolated Jewish kingdom of Turkic converts between the Black and the Caspian seas.