Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

  10.3 Index card from Goitein’s Geniza Lab. Courtesy of the NLI.

  10.4 Twelfth-century check. CUL T-S Ar. 30.184(3r).

  10.5 S. D. Goitein with his lab, Princeton. Courtesy of the Goitein family.

  10.6 Goitein in the classroom, University of Pennsylvania, 1970, with Zvi Gabay, Moshe Gil, Gary Leiser, Ellen Seidman, and Yedida Kalfon Stillman. Marion Scheuer Sofer photographer, courtesy of the Goitein family.

  bm.1 Additional Series sorting: Stefan Reif, Yisrael Yeivin, Ezra Fleischer. CUL T-S Genizah Research Unit.

  bm.2 Ironing manuscripts. CUL T-S Genizah Research Unit.

  bm.3 Palestinian Talmud, Berakhot 2:4–3:1. CUL T-S F 17.20r.

  bm.4 Rambam draft, with revisions, Mishneh Torah (Malveh veloveh). JTS MS 8254.4a.

  bm.5 Obadiah, musical score. CUL T-S K 5.41.

  bm.6 Magical manuscripts, amulet. CUL T-S K 1.94.

  bm.7 Geneva box. Courtesy of David Rosenthal.

  NOTES

  * * *

  Hebrew book and article titles appear here in English translation and are marked [Heb]. When English translations of the titles are provided by the publishers themselves, we have maintained the spelling used there. Publication information is given the first time a work is cited. Throughout the book, Hebrew transliteration has been simplified in order to aid pronunciation by the general reader.

  Archival abbreviations are as follows: CUL (Cambridge University Library); WGL (Westminster College, Cambridge, Gibson-Lewis papers); JTSA (Jewish Theological Seminary Archive); BLR (Bodleian Library Records, Oxford); NLI (National Library of Israel). Other abbreviations are detailed in full the initial time a reference appears. Our thanks to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library and to these other institutions and archives for permission to quote from their holdings.

  1. Hidden Wisdom

  Information about Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson comes from Janet Soskice, Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels (London, 2009); A. Wigham Price, The Ladies of Castlebrae: A Story of Nineteenth-Century Travel and Research (Gloucester, 1985); Stefan C. Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University’s Genizah Collection (Richmond, 2000); Stefan C. Reif, “Giblews, Jews and Genizah Views,” Journal of Jewish Studies [JJS] 55/2, 2004; Rebecca J. W. Jefferson, “Sisters in Semitics: A Fresh Appreciation of the Scholarship of Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson,” Medieval Feminist Forum 45/1, 2009; Editha Klipstein, “The Learned Twin Sisters from Scotland,” WGL 8/4; Christa Müller-Kessler, “Agnes Smith Lewis” and “Margaret Smith Gibson,” The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); and the twins’ own writing, especially Margaret Dunlop Gibson, How the Codex Was Found: A Narrative of Two Visits to Sinai (Cambridge, 1893); Agnes Smith Lewis, In the Shadow of Sinai: A Story of Travel and Research from 1895 to 1897 (Cambridge, 1898); Agnes Smith Lewis, “Two Unpublished Letters,” WGL 6/10.

  Descriptions of Schechter (whose initial position as “Reader in Talmudic” seems to have been short for “Reader in Talmudic Literature”) come from Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter (Philadelphia, 1938); Mathilde Schechter’s unpublished memoir (JTSA Schechter archive, box 28/1-11); Adolph S. Oko, Solomon Schechter: A Bibliography (Cambridge, 1938); Cyrus Adler, Solomon Schechter: A Biographical Sketch (American Jewish Yearbook, 1916); Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, with a foreword by F. C. Burkitt (pamphlet, London, 1931); Alexander Marx, Essays in Jewish Biography (Philadelphia, 1947); George Foot Moore, “Schechter, Scholar and Humanist” and Cyrus Adler, “A Tribute to Schechter,” both from Menorah Journal 2/1, Feb. 1916; Louis Marshall, Joseph Jacobs, et al., “Solomon Schechter,” JTS Students’ Annual, 1916; Louis Ginzberg, Students, Scholars and Saints (Philadelphia, 1928/1945); Margaret D. Gibson, “Dr. Solomon Schechter,” The Week-Day, Jan. 15, 1916; “Schechter Anecdotes Gathered by F. I. Schechter in England,” JTSA Schechter 29/17; F. I. Schechter, “Schechteriana,” Menorah Journal 8/2, April 1922; A Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Jack Wertheimer, ed. (New York, 1997); Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge, 1987). In particular, the authors would like to acknowledge David Starr’s dissertation, Catholic Israel: Solomon Schechter, A Study of Unity and Fragmentation in Modern Jewish History (Columbia University, 2003), which is an excellent guide to Schechter’s thought, and Stefan Reif’s A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo, a groundbreaking history of the Geniza collection at Cambridge, based on years of Reif’s work as the head of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit.

  For the origins of the term “geniza,” see Avihai Shivtiel, “The Genizah and Its Roots,” in The Written Word Remains, Shulie Reif, ed. (Cambridge, 2004). For more on the notion of geniza in general, see Solomon Schechter, “A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts,” Studies in Judaism II (Philadelphia, 1908); A. M. Habermann, The Geniza and Other Genizoth: Their Character, Contents and Development [Heb] (Jerusalem, 1971); S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza 1, 5 (Berkeley, 1967–85/1999); Simon Hopkins, “The Discovery of the Cairo Geniza,” Bibliophilia Africana 4, 1981; E. N. Adler, “Genizah,” The Jewish Encyclopedia 5, 1903; Mark Cohen and Yedida Stillman, “The Cairo Geniza and the Custom of Geniza among Oriental Jewry: An Historical and Ethnographic Survey” [Heb], Pe’amim 24, 1985; Reif, A Jewish Archive; Nehemia Allony, “The Practice of Geniza among the Jews” [Heb], Sinai 79, 1976; Malachi Beit-Arié, “Genizot: Depositories of Consumed Books as Disposing Procedure in Jewish Society,” Scriptorium 50, 1996; “Geniza,” Talmudic Encyclopedia: A Digest of Halachic Literature and Jewish Law from the Tannaitic Period to the Present Time 6 [Heb], Shlomo Yosef Zevin, ed. (Jerusalem, 1954).

  Biblical references relating to the idea of “geniza” may be found, for instance, in Esther 3:9 and 4:7; Ezra 5:17, 6:1, and 7:20; 1 Chronicles 28:11. Talmudic allusions to the practice appear, among other places, in Shabbat 115a, 116a; Megilla 26b; Gittin 45b; Sotah 20a; and Baba Batra 20b.

  For more on the practice of Muslim geniza, see Joseph Sadan, “Genizah and Genizah-like Practices in Islamic and Jewish Traditions,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 42/1–2, Jan.–March 1986; Sadan, “New Materials Regarding Purity and Impurity of Books in Islam in Comparison with Judaism,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 33, 2007; Sadan, “Storage and Treatment of Used Books (Genizah) in the Moslem Tradition, and Jewish Parallels” [Heb], Kiryat Sefer 55/1, 1980; Mark Cohen, “Geniza for Islamicists, Islamic Geniza, and the ‘New Cairo Geniza,’ ” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 7, 2006.

  The explanations cited here for the particular geniza practices of the Ben Ezra community come, respectively, from Malachi Beit-Arié, “Genizot”; Mark Cohen (correspondence with the authors, Jan. 27, 2010); Marina Rustow, “From the Palace in Cairo to the Synagogue in Fustat: In Search of the Lost Arabic Archive” (unpublished paper, June 2009, courtesy of the author).

  For more on the role that the Ben Ezra synagogue played in the life of the Fustat community, see Goitein, MS 2; Mark Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (Princeton, 2005); Elinoar Bareket, Fustat on the Nile: The Jewish Elite in Medieval Egypt (Leiden, 1999). Measurements of the Geniza’s dimensions come from Cohen and Stillman, “The Cairo Geniza and the Custom of Geniza” [Heb] and Malachi Beit-Arié (“Genizot”), who calculates the capacity of the chamber as being between 25 and 30 cubic meters. The descriptions of the Geniza quoted here are: “For centuries,” Agnes Smith Lewis, introduction to Palestinian Syriac Texts from Palimpsest Fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Collection (London, 1900); “that pestiferous wrack,” H. F. Stewart, Francis Jenkinson, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Cambridge University Librarian, a Memoir (Cambridge, 1926).

  The Geniza–Dead Sea Scrolls comparison is discussed in Stefan Reif, “Cairo Geniza,” Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Lawrence Schiffman and James VanderKam, eds. (Oxford, 2000); Paul Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (Oxford, 1959); Haberma
nn, The Geniza [Heb]; Norman Golb, “Geniza Studies in Jerusalem,” Studies and Reports II, Yad Ben Zvi, Jan. 1956; Joel Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (New York, 2008). See also T. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures (New York, 1976). Goitein’s comments about the “Living Sea Scrolls” come from an unpublished lecture, Goitein Geniza Lab 2K.1.1, NLI.

  The most recent and accurate count of fragments at the Cambridge Library is 193,654 items. For a detailed reading of this number, see Rebecca J. W. Jefferson, “The Historical Significance of the Cambridge Genizah Inventory Project,” in Language, Culture, Computation: Studies in Honour of Yaacov Choueka, Nachum Dershowitz and Ephraim Nissan, eds. (Berlin, forthcoming). Grateful acknowledgment is due to Rebecca Jefferson for showing us her article and for providing further helpful information about the inventory, which was carried out on behalf of the Friedberg Genizah Project.

  2. Serpents and Secrets

  All quotes from Heine come from Memoirs of Heinrich Heine, Thomas W. Evans, ed. (London, 1884). Further information about Von Geldern is drawn from Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton, 1979); Hopkins, “The Discovery”; Habermann, The Geniza [Heb]; Elkan Adler, “An Eleventh Century Introduction to the Hebrew Bible,” Jewish Quarterly Review [JQR] 9/4, 1897. The account of both of Safir’s trips appears in Yaakov Safir, Even Safir (Lyck, 1866).

  For more on Europe’s fascination with ancient Egypt, see Joyce Tyldesley, Egypt: How a Lost Civilization Was Rediscovered (Berkeley, 2005); Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, 2007); and especially Leo Deuel, Testaments of Time: The Search for Lost Manuscripts and Records (New York, 1966). James Baikie’s words appear in A Century of Exploration in the Land of the Pharaohs (London, 1924).

  Details about Firkovitch (and quotations from his correspondence) are gathered from Zeev Elkin and Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Avraham Firkovich and the Cairo Genizas in the Light of His Personal Archive” [Heb], Pe’amim 90, winter 2002; Tapani Harviainen, “Abraham Firkovich,” in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources, Meira Polliack, ed. (Leiden, 2003); Tapani Harviainen, “The Cairo Genizot and Other Sources of the Second Firkovich Collection in St. Petersburg,” in Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of the International Organization for Masoretic Studies, E. J. Revell, ed. (Atlanta, 1996); Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate, introduction (Ithaca, 2008); Dan Shapira, Avraham Firkowicz in Istanbul (1830–1832): Paving the Way for Turkic Nationalism (Ankara, 2003); Mikhail Kizilov, Karaites through the Travelers’ Eyes: Ethnic History, Traditional Culture and Everyday Life of the Crimean Karaites according to the Descriptions of the Travelers (Simferopol, Warsaw, 2002). The more skeptical view of Firkovitch’s methods is put forth, for example, in Kahle, The Cairo Geniza.

  The differences between the Fustat genizot are discussed in Rustow, Heresy, chapter 1; Haggai Ben-Shammai, “Is ‘The Cairo Genizah’ a Proper Name or a Generic Noun? On the Relationship between the Genizot of the Ben Ezra and Dar Simha Synagogues,” in From a Sacred Source: Genizah Studies in Honour of Professor Stefan C. Reif, Ben Outhwaite and Siam Bhayro, eds. (Leiden, 2010). On the Basatin, see Jack Mosseri, “A New Hoard of Jewish MSS. in Cairo,” Jewish Review 4/21, 1913.

  Elkan Adler’s account of his first visit to Ben Ezra comes from “Notes of a Journey to the East,” Jewish Chronicle [JC], Dec. 14, 1888. Descriptions of the once-derelict state of Ben Ezra come from Jack Mosseri, “The Synagogues of Egypt: Past and Present,” Jewish Review 5/25, 1914; Charles Le Quesne, “The Modern Period,” in Fortifications and the Synagogue: The Fortress of Babylon and the Ben Ezra Synagogue, Cairo, Phyllis Lambert, ed. (Montreal, 1994).

  Information about Chester is drawn from E. A. Wallis Budge, By Nile and Tigris: A Narrative of Journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia on Behalf of the British Museum between the Years 1886 and 1913 (London, 1926); Rebecca J. W. Jefferson, “The Cairo Genizah Unearthed: The Excavations Conducted by Count d’Hulst on Behalf of the Bodleian Library and Their Significance for Genizah History,” in From a Sacred Source, Outhwaite and Bahyro, eds.; Stefan C. Reif, Hebrew Manuscripts at Cambridge University Library: A Description and Introduction (Cambridge, 1997); Gertrud Seidmann, “Greville John Chester,” Wolfson College Records, 2005–6; Gertrud Seidmann, “Thunder, Lightning and a Ray of Sunshine,” Romulus Voices, Wolfson College, 2006; Margaret S. Drower, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology (Madison, 1985); Charles Q. Choi, “World’s First Prosthetic: Egyptian Mummy’s Fake Toe,” www.LiveScience.com, July 27, 2007. Quotations from Chester come from Greville J. Chester, “Notes on the Ancient Christian Churches of Musr el Ateekah, or Old Cairo and Its Neighborhood,” Archaeological Journal 29, 1872; “The Jew Earl,” JC, Sept. 8, 1876; “Archaeological News,” The American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts 8/1, 1893; letters from Chester to Nicholson, the Bodleian librarian, dated Dec. 20, 1889, Jan. 18, 1890, Dec. 14, 1890, BLR, e. 479. (All sterling equivalents have been calculated using the U.K. National Archives currency converter.)

  The two otherwise forthright scholars were Richard Gottheil and William H. Worrell in Fragments from the Cairo Genizah in the Freer Collection (New York, 1927). For more on Cyrus Adler and the Egyptian role at the Columbian Exposition, see his I Have Considered the Days (Philadelphia, 1941); Egypt-Chicago Exposition Co., Street in Cairo: World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893; Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York, 2004).

  Information about Wertheimer comes from Manuscript and Book [Heb] (Jerusalem, 1893/1990); Shelomo Aharon Wertheimer, Batei midrashot (Jerusalem, 1980); Wertheimer, Ginzei Yerushalayim (Jerusalem, 1901/1992); Reif, A Jewish Archive; and interviews with Shelomo Leshem and Shelomo Aharon Wertheimer (the elder Wertheimer’s descendants), Aug. 5, 2008, Jerusalem. The postcards and letters from Wertheimer to the Cambridge librarian quoted here are as follows: June 8, 1893, CUL Or. 1080.13viii; April 1893, CUL Add. 8398/12; Oct. 12, 1893, CUL Or. 1080.2viii. The list in Jenkinson’s hand is CUL Or. 1080.13iii, v, vi. Wertheimer’s reference to the “poor man” is to Ecclesiastes 9:14–15.

  Neubauer’s biography is drawn from Stefan Reif, “A Fresh Look at Adolf Neubauer as Scholar, Librarian, and Jewish Personality,” unpublished paper (our thanks to Stefan Reif for showing us this paper); Rebecca J. W. Jefferson, “A Genizah Secret: The Count d’Hulst and Letters Revealing the Race to Recover the Lost Leaves of the Original Ecclesiasticus,” Journal of the History of Collections 21/1, 2009; H. Loewe, “Adolf Neubauer, 1831–1931” (pamphlet, no date); S. R. Driver, Sinéad Agnew, “Adolf Neubauer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Alexander Marx, “The Importance of the Geniza for Jewish History,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 16, 1946–47. Quotations from Neubauer come from “The Mail,” University Intelligence, Oxford, Nov. 24, 1876; “Miscellanea Liturgica,” JQR 6/2, 1894; “Grammatical and Lexicographical Literature,” JQR 6/3, 1894.

  Accounts of the synagogue “repairs” may be found in Mosseri, “The Synagogues”; Cohen and Stillman, “The Cairo Geniza and the Custom of Geniza” [Heb]; Lambert, Fortifications. According to one version of events, a certain German had in 1888 “been sinking a well in the neighbourhood of the Fostat Synagogue [when he] excavated a number of Hebrew MSS.” Documents had, in other words, been interred in the area before the synagogue was razed. See “The Cairo Geniza: How It Was Found,” JC, May 5, 1933. For further discussion of the “repairs,” see Elazar Hurvitz, Catalogue of the Cairo Geniza Fragments in the Westminster College Library, Cambridge 1, introduction [Heb] (New York, 2006).

  Rebecca J. W. Jefferson is single-handedly responsible for uncovering the remarkable story of d’Hulst and his role in the Geniza’s retrieval. We are enormously grateful to her for sharing her research with us. For more about d’Hulst, see Jefferson, “A Genizah Secret” and Jefferson, “The Cairo Genizah Unearthe
d.” Quotations from d’Hulst and Sayce are all drawn from BLR, d. 1084.

  Elkan Adler’s second trip to the Geniza and its aftermath are described in his “An Eleventh Century Introduction”; “The Hebrew Treasures of England,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 1918; “Ecclesiasticus,” JC, March 11, 1904.

  3. All Sirach Now

  Background information relating to Solomon Schechter’s interest in Ben Sira is drawn from David Starr, Catholic Israel; Y. Zussman, “Schechter the Scholar” [Heb], Madda’ei haYahadut 38, 1998; Francis Jenkinson’s 1891, 1894, and 1896 diaries (CUL Add. 7414, Add. 7417, Add. 7419); Stefan Reif, “The Discovery of the Cambridge Ben Sira MSS,” in Proceedings of the First International Ben Sira Conference, 28–31 July 1996, Soesterberg, Netherlands, Pancratius C. Beentjes, ed. (Berlin, 1997); Mathilde Schechter’s memoir; Schechter, “A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts,” “The Study of the Bible,” and “Jewish Life in the Time of Ben Sira,” all in Studies II. The last Jewish scholar to quote from the Hebrew Ben Sira was Saadia Gaon (about whom, see chapter 5, chapter 6, and especially chapter 8). “Badly mutilated” is Leo Deuel’s description in Testaments of Time.

  For general information about the Book of Ben Sira, see The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, or The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach), Revised Standard Version (New York, 1973); The Wisdom of Ben Sira (the Anchor Bible), A. A. Di Lella, ed., P. W. Skehan, trans. (New York, 1987); “Ecclesiasticus,” The Catholic Encyclopedia; Bernard Mack, Wisdom and the Hebrew Epic: Ben Sira’s Hymn in Praise of the Fathers (Chicago, 1985); James Kugel, The Bible As It Was (Cambridge, 1997) and How to Read the Bible (New York, 2007); John J. Collins, “Ecclesiasticus,” in Oxford Bible Commentary, J. Barton and J. Muddiman, eds. (Oxford, 2001); Daniel J. Harrington, Jesus Ben Sira of Jerusalem: A Biblical Guide to Wise Living (Collegeville, 2005). The best introduction to the book is still the Hebrew critical edition, The Complete Book of Ben Sira [Heb], M. Segal, ed. (Jerusalem, 1958).