Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

  Accounts of the fate of the David Kaufmann collection are contradictory. In “The Life Story of a Scholar,” Goitein says that it was thought at the time of his trip that the collection had been destroyed during the war, but in July of 1948, at the International Congress of Orientalists, Samuel Löwinger and Alexander Scheiber presented their Genizah Publications in Memory of Prof. Dr. David Kaufmann (Budapest, 1949) and announced that the collection had mostly survived. Goitein was present at the congress and would have known this. It is true that several years earlier it was believed that the whole collection was lost. See Dov Schidorsky, Burning Scrolls and Flying Letters: A History of Book Collections and Libraries in Mandatory Palestine and of Book Salvaging Efforts in Europe after the Holocaust [Heb] (Jerusalem, 2008).

  Information about Goldziher comes from Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary (Detroit, 1987); Goitein, “Goldziher as Seen through His Letters” [Heb], Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume, part I, Samuel Löwinger and Joseph Somogyi, eds. (Budapest, 1948); Goitein, review of Alexander Scheiber, ed., Ignaz Goldziher Tagebuch, in JSS 41, 1979; Goitein, “Goldziher, the Father of Islamic Studies” [Arabic], al-Katib al-Masri 5, 1947; Goitein, “I. Goldziher’s Hebrew Writings” [Heb], Kiryat Sefer 23, 1946–47. Goldziher’s description of the Kaufmann fragments is recounted in A. Scheiber, “The Kaufmann-Genizah: Its Importance for the World of Scholarship,” in Jubilee Volume of the Oriental Collection. Goitein’s comments about Goldziher’s work as a mosaic come from “Goldziher as Seen through His Letters” [Heb]. For more on the connection between Goldziher and Goitein, see Gideon Libson, “Hidden Worlds and Open Shutters.”

  For more about Scheiber, see Occident and Orient: A Tribute to the Memory of Alexander Scheiber (Budapest, 1988); Menahem Schmelzer, “Scheiber’s Beloved Books,” in Studies in Jewish Bibliography. Details about the Hungarian fragments appear in S. D. Goitein, “Early Letters and Documents from the Collection of the Late David Kaufmann” [Heb], Tarbiz 20, 1950. Goitein’s diary entries are as follows: “What should I do now?” Goitein diary, Nov. 15, 1952; “Just now I feel,” Sept. 16, 1954.

  Goitein’s description of “the heartbreak, horror and wrath” comes from Goitein, “The Life Story of a Scholar.” The term “pain and piety” is Leopold Zunz’s. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Shelomo Dov Goitein; Ismar Schorsch, “The Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History,” in his Text and Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Waltham, 1994). Baron’s famous comments about the lachrymose conception are drawn from “Ghetto and Emancipation,” reprinted in The Menorah Treasury, Leo W. Schwarz, ed. (Philadelphia, 1964). For more on the connection between Goitein and Baron, see Mark Cohen, Under Crescent & Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1994); Goitein, “Jewish History—the First 2,000 Years,” Jewish Observer and Middle East Review, Aug. 14, 1953; Goitein review of A Social and Religious History of the Jews in Speculum 36/3, July 1961. See also Mark Cohen, “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History” and Norman Stillman, “Myth, Countermyth and Distortion,” both in Tikkun 6/3, 1991.

  Goitein’s study of the India trade is described in his “Involvement in Geniza Research”; “The Jewish India-Merchants of the Middle Ages,” India and Israel 5/12, 1953; “From the Mediterranean to India: Documents on the Trade to India, South Arabia, and East Africa from the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Speculum 24/2, part 1, April 1954. For the history of the “India Book,” see also Friedman, preface, India Traders; Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, 1973). Goitein repeats the story about the offer to write a more general book almost verbatim in the preface to MS 1 and “Involvement in Geniza Research.”

  Details of the “The Cairo Geniza Documents Project” appear in SDG Geniza Lab 2J.1.2, a report on his work during the summer of 1958. This seems to be an account that Goitein prepared for Fernand Braudel’s Ecole pratique des hautes études (VIº section) in Paris, which was partially funding his research. His initial description of an “eight-volume collection” comes from the June 15, 1955, letter to Clemens Heller that he mentions on the first page of MS 1. Our thanks to Peter Miller for generously showing us this letter (from the files of l’Ecole des hautes études), and for sharing with us his research about the failed Goitein-Braudel connection. The quotes that involve the “workers” and “a whole generation of scholars” also come from the Heller-Goitein correspondence housed there. For the contents of the lab, see Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research.” Goitein’s diary entries are as follows: “I’ve completely stopped,” Dec. 2, 1957; “the rest,” undated.

  For all of the references to the material covered in A Mediterranean Society, see the five volumes of text and, especially, volume six, the cumulative index, edited by Goitein and Paula Sanders. All Goitein quotes in what follows come from MS unless otherwise noted. Readers should note that the single-volume abridgement of A Mediterranean Society (made by another scholar, after Goitein’s death) lacks most of the daily, economic, linguistic, and human detail that distinguishes the original; it is therefore in no way representative of Goitein’s work.

  The description of the “gorgeous variety of colorful robes” comes from “The Mediterranean Jewish World in the Light of the Cairo Geniza,” SDG Geniza Lab 2J.2.1. The term “religious democracy” figures prominently in MS 2 (see preface). Goitein’s use of the term is described in Goitein, “Political Conflict and the Use of Power,” in Kinship & Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses, Daniel I. Elazar, ed. (New Brunswick, 1997). For more on the dhimmi, see Mark Cohen, Under Crescent & Cross; Cohen, “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History.”

  Information about Wuhsha comes from Goitein, MS 3: viii, D; Goitein, “A Jewish Business Woman of the Eleventh Century,” JQR 57, seventy-fifth anniversary issue, 1967; Friedman-Goitein, India Traders, section 2, chapter 1. For more on the economic life of women in Geniza society, see Goitein MS 1: ii, 6; MS 3: viii, D; Mark Cohen, Poverty and Charity; Cohen, The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza (Princeton, 1985). For more on the sexual context in which Wuhsha lived, see Goitein, “The Sexual Mores of the Common People,” in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, ed. (Malibu, 1979).

  Accounts of Abraham Maimonides’ life and work come from Goitein, MS 5: x, D; Goitein, “Abraham Maimonides and His Pietist Circle,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Alexander Altmann, ed. (Cambridge, 1967); Goitein, “A Treatise in Defense of the Pietists by Abraham Maimonides,” JJS 16, 1965; Goitein, “The Renewal of the Controversy Surrounding the Prayer for the Head of the Community at Abraham Maimuni’s Time” [Heb], Ignace Goldhizer Memorial Volume, part 2 (Jerusalem, 1958); A. H. Freimann and S. D. Goitein, Abraham Maimuni: Responsa [Heb] (Jerusalem, 1938); Goitein, “Documents on Abraham Maimonides and His Pietist Circle” [Heb], Tarbiz 33, 1964; Samuel Rosenblatt, The High Ways to Perfection of Abraham Maimonides (New York, 1927/Baltimore, 1938); Goitein, review of The High Ways to Perfection, in Kiryat Sefer 15, 1938–39; Mordechai A. Friedman, “Responsa of R. Abraham Maimonides from the Cairo Geniza: A Preliminary Review,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 56, 1990; Friedman, “Responsa of Abraham Maimonides on a Debtor’s Travails,” in Genizah Research after Ninety Years: The Case of Judaeo-Arabic, Joshua Blau and Stefan C. Reif, eds. (Cambridge, 1992); Paul B. Fenton, “Abraham Maimonides (1168–1237): Founding a Mystical Dynasty,” in Jewish Mystical Leaders and Leadership in the 13th Century, Moshe Idel and Mortimer Ostrow, eds. (Northvale, 1998); Gerson Cohen, “The Soteriology of R. Abraham Maimuni,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 35/36, 1967–68; Y. Tzvi Langermann, “From Private Devotion to Communal Prayer: New Light on Abraham Maimonides’ Synagogue Reforms,” Ginzei Qedem 1, 2005. All of Goitein’s quotes about Abraham come from MS 5: x, D. Quotes from Abraham are from Rosenblatt, High Ways (1938), translation adjusted slightly by the authors. For more on the comparison between Goitein and Abraham
Maimonides, see Udovitch, “Foreword”; Libson, “Hidden Worlds”; Wasserstrom, “Apology.”

  The notion of MS as “only a sketch” is described in Mark Cohen, “Shelemo Dov Goitein.” Abraham Udovitch is the colleague who saw the fifth volume as “the most difficult to conceptualize” (see “Foreword,” MS 5). Goitein’s account of the number of letters he wrote every day is drawn from Friedman: “Prof. S. D. Goitein, Man and Scholar” [Heb].

  “Goitein’s protégés and students” include those scholars who completed their doctoral work with him. Among these were Mordechai Friedman, Norman Stillman, Yedida Stillman, Moshe Gil, and Gershon Weiss. Later, after his retirement, Goitein was an important mentor to others, including Mark Cohen. See Cohen, “Shelomo Dov Goitein.”

  For more on “EurAfrAsia,” see Goitein, “M.E.’s Future in Eurafrasia,” Jerusalem Post, Feb. 15, 1957; Goitein, “EurAfrAsia,” New Outlook 1/11, 1958. Goitein’s letter about Ihud was written to Ernest Simon, March 25, 1948 (NLI Arc 4 1751/426). His letter to Baneth is dated Nov. 11, 1967.

  Goitein wrote often on symbiosis. The quote cited here is drawn from Goitein, “On Jewish-Arab Symbiosis” [Heb], Molad 2/11, 1949. For more on the historical context in which Jews and Arabs was written, see Mark Cohen, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” in Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Cultural Relations (Mineola, 2004). The quote from Agnon is from a 1961 letter (no month or day) in Gordon, Between Shelemo Dov Goitein and Shmuel Yosef Agnon [Heb].

  Although Goitein worked for many years in the United States without honors or much public attention, at the very end of his life he was awarded one of the first MacArthur fellowships. He was the oldest fellow that year. See Kathleen Teltsch, “20 Get Cash Prizes in ‘Genius’ Search,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1983. The description of Goitein as “a born schoolmaster” is from Scholem, From Berlin. All quotes from Eric Ormsby are from “Born Schulmeister.”

  That Goitein returned immediately to work on the “India Book” is indicated in a letter to Stefan Reif, Dec. 21, 1984 (files of T-S Genizah Research Unit) and another to Mordechai Friedman, Jan. 5, 1985 (Friedman, preface, India Traders). After Goitein’s death, Friedman completed the work on the “India Book.” It was published in 2008 as India Traders of the Middle Ages.

  Avot Yeshurun’s poem is “The Collection” [Heb] in Avot Yeshurun, Complete Poems 2 (Tel Aviv, 1995–2001).

  Afterword

  For a detailed look at the contemporary fate of Egypt’s Jews, see Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Cairo, 2005). A full account of the Ben Ezra renovation appears in Phyllis Lambert, Fortifications and the Synagogue, as does Herbert Loewe’s description, from “Some Traditions of Old Cairo,” JC, July 20, 1906. The description of Fustat and the synagogue is also based on the authors’ December 2009 visit to Ben Ezra—and up the ladder into the Geniza.

  The (inaccurate) description of Ben Ezra as a former church is repeated in nearly every English-language guide book to Cairo. Scholars now agree that the church-turned-synagogue in question was probably the nearby Babylonian synagogue, once the Melkite church of St. Michael. See Goitein, MS 2: v, D, 1, a; Charles Le Quesne, “The Synagogue,” in Lambert, Fortifications; Reif, A Jewish Archive.

  The history of the Genizah Research Unit is drawn from Rebecca Jefferson, “Thirty Years of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit,” in The Written Word Remains, Shulie Reif, ed.; Stefan Reif, “One Hundred Years of Genizah Research at Cambridge,” Jewish Book Annual, no. 53, 1995–96; Reif, A Jewish Archive; Rebecca Jefferson, “The Historical Significance”; interviews with Stefan and Shulie Reif (August 25, 2008, Beit Shemesh) and Ben Outhwaite (July, 2008, Cambridge). Stefan Reif retired in 2006, at which point the Bible scholar and bibliographer Ben Outhwaite became director of the Unit; he continues to run it today. For more about the Unit’s current activities see www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/.

  Particulars of the Unit’s early conservation methods are detailed in Sue Greene, “Conserving History,” Genizah Fragments 1, April 1981; “Conservation Nears End,” Genizah Fragments 2, October 1981; A. E. B. Owen, “Space-Age Technology Helps Unit,” Genizah Fragments 9, April 1985; “A New Use for Moon Film,” Cambridge Evening News, Oct. 29, 1969. The description of the Additional Series is Ezra Fleischer’s, from his report (dated Sept. 11, 1974), CUL ULIB 6/7/6/51. Details of the conservation of the Mosseri collection come from Rebecca Jefferson and Ngaio Vince-Dewerse, “When Curator and Conservator Meet: Some Issues Arising from the Preservation and Conservation of the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 29/1, April 2008; interview with Ngaio Vince-Dewerse (July 2008, Cambridge). The quote from the conservators comes from Jan Coleby and Ngaio Vince-Dewerse, “Mosseri Collection’s Challenge,” Genizah Fragments 53, April 2007. For more on the Princeton University Geniza Project, see http://www.princeton.edu/~geniza/.

  The description of the Friedberg Project is drawn from the following sources: http://www.genizah.org/; Yaacov Choueka, lecture [Heb], Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Friedberg Genizah Project panel, Jerusalem, August 2009; Roni Shweka, Yaacov Choueka, Lior Wolf, et al., “Automatically Identifying Join Candidates in the Cairo Genizah,” Post ICCV Workshop on eHeritage and Digital Art Preservation, 2009; interview with Yaacov Choueka (Feb. 2, 2010, Jerusalem). The Friedberg Project is a joint venture with the Jewish Manuscript Preservation Society. Schechter’s words about the corpus appear in Bentwich, Solomon Schechter.

  Cynthia Ozick’s comments on remembering come from Quarrel and Quandary (New York, 2000). For Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s ideas of history and memory, see Yerushalmi, Zakhor (Seattle, 1982), and Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, David N. Myers, eds. (Waltham, 1998).

  For more on the Bible and the Geniza, see Reif, Jewish Archive; Reif, “A Centennial Assessment of Genizah Studies,” in The Cambridge Genizah Collections; Kahle, The Cairo Geniza; G. Khan, “Twenty Years of Genizah Research,” in EJ Yearbook, 1983–85. See also C. Sirat, Genizah Fragments 23 and 24, and Ben Outhwaite’s entries in In the Beginning: The Bible Before the Year 1000, M. Brown et al., eds. (Washington, D.C., 2006).

  On midrashim and responsa in the Geniza, see, for instance, Reif, A Jewish Archive; Danzig, A Catalogue of Halakhah and Midrash Fragments [Heb]. The many responsa found in the Geniza are also described in Robert Brody, The Geonim, and in works by Louis Ginzberg, Jacob Mann, Simha Assaf, and M. A. Friedman. See also Shmuel Glick, Kuntress hateshuvot hehadash: Bibliographic Thesaurus of Responsa Literature Published from ca. 1470–2000 [Heb] (Ramat Gan, 2006–7) and his forthcoming catalog of the responsa contained in the Mosseri collection. The Talmud’s role in this context is discussed in Reif, A Jewish Archive and “An Assessment”; Yaakov Sussmann, “Talmud Fragments in the Cairo Geniza,” Te’uda 1, 1980. See also Shelomo Morag, Vocalised Talmudic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Geniza Collections (Cambridge, 1988), and Robert Brody and E. J. Wiesenberg, A Hand-list of Rabbinic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Geniza Collection (Cambridge 1998). For more particular examples, see, for instance, Abraham Katsch, “Unpublished Cairo Genizah Talmudic Fragments from the Antonin Collection in the Saltykov-Shchederin Library in Leningrad,” JQR 69/4, 1979; Shamma Friedman, “An Ancient Scroll Fragment (B. Hullin 101a–105a) and the Rediscovery of the Babylonian Branch of Tannaitic Hebrew,” JQR 86/1–2, 1995; and Binyamin Elizur, “Towards a New Publication of Yerushalmi Fragments,” lecture [Heb], Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, the Academy of Hebrew Language session, Aug. 3, 2009. Schechter’s description of the Palestinian Talmud appears in “A Hoard II.”

  For more on grammar, lexicography, and paleography, see, for instance, Reif, Jewish Archive; Kahle, The Cairo Geniza; Khan, “Twenty Years of Genizah Research”; Malachi Beit-Arié, “The Contribution of the Fustat Geniza to Hebrew Paleography” [Heb], Pe’amim 41, 1989.

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bsp; The Khazar connection to the Geniza is described in Schechter, “An Unknown Khazar Document,” JQR 3/2, 1912; N. Golb and O. Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents (Ithaca, 1982). See also The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives, Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, András Róna-Tas, eds. (Leiden, 2007).

  Maimonides’ role in the Geniza world is detailed in, among other places, Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton, 2009); Kraemer, Maimonides; J. Kraemer, “Six Unpublished Maimonides Letters from the Cairo Genizah,” Maimonidean Studies 2, 1991; H. Isaacs and C. Baker, Medical and Para-Medical Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collection (Cambridge, 1994); Reif, “An Assessment.” See the “Fragment of the Month” for October 2007, by Esther-Miriam Wagner, and April 2007, by Ben Outhwaite, both on the T-S Genizah Research Unit’s Web site.

  For more on medicine in this context, see Isaacs and Baker, Medical and Para-Medical Manuscripts; Haskell D. Isaacs, “Medical Texts in Judaeo-Arabic from the Genizah,” in Genizah Research after Ninety Years, Blau and Reif, eds.; Goitein, “The Medical Profession in the Light of the Cairo Geniza Documents,” HUCA 34, 1963; Ephraim Lev and Zohar Amar, “Practice versus Theory: Medieval Materia Medica according to the Cairo Genizah,” Medical History 51/4, 2001; E. Lev, “Medieval Egyptian Judaeo-Arabic Prescriptions,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 18, 2008, and other publications by Lev.

  Obadiah’s life and work are discussed in N. Golb, “The Music of Obadiah the Proselyte and His Conversion,” JJS 18, 1967; Golb, “Obadiah the Proselyte: Scribe of a Unique Twelfth-Century Hebrew Manuscript Containing Lombardic Neumes,” Journal of Religion 45/2, 1965; J. Prawer, “The Autobiography of Obadyah the Norman, a Convert to Judaism at the Time of the First Crusade,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, I. Twersky, ed. (Cambridge, 1979); Giovanni-Ovadiah da Oppido, proselito, viaggiatore e musicista dell’eta normanna, A. De Rosa and M. Perani, eds. (Florence, 2005).