By ANTHONY JULIUS
Published: May 27, 2011
About 120 years ago, a cache of manuscripts, mostly fragments, was discovered in the storeroom of an old Cairo synagogue. Its members had deposited them there over many centuries. This collection of documents managed to be both heterogeneous and comprehensive at the same time.
Photograph from Syndics of the Cambridge University Library
Solomon Schechter examining manuscripts from the Cairo geniza.
SACRED TRASH
The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza
By Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
Illustrated. 284 pp. Nextbook/Schocken. $26.95
Adina Hoffman is the author of “House of Windows: Portraits From a Jerusalem Neighborhood.” Peter Cole is a poet and translator. As they relate in their engaging book “Sacred Trash,” the materials in the storeroom included letters, wills, bills of lading, prayers, marriage contracts and writs of divorce, Bibles, money orders, court depositions, business inventories, leases, magic charms and receipts. One early examiner of the cache described the scene as a “battlefield of books.” The most recent deposits were made in the 19th century; there were fragments that dated back to the 10th century. Another early visitor described the scene thus: “For centuries, whitewash has tumbled” upon the documents “from the walls and ceiling; the sand of the desert has lodged in their folds and wrinkles; water from some unknown source has drenched them; they have squeezed and hurt each other.”
The challenge presented to researchers, to reconstruct documents out of fragments, remains akin to the challenge embraced by jigsaw enthusiasts, save that in the case of the Cairo cache, there were very many pieces, from very many puzzles, all mixed up together, in one great mess. Though scrutiny of this material continues, several books drawing on the documents have already illuminated the lives of Mediterranean Jewry. At least one masterpiece of scholarship and imaginative reconstruction owes its existence to the cache: “A Mediterranean Society,” the Israeli scholar S. D. Goitein’s five-volume study of medieval Jewish communities — in all their “quotidian glory,” Hoffman and Cole add. Goitein is one of the heroes of this book, one among several who committed themselves to the collection’s study. The story told by “Sacred Trash” is both lively and elevating; it is best read as an extended act of celebration of Cairo’s historical Jewish community, their documents and their documents’ 20th-century students (though the authors also find space to relate the less creditable activities of the storeroom’s plunderers, pillagers and looters).
The cache was known, and is still commonly referred to, as a “geniza.” This word, which is barely translatable, holds within it an ultimate statement about the worth of words and their place in Jewish life. It intimates the meaning “hidden” or “concealed.” But behind that notion, when applied specifically to manuscripts or books, two further, ostensibly contradictory meanings lurk. The works to be hidden or concealed have either a sacred or a subversive character. Those that are sacred are to be protected and preserved when no longer usable; works in that countercategory, which are subversive, and therefore fit only to be censored or suppressed, are to be put out of view. In neither case is the work accessible, but for quite opposing reasons. The one is to be treasured; the other, condemned. A geniza, then, serves the twofold purpose of preserving good things from harm and bad things from harming. Over time, “geniza” became the name for a place that held any redundant or obsolete documents. It was the great achievement of the men and women who worked on the Cairo texts to recover them from obsolescence. Where others saw rubbish, they found riches.
It is perhaps the chief appeal of Hoffman and Cole’s book that it restores to life the mostly obscure and unnoticed scholars whose careers were touched by the geniza or who committed themselves to its study. Chief in interest among them must be the extraordinary Solomon Schechter (circa 1847-1915). Romanian and Hasidic by origin, Yeshiva- and then university-trained, a vigorous critic of what he regarded as the anti-Jewish bias of the German Protestant higher criticism (which questioned the dating of several books in the Hebrew Bible), he was a Cambridge don before leaving for the United States, but throughout his life, a charismatic, brilliant man of wide culture and eccentric manner. He became the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and is best known today as the man after whom the Conservative movement’s network of day schools is named. He immediately grasped the significance of the geniza materials, which had been shown to him in 1896 by Cambridge acquaintances — two elderly widows of scholarly bent, also wonderfully revived by Hoffman and Cole. Schechter alone was responsible for rescuing some 190,000 fragments. The collection came to dominate his life, taking him away from other scholarly projects. One of his colleagues remarked, “It makes me unutterably sad when I see your unique powers not turned to noble account.”
Arab-Jewish relations, as disclosed by the geniza material and examined by Goitein, were not especially good (though the position of Jews was better than in the Christian West). The poll tax, payable every year by the protected but subordinate class of Jews and Christians, was burdensome, even onerous. The season of the tax, when payment fell due, was a time of “horror, dread and misery,” Goitein wrote. The Egyptian Jewish community of the late Middle Ages, afflicted by persecutions, epidemic and apostasy, diminished over time both in size and significance. Yet the many members of this community left behind them a great treasure, and thereby put us all forever in their debt.
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