Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. By Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. New York: Schocken Books, 2011. 283 pp. $26.95. [1]
In the newest addition to the Nextbook series, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole have written
a remarkably literary history of the vast, but scattered, manuscript fragments
that make up the Cairo Geniza. They begin their story with the discovery of
a page of the lost Hebrew text of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) at the end of the
19th century in Cambridge, England, and close with the discovery of
yet another page of that special text at the beginning of the 21st
century in Geneva, Switzerland. In between, the book moves at a breathless pace
as the authors recount the race to acquire the Geniza
fragments, then to decipher and publish them, and finally to reconstruct
medieval Mediterranean Jewish economic and social history from them.
The key to the success of this book is the
lively yet meticulous portrayal of the key characters. The portrait of Solomon
Schechter, the volatile, driven scholar of Judaica who worked tirelessly to
acquire the largest part of the Geniza for the
Cambridge University Library, is riveting. Schechter’s battle with the
antisemitic undertones of higher biblical criticism turns out to have been as
important as his restless curiosity about the contents of these fragments. The
portrait of Neubauer, the representative of the Oxford University Library, who
turns out to be the loser in the race for the Geniza
is so clear that one can feel his misanthropy. The portrait of S. D. Goitein, the person who shifted the emphasis of Geniza scholarship from the famous texts in the large
fragments to the life of the common person depicted in the smallest fragments
is so well done that I, who had the privilege of knowing him, could recognize
his turns of speech. The portrait of the German Jewish merchant, Schocken, shows his vision and drive, not only in his
business but in his effort to preserve the Geniza
fragments and gather scholars to study them. Lesser known scholars, too, are
given their fair treatment in the cameos that make up the core of Sacred Trash. Even the smell and the
dust are palpable.
Then there is the romance of it all:
Ecclesiasticus had been known only in its Greek translation but the syntax of
the Greek suggested a Hebrew original. And there it was! Page after scattered
page, the whole suggesting a vibrant Hebrew culture in the post-biblical
period. Yannai, an early medieval poet, had been
hardly known at all. And there it was! A complete oeuvre that fills an entire
book, once it was identified and assembled, suggesting a vibrant Hebrew culture
in the post-talmudic period. Dunash ibn Labrat had been a little-known poet of the early Spanish
period. Suddenly, there was a whole body of poetry that included a poem by his
wife, who seems to have been better at it than he, and wholly secular poems
about wine and love that had nothing to do with the well-known genre of
liturgical poetry, and that suggested a precedent for the emerging secular
Hebrew poetry of the 20th century. There were also new poems of
Yehuda ha-Levi and Ibn Gabirol, previously well-known
Hebrew poets.
Then there is the detective story:
Fragments from heretics who seem to be linked to the Sadducees and the (later
discovered) Dead Sea Scrolls. A heretic who asked really tough questions about
the origin and truth of the biblical narrative, suggesting some of the
skepticism about the truth of the Bible in the 20th century. And the
Karaites, a Jewish group that accepted the Bible but not the rabbinic oral
tradition of interpretation. Karaites, for instance, had a different ritual
calendar, different rules for observing the Shabbat, and different
prescriptions concerning the mixing of meat and milk. And yet, Karaites and Rabbanites (as rabbinic Jews were known) lived together,
with their synagogues in close proximity and their business and social
relations intertwined. Karaites and Rabbanites even
“intermarried.” So, how did one manage a household in which there were two sets
of rules for keeping kosher, and two sets of rules for keeping the Sabbath and
holidays? All this is in the Geniza.
How much did a specific quantity of cotton
cost? Which spices were available? What was a living wage in 13th
century Fustat (old Cairo)? How were international
money transfers made? What was the structure of the community? The place of
teachers? The place of women? Who married whom? What medicines did a doctor
have in his kit? Putting together the pieces of the puzzle by finding which
fragments belong to which was the first step. Reconstructing the history of
everyday life was the next step.
The data is endless, and Hoffmann and Cole
devote a good part of their last chapter to the topics they did not cover. What
was regarded as trash by the Cairo community, and even by some modern
authorities, became the object of sustained research by scholars. Over 100
years after the discovery of the Cairo Geniza,
scholars are still pursuing this search of the trash of the ages to learn about
the depth and breadth of the life of people who lived seven centuries ago.
David R. Blumenthal, Emory University