On the other hand, the American-Jewish classicist Moses Hadas called Ecclesiasticus “the most attractive book in the Apocrypha,” adding that “it can be read almost as an essay of Montaigne is read.” More than just an extender of scriptural tradition, Ben Sira’s author is, says one leading Israeli Semiticist, a self-conscious, skillful, and at times even virtuoso artist whose work introduces to Hebrew notions that develop into pivotal concepts and terms in rabbinic literature (the immanence of God, for example, which later in the tradition becomes the Shekhina). The book is, he says, brimming with treasures (genazim).
Whatever reservations Schechter himself had about the epigonic nature of some of the writing, when Ben Sira the poet hit his stride, the results, he felt, rang a large literary gong: “The chapters containing the praise of wisdom and the praise of holy men,” he wrote, “are unsurpassed in beauty of diction and grandeur of thought.” He no doubt had in mind the book’s opening lines—
All wisdom comes from the Lord
and is with Him forever.
Who can number the sands of the sea,
and the drops of rain, and the days of eternity? …
Who can find out the height of heaven,
and the breadth of the earth, and the deep, and wisdom? …
and the passage midway through the book when Wisdom speaks in praise of herself:
I came forth from the mouth of the most High,
and covered the earth like a mist.
I dwelt in high places,
and my throne was in a pillar of cloud.
Alone have I compassed the circuit of heaven,
and walked in the bottom of the deep.
In the waves of the sea, and in all the earth,
and in every people and nation, I have gotten a possession.
Schechter was almost certainly thinking, too, of Ben Sira’s turn at this point from the universal toward the particular, as he asks:
Among all these I sought a resting place—
[but] in whose inheritance might I abide?
Then the Creator of all things
gave me a commandment,
and He who made me
assigned a place for my tent,
and said: Make your dwelling in Jacob,
and in Israel receive your inheritance …
And finally, if not quite consciously, Schechter may well have been alluding to the concluding verses of that same chapter when Ben Sira himself speaks out as a scholar-sage or “man of letters” and identifies in the deepest fashion with Wisdom, saying:
I came out like a brook from a river,
like a water-channel into a garden.
I said, I will water my orchard
and drench my garden;
and lo, my brook became a river,
and my river became a sea.
I will make instruction shine like the dawn …
and leave it to all future generations.
Wisdom in this scheme links humankind—through the Torah—to the divine and the eternal. It is a presence that survives through the ages, surfacing here through the detritus of history. Rooted in the fear of God, it involves not so much unusual insight, or cleverness, but a teachable, practical sort of knowledge that hones the ability to choose between evil and good, and helps one navigate the ethical, spiritual, and wholly ordinary challenges of living. This late expression of it—the Book of Ben Sira—culminates, some twenty chapters further on, in a great catalog of biblical heroes and the moral lessons their lives embody. The curtain call of exemplars opens with lines taken up by the American writer James Agee, who applied them to powerful effect in the title of the book he began preparing in 1936 with photographer Walker Evans about gaunt, dirt-poor tenant farmers in Alabama—radically altering the polarity of Ben Sira’s verse in the process:
Let us now praise famous men
and our fathers in their generations.
The Lord apportioned to them great glory,
His majesty from the beginning.…
There are some that have left a name,
so that men declare their praise.
And there are some who have no name,
who have perished as though they had not lived.
The paean goes on to celebrate the ethos and extension of Jewish teaching—from Noah and Abraham and Jacob through Ezekiel, Nehemia, and Shimon Ben Yohanan (Simon the Righteous), the high priest of Ben Sira’s age, installed in the Temple and likened to the “cypress towering in the clouds” and other glories of Creation. The scholar-sage in this all-encompassing vision is an essential part of the continuum of Jewish history and of Wisdom’s work in the world.
While the sensitive Schechter was, then, responding viscerally to matters of style, it stands to reason that his passion was also being stoked by a more fundamental concern: “It is one of the great tragedies,” Schechter wrote in another context, “that modern Judaism knows itself so little.”
So much for Schechter’s nobler aspirations and his long-standing enmity toward the higher critics. What had most recently gotten his Ben Sira goat involved something much closer to home.
In 1889, David Samuel Margoliouth, the son of a missionizing Jewish convert to Anglicanism and a man of massive learning, which he would come to hide behind a stiff brush of a mustache and a cliff-like face, was appointed the Laudian chair of Arabic at Oxford. His inaugural lecture, based on a prizewinning dissertation he’d completed two years earlier, was called “The Place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic Literature.” Margoliouth had been reluctant to go public with his dissertation, he said, because he “felt that there was some secret about Ecclesiasticus which had not yet been explained.” (Little did he know.) But now, he announced, he had the key and so was ready to release his thoughts on Ben Sira to the world.
(Photo Credit 3.3)
Margoliouth’s lecture examined the question of textual authenticity in Ben Sira and concluded that the true nature of the lost Second Temple book is best reflected in the less-than-perfect mirror of the extant Greek and Syriac versions and, curiously, that a Hebrew replica could be worked up so as to provide scholars with a reliable sense of what the original Hebrew conveyed. And this he proceeded to do. He’d later claim that the original was not in fact “lost” but deliberately “destroyed,” which is what he suggests is the true meaning of the g-n-z root that gives us the word geniza. (Margoliouth was known for having what one writer has called “the kind of beautiful mind that could see patterns where none existed” and who instead of telling his dog to “ ‘Sit!’ … would order it to ‘Assume the recumbent position!’ ”) “It is a strange feeling,” he told his Oxford audience, “after reading some pages in illustration of a peculiar saying or expression to find that that saying or expression never existed.”
The “key” that led Margoliouth to the convoluted argument of his lecture was his realization that the language of Ben Sira was, in all probability, not the “classical” Hebrew of the Prophets, but rather a mongrel and quantitatively metrical sort of “post-biblical language,” incorporating “vulgar” Hebrew as well as elements of “Chaldean [Aramaic] and Syriac.” The replicated text, Margoliouth asserted, showed that there was in fact a huge gulf between the diction and syntax (and thought) of Ben Sira and that of “the grave of the Old-Hebrew and the Old-Israel.” While Margoliouth was by no means a higher—or for the most part even a Bible—critic (he argued aggressively for revelation and held wholly distinct theories of dating), he shared Higher Criticism’s tendency to disparage postbiblical Judaism and to see in the history of Hebrew violent disjunction and decline rather than continuity and organic evolution. (“What a descent!” he calls it in another essay.) And in coming to his conclusions Margoliouth pointedly dismissed the many Hebrew passages of Ben Sira that appear in early midrashic literature, which he snidely referred to as “the whole rabbinic farrago.” Needless to say, Hebraic hackles were raised. For Schechter in particular, Margoliouth’s lecture amounted to the casting down of a gauntlet.
/> Margoliouth was Schechter’s foil in every way. Where Schechter was educated in patchwork if serious fashion in a variety of European institutions, including the yeshiva, hadn’t earned a doctorate, and was, as a non-Anglican, never granted a chair at Cambridge, Margoliouth, twelve years his junior, was an Orientalist whose prodigious learning (reflected in erudite publications examining texts in Persian, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Greek) earned him a prestigious professorship at Oxford and prize after prize—such that “he ceased to be quite human,” as one eulogist would put it. In Cambridge the impulsive Schechter worked away with an all-consuming, Hasidic zeal; at Oxford Margoliouth was known as a cold contrarian and serial debunker—of, for example, the authenticity of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and the Elephantine Hebrew papyri. (“Never was a learned man less apt to wax enthusiastic over the value of learning,” observed Gilbert Murray, the well-known British classicist and translator.) And while Schechter sought throughout his life to demonstrate the unbroken line of Jewish vitality through the ages, Margoliouth saw Judaism through an apostate’s eyes, arguing for the relevance of Ben Sira not to Jewish continuity, but to the Greek New Testament.
A year after being appointed to his Cambridge post, Schechter published a pointed response to his Oxford colleague, though he mentions Margoliouth and his lecture only in passing. This study of rabbinical quotations from Ben Sira was Schechter’s first published work as a lecturer at the university. His goal with the article was to show that Ben Sira may once have been included in the biblical canon; was not composed in meter; and that “the version of Ecclesiasticus known to the Rabbis was mostly written in pure Hebrew”—that is, Hebrew as it was used by a masterful writer of scripture in the second century B.C.E., not the motley pastiche of Margoliouth’s reconstructed passages, of which Schechter said: “I do not pretend to understand [them]. They are certainly not Hebrew.” Finding the original version of Ben Sira would, in other words, help Schechter build a case against both the likes of Margoliouth and the more properly Protestant higher critics, who were—obviously—still very much on his mind and under his skin.
In that early study, however, Schechter was working with only a handful of quotations scattered through numerous works and handed down from rabbi to rabbi. Now, bobbing up from the depths of history was a page from what appeared to be the work itself.
The find roused him to such a degree, then, because Schechter had from the start seen Ben Sira as a critical link in the chain of Jewish bequeathal through the ages—one that connected the Beit haMikdash (the House of the Shrine, or the Temple) to the Beit haMidrash (the House of Learning, a term that first appears in Ben Sira itself, though it didn’t yet denote a place of rabbinic study). That ancient house of learning was, Schechter believed, headed in spirit and possibly in fact by Ben Sira himself. Which is to say that already in Ben Sira’s day—with the Temple still standing and sacrifices being offered at its altar—young men were being taught the tradition of wisdom and ethics in an early form of the Beit haMidrash. So in a sense, the culture that we know as Judaism today has its foundations in that fragment passed on to Schechter by Agnes and Margaret. In any event, its relevance for Judaism as he was encountering it in England seems to have virtually leapt out at the uprooted Romanian, who—noting the social circumstances and educational ideals of the book, and its author’s sober assessment of mortality—characterized Jewish life in Ben Sira’s time as “a world very much like ours.”
For one, there was the author’s grounded if not effortless attempt at absorbing elements of the surrounding Hellenistic society into his notion of Judaism. Wisdom in this Hellenized context meant “culture,” and what Homer and his poems were to the Greek notion of paideia (or the centrality of education in the formation of character), Moses and scripture were to the Jews (at least in Ben Sira’s “fantasy,” which is how one scholar has described his hymn to the tradition). Moreover, the “good” for Ben Sira included not only the moral good of a purer sort, but a proper appreciation, in both ethical and aesthetic respects, of the full range of life’s pleasures, subtleties, and trials: “What is life to a man without wine? / It was made to make men glad. / Drunk in season and temperately, / wine is … gladness of soul.… / A ruby seal in a setting of gold / is music at a banquet of wine.” Detailed and indeed still useful instruction is given about how to behave at such a banquet, or symposium. Apart from moderation in drink, the old are cautioned not to interrupt the music with their talk and not to show off their cleverness or erudition, and the young not to be presumptuous (“among the great, do not act as their equal”). More delicate problems are also addressed. The book is hardly calling for withdrawal from the world, notes one commentator: “[Ben Sira’s] godly man wears golden jewelry and bracelets on his right arm and appreciates meats and dainties. When invited as a guest, he should not greedily put his hand into the common dish. If, however, he should happen to overeat, he should leave the table, like a gentleman, and go elsewhere to vomit.” (Well, some of it involves a world like ours.)
Ben Sira’s consciousness of nature is also often utterly familiar and wonderfully concrete: “By His command He sends the driving snow / and speeds the lightnings of judgment. / Therefore the storehouses are opened, / and the clouds fly forth like birds.… The eye marvels at the snow’s whiteness, and the mind is amazed at its falling.” And moving into an equally physical feel for the abstract, he writes: “A mind settled on an intelligent thought is like the stucco decoration on the wall of a colonnade.” At the same time the book’s defense of appropriate instruction betrays an underbelly of anxiety on the part of the author, who—his grandson the translator notes—composed the book “to help the outsiders” (Jews not trained in this tradition) gain access to these vital teachings. Their reputation as People of the Book notwithstanding, ordinary Jews of the early Hellenistic period absorbed scripture only at the remove of religious practice and through oral teachings passed down through the family. Torah readings were not part of the Temple service and the study of the Torah itself was reserved for specialists like Ben Sira and his pupils. And even Jewish intellectuals educated in the traditional texts were increasingly influenced by Greek-style learning. As another of the principal twentieth-century commentators on the book puts it: “These Jews [of Ben Sira’s period] had a gnawing, unexpressed fear that the religion of their ancestors was inadequate to cope with the needs of social and political structures that had changed enormously. To bolster the faith and confidence of his fellow Jews, Ben Sira published his book.”
So it wasn’t merely that Schechter sought to bring Judaism into the new world from the old—out of the trance of Eastern European piety and Orthodox religious observance and into the vortex of modern scholarship—but that he longed to limn a Jewish culture that reached through history with integrity and without diminishment of strength. The discovery of the original Hebrew text of Ben Sira, composed during a critically transitional phase of the Second Temple period, and essentially identical to the copy of the book possessed by the later rabbis and also by Jews in medieval Egypt, would buttress his claims for the validity of this continuous culture. “We thus see clearly,” wrote Schechter, acutely conscious of his own predicament, “that what inspired Ben Sira was the present and the future of his people.”
Perhaps—but for Margoliouth the newly discovered Ben Sira fragments in a tenth-century hand were “rubbish,” which is to say, second- or third-rate Hebrew renderings made from a Persian translation of the original Greek and Syriac. “This … is the miserable trap in which all of Europe’s Hebraists have been ensnared,” Margoliouth sneered, noting that they were off in their dating of these fragments by no less than thirteen hundred years! If Schechter could use the discovery of the Hebrew Ben Sira to show that the Protestant critics were fundamentally mistaken in their dating of key biblical books—and better yet, if he could find the rest of the long-lost Ecclesiasticus and prove that these critics and Oxford’s professor of Semitic languages were disfiguring and fundamenta
lly misrepresenting the history of Judaism—that would help considerably to undermine their authority. The inevitable dose of Oxbridge and also personal rivalry provided by Margoliouth and Neubauer (who was, meanwhile, racing to find other Ben Sira leaves in the Bodleian collection) only added fuel to an already very serious fire.
“I am all Sirach now,” Schechter would soon write to a Philadelphian confidant, noting that he was preparing “a declaration of war to [sic] certain results of higher criticism … Heaven knows that I do not want to play the savior of the orthodox party. It is for me a simple question of history.… We ought,” he added, stating his motivation as clearly as he ever would, “to recover our Bible (Apocrypha included) from the Christians.” To do so, he’d first have to make his way to Cairo.
4
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Into Egypt
Schechter was now a man with a mission—a “secret mission,” as Mathilde dubbed it in a letter from Cambridge to the judge and bibliophile Mayer Sulzberger, that same Philadelphian friend of her husband. True, Mathilde was writing a romance novel in her spare time and had always displayed a certain theatrical dash in her prose, though this time she wasn’t dramatizing at all when she described in an epistolary whisper how Schechter had quietly slipped out of England on December 16, 1896, bound for Egypt and Palestine. He had gone, she explained, for “purposes of research (Hebrew Mss.)” though “the fact will be announced … only … about the end of January, when he will already have secured permission to work in the old Genizah, as otherwise his plans might have been defeated.” He had left home for several months but—she couldn’t quite contain herself here—“glowing with love of labour and enthusiasm, to the land of bondage and land of unfulfilled promises to try his luck.”
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