Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

  We don’t know precisely what happened next, but one can imagine that this find would have set the wheels whirring in the mind of the unpretentious yet ambitious Hebraicist. Davidson’s wife, in her much later memoir, notes that after her husband had brought out his important edition of The Book of Delight, a picaresque volume by the twelfth-century Spanish Hebrew poet Yosef ibn Zabara, “the urge became ever stronger to go abroad and seek manuscripts at their source.” Like Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, Davidson wanted to see the real thing, not a reproduction, and he was especially interested in inspecting the enormous collection of Geniza documents that Schechter had left behind at the Cambridge University Library. And so, in June of 1914, having booked passage on a freighter with the help of a friend, Davidson, his wife, and their young daughter set out on a twelve-day voyage to reach Europe.

  Davidson did make one important discovery in Cambridge, of another work by Saadia Gaon, but it was after he returned from England that “the modest man … [with] a veritable genius for labor,” as one colleague described him, found what it seems he’d been looking for. Again, we don’t know when, or even how—neither he nor his wife has left a paper trail to his epiphany, and much of his eight-thousand-volume library, which was housed at JTS, was destroyed in the 1966 fire there—but at some point (institutional lore has it on one Sabbath afternoon, waiting for students to arrive for tea), something or someone told Davidson to take the Burkitt and Taylor palimpsest volumes down from the shelf and have another look at that Hebrew upper writing, which Schechter had identified as liturgical and which Charles Taylor had gestured at in passing as he hurried on to the more alluring, underwritten Greek.

  And there it was, and had been for nearly twenty years, in at least four places on several pages bound between covers, printed by the Cambridge University Press and distributed to libraries around the world, where no one had noticed: Yannai’s name, in that bold and easily decipherable Hebrew hand, running down the spine of a poem as an acrostic “signature.” It was a find that would, in time, lead scholars to the complete works of one of the titans of Hebrew poetry and a thorough reconsideration of the evolution and nature of Hebrew literature.

  Given the significance of Davidson’s discovery, one can’t help but note what has been called the “grotesque” nature of the fact that these hymns had been lying there, available in print for two decades. Yannai’s work appeared on eight of the seventeen palimpsest pages published by Burkitt and Taylor—without anyone noticing what it actually was. The palimpsestic ironies within the grotesquery of that long delay in discovering the Yannai are compounded further when one realizes that Burkitt’s terse report of his accidental Aquila discovery was printed in the Times of London on Tuesday, August 3, 1897, directly under Schechter’s spectacular announcement of having found “a hoard of Hebrew manuscripts.” Adding to that irony was part two of Schechter’s article, which was published the following year and went on at great length about the nature of the early medieval Hebrew hymns and the pleasure their co-redeemer took in them. “I am particularly fond,” writes Schechter,

  of looking at the remnants of a Piyyutim collection … with their rough edges and very ancient writing. In turning those leaves, with which time has dealt so harshly, one almost imagines one sees again the “gods ascending out of the earth,” transporting us, as they do to the Kaliric period, and perhaps even earlier, when synagogues were set on fire by the angels who came to listen to the service of the holy singers, and mortals stormed Heaven with their prayers.… These are, however, merely my personal sentiments. The majority of students would look rather askance upon the contents of the Sabbatical hymn under which the remains of Aquila were buried for nearly nine centuries.

  Already in 1897, then, Schechter realized that he had before him (and over the Aquila) a liturgical hymn for the Sabbath that was very likely from the period of Yannai’s famous student and reputed victim, Kallir, and he even grew rhapsodic over the transformational quality of the presence of these poems on the ancient page. And yet, inexplicably, Schechter never seems to have directed his protégé, Israel Davidson, whose field this was, to examine these works—not even after the latter’s 1910 article about Yannai, which was followed by a series of pieces published over the next three years under the same heading, “Poetic Fragments from the Cairo Geniza” (all in a journal that Schechter himself coedited). Nor did Davidson’s 1914 cut-rate cruise to Cambridge produce anything in the way of a lead. Furthermore, Davidson’s handwritten catalog of his private library—two highly evocative palm-sized notebooks encased in red wraparound leather, prepared in 1914 and titled Hemdat Yisrael, Hebrew for “Israel’s Delight” (or “Desire”), shows that he owned at least one of the Cambridge palimpsest volumes, and so would have known of the other. “If the two English scholars [Burkitt and Taylor] had not published the facsimiles,” Davidson noted, “the Mahzor of Yannai would very likely have remained unknown for many more years to come.”

  (Photo Credit 6.3)

  Newly oriented, Davidson went back to the palimpsests and identified forty individual units of eight long composite poems, all of which were clearly part of that Yannai “hymn book” he’d written of in 1910. Each of the elaborately orchestrated sequences was intended to accompany the portion of the Torah as it was read in Palestinian synagogues on the Sabbath during the period of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. As such, these poems were front and center in the calendrical and spiritual consciousness of that community’s Jews, who would, weekly, at the core of their sacred service, await the latest word from their poet—news that might inject life into their faith. In their serial and commissioned aspect, Yannai’s composition of poems for the prayer service has been compared to Bach’s production of cantatas for Sunday after Sunday while serving as musical director of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig.

  Differing from present-day Jewish practice, which is based on the Babylonian rite and completes the cycle of reading through the Torah annually, Palestinian communities in the Land of Israel and the Diaspora divided the Torah into much shorter portions and so they took three times as long to read from Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy before starting all over again. This “triennial” division of the Five Books of Moses, along with the distinctive Palestinian spelling of the poet’s name (yod, nun, yod, yod—rather than yod, nun, alef, yod—though both were pronounced ya-NIGH), and the fact that there were no references in the poetry whatsoever to Islamic presence in the Holy Land, confirmed previous speculation that the poet hailed not from Italy, and certainly not from the tenth century, but from Palestine prior to the seventh-century Muslim conquest of the region.

  Looking from the other end of the telescope for the work’s earliest possible date, we see both that the poet makes extensive use of particular collections of midrash that were edited in the late fifth century C.E. and that his hymn book assumes the existence of a standardized, if still flexible, core liturgy, which was established shortly before that. This leads most scholars to date the poet to the mid-to-late sixth or early seventh century, which is to say, around the reign of Justinian the Great and the height of Byzantine achievement and influence, when architectural monuments such as the Ravenna mosaics were being marveled at and the rebuilt Hagia Sophia was worshipped in. It is also when the preeminent Byzantine hymnist of the jeweled style, Romanos, was writing his ornate, theatrical poems.

  But just as the triennial system contributed to the development of Hebrew liturgical poetry—in that the brevity of the weekly readings left much more time for embellishment and literary commentary in the form of hymns and midrashim—it was also responsible for the tradition’s demise. For one, the proliferation of liturgical poems eventually provoked widespread rabbinical opposition to the phenomenon itself, and, increasingly, pressure was put on communities to rid their worship of these overgrown baubles. More significantly, when the triennial reading fell out of practice—by the ninth or tenth century in Palestine and, it seems, early in the thirteenth century in Fust
at—Yannai’s hymns and others like them were rendered obsolete or fundamentally distorted in attempts to dismantle them and adapt them to the annual (Babylonian) reading. As a result, they disappeared almost entirely.

  Now that work was back, at least in part—though what it was saying was by no means clear, as one example of many makes plain:

  [when any man hath an issue] out of his fle[sh] and …

  As who [ ........ ] on high .................

  [B....... ] turn [ ................. ]

  Circumscribed by justice as well..........

  [D..... ] as an issue of .........

  Each who [ ............... ] made him

  For his desire....... if ... it [..... ]

  [G] ... of his from him, and his law and ma[ ... ]

  [H] ...............................

  Impurity lies within him, if his ethic ends

  J...... upon him his corrector

  [K]ept his yeast leavened from youth

  Leaving the issue to flow from his skin

  And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying: Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them: When any man hath an issue out of his flesh, his issue is unclean

  Despite the gall-eaten gaps that Davidson found in the manuscript—chasms, really, into which the words of our palimpsest long ago tumbled—several characteristic elements of Yannai’s poetry are immediately apparent, even in rough translation. Like many poems in this tradition, the hymn develops along an alphabetical acrostic. The final line of this opening section (alef through lamed in the Hebrew) leads into the first verse of the portion of the Torah read in the synagogue that week—in this case the seder (literally, the order) consisting of Leviticus 15:1–24, which treats the question of ritual purity, bodily discharge, and their attendant expiatory offerings—hardly the stuff of an inspiring lyricism. And yet, pus, too, was part of the early medieval Hebrew poetic process. For it was incumbent upon the poet to make use of all the literary devices at his disposal in order to revive the experience of worship and wonder for his synagogue listeners. In this the payyetan was more mediating priest than scolding prophet.

  However exotic or ingrown their compositions might seem by our own standards, at their best payyetanim produced real poetry, sometimes of a major sort. A vast allusive range; a feeling for dramatic possibility; an ability to extend scriptural narration; a varied repertoire of virtuoso musical strategies; and above all a developed sense of the tradition’s homiletical potential and the congregation’s hunger for the nourishment it might afford—all these were used to intensify the liturgical moment, to suck marrow from the seemingly dry bones of routinized prayer and to make it matter afresh, as the Mishna demanded: “Whosoever makes his prayer a fixed task,” it cautions, “his prayer is not a true supplication.” Other sources echo that call: “One’s prayer should be made new each day,” the Palestinian Talmud tells us, and “As new water flows from the well each hour, so Israel renews its song.” Extending that notion, other writers still have likened the piyyutim to angels, which—according to one midrash—are created by God for specific missions and vanish after completing them. Among certain Jewish communities of the East, from roughly the fifth through the end of the ninth centuries, it seems to have been considered disgraceful for a prayer leader to recite as part of the prayer service work that wasn’t his own.

  Part three of Yannai’s long sequence based on the Levitical discussion of impurity contains the telltale acrostic “signature” that quietly, if precariously, copyrights the poet’s work. Though scholars before Davidson did not know it, and therefore did not see it, in Yannai’s mahzor this section always involves a four-line (or eight-hemistich) stanza, strung along the poet’s acrostic signature and concluding with an allusion to the first verse of the week’s haftara, or supplementary reading from the prophetical books (in this case, Hosea 6:1 and its notion of returning to God—“who has torn, that he may heal”). While here, too, the manuscript is damaged, it is clear from the opening two lines and other piyyutim that the poet is employing full rhyme. This turns out to be an important literary discovery in its own right, as it represents the earliest known systematic employment of end rhyme in Hebrew, and one of the earliest in Western and Near Eastern literature.

  You, Lord, who are faithful, our God and healing’s master—

  your healing power is readied for all you summon with desire.

  Now we return, [turning] to[ward] you, .................

  as you give strength to our weakened hand … in yours

  Into the rain of fresh blows ..... he ....................

  and to the blow of ap.… [ah], blind wandering

  Instill our remnants with wholeness … [our … ess],

  Our father and healer, return to restore us.

  In short—and notwithstanding the many lacunae in the manuscript—Davidson’s discovery of Yannai’s work made it possible for the first time to follow the elliptical, complex, and even symphonic development of this new kind of liturgical poem, which was known in Hebrew as a kerova—from the Aramaic karova, meaning cantor or prayer leader, who would draw near (karov) to the ark in the synagogue as he led the prayers or offered a sermon. Given the emphasis in so many piyyutim on the priestly dimension of worship, a powerful link was established in these hymns between poetry and prayer as a substitution for sacrifice (which was no longer possible after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.). The synagogue by this time had evolved from the house of study it was during the time of Ben Sira to a place of worship, a mikdash me’at, or little sanctuary. Like a cultic rite, and perhaps not unlike an opera, the poem’s ability to move an audience was, in large part, rooted in the spectacle and splendor of its structure. For while it posed a challenge, socially and intellectually, and in many ways involved a code that had to be cracked, this product of an age obsessed with endless renewal and experience of the sublime in prayer was, apparently, sufficiently compelling to draw at least to certain synagogues large crowds—young and old—who would come, as one writer has put it, not with a prayer book they’d memorized, but anxious for a “fresh, living, and instructive word, one that would also console, as it provokes thought and serves as a spur to the imagination.”

  And so, Sabbath morning after Sabbath morning, Yannai’s poems and others like them would be recited, or sung, ornamenting the opening benedictions of the liturgy’s central prayer—the amida, or standing prayer. (To a certain extent the piyyutim were originally intended to replace the standard liturgy.) The variegated and sometimes powerful Hebrew of the kerovot (plural) gave expression to virtually every aspect of the people’s life as a people (though not as individuals), and it led worshippers into the innermost layers of their faith’s foundational text. For these poems were devotional devices, spiritual machines made of words that were designed with a particular function in mind. And just as Burkitt had proposed that the Aquila hovering beneath Yannai’s Hebrew came from a synagogue copy of the Bible in Greek translation, so Davidson concluded that this collection of hymns, written over Aquila’s Greek, was also intended for synagogue use—most likely by the Palestinian Jewish community in Fustat, where these manuscripts were found.

  The slim collection of some forty poems by Yannai that Davidson managed to bring quite elegantly between navy blue covers in 1919 was just the beginning. Alert now to the presence of a singular and major body of poetry among the some quarter million or so Geniza fragments held in libraries around the world, scholars turned their attention to the obvious—the upper writing, as it were, of the Geniza collection as a whole, where Hebrew liturgy (both hymns and prose prayers) constituted some 40 percent of the cataloged documents, and they began rummaging. Davidson himself continued to identify and publish additional Yannai fragments as well, but the next serious advance in the field came, oddly, if indirectly, from the shelves of a German department store.

  II

  Early in 1928, the fifty-one-year-old self-made businessman and cultural patron Salman S
chocken, looking a lot like a Roman patrician, traveled to Stuttgart to attend the opening of a new store, part of a chain he’d founded and operated throughout Germany. He had come a long way from his first job as a textile salesman based in Leipzig—that city of Bach’s cantatas—but he’d clearly taken a great deal with him. Schocken’s department stores were designed by some of the country’s finest architects, and the buildings themselves instantly became monuments of a kind. Implausible as it sounds, they were part of a broad, revolutionary vision that combined commerce and culture in an effort to bring “taste” of both a material and a spiritual sort to the hardworking members of German society at large. Just as he found new ways of making Bauhaus-inspired furniture, form-fitting cotton clothes, cologne, and the latest fashions in lingerie available to middle- and working-class people at affordable prices, so Schocken sought to disseminate the products of the humanist tradition to the masses—serious fiction, progressive cultural criticism, and both German and Jewish classics. By the time the Stuttgart store was completed, the Schocken chain was one of the largest in Europe.

  (Photo Credit 6.4)

  While Schocken’s marketing strategies extended through all registers and regions of the country, the cultural renaissance he helped lead was initially limited to a small and radical circle of Jewish intellectuals he supported, including the Hebrew novelist and future Nobel Prize winner S. Y. Agnon; the soon to be world-famous scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem; and the philosopher Martin Buber. But Schocken had plans to start a major publishing house, which would make classy, compact editions of those and other writers, including Kafka and Walter Benjamin, widely available. Eventually the German and then Palestinian and Israeli firm sprouted an American branch (which published the book you’re now reading), and in time, Schocken bought what would become the daily Hebrew paper of record in Palestine, Haaretz, which the family still runs. Apart from that—or not at all apart from that—Schocken was an avid collector of valuable German and Jewish books and manuscripts (he had nearly thirty thousand in his personal library at the time), and it was this latter passion that led him that day from the Stuttgart train station directly to an antiquarian-book dealer, who, without delay, showed him an old and very large poetry manuscript that had recently come onto the market and might be of interest to him. While the dealer didn’t know what the manuscript contained, Schocken—whom Scholem would dub “the mystical merchant”—had, it seems, a sense that the cache was special.