Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

  There it was, yet again: the wholesale dismissal of the Geniza manuscripts as nothing more than a rag-paper and parchment scrap heap was, as we have seen, a very old story. Another Shelomo, the desperate nineteenth-century Jerusalem bookseller Shelomo Aharon Wertheimer, could attest to this, having been informed repeatedly by the Cambridge library that so many of the Cairene items he’d offered for sale were “not wanted” or “worthless.” Schechter himself had, after his own sometimes single-minded fashion, been blind to the value of those “Egyptian fragments” before he’d recognized the leaf of Ben Sira and caught the Geniza bug. And even after he’d realized the worth of the cache and worked so hard to rescue it, others had been decidedly unimpressed: “About a score of years ago,” wrote Schechter’s nutty if forbiddingly learned nemesis in the Ben Sira controversy, D. S. Margoliouth, in 1913, “the University of Cambridge was presented with the contents of a huge waste paper basket, imported from Egypt, where such stores abound. The material contained in these repositories is almost always valueless, like the gods of the Gentiles unable to do good or harm, and so neither worth preserving nor worth destroying.” While certain Geniza finds were widely celebrated, a dump-like aura stuck to those fragments left behind after Schechter’s departure for New York and the subsequent deaths of Charles Taylor (in 1908), Ernest Worman (in 1909), and the conscientious, bird- and bug-obsessed Cambridge librarian Francis Jenkinson (in 1923). Just four years after Jenkinson passed away in a Hampstead nursing home, one library assistant described what remained in the Taylor-Schechter boxes as “nothing of any interest or value. The late librarian would not allow anything to be destroyed which is the only reason why they were not burned years ago.” Writing a report in the 1940s, Jenkinson’s successor was only a bit more circumspect about his experience with one particular Geniza crate. “I have,” he admitted, “once or twice rummaged in the box (a large ‘tea chest’) and imagine that they are the leavings after Dr. Schechter had picked over the whole collection. They might from their size and condition be fairly described as a dust-heap … [and] seem (to an ignorant person) to be a hopeless case.”

  Goitein, though, knew otherwise, and, like Schechter before him, had an uncanny gift for recognizing treasure where others saw trash. And as Schechter’s “chance” encounter with Agnes Lewis in downtown Cambridge and subsequent identification of the Ben Sira fragment had in fact been the product of years of inadvertent preparation, so Goitein’s unexpected “rediscovery” of the Geniza didn’t just happen with a random tap on the shoulder from Creswick. (“I see you here every year working assiduously on our Geniza collections. I should like to show you something,” was how Creswick put it in the too-stiff-to-be-true account that Goitein offered in print. In his diary that evening, he noted simply “2:30 with Creswick and Skilliter to the seventh floor, under the roof.”) Whatever the librarian’s actual words were, by the time Creswick invited the small-boned, balding, bespectacled, and vaguely Mr. Magoo–like professor to ascend to the attic and have a look, S. D. Goitein had, unknowingly but rigorously, readied himself to fathom the significance of those crates.

  Before Goitein—or B.G., as it might be called, given the eventual scale of his accomplishment—scholars of the Geniza materials had almost always focused their energies on major trends, shall we say, in Jewish pietism. What mattered were liturgical fragments, pages of Talmud and midrash, rabbinical rulings, and documents relating to important political and religious developments, or to the lives and leanings of medieval Jewish communal leaders. Dramatic discoveries like the Ben Sira fragments, the piyyutim of Yannai, and the Damascus Document commanded the lion’s share of academic and popular attention during the first half of the twentieth century. While the materials were rich, the linguistic range of the texts in question remained, at this stage, narrow: fragments written in Hebrew and Aramaic lent themselves most readily to translation and commentary by scripturally savvy scholars of Judaica.

  Several others had, it’s true, ventured beyond the traditional languages of sacred Jewish writing and into the scrappier realm of Judeo-Arabic, which amounted to the Hebrew transliteration of an unadorned middle register of Arabic. This Judeo-Arabic was once the fluid language of most nonliterary written communication and instruction for the Jews of North Africa, Spain, and the Muslim East. (Classical Arabic—written in Arabic characters and considered by believing Muslims to be the holy language of Koranic revelation—was more formal, uniform, and elaborate.) At the start of the century, Ernest Worman had made a very preliminary attempt to detail some of the documents written in this language, and the historian Jacob Mann had taken a stab at Judeo-Arabic in some of his later work. In pre-state Palestine, scholars like David Baneth, whom his confidant Goitein regarded as “the father of the Geniza project,” had deepened these Arabic explorations.

  Language apart, however, the scholarship of this period still adhered by and large to the same high-minded conception of the Jewish past that had prevailed during Schechter’s day. This approach was Victorian and set in a major key, for full orchestra: “The History of the World …,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1888, “was the Biography of Great Men.” Eminent medievals like Maimonides, Yehuda HaLevi, Saadia, and the other Gaonim of Babylonia and Palestine played the prominent roles. Living proof of this all-star approach remains visible in twenty-first-century Jerusalem’s leafy Rehavia neighborhood, where the Hebrew University was housed in the early years of the state (as was the Schocken Institute ), and where so many of the Geniza scholars—including Goitein, Baneth, Zulay, and Schirmann—lived, alongside Gershom Scholem and much of the rest of the university faculty. (Indeed, had a large, well-placed bomb hit Rehavia in the early 1950s, it would have dealt a near-fatal blow to modern Jewish thought.) As a member of the Neighborhood Committee in the mid-1920s, yet another Geniza scholar, Simha Assaf, was charged with the task of naming the local streets, and for this purpose drew from “the period of Spanish splendor, which is close to the heart of every Jew.” So it is that one can to this day stroll down Ramban (Nahmanides) Avenue, take a right on Ibn Gabirol, head left at Abarbanel, right on Avraham ibn Ezra, right again on Alharizi, and end up in a park that was once known as Yehuda HaLevi Boulevard and later as the Garden of the Kuzari—a jungle-gym-filled playground named for the poet’s most important philosophical work.

  While Goitein, too, was steeped in the work of the members of this Golden Age pantheon, had he named Rehavia’s streets, the map might have looked different. The historical figures who interested him most—shopkeepers and scribes, beggars and brides—were those whose lives emerged from the fragments that earlier scholars had brushed aside as (once again that scowling estimation) without worth. “Business letter, and therefore valueless” was, Goitein noted wryly, the telling description of one such Geniza item in the catalog of a “most distinguished library.” But Goitein’s approach was intensely democratic and, as he understood from the very start of his work with the documents, it was precisely those fragments of a more humdrum-seeming daily nature—court depositions, merchants’ accounts, bills of divorce, and the like—that would allow him to bring the Mediterranean world of the High Middle Ages alive on the page, in all its quotidian glory.

  That start, however, was a long time coming. Surrounded by Geniza scholars and Geniza studies from his earliest days in Jerusalem, Goitein had, he said, “studiously avoided” the field for years. He “read the relevant publications, though not regularly,” and had the sense that “Geniza research was sufficiently taken care of by others.” Besides, his hands and head were plenty full without it.

  When he’d first come to Palestine in 1923, at age twenty-three, on a boat with his friend Gershom Scholem, Goitein, the Frankfurt- and Berlin-trained scholar of Islam, idealistic Zionist educator, and aspiring playwright, taught Bible and Hebrew at Haifa’s prestigious Reali High School. In the wake of the lukewarm public reaction to a turgid five-act costume drama he’d published, about a Jewish woman burned at the stake in twelfth-century France (pa
rticularly devastating was a serialized, three-part pan of the play in one of the leading Hebrew newspapers of the day by Shalom Spiegel, Goitein’s colleague at the Reali school, brother of Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel, and himself a future Geniza scholar), Goitein seems to have realized his severe limitations as a literary writer and been forced to consider how he might put his lively imagination to better use.

  So it was that in 1927 he accepted an invitation to move from Haifa to Jerusalem and take the job of the first-ever lecturer in the History of Islam and the Muslim Peoples at the Hebrew University’s newly founded School of Oriental Studies. “The whole student body turned up” for his initial lecture, he would later remember, because “everyone was curious to learn something about the Arabs.” Soon after, he married the aristocratic and strong-willed Theresa Gottlieb, a Latvian eurhythmics teacher and children’s book writer who had, as a younger woman, flirted seriously with political anarchism and appeared as a butterfly in one of Berlin director Max Reinhardt’s elaborate theatrical productions. By the late 1930s, with three children and a live-at-home mother (Theresa’s) to support, they were both working hard to make ends meet: in addition to his full-time job as chief inspector of Jewish and Arab schools in Palestine, or—as he preferred to introduce himself—“His Majesty’s senior education officer in Palestine,” Goitein was teaching almost daily at the university.

  (Photo Credit 10.2)

  He was absorbed, as well, in his own scholarship, which included intensive “ethnolinguistic” research on Yemenite Jews—the “most Jewish and most Arab of all Jews” he called them—and he found time to translate several volumes from Judeo-Arabic to Hebrew, to edit a lengthy work of classical Arabic history, and to write a number of “popular” books (on education, on the Yemenites) as well as dozens of academic articles, poems, letters, and reviews, even as he rose early every morning to put on his phylacteries and study a page of Gemara before doing his calisthenics. A grueling schedule of professional and social meetings filled his week, and even the Sabbath day was rigidly regimented: Torah study with his children in the morning, followed by a brisk and botanically instructive hike through the meadows and hills. Inquisitive and businesslike, he would also pause along the route to talk with—really interview—the Palestinian peasants working in their fields, or to discuss a new publication with some learned acquaintance. Later, he might set scraps of these conversations down in his journal, which reads at times like an anthropologist’s telegraphic field notes. (Written mostly in Hebrew, this diary also contains occasional, particularly private notations in the obscure and extinct South Arabian alphabet.) Aside from the strictly enforced two hours of naptime silence that reigned in the Goiteins’ Abarbanel Street apartment every afternoon, S. D. Goitein rarely stopped moving.

  To an onlooker it might have seemed, in other words, as though the spry and rather officious little man was suffering from a highly refined, intellectual case of A.D.D. One nonagenarian former student (now an eminent professor emeritus) recalls that Goitein was, during these years, “like a bumblebee, tasting all the flowers” and, according to Goitein’s own diary, Theresa described him as the human equivalent of Grand Central Station, with trains constantly coming and going in different directions.

  But then, for a critical month and a half in 1948, all those trains screeched to a standstill—and S. D. Goitein’s life was altered unexpectedly and forever.

  The circumstances surrounding this pivotal point in his own—and the Geniza’s—history are oddly opaque, though we do know this much: with war still wracking the two-month-old state of Israel and Goitein’s political mood darker than ever (he had never been sanguine about the prospects for peace, but the recent violence on all sides had compelled him to write even grimmer-than-usual letters to friends abroad, proclaiming, for instance, “I fear that our entire existence—our lives and our property—will be destroyed in a very short time if a miracle doesn’t occur”), he had set off for Europe, charged with what he vaguely called “a special mission.” Though the echo is inadvertent, his terminology was, bizarrely, almost identical to that Mathilde Schechter had used in a letter, some fifty-two years before, to describe Solomon’s top-secret trip to Cairo.

  To this day, no one knows for certain what Goitein’s mission was—not his children, not his students. His diaries from the period are frustratingly blank, and his correspondence reveals few clues. There are theories (he was sent on a diplomatic errand by the Israeli government, he was dispatched to retrieve a manuscript or book collection for the National Library), but little to go on in terms of hard facts. And while he would later describe at least part of his trip as “a most innocent undertaking,” it stands to reason that something urgent must have caused him to board a Piper plane in recently besieged and still tense Jerusalem and bid good-bye to his wife and children for a full three months. His sense of civic and domestic responsibility was, after all, unflagging, and the situation at home was dire: there were battles and bombings everywhere, and Theresa was serving as a volunteer nurse and witnessing all kinds of atrocities up close. Although it isn’t clear that he knew how long he would be gone or that he planned from the outset for his trip to take him beyond France, he left in July for the International Congress of Orientalists in Paris and returned only in October, from Hungary—on, it seems, a plane filled with frozen chickens, shipped for the Israeli army at the cost of forty grush [at the time, the Israeli equivalent of cents] a kilogram. “It’s good,” he quipped in a letter to his wife, “that I’ve lost weight.” In his later writing about this period he dispensed with the joking and took pains to mince around the specifics of what or who compelled him to embark on the Hungarian stage of this journey. (He also never explained what he was doing in Paris for more than a month.) He had, he says, planned to spend just two weeks in Budapest, recently occupied by the Soviets. But the new Communist bureaucracy was not nearly as efficient as the middle-aged Germanic scholar, and Goitein was forced to wait. And wait. And as he was waiting (for a full six weeks), he bided his time at the Academy of Sciences—again, we don’t really know why—where he had a chance to examine a small bundle of Geniza fragments from the David Kaufmann collection, that important gathering of manuscripts that had been housed in Hungary since Schechter’s day and which had narrowly escaped destruction after the Nazi invasion in 1944.

  The thin file that Goitein encountered that fateful autumn was apparently all that remained, after the war, of the documents that had been set aside much earlier in the century by the great Hungarian Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher, widely regarded as the founder of Islamology. A religious Jew and scholarly prodigy (he published his debut book—on the history and nature of Jewish prayer—at age twelve), Goldziher was the first European to study at the all-Muslim al-Azhar University in Cairo and was also the first to examine the Judeo-Arabic materials in the Kaufmann collection. “I can say,” wrote the notoriously irascible genius in 1906, “that I found the contents of the [Kaufmann] documents of extraordinary interest. To say nothing of … the letters and inventories which bear direct witness to every aspect of life.”

  It may just have been a coincidence that in the year leading up to Goitein’s trip to Hungary, he had published a spate of articles (several in Hebrew and one in Arabic, for a popular Egyptian journal) about Goldziher’s life and work, and the relationship between the late master’s decidedly uneasy Judaism and his fascination with Islam. As rendered by Goitein—who was himself, it’s worth noting, not just a student of any and all aspects of Islamic civilization but descended from a long line of Hungarian and Moravian rabbis—Goldziher comes across as (like Goitein) unquenchably curious. Goldziher, Goitein writes, was someone who knew “how to create an enormous mosaic from the tiniest of tiny details, scattered in the most out-of-the-way places.”

  It may also have been mere chance that the Orientalist Congress where Goitein started his European trip that summer featured a presentation by the two Hungarian bibliophiles responsible for maintaining the Kauf
mann collection. This was the first meeting of the learned society since World War II, and the director of the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary, Samuel Löwinger, and the school’s then librarian (later director and himself an important Geniza researcher), Alexander Scheiber, used the occasion to announce that “the scholars surviving from the annihilated Jewry of a little European country take the liberty of reporting … on what has remained … from the Hebrew and Hebrew-Arabic MSS in Hungary.” The black shadow of the Holocaust, one imagines, must have trailed every step of Goitein’s trip, his first to Europe in years.

  The mysteries of his “innocent undertaking” notwithstanding (in the end he declared it a failure), there is, for our purposes, the more important question of just what it was, after all those decades of studious avoidance, that suddenly drew Goitein so magnetically to the modest bunch of twenty-one Geniza fragments that Löwinger and Scheiber entrusted to him during his long wait in what he called their “ruined city.” In fact only seven of these fragments were, to his mind, of any value. These included an eleventh-century letter from Jerusalem to Fustat, in which one man consoled another about the loss of a great deal of money; an emotionally charged business letter concerning the delay of a wood shipment sent to Spain from Kairouan; an epistolary account “in very animated language” of a violent pirate attack; and a draft of plans for a medieval fund-raising drive. (Slave girls and dancers figure prominently in the summary of the potential donors’ valuable property.) The rest of the fragments were, Goitein would later write—need we say it?—just “scraps and tattered remains.”