And neither last nor least of the major topics untouched upon in this book, the Geniza holds a store of detailed and often intimate information relating to one of the greatest figures of the medieval Jewish day—the philosopher and communal leader Moses (Musa) ben Maimon, or Maimonides, whose somewhat tortured son appears in our final chapter. The Geniza has yielded more than sixty fragments in the philosopher’s own handwriting, including marked-up “draft copies” of his famous Mishneh Torah (which was, controversially, intended to replace the Talmud as a core text for study). These drafts are full of crossed-out words and second thoughts—revealing what we might think of as either a perfectionist, conscientious, neurotic, or simply human side of the Rambam. The Geniza has also preserved moving examples of his personal correspondence (to, among others, his beloved traveling-businessman brother, David—who eventually drowned in the Indian Ocean) and numerous specimens of his dashed-off responses to petitioners’ questions about Jewish law. At the same time, we see Maimonides the Jewish physician at work, as the Geniza has left us a letter of application to apprentice with Dr. Maimonides, and some of his handwritten prescriptions, including aids to digestion and what appears to be a kind of medieval Viagra, an iron-water-based concoction designed to boost male potency. The Geniza also lets us know that, despite his generally party-squashing, stoic philosophical tendencies, the Rambam seems if nothing else to have been liberal with prescriptions of wine, the curative powers of which he apparently held in high esteem. In fact, the Geniza provides the equivalent of an entire medieval Physicians’ Desk Reference, describing in precise detail the cause, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases; the preparation of a Mediterranean medicine chest of potions, pills, pastes, ointments, lotions, and gargles; and even the social and ethical aspects of the medical profession.
(Photo Credit bm.4)
Alongside this largely unexplored mountain range of fragments relating to the principal modes of medieval Jewish life in the East, the Geniza has turned up a number of curious though by no means trifling items among its foothills. The earliest known piece of Jewish musical notation surfaces there, for example—in manuscripts left by one Obadiah, a messianically minded early-twelfth-century ex–Norman monk of southern Italian origin who converted to Judaism and eventually settled in Fustat. And further testament to the Geniza’s ability to blindside us are two of the world’s oldest Yiddish documents, which were probably left behind by Ashkenazic visitors to Egypt: a fourteenth-century 420-line anonymous poem in rhymed quatrains about Abraham’s destruction of his father’s idols, the story of which is told in considerable (midrashic) detail and with what at times seems almost a kind of slapstick humor—and, from the Middle High German epic tradition, a Yiddish narrative poem that has no German analogue and is therefore invaluable for the study of early German literature.
(Photo Credit bm.5)
In a much lower Yiddish register, Geniza scholars have found a group of letters from a sixteenth-century Jerusalemite named Rachel Zussman to her grown businessman son Moshe in Cairo. Among the earliest examples of Yiddish letter-writing, and clearly part of a much more extensive correspondence, they tell of the once well-off but now struggling Prague-born woman’s complicated relationship with her only child. Apart from warning him to watch over his money carefully and (above all) to keep up his studies, and also not to be proud when he does something good and of course to write her more often—she wastes little time before pressing the inevitable buttons: “God knows what will become of me,” she moans, adding that she has already spent such and such amount this month and has had to borrow money from her own grandson, but
God will help me, and all [the people of] Israel in the future.… Don’t worry, my son. I always ask God that you not be sick and that I suffer in your stead. And I also ask that He not let me die before I see your face again and you lay your hands over my eyes.… Don’t worry, my son … but don’t come now. [The situation, she explains, isn’t good.] Don’t worry, my son, … if I died I would not have a sheet to be brought down from my bed in … and I don’t have a cover for my head. If you can, buy me one, cheaply.… Come back to the holy city.
While one would think that our Fustat closet contained a finite amount of material, the end of which will soon be reached, the history of scholars’ finds does make one wonder. Within the last decade or two a striking array of discoveries have proven that the Geniza stock is far from spent.
Just a few months back (we write in the first weeks of 2010), a fragment was found by a T-S Genizah Unit researcher that completes one of those previously extant Yiddish epistolary fragments and helps us understand the thrust of an otherwise hard-to-decipher letter from Rachel Zussman—which turns out, once again, to be her complaint that her son hasn’t written, that his silence is making her suffer, and that she thinks he’s wasting his time in Cairo and would do better for himself (learn more and make a better living) if he moved back home, to Jerusalem. One is tempted to declare “Jewish mothers and their sons” a new Geniza field altogether—between the apple of Wuhsha’s eye and a letter from an aristocratic elderly mother who, writing in Judeo-Arabic from Syria in 1067, offers up the familiar and almost conventional complaint that her son hasn’t been in touch for months: “I get letters from your brother, may God preserve him, but don’t find any from you among them.… Nothing less than a letter from you will cheer my spirits. Do not kill me before my time! … I fast and pray for you night and day.” And then, in classic medieval and also inimitable Jewish maternal fashion she animates the convention with a marvelous leap to the particular, pleading with him: “By God, … send me your worn and dirty shirts to revive my spirit.”
Also forced to stand brooding off to the side not only of our book, but of the entire field of Geniza studies for much of the previous century, is the long-scorned subject of magic and mysticism—with its incantations, fumigations, talismans, angels, curses, and cures. Such texts were widespread in medieval Jewish society, and thousands of “magical” pages exist in the Geniza, though they have been examined in serious scholarly fashion only since the 1980s. A particularly spicy specimen of this sort was encountered not long ago—a multilingual curse that begins in Judeo-Arabic, “Take a plate of lead and write on it in the first hour of the day; bury it in a new grave which is three days old,” then moves into Hebrew and Aramaic, in which it addresses by name specific angels (Anger, Wrath, Rage, Fury, and the Destroyer), adjuring them to “blot out the life of N. son of N. from this world” (the victim’s name is to be filled in by the one who utters the curse). A short sentence in Arabic (and Arabic characters), in a different and later hand, follows as a kind of postoperative report, observing that “it’s effective for killing.” Other magic fragments outfit us with recipes for sleep, fishing, ease in childbirth, expelling mice from a home, making people shudder in a bathhouse, and causing a would-be beloved’s heart to burn with desire.
(Photo Credit bm.6)
Quietly spectacular finds have emerged of late beyond the main collections as well. In 2002, a tin box containing 350 Geniza pages was found almost by chance in the Geneva Public and University Library. Archivists came across it while going through the papers of a noted Swiss scholar who had purchased the fragments together with Greek papyri in Cairo at the end of the nineteenth century. The top of the box bears a faint ink inscription that begins “Textes hébraïques … Provenant de la Synagogue du Vieux Caire” and goes on to tell us that the manuscripts were purchased by Jules Nicole in 1896–97 and identified in part by his son Albert Nicole.
Having just completed his graduate studies in theology, Albert was passing through Oxford on his way to a fellowship in Edinburgh when he heard from a colleague about the “sensational” recent discovery of parts of the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus from Cairo and began to wonder if the Nicole family tin box might not contain additional passages from this missing scriptural link. In 1898, newly ordained as a minister, the younger Nicole brought his fragments back to Oxford, where—with Adolf Neubauer and
A. E. Cowley—he examined the collection; but—plus ça change—apparently Neubauer wasn’t impressed (though several palimpsests drew his attention) and the material was returned to Geneva, where it lay untouched in a vault for the next 104 years. When the box was rediscovered at the start of the twenty-first century, a local Dominican scholar-priest was called in to examine the documents, which he sorted in rudimentary fashion—and back they went into the collection, until, three years later, the director of the Institute for Microfilmed Manuscripts at the National Library in Jerusalem (the goal of which is to gather copies of every Hebrew manuscript on the planet) just happened to write to the Geneva library about an administrative matter concerning a particular collection. He also asked in passing if the library had acquired any other Judaica over the course of the previous fifteen years. “Oui et non,” responded the Geneva librarian, who then told the story of the newly discovered old tin box, which turned out (after examination by various specialists from Jerusalem) to contain an extremely well preserved and characteristic range of Geniza goods. There was everything from Mishna, Talmud, and Gaonic fragments to liturgical texts, historical documents, Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic correspondence, and of course poetry—including previously unknown work by major and minor writers alike and, amazingly, a copy of that same foundational “wine poem” by Dunash ben Labrat that Hayyim Schirmann had identified from the caption he’d discovered as a young man in a Cambridge manuscript in the 1930s. The Geneva Dunash fragment was just the second copy of this key Spanish Hebrew poem ever seen by modern eyes; more important, this version was considerably longer than the earlier find and so raised a cloud of fresh questions, namely: Which was the “real” version of the poem? Was the shorter poem detached from its end at some point? Or was the new ending tacked on later? The different scenarios can lead to wholly disparate readings of the poem, reflecting divergent understandings of the period’s origins. Such are the ways of the Geniza that a development as dramatic as this one leaves us with more riddles than resolutions.
(Photo Credit bm.7)
Quieter still is another recent discovery that involves an even more essential sort of poetic justice than does the Geneva find. In the spring of 2007, a British dealer in Judaica put up for sale several unidentified Geniza fragments that had initially been purchased at auction by a German collector in 1898 and held privately ever since. In preparation for the sale, the fragments were submitted to specialists, who identified them tentatively as liturgical hymns, and they were sold to an American collector. A short while later, digitized images of three of the manuscripts came into the skilled hands of Shulamit Elizur, a leading expert in liturgical and medieval poetry, and one of Ezra Fleischer’s most distinguished students, as well as his successor at the Geniza Research Institute named for him. Elizur easily confirmed the identification of two of the fragments as medieval poems from Spain and Palestine (one of them by Yehuda HaLevi), but the third gave her pause. This was something different. It contained none of the trademark signs of medieval verse, and its language instantly marked it as a kind of wisdom literature. But which? Though further probing left her with a strong hunch, the clock was ticking and she was late for an important meeting. She put the printout of the photographed manuscript down—and only in the taxicab heading home from her meeting did she confide in her husband, also a seasoned Geniza scholar, what she suspected.
Her excitement mounting, if not her haste, and the ghost of Schechter perhaps lurking, she continued, late into the night and with her husband’s help, to inch through the four partly torn pages of blocky letters, as she checked them against different published texts and cross-referenced translations. Preparations for the Sabbath and the Sabbath itself brought the work to a halt. (The Elizurs are strictly observant.) But after nightfall on Saturday, she resumed her investigations, and by Monday she was certain: glowing before her on the computer screen were long-lost passages from the same second-century B.C.E. book, the original Hebrew Ben Sira, which had triggered the initial chase for the Geniza. Missing since the tenth century, here they were well into the first decade of the new millennium being slipped into the puzzle Schechter had begun assembling in the late 1890s—a still gap-filled textual tapestry to which Neubauer, Cowley, Adler, Schirmann, and others had already contributed pieces.
And so it is that month after month Geniza miracles continue to occur, as vigilant scholars sift through the Cairene debris, sometimes on microfilm or in digitized versions, sometimes leaning over, or on, the paper and parchment in person—pliant, resilient, immaculate pages with the ink still vivid, and thumbnail-sized remnants of brittle pages concealing faded words in their grain. If the record of the past decade, or even the past year, is any indication, other treasures, large and small, will no doubt surface as well—in Cambridge and in Oxford, in Princeton, New York, and Budapest, perhaps in another Geneva tin, at the bottom of a forgotten old-world briefcase, or maybe in Fustat itself. “Turn it and turn it,” urges the sage Ben Bag-Bag—in that same mishnaic tractate, the Sayings of the Fathers, that begins by elaborating the chain of tradition’s transmission and enjoins us to take no object for granted—“everything is in it.” And there are, it would seem, as many ways to write a history of the Geniza as there are scholars or readers who have stepped, or might step, through the looking glass of its scattered leaves.
ILLUSTRATIONS
* * *
1.1 Margaret Gibson on a camel. By permission of Westminster College, Cambridge.
1.2 Agnes Lewis in a tent. Westminster College, Cambridge.
1.3 Solomon Schechter. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. (All images marked “JTS” are courtesy of the JTS Library.)
1.4 Ben Ezra synagogue. Photographed by Richard Pare; by permission of the photographer.
1.5 The Geniza. Photographed by the authors, December 2009.
2.1 The Sphinx. From Description de l’Egypte, Antiquités, vol. 5 (Paris, 1823).
2.2 Avraham Firkovitch. Special thanks to Mikhail Kizilov for providing us with this photo.
2.3 Elkan Nathan Adler. This and all Cambridge University Library images (marked CUL) are reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
2.4 Greville Chester. From T. G. H. James, Ancient Egypt: The Land and Its Legacy (London, 1988).
2.5 Egyptological Exhibit poster from the World’s Columbian Exposition.
2.6 Shelomo Aharon Wertheimer. Courtesy of Shelomo and Dafna Leshem.
2.7 Wertheimer letter to the Cambridge librarian, April 1893. CUL Add. 8398/12.
2.8 Adolf Neubauer, 1899. Schwadron collection, by permission of the National Library of Israel.
2.9 Count Riamo d’Hulst (tentative identification by Rebecca Jefferson). CUL Views y.4.
3.1 Francis Jenkinson diary. CUL Add. 7417.
3.2 The Ben Sira page that Schechter identified in the Giblews’ dining room. CUL Or. 1102.
3.3 D. S. Margoliouth. CUL.
4.1 Mathilde Schechter. JTS.
4.2 Charles Taylor, 1900. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.
4.3 The Grand Rabbi of Cairo, Raphael ben Shimon. CUL.
4.4 The Grand Rabbi of Cairo’s seal. JTS.
4.5 Villa Cattaui, Cairo. Thanks to Samir Raafat for permission to use this postcard.
4.6 Letter from Schechter to Mathilde, from Cairo. JTS, Schechter archive, box 26.
5.1 Francis Jenkinson. CUL.
5.2 Francis Jenkinson diary. CUL Add. 7422.
5.3 Schechter in the “Cairo apartment” at the Cambridge University Library, 1897. CUL.
5.4 Shorthand Bible, part of Leviticus 19:15–20:3. CUL T-S AS 63.5.
5.5 Children’s primer. JTS Mss 7737.2r.
6.1 Yannai/Aquila palimpsest. CUL T-S 12.184r.
6.2 Israel Davidson. JTS.
6.3 “Israel’s Delight,” 1914. JTS, Arc 28, series II, box 23, 5.
6.4 Salman Schocken. Alfred Bernheim photographer, courtesy of the Israel Mu
seum.
6.5 Schocken department store (designed by Mendelsohn), Stuttgart, 1928. © Landesmedienzentrum, Baden-Württemberg.
6.6 Menahem Zulay, 1947. By permission of Ada Yardeni.
7.1 E. J. Worman. CUL.
7.2 E. J. Worman notebook. CUL, T-S Genizah Research Unit.
7.3 E. J. Worman notebook. CUL, T-S Genizah Research Unit.
7.4 Jacob Mann. CUL.
7.5 “In the Land of the Pharaohs,” interview with Jack Mosseri. Jewish Chronicle, May 5, 1911.
7.6 Elkan Adler bookplate. JTS.
7.7 JTS reading room. From the JTS Register, 1921.
8.1 Karaite Bible mss., Jeremiah 20:4. JTS ENA 3913.3.
9.1 New Cambridge University Library. From Cambridge University Library, 1400–1934: With a Description of the New Building Opened by His Majesty the King, 22 October 1934, and an Account of the New Science Buildings of Agriculture, Botany, Physiology and Zoology (Cambridge, 1934).
9.2 Schocken Institute, Jerusalem. Courtesy of the Schocken Archive, Jerusalem.
9.3 Hayyim Schirmann, ca. 1940s. Alfred Bernheim photographer, courtesy of the Hebrew University.
9.4 The wife of Dunash fragments reunited. CUL Mosseri VIII.202.2; Mosseri IV.387.
9.5 Letter from Schirmann to Goitein, concerning the New Series. From the S. D. Goitein Geniza Lab (NLI, Jerusalem).
9.6 Letter in Yehuda HaLevi’s hand, from HaLevi in Alexandria to Halfon ben Natanel in Fustat, September 1140. JTS ENA 18.33.
9.7 Ezra Fleischer. Courtesy of Shula Bergstein.
10.1 “Sodi,” or “secret.” Letter courtesy of the Goitein family.
10.2 S. D. Goitein and Theresa Gottlieb’s wedding, Jerusalem, 1929. Other guests in the photo include S. Y. Agnon, Hugo Bergmann, and Levi Billig. Courtesy of the Goitein family.
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