Sacred Trash
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For more on the unearthing of Yiddish manuscripts in the Geniza, see Leo Fuks, The Oldest Known Literary Documents of Yiddish Literature (Leiden, 1957); J. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts 1100–1750 (Oxford, 2004); Dovid Katz, Words on Fire (New York, 2004). The poems mentioned here are part of a bound volume and were discovered by Fuks in 1953. In Fuks’s opinion, by the fourteenth century an Ashkenazic community—seeking shelter from persecution in the north—may have settled in Egypt and Palestine, among other Eastern places. More recent scholars have argued that the codex may have belonged to travelers passing through. For the letters, see Ch. Turniansky, “A Correspondence in Yiddish from Jerusalem from the 1560s” [Heb], Shalem 4, 1984; S. Assaf, “A Yiddish Letter from Jerusalem” [Heb], Zion 7, 1941; and A. M. Habermann, “On Ashkenazim in the Geniza” [Heb], Te’uda 1, 1980. The letter quoted is T-S Misc 36.152. The more recent Yiddish find is T-S AS 202.383, discovered by T-S Genizah Unit researcher Esther-Miriam Wagner and published as the Unit’s Fragment of the Month, Oct. 2009. The fragment it completes is T-S NS 298.18. The exchange also contains Moshe’s answer.
Wuhsha and the Syrian mother don’t represent new finds, but they do represent a field that began to draw interest relatively late in the Geniza game. See Joel Kraemer, “Women Speak for Themselves,” in Reif, The Cambridge Genizah Collections, and Goitein, MS 3: viii, D. The Judeo-Arabic letter in question is T-S 13 J 23.5.
Magic and the Geniza are discussed further in Mark Cohen, “Goitein, Magic and the Geniza,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13, 2006; Steven Wasserstrom, “The Magical Texts in the Cairo Genizah,” in Genizah Research after Ninety Years, Reif and Blau, eds.; Wasserstrom, “The Unwritten Chapter: Notes towards a Social and Religious History of Geniza Magic,” in Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic in Antiquity, Shaul Shaked, ed. (Leiden, 2005); Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge, 2008); Bohak, “Reconstructing Jewish Magical Recipe Books from the Cairo Geniza,” Ginzei Qedem 1, 2005; Bohak and F. Neissen’s “Fragment of the Month,” Sept. 2007, T-S Unit Web site; L. Schiffman and M. Swartz, Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts from the Cairo Genizah: Selected Texts from Taylor-Schechter Box K1 (Sheffield, 1992); N. Golb, “Aspects in the Historical Background of Jewish Life in Medieval Egypt,” in Altman, Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies; P. Schafer, “Jewish Magic Literature in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages,” JJS 41, 1990; “Medieval Jewish Magic in Relation to Islam: Theoretical Attitudes and Genres,” in Judaism and Islam. Boundaries, Communications and Interactions. Essays in Honor of W. M. Brinner, B. H. Hary, J. L. Hayes, F. Astren, eds. (Leiden, 2000).
Details of the Geneva Geniza are drawn from The Cairo Geniza Collection in Geneva: Catalogue and Studies [Heb], David Rosenthal, ed. (Jerusalem, 2010). See, especially, David Rosenthal, introduction, Barbara Roth-Lochner, “Fragments from the Cairo Geniza in the Geneva Library”; Shulamit Elizur, “New Findings in the Study of Hebrew Poetry from the Geniza.” See also articles by Rosenthal, Haaretz, May 26, 2006, and June 9, 2006. Information regarding the correspondence with the Geneva library is courtesy of Benjamin Richler, at the time director of the Institute for Microfilmed Manuscripts, NLI (author interview and e-mail correspondence between Richler and Barbara Roth-Lochner, Oct. 7, 2005). Our thanks to Richler and Roth-Lochner for supplying this and other helpful information.
The riddles that arise in the wake of the new Dunash finding include the following: Was this originally a shorter polemical poem onto which Dunash attached an ending in praise of Hasdai—perhaps in order to camouflage the poet’s own disapproval of the looser ways of the Andalusian court and thereby win Hasdai’s approval? Or was this originally a poem that celebrated the ways of the court and the court’s patron, even as it acknowledged resistance to those ways? In the latter scenario, it would have then been truncated (by the poet or by someone else) so as to make it seem either more ambiguous or in fact to make it a poem that denounced the courtly ways.
Information regarding the new Ben Sira find is from author interviews with Shulamit Elizur and Binyamin Elizur and S. Elizur, “A New Fragment of the Hebrew Ben Sira” [Heb], Tarbiz 76/1–2, 2007. (For an English version of this article see S. Elizur, “Two New Leaves of the Hebrew Version of Ben Sira,” Dead Sea Discoveries 17, 2010.) The manuscript in question was ms. “C,” a medley of verses.
In what might be called the Case of Krengel, the “forgotten old-world briefcase” scenario has in fact taken place. At the start of the twentieth century, the German rabbi Johann Krengel came into possession of several hundred Geniza fragments and wrote an article about some of them. According to former JTS librarian Menahem Schmelzer, in “One Hundred Years of Genizah Discovery and Research,” the manuscripts “disappeared during World War II and were found in the Seminary Library in the 1970s in an old, worn, leather briefcase, mixed up with Krengel’s typewritten sermons in German. The collection is now called the Krengel Genizah.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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This is a book about a lost culture and the scholar-heroes who have been retrieving it bit by dusty bit for well over a century. To do justice to the ongoing aspect of that project would have required adding numerous chapters to the volume, detailing the contribution of the scores of men and women hard at work with the Geniza material today. Without their seemingly tireless efforts this book would not have been conceivable; nor would its composition have been as pleasurable as it was without the magnanimity of so many of them. We’ve been fortunate beyond measure to have had the guidance—on the page and in person—of scholars who have lived with the Geniza day and (often well into the) night for many years now.
First and foremost, our gratitude to members—past and present—of the Cambridge University Library Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit can’t properly be put into words. With patience, warmth, precision, and humor, they brought us into their fold and gave us a world. No gift could be greater. Above all, we’re grateful to Rebecca Jefferson for her sustained and vital assistance, advice, and encouragement, and for generously sharing the fruits of her research into the early history of the Geniza’s recovery; and to Ben Outhwaite, director of the Unit—who first opened the Unit’s doors and drawers to us and personally helped us rummage through its various treasures over a period of several years. Both have become partners of a kind in the making of this book. We’re also deeply indebted to the Unit’s founder and former director, Stefan Reif, for his endless openness and willingness to share his stores of knowledge and experience with us. The late Shulie Reif was a gracious and welcoming presence as well, and we remember her for her valuable work with the Unit and for her kindness. Mark Cohen of Princeton University, and the Princeton Geniza Project, has been a close consultant on this project from the very start, and he has been generous in the extreme with his learning and his wisdom, helping us get our bearings, answering questions huge and minuscule, feeding us valuable material, and putting us in touch with critical contacts. Our debt to him is major. Early readers of parts of this book provided invaluable feedback. We’re especially glad to have been advised, prodded, boosted, and improved by the likes of (alphabetically) Yehoshua Granat, Matti Huss, James Kugel, Gabriel Levin, Laura Lieber, Stephen O’Shea, Marina Rustow, Steven Wasserstrom, Larry Yarborough, and again, Mark Cohen, Rebecca Jefferson, and Ben Outhwaite. While they can and should take credit for much that is here, all blunders and howlers are, it goes without saying, ours.
The families, friends, and former students of our book’s protagonists have also been exceptionally gracious and patient with our repeated inquiries. We hesitate to think what this book might have been without the cooperation and trust of Ayala Goitein Gordon and Amirav Gordon, Elon and Harriet Goitein, Ofra Rosner, Ada Yardeni, Shelomo and Dafna Leshem, Shelomo Aharon Wertheimer, and Shula Bergstein; Shulamit Elizur, Binyamin Elizur, Mordechai Friedman, Norman Stillman, Eric Ormsby, Joshua Blau, Paula Sanders, Dvora Bregman, and Dan Almagor. Malachi Beit-Arié, Janet Soskice, Peter N. Miller, Itta Shedletzky, Mikhail K
izilov, David Rosenthal, Yaacov Choueka, Reuven Rubelow, Shuly Rubin Schwartz, and Samir Raafat were unstintingly helpful as well. Special thanks to Yosef Yahalom for his willingness to entertain every sort of question, and, above all, for his extensive work with the Geniza documents themselves.
Heartfelt thanks are likewise due to the librarians and archivists at the Israel National Library (Avraham David, Benjamin Richler, Ezra Chwat, and the staff in the General Reading Room, the Judaica Reading Room, and the Manuscript Reading Room); the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York (Ellen Kastel, Menahem Schmelzer, Jerry Schwarzbard, David Kraemer, and David Sclar); the Schocken Institute, Jerusalem (Shmuel Glick, Baruch Yunin, Racheli Edelman); Cambridge University Library (Ngaio Vince-Dewerse); the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Piet van Boxel, Linda Needham); Westminster College, Cambridge (Margaret Thompson); St. John’s College, Cambridge (Jonathan Harrison); the Bibliothèque de Genève (Barbara Roth-Lochner); the Israel Museum (Amalyah Keshet, Rachel Laufer); the Hebrew University (Annette Freeman); and the Ezra Fleischer Geniza Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry (Sarah Cohen). We left Cairo in grateful debt to Raymond Stock, Carmen Weinstein, Mohamed el-Hawary, Nevette Bowen, Peter Kenyon, and Barbara Surk.
Various other friends and colleagues have provided critical doses of advice, company, and/or assistance of one sort or another along the way to this book, and we’re in their debt as well: Jenny Diski, Ian Patterson, María Rosa Menocal, Miriam Altshuler, Ivan Marcus, Jacob Abolafia, Giddon Ticotsky, Dan Laor, Gidi Nevo, David Stern, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Gali Gamliel-Fleischer, Francesco Spagnolo, Emily Levine, Michael Chazan, Yael Cohen, Brian Kitely, Sarah Pessin, and Amiel Vardi.
We’re also grateful to the many people who worked on this volume at Schocken Books and Random House. We’re especially lucky to have been in the good hands of Altie Karper and Dan Frank, and we thank them for their enthusiastic support.
And last, though he was also first, it’s a special pleasure to thank Jonathan Rosen—who believed in this project from the speculative start and saw it through to this inky end.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ADINA HOFFMAN is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, which was named one of the best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and one of the top ten biographies of the year by Booklist. My Happiness also received Britain’s 2010 Jewish Quarterly–Wingate Prize. Hoffman’s essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, the Washington Post, the TLS, Raritan, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House, and on the World Service of the BBC. Formerly a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post, she is—with Peter Cole—one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions.
PETER COLE’s most recent book of poetry is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled—whose title poem revolves around the Cairo Geniza. Cole’s translations from Hebrew and Arabic include War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems by Aharon Shabtai; So What: New & Selected Poems by Taha Muhammad Ali; and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, which received the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and the American Association of Publishers’ 2008 Hawkins Award for the outstanding university press book of the year. Cole has received numerous other honors for his work, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the PEN Translation Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Hoffman and Cole live, together, in Jerusalem and New Haven.
JEWISH ENCOUNTERS
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Jonathan Rosen, General Editor
Jewish Encounters is a collaboration between Schocken and Nextbook, a project devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas.
PUBLISHED
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THE LIFE OF DAVID · Robert Pinsky
MAIMONIDES · Sherwin B. Nuland
BARNEY ROSS · Douglas Century
BETRAYING SPINOZA · Rebecca Goldstein
EMMA LAZARUS · Esther Schor
THE WICKED SON · David Mamet
MARC CHAGALL · Jonathan Wilson
JEWS AND POWER · Ruth R. Wisse
BENJAMIN DISRAELI · Adam Kirsch
RESURRECTING HEBREW · Ilan Stavans
THE JEWISH BODY · Melvin Konner
RASHI · Elie Wiesel
A FINE ROMANCE · David Lehman
YEHUDA HALEVI · Hillel Halkin
HILLEL · Joseph Telushkin
BURNT BOOKS · Rodger Kamenetz
THE EICHMANN TRIAL · Deborah E. Lipstadt
SACRED TRASH · Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
FORTHCOMING
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THE WORLDS OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM · Jeremy Dauber
ABRAHAM · Alan M. Dershowitz
MOSES · Stephen J. Dubner
BIROBIJAN · Masha Gessen
JUDAH MACCABEE · Jeffrey Goldberg
THE DAIRY RESTAURANT · Ben Katchor
JOB · Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
ABRAHAM CAHAN · Seth Lipsky
SHOW OF SHOWS · David Margolick
MRS. FREUD · Daphne Merkin
DAVID BEN-GURION · Shimon Peres and David Landau
WHEN GRANT EXPELLED THE JEWS · Jonathan Sarna
MESSIANISM · Leon Wieseltier