Sacred Trash (2 page)

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Photo Credit 1.3
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By turns fierce, warm, brusque, tender, biting in his wit, and thundering in his manner, “the king in any society in which he found himself,”
Schechter was often described in peculiarly zoological terms. Now he was “a demanding lamb,” now an eagle or a bear. “I can see him in my mind’s eye, at the height of a debate,” wrote yet another friend, “rising from his chair, perhaps kicking it down, and pacing … the room, like a wounded lion, roaring retorts.” Lamb or jungle cat, he inspired awe and devotion in most people, though one imagines that the formidable Agnes Lewis would not even have blinked as she sailed—however arthritically—toward Schechter that day in the street.

She and Mrs. Gibson had, she hastened to tell him, spent the last few weeks developing the photographs and sifting through the manuscripts they’d brought back from their most recent trip. Their purchases included what Agnes would later describe as “a bundle of documents from a dealer in the plain of Sharon … [and] a similar bundle bought in Cairo.” Margaret, whose turn it was to do the sorting, had managed to identify most of the items that they’d carted home in a trunk—and which had almost been confiscated by overzealous customs officials in Jaffa. She had worked her way through the Hebrew fragments and set aside what she deemed parts of “the Canonical Books of the Old Testament” (the only sections of the Hebrew Bible that she, as a good Presbyterian, would know), assuming that the others were either talmudic passages or “private Jewish documents.” But the twins were eager for Schechter to have a look at some of the items whose contents they did not recognize.

Schechter, of all people, might be able to identify the scraps. Remembered by Romanian relatives and acquaintances as having been the wildest boy in his hometown, one who “constantly had to be pulled down from the top of the chestnut trees,” he had also been a prodigy. It was said that Shneur Zalman Schechter knew the Pentateuch by heart at five. And although he was by now almost fifty and—as the Anglicization of his first name indicated—had traveled a long way in both physical and psychic terms from his Hasidic Russian family in the small Moldavian
town of Focsani (as had his twin brother, Yisrael, who had immigrated to the Jewish agricultural settlement of Zichron Yaakov in Palestine the same year that Schechter moved to England), he brought with him a prodigious Jewish learning, as well as a voracious appetite for all kinds of knowledge, classical and contemporary. Perhaps best known to twenty-first-century American Jews as the man for whom the Conservative movement’s network of day schools is named, Schechter had been ordained a rabbi in Vienna and applied himself to the Palestinian Talmud at Berlin’s influential new school of liberal Jewish learning, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums; he’d become skilled at the analysis of ancient manuscripts and absorbed a wide range of subjects at that city’s university—everything from psychology and pedagogy to aesthetics, ancient history, Aristotle’s ethics, and Syriac grammar. Besides a deep knowledge of biblical and rabbinic texts and a solid grounding in the “scientific” methods that had by then come to dominate in German Jewish scholarly circles, he had also developed a passion for German, French, and English literature.

When he first came to England in 1882—hired to serve as a tutor in Talmud to the aristocratic young Oxford-and-Berlin-trained theologian Claude Montefiore—he had not known a word of English. “The only phrase he had begged Montefiore to teach him,” according to his wife, Mathilde, “was ‘weak tea,’ for he could not stand the strong tea the English used to drink.” But he’d learned the language with typical rapidity, by sitting with his Hebrew Bible, the English translation, and a dictionary—then moving straight on to George Eliot. Herself an avid bookworm and elegant writer, Mathilde described her husband as a “tremendous reader” who took in “every good novel that appeared,” devouring essays, philosophy, history, and theology. He’d wooed Mathilde with the satirical and none-too-romantic
Book of Snobs
by Thackeray, and it was joked that a more accurate title for Schechter than Reader in Rabbinics would have been “Reader in Fiction.” He was especially
fond of critical works by Charles Lamb, Leslie Stephen, and Matthew Arnold and had a particular fascination with anything written about the French Revolution and the American Civil War (Lincoln was a hero); he “loved Schiller and Heine above all.” He also adored
The Vicar of Wakefield
and “boys’ books like ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe.’ ”

No knowledge of Robert Louis Stevenson or Daniel Defoe, however, was necessary on this particular May day, and when—just a short time after meeting Schechter in town—Agnes arrived home at Castlebrae, the twins’ stately Gothic Revival mansion, she found Schechter already huddled over the large dining-room table, intently examining the fragments that Margaret had spread across its surface.

Without much ado, he identified one vellum leaf as a rare and valuable page from the Palestinian Talmud.

“Then,” according to Agnes, “he held up a dirty scrap of paper. ‘This too is very interesting; may I take it away and identify it?’ ‘Certainly,’ ” she said.

In Margaret’s own account, “I noticed that his eyes were glittering.”

Although the scrap looked, in Margaret’s words, “as if a grocer had used it for something greasy,” Schechter, it seems, realized its importance almost instantly, and within an hour of his racing from Castlebrae with the two items, the twins received a telegram from the Cherry Hinton Road post office, just around the corner from the Schechters’ gabled brick house on Rock Road:

FRAGMENT VERY IMPORTANT; COME TO ME THIS AFTERNOON

Probably accustomed to a certain easy agitation in their friend, the twins did not go rushing out to meet him, but sat down to lunch—at which point a letter arrived, splattered with unblotted ink and scrawled on Cambridge University Library stationery in Schechter’s lurching hand. Agnes realized that it had, in fact, been sent before the telegram
and that they should eat as quickly as possible and get themselves over to Rock Road. (Schechter’s sense of urgency was such that he scrambled morning and night, writing p.m. for a.m.)

13/5/96

Dear Mrs Lewis

   I think we have

reason to congratulate

ourself
ourselves. For

the
pice
fragment I took

with me represents a

piece
of the original

Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus
.

It is the first time that

such a thing was

discovered. Please do

not speak yet about

the matter till to-morrow.

I will come to you

to-morrow about 11

p.m. and talk over

the matter with you

how to make

the matter known.

In haste and

great excitement

yours sincerely,

S. Schechter.

Schechter’s plea for secrecy bubbled up from the fact that the original Hebrew of this apocryphal book—also known as Ben Sira—had been missing for nearly a millennium and survived, it was generally believed, only in its Greek and Syriac translations. The haste and great excitement with which he announced the discovery of this text would, however, soon give way to elation of a far more enduring and varied sort, as,
within months, it brought Schechter to travel to Egypt and haul away one of the greatest finds unearthed in modern times: the astonishing cache of documents that has come to be known as the Cairo Geniza.

“G
eniza” is a barely translatable Hebrew term that holds within it an ultimate statement about the worth of words and their place in Jewish life. It derives from the Persian
ganj
(or
kanj
), meaning “hoard” or “hidden treasure,” and while the expression itself doesn’t appear in the Bible, several of the later biblical books composed under Persian rule contain a handful of related inflections: Esther and Ezra, for instance, speak of
ginzei hamelekh,
or
ginzei malka—
“the King’s treasuries,” and the “royal archives.” Rabbinic usage of the root is more common, if also more peculiar: in the Talmud it almost always suggests the notion of “concealment” or “storing away”—though just what that entailed isn’t usually specified. The rabbis describe the light of Creation by which Adam could see from one end of the world to the other as being “hidden” or “stored up” (
ganuz
) for the souls of the righteous in the afterlife. Writing the sages deemed somehow heretical (including, at one point, the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, “because [their] words contradicted one another”) should, some believed, also be
ganuz,
that is, censored in the most physical manner—by being buried. In one instance, a threatening text was placed under a step in a staircase. Likewise, religious manuscripts that time or human error has rendered unfit for use cannot be “thrown out,” but rather “require geniza”—removal, for example, to a clay jar and a safe place, “that they may continue many days” and “decay of their own accord.”

Implied in this latter idea of geniza is that these works, like people, are living things, possessing an element of the sacred about them—and therefore when they “die,” or become worn out, they must be honored and protected from profanation. “The contents of the book,” wrote Solomon Schechter, “go up to heaven like the soul.” The same Hebrew
root, g-n-z, was, he noted, sometimes used on gravestones: “Here lies hidden (
nignaz
) this man.”

The origins and otherworldly aspects of the institution aren’t the only mysterious things about it. Both its development and its precise nature have remained curiously elusive. What we do know is that at some point the verbal noun “geniza” evolved from indicating a
process
to also connoting a
place,
either a burial plot, a storage chamber, or a cabinet where any damaged or somehow dubious holy book would be ritually entombed. In this way, the text’s sanctity would be preserved, and dangerous ideas kept from circulating. Or, as one early scholar of the material neatly put it: “A genizah
^*
serves … the twofold purpose of preserving good things from harm and bad things from harming.”

Often this depositing of the sacred texts in a secure location was only an interim solution and suggested a kind of liminal existence preceding actual interment. In some communities texts that had been stored in a geniza would eventually be buried alongside a saint or righteous individual; more frequently the scrolls and scraps were ritually consigned to the earth alone. In still other cases it appears that removal from circulation to a geniza constituted the terminal stage of the process and brought the writings in question to their final place of rest.

With modifications, the practice of geniza has continued throughout the Jewish world into the present, ranging greatly from community to community. (A related though less well-known tradition exists in Islam, and in Arabic the word for funeral,
janaza,
derives from the same three-letter root implying “concealment.”) In general and over time, it seems the talmudic notion of geniza as a form of censorship waned, and most genizot came to serve the more neutral function of holding obsolete texts. Beyond that, customs were idiosyncratic and highly variable.
A nook near or under the synagogue’s ark, a basement room, a cubbyhole—all could and did function as genizot. (One Iraqi community chose to honor their bags of tired texts by throwing them into the river.) The fragments that required this sort of treatment became known as
shemot,
or names: they were considered sacred because they bore the name of God. In some towns and cities, the geniza materials were taken out of their receptacles on a designated day and buried in an elaborate ritual that was part funeral, part carnival. Depending on local tradition, the papers and books—and often discarded ritual objects that included or had contact with a written text, such as mezuzot, phylactery straps, and the like—would be placed in straw baskets, leather sheets, or lengths of white cloth, like shrouds. Coffins draped with decorative fabrics were sometimes used to hold a no-longer-valid Torah scroll, and the privilege of pallbearing was bestowed upon those who had donated money to the synagogue. Songs were sung, cakes eaten, and arak was drunk as a procession set out for the cemetery. This act of inhumation served, in fact, as a kind of twin ritual to the dedication of a new Torah scroll, and after the old scroll was buried, pilgrimages to the “grave” would be performed, just as they were made to the tombs of certain holy men.