Sacred Trash (23 page)

But first, Schechter’s sectaries—on the face of it, a surprising shift of attention for this scholar and leader whose work and life were devoted to reinforcing the integrity and “vital” center of Jewish history and tradition. Although he was very much a man of cultural progress and in many respects a liberal, and though he believed with all his heart in the unified vision of what he called “Catholic Israel” (in which all the streams of Judaism were, in essence, one), while still in Europe Schechter had developed a pronounced aversion to the dissension of Reform Judaism, whose individualism and Protestant-style reliance on private judgment he felt merely paved the way to Christianity. As Schechter saw it, Reform Judaism in Germany and America had become a modern sect, opposed to the body of Judaism, and like the sectarian movements of the Jewish past (to which some Reformist scholars were drawn, but about which the masses of its adherents were ignorant), it would prove evanescent. Perhaps his Cairo finds would help him make his case.

A zealously particular and utterly fascinating puritanical composition, “Fragments of a Zadokite Work” (the first and principal part of the
Jewish Sectaries
volume) comprises, as Schechter diplomatically put it, “the constitution and the teachings of a Sect long ago extinct, but in which we may perhaps easily detect the parent of later schisms with
which history dealt more leniently.” Arguably second in importance among the Geniza revelations only to the Ben Sira fragments, the find was reported on the front page of the
New York Times
on Christmas Day 1910. A long feature story occupying the entire opening spread of the Sunday Magazine section followed on New Year’s, complete with a large picture of the bespectacled Schechter and the declaration that this was a “discovery of … extreme importance to the history of religion.” The article noted that the manuscript, which was also known as the Damascus Document, had been found “in the Genizah or Hiding Place under [
sic
] one of the most ancient synagogues in the world,” and the
Times
writer plunged into the controversy that had immediately sprung up around the heretical text and which would intensify when, decades later, another copy of the work was found in the caves above the Dead Sea at Qumran: When was this work composed and who are its characters? Is it about John the Baptist, Paul, and one of the earliest Christian groups on record, or—as Schechter postulated—about a Second Temple Jewish community that in many ways anticipated the coming of Christianity and was but one of the many Jewish sects of the day?

Leading a group of Jews on the cusp, or over it, the protagonist of this cultish text—and also a central figure in the Qumran literature—is, as Schechter and most scholars translate the Hebrew, a man known as the Teacher of Righteousness. His mission is to lead Israel away from the erroneous instruction of the Man of Scoffing and back to the ways of God. Rejected by the majority of Jews and the mainstream Judaism of his time, the Teacher—who is considered “an anointed one,” or Messiah from the priestly line of Aaron, not the line of Jesse and David, and was himself a priest—takes his followers to Damascus, where they form a New Covenant, or Testament. While in Damascus the Teacher dies. His disappearance—he is expected to rise again—is followed by a period of backsliding, but the sect survives as a highly organized society scattered among several cities, one of which is designated as “the City of Sanctuary,” where sacrifices are offered.

The sect’s congregation sees itself as the true remnant of Israel, “an Israel … within an Israel,” and accepts the teachings, laws, and legends of the Old Testament, including the Prophets. But it also acknowledges the authority of several noncanonical or “outside” works, some of which today form part of the Pseudepigrapha—that is, falsely attributed books composed in a biblical style, usually dating from between the second century
B.C.E
. and the second century
C.E
. (for instance, the Book of Jubilees). Above all, the followers of the New Covenant distinguish themselves from the “transgressors of the Covenant” and “the builders of the fence,” which is to say, the official Judaism of the Pharisees, whose motto was “Make a fence for the Torah.” As Schechter bluntly puts it, this was “a Sect decidedly hostile to the bulk of the Jews as represented by the Pharisees.” Schechter’s translation of the document’s feverish Hebrew tells how the rabbis and their followers

searched in smooth things and chose deceits and looked forward to the breaches. And they chose the goods of the throat and justified the wicked and condemned the just and transgressed the covenant and broke the statute and gathered themselves together against the soul of the righteous man.… But with them that held fast to the commandments of God, who were left among them, God confirmed His covenant with Israel forever, revealing unto them the hidden things in which all Israel erred.

Among these hidden things—apart from the community’s additional sacred books and highly elaborate set of laws (which called for the ritual slaughter of fish and forbade, among many other things, the employment of a “shabbos goy”)—was a calendar of “new moons and seasons and Sabbaths” that differed from that of rabbinic Judaism. Likewise, the sect’s interpretation of the nation of Israel’s past also clashed with that of official Judaism, some of whose heroes (especially David) were singled out for abuse.

At this point a new set of questions float up before us. What was such a bizarre Second Temple sectarian text (the Dead Sea Scrolls proved Schechter right in his dating) doing in high-medieval Fustat? And why, when the manuscript was considered worn out, was it placed in the Geniza of a synagogue belonging to the Rabbanites—descendants of the Damascus Document’s “Princes of Judah, [who] turned not out of the way of the traitors … and walk[ed] in the way of the wicked … and builded the wall and daubed it with untempered mortar”?

The second part of Schechter’s sectarian diptych hints at a possible, though by no means definitive, answer. This Aramaic manuscript fragment by one Anan ben David, an Iraqi Jew who appeared on the Baghdadi scene some time around 770, sketches out the lines of yet another alternative Jewish system. Chafing against the ever-widening and controlling body of rabbinic law, Anan led a Muslim-influenced reform movement within Judaism proper. While he made ample use of rabbinic interpretive strategies, Anan adopted a seemingly libertarian and even postmodern line, declaring that each person was obliged to interpret the Torah for himself and that such independent interpretation of scripture took precedence over everything—tradition, community, and family—even if it led to differences in practice. But his
Book of Commandments
(
Sefer Mitzvot
), which was really a sort of maverick’s Talmud (“It reads,” Schechter told Sulzberger, “absolutely like Gemara”), promptly applies a corrective constrictive pressure and preaches anything but tolerance: “Father or mother, brothers or children who do not serve heaven in our fashion are persons from whom we are duty bound to separate.… Any Jew who does not observe the Torah is called a gentile.… And we must of necessity separate from them. And we are required to gather together.” Of specific note in this book of precepts is Anan’s forbidding not only the
kindling
of fire on the Sabbath (as the rabbis do, per Exodus 35:3), but the
burning
of fire, as the Bible states. In other words, according to Anan’s literalist reading of scripture, on the day of rest
all fire had to be extinguished,
including lamps, candles, and coals for cooking that had been lit before the Sabbath had begun. (One imagines Anan and his followers sitting on the floor and eating cold leftovers in the dark.) Likewise the biblical verse that in the rabbinical tradition gives way to the prohibition against the mixing of milk and meat in a meal or a pot is understood by Anan to mean exactly what it tells us: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk”—and nothing more. The consumption of milk and meat together, he ruled, was permissible, so long as the milk wasn’t that of a given kid’s mother. Furthermore, circumcision, Anan by way of the Geniza tells us, should be carried out with scissors, not with a scalpel; and so long as Israel was in exile, alcohol and all meat (except that of pigeons and deer) were forbidden.

These and other depressing precepts put forth in Anan’s book were eventually adopted by a community of various marginal Eastern Jewish movements that were united toward the middle of the ninth century and came to be known in Hebrew initially as
bnei mikra—
disciples or champions of scripture—and in time as
kara’im,
or readers of scripture. Others believe the term Karaite (
kara’i,
in Hebrew) comes from a different derivation of the k-r-a root, meaning “to call,” and reflects the influence of the sectarian Islamic Shiite movements of the time, within which the preacher was known as the
da’i,
or “caller.”

Whatever the origin of the term, Karaism took hold—and the letters and documents of the Cairo Geniza shine something of a klieg light on the movement, seriously revising our view of it and showing just how critical this seemingly heretical trend was to the development of what would become normative Judaism. Evidence of the Karaites’ success comes howling at us from the wrinkled pages of documents written by Rabbanite leaders on whose collective big toe they stepped. Repeatedly. The Gaon of one of the two Babylonian academies, for instance, went at them in the course of a controversy concerning alternative versions of the Passover Haggada then in circulation, and he threatened—Jews of New Jersey and the new Jerusalem take heed—excommunication for
anyone who dared to shorten or in any way alter the traditional text, calling those who do so “heretics who mock the words of the sages,
and the disciples of Anan—may his name rot—
… who said to all those who strayed and whored after him: ‘Abandon the words of the Mishna and Talmud, for I shall compose for you a Talmud of my own.’ And they still persist in their error and have become a separate nation.” This earliest mention of Anan’s
Book of Commandments
goes on to call it a “book of abominations.”

As it happens, the Geniza has also brought us more than one “shortened” version of the Haggada and, far from being an indication of heresy, the texts in question turn out simply to be Palestinian (as opposed to Babylonian) rabbinic versions of the Passover liturgy in use at the time. In some of these Geniza versions of the Haggada, the classic Four Questions (
Ma Nishtana
) that are asked at the seder table by the youngest child are reduced to two queries, or three; in one version they swell to five. In another instance the father asks them. An eleventh-century manuscript now held in a Philadelphia Geniza collection—which is among the oldest extant complete (or nearly complete) Haggadot—also presents truncated versions of both the prelude to the Passover story and the story itself.

One part of this “alternative” Philadelphia Haggada is, strangely enough,
longer
than its Babylonian and latter-day parallel: the blessing over the
karpas
(Aramaic for “celery”), which is said very early in the seder, immediately after the kiddush and the ritual washing of the hands. Instead of a single blessing recited over the typically wilted sprig-to-be-dipped-in-salt-water-reminiscent-of-our-tears, four blessings are inserted at this point in the Palestinian Geniza Haggada. This extended set of prayers makes it clear that the flimsy green thing on today’s seder plate is what one distinguished scholar of classical religious thought has described as the “lonely, desiccated survivor” of a lavish and life-enhancing Greco-Roman spread of hors d’oeuvres, or the Levantine mezze of late antiquity and the High Middle Ages. Palestinian seder-goers
gave thanks, in other words, not only for the fresh greens of spring, but for local fruits and diverse delicacies (most likely seasoned rice cakes), and for the different creatures that God creates—which is to say, an assortment of sweetbreads, grilled meats, and sausages that would help one through the ritual to come. As that same contemporary commentator noted, the Geniza gives us more than information—it also delivers universal wisdom: “It’s all about food!”

R
iding a wave of growing resentment against a ballooning Babylonian class of religious and civic administrators, Karaism spread and, toward the end of the ninth century, it reached Palestine and Egypt. This new wave of Karaite expansion was led by the Persian-born Daniel al-Kumisi, who moved to Jerusalem and helped found or at least develop what would become an aggressively missionary and relatively large, influential Karaite community there. In particular the scrupulous al-Kumisi encouraged settling the ravaged city, the destroyed Temple of which, as he saw it, should be constantly mourned: “Wake up and weep over the House of the Lord,” he writes in a forceful Hebrew appeal that, like a number of his other writings, landed in Fustat: “Come to Jerusalem and stand within it at all times before Him, mourning, fasting, weeping, and wailing, wearing sackcloth and bitterness, all day and all night.… Hold vigils before the Lord until the day when Jerusalem shall be restored.” The fragment also shows him to have differed from both Anan and previous Karaite thinkers—denying, for example, the existence of
all angels,
not merely a Logos-like being who, as one of Anan’s successors had written, God appointed to create the world in His stead. In this and numerous other ways al-Kumisi embodied what became the Karaite creed, attributed to Anan, but probably coined by a later author: “Search ye well in the Torah, and do not rely on my opinion.” Al-Kumisi actually upped the ante in this regard, calling Anan a “champion fool” and imploring his readers in this same appeal to rely neither on his (al-Kumisi’s)
wisdom nor anyone else’s, for “he who relies on any of the teachers of the dispersion and does not use his own understanding
is like him that practices heathen worship.
”

Perhaps the greatest Karaite writer of this period was Ya’akov al-Kirkisani, who lived in the first half of the tenth century, probably near Baghdad. Highly educated in a broad variety of fields, al-Kirkisani read widely in contemporary Arabic linguistics as well as in its theological, philosophical, and scientific literature, and he maintained an impressive network of friendships with leading Christian and Rabbanite intellectuals. By writing in Arabic rather than in Aramaic or Hebrew, he (and many of his successors) further distanced the Karaite perspective from rabbinic thought.