Sacred Trash (25 page)

And our elder, dear Yahya agreed, of his own free will and resolve … that he shall not desecrate the festivals of the Lord as observed by his aforementioned wife according to the sighting of the moon, and that he shall not light the Sabbath candles against her [will and custom], and not coerce her in matters of food and drink.… And if he violates any one of these conditions he will pay one hundred dinars to the poor of the Karaites and the poor of the Rabbanites in equal shares. And this Rayyisa agreed, that while she is with her aforementioned husband she shall not desecrate the festivals of our brethren the Rabbanites.

Other Karaite Geniza documents have less sanguine things to report about mixing and matching. The prickly issue of religious conversion, for instance, is addressed in a letter that brings us the story of a leading Byzantine Karaite scholar and translator named Toviyya ben Moshe; he had married a Christian woman who’d converted to Judaism and given birth to their daughter. Its medieval locutions and concerns notwithstanding, the letter is yet another example of just how poignant and present the voices from the Geniza can be. It appears that Toviyya had moved his family to Jerusalem so that he could study with the masters at the Karaite academy there and translate key works of Karaite literature from Arabic into Hebrew, for the benefit of non-Arabic-speaking members of the community (such as those in his native Constantinople). By the time of the letter, which dates to 1040 or 1041, it’s clear that Toviyya had made a name for himself in Jerusalem’s Karaite intellectual circles, although that may have come at the expense of his livelihood and peace of mind. Things fell apart when his wife left him, taking their daughter with her to Egypt and returning to Christianity. Time passed and circumstances changed, and our letter, written in a plain-spoken Judeo-Arabic,
finds Toviyya now in better material circumstances but tortured by thoughts of his long-lost daughter, who has, it seems, written him with a request for money. He is trying to win her back—not only for himself, but for his faith and its followers, whom he characterizes simply as “Jews” (rather than “Karaites”):

I am writing you, my daughter, from Jerusalem, may God protect it.… Some of what I must tell you, my daughter, is what I think about your affairs, for a fire burns in my heart because of you, and God stands between me and the one who brought you harm and made you an orphan in my lifetime.…

Know, my daughter, that I have sworn a solemn oath not to send you anything as long as I am uncertain about your condition and do not know what to do about your situation. God knows that I have no concern or worry other than for you. Nay, my health and my affairs are well, and my clothes cannot contain me for [my] happiness and good fortune.

Had I been seeking nothing but worldly gain, I would regard myself today as a great success, for I have become the administrator of the government compounds in Palestine, at a handsome salary and a good [ … ] Men are under my authority. I’ve become powerful, and issue orders and rescind them. God has made me happier than I had been before. So good fortune has been mine and misfortune your mother’s, God be praised.

And now, my daughter, I do not know who you are with. I do not know whether you are with the Jews, who are the stock of your father, or the stock of your mother, the gentiles. But know this: if the Christians wanted to sell you to me, my own daughter, I would buy you and rescue you from their hands. What else could I do? …

After [the festival of] Shavuot, I am leaving for Byzantium, for my native land and my family. Please tell me what your intentions are so that I can decide what to do about your situation, insha’allah.

Again, we don’t know how it is that this letter found its way into the Ben Ezra Geniza or what became of the broken family. Several other letters
by Toviyya have also emerged from the Geniza, but scholars disagree as to what they’re telling us. In one, which may have been written as many as seven or eight years later, Toviyya reports to a Fustat colleague that he has again fallen on hard times and plans to return to “my home and my patrimony,” but first he would like to know with whom he can leave the money that he owes a friend. No one in the Karaite community, he says, apart from a few fellow Byzantines, cares for him at all, and then he mentions his daughter, who still “will not leave my heart.”

However that sad story turned out—some say the daughter died and the wife returned to Toviyya, others say it just isn’t clear—Toviyya’s letters, like so many other sectarian and even heretical documents from the Cairo Geniza, throw into startling relief the question of how, through their long and sometimes lesser-known history, Jews have handled difference with regard to deepest belief and practice. More critically, these seemingly marginal contracts, tracts, letters, and appeals show us the ways in which dissension has at times come to define what Jewishness means and who, when push comes to excommunicating shove, is considered a Jew and who isn’t—thus linking, after a fashion, Lower Egypt and the Upper West Side, ninth-century provincial Persia and nineteenth-century reform-minded Berlin.

Pieces of the Spanish Puzzle

I
n addition to its functioning as a de facto dead-letter office, commercial archive, and dossier of divergent religious belief, the Geniza’s “mass of ragged, jumbled, dirty stuff” and its “anything but sanitary” odor hid keys to understanding the evolution of Judaism’s most distinctive embodiment of elegance and order: poetry from what has come to be known as the Golden Age of Hebrew literature in Spain. Arguably the greatest poetry composed in Hebrew since the biblical period, this verse constituted such a fundamental revolution in Jewish literary culture and consciousness that its emergence far from the traditional centers of learning in the East has long been called “miraculous.” And that by and large is how its story has been told—as a big Jewish literary bang, if not a full-fledged “creation out of nothing.”

With good reason. For more than a thousand years after the composition of the Book of Ben Sira, the poetry that Jews produced was generated almost entirely by the engine of synagogue worship and the liturgical year. Suddenly, around the turn of the first millennium, at the northwest end of the Mediterranean and deep inside the Diaspora, Hebrew poets began writing in a radically innovative and even shocking manner, developing what amounted to a new body of literature from the unlikely alloy of Arabic literary modes and motifs on the one hand, and scriptural Hebrew and Jewish mythopoetic materials on the other. Wine,
war, contemplation, wit, and erotic (as well as homoerotic) attraction—all now swam into the Hebrew poets’ ken. Within a short time Andalusia’s classicizing Hebrew new wave produced its first great, and some would say its greatest poet, Shmuel HaNagid, whose worldly, intimate, and supremely wise verse was followed by the work of four other major figures: the metaphysically inclined and misanthropic Shelomo ibn Gabirol; the most Arabized of the Hebrew masters, Moshe ibn Ezra, whose consummate craft acted as ballast and keel to an abiding melancholy; Avraham ibn Ezra, who was raised in Muslim Spain but whose refreshingly grounded work was written in the Christian north, as well as in Provence and Italy; and perhaps the most famous of them all, and certainly the sweetest singer of the age, Yehuda HaLevi.

The early years of the twentieth century saw quantum leaps in the study of this Golden Age poetry (as it has come to be known): scholars prepared the first serious critical editions and new manuscripts were discovered far and wide. In addition to Schocken’s Stuttgart windfall, the nearly complete works of HaNagid surfaced in Aleppo, Syria, causing the preeminent Hebrew poet of the day, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, to sputter: “A kind of light shines on the marvelous prince—upon him and his period and the poets of his day.… The man is unrivalled in our history.” Interested readers now had a reasonably clear view of the principal poetry of the period, though when it came to tracing the steps that led to the various stages of its development, there was little in the way of actual tracks. Hence the ex nihilo narrative. The Cairo Geniza, however, has changed all that—or, one should say,
is changing
all that—and as with so many dimensions of our repository’s tale, demystification has not led to deflation.

On the contrary, a concatenation of discoveries stretching into the twenty-first century has only enhanced the aura of wonder surrounding the poetry’s origins. Against staggering odds, patient and tenacious scholars have reunited torn pages or separated leaves or even just stray lines of manuscript fragments that had made their way from the Fustat
Geniza to libraries across Europe and North America. As “matches” large and small have been found for stranded pieces of the Spanish-Hebrew puzzle, not only new poems and new collections of poems, but new poets, new kinds of poems and poets, and the often extraordinary life stories of some of Hebrew literature’s finest writers have been introduced into the modern literary mix.

I
n 1936 a young but already experienced assistant at the Schocken Institute for the Research of Hebrew Poetry, Jefim Hayyim Schirmann, published several important articles treating historical and literary dimensions of work by poets of the Muslim period in Spain. The most substantial of these publications—really a ninety-five-page monograph on, and provisional edition of, the period’s minor poets—mentioned in passing a small fragment that Schirmann had found, like the other material he was treating, among the Geniza manuscripts. It consisted only of a short prose heading to a certain poem and that poem’s first three words. The Judeo-Arabic caption attributed the poem “to Ben Labrat, of blessed memory” and described the circumstances of its composition.

Ben Labrat, Schirmann knew, had to be the unusually named Dunash ben Labrat, who was by all accounts the founder of the new Andalusian Hebrew poetry. In an imaginative shift of a high order, sometime toward the middle of the tenth century the Moroccan-born Dunash had reconceived the very nature of Hebrew verse. While studying in Babylonia under Saadia Gaon, it seems that the aspiring poet had taken seriously, possibly too seriously, his influential mentor’s notion that the chosen people had more than a little to learn from the thriving Islamic society around them, including, for starters, science, philosophy, linguistics, and new modes of written discourse (much of this activity having been spurred, it seems, by the Karaite irritation and that movement’s own engagement with Arabic modes of writing). For one reason or another Dunash decided to apply Saadia’s line of thought to poetry as well, and
he came up with a way of adapting Arabic poetry’s standard of musical measurement—quantitative meter—to Hebrew. The ambitious disciple showed the results to his illustrious teacher, who offered up the decidedly ambiguous judgment: “Nothing like it has ever been seen in Israel.” Dunash soon headed west, and he reached Spain by his early thirties, having brought with him the new poetics and all they implied. “Let Scripture be your Eden,” he wrote in a motto-like fragment, “and the Arabs’ books your paradise grove.” The extant historical evidence indicates that Dunash’s liturgical verse was soon sung “in every town and city, in every village and country.” His secular poems also gained many admirers, despite his scorn for what he considered the provincial ways of the backward Spanish Jewish literati he encountered in Andalusia—and he eventually unseated the only rival for literary supremacy on the Hebrew cultural scene—the far more parochial, if by no means ungifted, Menahem ben Saruk (whose scant surviving work the Geniza preserves and who, in a most unfortunate case of fallout from court intrigue, had his Cordoban house quite literally razed around him, on the Sabbath no less, before he was tossed into jail by the leading Jewish patron of the day). With Dunash’s success, however, came some hard-core resistance, and the disturber of the literary peace with the alien (Berber) name was accused not only of “destroying the holy tongue … by casting it into foreign meters,” but, in doing so, of bringing nothing less than “calamity upon his people.”

Although documentary material relating to Dunash’s poetic revolution had been available since the mid-nineteenth century—including some of his prose (and that of his attackers and defenders in Spain who were hashing out what they clearly thought to be the major controversy of the day)—very little was known about his poetry. At the height of the modern fascination with the Hebrew Andalusian literature, when Schirmann was working at the Institute, the situation wasn’t much better than the one described in 1873 by a German scholar who had written:
“[Dunash’s] poems have been lost, and only a few lines remain.” This, too, the Geniza would change.

Schirmann, who would go on to become a towering figure in this field, had been intensively engaged with medieval Hebrew poetry since the age of twelve or thirteen. Born to a wealthy family in Kiev in 1904, he was given an excellent general education and, thanks to his religiously observant father, was also fed the best of what Hebrew literature had to offer. But the nineteenth-century masters Mendele Mocher Seforim, Shalom Aleichem, and their like were not, as Schirmann tells it, to his taste. One of his teachers decided to return to older material he knew would interest the gifted if obviously somewhat odd Jefim, and he brought him medieval dirges for the Ninth of Av, the holiday commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Among these poems was Yehuda HaLevi’s long, plaintive, and iconic ode,
“Tzion halo tishali,”
which, while not written specifically for that day of mourning, had long been incorporated into its literature:

Won’t you ask, Zion,

  how your captives are faring—

this last remnant of your flock who seek