Sacred Trash (33 page)
Authors: Adina Hoffman
And then there was his day job in Cairo, where he served as personal physician to the caliph and overworked doctor at the government hospital. All this
before
struggling to find the time to sit still and write his works of religious scholarship. As teacher and leader of his band of disciples, he also had yet another nagging task to attend to—since even wool-wearing, solitude-seeking ascetics required letters of recommendation.
In short, the workload was “staggering,” and Abraham was, declared Goitein, “destroyed by it.” The constant preoccupation with all this bureaucratic busyness brought about as well the eventual failure of his reforms and the disappearance of much of his writing, a process connected to the gradual decimation—by “persecutions, epidemic, and apostasy”—of the Egyptian Jewish community in the late Middle Ages. Besides the Geniza documents, only a small fraction of what Abraham wrote has come down to us—a collection of responsa and but a single volume of the ten-volume, or twenty-five-hundred-page, composition the younger Maimonides called “my book.”
And here it is worth stopping to consider how it is that S. D. Goitein
both did and did not resemble this “perfect man with a tragic fate.” Like Abraham, Goitein was utterly fluent in the language of both Jewish and Muslim texts. Like Abraham he combined a keen (if complex) religious faith with a no-less-fervent belief in the power of “science.” He, too, had devoted himself to public service and teaching, alongside his own scholarship. Goitein’s protégés and students—and the protégés and students of his protégés and students—stand at the forefront of historical Geniza studies today. Many of them express an almost filial affection for the fastidious man with the gentle smile, drill sergeant’s attitude toward punctuality, and drily self-deprecating wit.
Like Abraham, Goitein was a traditionalist who had been known to offer up fairly radical ideas about that tradition and its possible transformation. According to his oldest daughter, Ayala, Goitein dreamed—somewhat vaguely—of founding “a new religion,” and in the late 1950s he had published several articles about his vision for a political union called EurAfrAsia, which would stretch “between France and Persia on the one hand and between Sweden and Abyssinia on the other.” This new world power would emerge from “the cradle of many of humanity’s most essential achievements,” Greek thinking and art, the three monotheistic religions, constitutional government, and so on. As a “more or less integrated political body” and common market, EurAfrAsia would be “a blessing for the world not only as a safeguard for peace, but also as a fountain for moral and spiritual values.” This was just one of the surprising political proposals Goitein put forward over the years.
While he remained a committed and involved Zionist throughout his life, Goitein’s precise political attitudes were notoriously difficult to pin down. One person close to him remembers him as being “very left wing,”
while another has called him a “hard liner [about] Israeli politics, an extreme conservative”; other characterizations have run the gamut between these poles. Perhaps it would be truest to say that his ideas evolved over time and depending on the historical circumstances. During the war in 1948, he wrote to one of his friends who belonged (as he himself did not) to Brit Shalom, a group of Hebrew University professors who advocated the establishment of a binational state in Palestine, and who in 1942 had formed a political party called Ihud (Union): “You know that I never joined ‘Ihud’—not because I don’t love the Arabs, [and] am not ready to give my life for a pact of friendship with them, but because I know that there’s no chance of peace with them, as long as they believe they can just annihilate us.” That said, shortly after the Six-Day War he concluded a Hebrew letter to his cousin David Baneth, back in Jerusalem, by asking: “Is there still talk in Israel about the possibility of a binational state? … Never before has the possibility existed as it does now—despite the tremendous difficulties.”
In their very different contexts, both Abraham Maimonides and S. D. Goitein strove to realize the promise of what Goitein called the historical “symbiosis” between Arabs and Jews. “Biology defines symbiosis as the coexistence of two organisms so that both benefit from their being linked, and neither suffers loss,” wrote Goitein, in 1949. “Just a thin line separates this desirable symbiosis from subordination or parasitism, which is to say, a situation in which two bodies are connected to one another and one drains the marrow of the other without giving anything in return. And there is a third kind of living-in-proximity: conflict and competition, which ends in the subjugation or destruction of one partner and the impoverishment of the other.” The fact that the Jewish people are building their new life in close proximity to the Arabs, he wrote in Hebrew in that first year of Israel’s existence, provides “the possibilities for dangers without measure and blessing without bounds.”
He would return repeatedly to this notion of symbiosis throughout his intellectual life—most famously in his popular 1955 survey
Jews and Arabs,
which was written as a series of lectures, in the context of the political and military tensions that plagued the Middle East at the time, and which offers a slightly gloomier view. By the late 1960s, when he began to publish
A Mediterranean Society,
his attitude was more upbeat. Drawing as it does on all the Geniza realia, the book offers Goitein’s most subtle examination of actual (rather than theoretical) coexistence between Arabs and Jews.
His vision of the profound and inextricable bonds that joined the two peoples was, it should be said, not always understood or fully appreciated, even by those closest to him. The Nobel Prize–winning novelist S. Y. Agnon was one of Goitein’s oldest and dearest Jerusalem friends (in 1919, when they all still lived in Germany, Agnon’s then wife-to-be, Esther Marx—none other than the sister of JTS librarian Alexander Marx—had studied Arabic with Goitein and Hebrew with Agnon), and throughout the years that Goitein spent in America, the two men corresponded frequently. In a letter written during Goitein’s total immersion in his research for
A Mediterranean Society,
Agnon urged him to return to Jerusalem (“the main thing is that I miss you”) and challenged him—in typically lofty language—to “put aside the study of the Arabs and return heart and soul to the study of the Hebrews. Many of the great and good have given their best to the gentiles, and in the meantime the goyim have come into our legacy and grasped the art of Jacob with the weapons of Esau.” Goitein, for his part, wrote eloquently and often about Agnon’s fiction, which he held in the very highest esteem—though in a memorial lecture, delivered shortly after his friend’s 1970 death, he admitted, “For my taste, both Yehuda HaLevi and Agnon are a little bit too Jewish. I mean, in both the mere human element is too often subordinated to the specifically Jewish aspect.”
Although Goitein must certainly have been frustrated, as Abraham Maimonides was, by the failure of many of his ideas to take wider hold, he was careful not to make the same professional mistakes as his absurdly
overextended medieval counterpart: Goitein’s decision to leave Israel and all its public demands and focus so tightly on his Geniza scholarship may have saved him—and his work—from Abraham’s sad fate. In 1948, there were reports that Goitein was being considered by David Ben-Gurion for the position of minister of education in the first Israeli government; one can only wonder what would have happened to the Geniza and its documentary treasures had that appointment come to pass.
Perhaps most important, the difference between Goitein and Abraham is manifest in the relationships both men developed to the mass of daily details that crowded the universe of the medieval Mediterranean—and spilled forth from the Geniza. Engagement with the “trivia” of his culture brought Abraham low—nearly to ruin—and it prompted in him, paradoxically, a kind of hermit’s contempt for material existence. (The saints and the Prophets, he believed, were nobler for having shunned the “love of this world” and contented themselves with “reflections of the heart,” as they wore wool, fasted, and “gave up women … and repaired to mountain caves and secluded deserts.”) S. D. Goitein, on the other hand, managed, through his patient attention and almost boundless curiosity, to be
lifted up
by that same detritus, and while far from a sybarite, he made the celebration and disciplined scrutiny of just this quotidian jetsam his all-consuming lifework.
It was also how he absorbed the world: Goitein had been dubbed “a born schoolmaster” by his old friend and shipmate Gershom Scholem (it was a barbed characterization that reportedly hurt Goitein, accurate though it may have been), but he was also, as one admiring former student, Eric Ormsby, now an accomplished Arabist, essayist, and poet, put it in a posthumous tribute to his teacher, “a perpetual student himself,” and someone who existed in “a state of concentrated delight at every new fact or hint of a fact.” Ormsby recalls once accompanying Goitein to the Polish Catholic funeral of the murdered father of another graduate student, which took place in Philadelphia on the Jewish Sabbath, no less:
“I drove him there and we sat together during the mass. Throughout the service he peppered me with questions. Why is the priest doing that? What does this gesture signify? Can you explain those vestments?” Ormsby then relates how he “listened in horror as [Goitein] interrogated the funeral director about the precise mode of embalming that he used. Were the intestines removed beforehand? How was this done?”
While there was, as Ormsby describes it, something “a bit frightening about his inquisitiveness, something implacable, and relentless,” he understands Goitein’s passion for all this maniacal minutiae in terms of the “fierce tenacity” at the root of his scholarship and, perhaps more profoundly, as the embodiment of a long Jewish tradition of respect for the smallest things, placed in the service of the largest ones. As the mishnaic tractate
Pirkei Avot
(
Sayings of the Fathers
) counsels, “Despise not any man, and dismiss not any thing, for there is not a man who has not his hour and not a thing which has not its place.” Goitein observed this teaching until the very end—mailing off to his publisher the final, chock-full, and meticulous volume of his magnum opus at age eighty-four, and the very next day getting back to work on the “India Book,” the project he’d long put off. Six weeks later he was dead.
“Dismiss not any thing …”
The words of the Mishna’s rabbis echo down through the history of the Geniza and its dramatic, incremental retrieval, as they also call to mind lines by the great Polish-born, Yiddish-and-Arabic-speaking modern Hebrew scavenger-poet Avot Yeshurun—whose name means “the fathers are watching,” and who, in 1971, wrote in Tel Aviv: “I bring back all I find. / Not all that glitters is gold. / But I pick up / all that glitters.”
Which takes us around to that May day in 1896, when Margaret Gibson first handed Solomon Schechter the grimy scrap of Ben Sira and noticed the glint in his eyes. From Schechter and Taylor to Davidson and Mann; from Zulay to Schirmann, Fleischer, and Goitein; and from them to the delta of their successors—the scholars who have devoted their lives to the exalted and often exhausting work of recovering the Geniza
have been guided, each in his hour, by a similar fascination with a “hidden light.” For some it has been a matter of life and death for Jewish culture. Others have been driven by philological passions and the challenge of bringing order to history’s detritus. For others still, an almost mystical sense of resurrection has been involved. For most it was, and is, much of the above—and then some. As it happens, very little in the Geniza glittered; but almost all, in its way, was gold.
AFTERWORD
O
nce the very hub of a thriving empire, Fustat seems barely to register on the otherwise-occupied residents of crumbling, sprawling, diesel-choked modern Cairo, and taxi drivers find their way to it only after repeated stops to ask for directions. But it remains—marked Misr el-Qadima (Old Cairo) on the maps—hugging the Nile south of downtown and divided in half by the train tracks and the Mari Girgis, or Saint George, Metro station.
The haphazardly parked cars and tinny Koranic recitations pouring forth from storefront radios notwithstanding, it’s tempting to say that Old Cairo looks and sounds more or less as it might have when Wuhsha and Hillel ben Eli, Halfon ben Netanel and Abraham Maimonides lived there. A gargantuan man in a turban and galabia stands stern guard over a donkey-drawn cart piled high with swollen cabbages and cauliflowers. A small boy balances on his head a straw basket twice his size, filled with fresh, grainy pita, still puffed with heat. Women in headscarves pick through heaps of oranges, onions, and greens, much as they might have in Fatimid or Ayyubid Fustat. Sludgy-looking Nile fish flap in basins plunked in the dirt. And at the corner, men in long robes sit on stools and silently eye the passersby. The flies and filth are everywhere.
