Sacred Trash (42 page)

The discussion of Kumisi, al-Kirkisani, and the evolution of Karaite doctrine is based on Nemoy,
Karaite Anthology;
Nemoy, “Al-Qirqisani’s Account of the Jewish Sects”; Gil,
History of Palestine;
“Sadducees,”
EJ
14; and L. Schiffman, “Jewish Sectarianism,” in
Great Jewish Schisms,
Jospe and Wagner, eds. Al-Kirkisani lists seventeen different sects. Cf. Palestinian Talmud, Sanhedrin 29c.

The mention of “fourteen ‘religions’ ” is from Goitein,
MS
5: x, C, 4. See also Nemoy, “Elijah Ben Abraham and His Tract against the Rabbanites,”
HUCA
51, 1980. Marina Rustow’s
Heresy and the Politics of Community
has an excellent account of the diversity of Karaite opinion and the movement’s conviction that it alone represented the true Judaism.

On the Karaites and the Masoretes, see Rustow,
Heresy,
especially chapter 2; Goitein,
MS
5: x, C, 4; and G. Khan, “The Contribution of the Karaites to the Study of the Hebrew Language,” in
Karaite Judaism,
Polliack, ed. See also Rina Drory,
Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and Its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture
(Leiden, 2000), chapters 5 and 6. As Rustow notes, the Karaites may have been influenced by the general trend in the Islamic world, which by the tenth century was experiencing “an explosion of literary production” in fields ranging from the sciences to the arts and humanities and into the world of theology and religious philosophy. She attributes this explosion to both “the exponential growth of speakers of Arabic, and in part … the introduction of paper manufacture to the Near East.” On the intensified study of grammar and the details of linguistic analysis, see G. Khan’s article, above, and Stefan Reif, “A Centennial Assessment of Genizah Studies,” in
The Cambridge Genizah Collections: Their Contents and Significance,
Stefan C. Reif, ed. (Cambridge, 2002).

The notion of Karaism as “a leavening agent” or productive irritant is from J. Mann,
Texts and Studies
2. See also Elinoar Bareket, “Karaite Communities in the Middle East”; Drory,
Models and Contacts,
chapter 6; and Gil, “Origins of the Karaites.”

Information on the particulars of Karaite ritual observance comes from the following sources: Judith Olszowy-Schlanger,
Karaite Marriage Documents from the Cairo Geniza
(Leiden, 1998); Rustow,
Heresy,
chapters 1 and 2; Mann,
Texts and Studies
2; and Poznanski,
The Karaite Literary Opponents.
The coexistence of the two communities is discussed in Goitein,
MS
5: x, C, 4; Elinoar Bareket, “Karaite Communities”; Gil, “Origins of Karaism”; and, above all, Rustow,
Heresy,
introduction and chapters 9 and 10. The scholar who suggests that the Karaite material remained in circulation long after the movement itself died out is Stefan Reif in “The Damascus Document from the Cairo Genizah.”

The relation between the ninth-century discovery of the Qumran scrolls and the Geniza documents in question is described by Kahle in his introduction to the 1959 edition of
The Cairo Geniza.
The Damascus Document, says Kahle, must have been among the manuscripts taken from the cave at the time; it eventually made its way to Jerusalem, where—by the end of the ninth century—it would have interested the nascent Karaite community. See also J. Baumgarten, “Damascus Document,”
Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls;
S. Reif, “The Damascus Document,” citing L. Schiffman’s
Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The fluidity of communal affiliation in Jewish Fustat is discussed by Rustow in
Heresy,
especially in the introduction and chapter 1; Goitein,
MS
2: v, B, 1; Reif, “The Damascus Document,” and Reif, “The Cairo Geniza,” in
Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The correspondence between the scribe from Ramla and the judge from Fustat (“Because of you and your son-in-law”) is T-S 10 J 29.13. It is analyzed by Rustow in
Heresy.
The judge was none other than Ephraim ben Shemaria, who would go on to head Egypt’s Palestinian community for some fifty-five years. See also Bareket,
Fustat on the Nile,
and Goitein,
MS
2: v, D, 2.

The translation of Yahya and Rayyisa’s
ketuba
is adapted from the one that appears in Olszowy-Schlanger,
Karaite Marriage Documents,
as document 56 (Bodl. MS Heb a. 3.42). For the original text, see also Mann,
Texts and Studies
2, and, on the text in general, see Rustow,
Heresy,
chapter 9.

The translation of Toviyya’s letter is (with a few variations) by Rustow,
Heresy,
chapter 9, which also includes an extensive discussion of Rabbanite-Karaite marriages. That Toviyya’s letter ended up in the Geniza suggests that the wife and/or daughter at some point returned to Judaism, perhaps to take advantage of the charitable organizations that were so active within the Jewish community of Fustat. See also Gil,
History of Palestine;
Benjamin Outhwaite, “Karaite Epistolary Hebrew: The Letters of Toviyyah ben Moshe,” in
Exegesis and Grammar in Medieval Karaite Texts,
Geoffrey Khan, ed. (Oxford, 2001); Goitein,
MS
5: x, A, 2. Unlike scholars who believe that the mother may have returned to Judaism with her daughter, Gil thinks that she did not convert to Judaism until after the daughter died. Rustow, whose reading we’ve followed, understands the situation differently.

9. Pieces of the Spanish Puzzle

The descriptions of the Geniza at the start of this chapter are by Agnes Lewis and Laura d’Hulst, respectively. Both appear in Rebecca Jefferson’s “The Cairo Genizah Unearthed,” which quotes correspondence from Laura d’Hulst (Dec. 11, 1915, BLR, d. 1084) and Agnes Lewis’s
In the Shadow.

On how the Geniza has changed the way we understand the evolution of this poetry, see Fleischer, “Perspectives on Our Early Poetry after One Hundred Years of Studying the Cairo Geniza” [Heb],
Madda’ei haYahadut
38, 1998; E. Fleischer, “The Culture of the Jews of Spain and Their Poetry according to the Geniza” [Heb],
Pe’amim
41, 1989–90; E. Fleischer, “Early Hebrew Poetry in the Cairo Geniza” [Heb],
Deot
25, 2006; and H. Schirmann, “Secular Hebrew Poetry in the Geniza Manuscripts” [Heb],
Te’uda
1, 1980.

For more information on the major poets of the period, see Peter Cole,
The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492
(Princeton, 2007); H. Schirmann,
The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain
[Heb]; and H. Schirmann,
Hebrew Poetry from Spain and Provence
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 1954).

The history of the scholarship around Dunash’s work comes from Leopold Dukes,
Nahal kedumim
(Hanover, 1873), cited in N. Allony,
Dunash ben Labrat, Poems
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 1947). Schirmann’s article mentioning the heading is “Poets Contemporary with Moshe Ibn Ezra and Yehuda HaLevi” [Heb],
Yediot hamakhon
2, 1936. The manuscript is T-S 8 K 15.8. For more about Dunash (and for translations of the poems discussed here), see Cole,
The Dream of the Poem;
R. Scheindlin,
Wine, Women, & Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life
(Philadelphia, 1986); and R. Brann,
The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain
(Baltimore, 1991), especially chapter 2.

Biographical information about Schirmann is drawn, for the most part, from a radio transcript that includes excerpts from interviews with Schirmann himself as well as commentary by Ezra Fleischer and program host Shmuel Haupert
—Milim shmenasot legaat,
Y. Levtov, ed. (Tel Aviv, 1991). We have also drawn from 2009 interviews with former students and younger colleagues or acquaintances of Schirmann, including Yosef Yahalom, Malachi Beit-Arié, Dvora Bregman, Ada Yardeni, and Ayala Gordon. The poem “Won’t you ask, Zion” appears in Cole,
The Dream of the Poem.

On Mendelsohn, see Lili Eylon, “Erich Mendelsohn—Oriental from East Prussia,”
Architecture Week,
Jan. 24, 2001; Paul Goldberger,
New York Times,
Oct. 30, 1988; A. Cobbers,
Mendelsohn
(Los Angeles, 2007). Mendelsohn’s description of Palestine comes from his 1940 essay, “Palestine and the World of Tomorrow,” reprinted in
Erich Mendelsohn in Palestine,
a catalog of a 1994 exhibit at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. While Mendelsohn was utterly independent and in some respects opposed to the rigidity of the Bauhaus and the International Style, he absorbed elements of each approach into his far more dynamic and flexible design, which comprised a unique synthesis of expression and restraint, function, and what he called “a sensual component.”

Schirmann’s relationship with Bialik is described by Dan Almagor, “A Young Scholar Is in the Country” [Heb],
Yediot aharonot,
Jan. 25, 1980. The Italian anthology is Schirmann,
Hebrew Poetry from Italy: A Selection
[Heb] (Berlin, 1934).

Schirmann also writes of the heading to the Dunash poem in
The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain
[Heb]; see also Raymond Scheindlin,
Wine, Women, & Death.
The ambiguous situation of the poem is discussed in Scheindlin and in Cole,
The Dream of the Poem.

The poet who introduced this Arabized use of the gazelle figure is Yitzhak ibn Mar Shaul. See Schirmann,
History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain
[Heb]; Schirmann,
New Poems
[Heb]; E. Fleischer, “New Findings in the Work of R. Yitzhak Bar Levi (bin Mar Shaul),” in
Hebrew Language Studies Presented to Zeev Ben-Haim
[Heb], M. Bar Asher, A. Dotan, et al., eds. (Jerusalem, 1983). The poet who first wrote about fleas is Yosef ibn Sahl. See Cole,
The Dream of the Poem,
and Schirmann,
New Poems
[Heb]; Schirmann,
The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain
[Heb]. The poem about the old man caught with the boy is attributed to Yitzhak ibn Ezra. See Cole,
The Dream of the Poem;
Schirmann,
New Poems
[Heb]; and
Yitzhak ibn Ezra, Poems
[Heb], M. Schmelzer, ed. (New York, 1979). Schirmann’s landmark anthology is Schirmann,
Hebrew Poetry from Spain and Provence
[Heb], four volumes. The 1965 collection of Geniza poems is Schirmann,
New Poems from the Geniza
[Heb]. His two-volume history is Schirmann,
The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain
[Heb] and
The History of Hebrew Poetry in Christian Spain and Provence
[Heb], E. Fleischer, ed. (Jerusalem, 1997). For information on the circumstances of the two-volume manuscript’s discovery, see Fleischer’s preface to the book.

It was Y. Levtov who described Schirmann as “a riddle to all those around him.” See “In a Still Voice,”
Davar rishon,
March 29, 1996. The account of Schirmann after the bombing appears in Ayala Gordon,
Between Jerusalem and Neve-Yam, During the War of Independence
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 1995/2008), letters from Feb. 22 and 26, 1948. These and the preceding characterizations of Schirmann are drawn from the sources cited above, as well as from Israel Levin, “A Life’s Work” [Heb],
Davar,
June 26, 1981; Ezra Fleischer, “A Triple Jubilee” [Heb],
Maariv,
Jan. 4, 1980; Dan Almagor, “And You Would Hear Your Teacher” [Heb],
Hadoar
75/15, June 21, 1996. The quotations from Fleischer here are: “he shifted attention,” Fleischer, “A Triple Jubilee” [Heb], and “the type of character about which novels might be written,” Fleischer, in
Milim,
Levtov, ed.

The story of the discovery of the poem by Dunash’s wife is told in full by Fleischer in “On Dunash ben Labrat, His Wife, and His Son: New Light on the Beginnings of the Hebrew-Spanish School” [Heb],
Mehkerei Yerushalayim besifrut Ivrit
5, 1984, and “Towards an Early History of Secular Hebrew Poetry in Spain,” in
Culture and Society in the History of Israel During the Middle Ages: Studies Presented in Memory of Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson
[Heb], M. Ben-Sasson, R. Bonfil, and J. R. Hacker, eds. (Jerusalem, 1990). See also N. Allony, “Four Poems,”
JQR
35/1, 1944.

The vertically torn fragments are Mosseri VIII.202.2 and Mosseri IV.387. The manuscript of the full poem is T-S NS 143.46. The poem is translated in Cole,
The Dream of the Poem.
The description of it here is based on the analysis by Fleischer in “On Dunash and His Wife” [Heb]. Fleischer discusses the letter from Hasdai ibn Shaprut and the poem in its upper-left corner in “Towards an Early History” [Heb]. This is T-S J 2.71.

Other scholars, including Abraham Geiger, Shmuel David Luzzatto, and David Kaufmann, had written about HaLevi, but their work was based on a very limited number of poems. Schirmann’s study was, on the other hand, based on Brody’s six-volume edition of the HaLevi Diwan (Berlin, 1894–1930). Schirmann’s 1938
Tarbiz
article appears in Schirmann,
Hebrew Poetry and Drama
1 [Heb]; see also his supplement to that two-part study. A list of Goitein’s relevant articles appears in Schirmann,
The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain
[Heb]; E. Fleischer, “The Essence of Our Land and Its Meaning” [Heb],
Pe’amim
68, 1996. See also Goitein,
MS
5: x, D; Ezra Fleischer and Moshe Gil,
Yehuda HaLevi and His Circle
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 2001).

The twins’ motto,
“lampada tradam,”
echoes Lucretius:
“Quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt”
—or, “Like runners, they hand on the torch of life.”