Sacred Trash (45 page)

Avot Yeshurun’s poem is “The Collection” [Heb] in Avot Yeshurun,
Complete Poems
2 (Tel Aviv, 1995–2001).

Afterword

For a detailed look at the contemporary fate of Egypt’s Jews, see Joel Beinin,
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora
(Cairo, 2005). A full account of the Ben Ezra renovation appears in Phyllis Lambert,
Fortifications and the Synagogue,
as does Herbert Loewe’s description, from “Some Traditions of Old Cairo,”
JC,
July 20, 1906. The description of Fustat and the synagogue is also based on the authors’ December 2009 visit to Ben Ezra—and up the ladder into the Geniza.

The (inaccurate) description of Ben Ezra as a former church is repeated in nearly every English-language guide book to Cairo. Scholars now agree that the church-turned-synagogue in question was probably the nearby Babylonian synagogue, once the Melkite church of St. Michael. See Goitein,
MS
2: v, D, 1, a; Charles Le Quesne, “The Synagogue,” in Lambert,
Fortifications;
Reif,
A Jewish Archive.

The history of the Genizah Research Unit is drawn from Rebecca Jefferson, “Thirty Years of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit,” in
The Written Word Remains,
Shulie Reif, ed.; Stefan Reif, “One Hundred Years of Genizah Research at Cambridge,”
Jewish Book Annual,
no. 53, 1995–96; Reif,
A Jewish Archive;
Rebecca Jefferson, “The Historical Significance”; interviews with Stefan and Shulie Reif (August 25, 2008, Beit Shemesh) and Ben Outhwaite (July, 2008, Cambridge). Stefan Reif retired in 2006, at which point the Bible scholar and bibliographer Ben Outhwaite became director of the Unit; he continues to run it today. For more about the Unit’s current activities see
www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/
.

Particulars of the Unit’s early conservation methods are detailed in Sue Greene, “Conserving History,”
Genizah Fragments
1, April 1981; “Conservation Nears End,”
Genizah Fragments
2, October 1981; A. E. B. Owen, “Space-Age Technology Helps Unit,”
Genizah Fragments
9, April 1985; “A New Use for Moon Film,”
Cambridge Evening News,
Oct. 29, 1969. The description of the Additional Series is Ezra Fleischer’s, from his report (dated Sept. 11, 1974), CUL ULIB 6/7/6/51. Details of the conservation of the Mosseri collection come from Rebecca Jefferson and Ngaio Vince-Dewerse, “When Curator and Conservator Meet: Some Issues Arising from the Preservation and Conservation of the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library,”
Journal of the Society of Archivists
29/1, April 2008; interview with Ngaio Vince-Dewerse (July 2008, Cambridge). The quote from the conservators comes from Jan Coleby and Ngaio Vince-Dewerse, “Mosseri Collection’s Challenge,”
Genizah Fragments
53, April 2007. For more on the Princeton University Geniza Project, see
http://www.princeton.edu/~geniza/
.

The description of the Friedberg Project is drawn from the following sources:
http://www.genizah.org/
; Yaacov Choueka, lecture [Heb], Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Friedberg Genizah Project panel, Jerusalem, August 2009; Roni Shweka, Yaacov Choueka, Lior Wolf, et al., “Automatically Identifying Join Candidates in the Cairo Genizah,” Post ICCV Workshop on eHeritage and Digital Art Preservation, 2009; interview with Yaacov Choueka (Feb. 2, 2010, Jerusalem). The Friedberg Project is a joint venture with the Jewish Manuscript Preservation Society. Schechter’s words about the corpus appear in Bentwich,
Solomon Schechter.

Cynthia Ozick’s comments on remembering come from
Quarrel and Quandary
(New York, 2000). For Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s ideas of history and memory, see Yerushalmi,
Zakhor
(Seattle, 1982), and
Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,
Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, David N. Myers, eds. (Waltham, 1998).

For more on the Bible and the Geniza, see Reif,
Jewish Archive;
Reif, “A Centennial Assessment of Genizah Studies,” in
The Cambridge Genizah Collections;
Kahle,
The Cairo Geniza;
G. Khan, “Twenty Years of Genizah Research,” in
EJ Yearbook,
1983
–
85
.
See also C. Sirat,
Genizah Fragments
23 and 24, and Ben Outhwaite’s entries in
In the Beginning: The Bible Before the Year
1000
,
M. Brown et al., eds. (Washington, D.C., 2006).

On midrashim and responsa in the Geniza, see, for instance, Reif,
A Jewish Archive;
Danzig,
A Catalogue of Halakhah and Midrash Fragments
[Heb]. The many responsa found in the Geniza are also described in Robert Brody,
The Geonim,
and in works by Louis Ginzberg, Jacob Mann, Simha Assaf, and M. A. Friedman. See also Shmuel Glick,
Kuntress hateshuvot hehadash: Bibliographic Thesaurus of Responsa Literature Published from ca.
1470
–
2000 [Heb] (Ramat Gan, 2006–7) and his forthcoming catalog of the responsa contained in the Mosseri collection. The Talmud’s role in this context is discussed in Reif,
A Jewish Archive
and “An Assessment”; Yaakov Sussmann, “Talmud Fragments in the Cairo Geniza,”
Te’uda
1, 1980. See also Shelomo Morag,
Vocalised Talmudic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Geniza Collections
(Cambridge, 1988), and Robert Brody and E. J. Wiesenberg,
A Hand-list of Rabbinic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Geniza Collection
(Cambridge 1998). For more particular examples, see, for instance, Abraham Katsch, “Unpublished Cairo Genizah Talmudic Fragments from the Antonin Collection in the Saltykov-Shchederin Library in Leningrad,”
JQR
69/4, 1979; Shamma Friedman, “An Ancient Scroll Fragment (B. Hullin 101a–105a) and the Rediscovery of the Babylonian Branch of Tannaitic Hebrew,”
JQR
86/1–2, 1995; and Binyamin Elizur, “Towards a New Publication of Yerushalmi Fragments,” lecture [Heb], Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, the Academy of Hebrew Language session, Aug. 3, 2009. Schechter’s description of the Palestinian Talmud appears in “A Hoard II.”

For more on grammar, lexicography, and paleography, see, for instance, Reif,
Jewish Archive;
Kahle,
The Cairo Geniza;
Khan, “Twenty Years of Genizah Research”; Malachi Beit-Arié, “The Contribution of the Fustat Geniza to Hebrew Paleography” [Heb],
Pe’amim
41, 1989.

The Khazar connection to the Geniza is described in Schechter, “An Unknown Khazar Document,”
JQR
3/2, 1912; N. Golb and O. Pritsak,
Khazarian Hebrew Documents
(Ithaca, 1982). See also
The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives,
Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, András Róna-Tas, eds. (Leiden, 2007).

Maimonides’ role in the Geniza world is detailed in, among other places, Sarah Stroumsa,
Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker
(Princeton, 2009); Kraemer,
Maimonides;
J. Kraemer, “Six Unpublished Maimonides Letters from the Cairo Genizah,”
Maimonidean Studies
2, 1991; H. Isaacs and C. Baker,
Medical and Para-Medical Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collection
(Cambridge, 1994); Reif, “An Assessment.” See the “Fragment of the Month” for October 2007, by Esther-Miriam Wagner, and April 2007, by Ben Outhwaite, both on the T-S Genizah Research Unit’s Web site.

For more on medicine in this context, see Isaacs and Baker,
Medical and Para-Medical Manuscripts;
Haskell D. Isaacs, “Medical Texts in Judaeo-Arabic from the Genizah,” in
Genizah Research after Ninety Years,
Blau and Reif, eds.; Goitein, “The Medical Profession in the Light of the Cairo Geniza Documents,”
HUCA
34, 1963; Ephraim Lev and Zohar Amar, “Practice versus Theory: Medieval Materia Medica according to the Cairo Genizah,”
Medical History
51/4, 2001; E. Lev, “Medieval Egyptian Judaeo-Arabic Prescriptions,”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland
18, 2008, and other publications by Lev.

Obadiah’s life and work are discussed in N. Golb, “The Music of Obadiah the Proselyte and His Conversion,”
JJS
18, 1967; Golb, “Obadiah the Proselyte: Scribe of a Unique Twelfth-Century Hebrew Manuscript Containing Lombardic Neumes,”
Journal of Religion
45/2, 1965; J. Prawer, “The Autobiography of Obadyah the Norman, a Convert to Judaism at the Time of the First Crusade,” in
Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature,
I. Twersky, ed. (Cambridge, 1979);
Giovanni-Ovadiah da Oppido, proselito, viaggiatore e musicista dell’eta normanna,
A. De Rosa and M. Perani, eds. (Florence, 2005).

For more on the unearthing of Yiddish manuscripts in the Geniza, see Leo Fuks,
The Oldest Known Literary Documents of Yiddish Literature
(Leiden, 1957); J. Frakes,
Early Yiddish Texts
1100
–
1750 (Oxford, 2004); Dovid Katz,
Words on Fire
(New York, 2004). The poems mentioned here are part of a bound volume and were discovered by Fuks in 1953. In Fuks’s opinion, by the fourteenth century an Ashkenazic community—seeking shelter from persecution in the north—may have settled in Egypt and Palestine, among other Eastern places. More recent scholars have argued that the codex may have belonged to travelers passing through. For the letters, see Ch. Turniansky, “A Correspondence in Yiddish from Jerusalem from the 1560s” [Heb],
Shalem
4, 1984; S. Assaf, “A Yiddish Letter from Jerusalem” [Heb],
Zion
7, 1941; and A. M. Habermann, “On Ashkenazim in the Geniza” [Heb],
Te’uda
1, 1980. The letter quoted is T-S Misc 36.152. The more recent Yiddish find is T-S AS 202.383, discovered by T-S Genizah Unit researcher Esther-Miriam Wagner and published as the Unit’s Fragment of the Month, Oct. 2009. The fragment it completes is T-S NS 298.18. The exchange also contains Moshe’s answer.

Wuhsha and the Syrian mother don’t represent new finds, but they do represent a field that began to draw interest relatively late in the Geniza game. See Joel Kraemer, “Women Speak for Themselves,” in Reif,
The Cambridge Genizah Collections,
and Goitein,
MS
3: viii, D. The Judeo-Arabic letter in question is T-S 13 J 23.5.

Magic and the Geniza are discussed further in Mark Cohen, “Goitein, Magic and the Geniza,”
Jewish Studies Quarterly
13, 2006; Steven Wasserstrom, “The Magical Texts in the Cairo Genizah,” in
Genizah Research after Ninety Years,
Reif and Blau, eds.; Wasserstrom, “The Unwritten Chapter: Notes towards a Social and Religious History of Geniza Magic,” in
Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic in Antiquity,
Shaul Shaked, ed. (Leiden, 2005); Gideon Bohak,
Ancient Jewish Magic: A History
(Cambridge, 2008); Bohak, “Reconstructing Jewish Magical Recipe Books from the Cairo Geniza,”
Ginzei Qedem
1, 2005; Bohak and F. Neissen’s “Fragment of the Month,” Sept. 2007, T-S Unit Web site; L. Schiffman and M. Swartz,
Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts from the Cairo Genizah: Selected Texts from Taylor-Schechter Box K
1 (Sheffield, 1992); N. Golb, “Aspects in the Historical Background of Jewish Life in Medieval Egypt,” in Altman,
Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies;
P. Schafer, “Jewish Magic Literature in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages,”
JJS
41, 1990; “Medieval Jewish Magic in Relation to Islam: Theoretical Attitudes and Genres,” in
Judaism and Islam. Boundaries, Communications and Interactions. Essays in Honor of W. M. Brinner,
B. H. Hary, J. L. Hayes, F. Astren, eds. (Leiden, 2000).

Details of the Geneva Geniza are drawn from
The Cairo Geniza Collection in Geneva: Catalogue and Studies
[Heb], David Rosenthal, ed. (Jerusalem, 2010). See, especially, David Rosenthal, introduction, Barbara Roth-Lochner, “Fragments from the Cairo Geniza in the Geneva Library”; Shulamit Elizur, “New Findings in the Study of Hebrew Poetry from the Geniza.” See also articles by Rosenthal,
Haaretz,
May 26, 2006, and June 9, 2006. Information regarding the correspondence with the Geneva library is courtesy of Benjamin Richler, at the time director of the Institute for Microfilmed Manuscripts, NLI (author interview and e-mail correspondence between Richler and Barbara Roth-Lochner, Oct. 7, 2005). Our thanks to Richler and Roth-Lochner for supplying this and other helpful information.

The riddles that arise in the wake of the new Dunash finding include the following: Was this originally a shorter polemical poem onto which Dunash attached an ending in praise of Hasdai—perhaps in order to camouflage the poet’s own disapproval of the looser ways of the Andalusian court and thereby win Hasdai’s approval? Or was this originally a poem that celebrated the ways of the court and the court’s patron, even as it acknowledged resistance to those ways? In the latter scenario, it would have then been truncated (by the poet or by someone else) so as to make it seem either more ambiguous or in fact to make it a poem that denounced the courtly ways.

Information regarding the new Ben Sira find is from author interviews with Shulamit Elizur and Binyamin Elizur and S. Elizur, “A New Fragment of the Hebrew Ben Sira” [Heb],
Tarbiz
76/1–2, 2007. (For an English version of this article see S. Elizur, “Two New Leaves of the Hebrew Version of Ben Sira,”
Dead Sea Discoveries
17, 2010.) The manuscript in question was ms. “C,” a medley of verses.

In what might be called the Case of Krengel, the “forgotten old-world briefcase” scenario has in fact taken place. At the start of the twentieth century, the German rabbi Johann Krengel came into possession of several hundred Geniza fragments and wrote an article about some of them. According to former JTS librarian Menahem Schmelzer, in “One Hundred Years of Genizah Discovery and Research,” the manuscripts “disappeared during World War II and were found in the Seminary Library in the 1970s in an old, worn, leather briefcase, mixed up with Krengel’s typewritten sermons in German. The collection is now called the Krengel Genizah.”