Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Jewish Encounters) [Hardcover]

Imagine you are a forty-year old who was severely injured in an automobile crash and suffered amnesia that wiped out thirteen years of your life, two periods: ages 10-12 and 21-30. Then after enduring the dark space in your memory, sometimes agonizingly, you stumble on several trunks in your attic. You open the trunks with difficulty and find old, frequently torn, moldy, disheveled letters, scrapes of paper, and memoranda that were written during these thirteen years. You read them with astonishment. Like the plot of a mystery novel, you find that these papers reveal facts about your life that you had forgotten. They disclose things about you that are radically different than your image of yourself. This is what happened in a synagogue storeroom, called a Geniza, in Egypt, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Civilization lost its memory of Jewish happenings during the first half of the second Temple period, from about 536 until about 165 BCE, and for centuries of the Middle Ages. Then, like the amnesiac in the example, scholars unearthed some three hundred thousand documents from these periods.

Jews and many Christians considered God's name so holy they felt it was wrong to treat the name as trash and toss it like garbage. Thus, in ancient time, they stopped mentioning or writing God's name and substituted "Lord" for y-h-v-h. This sensitivity was later extended. Jews began to bury papers containing God's name, as people bury relatives, with respect. Soon, in Cairo, Egypt, from about the eleventh century, Jews placed many of their unwanted documents in a storeroom in the Cairo synagogue, as well as other synagogues, and they buried some as well, even papers without God's name, for writing too, they felt, has a holiness.

This well-written, easy to read, well-researched, and informative book tells about the remarkable materials found in the Cairo Geniza and about the lives of the people who made the finds and the difficulties they encountered. I suggest that readers of this review read my review of Rabbi Mark Glickman's Sacred Treasure of Cairo Genizah (the latter word can be spelt with and without a final h). That review discusses some of the significance of the finds, and places them in perspective with the Dead Sea Scroll finds and those of the Nag Hammadi Library. I will not repeat this information here.

Among many other discoveries in Cairo were the following. Scholars knew that the famous book by Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus, composed in the second century BCE and quoted frequently in the Talmud, was composed in Hebrew, but the original Hebrew was lost. It was found in the Geniza. Many of the poems of the seventh century poet Yannai were unearthed; we only had a fragment of his writings until then. He was probably the first poet who composed poems for synagogue services. Writings by the famed philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) including compositions in his own handwriting with corrections he made were in the Geniza. There were interesting palimpsest, writings written over scratched out prior writing, a process used to save parchment. Modern science is able to restore the underlying older, frequently more valuable text. Manuscripts penned by members of the Jewish sect Karaites, who rejected rabbinical innovations, were in the cache, including marriage contracts that disclose interesting stories of how fortunes were made and lost and wives retaken after a divorce. There were business contracts, trade documents between Jews and India, letters that tell tales of family life, information about common people and community leaders, records and deeds, a host of scholarly writings, letters finally revealing what happened to the famous Jewish poet Yehudah Halevi during the final years of his life, and much more. There is even a document by Maimonides containing the ingredients of a medieval Viagra.

In summary, like amnesiacs who see themselves differently after the attic finds, civilization now has a new perspective of its past after the Geniza discoveries. And, what is more, scholars are still today continuing to decipher and disclose the secrets that were buried in the Geniza.

I was very much impressed by this book. Impressed, first by the authors for the excellent writing and research. This goes for the entire book, but I was literally delighted by the brightness of style in the first chapters. (All the part on Schechter). The authors succeeded in keeping this reader's full interest after the first chapters, which read like a thrilling novel, after the disappearance of the earlier heroes and the turning of the book towards broader subjects. I bought the book because I had certain knowledge about genizas and wanted to learn more. I also bought the useful Sacred Treasure, by Max Glickman. But this one is much more than just a splendid story of the Cairo Geniza. It is a new view of certain aspects of Jewish history; it is also a much needed confirmation of the high level and elegance of Arab and Islamic civilization of old. We westerners are brought down to our size at that period in time. But I was also impressed by the book's editorial excellence (Schocken). I think the edition is novel, outstanding, and clever. Although I had already some knowledge of rabbinism, (consulting Strack-Billerbeck, Bonsirven, Gilman&Zipes, etc.) I received a new light about the relations between the Torah, the Tanach, and rabbinic writings: no diminution for the Tanach, but higher appreciation of the contributions of Talmud (this time especially Palestinian Talmud), rabbinism and its originality. I wish I had read the book before attending a local symposium on the spirituality of the Second Temple period. I couldn't let the book down. No need to be a Jew to enjoy thoroughly. Catholics might enjoy knowing this part of the story of Ben Sira's book, which they have always honored. The book is not written for specialists, but many a specialist might learn a lot with it. It is written for people with some background that enjoy good writing in cultural history. Good aperçus in British scholarship. A high praise for Adina Hoffmann and Robert Cole. They have grasped many subtleties that many a specialist seems to ignore. They have fascinated me with their book. My profession is a reading profession, but his time, pleasure was the main oucome.

Hoffman and Cole tell a compelling story about the discovery of the Cairo Genizah, and the subsequent fate of its collection and the people who have studied them. The book sheds light on how one generation of scholars will consider material not worthy of study, while another will base a lifetime of study on it.

For example, Hoffman and Cole explain how Solomon Schechter, who collected most of the Genizah for Cambridge University, was interested in big names found in the collection. He crated business documents and other miscellaneous material and labeled it trash. This "trash" remained in the attic of the Cambridge library becoming, in a sense, a second Genizah, until it was re-discovered Solomon Goitein, who went on to detail the everyday life of Jews and Gentiles in the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages.

This book shows how dynamic really top-notch scholarship can be; it is a perfect illustration of how a group of documents can turn an entire field on its head and not only provide new information about a lost world, but reveal something of ourselves and our interests and the changing tastes of the times.