About 120 years ago, a cache of manuscripts, mostly fragments, was
discovered in the storeroom of an old Cairo synagogue. Its members had
deposited them there over many centuries. This collection of documents
managed to be both heterogeneous and comprehensive at the same time.
Adina Hoffman is the author of “House of Windows: Portraits From a
Jerusalem Neighborhood.” Peter Cole is a poet and translator. As they
relate in their engaging book “Sacred Trash,” the materials in the
storeroom included letters, wills, bills of lading, prayers, marriage
contracts and writs of divorce, Bibles, money orders, court depositions,
business inventories, leases, magic charms and receipts. One early
examiner of the cache described the scene as a “battlefield of books.”
The most recent deposits were made in the 19th century; there were
fragments that dated back to the 10th century. Another early visitor
described the scene thus: “For centuries, whitewash has tumbled” upon
the documents “from the walls and ceiling; the sand of the desert has
lodged in their folds and wrinkles; water from some unknown source has
drenched them; they have squeezed and hurt each other.”
The challenge presented to researchers, to reconstruct documents out
of fragments, remains akin to the challenge embraced by jigsaw
enthusiasts, save that in the case of the Cairo cache, there were very
many pieces, from very many puzzles, all mixed up together, in one great
mess. Though scrutiny of this material continues, several books drawing
on the documents have already illuminated the lives of Mediterranean
Jewry. At least one masterpiece of scholarship and imaginative
reconstruction owes its existence to the cache: “A Mediterranean
Society,” the Israeli scholar S. D. Goitein’s five-volume study of
medieval Jewish communities — in all their “quotidian glory,” Hoffman
and Cole add. Goitein is one of the heroes of this book, one among
several who committed themselves to the collection’s study. The story
told by “Sacred Trash” is both lively and elevating; it is best read as
an extended act of celebration of Cairo’s historical Jewish community,
their documents and their documents’ 20th-century students (though the
authors also find space to relate the less creditable activities of the
storeroom’s plunderers, pillagers and looters).
The cache was known, and is still commonly referred to, as a
“geniza.” This word, which is barely translatable, holds within it an
ultimate statement about the worth of words and their place in Jewish
life. It intimates the meaning “hidden” or “concealed.” But behind that
notion, when applied specifically to manuscripts or books, two further,
ostensibly contradictory meanings lurk. The works to be hidden or
concealed have either a sacred or a subversive character. Those that are
sacred are to be protected and preserved when no longer usable; works
in that countercategory, which are subversive, and therefore fit only to
be censored or suppressed, are to be put out of view. In neither case
is the work accessible, but for quite opposing reasons. The one is to be
treasured; the other, condemned. A geniza, then, serves the twofold
purpose of preserving good things from harm and bad things from harming.
Over time, “geniza” became the name for a place that held any redundant
or obsolete documents. It was the great achievement of the men and
women who worked on the Cairo texts to recover them from obsolescence.
Where others saw rubbish, they found riches.
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