THE AMAZING—AND RELIGIOUSLY UPLIFTING—JOYS OF ARCHEOLOGY: THE CAIRO GENIZAH
By Allan Gould, for kolel.org
Most of us recall the charming Indiana Jones series of movies, directed by Steven Spielberg. They were entertaining enough to send many people into the field of archaeology as their livelihood. I felt that way while reading the irresistibly fascinating book by Rabbi Mark Glickman, Sacred Treasure—the Cairo Genizah (Jewish Lights, 288 pages, $24.99). For readers who are not familiar with the Hebrew term in that title, the sub-title of this superb read gives you a sense of it: “The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic.” As you may know, Jews have always considered writings containing the name of God holy, meaning that pages of Torah, marriage contracts, responsas [letters between scholars discussing religious questions], and countless other documents would not be merely thrown out, like yesterday’s newspapers, but hidden away over the centuries.
This meaningful tradition occasionally led to astonishingly important discoveries, the greatest of them all occurring when a young rabbi from Cambridge University, Solomon Schechter—yes, he later was the founder of the Conservative Movement of Judaism—found his way into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in 1896, and must have wept in happiness and awe when he beheld nearly 300,000 individual documents, some going back over a millennium. It was as if I, a student and teacher of English literature and drama for over a half-century now, opened up a drawer in an old building in London, and came across a lost play in the handwriting of Shakespeare.
Schechter wrote an essay a half-dozen years later, probably thinking of an obscure line in Deuteronomy (“You shall not destroy the name of your God”), “Every discovery of an ancient document giving evidence of a bygone world is, if undertaken in the right spirit. . .an act of resurrection in miniature.” And you thought that Jews didn’t believe in resurrection! When one reads of some of “the most spectacular” documents uncovered in the Cairo Genizah, your mouth may fall open as wide as its discoverers’ did: the last letter to Maimonides from his brother David, a merchant who was lost at sea on a voyage to India; the oldest-known Passover Haggadot in the world; the earliest fragment of Rabbinic literature ever discovered; the earliest example of Jewish sheet music—a Hebrew poem set to Gregorian chant during the 12th century by a former priest in Italy who converted to Judaism during the Crusades (!); the oldest known dated document—a fragment from a 9th century ketuba [marriage certificate]; requests for alms, sermons, love letters, calendars, liturgical texts, mathematics, astrology, many written in Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, even Indian languages, and hundreds of thousands more.
Does one need to be an archaeologist or a historian or even a Jew to be ecstatic to realize how the Cairo Genizah brought “new clarity and focus to the emerging picture of medieval Jewry in the Middle East, a picture showing that its Judaism was far more dynamic than most Jews ever realized”? This passionate, witty, insightful volume is a non-stop joy to read, as it asks why on earth the Dead Sea Scrolls got all the headlines and glory (and were justiafiably of great scholarly interest), while so few people today are aware of the still-being-understood-and-studied contents of the Cairo Genizah? The last paragraph of author Glickman’s delightful book puts it well: “It was much more than a pile of old scraps. It was a collection of countless lives and stories, a massive, messy heap of humanity stored in an attic for centuries. Its every document brought a bit of immortality to the people and thoughts it preserved. Studying any one of them is to resurrect something of times long past, often in ways that can help us make things better for the future. The Cairo Genizah was—and is—a sacred treasure.”
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Dr. Allan Gould is the regular book review for Kolel.org.
