Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza [Hardcover]

Adina Hoffman (Author), Peter Cole (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 5, 2011

NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

One May day in 1896, at a dining-room table in Cambridge, England, a meeting took place between a Romanian-born maverick Jewish intellectual and twin learned Presbyterian Scotswomen, who had assembled to inspect several pieces of rag paper and parchment. It was the unlikely start to what would prove a remarkable, continent-hopping, century-crossing saga, and one that in many ways has revolutionized our sense of what it means to lead a Jewish life.
 
In Sacred Trash, MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole and acclaimed essayist Adina Hoffman tell the story of the retrieval from an Egyptian geniza, or repository for worn-out texts, of the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried scholarly treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other heroes of this drama with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, money orders, fiery dissenting tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of nine hundred years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Hoffman and Cole bring modern readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have rightly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.” Part biography and part meditation on the supreme value the Jewish people has long placed on the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Beautifully written, learned and lucid, Sacred Trash is a treasure that should not be hidden . . . Exquisitely realized.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A literary jewel whose pages turn like those of a well-paced thriller, but with all the chiseled elegance and flashes of linguistic surprise that we associate with poetry . . . Sacred Trash has made history beautiful and exciting.”
—The Nation
 
“Hoffman and Cole unfold this saga with dramatic flair, peppering their narrative with the Geniza’s own distinct voices, from the ancient and medieval to the modern and contemporary. Skillfully they embed the drama contained within the old texts with the contemporary dramas of the people handling the texts . . . It is a testament to [them] that they have fleshed out these ghosts, and patiently constructed a vivid, human saga every bit as extraordinary as a miracle.”
—Haaretz (Israel)

“Both lively and elevating . . . An extended act of celebration of Cairo’s historical Jewish community, their documents, and their documents’ 20th-century students . . . wonderfully revived by Hoffman and Cole.”
—Anthony Julius, The New York Times Book Review
 
“A multi-layered work that provokes admiration and excites the imagination on many levels.”
—Moment
 
“Hoffman and Cole’s vivid portrayal of the discovery of the ancient Cairo Geniza . . . is equal parts treasure hunt for the sacred and historical, and Herculean rescue of important texts . . . Sacred Trash is a wonderfully accessible and exciting account of ‘numerous heroes, medieval and modern’ and their discoveries of artifacts that have transformed our understanding of the interplay between history and religion.”
—The Boston Globe
 
“The real behind-the-scenes story of the Cairo Geniza and the Western scholars who retrieved and studied it is . . . also a very human story, as Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole show in their charming and unobtrusively erudite new book.”
—The Jewish Review of Books

“A wonderfully passionate and lively account of a civilization we could not have imagined existed and of the men and women whose enthusiasm and dedication brought it to light.”
—Gabriel Josipovici, The Wall Street Journal

"Absorbing  . . . Hoffman and Cole are adroit in their exegesis . . . [Sacred Trash is] an accessible, neatly narrated story of hallowed detritus and the resurrection of nearly 1,000 years of culture and learning."
—Kirkus Reviews

“What a delight to have the story of the Cairo Geniza, its romantic recovery and spectacular contents, told here by two such brilliant wordsmiths as Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. This book takes readers to the very navel of the medieval world, east and west, Arab and Jew, shattering many preconceptions along the way.”
—Janet Soskice, author of Sisters of Sinai

“Hoffman and Cole spin an extraordinary tale of intellectual adventure and lasting scholarly accomplishment. The men and women who brought the Cairo Geniza to light are presented here in painstaking detail, their quirks and their brilliance exposed in equal measure. Carefully researched and beautifully written.”
—James Kugel, author of How to Read the Bible

“Sacred Trash is a jewel of a book: a lively and deeply informed account of the Cairo Geniza, a magnificent Egyptian treasure-house of Jewish religion, literature, and history that was forgotten for centuries, and of the extraordinary crew of scholars and impresarios who saved the documents, fitted the scraps back together, and made them speak and sing.”
—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
 
One hundred and twenty years ago, time travel was all at once realized: With the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, medieval Jewish life in all its sacred and mundane efflorescence came tumbling out in thousands of manuscript fragments, each one a distinct and living voice of an ancestral civilization. No longer can we speak of the seven wonders of the world—in this astounding and acutely relevant tale, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole have uncovered a remarkable eighth; and in its connection to our own humanity, it surpasses all the rest.”
—Cynthia Ozick

“Sacred Trash is a small masterpiece. The romance of Hebrew scholarship has never been so vividly conveyed. This book is extraordinary in characterization, thought, and prose style. It will teach common readers, Jewish and gentile, how much spiritual tradition owes to the greatest scholars. This teaching comes through delight.”
—Harold Bloom

About the Author

Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, which was named a best book of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review.
 
Peter Cole’s most recent book of poems is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. His many volumes of award-winning translations include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950––1492. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.
 
Hoffman and Cole live, together, in Jerusalem and New Haven.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Schocken; First Edition edition (April 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805242589
• ISBN-13: 978-0805242584
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #52,924 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #22 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Judaism > History of Religion
  • #35 in Books > History > World > Religious > Judaism
  • #94 in Books > History > Medieval

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Discoveries that radically change our understanding of the past June 7, 2011

By Israel Drazin TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format: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. Read more ›

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A delightful reading May 30, 2011

By Jose R. Villalon-Sorzano

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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. Read more ›

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Slice of the Genizah May 24, 2011

By Eric Maroney

Format:Hardcover

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.

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars It is such an exciting and well done book that I cannot strongly recommend enough it to all! May 12, 2011

By Bernard H. Pucker

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

A cultural detective tale or the detailed description of the "discovery" of the Cairo Geniza by "self taught Scottish scholar of Arabic and Syriac Agnes Lewis and her no less learned twin sister Margaret Gibson" in May 1896 and its amazing ramifications for scholarship in theology, Biblical studies, Medieval Hebrew poetry and the ways of Jewish life in the entire Mediterranean area and beyond circa 7th to 13th century.

They shared these fragments with the Romanian born Reader in Judaica at Cambridge (where women were not awarded degrees until 1948!) who identified this page from the Wisdom of Ben Sira/ Ecclesiasticus and wrote "the contents of the book go up to heaven like the soul".

The same Hebrew root, g-n-z, was he noted, sometimes used on gravestones. The text's sanctity would be preserved and dangerous ideas kept from circulating.

Excellent, succinct biographies of leading scholars like Schechter, Cyrus Adler, Elkan Adler, Adolf Neubauer, S.D. Goitein and founder and interested party Salman Schocken are tied together as the journey of thousands of pages of materials travel from Fustat, Egypt into the world of scholarship throughout the entire 20th century and into the 21st.

Favorite quotes: "Goitein invented a term to describe his work, calling himself an "interpretive sociographer", one who describes a culture by means of its text."

"If, with Cynthia Ozick, we think of history as "what we make from memory", then these scholars have quite literally been making history by re-membering it, by putting it back together syllable by syllable under the intense pressure of powerfully informed and at times visionary imaginations."

It is such an exciting and well done book that I cannot strongly recommend enough it to all!