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

There was some fascinating information in this book, but the writing was confusing. It seemed to assume a level of knowledge that I don't have, and it kept jumping in and out of historical time periods. Overall, I'm glad I'd read it. ( )

A geniza(h) is a kind of storeroom found in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery, used to store old Hebrew religious texts, as it was forbidden to throw away or destroy any document which contained the name of God. Over time, genizot also came to contain many writings of a secular nature in languages like Yiddish or Ladino, because even personal letters and legal contracts could begin with a divine invocation. The Cairo Geniza is one of the largest medieval genizot, with documents and document fragments numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

The title of this book is a little misleading—Sacred Trash is really more a collection of linked biographies about key scholars, such as Solomon Schechter and S.D. Goitein, who've worked on the Cairo Geniza since its "discovery" in the late 19th century. To that extent, it may be a little dense for someone who doesn't have much background in the area; certainly, while I've read some about this Geniza before, and about the Jewish community of Fustat, there were parts that went over my head. Hoffman and Cole do seem to assume a Jewish readership, or at least a readership which has done more focused reading in the area than I have. Still, I think if you do have an interest in the area, or even just in the role of serendipity, chance, and hard work in scholarly endeavours, Sacred Trash makes for a very interesting read. ( )

I was quite disappointed in the writing of this book. This is the story of the discovery and much of the organization of a Genizah in Old Cairo. However, I found the writing of this book and its organization very poor and confusing. There were many run-on sentences. ( )

Like the Geniza, the crowded storeroom for discarded documents written in Hebrew characters (although in many languages) in the attic of an old Cairo synagogue, this wonderful book is filled with a multiplicity of discoveries, from insights into the medieval development of the Jewish religion, including a variety of sects, to poetry from the cultural flowering in Muslim-ruled Spain, to business transactions, to personal letters; and, like the palimpsests that were found in the Geniza, it reveals its treasures on two levels, that of the scholars who found, lived with, and deciphered the finds from the Geniza and that of the Jews of old Cairo, or Fustat, whose daily activities sprang to life from these old pages.

In the middle ages, Cairo/Fustat was at the center of the Jewish world, with travelers, students and scholars, traders, poets and others passing through from Spain in the west to Jerusalem and even India in the west. As a result, their writings ended up in the Geniza where they sat for centuries until the late 1800s when two British women showed a document, written in Hebrew, that they had bought in Cairo, to Cambridge scholar Solomon Schecter. While some other material from the Geniza had filtered out earlier, Dr. Schecter immediately and dramatically realized its value and traveled to Cairo where he convinced the rabbi in charge of the old synagogue to let him take whatever he wanted. Since then, the study of these documents has kept scholars happily busy, investigating what seems to be an inexhaustible treasure trove of information on religion, history, poetry, the relationships between Jews and Muslims, cultural life, daily life, personal relationships and dramas, language, and much much more, from the 10th through the 13th centuries, a time when the vast majority of Jews lived largely peaceably in what was largely a Muslim world. In their preoccupations with family and business, love and death, celebrations and study, they seem a lot like us.

Fascinating as these medieval Jews are, the true heroes of this book are the scholars, and Hoffman and Cole characterize each of them and their work so brilliantly and readably that they too spring to life from the pages of this book. Buried as they were in the dusty and often smelly documents, obsessed with their research, demanding of their students, uncaring about their own health, they are the ones who figured out the connections between one scrap of paper and another, and between all this information and the larger threads of history and culture and religion.

Not only did I learn a lot about the life of Jews in the medieval middle east, but I also came away with a new appreciation of scholarship. The work of understanding the treasures of the Cairo Geniza continues to this day.

Olin BM180 .H64 2010 checked out